094 - Illusion of Choice

The debate over "Determinism", "Compatibilism", and "Free Will" has recently taken the stage again. While it is tempting to act like nothing has really changed, that isn't how scientific progress operates, but rather it is a temptation that cognitive bias is always quick to offer.

I should note that I'm quite dispassionate on this topic. Instead, what has caught my attention is how cognitive biases are being applied to it, not the subject matter itself.

Some neuroscientists like Peter U. Tse have responded to Sapolsky's recent book with statements asserting that because humans are complex and vary from one to another they can't be considered deterministic. He goes on to accuse those who make the case that they are deterministic of promoting hopelessness and suffering in the world.

To put this in culinary terms, he is serving up a Straw Man Fallacy, where he proposes that just because something is complicated and/or functionally unique it cannot be deterministic. He mixes together Reactive Devaluation, Essentialism, Confabulation, and Illusory Correlation as a sauce to go over this dish, and garnishes it with Substitution Bias to lay the blame for the world's suffering on any who dare oppose his belief system. Not a meal I'd pay for.

Of course, that isn't how deterministic systems work at all. Whether or not a system is deterministic isn't impacted by the complexity of that system, nor does a system's uniqueness or lack thereof have anything to do with it. A system can be wholly unique and so complex as to remain forever outside of human comprehension and still be purely deterministic.

What changes is that as a system grows more complex the human perceiver faces increasing cognitive pressure to apply greater cognitive bias, as per the Complexity versus Cognitive Bias trade-off which all intelligent and non-scalable systems are subject to. This shift in perception based on the complexity of a system, and the associated subjective experience, doesn't shift reality.

The catch-all bucket of "Free Will" and the escapism of Compatibilism are much like the catch-all bucket of "Quantum ...", they shrink over time as more is discovered because that which is discovered can no longer be tossed in these buckets. By all evidence now known, Free Will appears to be a "useful, but wrong" concept. It remains useful for purposes of emotional motivation, even recognizing that it is likely wrong.

The path forward isn't to hide inside a shrinking bucket but to pave new roads with the new tools and understanding available to us. New can be scary, but this seems like the right time of year for that.