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You're trying to start with our fundamental physical theories and calculate your way to free will. And you're right that we can't do that. But we can't calculat

You're trying to start with our fundamental physical theories and calculate your way to free will. And you're right that we can't do that. But we can't calculate our way to a rose, or a tree, or a squirrel, or a human, or Mt Everest either. We can't even calculate our way to folding proteins. How complex phenomena emerge from the fundamental laws of the universe is a blank spot on the map of human understanding. You're looking there and saying "I don't see a road to free will through here." You think this says something about free will, but all it really does is say something about the map. The best we can do is observe complex phenomena and look for contradictions to fundamental physical theory. I can observe a beetle and see if anything about it contradicts quantum mechanics. So far, no. And observations of free will do not either. This only disproves free will if you carefully define "free will" in advance as a quality that contradicts fundamental physics. But why would you do that? Free will has historically meant the quality that allows people to make decisions in the course of everyday life, not a quality that allows them to do fantastic feats like generate infinite amounts of energy or some other violation of physics. As long as our ability to freely make decisions doesn't violate our understanding of physics, you can't say that our understanding of physics excludes our ability to freely make decisions.

wodenokoto 4y ago
> But we can't calculate our way to a rose [..] How complex phenomena emerge from the fundamental laws of the universe is a blank spot on the map of human understanding. You're looking there and saying "I don't see a road to free will through here." You think this says something about free will, but all it really does is say something about the map. I think this is a very good argument and I think I will use it myself in the future. But I can see that our current understanding of physics can have a road to a rose, even if I can't see the road. I can't see how our current understanding of physics can have a road to decision making that is different from an artificial neural network or an ensemble of boosted trees. So where I am stuck on the free will question is: Either my computer has free will, or humans don't. And we generally consider computers to not have free will, because they follow their programming. So what is it that humans do, that is fundamentally different from following our programming? > As long as our ability to freely make decisions doesn't violate our understanding of physics, you can't say that our understanding of physics excludes our ability to freely make decisions. My argument is that we are not making decisions freely, but we are a complex system, running entirely on reactions following the laws of physics in fundamentally the same way that water doesn't make a decision about where to flow, it just flows.

wodenokoto 4y ago

> But we can't calculate our way to a rose [..] How complex phenomena emerge from the fundamental laws of the universe is a blank spot on the map of human understanding. You're looking there and saying "I don't see a road to free will through here." You think this says something about free will, but all it really does is say something about the map. I think this is a very good argument and I think I will use it myself in the future. But I can see that our current understanding of physics can have a road to a rose, even if I can't see the road. I can't see how our current understanding of physics can have a road to decision making that is different from an artificial neural network or an ensemble of boosted trees. So where I am stuck on the free will question is: Either my computer has free will, or humans don't. And we generally consider computers to not have free will, because they follow their programming. So what is it that humans do, that is fundamentally different from following our programming? > As long as our ability to freely make decisions doesn't violate our understanding of physics, you can't say that our understanding of physics excludes our ability to freely make decisions. My argument is that we are not making decisions freely, but we are a complex system, running entirely on reactions following the laws of physics in fundamentally the same way that water doesn't make a decision about where to flow, it just flows.