3 ms·

You can discard free will if you believe in science (or its artefacts) because of the Occam's Razor (don't need it to explain the rest).

coldtea 10y ago
You mean if you believe in scientism. Occam's razor is more a heuristic at the level of epistemology than actual science (the latter involves the experimental method, not logical posits like Occam's Razor). And of course it's statistical, not absolute. Heck, even in everyday life we find cases where Occam's Razor is plainly wrong. Sometimes the explanation for an event is the more bizarre one rather than the simpler one. “The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” – Alfred North Whitehead http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/05/14/why-the-simplest-theory-is-alm/ http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/05/14/wh...
- mabynogy 10y ago
  > You mean if you believe in scientism. No. If you believe in science as a practice or a way to explain things or "operate" things (like someone that switch on a light and that have some knowledge about electricity). If you agree with what science explains (how it works thus the Occam's Razor) and disagree with what science doesn't explain (yet or never), you create a duality. The duality can be eliminated with the Occam's Razor and then remains what is explained by the science (with its hypothesis). It's not an opinion. It's just a rationale. Everything that will not fit in that paradigm will probably be rejected sooner or later (by science). As writing and science has a beginning in human history, we may discover something more powerful than science to discover the rest.
rocqua 10y ago
That only holds if you consider the question of free will to be scientific. That is, if the question of free will can be tested. Moreover, is the non-existence of free will really the simpler alternative to the existence of free will?
- mabynogy 10y ago
  > Moreover, is the non-existence of free will really the simpler alternative to the existence of free will? I would say yes because it's mostly a western world concern (thus cultural). It was also used to explain the existence of the sin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas
deleted 10y ago
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RangerScience 10y ago
I think he does a pretty good job of explaining a theory in which that isn't the case - that a) in order to predict (compute) "you" at at point, you have to actually "run" you at every time-step up until that point; this is specifically analogous to NP-completeness: result verification is identical to result generation; which could be meaningfully rephrased as "there's no shortcut to figuring out what you will do than going out and doing it." b) There's a gap between non-determinism and randomness. This reminds me of the basics of Kolmogorov complexity: the number of bytes to transmit a random string is the same as the size of the random string, except instead of "random" you have "non-deterministic". You are a non-random non-deterministic string; there is no shortcut in computing you than actually doing it... with the rest of the universe. (Which may mean there's no way to transmit you, either...?)
- mabynogy 10y ago
  It seems something else than the state is stored in "you" and released later.

coldtea 10y ago

You mean if you believe in scientism. Occam's razor is more a heuristic at the level of epistemology than actual science (the latter involves the experimental method, not logical posits like Occam's Razor). And of course it's statistical, not absolute. Heck, even in everyday life we find cases where Occam's Razor is plainly wrong. Sometimes the explanation for an event is the more bizarre one rather than the simpler one. “The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” – Alfred North Whitehead http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/05/14/why-the-simplest-theory-is-alm/ http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/05/14/wh...

mabynogy 10y ago
> You mean if you believe in scientism. No. If you believe in science as a practice or a way to explain things or "operate" things (like someone that switch on a light and that have some knowledge about electricity). If you agree with what science explains (how it works thus the Occam's Razor) and disagree with what science doesn't explain (yet or never), you create a duality. The duality can be eliminated with the Occam's Razor and then remains what is explained by the science (with its hypothesis). It's not an opinion. It's just a rationale. Everything that will not fit in that paradigm will probably be rejected sooner or later (by science). As writing and science has a beginning in human history, we may discover something more powerful than science to discover the rest.

rocqua 10y ago

That only holds if you consider the question of free will to be scientific. That is, if the question of free will can be tested. Moreover, is the non-existence of free will really the simpler alternative to the existence of free will?

mabynogy 10y ago
> Moreover, is the non-existence of free will really the simpler alternative to the existence of free will? I would say yes because it's mostly a western world concern (thus cultural). It was also used to explain the existence of the sin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

RangerScience 10y ago

I think he does a pretty good job of explaining a theory in which that isn't the case - that a) in order to predict (compute) "you" at at point, you have to actually "run" you at every time-step up until that point; this is specifically analogous to NP-completeness: result verification is identical to result generation; which could be meaningfully rephrased as "there's no shortcut to figuring out what you will do than going out and doing it." b) There's a gap between non-determinism and randomness. This reminds me of the basics of Kolmogorov complexity: the number of bytes to transmit a random string is the same as the size of the random string, except instead of "random" you have "non-deterministic". You are a non-random non-deterministic string; there is no shortcut in computing you than actually doing it... with the rest of the universe. (Which may mean there's no way to transmit you, either...?)

mabynogy 10y ago
It seems something else than the state is stored in "you" and released later.