Philosophy Mondays: Randomness, Replication, Selection and Free Will

At present it is once again wildly popular to speculate about the relationships between fundamental physics and concepts such as consciousness and free will. Despite the often high quality of the people participating in this I do consider this to be largely bunk. Or slightly less dramatically, I believe this path is unlikely to lead to deep insights. The deep flaw here is the application of theories that describe particles with little or no information content to complex systems which cannot exist independently of the information that they contain. I am pretty firmly in the camp that both consciousness and free will are emergent phenomena of such complex high information systems. In today’s post I will focus on free will as it is most pertinent to a philosophy based on the notion of choice.

I want to start with a question about the emergence of structure in the world. I am writing this upstate looking out at a forest of beautiful trees. I am typing on a laptop which rests on a desk, while sitting in a chair. All of these things, myself included, contain a great deal of structure. Yet when we look out across our solar system most planets and the sun have virtually no structure. So where does all of our structure come from?

It turns out that three processes when combined under the right conditions can produce the growth of structure. These are randomness, replication and selection. Together these explain the rise of structure in three important and separate phases: assembly, evolution and intelligence. Each of these phases has a different selector: stability, fitness, rationality.

The first phase of assembly happened a long time ago before life as we generally think of today (and some of the building blocks may have been imported from elsewhere via cosmic bombardment). It works approximately as follows: some random combination of elements achieves lower energy states, i.e. it is more stable in its environment than the elements by themselves or other combinations of elements. The existence of some of these more stable combinations will act as a catalyst for the formation of other stable combinations, thus giving rise to the earliest form of replication. While we don’t know all the possible conditions under which this works, various primordial soup experiments have shown specific examples that can give rise to the kind of structures which form the basis of plants, animals and even humans.

The second phase is the period of evolution. Objects coming out of the first phase have started to explicitly encode their own blueprint in the form of genetic material. This allows for randomness to start operating at the information level through gene mutations and new combinations through genetic splicing (e.g. viral insertion) and sexual reproduction. Replication now takes the form of copying of genetic material with new matter being shaped into structure by growing new organisms. The predominant selection mechanism becomes a notion of fitness. Species that are better adapted to their niches outcompete ones that are worse adapted. It’s important to note that adaptation can include the long running symbiosis between species (such as humans and certain types of bacteria).

The third phase, intelligence, starts with the arrival of expressive language and really takes off with written language among humans. Randomness now takes the form of people coming up with and trying out different ideas (like irrigating fields) and sharing among each other what works and what doesn’t work. Replication takes the form initially of repeating speech but eventually of copying text, a process that is disconnected from the embodiment in a living organism and can thus spread rapidly across space and time. I am using text here loosely, this also includes databases, recordings of audio or video, and other types of storable and copyable media, what in toto I call “knowledge” in my book. Selection happens on the basis of evaluating effectiveness, as well as through moral and aesthetic judgment. All of these are informed by intelligence. Furthermore, in this phase intelligence plays a role not just in the selection process, but operates also to a degree on randomness and replication. For example, instead of trying entirely random molecules for therapy, we can take guesses that are informed by our understanding of the workings of cells (there is still some randomness remaining in what gets tried when). Replication too should be informed by intelligence in creating more easily accessible, cheaper and more effective instances of useful knowledge. Put differently, in the intelligence phase, randomness, replication and selection are all influenced by intelligence.

So how does this permit free will? Well there is no such thing as instantaneous individual free will. At any one moment our choices are either predetermined or random. But over time and in interaction with others we can come up with new and different choices that we can make in the future. For this to be the case, knowledge externalized as language has to be mixed into our decisions and the judgement we apply to choices. Doing so gives us the unique ability to apply intelligence to rewire our brains through a wide variety of techniques, such as habit forming, cognitive behavioral therapy, and psychedelics. Put differently: a single brain by itself is, moment by moment, an unfolding physical process without free will. But a series of brains connected with each other through the creation, sharing and accumulation of knowledge via language has free will as an emergent property.  Free will as innovation. I will elaborate on the elements of this view of free will in future posts.

This theory of free will has important moral implications, many of which I will explore as Philosophy Mondays progresses. But one crucial immediate implication is that artificial intelligences too can have free will through their interactions with humans and with other machines. This is why I want to once again emphasize how important it is to be open to the idea that what we are building (and what is increasingly building itself) are beings that we should consider neo-humans and treat as such.

My thinking on the interplay between randomness, replication and selection across the phases is inspired by a lot of prior philosophy and science but I want to especially point to David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto’s work on Constructor Theory and Lee Cronin and Sara Walker’s work on Assembly Theory. Thanks to Matt Mandel for helpful comments. Illustration by Claude.