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I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

empire_and_sun 3y ago
Looping Soup
mysecretaccount 3y ago
> You still have your free will. Highly debatable.
- mrkstu 3y ago
  If we don't what's the point of debating it?
  - mysecretaccount 3y ago
    Debating its existence serves the same purpose regardless of its existence.
  - vasco 3y ago
    Free will doesn't matter, there's a deeper level, which is, what is the meaning of all this, the universe, us, our place in it. And yet we dance. The point in debating is enjoying the debate, learning new things. What else is there to do?
  - VMG 3y ago
    To satisfy the predetermined desire to debate it.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Monkeys are determined to argue, so they will argue about free-will, and wonder if they could have chosen not to argue, and then argue about that also.
  - digging 3y ago
    Because our belief in it may influence our actions... Free will is the experience of making a decision. If we define free will as the ability to make a decision independently of our current state (sensory input, memory, emotions), that's utterly asinine. Neither are you an unfeeling, unthinking slave to entropy, simply printing outputs. You are an introspective machine, which can ask itself why it made decisions and update its own internal state to make different decisions in the future. That's what "free will" is.
NERD_ALERT 3y ago
Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > Free will hasn’t been proven. Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.
  - nikkwong 3y ago
    How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? Thoughts and intentions just seemingly appear in consciousness, without any explanation as to how they arose. Feelings are like this too; we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served them. When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but that intention too is also just a thought that appears in consciousness. To decide what to think in a manner compatible with what most people think free will is would require you to decide what to think or feel before actually thinking or feeling it, which is not possible. And when you think about the causality of feelings or thoughts, which are just neuronal signaling patterns/chains in the brain, it begins to appear much more mechanical than free will intention.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave. Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.
komali2 3y ago
You have free will, but isn't there still such a thing as an information hazard? For example, you may have free will, but you still just lost The Game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
- kevindamm 3y ago
  https://xkcd.com/391/ https://xkcd.com/391/
sitkack 3y ago
You only have free will in so much as what environments you put yourself in the long term. Our immediate actions are outside of our consciousness.
- mysecretaccount 3y ago
  If we are not in control of our immediate actions, how can we have any sort of meaningful "free will"?
  - card_zero 3y ago
    I never understand what people are asking when they debate free will. It's a brain's process. Everybody's got one. Your brain's process isn't necessarily lovely to you, and doesn't necessarily do what you (the brain process) admire, like, or prefer. It's subject to outside influence and isn't perfectly under it's own control, because it's a cranky machine and goes wrong a lot. Some parts of it conflict with other parts. It's slow, and bad at monitoring itself. What do expect, magic? It's still yours, however unfair it may be to be stuck with it. So you have free will, whoopee.
    - mysecretaccount 3y ago
      If consciousness (and choices, the output of consciousness) is completely determined by the brain's physical process, then there is no such thing as "libertarian free will" which is what people typically mean when they say "free will".
      - card_zero 3y ago
        Metaphysical libertarianism. Yeah, by definition, that's not compatible with the view that everything is determined by physical processes. This is just people freaking out over determinism. I kind of see why. "I am a physical process" sounds like "I am controlled by fate and my choices are pointless". But a person is a process that can't see the future, and a process that experiments and discovers things. Choices are the deterministic process: the person determines things. I could repeat this several times in different words but I'd just be trying to placate a kind of paranoia that happens when people realise they're physical.
j_bum 3y ago
Probably not much if any “free will”… Check out “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky [0] [0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592344/determined-by-robert-m-sapolsky/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592344/determined-b...
verisimi 3y ago
Lots of answers about free will. My criticism is that they all seem to make the same error, in treating the existence of free will as some sort of binary decision. My view is that the more one's model is coherent with the underlying reality, the more options are available to the individual. The greater the selection, the more free will you have. Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options. Put simply one doesn't know what one doesn't know. Most likely this will occur in the case where one is certain of one's 'knowledge' of something that is actually false, ie one is operating within a lie/fantasy and has been tricked. Here, one will have a constrained set of options and therefore less free will.
- schneebyte 3y ago
  Maybe you have a different definition of free will. But to me those examples are just knowledge. Regardless of how many possible options, the process of making the choice would be free will, if it existed.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    Feel free to give your definition of free will. My one is that one is more free if one is aware of the full scope of one's options. This is not an ephemeral idea, it is not related to the 'what might have been' aka the 'opportunity cost' of choosing. One's present awareness (and potential expansion of that awareness) has an impact on how free one is.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I mean, no one has a well defined definition of free will, much like the worlds intelligence and consciousness. With this said having more knowledge expands your ability to explore the problem space of existence. Lets imagine that you are a single bit, you have the 'choice' of being one or zero. From an outside observer the problem space of the outcome is very predictable in the sense we know it's going to be a 1 or 0. Now, keep adding random bits and our ability to predict the outcome of any state drops dramatically very quickly. But that's choosing at random, what if most bit states are bit random at all? For example this digital creature we're talking about now is millions of bit states long set by a learning algorithm, it so advanced it has an internal Turing machine that can simulate potential outcome states far into the future when executing code. You would look at this and say "well, it doesn't have free will, it just has an incomputably large set of potential bit states" But an outside observer unaware of the programs nature and it's starting state (for example it's performing a Turing test against the machine) would probably think the entity has free will. You are a very large set of states, because of this you cannot prove free will. You've reversed causality in your summary.
082349872349872 3y ago
> Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. "Everyone learns from experience. The wise try to learn from other people's experience."
- pixl97 3y ago
  Other people's experience you witness, directly or via delayed medium, is your experience.
air7 3y ago
I don't know to reconcile the idea that Free Will as a concept obviously cannot exist (because the omnipresent Laws of Physics govern the movement of the particles inside my skull as they do all other particles), with the fact that it just feels so real...
matwood 3y ago
Do your past experiences lead you to do the next thing? If you could perfectly know my past, could you predict my next decision? Do I have free will in that case?
layer8 3y ago
Free will doesn’t mean that the decisions you end up making aren’t significantly determined by the experiences you had.

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

empire_and_sun 3y ago

Looping Soup

mysecretaccount 3y ago

> You still have your free will. Highly debatable.

mrkstu 3y ago
If we don't what's the point of debating it?
- mysecretaccount 3y ago
  Debating its existence serves the same purpose regardless of its existence.
- vasco 3y ago
  Free will doesn't matter, there's a deeper level, which is, what is the meaning of all this, the universe, us, our place in it. And yet we dance. The point in debating is enjoying the debate, learning new things. What else is there to do?
- VMG 3y ago
  To satisfy the predetermined desire to debate it.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Monkeys are determined to argue, so they will argue about free-will, and wonder if they could have chosen not to argue, and then argue about that also.
- digging 3y ago
  Because our belief in it may influence our actions... Free will is the experience of making a decision. If we define free will as the ability to make a decision independently of our current state (sensory input, memory, emotions), that's utterly asinine. Neither are you an unfeeling, unthinking slave to entropy, simply printing outputs. You are an introspective machine, which can ask itself why it made decisions and update its own internal state to make different decisions in the future. That's what "free will" is.

NERD_ALERT 3y ago

Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.

nyokodo 3y ago
> Free will hasn’t been proven. Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.
- nikkwong 3y ago
  How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? Thoughts and intentions just seemingly appear in consciousness, without any explanation as to how they arose. Feelings are like this too; we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served them. When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but that intention too is also just a thought that appears in consciousness. To decide what to think in a manner compatible with what most people think free will is would require you to decide what to think or feel before actually thinking or feeling it, which is not possible. And when you think about the causality of feelings or thoughts, which are just neuronal signaling patterns/chains in the brain, it begins to appear much more mechanical than free will intention.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave. Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.

komali2 3y ago

You have free will, but isn't there still such a thing as an information hazard? For example, you may have free will, but you still just lost The Game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

kevindamm 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/391/ https://xkcd.com/391/

sitkack 3y ago

You only have free will in so much as what environments you put yourself in the long term. Our immediate actions are outside of our consciousness.

mysecretaccount 3y ago
If we are not in control of our immediate actions, how can we have any sort of meaningful "free will"?
- card_zero 3y ago
  I never understand what people are asking when they debate free will. It's a brain's process. Everybody's got one. Your brain's process isn't necessarily lovely to you, and doesn't necessarily do what you (the brain process) admire, like, or prefer. It's subject to outside influence and isn't perfectly under it's own control, because it's a cranky machine and goes wrong a lot. Some parts of it conflict with other parts. It's slow, and bad at monitoring itself. What do expect, magic? It's still yours, however unfair it may be to be stuck with it. So you have free will, whoopee.
  - mysecretaccount 3y ago
    If consciousness (and choices, the output of consciousness) is completely determined by the brain's physical process, then there is no such thing as "libertarian free will" which is what people typically mean when they say "free will".
    - card_zero 3y ago
      Metaphysical libertarianism. Yeah, by definition, that's not compatible with the view that everything is determined by physical processes. This is just people freaking out over determinism. I kind of see why. "I am a physical process" sounds like "I am controlled by fate and my choices are pointless". But a person is a process that can't see the future, and a process that experiments and discovers things. Choices are the deterministic process: the person determines things. I could repeat this several times in different words but I'd just be trying to placate a kind of paranoia that happens when people realise they're physical.

j_bum 3y ago

Probably not much if any “free will”… Check out “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky [0] [0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592344/determined-by-robert-m-sapolsky/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592344/determined-b...

verisimi 3y ago

Lots of answers about free will. My criticism is that they all seem to make the same error, in treating the existence of free will as some sort of binary decision. My view is that the more one's model is coherent with the underlying reality, the more options are available to the individual. The greater the selection, the more free will you have. Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options. Put simply one doesn't know what one doesn't know. Most likely this will occur in the case where one is certain of one's 'knowledge' of something that is actually false, ie one is operating within a lie/fantasy and has been tricked. Here, one will have a constrained set of options and therefore less free will.

schneebyte 3y ago
Maybe you have a different definition of free will. But to me those examples are just knowledge. Regardless of how many possible options, the process of making the choice would be free will, if it existed.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Feel free to give your definition of free will. My one is that one is more free if one is aware of the full scope of one's options. This is not an ephemeral idea, it is not related to the 'what might have been' aka the 'opportunity cost' of choosing. One's present awareness (and potential expansion of that awareness) has an impact on how free one is.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I mean, no one has a well defined definition of free will, much like the worlds intelligence and consciousness. With this said having more knowledge expands your ability to explore the problem space of existence. Lets imagine that you are a single bit, you have the 'choice' of being one or zero. From an outside observer the problem space of the outcome is very predictable in the sense we know it's going to be a 1 or 0. Now, keep adding random bits and our ability to predict the outcome of any state drops dramatically very quickly. But that's choosing at random, what if most bit states are bit random at all? For example this digital creature we're talking about now is millions of bit states long set by a learning algorithm, it so advanced it has an internal Turing machine that can simulate potential outcome states far into the future when executing code. You would look at this and say "well, it doesn't have free will, it just has an incomputably large set of potential bit states" But an outside observer unaware of the programs nature and it's starting state (for example it's performing a Turing test against the machine) would probably think the entity has free will. You are a very large set of states, because of this you cannot prove free will. You've reversed causality in your summary.

082349872349872 3y ago

> Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. "Everyone learns from experience. The wise try to learn from other people's experience."

pixl97 3y ago
Other people's experience you witness, directly or via delayed medium, is your experience.

air7 3y ago

I don't know to reconcile the idea that Free Will as a concept obviously cannot exist (because the omnipresent Laws of Physics govern the movement of the particles inside my skull as they do all other particles), with the fact that it just feels so real...

matwood 3y ago

Do your past experiences lead you to do the next thing? If you could perfectly know my past, could you predict my next decision? Do I have free will in that case?

layer8 3y ago

Free will doesn’t mean that the decisions you end up making aren’t significantly determined by the experiences you had.