It's the year 2062 and Neuralink has finally perfected mind-reading implants. Dictatorial regimes across the globe are forcibly implanting children with the technology, their every thought sent to the Bureau of Ethics and Education. In accordance with new laws, adults also must submit to an implant, lest they face severe penalties of jail time.
Citizens with unsanctioned thoughts are apprehended and re-educated. Those unhappy with the state of affairs no longer have any opportunity to gather like minded others or sympathetic supporters, as the Bureau is alerted to their unharmonious thoughts, and they are intercepted before any collective action can be taken. The regime is stable, the citizenry completely suppressed, the dictators free to continue their atrocities as they see fit, unopposed, forever.
I think about this all the time. Copied from my bio:
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If you have any interest in privacy, while we missed the boat on internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier with neuro tracking.
Soon we will be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login. Next there will be a TSA neuro scan to board.
> Proposed neuro-rights include the right to identity, or the ability to control both one's physical and mental integrity; the right to agency, or the freedom of thought and free will to choose one's own actions; the right to mental privacy, or the ability to keep thoughts protected against disclosure; [0]
For a great breakdown on the SOTA tech, and the long term implications, please see this podcast with full written transcript.
> Sean Carroll & Nita Farahany on Ethics, Law, and Neurotechnology [1]
To be honest as grim as this is, judging by how little resistance there currently is to adopt new technologies and services regardless of privacy concerns, the majority of people most likely won't be forced at all..
I think of my 12 year old niece. She doesn't have a concept of privacy the way I have a concept of privacy.
It would never occur to me to film someone in public without their consent for privacy reasons. For younger people, it would never occur to them why you wouldn't film potentially good online content. The idea we are going back to the past seems delusional at best.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
"Free will" doesn't seem to have a generally accepted concrete definition to be proven or disproven in the first place.
Besides, as someone with ADHD I know that even if I have free will, other parts of my brain work against me anyway, so I don't actually have total control over my actions.
I think it’s generally understood to mean that you can consciously decide to do a specific thing.
The “anti” free will side is generally understood to mean that the brain chooses to do something and then you experience it as a decision after the fact.
That’s my understanding of it at the very least and I tend to lean towards the “It thinks therefore I am” side of things.
All definitions (that I’ve ever heard) do this thing, though, where they just instantly add more concepts that either don’t have precise definitions, or whose definitions instantly render free will trivially existent or nonexistent, depending on what you go with. What do “you”, “consciously” and “decide” mean? And in particular, how is “you” distinct from “the brain”?
This doesn't fundamentally answer what the post you're responding to is asking. What do you mean by 'you'? When we use that word we often presuppose that such a thing exists. I suspect that if you dig deep enough 'you' will be something like a fancy version of a mixture of experts 'blind sight' system.
I’m aware of that research, but my point is that whether you consider that to have any bearing on free will depends largely on where you draw those other boundaries.
I can try to decide to do whatever I want, but sometimes my brain will "disagree" with me by making it impossible for me to actually perform any action towards that thing.
I feel like I don't have free will, because even though I have the capacity to want anything at any time, what I can actually do is limited by what my brain will agree with me on. However, I am conscious about this and aware of the things that I am not allowed to do, and this makes me sad.
However, I also feel like this ability for me to disagree with what my brain wants could be what free will is. Sometimes I can even win against it. But other times it's impossible for me to do anything about it.
Now, the real question is whether the separation between these processes is purely an ADHD thing, or whether normal non-ADHD brains have the same processes but simply don't ever have this kind of "disagreement".
The next one would be whether the disagreement never happens because their brain is less picky about what it lets them do (free will), or whether it never happens because the conscious mind doesn't attempt to defy the brain's wants (no free will).
> I feel like I don't have free will, because even though I have the capacity to want anything at any time, what I can actually do is limited by what my brain will agree with me on. However, I am conscious about this and aware of the things that I am not allowed to do, and this makes me sad.
Are “you” wanting the thing or is your brain just firing conflicting signals automatically and you experience that as a thought after the fact?
> How would a neural implant help with this?
The linked article talks about direct measurement of brain activity. ie you can compare when something happens in the brain vs when you think you chose to make a particular decision.
> Are “you” wanting the thing or is your brain just firing conflicting signals automatically and you experience that as a thought after the fact?
You're implying a definition of "you" here that I don't use. My definition of myself is like the collection of signals that can be attributed to myself. Which is important since my brain contains multiple people who can each have their own independent signals.
(Of course, there are multiple definitions of myself depending on which realm I'm using it in, but in terms of the physical realm, yeah it's whatever my brain does that can be attributed to "me" somehow. So it's self-describing, technically. Or I am. Literally.)
In other words, my self is not a physical point in the brain from which decisions originate. My concept of self is meant to make it easier for me to communicate where it feels like a thought or action of mine ("of mine", see?) originated.
You can see something like this in split brain experiments, where one side of the brain can do something visible to, but completely independent of, the other side, which is neurologically disconnected. That other side will then interpret this as having been an action of its self, even without ever actually having done it.
That suggests the self exists only as something to which actions and feelings can be attributed. A thought device, maybe.
Part of the reason why it's important for me to recognize this is because my brain does contain multiple selves, also known as dissociative identities. I need to have some way of identifying myself in here that's more nuanced than "if my brain consciously did it, then obviously it was me".
During polyconscious periods I have a stable identity even while others coexist, but I'm not always polyconscious, so sometimes my identity will change and I have to figure out who I've changed into.
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I have experienced a difference between "arriving at something through conscious thought" and "my brain arriving at something without conscious thought", because the latter typically completely bypasses conscious thought. It can take years for me for me to consciously catch up to things that my brain had already figured out long ago, because it didn't use thoughts to do it.
An example is trauma responses. I have a few elaborate protection mechanisms that I did not understand for about six years because they relied on quite a few bits of knowledge that I simply did not have until recently. But the trauma was shocking enough to force my brain to make an immediate correction, and I was not consciously involved whatsoever in this. I was never given conscious thought or awareness but it managed to protect me so well that it took me years to figure out what it was even protecting me from. That's fascinating to me.
So there is compelling evidence that my brain has the capacity to make extremely elaborate calculations without my conscious involvement whatsoever. I guess your question still stands about whether or not my experience of consciousness is a direct result of these same processes or whether the experience of consciousness is different enough to have its own semblence of "free will".
This is ignoring the materialistic observation that the brain is technically deterministic, of course.
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> The linked article talks about direct measurement of brain activity. ie you can compare when something happens in the brain vs when you think you chose to make a particular decision.
This won't necessarily allow you to tell apart whether someone had the thought first or interpreted some non-thought signal as a thought retroactively. Both would feel exactly the same from the perspective of whatever form of consciousness had the corresponding experience of thought. It's even likely that both possibilities happen, considering you can be reminded of things by your senses, and, you know, get feedback from the world.
I sometimes figure out thoughts retroactively, but because I'm used to this I can typically tell it apart, or at least tell apart the fact that I retroactively re-identified something that had occurred before the identification. But this is over time scales of minutes, hours or longer, to the point where I would remember having considered that thought differently before. If it happened in some sort of direct chain reaction, it would be indistinguishable from the thought happening that way from the start.
There's a load of other nuance in it from my perspective but that should be the most relevant bit of it.
By the way, keep in mind I'm autistic so I don't know if neurotypical brains work in an even remotely similar manner.
Sounds about right. I did read a study or something where people figured that consciousness gives us a believable illusion of free will, but in fact it's more like an observer of whatever I/O the brain performs and stitches everything together post-hoc.
Hey, the question they posed is still somewhat valid, or at least I can gleam an interpretation that would still be valid.
I think what they're asking is if there is some separate process of consciousness that is capable of generating brand new thoughts to act on, or if the experience of conscious thought is purely composed of actions that the brain is taking anyway.
I think it's a valid question, because I have personal experience suggesting that my brain has the capability to do at least some actions that normally would require conscious thought but without actually involving my consciousness at all.
That would imply my conscious thought is not actually necessary for those actions, and therefore would raise the question of why I think that my conscious thoughts can control my actions.
After all, my brain could simply be doing that all the time, and selectively exposing some of it to my consciousness.
However, deriving protection mechanisms after trauma is different than living everyday life; it's fairly well known that trauma can cause some pretty severe and extremely subconscious psychological damage, while it's not yet known whether consciousness can ever be reduced or eliminated while allowing one to continue to even tend to basic survival needs.
So the question is then whether things like everyday actions, problem solving, internal thought and introspection, and so on, originate from consciousness, or whether consciousness originates from the need to maintain some kind of chronological experience of it all, and only exists to integrate information rather than directing the rest of the brain.
I hope that makes some amount of sense.
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My personal experience is that I can identify a consciousness by its ability to think for itself and generate its own outputs (like the thought-forms themselves, interaction with the inner world, and possibly control over the real body). I do not know if consciousness is the sole originator of those outputs but I know that is how I identify one.
And as I alluded to above, sometimes there are multiple of them simultaneously, which is what "polyconscious" means. I don't feel entirely cut off from others; I can technically access their thoughts and experiences, but don't out of some sort of respect or inhibition.
That means that either my brain has divided itself into multiple self-aware entities, in the case that free will is trivially available, or my brain has developed multiple independent sets of pathways for signals to follow, all of which get a say over the final output, but each identifying as their own individual selves and maintaining their own individual experiences of consciousness.
During periods of activity perhaps those pathways can activate or deactivate depending on who is supposed to be currently present. Thus, there is the impression of multiple consciousnesses inhabiting the same brain, coming and going as they please.
As always, the answer could very well be both. I experience both polyconsciousness and monoconsciousness, which means that sometimes other people will have their own consciousnesses but sometimes my consciousness will simply change which person it is. That probably means they are something slightly more abstract than a structural division of consciousness into multiple independent ones, since they are not limited to polyconsciousness.
Also, sorry for bringing plurality/DID into this so much. It just has a lot to do with my personal experience of self and consciousness, and trying to understand it is one of the primary reasons why I've studied myself so much.
I suppose physical dependence/addiction has a similar mechanism. Rather than being unable to make yourself do something your brain doesn't want, you have to fight your brain really wanting something instead. And even non-ADHDers can suffer from that!
Consider the case of a computer simulation of a worm [0]
If your simulation predicts the worm behavior up to some tolerance, you then laugh at it's supposed free will
There's some outside conditions that can't be controlled (the simulator is also a subset of the same universe) and may deterministically affect the worm behavior
To fully account for these factors and their corresponding deterministic chains, the simulation must grow more and more complex if you want more precision
Maybe free will could be thought instead of as a determinism ratio taking into account compute limits
I suspect a logical contradiction could arise presuming a subset of the universe being able to simulate the whole universe
If the simulation has to be limited, some "wiggle room" of free will must be granted to the worm
my pet theory: consciousness, free will, the soul, the spice, whatever you want to call it is a sum of the evolutionary process which produces a living being plus the noise that its substrate and environment excite it with.
i believe that the true fuel that drives complex behaviors in neurological systems is noise, and what appears to be free will is simply noise that we can never completely measure, understand or replay.
i suspect neurological systems are deterministic only in context of a completely deterministic environment/universe which for our purposes simply doesn't exist.
so maybe the field of artificial intelligence, with its completely deterministic and replayable ttl worlds may produce some interesting results around the notion of free will, but i suspect that unless we can replay and then mutate the physical world deterministically, we'll never know if the study of neurological systems can.
if you excite a machine with noise, and it creates a memory while producing a complex behavior, is it any less alive than a living biological system that is excited by the noise in its environment?
I think it’ll do even more: show why that’s impossible. We already know that thoughts are electric patterns, so the thought that the manipulation of those patterns could change the inputs or outputs of your conscious mind shouldn’t be a surprise.
Regimes like North Korea will implant it into soldiers and prisoners so it gives an electric shock every time those show signs of "wrong" neural activity. False positives is a plus. Other similar regimes will follow.
If anyone wants to get into this field, I did a bunch of research recently and the Gtech Unicorn is by far the best option for entry level devs AFAICT. Now we just need to wait until someone starts selling fNIRS+EEG+ultrasound lightweight headsets with built-in LLM processing functions for noise removal and spatial mapping. From there it’s a hop skip and a jump to mind control, sadly.
Calling it now, within 5 years American police will start experimenting with EEG helmets for detecting impairment.
EDIT: also implants are rediculously unnecessary and dangerous. And that’s just for sensing - please please please never let a Silicon Valley company modulate your brain. That’s sci fi lesson #1, above “don’t do clones” and “time travel is bad”
I feel like this is one of those things where a genius develops this technology and acts like it'll bring major insights into how people operate and then they just find out it's nothing but "I'm hungry/thirsty/horny/tired" 90% of the time.
Yeah but this is mind reading. Idk if “most people are boring” is the right reaction to such a pressing and absolutely terrifying threat to our personal safety and autonomy, in the long term.
Citizens with unsanctioned thoughts are apprehended and re-educated. Those unhappy with the state of affairs no longer have any opportunity to gather like minded others or sympathetic supporters, as the Bureau is alerted to their unharmonious thoughts, and they are intercepted before any collective action can be taken. The regime is stable, the citizenry completely suppressed, the dictators free to continue their atrocities as they see fit, unopposed, forever.