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Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

You have touched on some very old knowledge found in Hindu and Buddhist texts.

You do not exist in the same frame of reference as the objects you perceive. You are fixed while the objects perceived are subject to spacetime.

The sense of existence is all that you are. Free will and control over external environment are only apparent. We claim to be the owner of actions and deeds. Claims do not make it so. The senses and intellect are easily fooled, i.e. Dreaming or VR.

I suggest the Upanishads for anyone looking for more. Eknath Easwaran’s version is an excellent read.

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I don't agree that that view is correct. Perceived self and perceived reality are abstractions, but that doesn't mean they aren't real. Also I'm a compatibilist, meaning that I think that free will arises from and within determinism. At any rate, how can you tell anyone "what they are"? That's a subjective categorization; it can be useful or useless, but I don't know how it can be mistaken even in principle.

My consciousness isn't the (only) thing that thinks or makes decisions, but I am more than my consciousness. My consciousness is just a part of the system that I view as my self.

>> that doesn't mean they aren't real.

This feels a little semantic. In buddhism this is partly due to sunyata being translated as "emptiness," which implies "not real" or "doesn't exist." I think most people are on the same page on this instinctively but struggle to find the words because it's not something that can easily be put in words, but in the words of Leonard Cohen "everybody knows"

What is free will? Is there a non-free will?

I mean, I don't think there is non-free will either, but this debate is kind of confused because the widespread concept of philosophical free will, as "choosing one of a set of possible alternative futures to become real", is either self-contradictory or forces some very strange models of selfhood, to the extent of requiring some form of dualism or magical powers of consciousness. In contrast, I just think that people can evaluate imaginary futures and select which seems most pleasing, then act to bring it about, and that this is what free will is in the decisionmaking sense. But I don't think that's the same meaning of will as in this article, which seems to refer more to the ability to act from intention at all.

I think people instinctively feel that more extensive concepts of selfhood "aren't real" more because they don't have the conceptual tools to recognize and describe their presence in their minds. Most people behave as if self and control are real, at least.

For context, I believe that the universe fundamentally consists in a kind of mathematical structure; I don't think there is a reason to postulate a difference between "matter" and "the laws of physics" as a plain mathematical abstraction. As an extension of that, it seems to me that "models" of reality, such as self and the subjective perception of the universe, are embedded, compressed mathematical structures that can be viewed as a simplified abstraction plus an error term. We hold these models precisely because they predict and enable control of the larger system; this is occasionally useful. :) As such, I think they are fundamentally constructed, but not arbitrary - I think that's my major disagreement with the buddhist view.

I just can't square the mechanistic view of the world with the idea that we have any agency. The compatibilists just seemed to define things in a way that it logically checks out. Certainly I FEEL like I have agency, and if I didn't some self-destruct circuit would fire in my head. That's certainly an incentive to prove it.

When I was a child I thought "This is the way the world is, always has been and always will be", then as an adult I think "This system is what governs change, always have and always will,".

If reality is goverened by a mathematical structure, then there are a set of rules where it is no longer a simplified abstraction and there is no error term. Either A) there is a mathematical structure and we will iterate until we find it (or it is fundamentally unknowable, thanks Godel!) or B) our brains are evolved pattern recognizers, and we deem what is repeatable as "useful" and ignore the parts that don't repeat, building a world view based on logic that certainly exists locally but isn't the fundamental fabric of reality. Something like "free will" could only fit into scenario B.

One attempted solution I've heard is the idea that we are all co-creating reality, and what really happens is the mathematically constrained union of all consciousness wills. But if the world was truly a mathematical system, then results can't teeter between alternatives like a ball on the top of a triangle roof. Any idea of free will implies there is SOMETHING that is indeterministic, and as we understand the world at a smaller and smaller level, our definitions of free will just push that indeterminism smaller and smaller. But it remains.

I don't think Buddhism denies the local existence of constraints, just as it doesn't deny the local existence of an orange or banana. But are those constraints truly fundamental or just as impermanent as decaying fruit (but on the scale of aeons instead of days)? "Emptiness" in the Buddhist sense doesn't mean things don't exist, or that things are arbitrary, or there is or isn't free will. To say things are arbitrary implies the existence of meaning. I like to translate the Buddhist "Mu" as "N/A". Disclaimer: there are so many types of Buddhism and my a la carte version of it suffers from the no true scotsman fallacy.

Sorry for saying the same thing in multiple ways. Personally I don't think any of this matters when it comes to doing the right thing day by day, but it's an interesting game to play. Someone reading this is thinking I'm one of the folks ruining Hacker News.

> If reality is goverened by a mathematical structure, then there are a set of rules where it is no longer a simplified abstraction and there is no error term. Either A) there is a mathematical structure and we will iterate until we find it (or it is fundamentally unknowable, thanks Godel!) or B) our brains are evolved pattern recognizers, and we deem what is repeatable as "useful" and ignore the parts that don't repeat, building a world view based on logic that certainly exists locally but isn't the fundamental fabric of reality. Something like "free will" could only fit into scenario B.

I think that agentic, practical free will is entirely compatible with "A", and in fact relies on determinism for its operation. I think the common mistake that people make is that they think that the fact that only one outcome exists in the physical layer means that only one reality can exist in their decisionmaking. But the future worlds you evaluate as part of the process of making a decision are fundamentally a different kind of thing from the physically real world your decision actually plays out in - not in the sense that they're spiritual, or metaphysical, but in the sense that they're fictional constructs.

There is a philosophical difficulty here in that, when you evaluate possible worlds, it must be the case that, because you will only actually make one choice, the yous in all but one of the choices seem like they are being logically inconsistent.¹ That is, all but one of those futures are not just not real, but internally incoherent, in that the you in them made a choice that, as you will soon discover, they did not actually make. To resolve this, it is again important to firmly keep in mind that these worlds are not real, and the you in them is not real, and you can just say "in this imagined world, I made this decision because it is imaginary, and I (on the real level) am using this world to evaluate the outcomes of a choice." So there is no contradiction after all.

In summary: assuming that in reality only one outcome exists, your ability to simulate fictional outcomes to process the consequences of your decisions is unimpeded. That is what deciding is. That's all it ever was.

¹ A surprisingly hard-to-fix failure mode for decision theories goes like this: "Consider the possibility that I decide to do A. Looking at that future world, we can know that the output of my decision theory was A, thus proving that A is the best choice. Therefore, I should do A." Imo the correct fix is making the agent aware that this is a fictional world being evaluated by means of assuming A. So the conclusion that A is the best choice does not follow.

Surely you would agree that brains are a product of the physical world, and thus are subject to mathematical laws (what we see as repeatable chemical and electrical deterministic actions).

If you believe this capacity to imagine before acting is an emergent property of the brain, then even the imagined options are subject to the same mathematical laws. If you imagine a few different outcomes, then you were always going to imagine those outcomes and you were already going to pick the physical action. In this scenario "Free Will" is a non sequitur, things just unfold the way they were always going to unfold - the end is contained within the beginning (if there is such a thing as beginning or end anyway!)

If you believe that the capacity to imagine before acting derives from something outside of the physical world, IE maybe part of it happens in the brain but another happens out of it. Perhaps it's a soul - Gurdjieff said that we're born without souls and spirituality is about developing a soul, and without one we are machines - literally used that word. There are tons of examples of people trying to explain this problem, that one just came to mind. The point is that you can't explain free will in a consistent system without implicitly introducing a foreign element that exists outside that system. If God created us, then who created God?

I have yet to see a logical explanation that really addresses the problem of consciousness. Your description, while it is very interesting, I feel just squeezes the problem into an abstract realm that exists outside the system. But I don't believe in a split between physical world and the mental abstract world, they both must arise from the same place. And if anything indicates that reality is far far weirder than we can know, it's that both the physical and mental/abstract world exist, emerging from the same reality.

FWIW I believe that there are some rules underpinning the world, however I suspect the physical laws that we've been able to piece together are emergent properties of something more primal, in other words there are probably systems determining systems - we see the world since the big bang but it's just a snapshot, the "systems" that we see as "natural laws" are most likely shifting slowly as well - slowly as in far slower than we can ever imagine, googleplexes of years. The underlying systems may not even be systems or rules in the logical sense, they could be, to borrow Godel, far beyond our ability to describe, or contain things that are impossible to prove. Can we even describe a system from within a system?

Because I believe that, I don't believe in free will or even non-free will - things just unfold the way they always would have.

EDIT: I also find it deeply weird that anything exists at all. Why isn't there just nothing? It's a seriously spooky thought if you think it through.

> Someone reading this is thinking I'm one of the folks ruining Hacker News.

And someone other thinks you are adding juice to it. To me sufficiently rational, open-minded and easy-worded (the combination hard to find elsewhere) discussions of how does the human mind/body/world/whatever work and how to possibly hack that seem way more interesting than how does yet another web service or JavaScript library does.

Occasionally the mind would even spit out a very wrong word which just has some phonetic similarity. E.g. I recently said "let's go to Wikipedia" instead of "... to Ikea". That was funny.

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