Newsome and free will

Bill Newsome gave a talk today about his ideas of free will, and I thought they were quite good. The overall premise was that he doesn't quite like the notion of bottom-up determinism as the end-all to free will -- he didn't say that bottom-up determinism was incorrect, but that the problem doesn't just end at bottom-up determinism and that there is more to it.

In the end, his rationale was based on emergence. Free will only exists above a certain level of a physical causal hierarchy. Quantum mechanics is at the bottom, and ultimately all phenomenon are derived from the laws of quatum mechanics, but there are important laws that come out at each level. These laws have important information and cannot be seen through a lens that just focuses on the pieces. The organization of the pieces as well as the rules of the pieces come together to create the rules at a higher level. The organization has information that shapes the rules, and thus without the information about the organization the pieces truly do not sum to the whole. Each higher level is defined by the pieces from a lower level, each piece follows its own set of rules. Only when the pieces are organized correctly do they produce rules at the higher level. A lion can kill me, the pieces of the lion cannot, unless they are organized into a lion.

So the true definition of free will shouldn't be looked at as something that arises from the laws of physics -- there is a certain level in the hierarchy below which free will become meaningless. Free will exists at a higher level. To have free will one must have beliefs and thoughts and aspirations, and then be able to act on those things. These are rules at a higher level of the hierarchy, and yes these things are still fully determined by the laws that govern the lowest level, but a meaningful definition of free will can come out from this distinction of different levels of causality. This gives some form of free will from a legal/moral sense, although it is still hard to draw a solid line.

Causality and complexity then arise from a hierarchical structure in dynamical systems. At the lowest level, lets just say its atoms, there are a few equations that govern all of the atoms. These are essentially differential equations, and thus for each atom there is a state-space that is determined by the differential equations and the initial conditions. The initial conditions in a way describe the information about the organization of all the pieces. All the atoms in the Universe form a vast high-dimensional dynamical system which ultimately produces everything else. However, there are lower-dimensional sub-structures which share properties -- i.e. the full system's dimensionality can be reduced in a way that describes a sub-system that behaves as if it has its own set of rules.

So the higher levels share a commonality because they have a lower dimensional projections from the higher dimensional space of the level below, that essentially looks the same. In the high dimensional space they are always separated, but there is a low-dimensional projections where the same rules come out that govern the system. The software of a computer is information about a particular program. At the low level copying software from one computer to another is fundamentally different -- there are different transistors that are processing the information. So all of the transistors in the world make up the full transistor space, but their dynamics can be projected on to a common lower-dimensional subspace that looks the same. The information of the software determines the system, and the low dimensional projection has meaningful rules.