Well... as you point out in the book, I "Serves as the list's operational skeptic and meeting chronicler. Consistently advocates for "sciencing the problem" and tethering complex philosophical concepts back to empirical behavioral testing (e.g., "rats in mazes")." 😅
In that vein I think the crucial starting point would be to find at least a few examples in which we agree someone acted of their own free will and a few examples in which they did not act of their own free will, and integrate those examples to determine the difference. Do I act of my own free will when I select a certain steak from the menu and request a certain doneness? Does the mugging victim act of their own free will when a gun is pointed at their child and their wallet requested? When my kid asks where we are going, and I tell them I want to take the scenic route to school today, was that free will? Etc. Whatever we find freewill to be, when we have finished engaging in that task, I doubt we will find discussion of quantum mechanics or structural-decay-that-might-make-the-past-unknowable to be relevant. (And, by "doubt" I am not asserting certainty of irrelevance, I only mean that I do not think it will be the outcome, but I could be wrong.) Best, Eric <[email protected]> On Sat, Aug 15, 2026 at 1:28 PM Jochen Fromm <[email protected]> wrote: > A long and thoughtful post Jon. I like the drunkard's streetlight metaphor. > > Physicists would not agree that "the world" unfolds deterministically. The > weather for example that Nick mentions so often is unpredictable in the > long run - as you know due to chaos theory and the butterfly effect. > > Biological systems in turn have and keep low internal entropy because of > their high degree of internal order and complexity. Human behavior is > operating 4 or 5 levels above the physical level of atoms and molecules, on > top of and in a low-entropy biological system. > > I see the problem differently, more from a human and less from a mere > physical perspective. For me the interesting thing is why we can have free > will although our behavior is determined by our habits, our emotional > reactions, and the character formed by our past environments. By the wiring > of our hardware so to speak. > > The interesting question for me is not if a human mind can magically break > the laws of physics by some kind of quantum woo, but how constraints, > habits, and conscious interventions interact and which forms of agency > emerge from it. > > But I agree that we should not to let a 17th-century view of the universe > dictate the terms of 21st-century thinking. It is probably better to see > human freedom and agency as a dynamic spectrum. Some people have fewer > cognitive degrees of freedom than others, and there are moments where we > show full free will, and others where we lack it. > > Instead of asking, "Did this person act out of free will?", we should > probably better ask "Given their biological state, stress level, history, > psychological conditioning, and available information, how many meaningful > alternative paths could this system actually evaluate and take in that > moment?" > > > -J. > > > -------- Original message -------- > From: Jon Zingale <[email protected]> > Date: 8/15/26 6:21 PM (GMT+01:00) > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> > > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New philosophy book > > Jochen, > > Implicit in many of the group's discussions of free will and determinism > is the premise that the world unfolds deterministically, and that the > remaining question is whether something extra exists that can escape or > modify that mechanism. I do not think that this setup is necessary or > given. More importantly, I think it installs a false dichotomy at the > center of what may be an ill-posed problem. > > Locally, and for many purposes, causal accounts work extraordinarily well. > We can often treat physical laws as stable, or at least as evolving > according to some effective computable rule. We can model bounded domains, > specify state variables, solve or approximate equations, and aim to obtain > predictive control. Nothing I wish to say here denies that success. > > But a successful local model is not yet a warrant for the stronger > metaphysical conclusion that there exists a complete global state of the > universe, that this state retains every relevant distinction in a lossless > way, and that its entire evolution is specified by a computable rule. Those > are substantive further assumptions. > > My disagreement with the "aggregation of history" picture begins here. A > world with finite physical resources cannot straightforwardly be assumed to > be an indefinitely accumulating, lossless record of arbitrarily fine > distinctions. Entropy and information bounds are often read as limits on > how much information can be stored in a finite region with finite energy. > At a minimum, physical history must be represented through selective > persistence: some distinctions become stable records, some are dispersed > into inaccessible correlations, some are erased relative to a scale of > description, and some cease to be recoverable by any physically available > process. > > So I wonder whether *the total state of the universe* is doing more > metaphysical work than it has earned. If one allows that the global > unfolding may involve non-computable structure, then no finite internal > description can, in general, serve as a complete ledger of that unfolding. > The universe cannot stand outside itself with a second, lossless copy of > its own full history. > > I am not claiming that noncomputability establishes free will. I am asking > whether the familiar determinism vs free will framing already presupposes > an idealized total-state picture that may not be physically meaningful. > > There is a related mathematical point. Scientists understandably favor > well-posed models: operators and dynamical systems with domains, > regularity, stability, and convergence properties sufficient for analysis > and prediction. But those are selected virtues, not neutral evidence that > the space of possible physical evolutions is itself globally well behaved. > Compact operators, for example, are a special class. They map bounded sets > to relatively compact sets and are necessarily bounded, but they are not > representative of all operators one might write down. I would like to not > confuse the tractability of the mathematical objects we can successfully > use with a demonstration that reality is exhausted by such objects. > > The same caution applies to computability. Under the ordinary Lebesgue > measure on the reals, the computable reals form a countable set and > therefore a set of *measure-zero*. By contrast, algorithmically random > sequences are typical under the fair-coin measure. That is, Martin-Löf > random sequences have *measure-one*. Of course, there is no canonical > uniform distribution over *all laws* or *all operators*, so this is not a > probability calculation showing that physical law is non-computable. It is > an admonition against quietly assuming computability merely because > computable descriptions are the ones available to us. > > I am imagining the drunkard under the streetlight metaphor. It is sensible > to look where mathematical models offer light: computable dynamics, > well-posed initial-value problems, bounded domains, compactness arguments, > and stable approximations. But their usefulness does not establish that the > deep structure of the universe is confined to those regions of conceptual > illumination. > > For me, the more difficult thought is that materialism may imply not a > perfectly preserved cosmic archive, but an unfolding in which persistence > is selective and forgetting is real. Perhaps there is no complete *deep > history* available even in principle. Instead there may only exist present > structures bearing partial, transformed, scale-dependent traces of what > preceded them. I am tempted to say that what leaves no trace whatsoever > *never existed* in any ontologically robust sense. I suppose I am arguing > for a surprisingly shallow image of history. > > If so, the future may be genuinely productive (immanence) rather than > merely unknown to us. Not necessarily because an agent steps outside > causality, but because the global boundary conditions, state description, > and rule of unfolding are not available in the form demanded by classical > determinism. > > This may make *free will* the wrong label. We may all be acting in ways > that are locally causal, constrained, and intelligible while global > determinism remains undefined, ungrounded, or simply irrelevant. I do not > yet know what positive concept should replace it. But I do not think that > uncertainty should be hidden by accepting the *determinism vs free will* > dichotomy as our starting point. > > My two cents. > > Jon > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / > ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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