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The Justice Algorithm

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Why do we need judges? Why do we leave important decisions to flawed, biased, distracted, even corruptible human beings? Couldn’t A.I. do this job so much better now? So much more cleanly, precisely – without all that messy, human subjectivity? Couldn’t we just submit the evidence to a great big algorithm to determine guilt or innocence? Or, if that involves too much ambiguity, at least to determine appropriate sentencing, taking all appropriate factors into consideration? Shouldn’t there be a single right answer that can be reached in each case?   After all, we have, in most jurisdictions, a constitution that lays out our moral and societal values and guiding legal principles. Of course, these aren’t specific to any situation, so we also have a set of laws that dictate very clearly what’s allowed and what isn’t. Admittedly, we keep having to make new ones to keep up with a changing world, but they’re as comprehensive and up-to-date as our political systems allow. We know what...
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Undetermined - a response to Robert Sapolsky. Part 4 - Loosening the treaties of fate

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In Part 3 of this series, I argued that organisms really do think about what to do, really do come to their reasons by reasoning, and really do make decisions, in ways that cannot be pre-determined.   If the neural computations are causally sensitive to semantic content, rather than detailed syntax, and those semantics relate to organism-level concepts, and all that information is integrated in a hugely contextually interdependent way, and is used to direct behavior over nested timescales, in ways that cannot be either algorithmically or physically pre-specified, based on criteria configured into the circuits derived from learning, which embody reasons of the organism and not any of its parts, then I would say that just is the organism – as an integrated self with continuity through time – deciding what to do.   I also argued that more fundamental principles of indeterminacy and emergence and organisation are the things that enable organisms themselves to come to be in...
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Undetermined - a response to Robert Sapolsky. Part 3 - Where do intentions come from?

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In his book Determined , Robert Sapolsky argues that our intentions arise in a completely deterministic fashion from the combined effects of all the prior causes that have acted on us, right up to the moment of action. He contends (i) that our intentions determine what we do, and (ii) that we have no control over their formation – they just appear when we are confronted with each successive situation we encounter. Referring to a classic turn-back-the-clock kind of thought experiment, he says:   But no matter how fervent, even desperate, you are, you can’t suc­cessfully wish to have wished for a different intent . And you can’t meta your way out— you can’t successfully wish for the tools (say, more self- discipline) that will make you better at successfully wishing what you wish for. None of us can. (page 46, original emphasis)   Here, Sapolsky seems to be arguing for psychological determinism . Your behavior at any moment is fully determined by the sets of reasons that...
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Undetermined - a response to Robert Sapolsky. Part 2 - assessing the scientific evidence

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In Part 1 of this series, I explored the different philosophical premises that Robert Sapolsky and I bring to the question of free will, in our respective books, Determined and Free Agents . Here, I will examine the scientific evidence that Sapolsky marshals to make his argument that all our decisions are fully determined. Part 2   No, but yeah, but no – assessing the scientific evidence   Sapolsky presents an array of experimental evidence from studies of various kinds to support his claim that we are completely driven by all the causal factors in our past or intervening on us in the present. The word study appears 163 times in the text, in fact, and it felt a bit like being pummeled into submission at times. I’m all for providing experimental evidence to support one’s claims, but in this case, much of the supposed evidence is completely unreliable. The fields that are cited the most include social psychology, especially social “priming” experi...
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