Comment by hansbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hansbo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I view this the same way. Determinism vs randomness says nothing about free will.

I think the problem with arguments regarding free will is that it's very hard to define (like consciousness for that matter). I am my brain. My brain controls what I do. Therefore, I control what I do. Only if we lift up our consciousness or free will as something higher than our brain does this become a problem.

The fact that my free will is deterministic, that is, a consequence of how the brain is structured and how the environment looks, does not change the fact that I, that is, my brain, controls what my body does. If anything, randomness makes this worse - then it is not my brain controlling my body, but some random result of a wave function collapse.

Yes, to me that seems the only sensible way to interpret free will.

I think that the whole determinism vs randomness debate boils down to the fact that when we make a choice, for example whether to order soup or a sandwich, we have to hold the belief that either choice is possible. We can simulate ourselves in our mind taking either decision, evaluate pros and cons, and use the results to act. In that sense, because it is compatible with many counterfactuals, our internal self-model is decidedly non-deterministic. And if you think about it, it has to be non-deterministic in order to be a useful decisional tool: considering what would happen if you did X or Y is the foundation of deliberation.

The trick, though, is that ultimately this is just epistemological non-determinism: you don't know what is going to happen, and you can't know, because you are in the process of figuring it out. When I am looking at the menu, I think it is possible that I will order a soup or a sandwich, just like I think it is possible that they are out of soup, even though there is a definite answer to whether they do or not. I just don't know it. Our misstep is to (intuitively) extrapolate that if we can't know what we will choose, then no one else can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com