Since the animation was “ based on the history of the players’ past movements and on the beginning of their current movement”, the human subjects did in fact have agency over the animation. Their brains probably figured out the pattern: “if I move the mouse towards a subject, it will explode”, which changes the game a little but nonetheless gives the players agency.
Not only that... Their measurement of the sense of agency (SoA) is weird. Within the same paper they're inventing a new way to estimate moment to moment SoA and correlating it to reported SoA. Whether their modeling is valid should have been a separate paper.
There's a very good chance their experimental design and measurement strategy are influenced by one another.
Yeah it kinda sounds like technically the outcome isn't triggered by the players inputs, but practically they've just designed a system that reacts to the players inputs in a much more convoluted manner than normal.
It is like auto aim in games, it aims the gun for you and you just click and enemies dies. The crutch makes people feel more in control since now the guy on the screen do what they want it to do rather than what input they gave it, making them less frustrated.
Of course that is the average case, some get more frustrated by the program altering their aim so they can't shoot exactly where they want. The same will probably be true for most AI tools.
Funnily enough this is somewhat explored in an episode of Ghost in the Shell, where a professional sniper rejects an AI-enhanced rifle mount because its correction is in conflict with his aiming, even if following the correction exactly would have been a better shot. He preferred to have complete control of the aiming.
I propose a moratorium on any human behavior studies posted here until the reproducibility crisis is sorted out in the field. And if the study isn't fraud, then it's usually poorly designed anyway
Investigations into the reproducibility crisis and the golden standard of treatments in psychiatry - mixed with bis of the big pharma industrial complex, the psychology of the masses, the madness of crowds, economic nudging and the exploitation of peoples biases, fallacies and emotions - are imperative before "we" nail "AGI".
This is interesting in an abstract-intellectual sense, but doesn't really seem to surprise me.
If I understood the abstract right, they made a program learn where a user clicks, then used this to anticipate where the user would click next and begin visual feedback prior to the actual click. Users either didn't think twice or understood that the system was anticipating them and rolled with it.
This is what I would expect. Extrapolation and prediction of how a system will evolve based on past experience (if I roll this ball off the table it will fall; it was me who set it in motion) is something humans master as young children.
>This is what I would expect. Extrapolation and prediction of how a system will evolve based on past experience (if I roll this ball off the table it will fall; it was me who set it in motion) is something humans master as young children.
Also something that causes people to lose massive amounts of money in financial markets and other forms of gambling.
Does anyone else sometimes have the experience where you feel like you know everything that’s going to be said or happen, as if life were a movie you saw so many times in grade-school that you know every line, but forgot about the film until just now?
I feel like this is another situation where sense of time can be reversed.
Derives from consciousness being actually a slow integration of diverse parallel processes.
There are Jamais Vu, Presque vu, and the more well-known Déjà Vu, but I'm not sure any of them are quite what you're saying.
I've had a semi-similar feeling, where it seems like I've made a decision simultaneously in past/present/future. So it's somehow the way it has always been, even though I decided it now.
I would strongly suggest reading “Time Loops” by Eric Wargo if you’re interested in investigating this feeling more. There are many (documented!) instances of people “remembering” and dreaming about real events in their lives that haven’t yet happened. But of course, the scientific evidence for precognition is pretty flimsy. If it’s real, it seems to have a very small/rare effect.
The reason the scientific evidence is flimsy is that this can almost entirely be attributed to selection bias: it feels important when you make predictions that are correct, it doesn't feel noteworthy when you make ones that are wrong - you'll probably even forget about them by the time they turn out to have been wrong.
Plus our brains are pretty good at predicting what will happen based on things we've seen before and most people have intrusive thoughts (though these are usually based on actions rather than just things happening, e.g. throwing a baby out of a window or jumping in front of an oncoming train). Our memories are also extremely malleable so if a prediction didn't match exactly our brains will happily adjust the details to find a match or we'll ignore details that don't match because they don't seem as important as the ones that do.
It's spooky but the real wonder here is that our brains work somewhat reliably most of the time to begin with. Even our vision is a complete mess - ranging from the physical blind spots in our eyes to various forms of "blindness" (e.g. change blindness) and the work our brains have to do in order to compensate for saccades (i.e. why you don't see motion blur every time your eyes move).
There have been many occasions where I've been somewhere I know for a fact I haven't been before but can vividly "remember" being there, just as a still frame of what I was looking at in that moment.
My theory is that the brain is temporarily using a lossy delivery protocol - you're receiving short-term memory packets out of sequence and its causing you to feel like you're "remembering" the present.
There is no basis for my theory and it's fantastical horseshit.
"Zeman says he has seen several people whose experiences fit the description of déjà vécu more than déjà vu, because they are so overpowering. Like Shona, a woman in her mid-twenties who woke up one morning, ate breakfast, got ready for work, but felt she was 'acting in a film that she had seen before.'", from https://www.vice.com/en/article/gymn5m/there-is-more-than-on...
Twice I've had a similar sensation. DMT was involved.
I tripped in the same place twice exactly a year apart (four trips, two places). On the second of these I had a sense that time looped around so I could hang a left and go re-live the past year, or I could take a right and move on to the future.
Not sure how many lefts I made, but the most recent pair of choices were: right, right (as they'd have to be in order for me to be in this now).
This feeling is connected to memory formation and the fading out and fading in of action potentials aka neuronal spikes. Little research so far.
I'm certain it's strongly connected to dopamine and serotonin (of fucking course) circuits and global receptor states and depending on intensity of the sensation and level of awareness of person probably linked to schizophrenia, paranoia and other fun stuff.
I can't remember the name of the study but I believe it was posted here on HN a short while ago. If anyone is in the mood or has it stored in memory or bookmarks, please provide. Thanks!
I used to sit in class and speak in my head exactly what the teacher was saying, which made it feel like I was somehow predicting what the teacher was going to say next.
Description sounds like normal déjà vu to me. It's not a feeling that I felt before, it's a feeling that I know what's going to happen the next moment, but I can't actually recall it, but the moment it happens I recognize it as recalled.
Sometimes, I feel like not only I've been in this same situation before and know what will happen next, but also that I've felt like I've been in this same situation before. So basically like this is (at least) the third time I'm experiencing this situation: once when it was new to me, a second time where it felt like deja vu, and this third time where the deja vu itself is already familiar.
I mean there are times where I feel like I’m so familiar with the variables involved or so fixated on observing everything that I can make very good guesses about the sort of thing that might happen next - but that isn’t the same as knowing or getting time backwards or ‘remembering the future’ or something.
> Derives from consciousness being actually a slow integration of diverse parallel processes.
Yes. I might rephrase to highlight possibility that consciousness is a form of recursive self-control of the relative timebases of those many parallel, and only roughly synchronized neural processes.
Modulating relative synchrony (parasynchrony) may be as important in cognition and consciousness as the number of spikes per time window.
One of the big challenges in consciousness research is the binding problem across systems.
Binding may be explainable by multiplexing and manipulating a set of quantal temporal offset strata spaced a few milliseconds apart from each other. Binding, attention, and even consciousness may involve a set of recursive attentional proceses that shift and shunt active neuronal subcircuits into different temporal offset tiers. A few milliseconds one way or another may be the difference between attending or ignoring a stimulus or proto-thought.
An inexact metaphor: imagine a set of adjacent radio channels swapping content to be closer or farther apart in frequency. Neighboring channels snap together if content harmonizes, giving rise to vibrant voice and music. If not, then only low level signal or noise.
The recursive modulation of thalamocorticothalamic activity across “chosen” subsets of circuits may be what Douglas Hofstadter was hinting at towards the end of Gödel, Escher, Bach (p 709; Strange Loops as the Crux of Consciousness). What I am adding is the probable CNS circuitry and the idea of temporal multiplexing—-a common theme in both analog and digital processor design and computing.
My interpretation is that rather than lack of agency, the paper demonstrates perfect analogy of what agency turns out to be in real life. Not our willpower or decisionmaking in the minutiae, but rather a general pattern of our behavior over time. Removing the explicit causal link for the click, making it rather implicit based on an algorithm over their past behavior, is still a ”reflection” of their will. If they happen to identify with the mimicked behavior or not is less significant. I think it’s fitting because in real life the noise of minute events can detract from ”us”, but over time our values and character is revealed through actions and results.
Let’s extend the concept. Deploying AI agents in the future say with my values and simulated life experience, they would (maybe) act independently of me but according to my instruction or general desires and values. It’s not far removed from an employer instructing their employees, or a parent instructing a child. Or removing instruction, perhaps just expectation of a certain type of maneuvering in the world. Or presuming no expectation at all, let’s say I have an AI copycat without knowing about it, acting like me but in another setting, there would be remnants of my will in how it acts. Like information theory or energy laws, since it has information replicating me that it uses to act in the world, it’s like a lack of entropy, my will is preserved and extended.
Disclaimer: None of what was just written makes too much sense, and many what-ifs.
There are things I have seen in popSci which go to the minimum possible signal delay between some sense of things in the world, and the brain being told, and the continuous model we operate as brains, which has to integrate over those inputs.
So believing that is a tenable view of things, I can believe in this model we maintain, we can assign 'agency' to actions which other parts of the model predict "are going to happen" based on mismatches between actual signal delay, "computed" delay, and synthesized interior world-view delay. Events can happen in real world time, and lag into the system. Events can lag into the system in a fully integrated manner but we can have a computed sense of their likely outcome based on our internal predicted model.
Measurement across this would be complicated. I don't know I think ML is going to be the best path, if it actually drives to some "wrong" assumptions about where delay is, and where "agency" is being inferred.
Agency in gross time, where we choose to press a button and therefore cause things to happen, and where we can choose not to press the button at the last moment, and have them not (yet) happen, is different to a sense of agency over things which are happening, and which we sense internally against our world model, distinctly from when we get input signals about them.
Humans are used to dealing with natural intelligences all the time, in the form of other humans. Other humans often get a sense of what we're going to do next based on what we've done before and move to our next step alongside or slightly before us. This kind of experience-based cooperative alignment arguably even has an evolutionary advantage.
The fact that a computer can do it now too doesn't make it a novel experience for us. Most of us have known since we were kids that we can affect the actions of other entities by establishing a pattern.
This sounds similar to how autocomplete works. If it guesses right then it feels like writing the word yourself, and if it guesses wrong, you fix it, and maybe complain a bit.
Lots and lots of serious thinkers believe free will “is just autocomplete.” Or more precisely, we don’t actually possess free will but we have a convincing-enough intuition that we have it.
It’s a compelling argument because no one seems to have any idea where free will would come from and actually when you pay close attention to your own cognition, it doesn’t feel free-willy at all.
The only reason I sometimes hesitate to agree with this line of thinking is precisely because we have the ability to think about free will at all.
I can take a moment right now to consider whether I want to lift my right hand over my head - to no benefit of my own. I can also consider how free will plays into that and decide to lift my left hand instead, stay with my right hand, or lift no hands at all.
When you have the ability to do that, I think you have free will. At least, you have the closest thing to free will anyone can ever have.
By the way, I wiggled my right foot. That was my decision after my comment.
All of your thoughts of lifting your right hand or to wiggle your foot were downstream of reading my comment. You can definitely have thoughts before making actions, but you don’t choose to have the thought. It just appears!
Any one of a number of things, one of which is volition.
The majority of people are capable of determining both proximal and ultimate causes/motivations for their actions. They're influenced by external stimuli, sure, but humans are capable of directing their thoughts deliberately to, for example, perform simple mental arithmetic.
Every time someone thinks "What's 20% of 38?" or "How do I spell conceive?" or "What's the quickest way to Dave's house?", they are triggering a mental process. They are choosing to focus their thoughts in a particular direction to get a result that they will then use in future decision making.
It's not relevant what caused the thought that led to them making the decision; the decision still gets made and acted on by the person. The sequence of thoughts from the decision point to the result/abandonment is volitional.
You cannot hear or read "What's 20% of 38?" and choose whether to process it or not. Your brain might resolve that into the correct answer, an incorrect answer, or a refusal to answer, but your brain just does it. If it's not your brain producing the sensation you call "volition," what is? If it is your brain, then what mechanism causes it that's neither deterministic nor random?
If that was true, then all mathematics teaching would be both impossible and superfluous.
You don't choose whether or not to process the audio, but you absolutely do choose to do the mathematical processing to arrive at an answer. If that's a struggle to contemplate, increase the complexity of the problem until you can't reach the answer in one step, and then you should see the chain of thought.
As above, that's a separate issue and irrelevant to this once. Once a choice has been made regardless of the drivers of that initial choice, there is conscious direction of thought through the resultant process.
Same question again: do you really have no experience of logically and consciously working through a process?
The drivers of the initial choice (and really every choice thereafter) is the entire question. The universe has deterministic processes and it has random processes. The brain has deterministic processes and (potentially) random processes. Neither type of process creates room for anything resembling "free will." There is nowhere in the known universe for this to occur.
No of course I experience the same thing you experience. My argument is that it's an illusion, and it's one that you can actually peel away yourself.
Close your eyes and clear your mind -- you'll find thoughts simply emerging. Eventually, the thought to give up and open your eyes will occur to you. You didn't choose to have that thought prior to it appearing. Following that first thought, you might then give up, or you might have another thought not to give up. One of those thoughts will just immediately become the next behavior. In either case, you didn't choose those impulses prior to their appearance and you didn't choose which one ultimately turned into behavior.
So not only is there zero believable physical explanation as to how and where free will could exist, the subjective evidence doesn't pass even a basic "close your eyes and observe your own cognition" test.
Your experience of cognition isn't universal, and asserting a universal law based on your subjective experience is tenuous at best. There's a reason we've been discussing these exact ideas for millenia, rather than settling it all immediately. Other people report very different conceptualisations of cognition - why is theirs an illusion and not yours an ellision?
> No of course I experience the same thing you experience.
It really doesn't sound like you do. Other people experience a decision making process -- one where they pick the impulse to follow or deny -- that is at least as valid as your immediate blur from thought to action. Many people are capable of having thoughts without acting on them, or of weighing up multiple thoughts, or of chaining together multiple thoughts (carry the 1, rotate this cube in your mind, etc.) towards a goal.
Thankfully my argument doesn’t actually hinge on subjective experience, yours does.
My explanation is dependent only on the known laws of the universe and biological systems. Your argument is effectively that those don’t matter because your subjective experience seems different. I disagree that’s what even your subjective experience really is, if you decided to pay close attention to it, but again it’s not actually important for my argument.
This was a somewhat reasonable debate before we came to understand that decisions, behaviors, sensory processing are done by the brain (or the biological system more holistically). Now we do understand that. So now in light of that, where does your phenomenon take place?
The universe has two kinds of phenomena, as far as we know: deterministic and random. Neither leaves room for free will. So again: where does it happen? Is our understanding of the physical universe wrong? Does thinking not happen in the brain? Is the brain exempt from physical laws?
Is there a better option that I’m failing to imagine?
To break the walls down on this thread, interested folks probably want to look at the question of qualia and the knowledge argument before they start wondering about free will in particular.
Not relevant. You need not know what someone else’s subjective experience is to know that it would violate all understanding of the physical universe for them to have free will.
“The wall” doesn’t come from any dispute around the subjective experience or the objective physical nature of the universe. It comes from the (understandable) discomfort with the conclusion and the necessary corollaries of that conclusion.
Totally relevant. You claim that someone having free will would violate all understanding of the physical universe. This is absurd, and therefore we should reject it.
If, however, information which is non-physical information exists, like TKP suggests, then we have evidence of an ontological jailbreak. If one such jailbreak exists, it suddenly seems much more absurd to claim others can't for some reason.
TKP doesn’t suggest “non-physical information” exists. It suggests that some information cannot be relayed through means other than direct personal experience. When the actual blue light hits Mary’s retina, that is net new information, and information that could not have been conveyed by numbers on a monochrome screen. It is very obviously physical: the text “blue light has a wavelength of 450nm” conveyed in light at 700nm is a totally different piece of information that will be processed by the retina and the brain totally differently from an actual beam of 450nm light.
Critically: in either case the brain will process those photons hitting the eye with a combination of random and deterministic processes. This is a physical fact, not a thought experiment, and so I think warrants a stronger rebuttal than simply asserting, “this is absurd, and therefore we should reject it.” If it’s not a physical fact, explain what other non-random and non-deterministic process is happening.
What specifically is absurd? That your subjective experience disagrees? We can reliably and trivially produce all sorts of illusions in which your subjective experience loses touch with objective reality.
> no one seems to have any idea where free will would come from
No materialists have any idea perhaps. A more common sense approach is to deduce from our common experience of free will (and consciousness too) and lack of a matter based reason for that experience that we are not merely made of matter.
This isn’t a statistical study with questionable methodology or a fleeting observation, it is a constant and personal empirical experience we all have that has been observed and analyzed for all human history. It is not self reported data, you have access to it right now, this is a totally different thing.
OK, here's self-reported evidence that I have precognition. When I'm riding my motorbike I typically have my face shield open (I wear sunnies so no point keeping it down, plus I like the fresh air.) If a piece of grit or something gets past and hits my face near my eyes, it feels like I blink a split second before it hits. Clearly I have precognition.
An alternate explanation is that my blink reflex is triggered locally by nerve cells around my eyes, regardless of what my brain does. My brain then receives sensory inputs indicating that I've blinked. It only finds out that something hit my face a split second (say 100ms, that seems to be one 'tick' for most brain things?) afterwards since touch data from that area of skin is fairly low resolution. At this point my brain feels pretty strongly that it wants to blink, to protect my eyes. Here comes the fun bit: Since there's always a strong and seemingly causal link between "something hitting face near eye", "eye has blinked", and "brain wants to blink" my brain is pretty sure it actually decided to blink just before the grit actually hit me.
This feels to me like I blink, out of nowhere, then a split second later feel something hit my face. How can you argue with my constant and empirical experience?
I recall a study with a setup similar to what's described in this article, but with an important change. In the experiment, when the equipment predicted a subject's choice to push button 'A', they ingeniously manipulated the outcome (perhaps through some neural stimulation?) causing the subject to choose button 'B' instead.
What's fascinating is how participants consistently rationalized their choices as products of their own free will, despite the external influence. This suggests that our conscious mind might often act as a 'spokesperson', justifying actions initiated by our subconscious.
Can anyone remember this and perhaps post a link to that study?
I think I saw that in some documentary but I can't recall either.
However I'm curious about your phrasing "this suggests that our conscious mind might often act as a 'spokesperson', justifying actions initiated by our subconscious."
To me this is far from a suggestion, it's an observable fact, both in others and in first person. Are there people who don't view it like this? Who think all their actions are conscious decisions and don't catch themselves spinning narrative threads by their biases and fears?
The events in the study are triggered after the participants actions. Both in terms of accounting for past actions as such, and in terms of anticipating continuation of present actions.
I'm surprised to see no reference in the paper to Bereitschaftspotential or Libet's famous (and criticized) experiments - at least to give some context on how the findings here relate or differ.
I think it is the feeling that what you wanted to happen happened at a micro level. Like, when you watch someone use telekinesis in a movie you feel the person is controlling it since you see the objects moving like that person obviously wants them to move, you know that can't be possible but your mind feels that the person has control over the boxes, I think that is the same effect here.
Yeah, “Predictor.” And “Story of your Life” (aka “Arrival”) also has elements of this. “Predictor” is about Compatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are compatible with each other depending on the boundaries. The paper could use some perspective.
