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There is no need for these experiments: There is no free will, and you can understand this by simply applying pure logic/rational thinking: When you're born (t

There is no need for these experiments: There is no free will, and you can understand this by simply applying pure logic/rational thinking: When you're born (the "1st second" of your life) you're given 2 variables: (1) Your genome and (2) the environment you're born into. You have absolutely no control whatsoever over these 2 variables (with their infinite number of sub-variables they "contain"). And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables: And this includes your brain that you will use to make the infinite number of choices in your life (both consciously, such as "I'm going to buy milk" and subconsciously, such as "firing neuron X at second Y", "moving atom A to location B", etc.). EDIT: Downvoters - please state why this would be wrong.

mattmanser 11y ago
Sigh. Arm chair philosophy at its worst.
- nota_bene 11y ago
  What's worst is when people leave worthless comments like these.
  - flycaliguy 11y ago
    You are right that it was an unnecessary comment, but declaring that "There is no need for these experiments" is a little armchairy. This is a debate that has been going on for a long time and a version which takes place on hacker news would be more useful if it wasn't immediately polarized.
interpol_p 11y ago
Even if your simplified argument were correct, you still could not conclude that there is no free will. We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. Does it really matter if it is within a deterministic framework or not?
- nota_bene 11y ago
  Where you're correct is: We can never prove the absence of free will, because we can never understand then entirety of our environment (how the universe "really works", etc.). But when you take what we know today and apply rational thinking, it certainly looks like there is no free will. > We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. That is exactly what my argument would deny. There seems to be not even an inch of free will. > Does it really matter 100% percent yes, for example: The absence of free will forces us to stop judging people, simply because the concept of "guilt" (on the negative side) and the concept of "merit" (on the positive side) are proven to be entirely baseless. If we applied this to our culture, we'd live in a totally different world.
  - randallsquared 11y ago
    Historical guilt and merit still exist in the absence of free will, and those are the important parts that allow us defect against defectors, etc.
    - nota_bene 11y ago
      > Historical guilt and merit still exist in the absence of free will Historical guilt and merit would simply be the sum of all guilt and merit of a society, meaning actually the sum of a lot of nothing...
      - randallsquared 11y ago
        I didn't mean to say anything about collective guilt or merit, but apparently I didn't communicate well; sorry. In iterated PD competitions, it's clear that none of the programs involved have free will, but punishing defections is still an important part of either a strategy for getting ahead, or a strategy for reducing defections. That is, the programs still have to keep track of the guilt or merit of their peers in order to make decisions about how to react to past cooperation or defection. Regardless of the moral responsibility of humans for their actions, they still have a responsibility in historical fact.
return0 11y ago
In 2015 this should be considered a no-brainer, i'm baffled at the blatantly unscientific responses in almost all the comments in these threads.
ucaetano 11y ago
Depends on how you define free will: 1) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surrounding and context, including the physical state of our body and brain 2) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surroundings and context, not including the physical state of our body and brain Note: In both cases I'm assuming there is no soul, mind beyond the body, etc. If you define free will as (1), then there is no free will, since any decision will always be subject to the physical state of my body and brain (except, of course, if there's something not physical in play as described in my note). If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it. The same could be applied to a state-machine (finite or not): 1) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's current internal states and the external inputs 2) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's external inputs (1) means no state-machines have free will, (2) means they can have free will.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it. How do you come to that? Obviously the state of our current surroundings and past histories determines the state of our brain and body (down to the firing of the very last neuron).
  - ucaetano 11y ago
    > Obviously the state of our current surroundings and past histories determines the state of our brain and body (down to the firing of the very last neuron). That's why I only said "current surrounding and context", I didn't include past histories. Look at the machine-state example, it makes things more clear.
- nota_bene 11y ago
  The issue with (2) is that the physical state of our body and brain is a function of all past and current surroundings and context (including our genome). Which means it can never be independent, but is instead fully defined.
chm 11y ago
This assumes that you were capable of conscious decision making, or had free will, at birth. The assumption is the problem, I think. I would think that "free will" is developed, not de facto available from birth. In fact, I think free will in a baby could be a pretty bad evolutionary disadvantage, whereas it would be a great advantage for an adult.
- nota_bene 11y ago
  > I would think that "free will" is developed If you see life as a 4-dimensional network of variables linked through "cause and effect", then there is no place for a "free" variable which could introduce free will (or its development). Unless you introduce invented concepts such as "soul" or "god", etc., which means that you quit the rational discussion altogether.
Someone 11y ago
"And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables" That's an opinion sprouting from a view on the world that states free will doesn't exist. It may be true, but goes counter to many people's intuition that there is a free will. A good argument would explain how, from the assumption of 'no free will', we can arrive at such things as 'property' and 'crime'. Why would societies sprout up in which people get imprisoned for using stuff that they didn't make themselves, or that they didn't get permission to use for from those who made it? My argument would be that this is just evolution: local optimization of the non-physical world, in the same way evolution gave us all kind of complex physical structures. On the one hand, I can't see much fault in that, but on the other, giving up the idea of free will means reintroducing predestination, accepting that no criminal can be blamed for their crimes, no Isaac Newton or Olympic champion can be praised for their accomplishments, that capital punishment and war are just things that happen, etc, and even accepting that there is no such thing as 'me'. So, yes, if physics as we know it is correct, logically, I think you are right, but emotionally, I don't believe it. That might have to mean that somewhere in our bodies there is a part that can bend the laws of quantum physics as we know them.
lawtguy 11y ago
This world view is a very 19th century clockwork universe one: if we know all the initial conditions in sufficient detail, we can predict the outcome. There are two problems with this: at a fundamental level, quantum mechanics says you can't know the initial conditions with infinite precision[0]. Second, even at a classical physics level non-linear systems with very similar starting points can have very different final states. As a practical matter that means even if the rules are deterministic, you cannot predict with 100% accuracy what the outcome will be. So we have a complex non-linear system (your genes) and a very very complex non-linear system (the environment) that make a very complex non-linear system (your brain). Because we have all of these complex non-linear system interacting together, we cannot determine what will happen in any practical sense. We can probably make some observations that will generally hold about some decisions a human brain will make (e.g. it's been a few hours, it will be hungry and decide to eat), but these are more probabilistic rather than 100% concrete deterministic rules. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

mattmanser 11y ago

Sigh. Arm chair philosophy at its worst.

nota_bene 11y ago
What's worst is when people leave worthless comments like these.
- flycaliguy 11y ago
  You are right that it was an unnecessary comment, but declaring that "There is no need for these experiments" is a little armchairy. This is a debate that has been going on for a long time and a version which takes place on hacker news would be more useful if it wasn't immediately polarized.

interpol_p 11y ago

Even if your simplified argument were correct, you still could not conclude that there is no free will. We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. Does it really matter if it is within a deterministic framework or not?

nota_bene 11y ago
Where you're correct is: We can never prove the absence of free will, because we can never understand then entirety of our environment (how the universe "really works", etc.). But when you take what we know today and apply rational thinking, it certainly looks like there is no free will. > We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. That is exactly what my argument would deny. There seems to be not even an inch of free will. > Does it really matter 100% percent yes, for example: The absence of free will forces us to stop judging people, simply because the concept of "guilt" (on the negative side) and the concept of "merit" (on the positive side) are proven to be entirely baseless. If we applied this to our culture, we'd live in a totally different world.
- randallsquared 11y ago
  Historical guilt and merit still exist in the absence of free will, and those are the important parts that allow us defect against defectors, etc.
  - nota_bene 11y ago
    > Historical guilt and merit still exist in the absence of free will Historical guilt and merit would simply be the sum of all guilt and merit of a society, meaning actually the sum of a lot of nothing...
    - randallsquared 11y ago
      I didn't mean to say anything about collective guilt or merit, but apparently I didn't communicate well; sorry. In iterated PD competitions, it's clear that none of the programs involved have free will, but punishing defections is still an important part of either a strategy for getting ahead, or a strategy for reducing defections. That is, the programs still have to keep track of the guilt or merit of their peers in order to make decisions about how to react to past cooperation or defection. Regardless of the moral responsibility of humans for their actions, they still have a responsibility in historical fact.

return0 11y ago

In 2015 this should be considered a no-brainer, i'm baffled at the blatantly unscientific responses in almost all the comments in these threads.

ucaetano 11y ago

Depends on how you define free will: 1) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surrounding and context, including the physical state of our body and brain 2) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surroundings and context, not including the physical state of our body and brain Note: In both cases I'm assuming there is no soul, mind beyond the body, etc. If you define free will as (1), then there is no free will, since any decision will always be subject to the physical state of my body and brain (except, of course, if there's something not physical in play as described in my note). If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it. The same could be applied to a state-machine (finite or not): 1) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's current internal states and the external inputs 2) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's external inputs (1) means no state-machines have free will, (2) means they can have free will.

coldtea 11y ago
>If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it. How do you come to that? Obviously the state of our current surroundings and past histories determines the state of our brain and body (down to the firing of the very last neuron).
- ucaetano 11y ago
  > Obviously the state of our current surroundings and past histories determines the state of our brain and body (down to the firing of the very last neuron). That's why I only said "current surrounding and context", I didn't include past histories. Look at the machine-state example, it makes things more clear.
nota_bene 11y ago
The issue with (2) is that the physical state of our body and brain is a function of all past and current surroundings and context (including our genome). Which means it can never be independent, but is instead fully defined.

chm 11y ago

This assumes that you were capable of conscious decision making, or had free will, at birth. The assumption is the problem, I think. I would think that "free will" is developed, not de facto available from birth. In fact, I think free will in a baby could be a pretty bad evolutionary disadvantage, whereas it would be a great advantage for an adult.

nota_bene 11y ago
> I would think that "free will" is developed If you see life as a 4-dimensional network of variables linked through "cause and effect", then there is no place for a "free" variable which could introduce free will (or its development). Unless you introduce invented concepts such as "soul" or "god", etc., which means that you quit the rational discussion altogether.

Someone 11y ago

"And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables" That's an opinion sprouting from a view on the world that states free will doesn't exist. It may be true, but goes counter to many people's intuition that there is a free will. A good argument would explain how, from the assumption of 'no free will', we can arrive at such things as 'property' and 'crime'. Why would societies sprout up in which people get imprisoned for using stuff that they didn't make themselves, or that they didn't get permission to use for from those who made it? My argument would be that this is just evolution: local optimization of the non-physical world, in the same way evolution gave us all kind of complex physical structures. On the one hand, I can't see much fault in that, but on the other, giving up the idea of free will means reintroducing predestination, accepting that no criminal can be blamed for their crimes, no Isaac Newton or Olympic champion can be praised for their accomplishments, that capital punishment and war are just things that happen, etc, and even accepting that there is no such thing as 'me'. So, yes, if physics as we know it is correct, logically, I think you are right, but emotionally, I don't believe it. That might have to mean that somewhere in our bodies there is a part that can bend the laws of quantum physics as we know them.

lawtguy 11y ago

This world view is a very 19th century clockwork universe one: if we know all the initial conditions in sufficient detail, we can predict the outcome. There are two problems with this: at a fundamental level, quantum mechanics says you can't know the initial conditions with infinite precision[0]. Second, even at a classical physics level non-linear systems with very similar starting points can have very different final states. As a practical matter that means even if the rules are deterministic, you cannot predict with 100% accuracy what the outcome will be. So we have a complex non-linear system (your genes) and a very very complex non-linear system (the environment) that make a very complex non-linear system (your brain). Because we have all of these complex non-linear system interacting together, we cannot determine what will happen in any practical sense. We can probably make some observations that will generally hold about some decisions a human brain will make (e.g. it's been a few hours, it will be hungry and decide to eat), but these are more probabilistic rather than 100% concrete deterministic rules. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem