Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

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It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'.

Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options:

    1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos
    2) <strike> Free will and alternative options exist</strike>
    3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles.

And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on the razors' edge where 1 and 3 intersect, science is as yet undecided if 1 or 3, but our macro scale world appears to be 3.

'I' really 'want' to be convinced of 2, but it's something 'I' lost a long time ago, anyone care to convince me? These days 'I' find some comfort in 1. If it 'turns' out to be 3 'I'll' 'be' very sad indeed :(

Long story short: There's nothing to chose, either it's all been decided already, and your 'thoughts' are nothing but atoms and other things rattling around, generating the illusion of your conciousness, or there's only chaos and we're (also) never 'making' any choices, they are all just rolls of the dice.

I recall studying free will in Intro Philosophy class, and Hobart [1] had a good argument that free will vs. determinism was a false dichotomy stemming from a misunderstanding of what it means to "choose" something.

His argument, paraphrased for the layman (he wrote in fairly impenetrable terms) was basically:

Say that we do have a deterministic world, where human action is the result of each human being continually processing stimuli, rationally (or emotionally) evaluating it, and then deciding on a course of action. The meaning of "choice" is this process, and the meaning of "self" is all the hidden machinery that lets us go from a stimulus to a course of action. People who believe free will and determinism are incompatible are implicitly positing that there's some entity outside of this process of weighing alternatives and choosing one, but there is no evidence for such an entity and no need to invent one. Rather, our common-sense notions of choice are completely compatible with someone having received a bunch of sensory inputs and then used the internal circuitry of their brain to decide on a course of action, and our common-sense notions of self are compatible with different people having different dispensations to make certain choices under various circumstances. And we can make moral judgments based on our evaluation of whether the choices another makes will be helpful or harmful to our interests.

Interestingly (and this is me adding to the theory after 15 years of life experience), this perspective seems to mirror psychological development. I've found that as I've gotten older, I tend to settle into my own skin. When I was young, it was like I'd frequently "pop out" of my self and my actions and be like "who is this person?" As I've gotten older, it's more like "Yeah, I'm me, and I make the best choices I can with the information available to me, and ultimately I'm responsible for the consequences even if they don't work out." It's like there's less of a divide between that automatic stimulus -> processing -> response cycle and my objective perception of my life.

[1] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mnat/~ball0888/oxfordopen/hoba...

I've always found the notion of compatibilism untenable as the problem is deeper than 'the hidden machinery that is in the process of weighing alternatives'.

The problem to me is that that machinery does not exist. It's not there, how can something (anything at all in them most extreme sense, a human, a 'system', an AI an animal the hidden machinery in the human brain, a bunch of particles or whatever) 'choose' when there's no alternatives? Real hard predeterminism implies that there's nothing to chose at all. Doesn't the theory of conservation of information tell us that information is never created or lost, so that on a grand scale, basically nothing is happening at all? All information that existed at the big bang is still there, and always will be. There's no place for hidden machinery to make more, or make choices. The 'result' of that choice must have existed/been known before, because otherwise information would have been created at that magical 'choosing' moment.

Eh, in one sense you don't choose who you are or what you really value deep down, but it is fully up you how you end up expressing that identity in terms of the things you do during your lifetime.

Sure, you can then say that if all your thought processes are deterministic (modulo some inherent randomness), then even the outer stuff isn't really choice, is it? But the fact is, from your perspective the way your life will unfold is completely unknowable to you. And so, you get to experience the unfolding of your life and the "choices" inherent in that.

Freedom means the freedom to express who you are[1], right? Whether they are philosophically "real" choices or not is irrelevant. Have you ever felt the satisfaction of building something?

[1] Some people might call it the freedom to ~decide~ who you are, but one could say the difference is just a matter of perspective, depending on how much you see determinism playing into it.

On the contrary dude, I don't think you've gone deep enough. To dismiss the parent comment on some vague existential bemusement seems near insidious in intent.

At the risk of derailing this conversation into semi-unrelated philosophical conversations: Why is it you would prefer 2 to 3?

> vague existential bemusement

We'll that is why I asked people to talk me out of it ;)

Most people that I meet either assume 2 from the get go, reasonable because that's how everything appears to us at first glance.

3 Basically means we don't even exist, in the sense that you can't have agency/identity/whatever you want to pinpoint as 'you' if everything is predetermined. The closes analogy to 'real' (this is always a problem when discussing such things) people in our world is the experience a film character 'has' when it's played (none, it's not an agent).

Basically from 3 follows that, however counter-intuitive it seems to 3-type-people, you have no agency, no thoughts, no freedom, no choice I'd argue that you don't even exist or alternitively that you have always existed. Can you even say that causality exists if every location of every particle/wave/force/field/w\e has already been predetermined? AFAIK science does not really know if this is the case, and the only science I understand is the layman's tl/dr. But the general consensus, again AFIAK, seems to be: do more experiments, we're unsure as of yet.

I only know that we live in the macro world, and in the macro world the case for predeterminism is pretty darn strong.

I'd prefer 2 over 3, because 2 is the only place where a possibility exists for ethics and/or freedom. I can't be ethical if I can't 'do' anything. I can't 'do' anything if 'I' don't even exist (which I'd argue is the case in 3).

See other replies to your parent comment for other ways of phrasing that free will as it relates to ethics is generally deemed a moot consideration. That is, we can't predict the future from our perspective of reality (computationally prohibitive, non-deterministic, etc), so what the future will be can’t be taken into consideration for decisions of the present.

To me, your concern seems more related to the meaning of life rather than the presence of free will though?

Unfortunately, I fear that’s may be too broad a subject to fruitfully assess on a medium such as this forum..

At the least, I’d argue ‘you’ existing is the only thing you can really be sure of. “I think, therefore I am”. It’s harder to tell if others exist, and there are several branches of philosophy that outright conject that nobody else other than yourself does exist. EG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

If we do not have free will, it would not be a tragedy. Ethics would still exist, and the importance of thinking about right and wrong would not be diminished.

Thinking about what is ethical often precedes acting ethically, because it puts your brain in a good mindset. Since we have good reasons to improve the world, we have good reasons to act ethically, and thus we've good reason to think about ethics. In this way, failing to consider ethics is a form of foolishness, because letting the world go to hell is a foolish thing to do.

This isn't a direct answer to your concern, but it might reduce how important free will is to you. If you're interested on the account I just summarized, see Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Vol 1 Section 38: "The Freedom that Morality Requires" (or just reply and I'll give my best attempt at answering).

1 and 3 can also be the same depending on what time actually turns out to be. It's not like there was someone who did the predetermination after all.

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