This is part 2 of our series on free will! In this episode we reconcile how it is that we can feel like we have free will (even when we don’t), give an evolutionary argument for why this might be the case and show how knowing this makes us more compassionate people who are (paradoxically) better at achieving our goals. Along the way, we explain what a Bayesian Network is (and why you should care about yours), and give an introduction to some of the key ideas and concepts in the field of Reinforcement Learning (a subfield of AI) and how we can use these concepts to clarify our view of ourselves and the world!
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Shownotes:
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Dan Dennett essay on Sam Harris’s argument: https://samharris.org/reflections-on-free-will/
Sam Harris’s response to Dennett: https://samharris.org/free-will-and-free-will/
Sam Harris’s “Free Will: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13259270-free-will
Good primer on the Libet experiments that preempted decision making: https://youtu.be/OjCt-L0Ph5o
The original Libet publication [paywalled]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273
Details of more recent versions of the Libet experiments with 7 second preempting and some predictive capability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMDuakmEEV4
A recent “debunking” of the Libet results: https://www.pnas.org/content/109/42/e2904
A popular article on the Libet experiments in the light of the new model: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
Radiolab Loops episode: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/radiolab-loops
Litany of Gendlin on LessWrong: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Litany_of_Gendlin
Julia Galef on Bayes Nets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFv5DvrLDCg
Learn Bayes Nets post on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tp4rEtQqRshPavZsr/learn-bayes-nets
Compatibilism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
A good introductory courses on reinforcement learning for those interested: https://www.theschool.ai/courses/move-37-course/
Video of RL agent walking on the back of its legs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdTBqBnqhaQ
Sean Carroll’s podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
How to Win Friends and Influence Reality (episode 9 of Bit of a Tangent): https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/009-how-to-win-friends-and-influence-reality/id1470855694?i=1000446168718
031 | Kat Woods — Effective Altruism, Infohazards, and Brain Hacks
030 | Predictive Processing 3: Neurobiology, Prediction, and Computational Psychiatry
029 | Predictive Processing 2: Where The Action Is
028 | Predictive Processing 1: The World You Thought You Knew
027 | 7 Practices to Survive the 2020 Apocalypse
026 | Drink and be Rational
025 | Self-Supervised Machine Learning: Introduction, Intuitions, and Use-Cases
024 | Replacing Guilt
023 | Are Brains Just Neural Nets?
022 | 6 Books You Need to Read in 2020… and 1 You Probably Shouldn’t
021 | The Top 19 Ideas from 2019
020 | Mental Models 3: Fantastic Biases and Where To Find Them
019 | Mental Models 2: How To Think Like A Bayesian, Avoid Black Swans, & Know The Value of Your Decisions
018 | Mental Models 1: How To Have Better Ideas and Improve Your Thinking
017 | Bronwyn Williams: Universal Basic Income & Individual Sovereignty
015 | You have no Choice in the Matter
014 | The Art of Looking - Part 1 of ??
013 | How To Learn Anything!
012 | How Deep Learning Does Magic
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