Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

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I personally think debating whether or not we have free will is the most onanistic thing one can do in philosophy, since if one of the two sides is correct, then the result of the debate is predetermined.

That being said, this article seems to advance the theory that even the most simple single-celled organisms have more agency than any algorithm, at least partly due to their complexity. This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models, which (had we not designed them) would be as opaque to us as many single-celled organisms.

I see nothing in this article that would distinguish biological organisms from any other self-replicating, evolving machine, even one that is faithfully executing straightforward algorithms. Nor does this seem to present any significant argument against the concept that biological organisms are self-replicating evolving machines that are faithfully executing straightforward algorithms.

> This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models

One general impression I have, having read the reactions by biologists to stuff like Kurzweil and people who believe we're close to a computational understanding of biology is that all the computer science people massively, MASSIVELY underestimate the extent to which we still do not understand how even a single cell works.

Sure, we can model things stochastically, or fiddle with DNA and be able to predict the results, but there's a bunch of stuff in the middle that we only have a functional understanding of. We know with <xxx> input, you get <yyy>, etc..., but the how is still a mystery.

This is everywhere in biology.

If you think biologists are underestimating complexity, you have the sign wrong.

I don't believe we are close to a computational understanding of biology. However, there is a difference between not having the understanding and claiming that because we don't understand it, there is definitively some Aristotelian non-computational anima in all life.

If I handed someone who had never seen an artificial neural network, and handed them a PCB with some giant LLM hard-coded into it, I suspect they would struggle to define how it reacts to its inputs, despite the fact that modern silicon designs are extremely regular compared to biological systems.

I expect the conclusion is correct, but the argument isn't really valid. Our knowledge of cells tells us only and precisely about our knowledge of cells. We have some gaping holes in our fundamental knowledge of the universe (what is it, how did it happen, etc) and nobody can claim with any certainty to understand how any of the basic things happen. It is a mystery of such epic proportions it is hard to even articulate what an answer could look like, let alone how we would work it out. That hasn't stopped the development of a bunch of useful models and theories of physics that explain a lot of local observations really well.

yeah I'll believe we are close to cracking biological intelligence once openworm gets at all close

https://www.wired.com/story/openworm-worm-simulator-biology-...

> debating whether or not we have free will

Free will is an abstraction. It's not something that's concrete enough to say it does or doesn't exist, but a tool for reasoning about certain systems that are to much of a pain to fully calculate.

Schopenhauer would disagree. In his world model the Will with capital W is probably best described as the driving force behind all movement. While abstract, it has concrete species (think color vs red, where color is will, and red is your concrete human will, that you can feel concretely by pinching your finger). About freedom of the will Schopenhauer also has a clear opinion: will is free in the sense of uncaused, random. That does not help humans though, because while they can do what they want, they cannot want what they want. I'm not saying that this is a good model, but it's quite concrete. Nietzsche build on it, Einstein had a portrait of him in his Berlin study alongside Faraday and Maxwell, and while Freud denied any influence, there are a lot of topics in common between them.

Free will is about deciding and executing actions contrary to your determined nature:

* Not eating until your body fails.

* Not breathing until automatic breathing kicks in.

And not being able to perform dematerialization doesn't count as non-free will, for example.

The issue there is that if we are capable of doing something it is hard to say whether or not it is part of our determined nature. For example, maybe we have an evolutionary adaption to famine where elderly people are biologically tweaked to be OK with starving themselves to death. That'd be pretty gruesome and I doubt they'd be excited at the prospect even if a mechanism does exist, but it is the sort of thing that evolution is perfectly capable of encoding into us.

It is less direct to the examples you give; but I'm confident that parents are psychologically designed to sacrifice themselves in the event it helps their children and many men, famously, are built to go to the frontlines and sacrifice themselves for family and community. Hard to make an assessment of whether those sort of choices is free will or determined nature.

Right. But free will is anti-deterministic, instead of undeterministic. That's why the "free" part gets confusing, because we are always limited, and yet free will is an intelligence power. Parrots can't lie, they reproduce sounds, humans can lie and encode lies as sounds. LLM's don't currently lie, since lying is strategic. Free will is about strategically choosing actions. Free will doesn't tell us anything about the (non)deterministic nature of the universe or ourselves.

Your determined nature is the ability to creat interim goals.

I agree with most of what you said. However it is not correct to say they are executing algorithms, just as it is not correct to say that a water fountain is executing an algorithm.

It is correct to say that in theory a water fountain can be modeled by an algorithm. It can either be modelled at a high level by simplified model. Or in theory you can simulate every possible atom that makes up that water fountain.

The model that reconstructs these simulations are certainly algorithms.

A map is not the territory.

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