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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why we are conscious and aware if there is no free will and we just react to stimuli. Why are the lights on? Is the answer that the lights are on because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question?

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My understanding is that conscious is a side affect of how memory works. Your conscious experience is essentially processing stimuli, connecting with existing memories, processing, and storing what is written to your “conscious” scratchpad.

Of course this is only one theory but I find it convincing.

https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/2022/12000/....

This is exactly what emergence is: a side affect. Emergence cannot usually be planned for...

> Why are the lights on?

Maybe consciousness is the only thing that exists and physics (or rather, the experience of physics) is just an emergent property of it.

There’s a 50/50 chance the lights aren’t on for us either.

There may be conscious beings in the universe (or galaxy, or perhaps solar system) who would consider us only vaguely conscious or not conscious at all.

Am I typing this because the lights are on or because I’m compelled to by my genetic and social programming, predictably and without a genuine choice in the matter?

> or because I’m compelled to by my genetic and social programming, predictably and without a genuine choice in the matter?

I don't understand how anyone can doubt this even a fraction of a second. Magic does not exist.

If you have enough information about my DNA, my society, where I am now and what I'm doing, I think you'd be surprised how predictable each and every decision and action I make becomes.

ChatGPT 4, limited as it is, could probably predict me down to a low margin of error with that kind of info alone, and it would seem like magic to me.

A character on the NBC/Yahoo! show Community had a good one-liner: "I'm not psychic, Annie. That's just an illusion caused by extreme preparedness."

I think it would vary a lot depending on the specific decisions and how unique the combination of circumstances are. Even though things tend to repeat on a large enough scale, different combinations can still be highly unique.

OTOH when they are not... a simple exercise one can do is go ask GPT-4 to simulate a comment section on some political news story posted online; you can even have it write a fictional news story first, for good measure. It is extremely good at it, and that tells me volumes about the actual (rather than perceived) rationality of our public discourse.

It's essentially the question of free will.

There is a case that everything we do is preordained. A result of forces and interactions that trace all the way back to big bang.

My choice on whether or not I reply to you doesn't exist. Your combination of words triggers a response in my brain that makes me type this combination of words. The words I "chose" to delete, rewrite, leave, are all a result of various forces.

The kicker is that we can't really know. There is no test for free will. In order to know whether or not I had a choice to do this, we'd have to run the entire universe again up to that point to see what I would do. Because experience matters. Even if this exact same post went up tomorrow with all the same response except for mine. The fact that it's now Thursday instead of Wednesday matters. The fact that I posted this today matters. What I had for lunch. How fast I drank my coffee. What shirt I wore. Etc. These are all things that change the conditions under which I will engage with the post.

The second kicker is that it doesn't matter. If free will truly does not exist, it's not like you have a choice in whether or not to believe in it. The arguments either will work or they won't.

There is a difference between consciousness and free will, though. There may be no such thing as free will and it's all a trick to us, but I mean, there's still a "me" here that experiences things. I can't be sure there's a "you" there, since your consciousness is entirely outside of anything I can perceive, but I can _assume_ it, since it makes sense that we share so much, we'd share that property, too.

It gets really tricky with machines. We share _nothing_ with them, but what about when they start sharing properties with us that we associate with consciousness? I don't have any good answers for that.

How can I be sure there's a "me" here?

You can only be as sure as you allow yourself to be. Nothing can be proven when it comes to metaphysics.

Apologies for not catching this in a more-reasonable amount of time, but you're going to have to be more specific about your question. The vast majority of humans throughout history agree that they are "someone", though the full nature of what "someonehood" entails is definitely debatable. I assume you're asking some question about the full nature and definitions and whatever, but you're not really doing it in a way that's answerable. If you can quantify that question better, I can attempt an answer. But this question is the epistemological equivalent of "how fast is a car?"

But is your "me" an actual entity, or is it just the process of experiencing things? And if the latter, what does it even mean for it to have a persistent identity - and does it, or is there just an illusion of one when you consider a single time slice of processing (e.g. "now").

The problem is that, just as with the outside world, we only have the perception of our own inner workings, not real understanding of them. So we are modelling "I" as an entity, and it seems useful enough for day-to-day purposes, but how accurate is it really if you get to the bottom of it?

Because there is free will and anyone arguing against it is edgy and/or high on their own hubris.

There's a difference between free will as a philosophical debate compared to a question of biology/chemistry/physics.

It matters as a point of principle to the physicists who are asking questions about whether true randomness exists - if the physical world can be influenced by something outside of the natural forces they know about, they want to measure that force, even if measurement and computing equipment to model the universe down to the Planck scale cannot exist.

Where it really matters is when you get to computer simulations: Without access to a source of non-determinism, an AI can hardly be said to have free will. Give the same pattern of bytes running on the same instruction set the same inputs, and it will deterministically generate the same outputs.

While it's tempting to see free will as self-evident, scientific evidence suggests that our actions are determined by a complex interplay of genetics, environment, and prior experiences. Dismissing this perspective as edgy or hubristic risks ignoring important insights into human behavior. Recognizing the absence of free will can foster empathy and compassion, as we become more aware of the factors that contribute to human choices and behaviors.

It is not either or. It’s a weighted sum of environment and self-agency.

> complex interplay of genetics, environment, and prior experiences

for me personally, this is a "soft free will" distinction, i.e. we have true free will, but we're very unlikely to actually use it. the other one is the question of "hard free will", i.e. whether "god plays dice" and the fully deterministic universe.

. . . or believes that the laws of physics apply to our bodies too.

Isn't that why people actually refuse to accept the possibility of no free will? I always got that impression.

How would a non-concious entity intelligently plan and act in response to stimuli in situations that require self reflection, such as interaction in a social environment? Consciousness seems necessary for effective goal pursuit in such an environment.

"Hey ChatGPT - here is the situation, here is my goal - what is my next step?"

Why wouldn't the universe observe itself with no ability to change the initial conditions? Why do we have to have free will? It's still a win, vs no self awareness. I think.

Try to define "conscious" in some kind of objective way, for starters. We can't even agree on what it is, except that each person accepts the fact that they're conscious as an axiom, and generalizes it to others on the basis of similar observed behavior. We "know it when we see it", which is good enough for most practical purposes, but extremely inadequate for discussions like this.

> I still don't understand why we are conscious and aware if there is no free will and we just react to stimuli.

In computing systems it's fairly common to have a monitoring and control layer on top of the core functionality. Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that evolution could have come up with something similar and that control view is what we call "consciousness"?

Consciousness is a reaction to stimuli. If we didn't have consciousness, we would not achieve our goals as effectively.

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