Comment by danwills | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danwills | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No hate from me! You can believe what you like but I do disagree I'm afraid.

I think any rule-following (ie ~computational) system is either below, or at the same level of dynamic complexity as all others.

I also think that it's truly impossible to draw a sharp line between alive and not-alive, so the idea of 'free will' would have to extend all the way down to the smallest things like atoms/quarks/space etc.

Is it really meaningful to suggest that it could be anything like 'free will' at that size? Sure some quantum stuff seems indeterminate but could be fed by something that looks random to us - it might not actually be (dunno!?), but the idea that things at a larger scale could be meaningfully controlled by feeding-in different values (that still somehow have to look perfectly random!) seems extremely far-fetched to me.

Larger things like a molecule, a transistor or a human! generally stay as coherent and predictable/controllable (or self-controlling) things, even in the face of indeterminate-ness at the smallest scales underneath. I just can't see how there's any utility in connecting the idea of free-will/consciousness to this indeterminacy.. it's like saying free will is just fuzziness, and how does that really help in understanding life, the universe and everything?

isn't free will, more about inner control, in opposition to external control?

What a great, thought-provoking question! Thanks mromanuk!

I started reading the Wikipedia page about free-will to try to work out where I stand on this. I think I quite like the classical way of thinking about free will as simply: Being free from coercion in one's decision-making! I guess the source of such limits could be either internal or external or both though! So I don't know whether that helps much in answering your question.

The Wikipedia page says about 'compatibilism' (which holds that free will and determinism are compatible) that it is "the absence of various impediments" and that "a coerced agent's choices can still be free if such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires", so that still doesn't really help answer the question.

I accept quantum-mechanics enough to be slightly skeptical of strict-determinism, so I guess maybe I fall more into the 'metaphysical libertarianism' point of view, but I still feel like the non-determinism that QM introduces probably acts more like a limit to how 'free' free-will can possibly be, rather than being a kind of 'secret sauce' that makes it possible for us or some external factor to be able to meddle with what reality (or ourselves) get up to in a meaningful way.

I also think that the internal/external distinction breaks down when examined very closely. For me this leads to the idea that I am actually the same thing (same 'wavefront' or whatnot?) as what caused the existence of the universe that I am a part of. I am both myself and the environment at the same time, but with a limited ability to sense very far into the external universe and its workings, beyond input from senses like sight/hearing/etc (I guess realms of pure-thought should also be included too though! Do we 'sense' reason/philosophy/mathematics/algorithms when we think about them?).

I think one answer (or the avoidance of a clear answer) to your question is that people have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and we (as a collective/species) are still really not very close to being firmly decided about it at all!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com