Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand • Hacker News Board

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#261

Post by LocalH » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 10:49 PM UTC

alwaysbeconsing wrote: post #241

legacynl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to come up with a scientifically valid test for something as wide and vague as 'free will'. So what happens is that the tests are designed to test for very specific things that are then used to reason better about vague things like 'free will'. What this test is actually focused on is decision making. The participant in the test is asked to randomly press either button A or B. The cognitive/mental experienc…

> even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made. There is an older better experiment by Benjamin Libet of this. The participant is directed to choose whether to press a single button, and watching a fast clock display to report the instant the decision is taken. The measurement and compari…

The leap from "detectable signals before sensation of choice means no free will" is laughable to me, as it presumes instant signal propagation within the brain, and instant processing speed, neither of which can be presumed. Your brain has to "make the decision" to do something before you can ever sense that you did, and it takes time for signals to propagate and be processed by your brain. It's also known that the brain can to some degree "rewind" time and fill in the blanks with information that it had to infer after an action was taken, such as how the brain fills in microsaccades.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#262

Post by anon-3988 » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 1:33 AM UTC

miika wrote: post #216

anon-3988 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I ask you to choose A or B, and let you take as long as you want to make this decision, at the point where you make the decision, you still have no idea why you chose what you chose. It is ultimately mysterious to you and anyone else why you chose what you chose. If you had any reasoning, it is still mysterious why that reasoning caused you to choose what you chose and why it didn't have the opposite effect? The i…

You say “if I ask you to choose” but if there is no free will then I cannot choose. Also if there is no free will then we cannot judge anyone, no matter what they did, because they didn’t have choice. Actually my argument is that the best evidence for free will is that the world is such a mess. Without free will we would live in perfect harmony with nature, like all the other species do. We are so free that we can ev…

> Also if there is no free will then we cannot judge anyone, no matter what they did, because they didn’t have choice.

This doesn't make sense. If there is a rock in the middle of the road, it would make sense to remove the rock from obstructing the road. Are we "judging" the rock in this case?

OTOH, if the rock happen to cause a massive accident, it seems absurd to punish the rock and try to cause as much suffering to the rock to compensate for all the suffering it caused.

> Without free will we would live in perfect harmony with nature, like all the other species do.

Harmony how? Like all the viruses, parasites, do you know what dolphins to pufferfish? What about cannibalism? Or infant mortality in nature?

> We are so free that we can even deny the existence of our freedom, hence avoid taking responsibility of our actions.

Realizing that free will does not exist does not mean that we don't have to live life anymore. We still have to live it. What it does it remove a lot of unnecessary baggage. Is it necessary to punish a rock for falling over a person? An elephant going on a rampage? What about murder?

When you realize that murder (or whatever immoral actions) is just the totality of the universe, you can think of any bad actions as just a very complex case of a brain tumor. You wouldn't blame a person for committing homicide once we learn that they went on a rampage because they have a brain tumor. But if we know enough about the universe, we will realize that pretty much anything that a human ever do is just another complex case of a brain tumor. Why did they do what they did? Well, here's a trillion page explanation of exactly why it happened starting from the Big Bang. Does it make sense to blame them now, still?

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#263

Post by pizza » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 1:42 AM UTC

The5thElephant wrote: post #242

alwaysbeconsing wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made. There is an older better experiment by Benjamin Libet of this. The participant is directed to choose whether to press a single button, and watching a fast clock display to report the instant the decision is taken. The measurement and compari…

You have to define free will first, and that is essentially impossible. What is happening in that "processing" though? That is not free will, your will is being determined by the state and context your brain is in. In fact any thing that is not a purely random choice is not a free will, and a purely random choice is not a will at all. The very concept of free will as most people understand it is absurd. The only defi…

How about 'post-processing that increases the information of an output signal beyond the information of the input signal', i.e. something that violates the data processing inequality.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#264

Post by hnfong » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 2:40 AM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #238

hnfong wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion my actions are a deterministic function of the state of my mind (including memory, personality) + input. I have no choice in the matter, only an illusion of one It's important to note that as far as materialist physics goes, "you" are literally "your state of mind (including memory, personality) and input". The fact that this system (i.e. "you") produces an apparently deterministic result doesn't mean…

I think that is exactly my stance. You are a system that is complex, iterative, and chaotic (in the mathematical sense). You are probably deterministic, but the only way you can be accurately predicted is by simulating your entire brain and sensory experience, along with memories, to the degree it's no longer a simulation; it's just building a copy. At that point, it's not a prediction; it's creating a copy of you an…

I'd add that the devil is in the details of the "copy".

To accurately simulate/copy the "sensory experience", you'll have to simulate/copy the entire "observable universe" of the person. Unless you just want to predict the behavior of a person locked inside a solitary, dark, sensory deprived room, the practical implication is that you need to simulate/copy the entire observable universe to run an accurate simulation/copy.

And that's not very feasible.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#265

Post by briHass » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 3:37 AM UTC

hnfong wrote: post #264

kbelder wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is exactly my stance. You are a system that is complex, iterative, and chaotic (in the mathematical sense). You are probably deterministic, but the only way you can be accurately predicted is by simulating your entire brain and sensory experience, along with memories, to the degree it's no longer a simulation; it's just building a copy. At that point, it's not a prediction; it's creating a copy of you an…

I'd add that the devil is in the details of the "copy". To accurately simulate/copy the " sensory experience ", you'll have to simulate/copy the entire "observable universe" of the person. Unless you just want to predict the behavior of a person locked inside a solitary, dark, sensory deprived room, the practical implication is that you need to simulate/copy the entire observable universe to run an accurate simulatio…

Which is why I always tune out when Laplace's demon is brought up. Granting such an obviously impossible premise means all kinds of insane/wrong conclusions can pop out the other end.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#266

Post by cc101 » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 4:02 AM UTC

I did use my free will. I refused to walk into your trap by refusing to follow your link.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#267

Post by yreg » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 6:29 AM UTC

tankenmate wrote: post #123

yreg wrote: post #112

I think the framing of this experiment is bad. It is actually about challenging the user to come up with a random sequence, which is pretty difficult without a coin to flip, an irrational number to copy, etc. When I just "randomly" mash the keys, the prediction rate is around 70%. I have to intentionally focus to avoid patterns as much as I can and then I'm able to pull it down to 54%. Dan Ariely[1] did a similar spi…

I managed to keep it below 45% without any real thought for inputs greater than 100 keystrokes. The biggest problem humans have with randomness is that they underestimate the possibility of long runs (they are rare but not that rare).

How do you do long runs without any real thought?

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#268

Post by ForwardObserver » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 8:44 AM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #151

lupire wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to prove that free will does not exist. I could be losing on purpose. However, what the game does is refute a particular attempt to prove that will does exist.

I don't see how. I think it's closer to an attempted refutation of a strawman. As one who leans towards belief in free will and also towards compatibilism, and more importantly originates from a culture with a shared belief in free will (conservative Christian evangelicalism), I don't think anyone I've known who believed in it meant "I believe my actions are fundamentally unpredictable." I think they just meant that…

[dead]

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#269

Post by ForwardObserver » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 9:07 AM UTC

lupire wrote: post #143

ForwardObserver wrote: post #140

It got less than half right, so worse than just guessing. Observation- predicting learned habits and other cognitive-effort preserving strategies your brain uses are not a refutation of free will. The whole point of habits, as Marvin Minsky pointed out in Society of Mind, is to save us from having to think through every little decision, i.e. to make ourselves predictable and unburden ourselves from decisions. So in t…

It's impossible to prove that free will does not exist. I could be losing on purpose. However, what the game does is refute a particular attempt to prove that will does exist.

[dead]

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#270

Post by GTP » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 12:53 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #258

GTP wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say that I have free will because my decisions come from myself and not from something outside me. Sure, the context in which I live can influence my decisions, but the final choice is mine and it can happen that I take a decision that goes against what the context (society, family etc.) would expect from me.

To an external observer, you are nothing by a very complex set of chemical and electrical reactions. With sufficient technology, we could take a snapshot of your brain and predict exactly how you respond to any given stimulus with 100% accuracy. Free will is an illusion. Consciousness is undefinable and unprovable.

> With sufficient technology, we could take a snapshot of your brain and predict exactly how you respond to any given stimulus with 100% accuracy.

This is assuming that intelligence is computable, but no one has proved it yet. And doesn't even get into the problems of quantum physics. Unfortunately, the real illusion is determinism.