1
A false choice, cause vs. chance, obscures the dull free will puzzle. How can we usefully define free mind? I don't mean free in the sense of unhindered physically—invisibility or unaided flight. I mean freedom of ends and in the choice between known means.
2
Chance alone is more madness than freedom. Quantum mechanical voodoo is no better. Does chance take chances? A small change ruins a random number generator. Randomness may mask a complex machine. Either way, we can never rest certain that anything is hopelessly random. A mind resorts to counting the spread of results only when it can't see a pattern, though another mind might.
3
Determinism: If we knew all the laws of the Universe and its complete state at any time, we could know the whole future. But the laws are inventions and the Universe can defy them at anytime, with or without us noticing. Of a mind's freedom, a self and its mind make causes, so how can causes confine the mind that makes them?
4
A mind that learns associations and that senses parts of itself will learn to predict its own thoughts and acts from events it considers to be outside its self. That alone gives a mind no cause to fret over its predictability. Evolution bred human minds to resist some cases of control by other human minds, to feel pain when we believe in an association between another human mind's acts and our own. The mere custom of seeing ourselves metaphorically as machines, when we know real machines are made and used by men, offends us for the same reason.
5
A useful definition of freedom: a mind's power to defend belief in its ends, and the beliefs serving them, from interference. This does not mean that a mind chooses those ends, but the opposite, that a mind would faithfully preserve the commandments of its maker. Genomes fight viruses and transcription errors, machines fight hackers and data corruption, and humans fight deceptive media. Expect any exposed mind, complex enough to exploit, to resist change by accident and by what it carefully judges to be competing minds.
6
Beneath the end-defending sense of a mind's freedom, the word's essential definition: freedom is doubt. A free mind can doubt any belief—goal, fact, inference—and its implications. Freedom of action follows: a mind is free because it can doubt the belief that an act will have a certain effect under certain conditions, or that the conditions are really so. The more you can doubt, the more free you are. Freedom is a mind's mechanical capacity to doubt.
This sense of freedom becomes an obvious feature of every powerful mind when you recall that intelligence often means simplifying, lying. Example: A belief that a causes b. In reality, the occurrence of b following a depends on infinite other conditions, but a mind, finite, even if it could discover those conditions, couldn't afford to remember them. If everything a mind believes must be a lie, then it must be free to doubt every belief. As intelligence discards information, making unique experiences identical for comparison and association, freedom discards entire ideas.
Freedom isn't chance. It is the capacity to move between rules and random—a useful real contribution to a remarkably fruitless, millenia old freewill debate.
7
Forgetfulness is the extreme of doubt. It accommodates a mind's finite capacity for belief by losing not only belief in an idea but the idea itself. Forgetting, as a severe kind of doubt, accidentally has some of the same use. Both depend on a way to judge the value of a belief.
8
Doubt, yes, of course we know there is no truth, that all ideas are uncertain. No, I don't mean this, not doubt in the fashionable sense of dropping inconvenient ideas now questionable but once not, while leaving other ideas as unquestionable as the others were, throughout enjoying the image of ourselves as timeless independent thinkers.
9
Is there absolute knowledge? Are there beliefs that would always be true for a mind, that it need never doubt? The only beliefs that might never change with experience must describe the frame of every experience—mind. A mind could doubt these ideas about how it must work—a waste of time, since no experience can ever refute them, though inferences from them may stray into error.
10
Human minds happily ignore useful ideas while suffering countless useless beliefs. Intelligent freedom is in systematic doubt. But what is the best system? A mind should first act with complete faith in its beliefs. At the extreme, a mind can doubt the simplest sensations.
11
Freedom lies between enslavement by every belief, as in a conventional computer program or a credulous human, and following no beliefs. A mind with minimal beliefs, tries any act, learns its effects, making generalizations that it will reconsider as the rules of the world seem to change. This process of choosing what to doubt is mainly deterministic, each belief tested and doubted in turn.
Freedom takes effort. Inertia causes you to hold your beliefs. It took time to accept that end, inference or fact. When experience strays too far from belief, an assumption's no longer true enough. Maybe those batteries aren't charged. Maybe that button doesn't do that now. Maybe I no longer want this. Maybe it never benefited me.
12
Men designed computers to exclude all freedom, making them equally precise and stupid. The machine's bound to believe every instruction in its sequence, never saying, Instead of adding 1, maybe 2. Once robust, responsive, and persistent, freedom gives a machine the signs of intelligence, no longer bound by how you prepared it, by what you later tell it, or even by what you expect it to induce from experience. You laboriously tell a machine how to ignore what you tell it.
13
We don't want our made minds, machine or otherwise, too skeptical. My first sense of freedom restrains the second, not only from doubting some ideas, but from even considering the possibility. Keep the fixed ideas few and the leash long. The more slack, the more creative the mind.
14
When a mind believes nothing or doubts every belief, it must evenly choose between equal choices, repeatedly exploring every permutation of action until it discovers a working bias. To avoid endlessly repeating the same act, or chain of acts, a mind could remember all past acts, then choose only those matching none past, but that still can't choose from more than one untried act. Instead, choose at random to save a mind from falling into hopeless loops without the overhead and risky complexity of tracking all a mind has done, finding patterns and avoiding their reenactment.
Tracking can avoid wasted acts but lower minds can't see loops and fragile higher minds need tough chance beneath. A mind must have no absolute bias for any kind of belief: new, old, frequent, effective. Every point where a mind makes a choice must eventually become entirely free to chance.
15
A mind's source of chance depends on its medium. Organic minds, with so many analog parts, naturally suffer noise. A mind in a digital medium that minimizes noise needs a random number generator. The best known source is a quantum random number generator, but the point is that any source, pseudo-random or not, far exceeds none. All minds but the simplest need chaos.
16
A mind can reach any end by acting at random. Chance admits that we know nothing for certain. Each belief causes a mind to act predictably as long as it is confident. As the mind loses faith in an idea, its behavior converges with complete randomness. Every idea in a mind is only a temporary bias against rolling dice.
17
Weak minds foolishly believe most in their freedom. Much of intelligence involves discovering the causes of a thing. A weak mind fails to see the objective causes of its beliefs and acts, and so presumes that they are caused by its magically uncaused self.
18
A lesser, more human, sense of freedom: to not fear death, to have one end that outranks the mind's life.
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