Free will

In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then came about the right conditions to cause an explosion.

Energy and matter was created and expanded in all directions, governed by laws of behavior we call physics. The most fundamental of those is that of entropy. It states that over time, disorder increases and information is lost.

The laws of physics are quirky in that entropy is not linearly increasing everywhere. There are pockets where it decreases on the road to disorder. Mass is attracted to other mass, coming together in different forms of mass pulled together. Those can be divided recursively: galaxies, solar systems, planets.

One of the planets that forms is ours, Earth. On Earth, the laws of physics marched on. It governed the creation and interaction of all things on it: continents, oceans, mountains, lakes, rivers.

At one point on Earth, these laws happen to form the right conditions for the creation of a new type of thing. Life. Life was special because in addition to being governed by the laws of physics it can grow and recreate itself. And each recreation can be a little bit different. And some of these become more fit at surviving and recreating themselves. Those win more resources and more of the next generation will be their offspring. This is evolution. Evolution pulled out of the first cells of life a seemingly infinite fractal of life branches. Like gravity pulling an apple out of a tree. The branches grow, die and sub-divide.

Evolution develops in some of these branches sensors that can observe the world around them. It develops some features that allow more advanced actuation in the world. In some of these branches, brains form. These pieces of biological matter do a level of information processing between the sensor input and the actuation.

Evolution pulls out of one of these branches a brain that gets consistently more powerful. This branch uses its more powerful brain to be more fit in survival and reproduction. It gets an unequal distribution of the rewards. Eventually this leads to our species, the homo sapiens.

Homo sapiens are more intelligent than other forms of life. More than any other species, we can use our brains to form increasingly abstract representations of the world, including each other and ourselves. We learn and understand those representations largely through our interactions with each other. The first of those is our interaction with our mother. We develop from birth and start developing an independent model of self. We learn dependence and independence. Exploration and exploitation. We form collectively larger collections of each other, from the self, to the family, the tribe, the nation, to all of humanity. What is true about one of these levels of collection is true for all.

In addition to basic pleasure seeking and pain avoidance, an individual develops complex models of themselves and the world. They predict their own actions based on those models and then attempt to perform those predicted actions. This happens at any level of our collection: a single person, families, tribes, nations, humanity. With a single person, information processing happens within the brain through electrical signals moving between neurons. With multiple people, information processing happens between people through various communication mediums.

Actions taken can range from small reactions to those around us to large-scale terraforming that permanently alters the Earth. Like all living things, the actions are a response to our stimuli. Those actions can be rationalized after being taken.

In rare situations, the right conditions occur for the action to be chosen by the individual in a higher level detached state. The self observes its internal models and chooses or modifies its model of itself for the situation. For some people, this condition will never arise. For some people, it will arise a handful of times. A handful of occasions where they are able to step out of the gravity of existence and intentionally choose a path forward. We call this free will. This can occur for an individual as well as all recursively larger collections of people: families, tribes, nations, humanity.

Like the Big Bang, life, and intelligence, free will is an exception that occurs, not never or all the time, but a small number of times.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.