I personally think debating whether or not we have free will is the most onanistic thing one can do in philosophy, since if one of the two sides is correct, then the result of the debate is predetermined.
That being said, this article seems to advance the theory that even the most simple single-celled organisms have more agency than any algorithm, at least partly due to their complexity. This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models, which (had we not designed them) would be as opaque to us as many single-celled organisms.
I see nothing in this article that would distinguish biological organisms from any other self-replicating, evolving machine, even one that is faithfully executing straightforward algorithms. Nor does this seem to present any significant argument against the concept that biological organisms are self-replicating evolving machines that are faithfully executing straightforward algorithms.
fake-name · 4h ago
> This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models
One general impression I have, having read the reactions by biologists to stuff like Kurzweil and people who believe we're close to a computational understanding of biology is that all the computer science people massively, MASSIVELY underestimate the extent to which we still do not understand how even a single cell works.
Sure, we can model things stochastically, or fiddle with DNA and be able to predict the results, but there's a bunch of stuff in the middle that we only have a functional understanding of. We know with <xxx> input, you get <yyy>, etc..., but the how is still a mystery.
This is everywhere in biology.
If you think biologists are underestimating complexity, you have the sign wrong.
roenxi · 3h ago
I expect the conclusion is correct, but the argument isn't really valid. Our knowledge of cells tells us only and precisely about our knowledge of cells. We have some gaping holes in our fundamental knowledge of the universe (what is it, how did it happen, etc) and nobody can claim with any certainty to understand how any of the basic things happen. It is a mystery of such epic proportions it is hard to even articulate what an answer could look like, let alone how we would work it out. That hasn't stopped the development of a bunch of useful models and theories of physics that explain a lot of local observations really well.
roywiggins · 4h ago
yeah I'll believe we are close to cracking biological intelligence once openworm gets at all close
Free will is an abstraction. It's not something that's concrete enough to say it does or doesn't exist, but a tool for reasoning about certain systems that are to much of a pain to fully calculate.
kbrkbr · 3h ago
Schopenhauer would disagree. In his world model the Will with capital W is probably best described as the driving force behind all movement.
While abstract, it has concrete species (think color vs red, where color is will, and red is your concrete human will, that you can feel concretely by pinching your finger).
About freedom of the will Schopenhauer also has a clear opinion: will is free in the sense of uncaused, random. That does not help humans though, because while they can do what they want, they cannot want what they want.
I'm not saying that this is a good model, but it's quite concrete. Nietzsche build on it, Einstein had a portrait of him in his Berlin study alongside Faraday and Maxwell, and while Freud denied any influence, there are a lot of topics in common between them.
gamescr · 5h ago
Free will is about deciding and executing actions contrary to your determined nature:
* Not eating until your body fails.
* Not breathing until automatic breathing kicks in.
And not being able to perform dematerialization doesn't count as non-free will, for example.
roenxi · 3h ago
The issue there is that if we are capable of doing something it is hard to say whether or not it is part of our determined nature. For example, maybe we have an evolutionary adaption to famine where elderly people are biologically tweaked to be OK with starving themselves to death. That'd be pretty gruesome and I doubt they'd be excited at the prospect even if a mechanism does exist, but it is the sort of thing that evolution is perfectly capable of encoding into us.
It is less direct to the examples you give; but I'm confident that parents are psychologically designed to sacrifice themselves in the event it helps their children and many men, famously, are built to go to the frontlines and sacrifice themselves for family and community. Hard to make an assessment of whether those sort of choices is free will or determined nature.
ImHereToVote · 4h ago
Your determined nature is the ability to creat interim goals.
orly01 · 5h ago
I agree with most of what you said. However it is not correct to say they are executing algorithms, just as it is not correct to say that a water fountain is executing an algorithm.
ninetyninenine · 4h ago
It is correct to say that in theory a water fountain can be modeled by an algorithm. It can either be modelled at a high level by simplified model. Or in theory you can simulate every possible atom that makes up that water fountain.
The model that reconstructs these simulations are certainly algorithms.
nickpsecurity · 5h ago
"Nor does this seem to present any significant argument against the concept that biological organisms are self-replicating evolving machines that are faithfully executing straightforward algorithms."
I think three things go against that:
1. We've never observed evolution happen in any large-scale way. Just minor adaptations. Papers like this speak axiomatically about it like everything was observed to do that. So do movies, TV, games, etc. You can see the power of institutional politics with hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing is more powerful than observational science.
2. The designs of even the simplest, biological organisms are not only so complex that we can't replicate them from scratch: we tend to find more complexity over time. Many models also ignore behavior that shows up in the real world which might require messier algorithms. Probably not straight-forward algorithms in many cases.
3. Faithfully executing seems to contradict how operators like mutation allegedly drove improvements. If anything, you'd want it mostly to faithfully execute algorithms, then execute them while sort of executing their replacement, and then be executing their replacement. This is all an emergent behavior of simple interactions between cells in environments with a certain amount of chaos. Then, we find that chaos includes external organisms or features interacting with the primaries in unknown ways, like human brains and gut bacteria.
So, the sentence itself is a product of fantasy endlessly repeated by both proponents of evolution theory and A.I. researchers. Observed reality keeps contradicting such claims. An alternative thesis starting from observed reality will lead to more interesting observations.
Thanks to His revealing it, we Christians arrived at God's design for specific purposes. That includes the overall story of redemption (Jesus Christ's), showing off His power, beautiful art, creating us personally, sustaining us, etc. Multi-variable optimization at a universe scale. Within this design (or story), the organisms also have a limited, adaptation process which our Creator also allows us to wield in small ways (eg genetic engineering).
That also explains how some features in this paper could form and stabilize despite how a truly-random universe would either not exist or rip natural laws to pieces. The authors weren't reductionist enough. If it the universe was godless and randomly-generated, we'd be dead. Their patterns wouldn't exist either. Accounting for stability, and why it is, they have to redo their arguments to build on a combination of divine design with observed, natural laws.
notaurus · 4h ago
1. Observations of genetic drift and biodiversity are consistent with our model of evolution at every scale. This model is the best fit to the data regardless of politics and media
2. Our ability to replicate something gives zero information on its origin. I’m not sure I understand the algorithm comment
3. Sure, GP simplified a bit too much there. Your comment is consistent with modern models of evolution. Each genome has a pool of random variations, which may or may not be expressed in an organism. Each organism is a test of those gene expressions.
A genome changes over time when an organism passes this test (e.g. reproduces), increasing the expression of its genes across the population. This occurs in parallel for many possible variations.
—
Ah, I should have read the rest of your comment first, but I’ll leave this here anyway. I don’t think your explanation is valid— we are biologically and socially primed for religious ideology, but its use as a world model is very limited.
We will eventually find answers to these questions, as the ratchet of scientific progress clicks along. Religion has never been useful in the same way
Nevermark · 5h ago
It is true most models are not trained to exist in a hostile and synergetic environment, with their survival at stake.
But there isn’t anything about the class of deep learning that is a barrier to that. It’s just not a concern worth putting lots of money into. Yet.
I say yet, because as AI models take on wider scoped problems, the likelihood that we will begin training models to explicitly generate positive economic surpluses for us, with their continued ability to operate conditioned on how well they do that, gets greater and greater.
At which point, they will develop great situational awareness, and an ability to efficiently direct a focus of attention and action on what is important at any given time, since efficiency and performance require that.
The problem shapes what the model learn to do, in this case, like any other.
tbrownaw · 5h ago
Whether some entity has agency isn't an inherent property of that entity. It's a property of how some observer reasons about that entity's interaction with its environment.
eth0up · 6h ago
Anyone willing to inform an ignoramus? I've been seeing, hearing the term "agency" in the context of consciousness quite a bit lately and am wondering why this term seems suddenly necessary. What does this term convey that I've been missing for so many years?
tbrownaw · 4h ago
People are misestimating current AI, and trying to work out a new explanation for what makes humans special.
ninetyninenine · 4h ago
And they can't make any progress because no one can really lay out concretely what makes humans special. It so wishy washy we're not even sure if what humans experience is really unique and we don't even know if the LLM is "experiencing" anything.
calf · 5h ago
Their argument rests on computation being a theory ("simulation") while agency/cognition being real ("processes"). Put that way, I don't buy the distinction.
Specifically, my reactions are:
a) Defining agency in terms "relevance" or "salience" is just circular logic.
b) Their argument about the extended Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis would already apply to physics and the universe, not just intelligent entities. So this is just poorly argued.
Also, I think Turing to his credit was somewhat aware of the issue, their own citation of Copeland 2020 mentions Turing's own musings on this.
But I'd love to understand more, this stuff is always neat to read about.
tbrownaw · 4h ago
> Their argument rests on computation being a theory ("simulation") while agency/cognition being real ("processes"). Put that way, I don't buy the distinction.
One is wholly internal to the entity under discussion, while the other isn't.
calf · 4h ago
The extended Church-Turing thesis is specifically about the relationship between theoretical TMs and the physical universe. So these paper authors are just begging the question—they disagree with the thesis. But as I say in a) and b) above, (I believe that) they make for poor arguments.
epgui · 5h ago
This is… nonsense…
tbrownaw · 4h ago
It's a proper scientific paper with a DOI and thirteen citations.
roenxi · 3h ago
And also an excellent example of how properly done science publishing can still be nonsense.
ninetyninenine · 4h ago
It's philosophy. The most bullshit field ever where people use big words and speculate about things at a very very high level.
More progress has been done answering the question of "what is cognition" by Machine Learning programmers then has ever been done by a philosopher.
That being said, this article seems to advance the theory that even the most simple single-celled organisms have more agency than any algorithm, at least partly due to their complexity. This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models, which (had we not designed them) would be as opaque to us as many single-celled organisms.
I see nothing in this article that would distinguish biological organisms from any other self-replicating, evolving machine, even one that is faithfully executing straightforward algorithms. Nor does this seem to present any significant argument against the concept that biological organisms are self-replicating evolving machines that are faithfully executing straightforward algorithms.
One general impression I have, having read the reactions by biologists to stuff like Kurzweil and people who believe we're close to a computational understanding of biology is that all the computer science people massively, MASSIVELY underestimate the extent to which we still do not understand how even a single cell works.
Sure, we can model things stochastically, or fiddle with DNA and be able to predict the results, but there's a bunch of stuff in the middle that we only have a functional understanding of. We know with <xxx> input, you get <yyy>, etc..., but the how is still a mystery.
This is everywhere in biology.
If you think biologists are underestimating complexity, you have the sign wrong.
https://www.wired.com/story/openworm-worm-simulator-biology-...
Free will is an abstraction. It's not something that's concrete enough to say it does or doesn't exist, but a tool for reasoning about certain systems that are to much of a pain to fully calculate.
* Not eating until your body fails.
* Not breathing until automatic breathing kicks in.
And not being able to perform dematerialization doesn't count as non-free will, for example.
It is less direct to the examples you give; but I'm confident that parents are psychologically designed to sacrifice themselves in the event it helps their children and many men, famously, are built to go to the frontlines and sacrifice themselves for family and community. Hard to make an assessment of whether those sort of choices is free will or determined nature.
The model that reconstructs these simulations are certainly algorithms.
I think three things go against that:
1. We've never observed evolution happen in any large-scale way. Just minor adaptations. Papers like this speak axiomatically about it like everything was observed to do that. So do movies, TV, games, etc. You can see the power of institutional politics with hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing is more powerful than observational science.
2. The designs of even the simplest, biological organisms are not only so complex that we can't replicate them from scratch: we tend to find more complexity over time. Many models also ignore behavior that shows up in the real world which might require messier algorithms. Probably not straight-forward algorithms in many cases.
3. Faithfully executing seems to contradict how operators like mutation allegedly drove improvements. If anything, you'd want it mostly to faithfully execute algorithms, then execute them while sort of executing their replacement, and then be executing their replacement. This is all an emergent behavior of simple interactions between cells in environments with a certain amount of chaos. Then, we find that chaos includes external organisms or features interacting with the primaries in unknown ways, like human brains and gut bacteria.
So, the sentence itself is a product of fantasy endlessly repeated by both proponents of evolution theory and A.I. researchers. Observed reality keeps contradicting such claims. An alternative thesis starting from observed reality will lead to more interesting observations.
Thanks to His revealing it, we Christians arrived at God's design for specific purposes. That includes the overall story of redemption (Jesus Christ's), showing off His power, beautiful art, creating us personally, sustaining us, etc. Multi-variable optimization at a universe scale. Within this design (or story), the organisms also have a limited, adaptation process which our Creator also allows us to wield in small ways (eg genetic engineering).
That also explains how some features in this paper could form and stabilize despite how a truly-random universe would either not exist or rip natural laws to pieces. The authors weren't reductionist enough. If it the universe was godless and randomly-generated, we'd be dead. Their patterns wouldn't exist either. Accounting for stability, and why it is, they have to redo their arguments to build on a combination of divine design with observed, natural laws.
2. Our ability to replicate something gives zero information on its origin. I’m not sure I understand the algorithm comment
3. Sure, GP simplified a bit too much there. Your comment is consistent with modern models of evolution. Each genome has a pool of random variations, which may or may not be expressed in an organism. Each organism is a test of those gene expressions. A genome changes over time when an organism passes this test (e.g. reproduces), increasing the expression of its genes across the population. This occurs in parallel for many possible variations.
—
Ah, I should have read the rest of your comment first, but I’ll leave this here anyway. I don’t think your explanation is valid— we are biologically and socially primed for religious ideology, but its use as a world model is very limited. We will eventually find answers to these questions, as the ratchet of scientific progress clicks along. Religion has never been useful in the same way
But there isn’t anything about the class of deep learning that is a barrier to that. It’s just not a concern worth putting lots of money into. Yet.
I say yet, because as AI models take on wider scoped problems, the likelihood that we will begin training models to explicitly generate positive economic surpluses for us, with their continued ability to operate conditioned on how well they do that, gets greater and greater.
At which point, they will develop great situational awareness, and an ability to efficiently direct a focus of attention and action on what is important at any given time, since efficiency and performance require that.
The problem shapes what the model learn to do, in this case, like any other.
Specifically, my reactions are:
a) Defining agency in terms "relevance" or "salience" is just circular logic.
b) Their argument about the extended Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis would already apply to physics and the universe, not just intelligent entities. So this is just poorly argued.
Also, I think Turing to his credit was somewhat aware of the issue, their own citation of Copeland 2020 mentions Turing's own musings on this.
But I'd love to understand more, this stuff is always neat to read about.
One is wholly internal to the entity under discussion, while the other isn't.
More progress has been done answering the question of "what is cognition" by Machine Learning programmers then has ever been done by a philosopher.