Alright, we'll start with the idea of "free.

"
There are two relevant notions of the word, and it's easy to fall into a habit of slipping
between them. One is the notion of not being under someone else's control, while the other is the notion
of an object which can change position or a variable which can change its value. The sensation that determinism
brings to mind for many people is that of having lost freedom in the second sense, and of this
feeling akin to a loss of freedom in the first sense. In other words "if my actions at time t+1 are
fully constrained by the state of the universe at time t, this is no better than having my
actions fully constrained by some outside force or entity." Are you with me so far?
What most people have failed to realise is that these two concepts are in fundamental conflict with
each other. Control is the ability to determine an item or variable's state. If an item is "free" to change
position or take on a different value due to the action of some outside force, it is by definition
under the control of that force. Conversely, if my actions are under my own control and not
someone else's, they are no longer free to be something other than what I constrain them to
be. My actions are free in the first sense if and only if they arenot free in the second sense.
Now, I'm guessing that for some of you this may feel like mere semantics. If that's the case,
it probably doesn't help to just remind you that since you are physics, physics has to constrain your
actions, and pronounce ourselves finished. That's why we need to take the next step and address
your notion of self directly. Who are you? And more importantly, what are you? You're probably
used to thinking of yourself as a chunk of meat that can think, a homo sapien. And we'll work up to
that. But we have to start with an intuition that your ancestral environment never prepared you for:
framing your concept of self in terms of information causality. We're used to thinking about
causality in terms of objects affecting objects, and I find that the following gedankenexperiment tends
to be far more effective than just reminding someone that objects are themselves information too.
Imagine taking a video camera and hooking its output up to a screen of some kind
so that it outputs what it sees live. This example comes roughly from Douglas Hofstadter. Now
imagine that you take that camera and point it directly at the screen. If you adjust the camera
so that it shows only the output of the screen, and the equipment is of suitably high fidelity, you can
obtain a stable feedback loop where some sort of signal is looping around and around. Do this for
fun in real life sometime if you get the chance. It's hard to produce stable loops, but it is possible
(colour balance is the hardest part to nail down). Now, what's causing the picture on the screen
to be what it is? It's true to say that the specific hardware used, combined with the precise sequence
of setting it up caused that picture to be what it is. But it's also true to say that the picture is now
causing itself. You'll get the best intuition for this if you're able to set up a pulsing or otherwise
changing image in the loop.
For me this thought experiment is a helpful reminder that information processes which
can control their own states are active, dynamic entities, unlike the thumb drive in your pocket
that the word "information" is more likely to bring to mind. Use that sledgehammer to bash your
intuition into accepting that "you" is an active information process. The fact that that
information process controls some meat is incidental, not fundamental, to your consciousness. Oh,
and that meat? It's information too, because physics itself is an information process.
Physics is the ocean in which you are a current. Immerse yourself in that intuition for a
while. Because once you've steeped in it for long enough, the notion that the laws of physics take
away your control will seem ludicrous. A deterministic physics is your control. It is the mechanism
by which you think. It is the mechanism by which you act. It is the mechanism by which you
continue to be. Anything that is not controlled by physics is not controlled by you, and for that
physics to be deterministic merely means that no entity outside our universe is reaching in and
flipping bits based on some process we have no way to know about. Yup, you heard it here
first: determinism is the very definition of free will.
Now, many of you won't be there yet. You're trying to think of yourself as an information
process, but the idea even in theory that someone could "look ahead" and somehow know what
you're going to do before you do it is driving you crazy. It does not sound free. It sounds like being
controlled by someone else. Or even if not a "being" of some sort, being controlled by "the laws
of physics" or "the state of the universe". So I've got an intuition pump just for you.
Let's talk about another screen, the screen on a far simpler device: a pocket
calculator. Let's say I've pulled out my trusty calculator, punched in "2, +, 2, =" and some bits of
my screen have ended up darker than others. If I was an alien asking why this is the case, you have
at least two approaches you can take to explaining why. The first one I'll call The Physics
Explanation, and it goes something like this:
Inside the device, a chemical reaction involving manganese dioxide, lithium perchlorate, and
lithium metal creates a flow of electric current along a metallic conductive pathway. Pressing of
the keys mechanically alters this conductive pathway so that as it flows by and through various
materials such as conductors like copper or carbon, dielectrics like barium titanate, and
semiconductors like silicon, a portion of the current is directed to an electrode where its field
will alter the alignment of liquid crystal cholesteryl benzoate molecules. The alteration in
alignment of these molecules causes a change in the amount of reflected light passing through
the glass and various polarising films, darkening some areas of the display. So ultimately, it's
because of the physical construction of the device that those areas are darker than
others. If the physical construction was different, different areas would have darkened.
Compare that explanation with a second approach, which I call The Math Explanation:
The symbol "2" is a member of the ordered set of symbols "0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9" typically used to
denote the correspondingly ordered elements of a free monoid on a singleton free generator of
"1", with "0" corresponding to the empty sequence and elements past "9" being represented in a
base-10 positional notation (a.k.a "the Natural Numbers"). The symbol "+" represents the
associative and commutative binary operator that generates the monoid according to the rules
"a + 0 = a" and "a + the successor of b = the successor of a + b" where a and bare elements of
the monoid and "=" denotes equivalence between two expressions. Confusingly (due to
historical reasons), the same symbol is used to tell the calculator it should execute the
instructions keyed in so far and display the result on its screen. The electronics inside the
calculator implement logic corresponding to the free monoid's behaviour below some arbitrary
limit, and when the button with the "=" symbol on it is pressed, the implemented logic darkens
the necessary areas of the display to show (in this case) the symbol "4". So ultimately, it's
because 2 + 2 = 4 that those areas are darker than others. If instead it was true that 2 + 2
= 6, different areas would have darkened.
Don't worry if you don't understand anything except the bolded part in either of those two
Explanations. The point is to realize that both The Physics Explanation and The Math
Explanation are true, and in fact the entire purpose of the calculator is to make them
coincide. When it fails to do so it malfunctions. So which one is thereal explanation? They both
are, obviously. But they differ in their applicability. The first explanation is the one you'd want if you were
trying to invent electronics, while the second is the one you'd want if you were trying to invent math.
Have you guessed where I'm going with this?
There are multiple competing explanations for the story you tell yourself to
understand yourself, and The Physics Explanation can sound downright oppressive if The
Math Explanation isn't getting included, because our experience of our own mental
operations is Math-like instead of Physics-like. That is to say, on a mental level you're less
concerned with the constituent parts that make up brain-matter, and more concerned with the active
information process it runs (however implemented). It doesn't matter to your thoughts which
physics implements them. It only matters that they are implemented (otherwise you are dead). Just
like, when most people use a calculator, they don't care which circuits make it do Math. They only
care that it does Math right.
Let's follow the metaphor through and see where it takes us.
Imagine that you were the equation "2 + 2 = 4" being evaluated out. Obviously you have
many characteristics that a simple equation does not, but this is just an oversimplified metaphor.
Imagine that the expression "2 + 2" represented your goals for yourself and that the number 4
represented a possible action in a situation that reflected those goals (whereas numbers like 5,6, or 7
did not). Then the expression of your will is the selection of "4" as an output (ideally). Importantly,
you do not know that 4 is the fulfilment of your goal until you actually arrive at it. You is not
the omniscient view of the situation. You is a process, and it takes at least some computational "work"
(however trivial) to reduce the expression "2 + 2" to the single natural number "4". Your initial goals
may include the requirement that your output will be a natural number, but you don't have the
answer until you actually find it. This means that you're probably going to model the answer as a
"free variable" (in the second sense of free from earlier) which can take on any one of those possible
values until you actually select one. But it certainly doesn't mean that you're going
to randomly select one of those outcomes. At least, not if you're actually achieving your goals.
Subnote: sometimes one of your goals may be to randomly/pseudorandomly select t
he valueof a variable or an output, i.e. ina cryptographic algorithm so that your adver
sary won't be able to determine it. But not here. And either way, you still want tobe t
he one in control of the output (freedom in the first sense). Apply this concept to th
e scenario of human power games andyou get a pretty good motivation for the devel
opment of the idea of free will in the first place. But back to the metaphor...
Instead, you're going to use the resources available to you to constrain the output to a specific
number which you eventually learn is "4". You want the little dark spots on the screen to be stuck in
a really specific, particular shape. You don't want them freely taking on all different possible kinds
of shape--because you're not the dark spot.You're the active information process
that controls the dark spot. Hopefully this will make clear how fundamentally broken the idea of
using quantum events (whether many-worlds style or, shudder Copenhagen-style "quantum
randomness") to explain free will is. In worlds where your brain fails to constrain its future states to
specific values, you wouldn't find an alternate you. You would find a dead you.
This is the key intuition: you aren't the stuff, you are the math. If you are alive, then the
universe is implementing you, and its future states have to be constrained by what you
think, just like a working calculator has to output the dark spots dictated by the meaning of
"2 + 2".
Subnote: This also explains, by the way, why we tend to identify with the whole bag
of meat instead of just the activity in thegooey stuff up top. Our bodies are things w
hose macrostates are almost completely constrained by the active informationprocess
es inside them, as opposed to the active information processes inside of all the other
bags of meat. So naturally weconsider them part of "self" in the same way we consid
er the thoughts we control part of "self". If we could all control eachother's muscles
through some sort of central router, I assure you the human concept of "self" would
not be at the bag-of-meatlevel.
So, let's finally get down to the someone-else-looking-ahead-and-knowing-what-you're-doing thing. In
our example, the process evaluating "2 + 2" has only partial information about the output it's
selecting until it gets there. But someone else could potentially already know where that
process will end up, which is our whole theoretical problem. It makes the entire "free in the
first sense will" thing seem like it's just an illusion, because this imaginary theoretical person is just
sitting there at the finish line before we even run the race. In terms of our evolutionary experience,
they are clearly holding all the power. But don't worry, little evolved ape. We are going to pull a fast
one on them with a cunning little question.
How? How does this theoretical person know where the process is going to end up?
"Well," you might say, "they might already know that 2 + 2 = 4."
And how did they know that?
"Well, they might have discovered it through piling up rocks and counting them, or they
might be good enough at math to mentally do what the calculator does."
Fair enough. Would you say that any given one of those methods qualifies as a way to evaluate the expression
"2 + 2"?
"Sure."
Didn't we give a name to the evaluation of that expression before? I think we called it "you".
Yup, that's right. Our theoretical person who can predict what a universe
implementing you will do does it by.....implementing you. If they made it to the finish line
before you did, they did it by riding on the back of another you. Now, don't work this metaphor too
hard, because you will quickly get tangled up in the problem of "what computation actually is" (or
do, that's awesome). But for my purposes, we're just trying to get that inner ape to smile and
embrace the deterministic universe like a long-lost friend. Any process that implements you is an
alive you. In our universe, an alive "you" is a co-incident Physics Explanation and Math
Explanation that both do the same thing in order to implement "you". You can use whichever
explanation of yourself to yourself is most useful in a given situation, but as long as you actually
exist, the two explanations are equivalent. And while they remain equivalent, the Universe is your
bitch. Celebrate, little ape! Throw some poop!
I hope this explanation will be helpful to others--these ways of thinking about free will and
determinism have certainly been helpful to me. I could go on at length spinning off useful corollaries
from them, but since this has gotten quite long enough I will leave it there for now. To sum up in
point form:
Being "free of another's control" is different than "being free to change
values or states".
The fact that my will is free in the first sense (control over my own actions)
constrains my actions NOT to be free in the second sense (they could be something else).
Therefore determinism is the very definition of free will.
I am more than "stuff". I am an active information process.
When I am alive, a physics process is coinciding with this active information
process, so that a Physics Explanation of me and a Math Explanation of me are both true
and equivalent, if differently useful.
Even though I don't always know where I'm going until I get there, any
process which perfectly predicts my future actions is simply another copy of me, whether
implemented in this universe or a (possibly theoretical) meta- one.
If an implementation of me didn't constrain the universe to specific future
states, I would be dead (i.e. it wouldn't be an implementation of me).
My inner ape can relax, because as long as I remain alive, the Universe is
forced to "make" me do what my own inner processes dictate (a perfect coincidence of the
two explanations). It's NOT a bigger ape bossing me around.