Is Free Will a Buffer Overflow? | Hacker News Reader

Is Free Will a Buffer Overflow?

rogueleaderr.com

3 pointsrogueleaderr4 comments

Glad to see the questions raised but I fail to see how free will can at all be compared to buffer overflow or how in doing so we draw any closer to an explanation or understanding of its existence. I think if your goal is merely to show that free will can't be discounted by the laws of the known universe you're better off comparing it to "strange matter," things that share physical properties with most matter but are missing fundamental blocks of what we call matter like mass (gravitons) or interaction with matter (neutrinos). That allows us to say that if this "strange matter" can violate those rules, there is the possibility that something exists in the universe that operates on the fringe of known matter, still interacting but violating most of what we consider "rules" regarding matter's existence, perhaps even allowing us to operate freely. In computing terms, free will is probably more like a systemic computer, maybe it's more easily understood as a human's ability to reprogram itself. A highly evolved, biological machine capable of reprogramming itself. Although that just begs the question since the reprogrammer must still be programmed at some higher level to follow commands. The process of making a biological machine like that is a blast, but they're wildly unpredictable, as you would expect anything truly capable of freely reprogramming itself would be. ;)

OP here. I'm with you on the notion of free will as "reprogramming", but I contend that "strange matter" is the wrong direction to look. My point in the article is that in order for free will to exist at all, it would have to exist as a dynamic of the information system that is "represented" by arrangements of matter but is not actually the matter doing the arranging.

As soon as you link free will to discrete matter (i.e. this is the free will atom) physical laws clearly attach and you've boxed yourself out. Strange matter may obey different laws, but it still obeys laws.

But in an information system like a computer program, things are a lot more nebulous. You can't even in principle point to the bit that makes one instruction a buffer overflow and another not. It's just that in one configuration the system behaves as intended and in another it doesn't, but the standing-in-relation-to-expectations of the system is something that exists in the information layer and not in matter per se. And when you introduce self-reference information systems go bonkers.

Free will has to be the same way, if it exists at all.

I think we need to determine what free will is first because to me random or just unpredictable does not equal free will (that's how I think of the buffer overflow you describe). Nor does complete freedom to act or do whatever you want equal free will. For example, having free will doesn't mean I can now fly or defy other natural laws. Free will, to me, incorporates interpretation and response, and the ability to change the rules regarding interpretation and response. It doesn't mean not having rules and laws regulating interpretation and response, it just means having the ability to redefine those laws. So yes, at some point I'll need something above causal reaction in order to have free will but that doesn't automatically imply that I'm boxed out because that free will is attributed to matter (strange as that matter may be). The whole point of the comparison to strange matter isn't that free will is a particle, but rather a way to show that physical laws don't clearly attach to everything in the universe. And I don't mean to imply that free will must be one thing or another. I think that's what I'm taking issue with in your argument. Especially your last sentence in the above comment. My comparison to strange matter is merely to show that free will cannot be discounted by physical laws. Your assertion says that free will, if existent, must be in a particular form. While my position can't be disproved, yours can't be proven. So I guess neither of us are pushing this argument much of anywhere.

I think we're only disagreeing on a pretty narrow point. I basically define "free" in this case as "impossible in principle to definitely predict". That's why I'm resistant to the strange matter explanation, because although neutrinos etc do behave unusually I haven't seen evidence that they behave without any laws. I could be wrong about that; I don't know much about strange matter.

But re: my last sentence, the idea is that:

1) Free will cannot follow laws 2) All physical objects follow laws 3) Therefore free will cannot be physical, if it exists

And re: disproval, I kind of think my position may actually be testable. I'm not clever enough to think of an experiment, but my contention is that "will" can have causal influence on the world. And where there's influence, there can be measurement.

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