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> determinist and believe in free will. Do you care to elaborate more? I am genuinely curious about your opinions. Have you read/listened to any of Dr. Robert

> determinist and believe in free will. Do you care to elaborate more? I am genuinely curious about your opinions. Have you read/listened to any of Dr. Robert Sapolsky's material on free will? I am curious what you think of his position on the matter.

deleted 2y ago
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CamperBob2 2y ago
Not the OP but one thing I find interesting about free will is that one of the things you can do with it is to choose to give it up, such as by delegating a decision to either a random process or one that you have no prior knowledge or control over. The act of flipping a coin to decide whether to drive to work or take the bus might end up altering the course of your life to an extent that no other decision you make that day will. Given how often we delegate whatever free will we have, intentionally or otherwise, it's easy to conclude (or at least suspect) that whether or not it exists in the first place simply isn't an interesting or important question. Sure, we might have free will, but if we do it's almost overwhelmed by noise.
slibhb 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism As far as Sapolsky goes, it's fine to argue that free will is an illusion. But it doesn't follow that we should stop believing in it. Actually, belief in free will is adaptive. Concepts that follow from free will such as punishment, guilt, blame, etc are extremely effective at promoting pro-social behavior and it's not clear how they could be replaced.
The_Colonel 2y ago
Not the op, but I will give it a shot. Free will relates to identity - there needs to be someone exercising the free will. So, what am I? I identify as the whole physical system of my body and especially my brain. The neurons, their connections, the atoms, the laws governing the interactions. I think people rejecting free will are considering physics to be some kind of external harness, constraint on themselves. But in my view, physics permeates my body. There's no myself without the physics (be it deterministic or not), it's an inseparable part of my system, ergo myself. In a deterministic universe, my thoughts and actions are driven by the configuration of matter, energy and physics in my body. But all of that is me.
sickblastoise 2y ago
Imagine you were to pause and take an exact carbon copy of the exact physical state of the universe in the current moment. When you press play in both universes, both universes will play out the exact same way into the end of time, and you would never be able to tell the two apart. That is determinism. If the universe were not deterministic, for reasons like non-deterministic physics, souls existing, etc. you would potentially see difference between the two as they played out separately. Another way to think about determinism vs non-determinism is that if something is deterministic, then if you have perfect information about it, you can predict it’s future states exactly. On the flip side, if something is non deterministic, no matter how much information you gather about it, you will never be able to exactly predict its future states (only probabilistically). Einstein is not so subtly telling us “god doesn’t play dice”, that there are no random physical properties of the universe, and that magic (like souls) doesn’t exist, in his opinion. Free will means we have a choice in what we do next, but if we go and examine your carbon copy in the other universe you will see they did all of the same things you did. Furthermore if we were granted perfect information about the universe and had a good enough gpu, we could from the physical principles of the universe predict the future state of everything in the universe until the end of time, including all of your future choices, hence no free will. My thoughts are that people are mixing up the human concept of free will — freedom to make decisions based on how you feel and what you know - with determinism, that the first state of all matter in the universe determined all future states of the universe, and that these are inevitable. The fallacy is that free will in the sense of determinism is only important to human decision making if we have perfect information about the current state of the universe, which we don’t - so until we do, we have to keep guessing what happens next.

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CamperBob2 2y ago

Not the OP but one thing I find interesting about free will is that one of the things you can do with it is to choose to give it up, such as by delegating a decision to either a random process or one that you have no prior knowledge or control over. The act of flipping a coin to decide whether to drive to work or take the bus might end up altering the course of your life to an extent that no other decision you make that day will. Given how often we delegate whatever free will we have, intentionally or otherwise, it's easy to conclude (or at least suspect) that whether or not it exists in the first place simply isn't an interesting or important question. Sure, we might have free will, but if we do it's almost overwhelmed by noise.

slibhb 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism As far as Sapolsky goes, it's fine to argue that free will is an illusion. But it doesn't follow that we should stop believing in it. Actually, belief in free will is adaptive. Concepts that follow from free will such as punishment, guilt, blame, etc are extremely effective at promoting pro-social behavior and it's not clear how they could be replaced.

The_Colonel 2y ago

Not the op, but I will give it a shot. Free will relates to identity - there needs to be someone exercising the free will. So, what am I? I identify as the whole physical system of my body and especially my brain. The neurons, their connections, the atoms, the laws governing the interactions. I think people rejecting free will are considering physics to be some kind of external harness, constraint on themselves. But in my view, physics permeates my body. There's no myself without the physics (be it deterministic or not), it's an inseparable part of my system, ergo myself. In a deterministic universe, my thoughts and actions are driven by the configuration of matter, energy and physics in my body. But all of that is me.

sickblastoise 2y ago

Imagine you were to pause and take an exact carbon copy of the exact physical state of the universe in the current moment. When you press play in both universes, both universes will play out the exact same way into the end of time, and you would never be able to tell the two apart. That is determinism. If the universe were not deterministic, for reasons like non-deterministic physics, souls existing, etc. you would potentially see difference between the two as they played out separately. Another way to think about determinism vs non-determinism is that if something is deterministic, then if you have perfect information about it, you can predict it’s future states exactly. On the flip side, if something is non deterministic, no matter how much information you gather about it, you will never be able to exactly predict its future states (only probabilistically). Einstein is not so subtly telling us “god doesn’t play dice”, that there are no random physical properties of the universe, and that magic (like souls) doesn’t exist, in his opinion. Free will means we have a choice in what we do next, but if we go and examine your carbon copy in the other universe you will see they did all of the same things you did. Furthermore if we were granted perfect information about the universe and had a good enough gpu, we could from the physical principles of the universe predict the future state of everything in the universe until the end of time, including all of your future choices, hence no free will. My thoughts are that people are mixing up the human concept of free will — freedom to make decisions based on how you feel and what you know - with determinism, that the first state of all matter in the universe determined all future states of the universe, and that these are inevitable. The fallacy is that free will in the sense of determinism is only important to human decision making if we have perfect information about the current state of the universe, which we don’t - so until we do, we have to keep guessing what happens next.