WK2 Reading Free Will

• Free will


  The ability to be free from one's past and yet to simultaneously act in accordance with one's will
• Free will is an apparent paradox because it requires a historical identity to escape its history in a self-guided fashion
• Design features necessary for free will

  • Scaling from action to agency and vice versa
• Neurocognitive capacities that provide a basis for neurocognitive free will


  • Adaptive access to unpredictability
  • Tuning of this unpredictability in the service of hierarchical goal structures
  • Goal-directed deliberation via search over internal cognitive representations
  • A role for conscious construction of the self in the generation and choice of alternatives
• Free will as a process of generative self-construction


  An iterative search process samples from experience in an adaptively exploratory fashion, allowing the agent to explore itself in the construction of alternative futures
• Effortful conscious control modulates adaptive access to unpredictability and resolves how randomness is used in the service of the will
• The implications provide a contemporary neurocognitive grounding to compatibilist and libertarian positions on free will, and demonstrate how neurocognitive understanding can contribute to this debate by presenting free will as an interaction between our freedom and our will
• Principle of alternative possibilities


  For an organism to be free it must be the case that it could have done otherwise
• Behavioural variability


  • An organism's ability to produce a variety of alternative responses to the same circumstances, situation or stimuli
  • Allows organisms to explore the solution space by trying out different alternatives
  • Allows organisms to identify and track favourable locations in the fitness space more quickly than genetic adaptation alone
• Behavioural variability in exploration


  • Run-and-tumble behaviour of E. coli
  • Area-restricted search in vertebrates and invertebrates
  • Hungry cats in Thorndike's puzzle boxes
  • Rewarding porpoises for novel actions
• Modulation of exploration in internal environments

  • Retrieving information from memory often requires retrieving a variety of answers to the same question
  • Aids in convergent search (searching for a unique solution) and divergent search (searching for as many solutions as possible)
• Only one idea or memory comes into the workspace of consciousness at a time, so effortful control processes are used to manage the scope of search
• Modulation of internal scope


  A kind of area-restricted search in a high-dimensional space that can be characterized as activation patterns in a distributed representation
• Behavioural variability in outwitting adversaries


  • Game-theoretic situations between two adversaries often require mixed strategies for which success depends on being unpredictable
• Cope


  A kind of area-restricted search in a high-dimensional space that can be characterized as activation patterns in a distributed representation, such as a connectionist or neural network
• Cope


  • Such a search can present varying activation patterns as a probe (the question or goal) and then explore patterns of activation in the representation for matches (solutions)
  • The information in the representation is unconscious until it is made conscious by the act of retrieving it
  • The information will be more or less predictable in relation to other knowledge depending on the constraints on exploration
• Mixed strategies


  Strategies for game-theoretic situations between two adversaries where success depends on being unpredictable
• Mixed strategies


  • Two predatory wasps competing over a hole to lay their eggs
  • Penalty kick locations in football
• Being too predictable is a problem. Prey that behave too predictably are more likely to become the meals of predators who can exploit that predictability.
• Invertebrates using randomly initiated evasive maneuvers


  • Cockroaches select from a repertoire of random directions when escaping predators
• Behavioural variability


  Is adaptive, in the behavioural repertoire of a wide variety of organisms and under internal control, with organisms able to increase or decrease variability in response to context
• Pseudo-random


  Arising from deterministic sources
• Indeterministic


  Arising from indeterministic sources
• Neurocognitive free will offers inroads for both pseudo-random and indeterministic sources of variability
• There is a finite precision on cognitive abilities, which is a result of a trade-off between computational accuracy and the metabolic cost of information processing
• This can lead to sensory noise when information from external stimuli is transformed into a neural representation
• At smaller scales, neural precision is limited by channel noise and synaptic noise
• If neural systems amplify quantum indeterminism, then two brains wired such that they would forever remain identical in a deterministic universe could eventually diverge in an indeterministic universe
• Conscious control influences unpredictability. People produce more predictable random sequences when exposed to tasks that compete for effortful attention, under time pressure, or with impairment in areas of the brain associated with executive control
• Mesh theories


  Theories that involve a consistent mapping among a hierarchy of desires, where higher-order volitions have preferences over first-order desires
• Goal-directed behaviour


  Behaviour that involves the neural representation of a goal that is not maintained by external stimuli
• Hierarchical goal representations


  • Allow for one to maintain high-level goals while exploring over subgoals
  • Regions of the prefrontal cortex are activated when individuals maintain a top-level goal while actively processing subgoals
• Episodic future thinking


  The selective replay of patterns of neural activation associated with past experiences, prior to decision-making
• Episodic future thinking is highest when animals have limited experience with an environment, and activates longer sweeps to reach goals that are further away
• These deliberations represent different possible future selves
• Deliberation process


  1. Activate neural structures associated with action while suppressing execution

  2. Distinguish between real and simulated experiences of the self

  3. Construct alternatives from prior experiences

  4. Sample alternatives in proportion to past frequency and match to present situation

  5. Choose among constructed alternatives
• Deliberation


  • Effortful conscious processes that construct the self and its alternatives
  • Alternatives are sampled by the self from the self, not random alternatives from outside
  • Alternatives are constructed from prior experiences
• Damage to areas associated with episodic future thinking (hippocampus)

  Impaired sense of self
• Whatever choice is made following deliberation is supported by evidence from the sampled construction of memory, which we identify as a product of the self
• Karl Popper: 'The selection of a kind of behaviour out of a randomly offered repertoire may be an act of choice, even an act of free will … the selection may be from some repertoire of random events, without being random in its turn'