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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Because free will is supported by some pretty overwhelming evidence. Every human who has ever lived has had the experience of making a free choice. That experience is every bit as real as the experience of, say, seeing the moon. If you're going to seriously entertain the possibility that there is no free will then you need to be ready to entertain with equal seriousness that the moon does not exist because both are supported by similar bodies of evidence.

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That seems more like evidence that humans believe they have free will than evidence that they actually have it.

What really seems a mirage to me is mistaking free will for unpredictability. That's like saying that your mind needs to be outside the physical world ("a soul") to make "real decisions", which is absurd.

Yes, it is outrageous to claim free will is an illusion. As you point out, it contradicts a huge volume of evidence (our perception). However, a significant proportion of physicists believe free will is an illusion. What possibly could have persuaded such a large number of Earth's greatest skeptics?

They can't see the trees from the wood.

The mind consists of different parts. Imagine the act of choosing to eat a strawberry ice cream or a chocolate ice cream. You happen to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. If you could analyze the path electrons follow inside your brain, you could trace, even predict that you will choose chocolate ice cream.

Does it mean that you aren't free? I don't think so.

You might say that you aren't free to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. I'm not convinced either. There were foods I disliked (actually most of them) that I chose to get used to, and finally came to appreciate. So I can make myself freer.

For minor dayly things I may indulge in neurotic behaviours. But I can make most decisions rationally and usually do that when they're important enough for my life. As I grow older I have more control so I'm actually more predictable. Does it means that I'm less free now?

Sure, you are free, but that you is precisely those electrons in "your" brain, nothing more and nothing less. So all there really is is electrons flowing in predictable ways, predictably choosing chocolate or strawberry.

Where is the "you" in that equation?

You just answered your question. You didn't like the answer and that's the only problem: your problem.

Have you ever written any papers or blog posts regarding your thoughts on free will? I'd love to dig deeper into your perspective. I had assumed you would consider free will to be an illusion.

I do consider free will to be an illusion! But making that argument is far from the slam-dunk that the OP implied, even in the face of quantum mechanics. I don't believe in superdeterminism either. The problem with SD is that it requires all of the information about all future events to reside somewhere now, and there is no known place in the universe where it could be hiding.

See:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...

BTW, I also believe that it is a defensible position to say that the moon does not exist, but again, this is not an easy argument to make. See:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf (or the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc )

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

There's a lot more where that came from if you're interested.

P.S. I love your handle! I see you created this account for the sole purpose of responding this comment. How did you even find this thread? It has been downvoted into oblivion.

Thank you.. I actually stalk you on here so finding this thread was easy. I have this link bookmarked and check it most days. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lisper

I've watched your QM video several times and will do so many more I'm sure in hopes that someday I will understand it.

> I actually stalk you on here

Heh. I wonder if I have any other secret followers on HN.

> in hopes that someday I will understand it.

Where did I lose you? Because that really was intended to be understandable by anyone with a high school algebra background.

The moon does not exist in the exact same sense that free will does not exist. The moon is a concept that only exists in living minds. From an ultimate perspective there is no moon and there is no free will. This is a straightforward consequence of physicalism.

I think free will is fundamentally a bad term/model, independent of the truth value of what everyone means by that label. That said, I think you might be somewhat conflating free will and consciousness; it's perfectly cogent, for instance, that a provably deterministic robot might have subjective experience; and that after executing each pre-determined binary instruction, would be programmed to have a feeling of "I chose that instruction".

I do think those who have a bias for materialism are overly eager to discard fuzzier subjectivities like free will, consciousness, even religious experiences and mystical states. There is obviously a sense in which Harry Potter is not real; but there is also a sense in which Harry Potter is more real than an arbitrary rock or tree, because as an ephemeral memeplex, that being altered planetary culture and created billions of dollars of economic activity. Just because a phenomenon lacks affordances for empirical measurement does mean it is necessarily absent from reality altogether.

For an opposing view to naive materialism which is still firmly nested in rationalist thinking, see Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality": https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...

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