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Comment by Capt-RogerOver | Hacker News Reader

Intuition is subjective. A long time ago it was very un-intuitive that the earth was spherical.

For many people the physical description of the brain does actually have free will.

The point is to change people's intuition about free will, based on all this new information we've discovered in the past century.

"external to our physical reality" There is no need for that.

Is the world inside of "No mans sky" game "external" or "internal" to our physical reality? Soul is something that is run on the hardware of the brain, and thus can have different properties than the physical properties of neurons. It's virtual. No less real for that though.

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> Soul is something that is run on the hardware of the brain

Well no, that's kind of the point. If it's run on the brain's hardware (wetware?) then it's just a physical machine following physical laws, and it's no more or less conscious and has no more or less free will than a computer.

As we understand the 'natural' world, there's no room for free will. Your three sources of data for choosing your state n+1 are your state n, your perceptions of the world around you, and maybe some truly random factor.

> has no more or less free will than a computer

Exactly. The only difference in our modern times is that a brain is orders of magnitude more complex than a computer. None of the scientists who are working on replicating the consciousness think that nowadays computers have comparable consciousness to a human. They all understand that the complexity needs to go up MANY times before we can talk about it. But it's still very clear that a consciousness (with free will and all other aspects of it) is definitely possible to have in a (future, much more advanced) computer.

> Your three sources of data for choosing your state n+1 are your state n, your perceptions of the world around you, and maybe some truly random factor.

That IS free will!

Perhaps you define it in some other way? If you say that "free will" is not possible if the decisions of such entity are based on some past experience (partly)? Well in that case there is no living entity that we know that have your definition of "free will", so what's the point of trying to recreate it? How would it even look?

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