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Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Your determined nature is the ability to creat interim goals.

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.

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