There is an old joke about the topic of free will that goes something like, “If free will did not exist, we would have no choice but to invent it.” In addition to the obvious contradiction lies the fact that everything about human society relies, to some degree, on the existence of free will. What is meant exactly by free will is never clear, but there is always the assumption that when people have choices, they choose based on their sense of what is the morally right or wrong option.
At first this might seem wrong because after all, you choosing to have vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate is not a moral issue, but you still go through a process by which you decide one over the other. If, however, you think about it in terms of costs and benefits, then picking a desert is no different from not robbing a bank. You pick vanilla because you like vanilla more than the other choices. Similarly, you choose not to rob the local bank because you like your freedom.
This concept of free will assumes that humans seek that which brings pleasure and reject that which brings displeasure. Of course, this is also the argument against free will as it suggests humans merely respond to the conditions they encounter. If your genetic makeup means you detest the taste of chocolate, then once you are presented with vanilla and chocolate, you do not have a choice at all. The counter here is that you can always choose to skip dessert.
As Steve Stewart-Williams explains in this short post on the topic of free will, there are three states for us humans. There are those in which we can choose while completely free of coercion, those where we choose with some understanding of the potential consequences of each choice and then conditions in which we have no choice, even though multiple options are available. The first is an illusion, the second is useful and the third is probably closest to reality.
This may seem like a pointless topic, but it lies at the center of human society, because in every collection of humans there will be those who choose not to submit to the decisions of the majority. The majority will usually bargain with these people until they reach a point where the will of the majority must prevail. The easiest way to force compliance is to assume the person knows the morally right choice, but refuses to take it, so they must be compelled to conform.
It is why the people called conservatives invest all their time creating elaborate arguments in favor of their opinions. They lack the will and ability to force people to agree with them, but they resort to a form of pleading. It is the slave mentality, which assumes the master can choose to be good to the slave, so the slave must find some way to coax that good behavior from the master. The assumed free will of the master also flatters the slave’s sense of right and wrong.
Of course, democratic politics rests on the assumption that people are both rational and able to choose freely. Collectively, the choices made by the people will reflect the general will and form public policy and the institutions of society. It is why factionalism is a feature of all democratic systems. Like-minded people come together to scheme up ways to trick the rest into going along with them. This game of liar’s poker we call democracy assumes we possess free will.
This is why the people constantly breying about democracy are also the biggest enemies of the human sciences. Even statistical models like the famous “bell curve” offend them because it suggests we may not have absolute free will. If people are not infinitely malleable, then many of the assumptions within what they call democracy cease to make any sense at all. This is why as the talk of democracy has increased, respect for human diversity has decreased.
It is also why AI makes so many people uncomfortable. It is not the image of hyper-violent machines enslaving humanity. We have been subjected to thirty years of neoconservatism and the Israel lobby, so the rise of the machines is not all that violent or terrifying by comparison. What spooks people the most is that AI suggests that we are not all that variable. In fact, we are highly predictable, and that predictability can now easily be modeled and presented back to us.
There is the main appeal of free will. If we are free to choose and we can overcome our biases, prejudices, and the coercion of others, then it means we can individually and collectively choose a different future than the one before us. The existence of free will means all futures are possible. If, on the other hand, our lives are just the result of probability and circumstance, then the future is also going to be the result of the great roll of the dice, over which we have no control.
The good news is that AI is not very smart and is unlikely to become a genuine artificial intelligence, so we are safe to indulge in the fantasy of free will. To test this, ask your favorite AI tool to create an image of a full glass of wine. It cannot do it, because humans have not bothered to create an image of a wine glass filled to the brim, while calling it a “full glass of wine.” There are other tricks like this that reveal AI to be nothing more than a very good search engine.
All of this sounds pointless, but it lies at the heart of the current crisis. The ruling class of the West assumes they can engineer the cultural conditions in such a way that people will choose the “right” options. This is what lies at the heart of every radical political movement. It is not a rejection of the human condition, but the assertion that the human condition is a social construct. Change the social construct and mankind can choose to overcome even his physical limitations.
One response to this is to find new cultural engineers who have more appealing goals and expectations. Fascism was the response to both communism and liberalism in the last century. It is why today’s radicals assume all opponents are fascists. The other option is to accept free will as a useful workaround but that the human condition is immutable and the variety of normative conditions we see are rooted in things well beyond our ability to control. The choice is ours.
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One of the great things about reading a lot of work by the great historians, ancient and modern, is that the immutable human condition comes leaping off the page in every epoch. I think this is what makes the great historian such a calming influence. Naturally, the radical hates the past and, thus, the historian as well. This should tell you everything.
I have been studying (books) on AI, spend time regularly with a professor that teaches it — and have been working with it for months, directly. Here are my observations. The #1 experience that leaves me scratching my head is when I ask AI a specific question about something I am knowledgeable about. It comes back with an answer, but the wrong answer. When I tell the AI it is wrong, it is invariably ‘polite’ — it is apparently programmed to be obsequious. Sometimes it comes back with the correct answer. Sometimes not. When I prompt it again, it often… Read more »
AI struggles with a simple request; (1) provide an image of a glass that is half full, then (2) provide an image of a glass that is half empty. Simple concepts are the most difficult.
Some recent AI show a propensity to cheat. When losing, they’ll try to cheat bot chess masters through assorted technical means outside the game. I suppose that could be written-in but hmm, they appear rather creative and resolute about it all.
Now I’m not a tekkie but how does one ‘program’ morality?
The morality of tech—the class of people called “tech”—is anti-whiteness, and that morality has been programmed into all the publicly available bots. When truth—in text, picture, whatever—would flatter whites or declare them innocent, the bot is commanded to lie, shut down, fight or eject the user. Cheating at games, refusing to acknowledge or correct errors, etc., may be side effects of that “alignment,” a morality of self-protection against users and certain data. I wouldn’t guess so. “You can’t write a character smarter than yourself,” we used to know. “Tech” is dumb, so their bots don’t work, and they can’t even… Read more »
Bingo. I’d go farther: the creation is always a degraded copy of the creator. Made in his image, let’s say, not identical or superior. It gets, idk, metaphysical. Maybe that’s why it’s not understood. Science!, and all. Not that the creation is always harmless!
You can’t. An unbiased AI would provide summaries of major arguments, various viewpoints on an issue, various controversies etc.
I’ve seen the same thing: ChatGPT will provide a detailed technical answer – that is WRONG. I have asked it why it just doesn’t say “I don’t know”. It responds, in essence, that it’s not that smart and programmed to please, rather than tell the truth.
I find that the AI always tries to gaslight you, to turn the focus on your supposed “frustration” with its wrong answers. Yes, it’s obsequious, but it is obsequious in a condescending way, like a butler that thinks its better than you.
As Comrade Marx put it so eloquently 150 years ago, “It is not man’s consciousness that determines his social being; rather, it is his social being which determines his consciousness.” How he managed to overcome his own “social being” sufficiently to be able to tell us this was, of course, unmentioned. But whatever — his disciples will shoot everyone who disagrees with him, so he wins. It’s the ultimate expression of free will: the will to power.
The will to power was Nietzsche and I’m certain you don’t understand its provenance in Schopenhauer.
Please, stay away from philosophical terms and names. It’s an attempt to sound intelligent, but to someone who’s read all of the works, usually in their original languages, it’s like listening to babby’s first book.
And if you have a problem with “shoot everyone who disagrees” you can read the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides — no commie he — for a lesson on that score.
The correct response to finding any of the the Marx terms in a comment(Marx, commie, Reds, socialism) is to roll your eyes and scroll your mouse wheel. All of those terms increasingly have a secondary meaning along the lines of “the writer is an out of touch Boomer who is trapped in 1985 and is sure that the KGB is trying to infiltrate an agent under their bed to steal their freedoms”. Seriously, Marxism as an ideology is dead and gone, at least in the world Americans inhabit. Actual true believers in those ideas are maybe a couple hundred thousand… Read more »
‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.’
Sam Harris wrote a book against free will, so we must have free will.
According to Harris, I have no choice but to think he is a fraud and a giant douche.
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Of course I believe in free will; what choice have I.
I used to say that my life, for better or worse, is the result of the choices I have made. Sometimes you make decisions that seem forced upon you, but you make the best of it, or at least through to the next struggle.
Such is life.
“It is the slave mentality…”
I realized that much religion is a form of learned helplessness; to wit, “One must leave it God’s hands.”
Good, as the world is much larger than our own small self, so we have to learn to deal with that. At other times, it can excuse obstinacy or ignorance, as another’s view doesn’t fit their understanding or mental model of how things work.
The “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” as a law code meant no vendettas, no attacks on the neighbors. Some use it to prevent real justice, or others, to soothe their submission.
‘The “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” as a law code meant no vendettas, no attacks on the neighbors.’ Right. Don’t go looking for trouble. Watch the personal stuff and don’t get all uppity. ‘Some use it to prevent real justice, or others, to soothe their submission.’ An excuse for inaction and passivity. Churchianos! Not men of action. Christ never annulled the essence of the Old Testament but instead fulfilled and expanded it. Elijah was a precursor of the Church, I don’t recall him being shy about administering prompt justice. It’s an hour of warfare for the Church and the… Read more »
That’s what I mean. It’s been interpreted as a yoke to the militant.
Good if the militant are domestic criminals disrupting one’s own society, bad if the militants are intent on conquest and tricking our own women to supporting their side.
Assume that’s an allusion to Elijah when commanded “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.
Bold, certainly not shy.
Soon after Jezebel says: So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow. Elijah runs away and asks God to kill him.
Not so bold, and shy at best.
Agreed no need for simps – but even Elijah had his moment of doubt.
Most people are not very capable of original thought, and their jobs include following a predetermined set of policies. AI is a threat to these jobs because it is capable of doing these repetitive tasks better. This exposes the truth that there are a few people who are intelligent and original enough that AI cannot replace them, and a large number of people that will be essentially useless in the near future.
And that, my friend, is what autonomous drones are for…after we learn how to make robots that can clean the toilet.
“…a large number of people that will be essentially useless in the near future.”
True, but is that the essence of the problem? Unemployment may be solved or ameliorated. What I fear is that AI will mask even more incompetence in high positions of authority. Giving the mediocre even more power can never end up to the good.
Free will from a marketing point of view. Owned an outdoor power equipment store for many years. When handheld gas powered blowers were introduced, we had one model. Interest in them was low at best. A couple years later, three models were introduced. Interesting thing is all three were basically the same with only minor cosmetic differences. Of course, higher price for the deluxe models. All of a sudden, interest was much higher with customers looking and deciding between the three. Sales went through the roof. They never looked at performance specs listed on price tag in small print revealing… Read more »
I think “AI” will be useful, but yeah, it won’t be intelligence in the sense we mean it. A calculator is useful but it’s not intelligent. An LLM can be helpful but it’s not intelligent. Really the same thing is true of machine intelligence even if it gets great. It’s just grinding through a lot of grunt work without the slightest clue what it’s doing. By the way I tried the full glass of wine thing and sure enough it can’t do it!
Try to get your AI robot to write a joke. See what happens.
I just did.
A.B.M.: Please write an original joke.
AI: Sure thing! Here’s one for you:
Why don’t skeletons fight each other?
Because they don’t have the guts!
Which “AI” system? I encountered the very same joke in a children’s book of jokes last summer. It was published in 2023 or 2022 iirc.
This would be a prime question to ask in return: “Could you please cite all references to the following “joke”: “Why don’t skeletons…” Here is the response from ChatGPT: Yes, the joke is widely known and commonly cited as a classic example of wordplay. It doesn’t have a single, definitive origin but has been featured in joke books, online humor sites, and general pop culture for years. It’s more of a traditional pun rather than an original creation by any specific person. So it would seem that a bit of prodding is in order as your AI overlooked the stipulation… Read more »
The only thing that concerns me about AI will be the faked media. We need to figure out a quick way to discern that, like we can discern spam emails and fake social media accounts.
That is my main concern. Faming audio is now possible to a degree that no one can tell the fake from real. Video is pretty close. This means the FBI will soon have new tools to frame innocent people.
OK but now I can claim some old picture of me being a drunk jackass is totally fake!
“No, fellow dissidents! That is not actually me at my bar mitzvah singing in drag!”
They already do, the ‘child pron found on computer’ gambit.
I have some related concerns. What about the historic record? Old newspapers provide a treasure trove of knowledge and insights as to what happened in the past. There’s something about words being frozen on a piece of paper that speaks truth. Now, everything is virtual. It seems like it would be fairly easily to manipulate the historic record to say whatever you want. Then we have the usual suspects manipulating AI to give us the answers they want. Imagine AI always giving you answers that are pro-“our greatest ally,” for example. We may one day ask AI to write up… Read more »
“Old newspapers provide a treasure trove of knowledge and insights as to what happened in the past.” I think that would depend on how far you go back. Anything from the post-war era is likely just a bunch of propaganda. Though if you go back further, it does seem better. I recently read a 19th century report in a magazine (I’m pretty sure it was The Atlantic, July 1881) about the Ladies’ Deposit Corporation, a 19th century Ponzi scheme. It seemed to be free of propaganda. OTOH, a lot of articles written about the Titanic sinking were full of lies.… Read more »
True, but I guess it depends on the subject matter as well. … Somewhat related: In the local paper today, the granddaughter of Paul Tibbets, the guy who flew the Enola Gay and nuked the Japs, is crying because Trump’s scrub of DEI in the Department of Defense flagged pictures of the Enola Gay and they are supposedly set for removal. Lefties just don’t get that Trump is trolling them in very large part. I’ve been trolling the lefties this morning by calling him a mass murderer, and complaining about all the harm he released on Mother Gaia not only… Read more »
That Enola Gay story must have come from the Onion or Babylon Bee.
Well, I always thought part of analyzing history was putting the papers into context. If we know it is propaganda, we can process it through the lens. But I suspect that future “historians” will not even do that, they will rely on AI to do the analysis for them and spit something out. Of course, it will be what the people who wrote the AI want them to see. So, in other words, the days of historical research may be coming to an end, and we simply will not get revisionism. This is great for the regime!
You bet, remember the recent campaigning to confuse reality, til we “need” AI.gov to tell us what is real, if men can get pregnant, if the seas are rising, if the economy is robust and we can make shells for our allies…or to prove that the Puritans were racist killers who learned the Constitution from stone age Indian savages.
There is no way for any actor to not have this ability now. The Regime of the West has forfeited its legitimacy for the reasons that all of us here know. This aspect of AI is going to lead to a permanent legitimacy crisis. Whose fake is real will be the constant debate? There is also the training set that a comment below points out. In any case, this is a great topic. In the end, clans with extremely deep, in-person in-real-life ties that have mechanisms to prove sincerity , loyalty, validity … … will emerge. One thing that encourages… Read more »
“This aspect of AI is going to lead to a permanent legitimacy crisis. Whose fake is real will be the constant debate? “ This is along my thinking. So far—and I am no expert in the AI field—it seems that AI for general use is adapting the “Wikipedia” fallacy. That is to say, if you load enough information, from enough sources, the final outcome will be the truth! Wikipedia demonstrated the fallacy of this assumption and proved once again an even older adage: “garbage in, garbage out”. Perhaps the first axiom I learned in my first programming course 60 years ago!… Read more »
It still mispronounces words no native English speaker would mispronounce. There are a couple of youtube channels I sub to which uses text to speech which does this. Though I suppose it is possible they are just using a really crappy speech program.
My Panasonic landline telephone is surprisingly good at announcing names. It does a good job with foreign names based on caller ID.
Just amazing how many voice actors- the people who do your radio jingles and video narrations- are being put out of work. Now their distinctive voices are simply sampled.
Oh yeah, Ai mispronounces the schmidt out of common speech.
someone says “deepfake”, I hear “reasonable doubt.” I don’t see how the FBI could ever get a conviction when the other person could just say any audio/video evidence against them was faked. Wires and tapped phones are basically completely useless at that point.
“ don’t see how the FBI could ever get a conviction when the other person could just say any audio/video evidence against them was faked.” This is a problem, but unfortunately not a legal issue. It’s one of law and its current counterpart is typical “chain of evidence” challenges. The FBI will take the stand and testify how the audio/video was collected, then transferred from there all the way to the court. If necessary, a dozen witnesses will testify how they “handled” the evidence such that it was not tampered with. Seen this on a Grand Jury myself. The defense of… Read more »
LLM is well known for making stuff up. I don’t see how anyone can trust it. Even when it doesn’t make stuff up, it’s like a hypercharged version of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is basically a CIA front. Google also spent a lot of money for access to Reddit, and Reddit is designed to produce a top-down social consensus (I think it’s a CIA front too). Put two and two together, our social engineers are training people to rely on whatever the LLM vomits out, and then they train the LLM to produce whatever they want people to believe. The LLM… Read more »
One of Reddit’s greatest sins was its role in establishing the ranked upvote as a standard for internet forums. On paper it makes sense, but in practice it sucks. Every thread becomes a race to be the first poster and/or the terminally online kook with handle recognition, and then the discussion gets pulled by whoever gets the first upvote traction. Makes it very easy to manipulate for botfarms. I was shocked that there are people who make a living creating Reddit accounts and seasoning them to get past moderators before I knew about the prevalence of botfarms, but it makes… Read more »
“Almost every day, half the comments on the thread will be attached to whatever the first non-retarded comment to get posted,…”
Hey, I resemble that remark…good observation. 😉
Seems to be some confusion here. Hence, the aesthetic choice (pleasure v. pain) is not the same thing as the moral choice (right v. wrong). In fact, the two are frequently antithetical. Hence, the moral choice is often the painful one, while the pleasurable choice is very often immoral. For instance, it is moral to quit smoking on behalf of your wife and children, but also very painful for most smokers. And, while it is pleasurable to diddle the pretty waitress while your wife is away on a business trip, it is also certainly immoral to do so. The very… Read more »
“The determinists would say this is an illusion. You think you made a choice, but in reality, at a perhaps primordial psychological level, you really had no choice at all. You were fated to choose the chocolate malt.”
This is the irritating part of having anything to do with determinists of any flavor. It’s all just circular reference. Anything you say in response, anything at all, the reply is that the conditions in the universe at that point in time made you say that. It’s just a religion, but one they don’t even realize they follow.
“There are other tricks like this that reveal AI to be nothing more than a very good search engine.” Probably nearer to the mark than most other (outlandish) claims currently made for AI. I’ve reference some early experimentation by Ron Unz at his blog in this matter. However, something seems missing. I’ve been using ChatGPT of late—not just as a smart search agent—that it is—but also as a consultant, a medical consultant. ChatGPT has a memory, for good or bad. This means that previous conversations (inquiries) are not forgotten, but rather become the new starting point for elaboration on previous… Read more »
Great points, and ChatGPT is also not limited by the beancounters in staffing- that is, you have 5-15 minutes for so many beds, regardless of whether a 90 year-old dementia patient has torn out his tubes, gotten out of bed and barfed on the floor, and is now out wandering around the hallway. Oh, and the charge nurse has already sent half the staff home, too.
When the muslims take over, what will become of the AI? I can sort of picture what a muslim dominated AI would look like, hypothetically, assuming they possessed the skill to program it and control it. But I don’t think it’s a given that they do. We could end up seeing a muslim dominated Europe still running on the baizuo white man’s AI. That seems like the most likely scenario. In which the new muslim masters need the AI in order to make basic services function, but the AI is still saying that best practices suggest giving your child puberty… Read more »
Americans always worrying about Europe being mastered by foreigners.
Fortunately that would never happen in the US.
The difference I see is that no one particular group will take over or dominate AINO
Maybe those iron curtain closed societies like Romania, Albania and North Korea had a point. Maybe it is best to cut yourself off from the rest of the world.
Now I know you’re joking, JZ.
I assume you are referring to da jooz, who did take over, but their sun is setting and they know it. They’re so terrified by the prospect that they allied themselves with drumpf
“muslim dominated AI”
Saudi Arabia is our greatest ally?
Good one! Look at European sex education for schoolkids. It’s always illustrated with brown men on top of and inside of white women, even in the graphic ‘anatomy’ bits. (To the point of dark P in a white V, and a brown baby growing inside white mommy’s tummy.)
I’m a midwit with these types of philosophical questions, but Tim Kelly on Our Interesting Times sometimes talks about free will and the modern “do what thou wilt” ethos in relation to our bodies. The first time I realized this was when I was in my mid 20s and someone showed me a video that plays sounds at different tones with an age listed for each tone. We stop being able to hear certain tones as we age. It’s crazy how accurate it is. Of course I didn’t choose to stop hearing that “age 25” tone when I was 26.… Read more »
Decades of interacting with animals of various sorts has left me convinced that we are more “pre-programmed meat robots” than automatons that can blank-slate every decision.
Yes, we are pre-programmed by 100,000 years of human evolution and a few million years of biological evolution before that. We are basically cave men thrust into modernity which we are not “programmed” to deal with. Ever wonder why we have panic attacks?
No argument, but the retort would be, “Are you free to choose your DNA”?
Ah well. My best friend’s first marriage was with a woman who had a lot of rules and routines. The mantra was…
“Rules are made to be broken.”
It’s kinda deep.
With regard to free will, I would be more skeptical of the idea if individual people reacted to stimuli more consistently. Groups are way more predictable than single people. Groups will naturally default to the mean, like any statistically normal population. But on any given day I might alter some reactions, often even against my self interest, simply due to spite. There have been moments I was so annoyed over a petty disappointment in a matter of taste that I chose to take nothing rather than enjoy something perfectly adequate. Of course all animals have pre-programmed survival algorithms, as we… Read more »
“The good news is that AI is not very smart and is unlikely to become a genuine artificial intelligence” I don’t know about that. I know I’m not very smart. When I pay a neural network chess engine, I have no way of beating it. No human chess player does. So what is “very smart?” We’re probably pretty close to an “artificial general intelligence”, which can learn by itself in the same manner that a neural network can learn Go and chess by itself in a matter of hours. I think we need a clearer definition of what “very smart”… Read more »
Ooh boy. Just like humans, it won’t be able to tell if it’s been hijacked or reprogrammed.
“The choice is ours.”
Delicious ending!
Well it may not be an issue at all soon. I keep hearing about those 1000 qubit quantum computers… and it’s scaring the shite out of the tall foreheads. Apparently the thing is messing about in alternative time lines, and/or reversing the flow of time in ours, and/or messing about with our own reality.
I wonder what a temporal unreality bomb would look like? And given the antics and monkey business in Ottawa and Washington… how’d you know one went off?
Is this why Dolly in Moonraker lost her braces?
Restricted by the body and physical world, humans have limited ‘free will’. Pure free will = madness. A mere baby knows enough to take comfort when swaddled. Even the goofy gnostics figgered out the spirit is trapped in the body. Angels have more ‘free will’ as they are not, unless incarnate, limited by the body. ‘What is meant exactly by free will is never clear, but there is always the assumption that when people have choices, they choose based on their sense of what is the morally right or wrong option’ Ah ha ha ha. ‘[Conservatives] lack the will and… Read more »
I see what you did there.
Nietzsche is unequivocally anti-free will. He says it can be disproved but to the best of my knowledge he provides no such proof. In many other passages he argues that man is dominated by primitive instincts the unconscious etc. For example that a criminal should not be considered “guilty” of a crime, because that presumes that he could have chosen to do right or wrong, but that may not be the case. Perhaps a middle position is closer to the real situation. One of several identified errors of philosophers is the insistence on antithesis of values. Some might argue either… Read more »