8 ms·

There is free will: we make choices even if our atoms don’t

27 points by r0n0j0y 7y ago

troll-thread 7y ago
These are usually troll threads.
arkades 7y ago
> If you try to make sense of human behavior, not just in ordinary life but also in the sciences, then the ascription of intentionality is indispensable. It’s infeasible and not illuminating to explain human behavior at the level of astronomically complex neural firing patterns that take place in the brain. “It’s difficult to describe macro behavior as a direct function of micro behavior, therefore, intentionality doesn’t belong on, nor should be falsified at, the micro level.” All of the lines of argument in this article seem pretty weak. My time of disrespecting modern philosophy has sure come to an abrupt middle.
soberhoff 7y ago
Step 1: Define "Free Will".
- turk73 7y ago
  I am at work right now but I can walk the fuck out anytime I feel like it.
  - soberhoff 7y ago
    Is that a definition?
  - tpetrina 7y ago
    Does determinism prevent you? Why _would_ you want or feel like it? And when that happens, how do you control the deliberation process itself? Can you freely choose your deliberations? Why would you choose them exactly like that?
  - have_faith 7y ago
    See you at work tomorrow.
  - akskos 7y ago
    In that case there is a reason why you feel like it and the only possible outcome is that you will walk out.
trevyn 7y ago
>The jury is out on whether the world is fundamentally deterministic...but suppose it is. This does not necessitate that the world is also deterministic at some higher level of description. Ah, so there can exist counterfactual levels of description which are inconsistent with what may be the fundamental nature of reality. This seems accurate. (C.f. religion) >We can attach probabilities to different scenarios, but it’s not the case that the weather state at the present time fully determines the weather state in a few days’ time. Multiple different trajectories are entirely possible. In superdeterminism, the state of the universe at the present time does fully determine the weather state in a few days time. Multiple trajectories are not physically possible, though we are able to probabilistically model such trajectories based on the incomplete information that we do have access to.
- nathanlied 7y ago
  This article seems (to me) to be advocating some sort of scientific cognitive dissonance. Where you can 'believe' different (and contradictory) things about the nature of systems surrounding you. I'm not sure I buy it.
  - unparagoned 7y ago
    It's not saying the same thing is different, but the fact free will is an emergent concept that only works on the level of a person. There is no reasonable definition of free will at the atomic level, it just doesn't exist. Let's say a picture is beautiful. Well atoms can't be beautiful so hence the picture can't be beautiful. Beauty is a very high level emergent concept that only exist at that level. It's completely compatible with determinism but the fact its ultimately deterministic atoms at play is irrelevant. It's similar for free will, the cocomcept doesn't reply on determinism and that it's completely independent from it. It's about a person's actions not the underlying mechanism of how a person acts.
mrkeen 7y ago
> Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level. Not sure I understand/agree with that. Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?
- Numberwang 7y ago
  Exactly. This article is a waste of time.
- jatsign 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
  - gilgoomesh 7y ago
    Chaotic systems are deterministic. Chaos pertains to measurement, not determinism.
  - nathanlied 7y ago
    That is not non-determinism; it's just difficult to predict determinism. I postulate that we cannot build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces - we can just get it complex enough that we can't accurately pre-determine what will happen. With enough data, and a system of sufficient predictive complexity, we can still predict everything, I'd wager.
    - naasking 7y ago
      > we can just get it complex enough that we can't accurately pre-determine what will happen. Which is observably indistinguishable from indeterminism.
      - szemet 7y ago
        It is not possible universally. I like the proof of this, it is simple and resembles to many similar no-go theorems (like the halting problem). 1. Imagine a finite formal system which universally can identify if an input is regular (compressible) or random (not compressible) / So we are using the Kolmogorov-complexity definition of randomness here... 2. Assume the above formal system can be described using L bits (e.g. it is an L bit long program) 3. Lets take the first (e.g. smallest in numerical ordering) 2×L (or 10×L, 100×L, ... take it as large you want) long bit string that the program classifies as random bit string 4. "3." is a definition of a 2×L long string in L bits (the formal system itself) + constant 5. The 2×L long string is therefore compressibe so it is not random - but our original algorithm is misclassify it as random (it is in its definition) - so the algorithm is not universal...
thejohnconway 7y ago
The strongest argument against free will doesn't have to do with determinism (and I agree with Christian List that looking at lower levels is a category error). Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it.
- thejohnconway 7y ago
  Err replying to myself here... I just had the personal revelation that this could also be a strong argument _for_ free will. If we can't properly examine is by breaking it down, it might be said to be a fundamental property (like consciousness, perhaps?).
- athroway 7y ago
  That's the case for many abstract notions no one seems to agree on. Art, culture, nation, justice... No one really agrees on what they're supposed to be, only on single instances. Doesn't make the more encompassing abstraction any less real or useful.
  - thejohnconway 7y ago
    No, I don't think that's it. Art, justice, etc, have constituent parts. People disagree, but there's lots of stuff in those boxes. When I turn my minds eye to free will, there's nothing there.
  - iamnothere 7y ago
    > Art, culture, nation, justice... Hence why there can be no true hard science based around these areas, and indeed no agreed-upon "truth".
- naasking 7y ago
  > Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it. I don't see why. Free will is a choice made for our own reasons that isn't coerced by another actor's will. No doubt there are nuances to this when you get into the details, but it's a big leap to say it simply evaporates. We can clearly see it doesn't because we can make meaningful distinctions between the behaviour of people and that of rocks.
athroway 7y ago
Before you go on disparaging the author and philosophy in general like the proverbial xkcd physicist, take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
tpetrina 7y ago
So typical - there is no clear definition, lots of ambiguous terms...People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms. It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle. 1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case. 2. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random. 3. Me deciding something doesn't happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4. The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing. If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.
- naasking 7y ago
  > People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms. It's a matter of denotative vs. connotative definitions. Free will proponents are saying, "hey that thing we all do when we make a choice that rocks can't do, that's free will", and you're saying "free will has such and such properties, so whether we have it depends on whether our choices have these properties". I'd argue that most people reason denotatively, in which case merely pointing out the thing we're trying to define suffices as an existence proof. What remains is defining what it is, logically. > 1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case It sure does! > The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing. Agreed. I don't see why this poses any difficulty. The behaviour of the process is largely governed by free will, just like a process on your computer will often sort lists. > If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. Sure, via suicide.
  - tpetrina 7y ago
    Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide, not deliberate and not think...or you do accept that some thoughts cannot be _prethought_ by you and they come to you for you to control. So why control _those_ thoughts? Why deliberate in _that particular way_?
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I'm not convinced. At least not by the summary this article puts forward. Perhaps the world isn't deterministic (although how could we possibly know?). Even if it isn't, that non-determinism is only visible at the smallest of scales. Whether an electron is here or there is hardly likely to be caused by my mental states. So, if we don't have free will, at best we have random will. That is not free will as most people conceive of it. To the whole section about human behavior being too complex to explain in terms of fundamental physics, my answer is: it can't be explained in terms of fundamental physics yet. But, again, given sufficient time, research, and computational power, it seems highly likely that eventually human behavior will be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Or at least, we will be able to simulate a human (or higher animal) brain with sufficient resolution so as to demonstrate that there are no other inputs to cognition than current state + laws of physics. I really don't see how our current inability to explain human behavior physically has any bearing on the question of cognitive determinism.
danieltillett 7y ago
Since we are discussing if there is free will or not can I get an answer to who first proposed the solution I describe here [0]. I know I am not the first person to have raised this argument, but I can't find who did. 0. https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-will/ https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-wi...
- trevyn 7y ago
  Not believing in free will does not inevitably lead to a nihilistic funk. Funks are often caused by an abrupt shift in worldview without a corresponding set of tools for integrating that worldview into the rest of your life.
  - unixbeard1337 7y ago
    Calvinists and Sunni Muslims don't believe in free will. Neither one as a class could be said to be in a nihilistic funk.
- krapp 7y ago
  Substitute "free will" for "God", and it basically seems like a restatement of Pascal's Wager, along with the prevailing (and untrue) belief that atheists (or, in this case, those who reject free will) are incapable of morality or of finding meaning in life.
  - danieltillett 7y ago
    It has superficial similarities to Pascal's wager, but it is not the same.
challenger22 7y ago
All arguments I have ever seen involving free will, from both sides, are very weak. It is a branch of philosophy that is particularly self-obsessed, and particularly unlikely to make any decent forward progress. The people who write books about free will are self-selected for a tendency to pontificate on a topic that has no foreseeable resolution.
Phenomenit 7y ago
As long as the concept of infinity exist it's impossible to say that existence is deterministic or not. It's rather determinism wrapped in indeterminism and that wrapped in determinism so on and so forth.
slfnflctd 7y ago
I can flip a coin every time I have an opportunity to make certain minor choices. Some of those choices will turn out to have major effects (my whole life changed once because the batteries were low on my Walkman and I tuned into the radio instead of playing a cassette tape like I otherwise would have). Most will not. The point is, I can do this, and I have. Other times I have chosen not to leave as much to chance. For all practical purposes, to me this indicates sufficient free will for me to comfortable believing I have it.
- doboyy 7y ago
  I agree that believing free-will exists can be advantageous when being confronted with choices and alternative timelines. Believing that you have no autonomy can lead to situations where you don't weigh different possibilties at a given moment in time. In general, it's... deflating? The problem for me is that there are an innumerable amount of solutions to any given choice. You have to narrow these down subconsciously. Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices that were implicitly ruled out, for me, ends up at birth, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a choice in being born.
  - slfnflctd 7y ago
    > Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices It likely varies a lot across individuals. For me personally, when I do this I see a whole lot of small choices made almost whimsically that led up to very large results. It came down to aesthetics a lot of the time. My values, relationships and knowledge were all inconsistent and in constant flux for many years, and when faced with analysis paralysis, how I forced a decision was often not discernably different from chance. As I get older, it appears my choices have more weight, but they paradoxically also seem more predetermined. Perhaps it's as simple as that we're more unpredictable in our youth.
wbhart 7y ago
I don't see how conflating inscrutible with non-deterministic is useful. But this is the argument the author is making. They seem to argue that it is a useful thing to do scientifically. Perhaps philosophers would do well to focus on whether a different person in the same circumstances would be forced to make the same decision. The answer is clearly no. But not because of a lack of determinism.
pron 7y ago
If some process M behaves according to fixed rules yet no other process can exist that can determine, with certainty, M's behavior ahead of M, then M is still "deterministic" in the physics sense of the word, but is it deterministic enough to claim no free will? I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is, could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely well-defined.
gerbilly 7y ago
HN should institute a rule than anyone replying to a free will thread should get 2ⁿ negative points for each post, where n is the depth position in the thread. Present company included, naturally.
- 0_gravitas 7y ago
  I feel honored
gus_massa 7y ago
> You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level of description, your decisions can be truly open. They essentially redefine "free will" as "difficult to predict", instead of "truly random" or "magical" or something like that. With this definition of "free will": Does a cow have free will? Does a tree have free will? Does a rolling dice have free will?
jenkstom 7y ago
This is just another false dichotomy theists like to use to argue their case. It's like arguing whether humans are inherently good or evil - no, humans create both of those things. Or whether the universe was created or not. Why make up stories for something we can never know?
riskneutral 7y ago
I think the root of the problem is in trying to use logical proof to reason about things that are beyond the limits of logical reasoning and our relatively small human minds. We know from results like the Godel Incompleteness theorem that even mathematics has very real limits on what is provable through human reasoning. The logical paradox of free will and determinism is like the paradoxes used within mathematics to prove its own limits. It is unfortunate but predictable that we cling to the delusion that we can resolve the paradox of free will through logical reasoning. There are some aspects of reality, particularly those dealing with one’s own mind or self, that cannot be reasoned about. It is also a well known open secret that those aspects of reality, while beyond the reaches of thinking and logical explanation, can be directly experienced. The practitioners of various forms of meditation experience have a great deal to report about such experiential knowledge.
aogaili 7y ago
Are you going to read this comment or not? this is a choice. If you read it, will you respond to it? yet another choice. I can stay the fact that you're reading this far is a free choice you made out of possible alternative forks of reality. Yet, if I attempt to dig deep on why you have decided to read thus far, I've to factor in your genetic makeup and the summation of all the experiences from the moment you were conceived until this very moment, which is impossible to do, I also have no way to infer the current state of your mind, your brain state is unaccessible information to me. So, I just abstract it all by giving YOU agency, a free will. You choose to read this far by your own freewill as far as I can tell. Therefore, freewill is a concept that exist at certain plan of abstraction (along with the concept of I and YOU) but they all dissolve once you try to peek inside inner-working of the brain's decision making machinery. But since we human don't have a way to peek inside each other brain in real-time with ease, we operate at the higher level concepts of YOU, and I assign the agency and "freewill" to YOU since I've no better explanation of why you have read up until this point.
Balgair 7y ago
Does anyone know of a good text that will better help explain the concept of 'free will' and the agruments around it? Kant et al are completely opaque and nearly unreadable.
bitforger 7y ago
I wrote a koan about free will not too long ago... http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html

27 points by r0n0j0y 7y ago

These are usually troll threads.

> If you try to make sense of human behavior, not just in ordinary life but also in the sciences, then the ascription of intentionality is indispensable. It’s infeasible and not illuminating to explain human behavior at the level of astronomically complex neural firing patterns that take place in the brain. “It’s difficult to describe macro behavior as a direct function of micro behavior, therefore, intentionality doesn’t belong on, nor should be falsified at, the micro level.” All of the lines of argument in this article seem pretty weak. My time of disrespecting modern philosophy has sure come to an abrupt middle.

soberhoff 7y ago

Step 1: Define "Free Will".

turk73 7y ago
I am at work right now but I can walk the fuck out anytime I feel like it.
- soberhoff 7y ago
  Is that a definition?
- tpetrina 7y ago
  Does determinism prevent you? Why _would_ you want or feel like it? And when that happens, how do you control the deliberation process itself? Can you freely choose your deliberations? Why would you choose them exactly like that?
- have_faith 7y ago
  See you at work tomorrow.
- akskos 7y ago
  In that case there is a reason why you feel like it and the only possible outcome is that you will walk out.

trevyn 7y ago

>The jury is out on whether the world is fundamentally deterministic...but suppose it is. This does not necessitate that the world is also deterministic at some higher level of description. Ah, so there can exist counterfactual levels of description which are inconsistent with what may be the fundamental nature of reality. This seems accurate. (C.f. religion) >We can attach probabilities to different scenarios, but it’s not the case that the weather state at the present time fully determines the weather state in a few days’ time. Multiple different trajectories are entirely possible. In superdeterminism, the state of the universe at the present time does fully determine the weather state in a few days time. Multiple trajectories are not physically possible, though we are able to probabilistically model such trajectories based on the incomplete information that we do have access to.

nathanlied 7y ago
This article seems (to me) to be advocating some sort of scientific cognitive dissonance. Where you can 'believe' different (and contradictory) things about the nature of systems surrounding you. I'm not sure I buy it.
- unparagoned 7y ago
  It's not saying the same thing is different, but the fact free will is an emergent concept that only works on the level of a person. There is no reasonable definition of free will at the atomic level, it just doesn't exist. Let's say a picture is beautiful. Well atoms can't be beautiful so hence the picture can't be beautiful. Beauty is a very high level emergent concept that only exist at that level. It's completely compatible with determinism but the fact its ultimately deterministic atoms at play is irrelevant. It's similar for free will, the cocomcept doesn't reply on determinism and that it's completely independent from it. It's about a person's actions not the underlying mechanism of how a person acts.

mrkeen 7y ago

> Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level. Not sure I understand/agree with that. Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?

Numberwang 7y ago
Exactly. This article is a waste of time.
jatsign 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
- gilgoomesh 7y ago
  Chaotic systems are deterministic. Chaos pertains to measurement, not determinism.
- nathanlied 7y ago
  That is not non-determinism; it's just difficult to predict determinism. I postulate that we cannot build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces - we can just get it complex enough that we can't accurately pre-determine what will happen. With enough data, and a system of sufficient predictive complexity, we can still predict everything, I'd wager.
  - naasking 7y ago
    > we can just get it complex enough that we can't accurately pre-determine what will happen. Which is observably indistinguishable from indeterminism.
    - szemet 7y ago
      It is not possible universally. I like the proof of this, it is simple and resembles to many similar no-go theorems (like the halting problem). 1. Imagine a finite formal system which universally can identify if an input is regular (compressible) or random (not compressible) / So we are using the Kolmogorov-complexity definition of randomness here... 2. Assume the above formal system can be described using L bits (e.g. it is an L bit long program) 3. Lets take the first (e.g. smallest in numerical ordering) 2×L (or 10×L, 100×L, ... take it as large you want) long bit string that the program classifies as random bit string 4. "3." is a definition of a 2×L long string in L bits (the formal system itself) + constant 5. The 2×L long string is therefore compressibe so it is not random - but our original algorithm is misclassify it as random (it is in its definition) - so the algorithm is not universal...

thejohnconway 7y ago

The strongest argument against free will doesn't have to do with determinism (and I agree with Christian List that looking at lower levels is a category error). Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it.

thejohnconway 7y ago
Err replying to myself here... I just had the personal revelation that this could also be a strong argument _for_ free will. If we can't properly examine is by breaking it down, it might be said to be a fundamental property (like consciousness, perhaps?).
athroway 7y ago
That's the case for many abstract notions no one seems to agree on. Art, culture, nation, justice... No one really agrees on what they're supposed to be, only on single instances. Doesn't make the more encompassing abstraction any less real or useful.
- thejohnconway 7y ago
  No, I don't think that's it. Art, justice, etc, have constituent parts. People disagree, but there's lots of stuff in those boxes. When I turn my minds eye to free will, there's nothing there.
- iamnothere 7y ago
  > Art, culture, nation, justice... Hence why there can be no true hard science based around these areas, and indeed no agreed-upon "truth".
naasking 7y ago
> Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it. I don't see why. Free will is a choice made for our own reasons that isn't coerced by another actor's will. No doubt there are nuances to this when you get into the details, but it's a big leap to say it simply evaporates. We can clearly see it doesn't because we can make meaningful distinctions between the behaviour of people and that of rocks.

athroway 7y ago

Before you go on disparaging the author and philosophy in general like the proverbial xkcd physicist, take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

tpetrina 7y ago

So typical - there is no clear definition, lots of ambiguous terms...People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms. It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle. 1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case. 2. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random. 3. Me deciding something doesn't happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4. The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing. If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.

naasking 7y ago
> People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms. It's a matter of denotative vs. connotative definitions. Free will proponents are saying, "hey that thing we all do when we make a choice that rocks can't do, that's free will", and you're saying "free will has such and such properties, so whether we have it depends on whether our choices have these properties". I'd argue that most people reason denotatively, in which case merely pointing out the thing we're trying to define suffices as an existence proof. What remains is defining what it is, logically. > 1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case It sure does! > The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing. Agreed. I don't see why this poses any difficulty. The behaviour of the process is largely governed by free will, just like a process on your computer will often sort lists. > If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. Sure, via suicide.
- tpetrina 7y ago
  Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide, not deliberate and not think...or you do accept that some thoughts cannot be _prethought_ by you and they come to you for you to control. So why control _those_ thoughts? Why deliberate in _that particular way_?

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

I'm not convinced. At least not by the summary this article puts forward. Perhaps the world isn't deterministic (although how could we possibly know?). Even if it isn't, that non-determinism is only visible at the smallest of scales. Whether an electron is here or there is hardly likely to be caused by my mental states. So, if we don't have free will, at best we have random will. That is not free will as most people conceive of it. To the whole section about human behavior being too complex to explain in terms of fundamental physics, my answer is: it can't be explained in terms of fundamental physics yet. But, again, given sufficient time, research, and computational power, it seems highly likely that eventually human behavior will be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Or at least, we will be able to simulate a human (or higher animal) brain with sufficient resolution so as to demonstrate that there are no other inputs to cognition than current state + laws of physics. I really don't see how our current inability to explain human behavior physically has any bearing on the question of cognitive determinism.

danieltillett 7y ago

Since we are discussing if there is free will or not can I get an answer to who first proposed the solution I describe here [0]. I know I am not the first person to have raised this argument, but I can't find who did. 0. https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-will/ https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-wi...

trevyn 7y ago
Not believing in free will does not inevitably lead to a nihilistic funk. Funks are often caused by an abrupt shift in worldview without a corresponding set of tools for integrating that worldview into the rest of your life.
- unixbeard1337 7y ago
  Calvinists and Sunni Muslims don't believe in free will. Neither one as a class could be said to be in a nihilistic funk.
krapp 7y ago
Substitute "free will" for "God", and it basically seems like a restatement of Pascal's Wager, along with the prevailing (and untrue) belief that atheists (or, in this case, those who reject free will) are incapable of morality or of finding meaning in life.
- danieltillett 7y ago
  It has superficial similarities to Pascal's wager, but it is not the same.

challenger22 7y ago

All arguments I have ever seen involving free will, from both sides, are very weak. It is a branch of philosophy that is particularly self-obsessed, and particularly unlikely to make any decent forward progress. The people who write books about free will are self-selected for a tendency to pontificate on a topic that has no foreseeable resolution.

Phenomenit 7y ago

As long as the concept of infinity exist it's impossible to say that existence is deterministic or not. It's rather determinism wrapped in indeterminism and that wrapped in determinism so on and so forth.

slfnflctd 7y ago

I can flip a coin every time I have an opportunity to make certain minor choices. Some of those choices will turn out to have major effects (my whole life changed once because the batteries were low on my Walkman and I tuned into the radio instead of playing a cassette tape like I otherwise would have). Most will not. The point is, I can do this, and I have. Other times I have chosen not to leave as much to chance. For all practical purposes, to me this indicates sufficient free will for me to comfortable believing I have it.

doboyy 7y ago
I agree that believing free-will exists can be advantageous when being confronted with choices and alternative timelines. Believing that you have no autonomy can lead to situations where you don't weigh different possibilties at a given moment in time. In general, it's... deflating? The problem for me is that there are an innumerable amount of solutions to any given choice. You have to narrow these down subconsciously. Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices that were implicitly ruled out, for me, ends up at birth, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a choice in being born.
- slfnflctd 7y ago
  > Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices It likely varies a lot across individuals. For me personally, when I do this I see a whole lot of small choices made almost whimsically that led up to very large results. It came down to aesthetics a lot of the time. My values, relationships and knowledge were all inconsistent and in constant flux for many years, and when faced with analysis paralysis, how I forced a decision was often not discernably different from chance. As I get older, it appears my choices have more weight, but they paradoxically also seem more predetermined. Perhaps it's as simple as that we're more unpredictable in our youth.

wbhart 7y ago

I don't see how conflating inscrutible with non-deterministic is useful. But this is the argument the author is making. They seem to argue that it is a useful thing to do scientifically. Perhaps philosophers would do well to focus on whether a different person in the same circumstances would be forced to make the same decision. The answer is clearly no. But not because of a lack of determinism.

pron 7y ago

If some process M behaves according to fixed rules yet no other process can exist that can determine, with certainty, M's behavior ahead of M, then M is still "deterministic" in the physics sense of the word, but is it deterministic enough to claim no free will? I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is, could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely well-defined.

gerbilly 7y ago

HN should institute a rule than anyone replying to a free will thread should get 2ⁿ negative points for each post, where n is the depth position in the thread. Present company included, naturally.

0_gravitas 7y ago
I feel honored

gus_massa 7y ago

> You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level of description, your decisions can be truly open. They essentially redefine "free will" as "difficult to predict", instead of "truly random" or "magical" or something like that. With this definition of "free will": Does a cow have free will? Does a tree have free will? Does a rolling dice have free will?

jenkstom 7y ago

This is just another false dichotomy theists like to use to argue their case. It's like arguing whether humans are inherently good or evil - no, humans create both of those things. Or whether the universe was created or not. Why make up stories for something we can never know?

riskneutral 7y ago

I think the root of the problem is in trying to use logical proof to reason about things that are beyond the limits of logical reasoning and our relatively small human minds. We know from results like the Godel Incompleteness theorem that even mathematics has very real limits on what is provable through human reasoning. The logical paradox of free will and determinism is like the paradoxes used within mathematics to prove its own limits. It is unfortunate but predictable that we cling to the delusion that we can resolve the paradox of free will through logical reasoning. There are some aspects of reality, particularly those dealing with one’s own mind or self, that cannot be reasoned about. It is also a well known open secret that those aspects of reality, while beyond the reaches of thinking and logical explanation, can be directly experienced. The practitioners of various forms of meditation experience have a great deal to report about such experiential knowledge.

aogaili 7y ago

Are you going to read this comment or not? this is a choice. If you read it, will you respond to it? yet another choice. I can stay the fact that you're reading this far is a free choice you made out of possible alternative forks of reality. Yet, if I attempt to dig deep on why you have decided to read thus far, I've to factor in your genetic makeup and the summation of all the experiences from the moment you were conceived until this very moment, which is impossible to do, I also have no way to infer the current state of your mind, your brain state is unaccessible information to me. So, I just abstract it all by giving YOU agency, a free will. You choose to read this far by your own freewill as far as I can tell. Therefore, freewill is a concept that exist at certain plan of abstraction (along with the concept of I and YOU) but they all dissolve once you try to peek inside inner-working of the brain's decision making machinery. But since we human don't have a way to peek inside each other brain in real-time with ease, we operate at the higher level concepts of YOU, and I assign the agency and "freewill" to YOU since I've no better explanation of why you have read up until this point.

Balgair 7y ago

Does anyone know of a good text that will better help explain the concept of 'free will' and the agruments around it? Kant et al are completely opaque and nearly unreadable.

bitforger 7y ago

I wrote a koan about free will not too long ago... http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html