3 ms·
That's interesting. It seems to me that rather than talking about NP-hard computation, you could say that free will is analogous to the undecidability of the ha
by jberryman 16y ago
That's interesting. It seems to me that rather than talking about NP-hard computation, you could say that free will is analogous to the undecidability of the halting problem. That is we can say that we have free will because the hypothetical act of predicting someone's future actions is equivalent to simply having their brain decide (i.e. running the computation)
- fizx 16y agoYeah, I'm not sure what the exactly correct formulation is. Your formulation may retain the spirit, but be more technically correct. I guess the important point is that I like to define free will as "the ability to make a decision faster than any available entity can predict the result of the decision." A computer running a some program doesn't have free will, because I can beat it to its own decision with more or faster computers. Also, I can force it to solve problems to which I already know the answer. Interestingly, I may have free will today, but "lose" it tomorrow, when a sufficiently advanced simulation of my mind is released.