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Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

> But if we have no agency, nothing matters. There can be no morality: a criminal was always destined to commit a crime. It was never right for us to punish them, but that’s okay: we couldn’t have acted differently, so we shoulder no blame.

Right, and determinism seems likely to me to be correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines that "saves" us is that you should act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide how to act anyway.

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Some thoughts:

1-We do have machinery that performs a resolution of next action/thought/belief (based on external input, current state, etc.) and we possibly just sense that action as "choice"

2-It seems pretty unlikely that the resolution process could be cleanly deterministic and repeatable given quantum stuff, meaning some step in the resolution process hovering on the edge of two options could go either way depending on the brain's electromagnetic soup's current state.

3-Our emotions are critical for our survival, driving choices that help us short and long term, and it seems that one of those core drivers is a sense of agency. Even if we don't have free will in the magic sense of causing electrons (or whatever) to suddenly turn left to support our choice, it would still be critical for us to have a sense that our actions and efforts all matter, so those feelings are probably built into the system.

Note: This assumes there is no special magic somewhere that defies our current understanding of the universe and it just hasn't been figured out yet.

The quantum stuff appears to me to very much be that the universe is deterministic if and only if it's deterministic. Like, if you imagine that we're all something like vibrational modes on an expanding "drum head" (which, as far as I know is very roughly basically what QFT says, but I've never actually studied it), then there's no issue as far as I know. The initial state of the universe set everything in motion, and the global geometry of the universe admits certain wave propagations or it doesn't. Could be that I just don't know enough, but I've always found the phrasing of "super-determinism" to be odd; obviously, if the universe is deterministic, you don't get to choose what experiments you run. That's just normal determinism.

Why does it matter how you "should" act if there is no free will. You are just going to act how your are going to act.

In smart psychopath Logic, because life is a repeated game and you will have moments of weakness and imperfections, so you would like the world to he in a moral equilibrium where even if you let your guard down for a moment you will not risk immediately be butchered by the other person. The game theory of collaboration and nice mess is pretty solid once you account for transaction costs, risk, repeated interactions etc.

For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.

Right, this is why you resolve act as if there is. If there isn't, then "you" didn't really resolve to do anything anyway, or at least it was inevitable that you would make that choice (for example that you would follow this line of reasoning) so it didn't matter. "You" weren't wrong because "you" weren't anything but an automaton.

If there really were such a thing as free will, whatever that means, then by acting like there is, you were acting correctly.

It's sort of like how in math, when you're dealing with an if statement, a false premise gives your conclusion for free. You only need to consider the case that you have a choice in the first place when deciding how you should act. Therefore you should act as if free will exists, even if deep down you really don't believe it does.

Basically "I should choose to act as if I have free will" really expands to "if I can choose how to act, then I should choose to act as if I have free will," which is then straightforward basic logic.

For me, I just can't falsify my experience that things do matter, that I make choices. The people in my life that I encounter seem to have this same experience.

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