Science's Assault on Free Will | Hacker News Reader

Science's Assault on Free Will

lawliberty.org

10 pointsjohntfella12 comments

Can we start these kinds of discussions with a definition of the core concert we’re trying to discuss? What do they mean when they say “free will”? Are they talking about the ability to choose behaviour based on predictions of potential outcomes? Or about some non-deterministic ability to act contrary to the laws of nature?

100%

The author themself appears to be unclear about the specific stance they are opposing. While it doesn't seem like they are strawmaning intentionally, they are arguing against positions that no reasonable person actually holds.

> they are arguing against positions that no reasonable person actually holds.

Very much the hallmark of many a Libertarian thinky tank. This one is brought to us courtesy of Pierre F. Goodrich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Fund

They do raise interesting questions, then often proceed to stomp all over them with all or nothing extreme positions.

Harrison Bergeron is a satirical dystopian science-fiction short story much loved by teenagers, not a starkly realistic portrayal of the inevitable outcome of social policy.

In line with the laws of nature there's no real choice to be made any more than a rock can choose it's path when rolling down a hillside. I don't see how the two concepts you've provided are in opposition.

> For, there is clearly bound up in such arguments the assumption that those being reasoned with are free to change their minds based on the merits (or demerits) of the evidence presented.

I understand that the author is arguing sincerely, but certain statements raise concerns about whether they fully grasp the concept of determinism.

Why is it necessary to assume the existence of free will for a person to be capable of evaluating new evidence and have a subsequently revised opinion based on this new information?

One thing I use to help to understand this: when you watch a movie you nothing about, there are things in it that surprise you, delight you, and seem new despite the fact that the movie was made long before.

I feel a consequence of determinism is that time is a matter of perception. Something we use to understand our environment. But, really, we are players in a movie that we are also watching.

The feeling of deciding is no different than the feeling of coercion. It's centered around ego. We evolved to feel like we make decisions. That's it, that's all. The deciding, though, is done.

Another example. I play for my son movies featuring pizza. I ask if he remembers how good the pizza was last weekend. I suggest we have it for lunch but find we are out of leftover pizza.

Is it free will when he asks for pizza for dinner? Or did his environment make that choice inevitable?

I've been struggling with this idea myself, but along these lines:

1. All events we know of are either caused by other preceding events, or are random.

2. One could reasonably claim that all events can ultimately be traced through their causal lineage to a random event, be it a random motion of a particle, the primordial quantum fluctuation that led to the universe, or subsequent fluctuations that broke the "smoothness" (symmetry) of the expanding universe and gave it detail.

3. For free will to exist, we have to posit another primary origin of events -- we don't know whether it's a particle, a field or some other entity and we can apply whatever label we want to it, but it will necessarily be another primary origin of events alongside random fluctuations.

4. If we disallow (3) as too "spooky", then what we're left with is the idea that what we perceive as free will and/or consciousness is an epiphenomenon that arises around randomness, especially randomness in large complex structures of connected, interacting nodes such as neurons.

When we look at LLMs and stable diffusion which mimic intelligence we see that random seeds are crucial for the inference process to produce an output. Maybe there is some random number generator also in the human brain which is necessary for the brain to function properly and to escape from local minima.

Funny this subject came up on yesterday's BBC QI show. I liked the poetic description of consciousness not as the driver of thought but as a compass needle that points the way the thoughts were going anyway.

I've not believed in free will for a long time, I think the idea is quite problematic at many levels. It implies that people would act out of character, that we don't make decisions based on inputs and internal feedback borne of experience, and that our brains don't follow known physics.

However, it's fine to act as if you have free will and so do others around you, even if one doesn't believe in it. You still need to run the universe to find out the future, so even disproving free will doesn't pragmatically change life.

Maybe the behaviour of LLMs can shed some light into this discussion. Does a LLM have free will? Obviously not because it is just a software running on a computer. But even when you ask an LLM exactly the same questions you will get totally different results. Sometimes it makes up things and sometimes you can push it to state that 1+1=3. It depends on the surroundings but also on some "magical free" will of the LLM to answer differently each time. Of course it is because of the random seeds that are needed to start the inference. Even though the human brain is not a LLM, we learn that there are systems that behave like having "free will".

just my 2 ct

Does the LLM have something it, as its own entity, wants to accomplish? Something it decided internally that may or may not mesh with its creators intentions? If it so, then regardless of whether or not its software, I would consider this evidence of free will.

There is no such thing as free will if the big bang happened.

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