Comment by Bodell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bodell | Hacker News Reader

"Why am I telling you this? Because I think that people who do not understand that free will is an illusion underestimate how much their decisions are influenced by the information they are exposed to."

I find this sort of ultra deterministic take on things renders articles like these pointless. I mean, what are we supposed to do now, 'choose' to expose ourselves to different information? Isn't too late, in a way before we were ever born kind of way? Wouldn't our "underestimating" be an imperative beyond reproach. Not to mention that free-will is not a factor in our being influenced by information. This is true in both cases, free-will and not.

Personally, I'm a non-compatibilist but believe the jury is still out on determinism. Despite having lots of evidence in support of it, I think there is still a lot of room for conformation bias, simply because the scope of such claims is so large. Overall, it takes a lot of hubris to make the claims stated in this article.

Also as a sort of pseudo-biological question: What would be the purpose be of evolving an illusion of free-will?

> what are we supposed to do now, 'choose' to expose ourselves to different information?

Yes? If there is no free will just input and output, the input of this article might change your internal state such that you as a machine process subsequent input differently. Free will or not does not change this. A lack of free will doesn't me we just stop even trying to change how people behave.

Cars are deterministic machines but we still get oil changes and repairs.

EDIT: Or to put it differently, a lack of free will does not mean a lack of internal state. But it might mean that we should pay more attention to that internal state and what we do with it.

But if we don’t have free will, how can we choose to pay more attention?

Simple, you just choose to as nothing stops you from doing so except yourself. The lack of free will doesn't stop you from doing anything or being anything you want. What you want (ie, will) may or may not be predetermined, but it feels remarkably like it isn't, and for all intents and purposes of living, it isn't predetermined.

If free will doesn't exist, so what? It still doesn't change anything when it comes to living day to day. Perhaps the only thing it would impact is ethics and morality, but even then, it's a far stretch to say you don't have a choice in doing the "wrong thing" and the "right thing" because you obviously do. The thing it might teach us, is that it's even more important to make sure we teach "the right thing" to our children and students. To make sure we predispose them to doing the "right thing" when a decision is presented, and not the "wrong thing." Shouldn't we be doing that anyway?

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