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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

I legitimately do not understand the philosophical exercise of 'free will doesn't exist'.

Yes it does. I could walk into the street right now. I could walk into the office next door and slap a co-worker. I could learn German. I could leave my life and walk to China.

What is your justification that free-will doesn't exist? Other than biological needs like eating and sleeping, I have control over the rest. Or, rather, I have control over how shitty the rest is. I have yet to hear an argument that has swayed me at all.

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What you do and think is exclusively dictated by the input of information going into your brain coming from perception encoded as electrons and ions flowing through the atoms consisting of your neurons. If someone had a printout of the small sub-manifold of spacetime that is you they could read out everything you ever thought and did and it would all make sense (meaning, follow from Schrodinger’s equation). You have no choice and you cannot defy physics. Even if you run into the street, it was so decreed, because you were deterministically ordained to be contemplating free will and attempt to violate it with a “random” action, which in conjunction with the random seed you have chosen (the current state of your neural ion flows) led you to deterministically run into the street. With, as always, a perfect causal pathway and explanation — no matter how free and random it seems. What you do next, always, is decided exclusively by what in the universe happened just before, and no other auxiliary or theological inputs.

The statement “free will does not exist” does not imply the world isn’t Minecraft. It is. Arbitrary actions allowed by physics are indeed allowed. The problem is unpacking that you can do what you want. It is the act and nature of wanting that is also fully constrained by physics. There is no “you” and no “want,” no notion of choice that isn’t simply isomorphic to doing the basic math of quantum mechanics and molecular biology… you are “merely” math executing in time and space, and you are and shall never be nothing more. https://secularsolstice.github.io/speeches/gen/Nothing_Is_Me...

Free will is a way to describe the macroscopic behavior of human beings, analogous to how we talk about temperature rather than listing the position and velocity of every molecule of air in a room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxqcuPZnOl4

I'm not convinced that free will doesn't exist for others, just myself. There seem to be people who can build their lives exactly as they want it, and maybe you are one of those, but they are the minority. Sounds like you are someone that is completely happy with the aspects of their life they can control because they are able to do exactly what they want when they want (get out of bed on time, learn a language when they want, focus exactly as they want when they want, etc). Or, maybe you are someone that just thinks they have free will by making excuses that they really want what they actually get. Don't know you well enough!

I am someone for whom the two universes are the same. I freely choose to act exactly in accordance with how I would act if I were steered by neurons and atoms, and neurons and atoms alone. And that is also the truth, so I am perfectly happy. The universe with and without free will, to me, is metaphysically identical - because of how I have chosen to live and be happy.

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