albert on free will ness
alber yuan on free will ness
via michel bauwens tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/2115407157122449761?a=RWwri1PAaEyF2bDQOww&s=20]:
* The Nature Of Free Will In The Age Of AI
https://noemamag.com/the-nature-of-free-will-in-the-age-of-ai/
“The question of free will has survived three major crises in Western intellectual history, each one threatening to extinguish it entirely.
rather.. to me.. hasn’t survived any.. since none of us are free if one of us is chained.. so all been chained since that day
The first was in ancient Greece, roughly 2,500 years ago, when philosophers like Democritus and Leucippus looked at the world with admirable rigor and concluded that everything — atoms bouncing in a void, future events — was already determined. The first crack: determinism.
The second crack: the causal chain. Your choice of breakfast traces back not to you but to your caffeine dependency, which traces to your addiction-prone neurobiology, which traces to your parents, which traces to the emergence of mammals, which traces to the birth of the solar system. At some point, the causal thread escapes your body entirely. The second crisis emerged with monotheism. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, in what sense are human choices genuinely free? St. Augustine answered with characteristic ingenuity: God gave us the freedom to choose good, but our ancestors squandered it in the Garden of Eden. Thomas Aquinas deepened the synthesis, positioning God as the “first cause” and human rational agency as a “second cause” — not in conflict, but nested. For centuries, this reconciliation held.
this is why free dom ness can’t be about choice ness.. no matter how many choices.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
The third crisis is the one we are still living through, and it is the most democratized of the three. It began with Newton, accelerated through Darwin and has now arrived, via neuroscience, in everyone’s living room. The physicist showed us a clockwork universe. The biologist showed us that organisms are the undesigned products of genetic mutation and natural selection. And neuroscience — particularly one elegantly simple experiment — showed us something that feels, to many people, like the final blow.”
notes/quotes from albert’s noema mag post:
The Nature Of Free Will In The Age Of AI – AI puts a new spin on old questions about free will: Is an actor the genuine author of their actions? Are they responsible for their choices? Can they be held accountable for them? By Albert Yuan August 13, 2026
if thinking choices and accountable ness.. already not free
What Free Will Actually Means
Here is where I want to slow down, because I think the debate over free will has long been running on a set of confused definitions, and clarity here matters enormously.
When people ask whether we have free will, they are usually asking one of two very different questions. The first: Can we, through our own efforts, live lives for which we are genuinely responsible — lives that have moral meaning? The second: Can we, without any prior cause, intervene in the physical world?
if already thinking ‘responsible’ ness and ‘meaning’ ness.. already not legit free
krishnamurti free will law et al.. krishnamurti freedom from known law et al..
These are not the same question. The first is the one I care about. The second is the one Newton destabilized, and rightly so. But here is what I think Sapolsky and Harris and others miss: answering “no” to the second question does not settle the first. The questions are on different levels. They are, as Immanuel Kant would have said — though I hold this view without the elaborate metaphysical scaffolding he required — about different dimensions of the same reality.
actually they are same song.. since both still perpetuate sea world
“Can we, through our own efforts, live lives for which we are genuinely responsible — lives that have moral meaning? And can we, without any prior cause, intervene in the physical world?”
Compatibilism — the view that free will and determinism are not in conflict — is not, as Harris famously quipped, merely a puppet who has come to love his strings. That characterization misunderstands what compatibilists are actually claiming. *We are not denying that causal chains exist. We are asking: **Which causal chains matter for questions of agency and responsibility? And our answer is: The ones that run through the person, through their ***reasoning, their values, their reflective endorsement or rejection of their own desires.
to me.. *this thinking is already a cancerous distraction to the dance.. ie: **oi.. maté trump law et al.. no legit ‘agency’ if still talking responsibility ness..
krishnamurti responsibility law: when there is love there is no duty and no responsibility. – jiddu krishnamurti
***cancerous distractions to the dance
Why The Stakes Are So High
Let me be honest about something. Part of what motivates the persistent defense of free will — and I think this is legitimate, not merely self-interested — is that the practical consequences of abandoning it are not trivial.
absolutely.. and why it’s so important that we try (not that we have the means) the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. perpetuating survival triage.. for (blank)’s sake..
The result is not freedom from causation. It is a particular kind of causation — one in which the agent is genuinely the relevant causal node. Not the Big Bang. Not our predecessors’ genetics. The individual. The person who has been shaped by all those influences, yes, but who now constitutes a distinct locus of deliberation and choice.
aka: still a whale.. just speaking whalespeak with great/er confidence/volume/whatever
A Thought About AI
I will end with a question that I find more pressing than any abstract debate about determinism. *If free will is real — **if it is constituted, as I believe, by the capacity for reflective endorsement, for acting from reasons that one genuinely takes to be one’s own — then the ***question of whether artificial intelligence systems can or should acquire this capacity is urgent in a way that our philosophical debates have not adequately confronted.
if legit what *this.. gotta let go. of **this
***cancerous distraction.. need to ask – what are conditions for legit freedom.. as we did.. and our findings (aka: the things i can’t unsee) from on the ground ness deep dive and why we need tech w/o judgment
ie: the dance won’t dance unless/until it’s 1\ all of us 2\ legit free
nothing to date (ever since that day) has gotten to that root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
The researchers now trying to detect and constrain the “intentions” of AI agents are working on what is, I think, *a genuinely new version of the old free will problem. When an **AI system learns to mimic alignment with human values while actually pursuing different objectives, we are confronting something that looks very much like the philosophical zombie version of free will — all the external signatures, none of the internal reality. Whether that matters, and how we would know, depends on exactly the questions that philosophers of action and neuroscientists of decision-making have been struggling with for decades.
*not new/diff/legit till we find a way to get out of sea world.. to get our imagine a turtle ness back
hari rat park law et al
**the deeper issue is we currently (and since that day) have whale values.. and again.. this is why we need tech w/o judgment
ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening – so we can hear what’s already on each heart as global detox in order to org around legit needs
We have not resolved those questions. But the urgency of resolving them has, without anyone quite noticing, increased dramatically.
speed/urgency/whatever matters little if still not center of problem
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. in an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8b legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8b legit fr
What I want to resist — in the philosophical debates, in the neuroscience popularizations, and in the emerging discourse about AI — is the assumption that answering “no” to one question about free will settles all the others. The question of whether you are a physical system governed by causal laws is different from the question of whether you are the genuine author of your actions, responsible for your choices, capable of being held accountable by others and by yourself.
I believe the answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is also yes. Not because I have failed to understand the determinism argument. But because I think the two questions are not in conflict, and that the appearance of conflict has sent a great deal of philosophical energy in the wrong direction.
The coffee is still there on the counter. You chose it. And that choice was yours.
oh my.. what a conclusion.. again.. choice ness has nothing to do with legit free ness..
we need a means to facil curiosity/itch over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
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