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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

It is an exercise of free will to overcome the imposed barriers of some test.

Although I do believe we have free will, I don't agree with this specific example: looking at the algorithm used to predict key presses and just doing the opposite of what would the algorithm predicts, is letting the algorithm tell you what to do. This is related to inverse psychology.

How do you define free will?

Even a Turing machine has free will. You can’t find out what it will do without running it, in a way beyond all questions of technical capability. Mechanistic attacks on free will died with godel.

Yes, if you define an array of transistors to have free will, it certainly does!

I would say it's a measure of probability. Of course measuring probability in non repeatable situations gets tricky.

But, if I wrote there is a 90% probability that lupire will write an application to 'beat' the free will program, and then you did so, it should at least give you pause.

I say that I have free will because my decisions come from myself and not from something outside me. Sure, the context in which I live can influence my decisions, but the final choice is mine and it can happen that I take a decision that goes against what the context (society, family etc.) would expect from me.

The context part is clear but how do you define "myself"? :)

Yes, I had the same discussion a couple years ago and I concluded it by saying that it boils down what's myself: is it my brain? My consciousness? My soul? But this is a related but different problem.

You feel your decisions come from yourself - whatever that is. That's not at all the same as having objective proof they do.

I call this the "subjective experience of free will": that is, it does seem to be a thing that people perceive, and it's such a convincing effect that we often turn it from a subjective experience to an objective belief (that free will exists).

Sure, I never said I have an objective proof. But there's no proof of the contrary either, so the two positions are at the same level, objectively speaking.

To an external observer, you are nothing by a very complex set of chemical and electrical reactions.

With sufficient technology, we could take a snapshot of your brain and predict exactly how you respond to any given stimulus with 100% accuracy.

Free will is an illusion. Consciousness is undefinable and unprovable.

> With sufficient technology, we could take a snapshot of your brain and predict exactly how you respond to any given stimulus with 100% accuracy.

This is assuming that intelligence is computable, but no one has proved it yet. And doesn't even get into the problems of quantum physics. Unfortunately, the real illusion is determinism.

Could technology be sufficient?

I mean you've got a body, too, right? So the moment the environment changes so does the mind state. So unless you've come up with a method of modeling all of those influences... And food, and hormones, and... And then you've got stuff like cosmic radiation slamming into your DNA causing dsDNA breakage and that precipitates into apoptosis and suddenly the model is off due to some completely unpredictable shit, 'cause were talking about interactions that are occuring on the scale of 6.022*10^23 per mol, and a lot of mols and a lot of different species of matter themselves subject to probability moreso than determinism at any reasonable scale.

If sufficient technology were to emerge, I expect that under no circumstances would it ever be considered as a worthy project to invest in. But the idea of such technology ever emerging itself is frankly worthy of ridicule.

first, how do you define the will part? what is will such that it can be free or not?

Does it count if you allow the test to be accurate but you still maintain control over when it is wrong?

I just spammed F and randomly hit D and it pretty much never predicted the D.

Which I think captures a fundamental flaw in algorithms vs humans. Humans know how to mask their signals within noise. I'm inclined to believe the generalization that algorithms that aim for accuracy are highly susceptible to being manipulated by humans who are allowed to have free will over the inputs.

“Always do F, so they’ll never expect D of you”

I think this is a sound strategy for “getting away with it” in society.

It's not really a flaw in algorithms nor a skill in humans.

It's (also?) a weakness in humans: someone mostly does X, we lean very strongly into the assumption that they will never do !X. This is one of the most basic elements of human-to-human deceipt since ... well, since the dawn of any kind of recorded/remembered human history.

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