3 ms·

Ask HN: Is my argument for the existence of free will correct?

• blacksqr 12y ago
  Please demonstrate the existence of subjective experience.
  • amichail 12y ago
    You are having one right now. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
  • duncan_bayne 12y ago
    You just did.
• PaulHoule 12y ago
  I think practically you are a nonintegrable and thus unpredictable process so your actions are not determined by your inputs thus you have free will.
  • lutusp 12y ago
    That's an example of an argument that assumes what it should be proving, the original meaning of the expression "begging the question." The question at the center of free will is whether there are any deliberate, choice-driven elements in human behavior that also and coincidentally defy advance prediction. Your argument is that the presence of unpredictable elements proves the existence of unpredictable elements. It's also a tautology. And finally, unpredictability doesn't prove free will, it only proves the existence of unpredictability. Free will would be a deliberate steering of the process toward some goal, something that true randomness contradicts.
• lutusp 12y ago
  > The argument is that subjective experience would not have evolved without free will. That's not an argument, it's an assertion. By its nature, subjective experience can't be used as an argument, because it's not accessible to the other parties to the debate. This is how subjective experience is defined. > If there's no free will, then an animal with subjective experience would not have an evolutionary benefit over one without it. This is easily refuted by examples in which computer programs, neither conscious nor possessing free will, without any behavioral latitude whatever, in a rigidly defined computer environment with no random or unpredictable elements at all, evolve according to the usual rules of natural selection. Therefore evolution and the existence of natural selection cannot be used to argue in favor of free will. > Is my argument for the existence of free will correct? It's not only not correct, it's not, strictly speaking, an argument. This is not to say there is no such thing as free will. We just don't know. The evidence for an argument in a debate must be accessible to all participants in the same way. This is not to say they will agree with the premise, but they will all experience the evidence in the same way before drawing their own conclusions.
• csmdev 12y ago
  There is no free will. You can do what you will, but you cannot will what you will. It all comes automatically and you blindly follow it without any real control. And if we think of the universe as a whole, your subjective perspective is like a worker thread in a computer program. You start with some specific parameters and evolve based on them. And at the same time there are multiple threads doing the same thing, but they have different parameters and a different evolution. Your will boils down to simple programming. You make decisions based on your anatomy and life experience. Input parameters and program evolution (if/else mostly). When you're hungry your brain already decided if it needs glucose, protein or something else. Your will allows you only to satisfy the hunger or not. And that decision is made based on past experiences. What you ate and liked, what you didn't like, the fact that you decided at some point to lose weight, or to gain weight. A simple decision to eat a hamburger is powered by your entire life so far. But if you really want something interesting to think about and you're a true hacker, look at the universe as a whole. At any point inside it matter either exists or it doesn't. Do you know any other binary-based ecosystem which contains different arrangements of data that evolve in time and space?