What do you think? I am curious to hear your opinion. BestJochen
-------- Original message --------From: Marcus Daniels <[email protected]>
Date: 8/17/26 4:07 PM (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free will as a spectrum.
Was: New philosophy book Does ChatGPT have free will? From: Friam
<[email protected]> on behalf of Jochen Fromm <[email protected]>Date:
Monday, August 17, 2026 at 1:12 AMTo: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
Coffee Group <[email protected]>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free will as a spectrum.
Was: New philosophy bookAs Jon reminded us free will is a spectrum. A few
examples ChatGPT helped me to create:Low free will+ Someone has an overwhelming
compulsive urge to drink a glass of Jack Daniel's and feels unable to resist
it+ Someone automatically pulls their hand away after touching something
extremely hot+ Someone threatens to kill you and you hand over your money
because you are afraid you will die Medium free will+ Someone wants to exercise
at the gym but has built a habit of checking social media sites on the phone
and decides to go later+ Someone wants to eat healthy but is strongly tempted
by a new Ben & Jerry's ice cream and eventually gives in High free will+
Someone recognizes an impulse, pauses, considers the own values and
deliberately chooses whether to act on it+ Someone decides to enroll at
Columbia University to study psychology+ After his doctor tells him he has too
much weight, someone decides to sign up for a 10km run in his city Best,Jochen
-------- Original message --------From: Eric Charles
<[email protected]> Date: 8/17/26 12:31 AM (GMT+01:00) To: The
Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re:
[FRIAM] New philosophy book 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 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.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- -
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