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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

The idea that this experiment would disprove free will seems to rely on thinking that the 'conscious' mind is somehow separate from your physical brain, and free will is the act of your non-physical consciousness telling your body to move.

This seems like nonsense to me. Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts. Of course they are present before you are conscious of your decision to move, because they ARE your consciousness.

Free will does not mean it has to be separate from your physics brain.

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That may be true, but I think our current conception of free will necessitates some sort of nondeterministic mechanism. Our brains, being physical systems, appear to be entirely deterministic.

Why does determinism preclude free will? If I am the physical processes that occur in my brain, then my decisions are rooted in those processes. Even if those processes are deterministic and there was only ever one outcome for my decisions, I can still say that I have free will because it was the very unfolding of those deterministic processes which led me to me to expressing my free will. There is only a clash between free will and determinism when you imagine that your consciousness is in some vague sense separate from the physical world.

What is your definition of free will?

> unfolding of those deterministic processes

Doesn't sound free to me. Is a computer running a program exercising its free will?

I think this actually perfectly shows how nebulous our definition of "free will" is. I sure can't define it, I can only observe what other people seem to think it means. The definition I tend to observe is one that fits in with a dualistic view, of some outside force making decisions for our body.

I am not sure why the 'outside force' is required for free will. What characteristic does that provide that is needed for free will?

If the physical world is non-deterministic, then there is nothing stopping a physical thing from having free will. If an 'outside force' can exert free will, why can't a physical thing?

But that just pushes it back a level. How does the outside force arrive at its decisions? Whatever it is, it has an effect on a body, so it must be measurable; could we perform something like Libet's experiment on it?

Why does a brain being a physical system necessitate it being deterministic?

It seems like the more we learn about quantum mechanics, the more things seem to be probabilistic than deterministic.

The physical brain being probabilistic fits perfectly with the idea of free will.

QM does have some impact on functional biochemistry, but I highly doubt its enough to make the system nondeterministic at any appreciable level. Not to mention, do we truly know that any part of QM is nondeterministic? Perhaps the nondeterministic appearance of QM is just our lack of understanding combined with our limited perspective.

I don't consider randomness as any more "free" than determinism - the concept of "choice" does not appear anywhere on the whole tradeoff spectrum between total randomness and total determinism.

It does emphasise the point that any discussion based on a dichotomy between determinism and free will is fundamentally flawed, as randomness can be a relevant factor, so an anti-determinism argument is not necessarily a pro-free-will argument.

Well, the definition of randomness is basically the inverse of determinable... it is something that is not predictable.

The important characteristic for randomness is that there exists no knowledge that, if possessed, would allow you to predict the outcome. In that sense, free will meets the definition of random.

In other words, not all randomness is free will, but all free will is random.

So yes, anti-determinism does not prove free will, but determinism would disprove it.

I think physical systems are probabilistic rather than deterministic.

I think some _would_ define free will as necessarily separate from physical processes in the brain. Absent the existence some kind of magical soul-like concept, the free will debate in general seems like more of a semantic argument than a real philosophical one.

"Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts." How can you know that? How do you know that your mind isn't somewhere else (in some sense of "where"), and transmitting signals to your brain, which simply acts as a receiver? I don't say this is true, I'm just asking how you would empirically or experimentally distinguish that situation from the notion that your brain makes up your thoughts.

This article seems kind of like noting that a web server returns a response to the caller before logging it.

I would say it is more like “we noticed the data was present in memory before the server started sending its response”

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