Choice and Compatibilism

[Papus79]

I'm going to take a swing at this one naively because I had something click today that I really hadn't thought of in quite this manner before but it makes a good degree of sense and smooths certain disconnects that I found between the seeming inescapability of hard determinism in theory vs. experience of day to day life.

Typically in the past I haven't liked compatibilism much because it almost seemed like either an emotional or political reaction to determinism, or believing all of the precepts that should lead to determinism but pulling back and stopping short of it due to moral / emotional / gut-level revulsion to the concept. Hearing debates and exchanges between people like Sam Harris and Dan Dennett seemed to solidify my sense that compatibilism was more of an outpost than a logical position in that sense. Then again, to be fair, I do think that sort of compatibilism may be a strawman and I wonder if what I'm playing with now might be closer to a steel-man position of the concept.

What's making me reconsider is that the concept of 'choice' is also perhaps a bit ill-defined and there are ways of looking at choice or framing it which seem to give us the deliverables of what choice means in life without violating hard determinism or superdeterminism.

I'm going to take a shot at this though as someone who sees no good reason not to believe that we're in an eternal block universe, or that if we aren't that the kind of quantum noise that Brian Greene would invoke against that still don't yield any capacity to choose what action you'd actually take other than that, if you persistently rolled back to the same time stamp and replayed that instead of forever starting at identical starting point and reaching an identical end point you'd be in different evolutions of the system where the starting point would never be the same but the end point would always flow logically from any given starting point.

So with no actual libertarian free will of the 'I have choice A and choice B and I can literally do either or right now' type in my own beliefs about this, I re-examine the meaning of 'choice'.

How would I review the concept of choice from a deterministic perspective?

I'm going to frame choice as taking an action that isn't strictly speaking going with the flow of external pressures, circumstances, and expectations. It's in one case action that violates external pressures and norms based on internal pressures, or in another choosing to go against internal inertia based on a piece of external information received that you know is more wholesome or accurately mapped to reality in important ways than how your internal system is currently operating (in either direction you could see it as doing the more difficult thing than continuing status quo). You might be able to say as well that living on autopilot is also a choice in the null sense but that when you're doing things deliberately based on there being either a reasonable payout for doing so, or alternately putting the skids on hard when you feel like the incompetence or idiocy of others is about to send you down the cattle chute or to force you into actions that are completely at odds with all of your deeply held values and convictions (eg. Bret Weinstein's absolute refusal to get on 'the boat' with the activist students) that's where choice is as such in the heretical sense, where you could view heresy as any violation of the pressures of one's surroundings in favor of living in line with one's own convictions.

Is that kind of 'choice' something that would happen in a Minkowski eternal block universe? Absolutely. It makes no requirement on libertarian free will and it also makes no requirement that you have any say in what your core preferences are vs. that of another person (ie. you can enhance, augment, and make your own constitution more self-consistent but there are types of person you could never be based on your presets, at least without tremendous pressure and brain-damage over prolonged periods).

I've run into people here who'd say that superdeterminism is meaningless, I still would disagree with that because I still think that the existence of hard determinism underwriting everything means that calling people 'evil' in the way most people use the word is more often than not a cope or a refusal to accept that the universe made them more than they made themselves. To that end I'm with Harris and Sapolsky that hard determinism has very practical criminal justice reform implications and things of the like. Similarly I do think this means that you can look at humans as part of complex systems and, in aggregate, you can theoretically design incentive structures that will work and be like a glass sculpture guiding and limiting the flow of the fluid within it or something roughly equivalent to that even if you really can't reliably predict what each given person would do ahead of time. To that last point there's an open question - is that kind of demiurgic crafting of societal incentive structures something that we can willfully do from within our own given system? That's another question that probably yields different answers ranging from 'no' to 'difficult but yes' depending what timescales or over how many generations and changes of technology we're talking.


Let me know if that makes sense to you or if you see any holes directly in that line of assumptions.

I'm thinking it's an interesting frame to take on partly because it also helps dissolve some of that disjuncture between maps of reality that a hard determinist like myself might come to but then not really be able to incorporate into my every day senses of the world because what I experience is constant decision making and the efforts involved as well as acting heretically in the world rather often rather than experiencing myself a wind-up mechanical play.

I also can't help but think of Colin Wilson's interest in the difference between life on autopilot and the tedious boredom that entails (which almost lead to him drinking a flask of poison) vs. the meaning-affirming quality of living in more deliberate mode. This (above) puts 'that' (Colin Wilson's observation) in a place where it can be a truth compatible with hard determinism.

[JackDaydream]

I'm going to take a swing at this one naively because I had something click today that I really hadn't thought of in quite this manner before but it makes a good degree of sense and smooths certain disconnects that I found between the seeming inescapability of hard determinism in theory vs. experience of day to day life.

Typically in the past I haven't liked compatibilism much because it almost seemed like either an emotional or political reaction to determinism, or believing all of the precepts that should lead to determinism but pulling back and stopping short of it due to moral / emotional / gut-level revulsion to the concept. Hearing debates and exchanges between people like Sam Harris and Dan Dennett seemed to solidify my sense that compatibilism was more of an outpost than a logical position in that sense. Then again, to be fair, I do think that sort of compatibilism may be a strawman and I wonder if what I'm playing with now might be closer to a steel-man position of the concept.

What's making me reconsider is that the concept of 'choice' is also perhaps a bit ill-defined and there are ways of looking at choice or framing it which seem to give us the deliverables of what choice means in life without violating hard determinism or superdeterminism.

I'm going to take a shot at this though as someone who sees no good reason not to believe that we're in an eternal block universe, or that if we aren't that the kind of quantum noise that Brian Greene would invoke against that still don't yield any capacity to choose what action you'd actually take other than that, if you persistently rolled back to the same time stamp and replayed that instead of forever starting at identical starting point and reaching an identical end point you'd be in different evolutions of the system where the starting point would never be the same but the end point would always flow logically from any given starting point.

So with no actual libertarian free will of the 'I have choice A and choice B and I can literally do either or right now' type in my own beliefs about this, I re-examine the meaning of 'choice'.

How would I review the concept of choice from a deterministic perspective?

I'm going to frame choice as taking an action that isn't strictly speaking going with the flow of external pressures, circumstances, and expectations. It's in one case action that violates external pressures and norms based on internal pressures, or in another choosing to go against internal inertia based on a piece of external information received that you know is more wholesome or accurately mapped to reality in important ways than how your internal system is currently operating (in either direction you could see it as doing the more difficult thing than continuing status quo). You might be able to say as well that living on autopilot is also a choice in the null sense but that when you're doing things deliberately based on there being either a reasonable payout for doing so, or alternately putting the skids on hard when you feel like the incompetence or idiocy of others is about to send you down the cattle chute or to force you into actions that are completely at odds with all of your deeply held values and convictions (eg. Bret Weinstein's absolute refusal to get on 'the boat' with the activist students) that's where choice is as such in the heretical sense, where you could view heresy as any violation of the pressures of one's surroundings in favor of living in line with one's own convictions.

Is that kind of 'choice' something that would happen in a Minkowski eternal block universe? Absolutely. It makes no requirement on libertarian free will and it also makes no requirement that you have any say in what your core preferences are vs. that of another person (ie. you can enhance, augment, and make your own constitution more self-consistent but there are types of person you could never be based on your presets, at least without tremendous pressure and brain-damage over prolonged periods).

I've run into people here who'd say that superdeterminism is meaningless, I still would disagree with that because I still think that the existence of hard determinism underwriting everything means that calling people 'evil' in the way most people use the word is more often than not a cope or a refusal to accept that the universe made them more than they made themselves. To that end I'm with Harris and Sapolsky that hard determinism has very practical criminal justice reform implications and things of the like. Similarly I do think this means that you can look at humans as part of complex systems and, in aggregate, you can theoretically design incentive structures that will work and be like a glass sculpture guiding and limiting the flow of the fluid within it or something roughly equivalent to that even if you really can't reliably predict what each given person would do ahead of time. To that last point there's an open question - is that kind of demiurgic crafting of societal incentive structures something that we can willfully do from within our own given system? That's another question that probably yields different answers ranging from 'no' to 'difficult but yes' depending what timescales or over how many generations and changes of technology we're talking.


Let me know if that makes sense to you or if you see any holes directly in that line of assumptions.

I'm thinking it's an interesting frame to take on partly because it also helps dissolve some of that disjuncture between maps of reality that a hard determinist like myself might come to but then not really be able to incorporate into my every day senses of the world because what I experience is constant decision making and the efforts involved as well as acting heretically in the world rather often rather than experiencing myself a wind-up mechanical play.

I also can't help but think of Colin Wilson's interest in the difference between life on autopilot and the tedious boredom that entails (which almost lead to him drinking a flask of poison) vs. the meaning-affirming quality of living in more deliberate mode. This (above) puts 'that' (Colin Wilson's observation) in a place where it can be a truth compatible with hard determinism.

I became interested in your post when Colin Wilson's perspective was introduced. Even though he is not taken much heed to in philosophy, possibly because he does not come from an academic background, his perspective is about the nature of reflective consciousness. I have read a variety of writings on free will, including that of Sam Harris. Sometimes, from my point of view discussions of free will seem to focus on the explanatory alone, in a causal understanding of choice. Somehow, this may miss the nature of reflective consciousness at the core of choice.

Colin Wilson's understanding seems to make the link between the robotic aspects of thinking and choice. This is especially in the notion of 'waking up' as opposed to being on autopilot, and the nature of the development of reflective consciousness. Waking up may be a process by which a person can be more aware and, consequently, more active in the nature of choices.

[Papus79]

Colin Wilson's understanding seems to make the link between the robotic aspects of thinking and choice. This is especially in the notion of 'waking up' as opposed to being on autopilot, and the nature of the development of reflective consciousness. Waking up may be a process by which a person can be more aware and, consequently, more active in the nature of choices.

Not to go off on a tangent but when you describe 'waking up' I'm almost seeing Nicholas Cage in Matchstick Men where he thinks he was getting grilled by the FBI from a hospital room just to find the scene vacate, opens the door in his gown to find himself on a roof-top and realizing he got long-conned by his buddy in a really complex way.

I think most people don't really wake up until they feel like they're in 'that' position with society, where the people who were up on em from youth like 'Make one wrong move and I'll knock your teeth out' all of a sudden just disappear and they find themselves sort of hovering in the void and realizing that so much of the pressure being applied to them from childhood into their teens, twenties, even beyond, was a grift. That's a strange place to be but that's kind of how I experienced it, especially when my childhood ASD diagnosis gave that con longer life than it should have received (up til....sadly... my late 30's).

[JackDaydream]

Colin Wilson's understanding seems to make the link between the robotic aspects of thinking and choice. This is especially in the notion of 'waking up' as opposed to being on autopilot, and the nature of the development of reflective consciousness. Waking up may be a process by which a person can be more aware and, consequently, more active in the nature of choices.

Not to go off on a tangent but when you describe 'waking up' I'm almost seeing Nicholas Cage in Matchstick Men where he thinks he was getting grilled by the FBI from a hospital room just to find the scene vacate, opens the door in his gown to find himself on a roof-top and realizing he got long-conned by his buddy in a really complex way.

I think most people don't really wake up until they feel like they're in 'that' position with society, where the people who were up on em from youth like 'Make one wrong move and I'll knock your teeth out' all of a sudden just disappear and they find themselves sort of hovering in the void and realizing that so much of the pressure being applied to them from childhood into their teens, twenties, even beyond, was a grift. That's a strange place to be but that's kind of how I experienced it, especially when my childhood ASD diagnosis gave that con longer life than it should have received (up til....sadly... my late 30's).

My own perspective on the idea of 'waking up' from the robotic state of consciousness is that it may require extreme jolts from comforts. It may be that the experience of suffering has an important role here, making the need to question and draw upon inner aspects of consciousness as resources.

[Papus79]

My own perspective on the idea of 'waking up' from the robotic state of consciousness is that it may require extreme jolts from comforts. It may be that the experience of suffering has an important role here, making the need to question and draw upon inner aspects of consciousness as resources.

I've seen the inverse side of that as well - ie. people treat people who have woken up as if it's a sign of having been through things thus a sign of genetic inferiority.

Consciousness and Darwinian evolution, at least at this level, mix like oil and water.

[JackDaydream]

My own perspective on the idea of 'waking up' from the robotic state of consciousness is that it may require extreme jolts from comforts. It may be that the experience of suffering has an important role here, making the need to question and draw upon inner aspects of consciousness as resources.

I've seen the inverse side of that as well - ie. people treat people who have woken up as if it's a sign of having been through things thus a sign of genetic inferiority.

Consciousness and Darwinian evolution, at least at this level, mix like oil and water.

I would definitely agree with you about how people who have 'woken up' are seen. As it is, I feel that so many experiences which I have had may have left me more marginalised rather than anything else. Also, I know of many people who have been through difficulties in life and who are seen as having some kind of 'genetic inferiority' more than anything else. This may be where the political aspects of philosophy come into play.

[Papus79]

I would definitely agree with you about how people who have 'woken up' are seen. As it is, I feel that so many experiences which I have had may have left me more marginalised rather than anything else. Also, I know of many people who have been through difficulties in life and who are seen as having some kind of 'genetic inferiority' more than anything else. This may be where the political aspects of philosophy come into play.

To me it seems like pretty good evidence that it has nothing to do with them not being able to see it and much more to do with an explicit choice to play, riffing on popular parlance for this these days in the complex systems world, 'GameA' rather than 'GameB'.