Lots of folks pointing out the philosophy 101 nature of the post as PG appears to rediscover the basics of the free-will debate, but I think there's one interes

Lots of folks pointing out the philosophy 101 nature of the post as PG appears to rediscover the basics of the free-will debate, but I think there's one interesting issue here: >"How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?" I think an interesting answer to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1]. How many dots are there on the grid? Weirdly enough more than you can see. When you see an entire image full of color turns out a good deal of that is also made up, as most of that visual perception only ever happens in the center, your brain filling in the rest. Point being, perception is inherently constructed, and that probably does apply to perception of your own cognition. Elaborate notions of wants and free choice are likely rationalizations just as your mind goes along and does its thing. It puts a sort of empirical limit on your confidence which I think is more productive than these linguistic rabbit holes about wants of wants of wants. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannGrid.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannG...