Hacker News Reader

Your claims are no more convincing than the article.

You're entirely free to hold your beliefs about this, of course (or are you? perhaps they're predetermined), but don't imagine they're somehow more valid than the alternatives.

They aren't predetermined, free will is not the opposite of determinism.

You cannot have process interacting with itself in non-random and non-deterministic way. It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...

> It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...

But you can have a process interacting with itself in a nonlinear way, and the outcome of those types of processes are difficult to predict.

Even if you write a small non linear program, with each instruction completely simple and clear, it's still very difficult to predict the outcome without running the program.

Now imagine that at a scale ten or twenty orders of magnitude higher.

But then free will requires you to mentally conceptualise future events like "I want to go to cafe" and then translate them into interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!

So freely chosen decision is actually a translation of human-level concepts to non-linear highly complex set of neurons/atoms/particles and it is working flawlessly?

Wow!

Yeah, free will is perhaps our sensed experience of the process you describe (the interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!)

So not free, then.

They're convincing to me. I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical process that was always going to happen in that particular way. A ball doesn't choose to bounce when it is dropped on the ground.

> I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical process

Who says it's a physical process to begin with? That's an assertion, not a proof.

More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)

> More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)

Very cute if unoriginal, someone says that anytime I bring up this argument, and the answer is very simple, of course I didnt!

A 'decision' is a physical process, as in 'physics' physical, if something is not physical, then it is magic, and I dont believe (believe being used in the abstract sense of course) in magic.

> if something is not physical, then it is magic

Again you are simply asserting it is so. I'll grant you it's a very popular assertion, but you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.

1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.

The concept has utility.

2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.

edited: To add point #2

> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.

The concept has utility.

You must understand, this is the most horrifying part! People are sentenced to prisons, torture, and death for "making bad/evil decisions". I'm not saying we should let murderers be murderers, but what I am saying is we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison. If we are operating on this whole free-will notion, then that will never happen.

> 2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.

Define emergent in this case, I dont know of any truly emergent behavior that violates the rules of what caused it, you could say 'organic life' was an emergent behavior, but it still obeys physics.

>you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.

I think if we can't get passed an agreement that magic isnt real, that may be a reasonable time to end the discussion.

In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.

I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.

(Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word: as if people disagreeing with you are just children who believe in silly things.)

> In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.

I don't think anyone here believes they have everything figured out.

> I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.

I think we're slowly getting better over time, as our collective knowledge compounds as time goes.

> Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word

You made a claim that a 'choice/decision' is not necessarily a physical process, I don't know how else I should interpret that.

> we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison

That's where hard determinism fails it, because all it can do is to make a very broad statement that our behaviour was predetermined, without going into the details.

Really we can't make "down to the hardware" fixes or even do a post hoc analysis of the cause of behaviour, so it's really useless as a theory, it has no predictive power.

> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.

> The concept has utility.

This is a thinly veiled argument from consequences. You're not the only one to do this, I see this from many people arguing in favor of free will.

Edit: I would also question the utility of the concept compared to the alternative. Show me some hard numbers for what happens in a society constructed around the lack of a metaphysical free will, and then I may reconsider. (I suspect that this sort of society hasn't existed and may never exist, because free will is such a persistent illusion that it may as well be a phantom limb for most people. We're probably hardwired for it at some level, like the incessant drive for reproduction that most people have.)

> Very cute if unoriginal, someone says that anytime I bring up this argument...

And every time someone brings up free will, someone will shout hard determinism from a pulpit like they are the final authority on the matter.

>And every time someone brings up free will, someone will shout hard determinism from a pulpit like they are the final authority on the matter.

The same could easily be said on the reverse, but that's the whole point of a discussion isnt it?

And I dont think anyone considers themselves the final authority, the idea of the falsity of freewill has been around for quite some time.

Proving free will exists is like proving red exists. You can point to the wavelength (or the brain signals) and declare “that is red” (or “that is the brain signature of a person deciding”) but neither of these conveys in any way the actual subjective experience of perceiving red or making decisions. Note that even if you were to, say, take a colorblind person and force them to see red by directly stimulating the relevant portion of their brain, that STILL does not neatly encompass everything there is to know about “seeing red.”

Also, what does a total lack of free will mean for the criminal justice system, which operates on the unspoken assumption that behavior is at least in part willful?

So it boils down always to moral choices - hence the whole problem is basically a problem of moral systems.

Why do you build wind barriers? Same reason for prisons - to prevent future things. As best as you can. Now is that a deterministic, chaotic, stochastic or purely random but stable process - do we care that much?

Should the fact that you want to punish/reward influence how you interpret the universe and logic?

Human centric always free will is...

> what does a total lack of free will mean for the criminal justice system

nothing, the goal of justice system is to prevent repetition of the crime, and it works the same whether the behavior was willful or not.

You assert that people simply define the term in a way that allows them to claim it exists, but then you simply define it in a way that allows you claim it doesn't exist. Wouldn't the obvious conclusion be that there is a semantic disagreement, rather than "no, you're wrong and I'm right"? Your post seems very dissonant to me.

> People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms.

It's a matter of denotative vs. connotative definitions. Free will proponents are saying, "hey that thing we all do when we make a choice that rocks can't do, that's free will", and you're saying "free will has such and such properties, so whether we have it depends on whether our choices have these properties".

I'd argue that most people reason denotatively, in which case merely pointing out the thing we're trying to define suffices as an existence proof. What remains is defining what it is, logically.

> 1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case

It sure does!

> The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.

Agreed. I don't see why this poses any difficulty. The behaviour of the process is largely governed by free will, just like a process on your computer will often sort lists.

> If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not.

Sure, via suicide.

Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide, not deliberate and not think...or you do accept that some thoughts cannot be _prethought_ by you and they come to you for you to control.

So why control _those_ thoughts? Why deliberate in _that particular way_?

> Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide

It is the answer to the problem as stated. Of course, if you move the goalposts to require two properties that are logically inconsistent, then sure, no conception of free will would qualify. I'm not sure why I should find that compelling.

Finally, your focus on "control" is telling of particular assumptions that free will must have certain properties (a connotative definition). Consider whether you are simply mistaken that these properties are necessary.

As I said, there is a clear distinction between the behaviour of people and inanimate matter. There is a lot of latitude there for a process that we would recognize as free will.