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Comment by seiferteric | Hacker News Reader

It's not satisfying that it would be considered free will if the outcome is based on the result of a probabilistic random number generator but perhaps that's what they mean... As for moral responsibility, essential no, it cannot exist again unless supernatural is involved for the same reasons outlined above, there is no "you" making a decision, just a process. As for whether you should feel guilty... well again I am not able to make that decision... Either I do or I don't and it is predetermined or random :) So there is really not much to debate I don't think.

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"moral responsibility, essential no, it cannot exist again unless supernatural is involved for the same reasons outlined above, there is no "you" making a decision, just a process."

This view is based on a misunderstanding of what moral responsibility is. Moral responsibility is essentially credit assignment [1]. It exists as a concept not because it matters whether or not you actually could have done differently before, but rather as a mechanism to teach you to do differently in a similar situation in the future. "You" is just a machine making decisions. When you make a bad decision, according to the other machines surrounding you (society) or your own brain's reward system, you are assigned blame or feel guilty because you should avoid making the same decision again in a similar situation.

To say that moral responsibility requires something supernatural doesn't make sense, since we successfully use the concept all the time. Its a mechanism for multi-agent learning.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08435

> When you make a bad decision, according to the other machines surrounding you (society) or your own brain's reward system, you are assigned blame or feel guilty because you should avoid making the same decision again in a similar situation.

But if free will does not exist then other machines (humans) aren't making these decisions either... it's turtles all the way down so to speak. You could go on to say that the entire system (of humans, society etc) is either determined or probabilistic, but still no free will exists. It is meaningless to say whether you should feel guilty or not etc. as it is just part of a system no one has any control over...

Edit:

What I meant to say is that moral responsibility exists like natural selection in evolution, it is there but we don't choose it to be there, it is part of the natural system we find our selves in.

>"as it is just part of a system no one has any control over" Define "control". A self-driving car is on some level in control over its driving. Otherwise it would not be self-driving. When discussing free will, ppl tend to use the word "free" and "control" differently than when used in everyday language.

It becomes a similar question as asking: if god or "something" created the universe, what created that something. Its turtles all the way down yes.

>"it is part of the natural system we find our selves in". Like exactly everything else that surrounds us :)

If there's no choice and everything is meaningless, then why do you post here?

Well I guess I didn't have a choice, I just did :) But really I am honestly not sure I believe what I am saying here, it just seems the most logical and easiest to argue. Of course I would like free will to exist and live my life as if it does.

if the "machine" is programmed to make a certain "choice", and "obeys" that programming, why is it guilty?

Because it's the source of the problem to be correct. That's it. Which part of this car is faulty? Same thing.

The human machine is not programmed in the traditional sense, it's learned to a large extent. Guilt is a signal that some behavior should be changed/relearned/reprogrammed.

The open question is why and how humans can "feel" guilt. How can a machine have a subjective experience at all? What is a subjective experience? This is the so-called "hard problem".

Yeah, it's also related to how well we can simulate the behavior of others.

And here you eventually hit both the limitation that without abstractions you can only simulate a less complex system, and also how the information about the exact state of the system is fundamentally limited by the (quantum) uncertainty principle (which also allows the discretisation of information, via Planck's constant h) - entropy being a superfluous concept meaning just "lack of information" :

https://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html#sec-ph...

>To say that moral responsibility requires something supernatural doesn't make sense, since we successfully use the concept all the time. Its a mechanism for multi-agent learning.

I've come to the same conclusion. Even without free will, "punishment" is a crucial tool in teaching agents acceptable behavior. Perhaps there's a meta morality question of whether the gains from that teaching are worth the suffering of the individuals being punished.

The fact that your process knows about and is able to comprehend and reason about its own workings gives it the opportunity to change itself based on this knowledge.

To hear about it and to then decide "this absolves me of any guilt, because I couldn't have done it any differently" is also a choice your process made. Counterfactually, it could've made the opposite choice (though it didn't do so).

Now, me pointing this out presents yet another choice and opportunity for change. And these opportunities keep happening for the rest of your life.

In essence, even though you cannot change your actions in a very deep sense, concluding "I can't change myself because it's already determined" is always a premature conclusion, whenever it is made.

Why do we absolve some people of guilt for being a product of their genes and environment and not others? Where do you draw the line? It would seem that "they couldn't help it" just as much as the people that you describe.

The line is subjective and arbitrary.

> just as much as the people that you describe.

I'm not sure which people you mean. I'm saying that it is both true that you "cannot help it" in one sense and false in another sense.

There is always a causal level in which you could not have helped it. But it is never correct to conclude that there is nothing you could've done to help it, because this is also a choice and making it prevents higher-order changes.

... because it's a good idea?

If a person with Tourette's said profanities to you during your Zoom meeting, would you hold them equally responsible as a person not having it? No, because it's a symptom and you assume it is out of their control and they didn't have a malicious intent. If both persons said "sorry it wasn't in my control", you'd think

1) the person A didn't do bad, because they have a tic and they definitely don't have negative feelings towards me

2) the person B has an anger management issues and may or may not have negative feelings towards me, maybe he's bad

We assume intent is malicious when a person has the capability to stop themselves from doing something negative towards us and yet they "chose" not to.

A CPU that doesn't work when power is off could be a good CPU, but a CPU that doesn't work when power is on is a faulty CPU.

> t is out of their control and they didn't have a malicious intent

We just established nobody chooses what they do or how they feel, so at best it's like a matter of degree and at worst it's completely arbitrary.

You can replace "out of their control" with "almost zero chance to go in the else{} branch".

And "can choose to" with "can go to else{} if rx is true" - and social interaction and reward/punishment can make rx == true.

> Why do we absolve some people of guilt for being a product of their genes and environment and not others? Where do you draw the line?

These questions are decided in legal contexts all the time, so you can look up precedent. Generally there are considerations of coercion, mental fitness, and age/experience, because your responsibility is proportional in some sense to how much you know/have learned. If you literally have never learned right from wrong, say you were raised by wolves, then you are generally not held responsible until you do (or rather, you are held responsible, but the penalties are teaching you right from wrong rather than something more severe).

Guilt requires an ability to act on it to be meaningful. It's meaningless to put guilt on people without such ability: they can't act on it anyway, similar to how it's meaningless to scream at a wall.

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