Last Update - Sun Jun 01 2025
Info Slide: An Omnisphere is a magical orb that grants its owner a form of foresight. Anyone holding it will continuously experience insights relating to significant events in their future, based on them continuing their present actions, plans and goals. If the user consciously changes their actions based on the insights, they will update to reflect the new outcome of the owner's actions. Metaphysics Open 2021 - Round 3 Dylan McCarthy, Joseph Lewis OG | OO DPM | DLO 83, 85 Philosophy Youtube Link (Timestamped): HERE Dylan McCarthy | DPM 83 Speech starting in 3, 2, 1... Panel, agency and the maximization of free will is the precondition to and the underpinning mechanism of all morality and all value and all things within the human experience. We maximize that in Opening Government and that's why we win this debate. I'm going to do two things in this speech: firstly, talking extensively about free will and how we maximize it on our side; secondly, it's going through a lot of responses to Opening Opposition where I think they slightly misunderstand our case. The first thing to say though is why free will actually exists, because I believe, in so far as our contention here is that free will is a priori valuable and not just instrumentally valuable—so it's not just the perception of free will being valuable but the actual will and agency of it—it therefore behooves us to prove that free will does exist so that you can't win perception of free will in opposition. I believe that when we contend with it later. Two reasons why free will exists: firstly, determinism is untrue. At the sub-molecular level, electrons and quarks behave erratically, like in quantum mechanics and stuff like that. And so the response to this would be to say that just because it's unpredictable doesn't mean it's not deterministic. But note that there's a decision-making function occurring here in so far as an electron going into a split right before it's being observed must go either one way or the other. There is a decision-making function occurring, and as far as that is true, those are the building blocks of all things. Note that, like, our brains are primarily composed of electrons firing off against one another. It's likely that they carry with them a decision-making capability that is inexplicable through determinism alone. The second thing to say on free will—and this is top-down—is that phenomenal consciousness exists, which is to say my perception of qualia, I can see color, I have a subjective experience of reality, I process emotions, I have thoughts and intentionality. These are all things which are inexplicable through physicalism alone. So you can't prove merely through physical reality the reasons why I have subjective experiences of reality. This being the case, it proves that physicalism is untrue. Physicalism, as in the conception that all things are physical in the universe, is a precondition for determinism. At the point in which the concept of determinism is that only things that are, like, a physical thing interacting with a physical thing will have a certain outcome, we are saying the non-physical causally interacts with the physical in such a way that it allows for free will to exist. Those things being true, therefore we explained already in Jack's speech that all of the conceptions of things that we find to be valuable are about free will. Note, for instance, all the things we perceive as being principally valuable—things like consent, things like agency, things like privacy—are all underpinning the conception that humanity has a preference for those things, and/or like, we are therefore all, like, adhere to those preferences. The underpinning of those things is morality—or is free will. Why do we maximize it? We maximize it in four ways: Firstly, we can push for the activity of free will by choosing our best possible life. I know that Opening Opposition contend with this—I'll respond to it later. Second thing, this was not responded to, is the ability to free yourself from the other things which will make decisions on your behalf in the absence of the omnisphere. Because in so far as we have conception, we have our, like, manacles of rationality—they're defined by our memory, by a previous version of us, by socialization, by society, by predictive functions that we have been taught to believe, by social values we are taught to have—these things, well, in the absence of the omnisphere, make these decisions on our behalf, and we will be enslaved to those decisions which we never consented to. These factors, on their side of the house. The third thing is you free yourself from probability, because you know with certainty that, at least to an extent, the insight you experience will manifest on our side of the house. You don't have that on their side. The fourth thing is just the ability to consent to continuous existence. But Opposition Bench say, "Aha, these are fragments and they lack context, and therefore they'll be incomplete and you can't make decisions based off." There's a number of things to say here. Firstly, the comparative is that you don't have any information at all to work out of. Insofar as you are aware—because we were able to figure it out in 30 seconds—that these things will have the possibility to lack context, you can factor that into your decision-making going forward. But you have no information based on which to make decisions on your side of the house. The second thing is you get continuous insight. As Jack already told you, you can do it all the time. So insofar as you have the fear that certain things might not work out for you based off of all of Operation Opposition's analysis about how we have fear for the long term and base decisions around this kind of fear, it must therefore be the case that you are likely to go back and check this thing routinely. Because there is no price to you to checking it—you know, once a day when you come home from work or those kinds of things—you can double or triple check your experiences. The third thing is the experience of insight in and of itself is valuable. This is along two fronts: firstly, just insofar as we want to give this person the possible experience of that kind of life, and they're going to tailor their intentionality towards that experience to maximize the positivity of the experience within the omnisphere. Insofar as they experience things in the omnisphere, by proxy, they get experiential, like, instrumental value from those things anyway. But the second thing to say is—and this is important—the information in and of itself is an absolute good. Insofar as we make decisions based off of information, even if that information is incomplete, it is valuable in and of itself. Noting here, our, like, our conception or framework of morality of being free will being important. The third thing, or the fourth thing to say, is that existential threats are weighed against on our side. So as far as there is a possible trade-off in the probabilities of certain things happening—if you get into this, if you press the atmosphere and you see that you are in a hospital because of an accident, you see that you are dead, if you see that certain things are going to happen to you that are extremely negative—you can err against those things specifically on our side, because they don't require context for you to understand that they are evil. Similarly, the flip side—there are certain good things in life that we can see as being valuable in and of themselves regardless. So having a safe home, having, like, experiential happiness, and all those kinds of things. The fifth thing to say, and this is important, is why do we think it's non-contextual? I think it is possibly the case—given that this is a magic orb who is giving us insights about our future—that these insights might come with context. They've never provided the information to believe—to, like, to tell us—why these continuous insights into our future are likely to be non-contextual. It's very possible that we get spreadsheet data on these kinds of things and put it directly into our brain. There's no reason to believe that the magic would err on the side of lack of context. I will take a point from Closing Opposition before I move on. Opening: “So if I may react badly or well to this information, your action is not likely to be a true reflection of yourself or your true decision-making calculus. It is because this intervenes in a way that societal forces don’t, for the reason you conceded when you talked about salad.” But the thing is though—and this plays into one of the responses—is all of their analysis on why society will incline you and biology will incline you to act in a certain way under status quo is precisely the mechanism by which we are freeing these individuals. Because they can see that we are likely to be short-termist on their side, to overweight proximate considerations for us, undervalue our long-term stability and happiness. Whereas in the comparative, we get at least some information based off of which to make these long-term goals. Because even if sometimes you might have proximate interest in the short term, you have long-term interest also. On the mental health harms that they bring up: like, the majority of these are contingent on the decision you make being bad. So, for instance, second-guessing and guilt and contextual things—anxiety and dread—are all based off of you making an incorrect decision, which we have contended previously. But even insofar as this is true, these are just secondary things—secondary values—that we are all, like, that we are inputting here. But just a matter of giving the preconception of these things is the agency that we maximize in Opening Government. Panel, this is a debate about free will. We bring it to you. Propose. OO Joseph Lewis | DLO | 85 Youtube Link (Timestamped): HERE I’m primarily in the speech going to focus on winning the agency clash because I think it is absurd that we are being told there is a drug that Opening Government willingly say you will become addicted to, that will shape the way you view the world. You'll become obsessed with it, you'll keep using it—that's their case—that that is a good thing and that is in some way not coercive. So I'm going to win that clash, and I'm going to do some weighing. If I have time, I'll deal with some other ideas in the round. There's a lot of framing at the top of OG's case about individuals liking agency because it lets us make decisions about themselves. I think it's broadly fine but does very little in the round. It's mostly based on the idea that humans do not have agency now because they lack perfect information. To the extent that this cannot give them perfect information, just abstract out-of-context insights, they are also unable to meet the burden of the argument they set out for themselves. They do not deal with this asymmetry; they just introduce new asymmetries. Prima facie, they have proven nothing—they've already lost the debate. Prima Facie: "based on the first impression; accepted as correct until proved otherwise", equivalent to "on the face of it" i.e. "it should be obvious to us". But specifically, we think this reduces the net agency of the human condition because they define agency in the abstract as if it's valuable to things which are not humans. This is the anti-physicalism argument they run—that there are uncertain outcomes so free will can exist—but there's not a reason to value it in and of itself. They have a second justification of intuition, which I'll deal with later. But before I explain why we care about agency—why we truly care about agency—this idea should be deeply unpersuasive prima facie because we value the idea of agency to the extent it exists in the natural state of humans. That's what we're seeking to protect when we say we don't like coercion. We care about agency because we value life and the ability to make meaningful choices, as Parth (LO) tells you. Satisfaction also comes from the ability to make meaningful choices about your frame of existence, even if the outcomes are better for you, for three reasons. The first is: it is worse to change your choice to something worse if you know that there was a better option that could be available and you have intervening information. The second is that it leads to guilt and remorse because you have more awareness of options and therefore are better able to constantly introspect on them, and they concede that you will, because they say you'll keep going back to the orb. And thirdly, there are many cases which don't have perfect outcomes, and because the sphere doesn't give you outcomes—it tells you about problems—they never solve that barrier to begin with. And why then is the orb coercive? It's coercive because, at the simplest level, risk aversion, which adheres in the human condition, gives the orb disproportionate influence on decisions because it tells you something bad might happen in the future and, without telling you how to solve it, forces you to act on that information. It is misleading. We say for a number of reasons. 2. Secondly, scenarios where there are no perfect outcomes, and they describe existential threats—imagine the mental health harm and the trauma experienced when you see a horrible existential threat in your future and you cannot solve it. You change your actions, you cannot solve it, you change your actions, you cannot solve it—it becomes your obsession and it destroys you as a person. They concede that. 3. Then choice paralysis, because it doesn't tell you what to do, just what will happen. And this deals with the POI from CG who concede your descent into obsession with the orb without ever proving you can find a perfect answer. We also say you probably got into your environment based on your current decision-making calculus, so you probably need to continue with this to be okay. You survived on informational asymmetry before, and you were willing to accept that as part of your life. Before I continue, a point of information from—uh—I'll take Opening CG, you haven't given me one yet. POI “Yeah, so your entire case and responses are based on this idea that you make a worse decision because you have risk of reversion. Note this response is flawed at the point at which you can actually view these different options you have and so—” Jack (DPM), That's false for two reasons. That’s also two reasons. The first reason is: that is not what our entire case is based on. Our case is based on—you do not meaningfully improve the state of asymmetry of information, you make it worse, and therefore you don't gain your benefits, but you do introduce lots of mental health harms on the individual in the short term. That's the major impact of our case. We're willing to win on coercion if you think it's really important, but we also beat you on that, so we're not contingent on those two things. But also more importantly, you don't get, like, multiple parts—you don't, like, look into the time stream and see every option that could exist. It says you get insights into how your current course of action will relate to your life as an individual, and you can keep doing that based on your conscious thoughts changing. That doesn't mean you have perfect introspection to how everything will go because it's just an insight. It's necessarily robbed of contextual information, so you can't prove that. And when Opening Government say ‘you have comparatively more information’, that statement is itself misleading. And this should be obvious when you think about the ways that a single piece of information in isolation distorts the way that we look at things. It's the problem of fake news. If you know nothing about something and you're told one thing, your entire view on that thing is shaped by the single piece of knowledge you have, especially when you view the orb as authoritative and become addicted to the orb as your only means of salvation. So it is inherently distorting the way that societal forces can't be, because they don't speak to specific events and choices in your future. It is also by definition coercive because it changes the course of action you're taking, so it's an inherently coercive bit. But also, this is different from forms of coercion that already exist because those are already innate to us—they exist either way. And note that humans are social creatures, so these are part of being human. So they are part of the thing that causes us to care about agency to begin with. Parth (LO) told you about biology and when we care about agency being robbed. In society, we don't care about coercive forces which are a priori to the world—like, we must live on this planet. We don't go like, it's coercive to say you live on Earth, not Mars. We care about the agency outside of the natural state—things which are forced on you and rob you of your natural ability to make decisions. That's what agency actually is. That's why Opening Government's nonsense case doesn't quite work. And indeed, their salad point, like, deals with this itself, right? Because they say you become accustomed to certain things and therefore those are not coerced for you as individuals. Those are things like society telling you to do things and information that exists in the world in a limited way. They are not things like a magic orb that you can pick up and it changes the way you view the world on the fundamental level in a way you can never consent to. We think it is inherently mind-bending, leads to seven practical harms Parth gave you that they never engage with. I won't repeat them. The weighing here is simple: to the extent there is some abstraction of agency, we care about it until it gives us a good experience of the world. And this is actually what OG tell us—that it is a precondition to getting goods in the world. That was their reasoning for why they value agency. And you'll notice this is conditional, therefore, on your ability to make choices better and deal with asymmetries. If they increase the ability to make choices but making those choices makes people worse off, we do not care because agency ceases to be a facilitative good. This is more important than anything that will take place later on in the round because we've sufficiently proven that we are more coerced by picking up the orb, so we have less agency. We have shown the extent of harms as a result of that. These are the factors which are of immediate relevance to the actor in the debate because they affect the way the actor interacts with the world in every other instance in their life going forward, and you can't reverse them once they've taken place. So they should be viewed as extremer impact, and because they are more certain in their proof than anything else which can be proven, they're the most fundamental harms in the debate. They fundamentally change the way you can interact with the world as an agent, but also in terms of your experience of the world because they harm your psychology permanently. We've definitively won the top half, and nothing can compare to these impacts in the second half, and therefore we have won the debate.
1. First is it gives you insights out of context. For example, if it tells you that if you break up with someone, you will feel pain and be upset, that does not tell you that a void would also help you avoid extensive harm from staying in the relationship in the long term that could be much worse. And that responds to DPM's claim about experiential happiness—that you may be experientially happy in an individual moment in your future, but pursuing that course of action might make you worse off and might make you lead a worse life. Prima facie, that is more coercion than exists now, because it's a way that you can't be coerced by societal forces. It's about the introduction of information about your future which cannot exist now. And I note Dylan’s (PM) face—that this is indeed something that's beating them.