A deterministic world and free choice

A recent article in the NYTimes talks about free will, specifically the tension between the existence of our sense of responsibility for our actions and the fact that we are as people, shaped in who we are (and therefore in what decisions we make) by forces that are beyond our control, i.e., genetics and the environment of our development, and that this actually makes our actions (which are a product of who we are) not in our control.

Both of these stances are valid: we DO feel a responsibility for our actions, even in spite of believing that we as people are who we are because of factors beyond our control. However, I sensed from the beginning that the conclusion was flawed because both premises, although seeming to contradict each other, actually didn't because they spoke about different levels of existence that we tend to confuse. When a problem arises in which two facts about reality appear to contradict each other, I tend to think that there is actually a confusion of logical types. In other words, the confusion occurs because two things that are different, or exist on different levels are made to seem the same. In this way, my thinking is indebted to the work of Gregory Bateson.

The article equates the person who is the result of purely physical processes with the person who makes decisions-decides to do or not to do things. Is this actually the same person?

One commentator (Ivan) replied that the article confused inanimate matter with a conscious thinking human being. I think that Ivan is in the right direction with this. I would pose the question: Does the fact that a sequence of events follows the predictable laws of physics preclude it from occurring because of an intentional choice? While the answer is not a clear no, it's also not at all clear how it could be clearly yes.

I am inclined to think that physical processes may follow physical laws, and that our experience of an intentional domain just occurs in parallel to this. The one troubling conclusion of this is that it implies that although our decisions are intentional, the way that they emerge in our body is also always in keeping with the laws of physics.

Therefore, if we could see every process in our nervous system, and predict our subsequent actions, how would these processes be affected by this knowledge? Say for example that a friend came up and asked us to pick a color, and we looked at the state of our nervous system and found that the system was such that we would most certainly choose green. Once we knew this, we could try to stump the system and decide to choose brown instead. If both the laws of physics and our intentional decisions fully overlap with each other, then our change of choice to brown would have had to correspond to those neural changes that could be read and interpreted as implying that we would end up choosing brown.

Barriers to Progress

I commonly think of myself as, in many contexts, a lazy man. There are things that need to be done in my life that I consistantly don't attend to even when then begin to cause me inconvenience. A persistently appearing example of this is doing laundry. This morning, it became clear to me, as it had for the past few days, that I needed to do some laundry. So dire was this need, that I actually resolved to do it.

When I began to do this I was confronted by the mismatch between the way that I categorized the dirty clothes in my room, and the way that "doing the laundry" demanded the clothes to be categorized. I see the clothes scattered about my room to be in various places along the spectrum between clean and dirty, whereas doing laundry involves the cloths being either clean or dirty. Although in this case the mismatch was between a digital and an analog system of representation, this doesn't have to be the case. A mismatch can also occur between two systems of discrete categories that simply don't match up-such as if I had 4 different levels of cleanliness.

What led me to this state of affairs? I believe that it's my tendency to create categories for things based not on how they must be used, but on certain characteristics of the things themselves. With regards to the clothes, I made categories based on how dirty the clothes were without regard to the fact that the clothes would eventually have to be seen as either clean or dirty.

The merits of this tendency in other areas is a subject for another post.

Gregory Bateson's Levels of Learning

An exciting chapter in an otherwise exciting book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, is concerned with Gregory Bateson's application of the idea of logical levels to the concept of learning. His premise is that the idea of logical levels is applicable to processes of learning, and that the ignorance of this fact leads to confusion in the behavioral and social sciences. What I want to focus on in this post is simply an overview of the different logical levels of learning. I hope in future posts to proceed from there, because this seems to be a topic worthy of exploration.

I imagine each successive logical level of learning as a process of systemic activity in which the learning (understood as specific changes in the system over time) comes to occur in ever larger parts of the system. I will begin by describing the first level.

Learning 1 is commonly understood as simple Pavlovian or operational conditioning. An organism is exposed to a specific environmental event which repeats itself, and this has the result of familiarizing the animal with the contingencies of their behavior in this instance. For example, an animal that repeatedly barks and is given a treat during one session with its owner has learned at level 1 the specific barking>treat contingency.

Learning 2 involves a more substantial type of learning. Rather than learning how to act in a specific situation, an organism that undergoes learning 2 learns to approach novel situations and act in a certain way that has been rewarded in other situations in the past. In other words, learning two is the process whereby an organism learns to act certain ways in certain types of situations, rather than just act in a certain way in a certain situation.

According to Bateson, level 2 is the general ceiling for most people's learning. Despite this, learning at level 3 is attempted with some success-and some destruction. The relationship between levels 1 and 2 is the same as between levels 2 and three. Beyond this level three is (and Bateson admits this) difficult to describe.

It helps to go back down and describe level 2 in more detail, and then scaffold off of this for level three. So, level 2 involves the development of the ability to approach a novel situation and categorize it (and then act towards it) in a certain way. Although the situation facing the organism is novel, the organism still retains its acquired ways of acting. Learning at level 2 gives the organism an intelligent basis upon which to choose a certain alternative.

In contrast, learning 3 involves learning to intelligently choose between sets of alternatives themselves. The choice of alternatives is no longer at the level of the individual situation (as it was at level 2), or at the level of the individual action (level 1). The choice that must be learned to be made intelligently occurs at the level of the sets of alternative interpretations.

So, someone who has learned at level 3 would, upon approaching a novel situation, say to themselves "what set of interpretations offers the most promise in this instance?" Once a decision has been made, the activity occurs on level 2-which interpretation within the selected set will I make-and then on level 1: what is the appropriate action to take in this context?