5 ms·

What this have to do with free will? It's a web page trying to infer the logic behind the user keystrokes. That's it. Maybe there's some randomness lying deep

• wmf 10y ago
  There are some physicists running around saying that free will is defined as acting randomly even though that's at odds with philosophical and common sense definitions of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
• aaron-santos 10y ago
  There's a thread running through free will discussions referred to as "ultimate origination". The Free will theorem touches on this as the sibling commenter mentioned. There's a fringe view (also help by some of these physicists) that "The more radical group holds that the agent who determines his own will is not causally influenced by external causal factors, including his own character."[1] Start with section 3.2 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and move on to perhaps the whole article or the referenced primary sources. My take on the link between the Aaronson Oracle and the ultimate origin view follows like this. Suppose that we take the radical definition of free will and try to devise a test that demonstrates an individual making a choice not influenced by external causal factors. One thing that comes to mind is to ask that individual to make a choice between two options. If the a choice is not causally influenced by external factors, then we can expect that it will not be predictable. It's interesting that a number of commenters have reported prediction rates very close to 0.5. Typically in similar hot hand experiments[2] that's not the case and I suspect it's a reporting bias (why should those closer to 1.0 feel the need to report their findings). There's also a bit of a counter-example in the whole space of pseudo-random number generation that's very much an example of a deterministic system with nothing but external causal factors, but will pass the Aaronson oracle test. On the other hand, truly random sources without any identifiable causal sources (ie radioactive decay) will also pass this test. Both of these passing support an argument that the test has no power to discriminate at all. My personal take is that I like the idea of thinking about having free will as a spectrum or degree rather than a binary proposition. In the ultimate origin conversation, I don't see external causal factors as being completely avoidable nor unavoidable so having a test whose output is a range of predicability is nice to see. [1] - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#1 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#1 [2] - http://math.williams.edu/the-hot-hand/ http://math.williams.edu/the-hot-hand/