I’ve been doing some philosophizing lately, and I’ve become very convinced that the following view is true:
Your brain is a purely physical system. It gets lots of stimuli from the outside world and it has muscles it can twitch to do stuff. How does it decide which muscles to twitch when as a function of the outside stimuli? Economists will tell you that the brain has a reward function and it builds a world model and selects the sequence of muscle twitches that has the highest expected utility. This is completely false. The problem of deciding which muscle twitches lead to which utility is much, much too hard to solve. Instead, your brain just hallucinates an answer. In particular, it imagines what would happen (I originally said “simulates” here, but that implies a bit too much determinism) if there was a homunculus living inside your skull that got all your sensory inputs as mysterious atomic qualia. Your brain imagines that the homunculus finds some of these qualia pleasurable and some aversive. The homunculus can have feelings and goals too. Having imagined this scene, your brain asks itself WWHD?: “What Would the Homunculus Do?”. Whatever the homunculus decides, the brain implements via muscle twitches and updates the hallucination.
This is the entire explanation to the hard problem. You are the homunculus. You don’t really exist, your brain made you up. The fact that your conscious experience doesn’t really make sense if you think about it is a crack in the simulation. The simulation is not designed to be perfectly seamless, it’s designed to make reasonable decisions for your brain to implement. Your brain simplifies and abstracts the real sense data to make the simulation more tractable. A trivial example is that your brain fills in the blind spot in your retinas with hallucinated qualia so the homunculus doesn’t get distracted by the mysterious patches of empty void floating around in its peripheral vision.
Again, I want to emphasize that this story perfectly explains everything you observe about the external world. There are no hard problems in the world you see around you. This story does not explain anything about the world the homunculus lives in. The homunculus’s world operates by different rules, which aren’t constrained to be entirely consistent or logical (and in fact are not). There is no logical explanation for how the homunculus’s world works, because it doesn’t exist and is logically impossible.
This is kind of a pessimistic view, and in a totally joking but also maybe serious? way, I worry that if I really convince myself of it I’ll go insane. BUT, I think the implications for free will actually have some nice vibes. The universe is deterministic with random elements, which means that all actions you will ever take were either set in stone at the moment of the Big Bang or are attributable to some random, meaningless quantum fluctuations that happened in the interim. The vibes are looking pretty grim so far. The good news, though, is that you don’t actually exist in this grim, meaningless reality. You don’t really exist at all! Your brain summoned you up out of the void of nothingness like a necromancer summoning a spirit from the astral planes. What’s more, having been summoned like this, “you” have real causal agency. If the “you” that your brain summoned is a malevolent demon, you’ll do a bunch of bad shit and hurt people, because you are evil. If your brain summoned a kind nature spirit, you’ll bless the crops or something because you are benevolent. Determinism constrains the particular properties of the homunculus is summoned up to live in your body, but once summoned, the brain gives your homunculus unconstrained agency to act as it chooses.
Again, this is not entirely satisfying because a strong concept of free will is incoherent. Everything is either caused by something else (deterministic) or not (random). There’s no third kind of cause that can be free will. However, if your entire existence is imaginary, then you can just imagine that there is! Less glibly, the entire idea of “you” exists at a different level of abstraction than the material universe. Free will is a concept that exists at that level of abstraction, not in the material universe of quarks and atoms.
I’ve become so convinced by this train of thinking that, even though I know people will strenuously disagree with me, it’s very hard to predict what you’re all going to say in a way that doesn’t seem totally ridiculous.
