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These are good examples of the fact that our common intuitions about free will are disconnected from reality, often silly, and usually plain wrong. For example
by solipsism 8y ago
These are good examples of the fact that our common intuitions about free will are disconnected from reality, often silly, and usually plain wrong.
For example, it's common to have the intuition that the choice when picking a number from 1 to 10 is completely unbiased and independent. That would imply a perfectly uniform distribution.
Of course that doesn't match reality, and it raises more questions for the intellectually honest thinker, but most people don't think about it beyond the simple intuition.
- baddox 8y agoYes, but that's just some humans being uneducated about how the human brain works. It doesn't really say anything about the existence of free will. In fact, the reason untrained humans are bad random number generators has little to do with the abilities of the human brain and more to do with how random distributions work. Untrained people just don't know, for example, that long streaks of heads and tails are actually quite likely in a sequence of random coin tosses. If they did know the likelihood, and they were tasked with writing down a sequence of random coin tosses, they would probably do a much better job. If you take this to the limit, a human could learn to compute a pseudorandom generator in their head (at least in theory, although it may be very slow going) or perhaps figure out an effective way to gather entropy from the environment and turn it into a truly random sequence.