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Comment by lbrandy | Hacker News Reader

Here's my attempt at a tldr.

1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high.

2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room for non-physicalist explanations of consciousness (or, I suppose, for other dualist ideas like a soul) because there is no mechanism for them to effect change in the physical world.

3. Anyone who wants a non-physicalist approach to consciousness must either claim they can violate the laws of physics in our brains, or cannot affect the physical world.

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> Anyone who wants a non-physicalist approach to consciousness must either claim they can violate the laws of physics in our brains, or cannot affect the physical world.

There is a strand in (an obscure corner of) Buddhism that maintains that:

- The fundamental "substance" in the Universe is awareness.

- Awareness creates the body and the sense organs.

- Awareness projects the external world through the sense organs.

In this model, there is no claim that consciousness violates "the laws of physics". It just disputes that the physical world is fundamental. And this model certainly doesn't ban consciousness from affecting the physical world (that it created).

I don't believe for a moment that this model was meant to explain things, like a scientific explanation; it's meant to present a "view" (a way of looking at experience) that is helpful to meditators. It's very much the opposite of the instinctive way of interpreting experience. In part, it's meant to disrupt pre-conceived notions about experience - so it's also meant as a challenge.

How does free will play into this? If the world is run by all physical laws, then I had no choice typing this out and submitting it, rather then closing the tab right now.

My "decision" isn't real.

If it is an actual conscious choice, that was not calculatable by the exact state prior, then consciousness is fundamental.

One possibility is that from an omniscient perspective, free will is indeed meaningless. But then again it can be argued that everything would be meaningless from an omniscient perspective: time, space, matter, energy, freedom, love, whatever

That is unless there is some sort of actual absolute meaning to the universe, which is a very boring and treacherous line of reasoning that i won't entertain here

However he existence of an omniscient entity would completely break physics as we know it so any physicalist/rationalist approch to understanding the universe can fairly safely rule it out

Free will may exist as a result of the unknown factors of human consciousness, their actions and consequences and their relations to the physicial world.

Personally I find that thought quite pleasant, because it means that free will does exist from a human perspective, and I happen to posess one of those.

You had the choice because all the processes that determine your actions happened in your brain, which is a part of you: you are not a puppet controlled from outside.

What is your conception of free will? Is it just "randomness"?

If your actions are not determined by your thoughts and desires .. then they would just be completely random. How is that "free" will?

My conclusion after a good amount of reading and thinking on this:

Free will, defined as autonomous decision-making partially influenced/affected by the external environment, does exist.

Now 'autonomous' = determined by the agent, i.e. the decision to have pizza today is determined by something in you, not fully determined externally, but that something is likely not your conscious experience.

In that sense, free will does not exist.

But that does *not* mean that everything you do is predictable because P!=NP. Even God, if s/he exists, does not yet know what you will do tomorrow, s/he's waiting to find out.

So: you are not free, but you are not bound to something either.

A decision is a situation in which you did one thing but could have imagined doing something else. It is a necessary concept due to human uncertainty about what will happen in the world -- including our own behavior.

We will never be able to perfectly calculate the causal chains of the universe before they unfold, so we operate in a world of uncertain chances and maybes.

I recommend reading "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" by Daniel Dennett to get a better handle on what the term "free will" might actually mean.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1z-pVZiRjac

We are still not sure, but probably your decisions aren't real.

It depends what you mean by free will. Non-philosphers almost always mean "libertarian" free will when they say that, and yes, this same argument also basically outlaws libertarian free will as well. There is no physical mechanism by which you can alter your brain physics to "choose" things.

Carroll and others have a compatibilist notion of free will which is a more subtle concept that I'm not sure I'm qualified to actually explain.

I remember once upon a time being pretty interested in understanding "what is consciousness". The more I have learned about neuroscience, the more plausible it seems that what we know as subjective experience is just an emergent behavior of this super complex lump of jelly in our heads. If you look at what the thalamus does, it seems like consciousness might even just basically be the function of that brain region.

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