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Comment by nota_bene | Hacker News Reader

There is no need for these experiments: There is no free will, and you can understand this by simply applying pure logic/rational thinking:

When you're born (the "1st second" of your life) you're given 2 variables: (1) Your genome and (2) the environment you're born into. You have absolutely no control whatsoever over these 2 variables (with their infinite number of sub-variables they "contain"). And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables: And this includes your brain that you will use to make the infinite number of choices in your life (both consciously, such as "I'm going to buy milk" and subconsciously, such as "firing neuron X at second Y", "moving atom A to location B", etc.).

EDIT: Downvoters - please state why this would be wrong.

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Depends on how you define free will:

1) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surrounding and context, including the physical state of our body and brain

2) Free will is the capacity to act at our own discretion, independent of our current surroundings and context, not including the physical state of our body and brain

Note: In both cases I'm assuming there is no soul, mind beyond the body, etc.

If you define free will as (1), then there is no free will, since any decision will always be subject to the physical state of my body and brain (except, of course, if there's something not physical in play as described in my note).

If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it.

The same could be applied to a state-machine (finite or not): 1) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's current internal states and the external inputs 2) Free will is the capacity of a machine to produce outputs independent of it's external inputs

(1) means no state-machines have free will, (2) means they can have free will.

>If you define free will as (2), then there is free will, since despite the context surrounding you, you can still make decisions independent of it.

How do you come to that? Obviously the state of our current surroundings and past histories determines the state of our brain and body (down to the firing of the very last neuron).

> Obviously the state of our current surroundings and past histories determines the state of our brain and body (down to the firing of the very last neuron).

That's why I only said "current surrounding and context", I didn't include past histories.

Look at the machine-state example, it makes things more clear.

The issue with (2) is that the physical state of our body and brain is a function of all past and current surroundings and context (including our genome). Which means it can never be independent, but is instead fully defined.

Exactly, so it all depends on how you define free will.

"And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables"

That's an opinion sprouting from a view on the world that states free will doesn't exist. It may be true, but goes counter to many people's intuition that there is a free will.

A good argument would explain how, from the assumption of 'no free will', we can arrive at such things as 'property' and 'crime'. Why would societies sprout up in which people get imprisoned for using stuff that they didn't make themselves, or that they didn't get permission to use for from those who made it?

My argument would be that this is just evolution: local optimization of the non-physical world, in the same way evolution gave us all kind of complex physical structures. On the one hand, I can't see much fault in that, but on the other, giving up the idea of free will means reintroducing predestination, accepting that no criminal can be blamed for their crimes, no Isaac Newton or Olympic champion can be praised for their accomplishments, that capital punishment and war are just things that happen, etc, and even accepting that there is no such thing as 'me'.

So, yes, if physics as we know it is correct, logically, I think you are right, but emotionally, I don't believe it. That might have to mean that somewhere in our bodies there is a part that can bend the laws of quantum physics as we know them.

This world view is a very 19th century clockwork universe one: if we know all the initial conditions in sufficient detail, we can predict the outcome. There are two problems with this: at a fundamental level, quantum mechanics says you can't know the initial conditions with infinite precision[0]. Second, even at a classical physics level non-linear systems with very similar starting points can have very different final states. As a practical matter that means even if the rules are deterministic, you cannot predict with 100% accuracy what the outcome will be.

So we have a complex non-linear system (your genes) and a very very complex non-linear system (the environment) that make a very complex non-linear system (your brain). Because we have all of these complex non-linear system interacting together, we cannot determine what will happen in any practical sense. We can probably make some observations that will generally hold about some decisions a human brain will make (e.g. it's been a few hours, it will be hungry and decide to eat), but these are more probabilistic rather than 100% concrete deterministic rules.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

This assumes that you were capable of conscious decision making, or had free will, at birth. The assumption is the problem, I think. I would think that "free will" is developed, not de facto available from birth. In fact, I think free will in a baby could be a pretty bad evolutionary disadvantage, whereas it would be a great advantage for an adult.

> I would think that "free will" is developed

If you see life as a 4-dimensional network of variables linked through "cause and effect", then there is no place for a "free" variable which could introduce free will (or its development). Unless you introduce invented concepts such as "soul" or "god", etc., which means that you quit the rational discussion altogether.

Even if your simplified argument were correct, you still could not conclude that there is no free will.

We all have the ability to act at our own discretion. Does it really matter if it is within a deterministic framework or not?

Where you're correct is: We can never prove the absence of free will, because we can never understand then entirety of our environment (how the universe "really works", etc.). But when you take what we know today and apply rational thinking, it certainly looks like there is no free will.

> We all have the ability to act at our own discretion.

That is exactly what my argument would deny. There seems to be not even an inch of free will.

> Does it really matter

100% percent yes, for example: The absence of free will forces us to stop judging people, simply because the concept of "guilt" (on the negative side) and the concept of "merit" (on the positive side) are proven to be entirely baseless. If we applied this to our culture, we'd live in a totally different world.

Historical guilt and merit still exist in the absence of free will, and those are the important parts that allow us defect against defectors, etc.

> Historical guilt and merit still exist in the absence of free will

Historical guilt and merit would simply be the sum of all guilt and merit of a society, meaning actually the sum of a lot of nothing...

I didn't mean to say anything about collective guilt or merit, but apparently I didn't communicate well; sorry.

In iterated PD competitions, it's clear that none of the programs involved have free will, but punishing defections is still an important part of either a strategy for getting ahead, or a strategy for reducing defections. That is, the programs still have to keep track of the guilt or merit of their peers in order to make decisions about how to react to past cooperation or defection. Regardless of the moral responsibility of humans for their actions, they still have a responsibility in historical fact.

>100% percent yes, for example: The absence of free will forces us to stop judging people, simply because the concept of "guilt" (on the negative side) and the concept of "merit" (on the positive side) are proven to be entirely baseless. If we applied this to our culture, we'd live in a totally different world.

Not really, it doesn't matter. If there's no "free will", then we have no say on whether we judge people or not, not even as to whether we believe in free will or no.

Your answer works accidentally on two conflicting levels, assuming that if we discovered that we have no free will we'd still have free will to act on a certain way upon it (not to mention that the discovery itself wouldn't be on our own free will).

> if we discovered that we have no free will we'd still have free will to act on a certain way upon it

No because we'd actually act upon it because of purely logical chains (1) of cause and effect, not free will.

(1) Or rather "networks" (of cause end effect) that work through all of the (currently 4) dimensions.

>No because we'd actually act upon it because of purely logical chains (1) of cause and effect, not free will

First of all, the discovery itself wouldn't be an action of "free will".

Second, who said we can act on "purely logical chains of cause and effect" when there's no free will? Whether we act on those chains or not will already be predetermined by the "no free will" mechanism determining our actions.

If anything, as societies we act pretty illogical a lot of the time (heck, even most), for stuff scientifically known to be BS.

All correct, except:

> as societies we act pretty illogical

It just looks that way on the surface. Below the surface, you can track all decisions back to their causes (down to "the smallest" scope).

> The absence of free will forces us to stop judging people..

Why would that be?

If A harms B, then your argument is that B has no right to retaliate it, because, that A should harm B was inevitable, and was totally out of the control of A.

But my argument is that just like A's harming B was inevitable, so is B's judgement of A and the further retaliation in response to the A's action..Inevitable.

In other words, the world should just go on as it is, even in the total absence of free will. What is important, I think, like many other things, is the 'appearance' of having free will. Because without that, all life looses it's meaning.

> If A harms B, then your argument is that B has no right to retaliate it

Yes and no. Yes, because no judgment allowed means no punishment allowed. But: the correct answer to A's action would be a sanction against A, in the sense that it would prevent A from harming again in the future. The wrong answers are: judgment, retaliation, punishment, revenge.

> In other words, the world should just go on as it is

It will. And it's also exactly what's happening here.

> What is important, I think, like many other things, is the 'appearance' of having free will. Because without that, all life looses it's meaning.

Not to worry, we'll always have this appearance, because causes and effects work on every macro and micro level. No system of sensors will ever be able to measure all variable, no model will ever be able to include all variables and no computer will ever be powerful enough to model everything. So, the magic remains.

I think you both essentially agree. The sentence you quoted makes no sense in a world without free will but that is probably just an unintentional small mistake by the author because we are so used to assuming we have free will in our everyday life even if we actually believe we don't. The sentence just tries to say what we should do (assuming we had the free will to do so) if we discovered that there is no free will in our universe (which of course is contradictory). You could (probably) get rid of the contradiction if you understand the sentence as someone in a universe with free will talking about making changes to a universe without free will from the outside, like a god fixing an issue in one of his universes to make it more consistent.

Then it really does not matter.

If everything we do is predetermined from the instant of our conception — actually much further back than that since all events leading up to one's conception were also predetermined — then we are all going to still do what we do, which includes judging others by their actions. If some choose not to apply guilt or blame to others, well, then that was also in the cards.

If there is some variable or factor outside our measurable environment that provides for truly free will, then it does make sense for people to be judged based on their actions and for guilt and blame to be applied in appropriate cases.

Applied more generally, if there is no free will then whether an individual believes there is free will does not matter; the deterministic environment decides that matter. If there is free will, then there is a distinct advantage to understanding and believing that fact. So, assuming there is free will has a neutral and upside state, while buying into determinism has a neutral and downside state. Isn't the rational and safe position to just assume there is free will?

> If some choose not to apply guilt or blame to others, well, then that was also in the cards.

Correct. Like this discussion and everything logically was also "in the cards". So, yes, in a sense "it does not matter", while it still does.

> If there is free will, then there is a distinct advantage to understanding and believing that fact.

The issue is that you see an "advantage" in free will. I suppose you mean that free will would make you more powerful because you would not believe that you "can't change things", etc. This belief however is false. It's not logical. Even if we understand that there is no free will, we are still going to make "our own decisions" based on all the variables in our lives. The vastness of the variables in our networks is such that it can never be measured and modeled entirely. It is simply too complex for us to understand, which means that it will never feel like a network of causes and effects. So our choices will always feel like our own, and that is good enough for us, it seems. For example, I'm still going to try to create useful products and believe I can become successful, because that's what motivates me, that's part of my "variables".

The advantage is that one does not come to the conclusion that there's no point in assigning guilt/blame and merit to an individual's actions.

At the very least there's no harm in assuming free will and it is a much less depressing outlook on life and the nature of existence.

The determinism kind of removes the "free" from free will. Determinism means that, if someone else knows your internal state, they can predict, or worse, manipulate your free will. People are naturally extremely personal and possessive about their free will, and these experiments are "stealing" it away. That's why the knee jerk reaction to these experiments is always extremely negative.

In 2015 this should be considered a no-brainer, i'm baffled at the blatantly unscientific responses in almost all the comments in these threads.

Sigh. Arm chair philosophy at its worst.

What's worst is when people leave worthless comments like these.

You are right that it was an unnecessary comment, but declaring that "There is no need for these experiments" is a little armchairy. This is a debate that has been going on for a long time and a version which takes place on hacker news would be more useful if it wasn't immediately polarized.

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