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Hayek's Evolutionary Epistemology, Artificial Intelligence, and the Question of Free Will
By Gary T. Dempsey
Gary T. Dempsey is assistant director of development at the Cato Institute.
Abstract
[...]
I also maintain that Hayek recognizes that his epistemology undermines the idea of free will because it implies that the mind's operation is determined by the evolutionary interaction of the matter that comprises ourselves and the world around us. I point out, however, that Hayek responds to this implied determinism by explaining that it can have no practical impact on our day-to-day lives because, as he demonstrates, the complexity of the mind's evolution prevents us from ever knowing how we are determined to behave. Instead, we can only know our mind at the instant we experience it.
[...]
The Implication for Free Will and Hayek's Response
Hayek's view that the mind is a complex adaptive system or “spontaneous order” holds a significant implication for the age-old controversy about free will—defined as a will that is not the exclusive and necessary result of the interaction of physical material. As far as we have seen, the mind consists of matter and its relations, and since everything can be realized in these materialist terms, there is simply no room for freedom of will. Indeed, it is another way of saying that our choices, judgments, and decisions are determined by the operation of the material that constitutes ourselves and the world, or as Oxford scholar John Gray summarizes Hayek's view, “our ideas are merely the visible exfoliation of spontaneous forces” (1986, p30). But if this account is correct, why should we do anything purposeful at all? Doesn't Hayek's materialism destroy the idea of goal-directed action?
Not so fast, responds Hayek; we can never introspectively predict how our mind is to be determined. Instead, “we can know [our mind] only through directly experiencing it” (1952, p194). With regard to the issue of goal-directed action, then, Hayek makes it clear that his materialism makes no practical difference in our daily lives; we must still conduct ourselves as if we are free because we can never know how we are meant to behave. Indeed,
"we may...well be able to establish that every single action of a human being is the necessary result of the inherited structure of his body (particularly of its nervous system) and of all the external influences which have acted upon it since birth. We might be able to go further and assert that if the most important of these factors were in a particular case very much the same as with most other individuals, a particular class of influences will have a certain kind of effect. But this would be an empirical generalization based on a ceteris paribus assumption which we could not verify in the particular instance. The chief fact would continue to be, in spite of our knowledge of the principle on which the human mind works, that we should not be able to state the full set of particular facts which brought it about that the individual did a particular thing at a particular time (1989, pp86-87)."
Hayek thus salvages the idea of goal-directed action from the grips of materialism by maintaining that we cannot avoid acting as if we are free because we are never in a position to know how we are determined to behave. In other words, Hayek does not assert that our will is free, but that we are incapable of knowing how to behave like our will is unfree.
In order to gain a fuller understanding of this argument, we must begin with the recognition that Hayek is a materialist without being a reductionist. Or as he puts it, “those whom it pleases may express this by saying that in some ultimate sense mental phenomena are 'nothing but' physical processes; this, however, does not alter the fact that in discussing mental processes we will never be able to dispense with the use of mental terms [for] we shall never be able to explain [them] in terms of physical laws” (1952, p191). Our minds, he contends, “must remain irreducible entities” (ibid.).
A primary obstacle to reduction, says Hayek, stems from the mind's interconnectivity. This occurs because the mind's elements—sensory experiences—are linked to one another in such a way that they actually determine what the others are through their interconnections. The mind, in other words, is a quality of arrangements; “its actions are determined by the relation and mutual adjustment to each other of the [multiple] elements of which it consists” (1967a, p73) and the multitude of connections “proceeding at any one moment, can mutually influence each other” (1952, p112). Thus, adding or removing even one sensory experience will change all the others in some subtle way.
The practical implication of such interconnectivity is that a sensory experience cannot be analyzed without reference to the other sensory experiences that a mind has encountered; that is, in order to describe a sensory experience all the way through, one must describe its relations to other experiences, which are, in turn, are related to still other experiences, and so on in an infinite regress. Logically, any attempt to describe precisely a sensory experience would have to take into account the complete order that emerges from a person's previous sensory experiences. As a result, the mind cannot be broken down into linear, A causes B terminology and reassembled into an explanation of the whole. No sensory experience is autonomous. Rather, all sensory experiences are embedded in complex relations with other sensory experiences. The relations change the experience so that it constitutes more than itself. It “resonates” with what Jaques Derrida (1976) might call “traces” of something “other.” Consequently, where one experience ends and another begins is undecidable. There are only sensory experiences in relations to other sensory experiences; their essence lies in their relations to the others and their effects on the same.
Another obstacle to reduction, says Hayek, has to do with the mind's dynamic quality. This occurs because the order of the mind is constantly being updated; that is, when the mind encounters a new bit of sensory data, it is itself altered by that data—it recontextualizes. The mind, in other words, successively publishes revised editions that incorporate the immediately preceding sensory experience. What results, to paraphrase Hayek's student Ludwig Lachmann (Garrison 1987), is a “kaleidic” process in which the order that we call the mind is continually cascading into new and novel patterns.
Given this, the mind is not a closed system. A closed system is like a finite collection of musical notes, where the possible patterns that can be played today are identical to the possible patterns that can be played next week, next year, or next century. But what happens when the unity of the system is broken and a new note is introduced? The whole nature of possible permutations changes. No possible permutation of the former set of notes can replicate a sequence containing the new note. The introduction of a new note, therefore, dramatically changes the possible outcome of all future scenarios.
Similarly, the introduction of a new sensory experience alters the mind's possible future scenarios. That is, each new sensory experience one witnesses will be interpreted within the context of an updated network of neural connections, one that incorporates the immediately preceding sensory information. As a consequence, each contemplation is unique or, as Heraclitus might have put it, you cannot step into the same stream of thought twice. The order of the connections in the mind, explains Hayek,
"is modified by every new action exercised upon it by the external world, and since the stimuli acting on it do not operate by themselves but always in conjunction with the process called forth by the preexisting excitatory state, it is obvious that the response to a given combination of stimuli on two different occasions is not likely to be exactly the same. Because it is the whole history of the organism which will determine its action, new factors will contribute to this determination on the latter occasion which were not present in the first. We shall find not only that the same set of external stimuli will not always produce the same responses, but also that altogether new responses will occur (1952, p123)."
What this suggests is that even if we could know the precise order and intensity of new experiences, this would not enable us to explain why a mind responds the way it does. The reason for this is the actual impossibility of ascertaining the particular circumstances which, in the course of a lifetime of experiences, have decided the emergence and trajectory of the complex order that we call the mind. In other words, the mind is biographical, and its manifestation is dependent upon a staggeringly long and statistically unrepeatable sequence of variables and intensities. Indeed, to paraphrase paleobiologist Stephen J. Gould (1989), wind back the tape of the mind to its early days; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like the identical mind will grace the replay (ibid. p14). Subsequently, a more appropriate question to ask than Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous “what is it like to be a bat?” is “what is it like to be another person?” Since each mind is historically fingerprinted, this cannot be known. An identical sensory experience would require “an identical history”—a requirement that ultimately “precludes the possibility that at any moment the maps [or minds] of two individuals should be completely identical” (1952, p110). Thus, although people can refer to the same sensory experience, it neither follows that it has the same location or intensity in their evolutionary mind, nor that all the connections that extend from it are the same. Each experience is, in this sense, 'private'—just as there are no two identical snowflakes, there are no two identical sensory experiences of a snowflake.
In conclusion, it should not be difficult now to recognize that although Hayek rejects the idea of free will, he accepts the idea of a subjective will; that is, a willfulness unique to each individual. It should also not be difficult to recognize the predictive limitations applying to explanations of such a will. In fact, Hayek rejects the possibility of “specific prediction” in the case of the individual will and finds that such a goal is “completely unjustified” (1989, p88). He maintains, rather, that specific prediction of the will could “be achieved only if we were able to substitute for a description of events in...mental terms a description in physical terms which included an exhaustive enumeration of all the physical circumstances which constitute a necessary and sufficient condition of the...mental phenomena in question” (ibid.). But, as has been argued, viewing the mind as a “spontaneous order” creates an “impossibility of ascertaining all the particular data required to derive detailed conclusions” (ibid., p86). As a result, says Hayek, “the individual personality [will] remain for us as much a unique and unaccountable phenomenon...but whose specific actions we [can] generally not predict or control, because we [can] not obtain the information on all the particular facts which determined it” (ibid., pp86-87). In other words, even though we may know the general principle by which the complex adaptive system we call the mind is causally determined by evolutionary processes, this does not mean that a particular human action can ever be introspectively recognized as the necessary result of a particular set of facts. Indeed, Hayek maintains that we are in no better position to predict the specific future motions of our mind than we are “able to predict the shape and movement of [a] wave that will form on the [surface of the] ocean at a particular place and moment in time” (1984, p243). Returning to the topic of artificial intelligence, this raises an important closing observation. If the same quality of irreducibility applies to intelligent machines, then they too will face limits to introspection. But more significantly, it will also mean that we will be incapable of recursively describing their evolved will; that is, we won't be able to tell from their operation the precise sequence and relation of events that contributed to their specific manifestation. As a result, if Hayek's epistemological insights hold for artificially intelligent machines, we can already recognize an imminent limitation on our ability to predict and/or plan their behavior. We shall see.
Source: http://www.cato.org/...rs/hayekee.html
By Gary T. Dempsey
Gary T. Dempsey is assistant director of development at the Cato Institute.
Abstract
[...]
I also maintain that Hayek recognizes that his epistemology undermines the idea of free will because it implies that the mind's operation is determined by the evolutionary interaction of the matter that comprises ourselves and the world around us. I point out, however, that Hayek responds to this implied determinism by explaining that it can have no practical impact on our day-to-day lives because, as he demonstrates, the complexity of the mind's evolution prevents us from ever knowing how we are determined to behave. Instead, we can only know our mind at the instant we experience it.
[...]
The Implication for Free Will and Hayek's Response
Hayek's view that the mind is a complex adaptive system or “spontaneous order” holds a significant implication for the age-old controversy about free will—defined as a will that is not the exclusive and necessary result of the interaction of physical material. As far as we have seen, the mind consists of matter and its relations, and since everything can be realized in these materialist terms, there is simply no room for freedom of will. Indeed, it is another way of saying that our choices, judgments, and decisions are determined by the operation of the material that constitutes ourselves and the world, or as Oxford scholar John Gray summarizes Hayek's view, “our ideas are merely the visible exfoliation of spontaneous forces” (1986, p30). But if this account is correct, why should we do anything purposeful at all? Doesn't Hayek's materialism destroy the idea of goal-directed action?
Not so fast, responds Hayek; we can never introspectively predict how our mind is to be determined. Instead, “we can know [our mind] only through directly experiencing it” (1952, p194). With regard to the issue of goal-directed action, then, Hayek makes it clear that his materialism makes no practical difference in our daily lives; we must still conduct ourselves as if we are free because we can never know how we are meant to behave. Indeed,
"we may...well be able to establish that every single action of a human being is the necessary result of the inherited structure of his body (particularly of its nervous system) and of all the external influences which have acted upon it since birth. We might be able to go further and assert that if the most important of these factors were in a particular case very much the same as with most other individuals, a particular class of influences will have a certain kind of effect. But this would be an empirical generalization based on a ceteris paribus assumption which we could not verify in the particular instance. The chief fact would continue to be, in spite of our knowledge of the principle on which the human mind works, that we should not be able to state the full set of particular facts which brought it about that the individual did a particular thing at a particular time (1989, pp86-87)."
Hayek thus salvages the idea of goal-directed action from the grips of materialism by maintaining that we cannot avoid acting as if we are free because we are never in a position to know how we are determined to behave. In other words, Hayek does not assert that our will is free, but that we are incapable of knowing how to behave like our will is unfree.
In order to gain a fuller understanding of this argument, we must begin with the recognition that Hayek is a materialist without being a reductionist. Or as he puts it, “those whom it pleases may express this by saying that in some ultimate sense mental phenomena are 'nothing but' physical processes; this, however, does not alter the fact that in discussing mental processes we will never be able to dispense with the use of mental terms [for] we shall never be able to explain [them] in terms of physical laws” (1952, p191). Our minds, he contends, “must remain irreducible entities” (ibid.).
A primary obstacle to reduction, says Hayek, stems from the mind's interconnectivity. This occurs because the mind's elements—sensory experiences—are linked to one another in such a way that they actually determine what the others are through their interconnections. The mind, in other words, is a quality of arrangements; “its actions are determined by the relation and mutual adjustment to each other of the [multiple] elements of which it consists” (1967a, p73) and the multitude of connections “proceeding at any one moment, can mutually influence each other” (1952, p112). Thus, adding or removing even one sensory experience will change all the others in some subtle way.
The practical implication of such interconnectivity is that a sensory experience cannot be analyzed without reference to the other sensory experiences that a mind has encountered; that is, in order to describe a sensory experience all the way through, one must describe its relations to other experiences, which are, in turn, are related to still other experiences, and so on in an infinite regress. Logically, any attempt to describe precisely a sensory experience would have to take into account the complete order that emerges from a person's previous sensory experiences. As a result, the mind cannot be broken down into linear, A causes B terminology and reassembled into an explanation of the whole. No sensory experience is autonomous. Rather, all sensory experiences are embedded in complex relations with other sensory experiences. The relations change the experience so that it constitutes more than itself. It “resonates” with what Jaques Derrida (1976) might call “traces” of something “other.” Consequently, where one experience ends and another begins is undecidable. There are only sensory experiences in relations to other sensory experiences; their essence lies in their relations to the others and their effects on the same.
Another obstacle to reduction, says Hayek, has to do with the mind's dynamic quality. This occurs because the order of the mind is constantly being updated; that is, when the mind encounters a new bit of sensory data, it is itself altered by that data—it recontextualizes. The mind, in other words, successively publishes revised editions that incorporate the immediately preceding sensory experience. What results, to paraphrase Hayek's student Ludwig Lachmann (Garrison 1987), is a “kaleidic” process in which the order that we call the mind is continually cascading into new and novel patterns.
Given this, the mind is not a closed system. A closed system is like a finite collection of musical notes, where the possible patterns that can be played today are identical to the possible patterns that can be played next week, next year, or next century. But what happens when the unity of the system is broken and a new note is introduced? The whole nature of possible permutations changes. No possible permutation of the former set of notes can replicate a sequence containing the new note. The introduction of a new note, therefore, dramatically changes the possible outcome of all future scenarios.
Similarly, the introduction of a new sensory experience alters the mind's possible future scenarios. That is, each new sensory experience one witnesses will be interpreted within the context of an updated network of neural connections, one that incorporates the immediately preceding sensory information. As a consequence, each contemplation is unique or, as Heraclitus might have put it, you cannot step into the same stream of thought twice. The order of the connections in the mind, explains Hayek,
"is modified by every new action exercised upon it by the external world, and since the stimuli acting on it do not operate by themselves but always in conjunction with the process called forth by the preexisting excitatory state, it is obvious that the response to a given combination of stimuli on two different occasions is not likely to be exactly the same. Because it is the whole history of the organism which will determine its action, new factors will contribute to this determination on the latter occasion which were not present in the first. We shall find not only that the same set of external stimuli will not always produce the same responses, but also that altogether new responses will occur (1952, p123)."
What this suggests is that even if we could know the precise order and intensity of new experiences, this would not enable us to explain why a mind responds the way it does. The reason for this is the actual impossibility of ascertaining the particular circumstances which, in the course of a lifetime of experiences, have decided the emergence and trajectory of the complex order that we call the mind. In other words, the mind is biographical, and its manifestation is dependent upon a staggeringly long and statistically unrepeatable sequence of variables and intensities. Indeed, to paraphrase paleobiologist Stephen J. Gould (1989), wind back the tape of the mind to its early days; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like the identical mind will grace the replay (ibid. p14). Subsequently, a more appropriate question to ask than Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous “what is it like to be a bat?” is “what is it like to be another person?” Since each mind is historically fingerprinted, this cannot be known. An identical sensory experience would require “an identical history”—a requirement that ultimately “precludes the possibility that at any moment the maps [or minds] of two individuals should be completely identical” (1952, p110). Thus, although people can refer to the same sensory experience, it neither follows that it has the same location or intensity in their evolutionary mind, nor that all the connections that extend from it are the same. Each experience is, in this sense, 'private'—just as there are no two identical snowflakes, there are no two identical sensory experiences of a snowflake.
In conclusion, it should not be difficult now to recognize that although Hayek rejects the idea of free will, he accepts the idea of a subjective will; that is, a willfulness unique to each individual. It should also not be difficult to recognize the predictive limitations applying to explanations of such a will. In fact, Hayek rejects the possibility of “specific prediction” in the case of the individual will and finds that such a goal is “completely unjustified” (1989, p88). He maintains, rather, that specific prediction of the will could “be achieved only if we were able to substitute for a description of events in...mental terms a description in physical terms which included an exhaustive enumeration of all the physical circumstances which constitute a necessary and sufficient condition of the...mental phenomena in question” (ibid.). But, as has been argued, viewing the mind as a “spontaneous order” creates an “impossibility of ascertaining all the particular data required to derive detailed conclusions” (ibid., p86). As a result, says Hayek, “the individual personality [will] remain for us as much a unique and unaccountable phenomenon...but whose specific actions we [can] generally not predict or control, because we [can] not obtain the information on all the particular facts which determined it” (ibid., pp86-87). In other words, even though we may know the general principle by which the complex adaptive system we call the mind is causally determined by evolutionary processes, this does not mean that a particular human action can ever be introspectively recognized as the necessary result of a particular set of facts. Indeed, Hayek maintains that we are in no better position to predict the specific future motions of our mind than we are “able to predict the shape and movement of [a] wave that will form on the [surface of the] ocean at a particular place and moment in time” (1984, p243). Returning to the topic of artificial intelligence, this raises an important closing observation. If the same quality of irreducibility applies to intelligent machines, then they too will face limits to introspection. But more significantly, it will also mean that we will be incapable of recursively describing their evolved will; that is, we won't be able to tell from their operation the precise sequence and relation of events that contributed to their specific manifestation. As a result, if Hayek's epistemological insights hold for artificially intelligent machines, we can already recognize an imminent limitation on our ability to predict and/or plan their behavior. We shall see.
Source: http://www.cato.org/...rs/hayekee.html
This source has been found with Liberty-Finder.com.
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