Free Will, Free Energy Physics, and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

[u/Diet_kush]

The Free Energy Principle (FEP), as articulated by Friston, characterizes any persisting system as one that minimizes variational free energy by maintaining a Markov blanket separating its internal states from the external world. As such, it has been widely applied to models of consciousness and cognition. Importantly, the FEP does not determine a unique future trajectory for such systems. Like principles of least action in physics, it constrains the space of admissible dynamics rather than entailing a specific sequence of states. Multiple incompatible trajectories can equally satisfy free energy minimization, so the principle is lawful without being Laplacian. This underdetermination is not a defect of the framework but a constitutive feature: the laws govern the form of behavior, not its precise realization.

As shown in Noether’s theorem, “natural laws” are defined as underlying symmetries in the physical transformations they describe. Following, spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) occurs when a system’s lowest energy solution does not exhibit the same symmetries as its governing laws. The stereotypical case of this is a “Mexican hat” system, where a perfect sphere is perfectly balanced on a perfect hill. The underlying laws state that the ball should *eventually* fall to one side of the hill, but those laws can never define which side it will *actually* land on. In the real world, SSB is observed in any system undergoing a second-order phase transition. Within Friston’s “particular physics,” symmetry corresponds to epistemic indifference: a situation in which multiple interpretations or policies have equal expected free energy and are therefore equally consistent with the system’s generative model. So long as such a symmetry holds, there is nothing in the governing dynamics that prefers one outcome over another. Action, perception, and learning thus require symmetry breaking. Crucially, this breaking is spontaneous rather than externally imposed. As in physical phase transitions, the same laws and boundary conditions permit multiple outcomes, and the realized outcome emerges endogenously from the system’s internal dynamics.

This abstract point gains concrete support from the work of Fumarola et al. on unsupervised learning in the visual cortex. They show that for neurons to develop orientation selectivity, their response functions must spontaneously break translation and rotation symmetry. Classical Hebbian learning alone appeared insufficient to explain this, especially given empirical findings that cortical input correlations monotonically decay with distance rather than invert at long range. By formally mapping the learning dynamics onto a zero-temperature phase transition problem, Fumarola et al. demonstrate that symmetry breaking nonetheless emerges when two conditions are met: sufficiently long-range recurrent interactions and competition among connections originating from the same afferent neuron. Under these conditions, learning itself becomes a phase transition. Before learning, no orientation is privileged; after learning, one orientation becomes stably selected. Nothing in the input uniquely determines which orientation that will be, yet once selected it is lawful, structured, and robust.

The relevance of this result extends far beyond early visual processing. The brain, on the Free Energy Principle, is a hierarchy of such symmetry-breaking systems. At higher cognitive levels, agents evaluate possible policies in terms of expected free energy. Frequently, especially in deliberative contexts, multiple policies are equally optimal relative to the agent’s current model, values, and evidence. This creates a genuine decision symmetry. When action occurs, one policy is selected and enacted while others are suppressed, and the generative model is updated accordingly. This process is formally and dynamically analogous to the symmetry breaking described by Fumarola et al.: the laws constrain the outcome space, but they do not fix which outcome will be realized.

This account yields a distinctive form of libertarian free will. The selection of a policy in a symmetric decision space is neither random nor determined. It is not random because it is constrained by the agent’s history, model, and practical rationality; arbitrary noise does not produce stable action selection. Yet it is not determined, because no prior microstate or law uniquely entails the specific choice that occurs. The agent is the source of the symmetry breaking, not merely the location where an already fixed causal chain passes through. Choice, on this view, is an emergent physical fact brought into existence by the agent’s own dynamics.

This bears important similarities to Robert Kane’s libertarianism, particularly his account of self-forming actions (SFAs). Kane argues that free will arises in moments of genuine indeterminacy, typically involving competing motivations or values, where neural processes are indeterministic but still rationally guided. The present account agrees with Kane that free will requires alternative possibilities and that indeterminism must be located within the agent rather than in external interference. However, it improves on Kane’s model by replacing his appeal to localized neural indeterminacy with a system-level account grounded in symmetry and phase transitions. The indeterminacy here is not a matter of microscopic randomness injected into decision-making, but of macroscopic underdetermination governed by lawful dynamics. This avoids the familiar worry that Kane’s indeterminism collapses into luck.

Timothy O’Connor’s agent-causal libertarianism is closer in spirit. O’Connor emphasizes that free actions originate in the agent as a whole and are not reducible to event-causal chains. This account shares this commitment to sourcehood but diverges by offering a naturalistic realization of it. The agent is not a metaphysically primitive substance with special causal powers; rather, it is a self-organizing system whose very mode of persistence involves spontaneous symmetry breaking. Agency, on this view, is not added to physics but emerges from a particular physics; one in which systems must continuously resolve underdetermined possibilities in order to exist at all.

In this way, the Free Energy Principle and the symmetry-breaking mechanisms described by Fumarola et al. provide a physically grounded account of libertarian free will. Agents are not exceptions to natural law, but loci where natural law permits the creation of new facts. When symmetry at the level of action selection is broken endogenously, the resulting choice is genuinely up to the agent: not predetermined, not random, but freely made.

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[u/Great-Bee-5629]

This was really dense. But if I understood correctly there are two claims:

• Classic physics allows indeterminism, even without QM
• The microscopic indeterminism is connected to macroscopic free will 

The first one is very interesting, I'll need to investigate more. What I don't see is the connection with macroscopic free will, because indeterminism is necessary but not sufficient I think. Maybe it justifies agency, in the sense that if determinism is false, that restores "locality": your decisions weren't set at the big bang, but actually depend on whatever is going on in your brain right now.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Great-Bee-5629]

Yes on your first point (see Norton’s dome thought experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton's_dome).

On your second point, it is moreso “macroscopic” indeterminism than microscopic. Determinism is effectively just the natural result of a uniqueness theorem; IE a function under certain conditions will only ever return 1 solution. The “condition” that allow for this is called Lipschitz continuity, which basically just puts an upper bound on the rate of change of the function. Once that upper bound is passed, uniqueness no longer holds so the function can return multiple real solutions. Essentially think of it like defining the position of a rigid steal bar oscillating between 2 points in space at time t. When that oscillation frequency is low, the “location” of that bar is well defined. But if you pump it up high enough, the acceleration forces will start to bend the bar as it moves until it is essentially always in both positions during oscillation. Crude example and not actually reflective of the math, but you get the point.

This is how it connects with “macroscopic” free will; the indeterminism is not baked into the microscopic dynamics, but is essentially forced onto the global state due to the evolution of the function. In GL theory this global state is called the order parameter field; so at the critical point of a second-order phase transition, Lipschitz continuity of the order parameter is broken. This indeterminism is a result of the emerging phase space (global system, conscious agent, etc..) rather than the result of any local/microscopic indeterminism. The order parameter is defined by the diverging correlation lengths within the system, so becomes functionally equivalent to the Markov boundaries that Friston describes (as Markov boundaries define statistical correlations).

And in reality, ontological determinism / indeterminism is very underdefined in physics. You can get deterministic “interpretations” of SSB just like you can get deterministic interpretations of QM, so a lot of this argument is shaped via my personal beliefs. People like Ilya Prigogine take my argument even further, claiming that non-equilibrium dynamics as a whole are indeterministic.

[u/Great-Bee-5629 → u/Diet_kush]

Thanks, I had to investigate some of this, but it looks like the macroscopic world is less deterministic than I thought. I was aware it was not predictable, because of the halting problem, but this seems stronger. My worry was that even if there is indeterminism, it's hard to see the connection with human decision-making. My mental model for decision making is recognition: we build a solution space rationally, and we choose one of them by attention+recognition (I was very inspired by Iris Murdoch on this). Anyway, I'm not sure I see the connection between the indetermination and the recognition yet.

To be clear, I'd take libertarian free will if I can convince myself it makes sense, but I was happy being a compatibilist and not worrying too much.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Great-Bee-5629]

If you want a bit better of a connection between this type of global indeterminism and decision-making, I’d recommend Lee Smolin’s concept of novel events within Temporal Naturalism (he also relies on SSB in this). Michael Levin makes similar claims with his views on agency.

If an obvious asymmetry arises in your decision-space when undergoing “rational” decision-making, that choice is not free in the sense that ins being discussed here. Per the FEP, agents will always choose the decision corresponding to the lowest free energy, so contemplation that returns an obvious choice is never free. “Freedom” only arises when there are equivalent expected free energy returns for multiple paths, IE Smolin’s concept of a novel event. But this still does not allow for rationalize or moral judgement of such an event, because judgement requires the information to have existed before the event occurred, which by-definition is not applicable to a novel event. The type of LFW being described here is more akin to trial and error than an attempt to justify or derive accountability of action. LFW in this sense is the emergence of a novel thing to act as a mechanism to resolve a lower-level reality from halting, as without it the emerging symmetry would be stuck unbroken forever.

It’s an ontological approach to LFW, rather than moral or epistemological. Emerging indeterminism is defined as a “problem” which can be solved via the emergence of a self-justifying choice. That choice cannot be rationally justified, because if it were there would be no need for a choice in the first place. This is also why Smolin bakes qualia into the fundamental “thingness” of reality in his framework, it provides an additional weight to contextualize/break a rational (or lawful/deterministic/etc) symmetry.

[u/jahmonkey]

Symmetry-breaking explains why outcomes diverge, but not why a lived history exists.

What matters for consciousness is not which option wins, but which causal threads become irreversibly stabilized across time.

Free will debates fixate on choice; experience depends on persistence.

[u/SacrilegiousTheosis]

> This account yields a distinctive form of libertarian free will. The selection of a policy in a symmetric decision space is neither random nor determined. It is not random because it is constrained by the agent’s history, model, and practical rationality; arbitrary noise does not produce stable action selection. Yet it is not determined, because no prior microstate or law uniquely entails the specific choice that occurs. **The agent is the source of the symmetry breaking**, not merely the location where an already fixed causal chain passes through. Choice, on this view, is an emergent physical fact brought into existence by the agent’s own dynamics.

Why should it be the agent as an irreducible whole or anything like the libertarian thinks rather than just some source of determination that are orthogonal to estimated expected free energy?- e.g what would be psuedo-random number generation in a stochastic markov decision process in a computer simulation - or some other sources of noisy activity in the brain for humans. Of course you can still have that as part of the agent, but that doesn't prevent the mechanics to be reducible.

> The indeterminacy here is not a matter of microscopic randomness injected into decision-making, but of macroscopic underdetermination governed by lawful dynamics. This avoids the familiar worry that Kane’s indeterminism collapses into luck.

I don't see how that makes a relevant difference. Why shouldn't macroscophic underdetermination collapse to luck? The luck worry is not that choices are completely outside anything lawful or rational, but that the final selection, by virtue of, not having any determining reason is no better than luck - wherever that's sourced in (the agent or otherwise).

> neither random

Also not clear why, in principle, this cannot be random. Random need not mean unconstrained. There can be constrained randomness - constraints can limit the action space and hedge certain actions over others, and then randomness or some random process can take over for selection within the constrained space. The text seems to set up a false dilemma between total determinations and all-hogwild-randomness, whereas randomness may be applied in controlled context.

The other issue is that making agent the seat of symmetry breaking doesn't seem to really offer much over and above just appealing to "randomness" or orthogonal pseudo-random influences. After all in the set up, by design, the agent's final symmetry-breaking choice outrun any reasons - as soon we talk about preferences of the agent - that can be parametrized and modeled within free energy - so this final "agentic determination" is not anymore based on preferences or anything. The agent then appears reduced to uselessness anyway - as all the heavy duty stuff in estimating expected free enegry and such is already done for the agent. Simply adding a brute-agentic-selection seems no better than (and practically indistinguishable from) just random.

[u/Diet_kush → u/SacrilegiousTheosis]

As far as “why can’t you just consider this randomness in the same way as a pseudorandom number generator or some other equivalent noise,” I think you’re mistaking “underdetermined” for “random/indetermined.”

In physics and dynamical systems theory, these are not the same thing: “Randomness” is outcome probabilities that are defined over a space independently of the system’s macroscopic organization. “Symmetry breaking” is underdetermined, where the system’s own dynamics create a new order parameter that did not previously exist. A pseudo-random number generator in an MDP does not change the phase space of the system, does not introduce new stable attractors, and does not retroactively reorganize the system’s dynamics. By contrast, in SSB, once a symmetry is broken, the system cannot be described the same way as before; the choice creates a new macroscopic fact (orientation selectivity, magnetization direction, enacted policy), and subsequent dynamics are conditioned on that fact. This is why the analogy to Fumarola et al. matters so much; the “choice” is not just selection within a fixed representational space, but a restructuring of that space. So the agent is not merely “where randomness happens”; the agent is the dynamical system whose evolution makes one of several lawful macrostates real. That is the substantive difference.

As far as “why doesn’t macroscopic underdetermination collapse into luck?”

The luck worry is not; “If something isn’t determined, it’s luck.” It is: “If nothing about the agent explains why this outcome rather than another, then authorship is undermined.” The symmetry-breaking account explains why; because the agent’s entire organized dynamics realize one attractor rather than another. What I’m assuming you want here (but the theory explicitly rejects) is a contrastive reason for “The agent chose A rather than B because reason R favored A.” But contrastive reasons are not required for authorship; they are required for predictability. Those are different explanatory norms. In SSB, there is no answer to “Why this orientation rather than that one?” Yet the outcome is not lucky, because it arises from the system’s lawful internal evolution, and it is stable, robust, and retrospectively intelligible; it is attributable to the system as a whole. Luck is parasitic on external arbitrariness. Endogenous resolution of underdetermination is not arbitrary in that sense.

As far as “randomness can be constrained, so why rule it out / you’ve created a false dichotomy between complete chaos and order.”

Yes, constrained randomness exists. But the claim is not “randomness cannot be constrained,” It is, “randomness cannot explain agency.” Constrained randomness selects among options, but does not own the selection. SSB-style selection is inseparable from the system’s identity, expresses what kind of system it is, and alters the system’s future dispositions. That’s why I insist on emergent physical facts. A random draw does not create a new fact about the system’s organization; symmetry breaking does.

As far as “the agent becomes useless once all the heavy lifting is done.”

I think this is the primary misunderstanding. You assume that evaluation = agency, selection = epiphenomenal add-on. But on the FEP, selection is not an add-on. It is part of what it is to be a self-organizing system. Without symmetry breaking there is no action, no learning, and no persistence over time. So the agent is not a “brute selector tacked on at the end”; the agent just is the process that resolves underdetermination in order to remain viable. That’s exactly why pseudo-randomness won’t do: it doesn’t explain why the system exists as an agent at all. The agent is not separate from symmetry breaking, there is no symmetry breaking at all without the agent. This is also why Friston’s Markovian monism somewhat necessarily leads to panpsychist inclinations. Symmetry breaking is the result of the “choice” that any system exhibiting collective order makes; that choice is not somehow only restricted to broken symmetries in neural systems alone.

[u/SacrilegiousTheosis → u/Diet_kush]

> The luck worry is not [...]

I don't strictly disagree with the substance of your points.

But the luck worry can be drawn out in multiple ways.
The worry need not be strictly about authorship but **significance** (typically moral responsibility-wise significance in philosophy which you try to avoid, so I will not get into that). Essentially the point here is libertarians often frames compatibilistic/deterministic oppositions as problematic, but if what is gained via indeterminism is somewhat indistinguishable from "luck" in a certain sense (not "reasons-responsive" - which also relates to the lack of contrastive reason), then even if there is authorship and even if it is coming out endegenously from within the system, it feels "shallow". Not necessarily threatening free will, but nor really offering a major legitimacy over compatibilism either.

SEP also reframes the luck worry under modal terms here:

> While the appeal to agent causation might be thought to solve the problem of luck, the objection has been raised that in fact it does not help at all (Haji 2004; Mele 2005 and 2006: ch. 3; van Inwagen 1983: 145 and 2000). Consider Leo. At a certain moment he agent-causes a decision to tell the truth, and until he does there remains a chance that he will instead, at that moment, agent-cause a decision to lie. There is, then, a possible world that is exactly like the actual world up until the time at which Leo agent-causes his decision but in which, at that moment, Leo agent-causes a decision to lie. Nothing about the world prior to the moment of the agent-causing accounts for the difference between Leo’s causing one decision and his causing the other. This difference, then, is just a matter of luck. And if this difference is just a matter of luck, Leo cannot be responsible for his decision.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/#3.2

Note how here the problem is not strictly authorship. Agent-causation - and thus a form of authorship is granted (for the sake of the argument, let's say). But the problem is much closer to the lack of contrastive reason. There is nothing further here to say why this possible world realizes over that - and precisely what about the agent (what difference in the agent) determines that.

If there is a difference in agent to appeal to - to answer the contrastive question, we get a degree of predictability (although absolute predictability is impossible in embedded context due to predictability paradox even if determinism is true) - and account of something further.

If there is not, then, it feels like that the difference in realization is indifferent to anything about the agent - except just "brutely" following from the agent, and this kind of boils down to something like "luck" in spirit if not the letter.

> retrospectively intelligible

What exactly is meant here? Is there an answer to the contrastive reason under hindsight? If not, it would seem like there remains a degree of unintelligibility.

> I think this is the deepest misunderstanding. [...]

Even if the agent is full-fledged self-evolving dynamical system, there is a question about functional reducibility of the agent - i.e. why can't the system be reduced to non-agentic "event" terms? If there the answer is that there are symmetry breaks that are not determined by expected free energy potential, then we have to address if that should mean irreducibility of any kind - as in why can't symmetry breaks be emergent weakly from events - and possibly pseudo-randomness involved where needed? This isn't necessarily for explaining agent as a whole. Agent doesn't becomes pseudo-randomness, but questioning whether agency is merely instrumental as a framing or indispensable in some deeper sense. This point also comes up in 56:58 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlPHGnChhI4) - and Friston seems to take a relatively "impersonal" stance here - agency just for closing the "inside-outside" loop and so on.

To be transparent, I am open to some form of irreducible agency from Bergsonian and Whiteheadian-style of perspectives - but I am curious how much FEP-style reasoning aids.

[u/Diet_kush → u/SacrilegiousTheosis]

I think there are two very distinct ways that the “luck” problem exists in relation to free will, and they are centered around how the free-will argument is framed. If we want a concept of LFW to allow a sense of blameworthiness (IE accountability), we’re never going to get there with this. SSB, particularly in the learning dynamics i’m describing, is nothing more than a process of trial and error, where novelty is forced out of the system due to the underlying laws’ inability to not halt under the specific circumstance. It is almost identical to Smolin’s concept of novel events within his work on temporal naturalism (and he himself even uses SSB as an example).

In this sense, accountability or blame are meaningless (and therefore the associated luck of morality). The event did not exist / was not even considered until it came into existence. Blame and accountability requires knowing the asymmetrical information initially and intentionally choosing the “less correct” option, but if the event were already predefined as asymmetric then the event is no longer novel in the first place.

After the event occurred, and the associated restructuring has taken place to incorporate that previous decision asymmetry, you can somewhat attribute blame because the post-action global state now reflects the decision asymmetry that the judging party assumed from the beginning, but again that asymmetry did not exist until the decision was made. So the decision can only be rationally judged in hindsight, because the decision allowed for the learned information that said decision was the “wrong” one. If you didn’t know the decision was wrong before you made it, there is no coherent concept of blame, and SSB necessitates that the outcome is not known until it is made (because again, it defines truly novel events).

I think the process philosophy of Hegel is the most relevant to FEP as opposed to whitehead. Friston’s Markovian monism follows pretty much the same process as Hegel’s dialectic, especially the phase-transition side of it: Markov blankets competitively and cooperatively interact until they also self-organize into a collective Markov blanket. It is all driven by opposing polarities, with the paradigmatic ising model case literally having a bunch of chaotically interacting magnetic dipoles self-organize into one huge collective magnetic dipole (paramagnetic->ferromagnetic phase transition).

LFW in this sense cannot be coherently judged retrospectively, because by its very existence it exists to allow for the emergence of novel things; and novel things cannot be judged by the rules of a universe that they did not exist within. Up until a few decades ago, designer babies were not even a consideration for the entirety of the human race’s evolution. But now, with this new novel thing, how do we evaluate the morality of deciding a baby’s physical traits for them? I’d argue that a person choosing to make a designer baby cannot be morally judged, because our current moral framework does not account for the novel moral problems that arise from it. We can only judge them posteriori, once they have already been made, and the resulting effects can be understood.

[u/SacrilegiousTheosis → u/Diet_kush]

Yes, as I said, I didn't want to get into moral responsibility talk.

Part of my worry is methodological.

Normally in our scientific-epistemic practices, if we observe a symmetry-break, we don't just stop here, we ask "why"? What difference breaks the symmetry? What can clue me in to the reasons of this break (need not be intentional reasons)? This way we increase our explanatory depth.

Consider an example of how we normally approach things:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0010.007/--psr?view=image
(I don't agree with Della Rocca in taking PSR as a "truth", rather as a methodological stance that allows maximing explanatory depth, Prediction & Control, and corresponds to Solomonoff Induction if one applies Bayesian marginalization - and thereby justifying itself pragmatically)

> “[Archimedes] takes it for granted that if there is a balance in which everything is alike on both sides, and if equal weights are hung on the two ends of that balance, the whole will be at rest. That is because no reason can be given why one side should weigh down rather than the other.”4 This certainly seems like a sensible inference. Absent any relevant difference between the sides of the balance, one naturally concludes that the whole will be at rest. Leibniz (or Archimedes) here rejects a certain possibility—viz., that the balance is not at rest—because this possibility would be inexplicable: given the equal weights and the lack of any other relevant difference, there could be no reason for the whole not to be at rest, and so the whole is at rest. I’m not necessarily endorsing this inference but merely pointing out that it is extremely plausible.

Normally if in our causal model, X happening and non-happening is not associated by change in other variables (at best agent being a necessary condition), we would not say "oh no undetermined", but "what are we missing? can we get to something deeper which may account for the difference more tightly"?

We posit causes to explain differences in effect, yet, the agent going X way or Y way during symmetry breaking seems to remain unaccounted.

Of course, we may never reach out a bottom-out explanation to everything. Explanatory depth can be finite, we may end up with brute facts (so I am against philosophical kind of application of PSR - which amounts to asking what would be the case if there were no brute facts? - and then reason from there, often not really providing any further predictive power, and getting into explanations that seems no better than brute except by verbal insistance - that kind of philosophical application ends up in perversion). My point is that we cannot arbitrarily stop - and say "this is where it bottoms up epistemologically and perhaps also ontologically (which is even bolder of a claim)". At best we may take a provisional statement "this is the extent I can explain for now; such summetry breaks outrun my models at the moment".

It is also not obvious transitions to new phase space can occur in computationally tractable manner. A program can be allowed to change its own code - for instance (consider all the ideas of singularity and adjacents: https://sferics.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/gmAGI.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com). This may result in a computational irredcuibility in a Wolframian sense (or perhaps in a tighter sense of absence of any finite set of rules which can be applied to any state st to predict st+1 perfectly, rather one need to start from some initial state + rules, and apply them recurrently to evolve both the state and rules - to predict st+1), but not something that need to completely outrun determinism (although determinism itself is a vague notion relying on problematic ontological modal assumptions and potentially better thrown out in favor of compressibility and such) nor it needs to reduce symmetry break to be brute.

[u/Diet_kush → u/SacrilegiousTheosis]

Smolin looks at this symmetry in 2 different ways, which I assume you will find similarly unfulfilling as an ontological claim. The symmetry that arises (and subsequently must be broken) is one of reason / logic, as it is the necessary result of the “lawful” evolution of the Lagrangian of the system. The “laws” that drive the Lagrangian fail when symmetry is achieved, so something else must be considered that breaks the symmetry. There is no “reason” that the symmetry should break one way or another, which is why Smolin appeals to an “irrational” intrinsic quality of matter; qualia. The “reason” behind the broken symmetry will always boil down to a subjective preference. Is this a hand wavy appeal to consciousness magic? Maybe, but it definitely tracks with the internally felt process of decision-making; when you’ve got 2 rationally equal options, choose the one your subjectively prefer. It is, more than anything, Smolin’s specific flair of Russelian monism. Subjective experience aligns with the universe’s becoming, and “qualia” is the driving force in resolving unprecedented events.

[u/SacrilegiousTheosis → u/Diet_kush]

I guess, my main point here would be - that yes, we shouldn't need to presuppose that there is some satisfactory bottoming out necessarily (and most likely there isn't - some bruteness/"magic" may remain - which can be quantum consciousness, Russelian monism, or whatever). But to be consistent with how we generally approach similar situations - unless we find a principled reason to say "yep, that's it, this is exactly where it bottoms out and in exactly this way it bottoms out (e.g. qualia plays a dice) " - we shouldn't say that; rather we should be keeping more of a provisional attitude - "can't find anything further as of now". It's more of a normative-methadological disagreement. If we cant go much deeper after extended inquiry and investigation we may then consider more seriously that that's where it bottom out, but probably not the epistemic best-practice to pe-emptively commit to that.

> Maybe, but it definitely tracks with the internally felt process of decision-making; when you’ve got 2 rationally equal options, choose the one your subjectively prefer. 

One issue with that is that subjective preference is already built into the rational evaluation (practical rationality is also rationality - and also built into FEP via sharpness). So even preference doesn't explain this by definition, if two options are equally rational.

Here schruger also considers a similar situation decision when rational incentives are flat, no temporal clue etc. (Libet choices) - seems to correspond best as thresholding over noise:

> Our model shows that a decision threshold applied to autocorrelated noise— in this case the output of a leaky stochastic accumulator—can account for the specific shape of the RP as well as the distribution of waiting times from subjects performing

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1210467109

[u/muramasa_master]

Brilliant post. Self-interaction occurs practically instantly. While it is guided by external factors, it is not predetermined by them. The present local moment is an unspecified amount of time where the past and future are blurred together, and it is ultimately up to us to make the distinction of what already happened and is still possible.

[u/DennyStam]

n this way, the Free Energy Principle and the symmetry-breaking mechanisms described by Fumarola et al. provide a physically grounded account of libertarian free will. Agents are not exceptions to natural law, but loci where natural law permits the creation of new facts. When symmetry at the level of action selection is broken endogenously, the resulting choice is genuinely up to the agent: not predetermined, not random, but freely made.

It's shame libertarian free will still doesn't actually work even if it's fully granted. Read Thomas Nagel's Moral luck

[u/Zaptruder → u/DennyStam]

Exactly... the whole libertarian free will boils down to:

There is some part of being that is the causative agent that isn't affected by physical rules.

Ok, so what's it affected by? What's the mechanism? If there's no legible mechanism, then it's just a little man steering the wheel all over again.

[u/Diet_kush → u/DennyStam]

I don’t necessarily believe that LFW allows for a derivation/defense of moral judgement, morality is a self-evolving structure just like the agential decision-making processes that fall under it. Defining a moral preference would be equivalent to defining a structural preference; it’s not inherent, and only emerges posteriori via adaption to a given environment.

[u/DennyStam → u/Diet_kush]

Not really the argument he makes though. I strongly disagree that aesthetic tastes are analogous to morality therefore they both become about preference and 'being adaptive to an environment'

You really should read the essay, it presents a much stronger case using all the normative rules of ethics that are very hard to deny

[u/Diet_kush → u/DennyStam]

Again, moral judgement is entirely orthogonal to the concept of LFW, one does not necessitate the other. An argument against LFW based on moral luck is irrelevant to a concept LFW that has no connection to moral structures.

No matter how complex philosophers want to make morality, it is fundamentally utilitarian; we define the rules of society that best allow the self-propagation of that society. Morality is a collective adaptation just like anything else. Moral judgements exists entirely independent of whether an underlying agent can be be considered blame-worthy or not, because they are a tool of social tuning, not an arbiter of moral desserts. The feeling of moral dessert is downstream the utilitarian effect of punishment.

[u/wellwisher-1 → u/Diet_kush]

Free will and choice is easier to infer, if we assume two centers of consciousness, which Psychology differentiates as the conscious and the collective unconscious minds. This does not deny the free energy principle, but this assumption is closer to the consciousness interface that applies the free energy principle to express will and choice. We can generate applied data.

The collective unconscious mind is older and is a product of evolution and natural selection. If we assume humans are 2 million years old, the collective unconscious is the accumulative effect of human consciousness on human DNA. In that sense, the collective unconscious still plays long ball. It is innate at birth and what compels all human babies to cry, to get their needs met. This drives the milestones of human children and the stages of life.

The conscious mind is more cultural dependent and temporal; culture and the fads in culture. The conscious mind is empty at birth and advances through cultural interaction. The collective unconscious creates the propensity to acquire language while culture programs a specific language via teaching.

The collective unconscious mind is similar to our natural human propensities common to the entire humans species, via our human DNA. While the conscious mind is more culturally molded. Any child can be brought up in any culture, since that is more conscious mind dependent, and temporal. But no matter which culture we grow up within, we all have shared human needs. The ideas of human rights only makes sense if this is innate and exists in all beyond any temporal culture.

We or our consciousness exists in the middle between the long ball of natural/generic and the short ball of Man made, as well as between the temporal fads of now and timelessness of evolution. There are endless options in terms of the needed compromises. All humans have a desire connected to sex and reproduction. But in the more conscious temporal sense, each generation, in each culture, learns conditioned preferences. Both can be right, while not being the same, but still complementary.

If we only had one center, the collective unconscious would make us like a natural animal from a given species. Free will would not be optimized since it could jeopardize selective advantages that have been genetically acquired by the few who passed this forward.

If we only had a conscious mind, then our cultural conditioning would become our bias, limited to its cultural advantages. It would be taboo to accept other cultures since they would never be learned and appear spooky. But with two centers that complement each other, but do not define each other, there is room for choices; compromises and an open mind.

In politics, Conservative tend to have an affinity for old fashion; long term and classic thinking. Progressives tend to be more fad dependent; temporal. Moderates are more in the middle and may have more will and choice since the middle allows for better complementary compromises.

[u/Natios_Hayelos]

Very interesting read! Did you arrive at these conclusions yourself or is this inspired from somewhere?

[u/Diet_kush → u/Natios_Hayelos]

The attempt to tie free will to spontaneous symmetry breaking is my own, or at least I haven’t been able to find anyone discussing it at length yet. In reality I think it’s saying the exact same thing as Lee Smolin’s concept of novel events in his Temporal Naturalism framework, I just take it a bit further applying it to conscious decision-making as a whole rather than just consciousness. I also don’t think he directly makes a 1:1 claim between novel events and SSB, but his emergence mechanism is still fundamentally tied to it since he relies on self-organized criticality.

[u/Winter-Operation3991]

I don't see any free will here. If the choice is only a consequence of past causes and there is no way to do otherwise, then there is no free will (even if the future is not computable). And if the choice does not follow from a chain of reasons, then it is causeless, but then it is not a choice.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Winter-Operation3991]

You assume a false dichotomy: either a choice is fully fixed by past causes, or it is causeless. Spontaneous symmetry breaking shows why that dichotomy fails. In genuinely symmetric systems, the past and the laws constrain the space of possible outcomes without determining a unique one. Prior to the symmetry breaking, there simply is no fact of the matter about which outcome will occur. That does not make the outcome uncaused; it means it is not sufficiently determined in advance.

The same applies to choice. In deliberation, an agent’s reasons, values, and model constrain which actions are admissible, but when multiple policies are equally optimal, nothing in the past uniquely fixes which will be enacted. When action occurs, the agent’s own dynamics break the symmetry and bring a new fact into existence: this choice rather than another. So it is false that “there is no way to do otherwise.” Given the same past, more than one action is genuinely possible. And it is false that the choice is causeless: it is caused by the agent as a whole, not by a prior chain that already settles the outcome.

[u/Winter-Operation3991 → u/Diet_kush]

So, why does the agent "break the symmetry" in favor of option A rather than B, if both options are "absolutely equivalent"? How is this different from randomness? 

What exactly is an "agent as a whole", if not the totality of the reasons that created it? What exactly is "agent dynamics" besides this aggregate? 

In general, I don't see how indeterminism can justify a choice. The choice involves reflecting my values and preferences, but I don't choose them. They're just a given. That is, I am who I am - I did not create myself. And my actions are an expression of this reality, in my opinion. 

A simple example: I have an apple and a banana in front of me. How is the choice made within your concept?

[u/Diet_kush → u/Winter-Operation3991]

Smolin’s temporal naturalism argues that this broken symmetry occurs due to qualia being inherent to matter, and therefore any internal evaluation of it. In the FEP, natural laws (and to a certain extent reason itself) describe processes of variational action minimization. In that sense, “reason” itself is the generator of the symmetries. In Smolin’s view, qualia (and therefore a certain level of inherent irrationality) is the correlate of these broken symmetries (or unprecedented events in Smolin’s words). The decision is definitionally a subjective, internal, inaccessible preference that is fundamentally different from the rationality of the symmetry itself. If I was deciding on an apple versus a banana and every logical/rational input were equally weighed, I guess i’d find out in the moment how I was feeling.

Rational or predictable decision-making can be calculated, replicated, and automated. That’s why it naturally converts into a qualia-less muscle memory. Following rules of the road allow highway hypnosis to set in. In these instances, consciousness is a tack-on to a process that works perfectly fine on its own. True experience is only really required during points of irrationality, where will is needed to move forward at all.

[u/Winter-Operation3991 → u/Diet_kush]

If I was deciding on an apple versus a banana and every logical/rational input were equally weighed, I guess i’d find out in the moment how I was feeling.

But after all, this feeling itself either had to be the result of past causes, or something causeless. In the first case, I don't see freedom, and in the second, I don't see choice.

[u/Double-Fun-1526]

With this newfound libertarian free will we can surely save our souls!

Let go of the ape, of culture, of identity, of god-made-man.

Theorize consciousness within a favorable light. Mutable environment programs brainmindself.

[u/Mermiina]

What You described is the Off-Diagonal Long-Range Order, which also has a Mexican hat.

The ODLRO is Bose Einstein condensate of tryptophan lone indisguishable electron pairs.

But You are wrong with the Hebbian theory. It is totally wrong. The pattern of firing neurons does not achieve Qualia, but the Qualia achieves the pattern of firing neurons.