What's Expected of Us

[Sarah]

Hey Misha, is there a link for this story that we can put in this thread?

[Dan]

Super clever, with a very clear, physical manifestation for the concept of free will. Chiang also does a great job of taking one very small step for time travel and making it possible for us to wrap our heads around. There's a lot of thought packed into this story.

I'm curious about the possibility of a Predictor that proves the existence of free will. If such a Predictor flashes but we don't press the button in one second, does this mean we've split into a separate time stream, or does it just mean it has a loose wire?

One thing I wasn't crazy about was the choice to format the first line in bold, as it looked more like a slug line than the actual start of the story. (Kind of a nit-pick, but it did confuse me.)

Anyway, great recommendation for discusion-- I really enjoyed it!

[Outis]

This retreads ground previously covered by the Nebula-winning Story of your Life.
Like I said in the Love Is the Plan discussion, free will is a religious doctrine. In my not so humble opinion, failing to recognize this leads to much confusion (such as positing an "experience of free will").
Those wishing for a non-religious treatment of the theme may turn to one of Egan's older stories: The Hundred Light Years Diary.

[Francesca]

Here's a link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/...

[Francesca]

The story is saying that if the future can be known, definitively, then that proves there's no free will. I have to think about that to see if I agree or not, but my instinct is to say I disagree. So that's one thing to talk about: if an unavoidable (as opposed to potential) future can be known, does that negate free will? Then there's the issue of whether a knowledge of lack of free will would have the effect the story suggests.

[Ben]

Outis wrote: "Like I said in the Love Is the Plan discussion, free will is a religious doctrine."

I remember when you brought this up and am still confused by it. Secular philosophers have talked about free will plenty. And, for example, here's the entry on free will from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Would you please clarify?

ETA: Not that the topic of free will isn't very important to some religions, just that they don't have a monopoly on it.

[Ben]

This was a fun little story.

It brings a question to mind, though: would people really act this way if they saw proof that free will doesn't exist?

This happens to me occasionally. Part of the fun of some stories is, accepting the author's starting idea, would people really react that way?

[Francesca]

Ben wrote: "It brings a question to mind, though: would people really act this way if they saw proof that free will doesn't exist?"

I don't think it would. It's like when you're asked to imagine (or accept) that this world is all an illusion, or that no two people are actually seeing green in the same way. Maybe so, but we sure do experience the world as if it's real, and we sure are able to get by as if we're seeing a similar color, so we take from there.

We experience our choices as free, and even someone tells you that it's all determined, either by scientific exigencies or religious ones, you still do have the feeling of choice.

[Francesca]

I believe something similar about time! (Similar to Misha--sorry; the comments don't thread clearly)

[Francesca]

Misha wrote: "I would tend to think that the people who would become "a legion of Bartleby the scriveners" would be people who are perhaps prone to depression. I could see being confronted with proof that free w..."

Your reasoning sounds good to me. I can backpedal and accept that some people, especially people prone to depression, might react this way. People are very various.

[Outis]

You have a feeling of choice, not a feeling about whether your choice was predetermined or not.
Perhaps you figure that a choice can't properly be called a choice if it's somehow predetermined but that's not a feeling. It's a doctrine, no matter how emotional you are about it.

Ben wrote: "Would you please clarify?"
Not only do secular philosophers write about religious doctrines all the time, they rarely think independently of a particular religion.
The type of free will brought up in this story does not make any sense outside of supernatural assumptions. If people's choices can be predicted by some physics-based mechanism, it means people's choices are ultimately predetermined by physics somehow. Having a will that's free from that kind of determinism would therefore mean that it's free from physics... which would only makes sense if you assume it's got a non-physical basis such as an immortal soul.

[Francesca]

Misha wrote: "I'd probably cling to the idea of free will..."

I'd be there arguing that just because the predictor accurately predicts when you'll hit the button, that doesn't mean that you didn't choose, in all your freedom, to hit it at that moment. And more broadly and pragmatically, even if everything is known and decided, we don't know how it's known and decided--you may still have a destiny to make a difference, so you might as well try for it.

[Ben]

Outis wrote: "You have a feeling of choice, not a feeling about whether your choice was predetermined or not.
Perhaps you figure that a choice can't properly be called a choice if it's somehow predetermined but ..."

I think I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree with a couple of points. (Also, I'm not a philosopher, so I won't be able to have a very educated discussion.)

First, I know there are atheist philosophers who argue for free will.

Second, supernatural is not the same as religious.

[Outis]

There are religions without gods and a great many atheists who cling to theist doctrines (usually without understanding where these doctrines are coming from).
Obviously people can have supernatural beliefs outside of a religion. But it takes a religion for such beliefs to give rise to endless and pointless philosophical debates or to convince people that some abstract notion which has no observable effect (outside of fiction) is nevertheless essential to their lives.

[Ben]

Misha wrote: "Since Ben asked for clarification, I wanted to give some room for Outis to provide a response. However, I'd also like to stick to the story at hand and to keep the discussion tied to the context of..."

Apologies and thanks for reining things in.

The way the story closes--the narrator embracing both his seeming choice and the apparent illusion--gets close, I think, to how I view the whole topic: whether or not free will exists, it feels like it does, so I'll act in that way.

I love how Chiang is able to make such a short story so interesting.

[Sarah]

Also interesting is that he's able to make an "idea story" work so well without character detail. There's a "you" and an "I." We are meant to place ourselves in this particular "you." We as readers want to trust "I" because that's who is telling us the story. But how would the hypothetical "you" who has seen the device respond in this situation?

[Scotty]

Fantastic. I can't remember where I read that before, maybe it was linked on Hacker News or something.

The free will question is fantastic, and it's always been one of my favorites. My understanding of the story is that if you believe that physics is deterministic then you can't really believe in free will, but that it's best to go on acting as if you have free will because otherwise it would be too easy to fall into complete inactivity. Which also makes sense, if your actions mean nothing, then why participate?

I think the tension in the story really hovers around that last point. The "why bother?" part of it. But we already know that to a certain degree we already live in a world with Predictors. MRI scans can show that your brain makes your decisions well before you're aware of them. Which I think is, again, part of the point.

[Outis]

Why bother?
Camus wrote a pretty famous book about that and meaninglessness. Free will or not, meaning is equally subjective and individualism has the same issues. And so lots of long-dead peeps have dealt with those issues without reference to what seems to be the contemporary Anglo conception of free will.

[Bunny]

I feel like he's bumping up against the limitations of language. Because our language is constructed on the assumption of a linear, cause and effect, time as an arrow universe.

It doesn't make sense to ask if, because I know what I did in the past does that mean I had no free will when I did it? But it does (seemingly) make sense to ask if I were to know what was going to happen in the future would that mean that I had no free will when I did that? Which, to my mind, suggests that maybe its not a question of whether or not free will exists but whether or not our concept of how it works is flawed.

[Scotty]

Camus wrote a pretty famous book about that and meaninglessness.

And it was a fine book. My point was that we already live in a world where we know that our actions are already decided before we're conscious that we're taking them. And that adds a little extra to the story, which is nice.

But maybe I'm missing your point.

edit: I re-read your comment. Are you saying that because the question of "why bother?" was addressed in books like Sisyphus then it's not worth talking about? Or are you saying that free will and meaninglessness are really separate concerns? Because I think I agree with that.

[Outis]

It's not so much a point as an expression of my puzzlement regarding your (meaning you all) investment in the free will doctrine.
But to answer your question, I indeed meant that the conception of free will that you all seem to share is a separate concern. The conception of free will you find in Sisyphus (and many other works) is a somewhat different matter.

As to the neurological experiments you reference, I've read about similar experiments but I didn't recall them to be about free will. Then again maybe I wouldn't remember the free will part for lack of interest. Unconscious decision-making on the other hand, now that's interesting.
The difference with what Chiang proposes is that unconscious processes are typically disturbed when you shed light on them. A Predictor relying on neural activity rather than time travel would probably not be so uncanny.

[Bunny]

Or possibly the predictor causes brain damage. And those who claim that it's causing depression by disproving free will are falling into exactly the same trap of assigning causes to effects. ;-)

[Francesca]

Bunny wrote: "Or possibly the predictor causes brain damage"
Hee--I like this idea.

[Terry]

Outis writes:

The type of free will brought up in this story does not make any sense outside of supernatural assumptions. If people's choices can be predicted by some physics-based mechanism, it means people's choices are ultimately predetermined by physics somehow. Having a will that's free from that kind of determinism would therefore mean that it's free from physics... which would only makes sense if you assume it's got a non-physical basis such as an immortal soul.

Discussions of the illusion of free will are everywhere, and there are any number of arguments against its existence: the quantum physics argument, the subconscious argument (that our choices are really made by parts of our mind other than the one we call ‘I’), and the hereditary argument (that your human choices are in large part given to you by your genetics and upbringing, and thus aren’t really yours in the first place.)

But Misha asks us to stick to the story, so let me suggest that the story modulates the concept free will into the related, but different, issues of causality and agency.

Then there’s the question of whether there’s morality if there’s no free will. Personally, I think the ones who give up after using the Predictor are all going straight to hell.

[Scotty]

The difference with what Chiang proposes is that unconscious processes are typically disturbed when you shed light on them. A Predictor relying on neural activity rather than time travel would probably not be so uncanny.

Could you swap out the time traveling Predictor for a neural imaging Predictor without the subject knowing the difference? The story seems to be a thought experiment about what would happen if you could prove to people that they didn't have conscious control over their actions (if that's more palatable than talking about "free will").

[Outis]

We do know that we don't have conscious control over everything. There are simpler and older experiements designed to demonstrate this with various degrees of effectiveness.
Unlike free will, that stuff is observable.

If a neural imaging Predictor worked like the time-traveling one (which is implausible), the user could refrain from pressing the button after the signal.
A more plausible neural imaging Predictor would have a much shorter delay between signal and presses. You might find yourself unable to refrain from pressing the button but it would be an experience more similar to reflexes or to muscular activity caused by an external electrical impulse. Again, not so uncanny.

[Bunny]

The Predictor simply reports on what it sees from one second in the future. It is no different from what I said earlier in this thread, if I know now what I did in the past then does that mean I lacked free will when I did it in the past? Pretty much anyone would say no, it doesn't. The Predictor is the future observer looking at the past. The difference being that the Predictor can report one second into the past what it is seeing in its present. So the only thing that has actually changed is the ability to report the event.

Also, the MRI experiments that show that people sometimes act before making the conscious choice to act don't disprove free will. They disprove the idea/assumption that the conscious mind is always in control of our behavior. But honestly anyone who thinks their conscious mind is always in control is not paying attention.

What these experiments (thought experiments and physical world experiments) demonstrate, I think is not that free will is an illusion so much as that its a fuzzy concept that is not all that well defined and that rests on some old misconceptions about how things work. But there are lots of fuzzy concepts that aren't well defined and rest on old misconceptions that we still get all sorts of perfectly serviceable use from even if we know they are kind of tattered at the edges. "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."

Its fun to play games with the imprecision of language. It allows us to write nonsense poetry about owls and toves and boojums. It allows us to pun, and tell shaggy dog stories, and create koans and paradox tales and jokes about where Moses was when the light went out.

[Scotty]

Not quite as uncanny, but close enough to convince people that they didn't have anywhere near as much conscious control over their actions as they thought they did, if any. Which, again, is the point.

That said, I don't think that people really would lapse into inactivity if Predictors existed. Most likely they'd just go on living as if they had control over their actions, the way most people do when they're confronted with uncomfortable knowledge that they don't want to deal with.

Regardless, I think the notion of "akinetic mutism" was enjoyable and worked really well in the story.

[Scotty]

Also, the MRI experiments that show that people sometimes act before making the conscious choice to act doesn't disprove free will. It disproves the idea that the conscious mind is always in control.

What's the difference between not being conscious of the decisions you're making and not having free will? Genuine question, since I don't necessarily think that they're equivalent.

Most evidence shows that the conscious mind is generally just along for the ride, a trailing indicator of what we're thinking. At least if you buy Daniel Dennett's view on the subject.

[Outis]

Free will implies that there is something the will might not be free of. The way "free will" is normally used, it means free from some form of determinism such as predictions made by a time-travelling device.
As far as I can tell, the reasons people do not consider that unconscious decisions infringe on free will are:
a) that they figure unconscious decisions can be countermanded by the will (which I think is the view of the guy who is best known for the experiments you alluded to)
or
b) that they consider unconscious decisions as part of the will (so the issue becomes: are such decisions subject to an external determinism?)

I would be far more concerned by evidence for time travel than by evidence that people don't have conscious control over something or other.
I don't see what's so uncomfortable about lacking conscious control. As far as simple experiments challenging folk psychology are concerned, I find the ones about about perception more disturbing for instance.

[Scotty]

Well you might not see why it's uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean it's not a generally uncomfortable notion for a lot of people.

Of the two choices above, a) isn't coherent, but I completely agree with b).

[Terry]

Let’s have some fun with this.

Take your Predictor out, and then find a coin. Flip the coin, and if it’s heads, press the button. As expected, Predictor will light up sometimes before you toss the coin and press the button.

Repeat a hundred times. How many light flashes did you get? If it’s about fifty, can we surmise that Predictor didn’t cause the coin to land heads or tails?

Can we infer, then, that free will has nothing to do with causality?

Suppose that you walk into your corner grocery store and there’s a robbery in progress. A thief is threatening the clerk with a gun, and you consider attacking him. You can either (a) succeed in capturing or scaring the bad guy off, or (b) get shot, in which case the thief is still free to shoot the clerk. You take out your Predictor and tell yourself you’ll intervene if the device tells you should. The light doesn’t go on. Should you intervene or not?

Isn’t this another way of asking if the outcome of your actions should control your choices? Is a decision made in this way a willing act? I submit that it’s not; if the outcome of your act alone controls your choice, you have no agency. I think that’s what this story is talking about. And incidentally, if you intervene and are shot for your trouble, are you less a hero?

I think that’s why we humans are wired to love stories: it’s the uncertainty, the suspense.

[Outis]

Coin-flipping prediction involves no particular difficulty. Two sources of random noise (the predictor and the coin) simply happen to be in sync.
It's trivial to modify the conventional account of causality to explain what's going on: the way the coin is flipped causes both the button to be pressed and the light to flash. Only one effect is in the future and the other in the past.
Clearly, you can't infer anything about free will from this because free will is not involved at any point in the most straightforward causal account of the observed result (about 50 light flashes out of a hundred).

The way the Predictor is used in the story is different and can not be explained so easily explained. As the device is not merely transmitting random noise into the past, accounting for what it does in conventional terms is not trivial.
In this instance, the problem that transmission of information into the past creates is simple to understand: when someone sees the light flash before they arbitrarily decided to press the button, the Predictor's output is obviously tampering with its input.
Does this create some kind of feedback loop across time? Does the Predictor instead become an overriding causal agent by transmitting information into the past? Or can we only account for this phenomenon by postulating a static system in four dimensions? The latter proposals do seem to invalidate the hypothesis according to which the will might be a independent causal agent while the first does not.

[Terry]

Oustis wrote:
This retreads ground previously covered by the Nebula-winning Story of your Life.

Not only the Nebula (2000), but the Sturgeon award (1999.) And a movie base on the story, starring Amy Adams, is slated for release in 2016.

And Sarah wrote:
Also interesting is that he's able to make an "idea story" work so well without character detail. There's a "you" and an "I." We are meant to place ourselves in this particular "you." We as readers want to trust "I" because that's who is telling us the story. But how would the hypothetical "you" who has seen the device respond in this situation?

Chang’s a brilliant craftsman. Not only does his unnamed narrator talking to the audience work very well in “Predictor”, but an unusual admixture of POV and tense and flashbacks is used for “Story of Your Life”. It’s written in the first person, mixing tenses (future, present, and past); the narrator, Dr. Louise Banks, is talking to her daughter, even about her daughter’s death.

The result is a kind of time hopping that’s marvelously suited to the story’s idea of time, as Dr. Banks learns the aliens’ written language.