Marvin Minsky/on free will

23 Mar 2024 -

The illusory nature of "Ego, Self, or Final Center of Control". This is of course where Minskyism lines up 100% with Buddhism, at least on the surface. They might not be talking about exactly the same thing, or agree on what is left when the illusion is removed.

According to the modern scientific view, there is simply no room at all for "freedom of the human will". Everything that happens in our universe is either completely determined by what's already happend in the past or else depends, in part, on random chance...whatever actions we may "choose", they cannot make the slightest change in what might otherwise have been...

First, let me say I hate this passage, and others like it, that are effectively eliminativist . Also the claim for "the modern scientific view". This is, more or less the same thing the Weird Studies guys believe – that science is incompatible with the human soul. That makes them enemies of science (or of materalism at least) while Minsky is its friend, but it seems to me that both of these positions involve a misunderstanding of the place of science. Science is not superior to your internal experience, it can't override it.

Whenever we find some scrap of order in the world, we have to attribute it to Cause—and whenever things seem to obey no laws at all, we attribute that to Chance. This means that the dominion controlled by Will can only hold what, up to now, we don't understand.

Does this mean that we must embrace the modern scientific view and put aside the ancient myth of voluntary choice? No. We can't do that: too much of what we think and do revolves around those old beliefs. Consider how our social lives depend upon the notion of responsibility and how little that idea would mean without our belief that personal actions are voluntary.

I agree with the above 100%; whether free will is real or not, we are obligated to act as if it were. "Obligated" is not quite a strong enough term perhaps. We can't be thinking beings without some kind of felt freedom and felt self, these experienceds are at the core of our being and we can't discard them without discarding our existence as such.

But in that case, in what sense is it not real? It's plenty real to me, and that pulls more weight with me than whatever some guy in a lab coat says about how I operate. If it's a choice between science and the most basic felt reality of experience, science can get fucked.

Minsky at least is acknowledging that his ideas are incompatible with ordinary life. He doesn't tell you how to deal with that paradox. Maybe it's a kind of tech koan, the contradiction is supposed to break your brain in way that's good for you. That is: rigid determinism is just as much a "mind-destroying idea" as "all is one", but they serve different agendas.

That's another big difference between Minskyism and Buddhism: the latter has a long tradition and highly evolved institutions that help real individual people manage their lives as they realize their selves are illusory. Tech does not, to put it mildly. To the extent it thinks about problems like this at all, they are waved away, or machoed away as something only the sissies in the humanities would worry about.