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             What You (Want to)* Want

             November 2022

             Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent
             contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a
             predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do
             whatever I wanted. At the time I had a self-interested motive
             for exploring the question. At that age (like most succeeding
             ages) I was always in trouble with the authorities, and it
             seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out
             of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my
             actions. I gradually lost hope of that, but the puzzle
             remained: How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter
             with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? [1]

             The best way to explain the answer may be to start with a
             slightly wrong version, and then fix it. The wrong version is:
             You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want.
             Yes, you can control what you do, but you'll do what you want,
             and you can't control that.

             The reason this is mistaken is that people do sometimes change
             what they want. People who don't want to want something -- drug
             addicts, for example -- can sometimes make themselves stop
             wanting it. And people who want to want something -- who want
             to like classical music, or broccoli -- sometimes succeed.

             So we modify our initial statement: You can do what you want,
             but you can't want to want what you want.

             That's still not quite true. It's possible to change what you
             want to want. I can imagine someone saying "I decided to stop
             wanting to like classical music." But we're getting closer to
             the truth. It's rare for people to change what they want to
             want, and the more "want to"s we add, the rarer it gets.

             We can get arbitrarily close to a true statement by adding
             more "want to"s in much the same way we can get arbitrarily
             close to 1 by adding more 9s to a string of 9s following a
             decimal point. In practice three or four "want to"s must
             surely be enough. It's hard even to envision what it would
             mean to change what you want to want to want to want, let
             alone actually do it.

             So one way to express the correct answer is to use a regular
             expression. You can do what you want, but there's some
             statement of the form "you can't (want to)* want what you
             want" that's true. Ultimately you get back to a want that you
             don't control. [2]











             Notes

             [1] I didn't know when I was 9 that matter might behave
             randomly, but I don't think it affects the problem much.
             Randomness destroys the ghost in the machine as effectively as
             determinism.

             [2] If you don't like using an expression, you can make the
             same point using higher-order desires: There is some n such
             that you don't control your nth-order desires.



             Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris,
             and Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this.



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