Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdavidn | Hacker News Reader

Is that not the human experience? I have no “agency” over the next thought to pop into my head. I “feel” like I can choose where to focus attention, but that too is a predictable outcome arising from the integration of my embryology, memories, and recently reinforced behaviors. “I” am merely an observer of my own mental state.

But that is an uncomfortable idea for most people.

View on HN

If this was true, you could lay back relaxed and watch where your brain takes you. But we experience life as a never ending stream of choices, usually between what's easy and what's right, and pursuing the right choice takes a constant effort. We are presented with problems and have to figure out solutions on our own, with no guarantees of success.

This "I'm just an observer" idea may be true at some higher level, if you're a monk on the threshold of nirvana, but for common folk this mindset leads nowhere.

> pursuing the right choice

I don't agree with this framing. A person's opinion of what a "good" or "right" outcome is is one of the inputs to the algorithm.

When you decide to put in less effort it's affecting the algorithm because the weight of the high-effort outcome is reduced.

Or, as Mistress Weatherwx put it,

The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live.

The „making choices“ could just be an illusion where it’s already clear from the inputs what you’re going to do. You rejecting determinism could already be determined and you couldn’t even choose to believe it. That’s not falsifiable of course, but your point doesn’t really contradict the idea of determinism due to the possibility.

Sapolsky wrote a 500 page rebuttal to this idea in Determined.

It is quite a convincing book and maybe even a dangerous book in a sense.

While technically true, the difference is that we don't know in details how that process works and we can't predict it.

There is not much of a difference in considering it deterministic or not, because we can't determine it.

> and we can't predict it

Has there been a serious effort to, using something that might be capable of doing so, like neural nets?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com