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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

If you don't accept that you have free will, than nothing you write or say has any meaning.

It may be possible to believe you don’t have free will, yet act like you do and to find meaning in life. After all, given how hard it is to even define “free will”, how can we know for sure whether we have it? Now recent research seems to indicate (note the weasel words) that we have less of this “free will” stuff than we like to think. Yet hopefully, if you dig a little deeper, we find something that qualifies as free will, even if we live in a deterministic world. Which we don,t quite; see quantum mechanics. But a free will based on QM seems no better. Who wants a “free will” based on randomness?

Please forgive my ramblings. I may have been reading Daniel Dennett too much, most likely with too little understanding.

If you are capable of acting as if you have free will, that is the proof you have free will.

I certainly would like to think so, but the argument seems circular. These things are so hard to reason about!

To be fair, I too have ended up thinking that free will probably does not exist. Yet everyone else and I will always continue to behave and live as if it existed, that is my consolation.

What someone says or writes could provide information useful for predicting the future. That by definition has meaning.

That's my point - that there is free will, otherwise no prediction has meaning.

That does not follow. Reduction in entropy generation surely has meaning, it has thermodynamic consequences, regardless of any ‘free will’ here or there.

Of course it follows.

It is specious to look at entropic consequences, when you should look at the existent will being exercised to predict those consequences.

You can't predict unless you have the will to perform a prediction. Having such a will to act, is free will.

As another example - You are able to freely exercise your will to comment or not to comment.

‘You can't predict unless you have the will to perform a prediction.’

I’m fairly certain fish can predict the course of future events, to a fairly high degree of accuracy, in relation to seasonal changes in water temp, food density, etc… e.g. spawning salmon

That's comparing apples and oranges. Perhaps, fish have free will, but this conversation is about human beings, where we have the internal laboratory apparatus required for introspection and determination. We can create hypothesis and tests, then inspect results. We are directly able to test, through choice, to prove that we have free will. It is foolish to compare yourself to a fish, though your ability to compare your mentality to that of a fish was your free choice made from your own free will.

That’s a fairly reductive definition of ‘will’ if fish can have it.

It is not clear at all your claim is true in the general case, which is the point. Humans differ from fish not in kind, but only in degree, a few hundred million years of evolutionary divergence as the biologists would have it. Unless of course special factors such as a ‘soul’ are assigned to humans and so on.

You didn't address anything I wrote, instead choosing to create a strawman about the will of fish. I sincerely hope that one day you will grow into realizing that you have free will.

‘You can't predict unless you have the will to perform a prediction.’

That is a general claim that you wrote that I have shown is not correct unless you have an interpretation of the word ‘will’ that is so broad as to render your other statements somewhat meaningless.

In fact you are the one creating the strawman since you dodged addressing the question. I have made no separate claims about my personal free will, or lack thereof.

Thanks for pretending to be the arbitar of truth, but you are the one who responded to my comment (made to another), "If you don't accept that you have free will, than nothing you write or say has any meaning."

It is now obvious you have no point other than wanting to debate words and are being intentionally obtuse. This is not a high school debate class, and I will no longer engage in your foolishness, since you have stated that you are not actually commenting on the subject of the conversation.

Another strawman.

I’m not exactly sure why you think I would care so much about your opinions to be ‘the arbiter of truth’ for any topic. You’ve made claims that are clearly erroneous and I’ve been pointing them out to the passing reader, so they are not waylaid. I won’t comment on the correct interpretation of ‘free will’ since I myself don’t know, and decline to pretend to know.

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