The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? • Hacker News Board

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#91

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 12:04 AM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #87

AlexandrB wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things either have a cause, and then they are causal. Or they have no cause, and then they are random. This is probably the most succinct statement that sums up the problem with "free will". As soon as you start to try to define "free will" in terms of the natural sciences you run into insurmountable contradictions that suggest that it must be an illusion. Edit: I wonder what proportion of posters here believe both…

We have no ethical framework to turn the scientific method towards what is going on at the deepest levels of the brain without some crazy cloning stuff or a horrible dystopian future.

I don't think that's entirely accurate. We've done plenty of tests on animals and found nothing that would contradict either known physics or chemistry.

Moreover, even if human brains were somehow special relative to animal brains, there's no reason to think they operate in a way that that's separate from all the other matter in the universe. And as the GP said - interactions between matter are either causal or random. There's no "free will" interaction. Such a thing would be - almost by definition - supernatural.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#92

Post by monkeycantype » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 12:11 AM UTC

_y5hn wrote: post #56

monkeycantype wrote: post #35

You want to make me cringe? remind me that I got into an email conversation on my theory on this topic with an internet stranger and it turned out that person's name was daniel dennett, who I would assume assumed that I knew who he was and that I was an internet fan boy. I'm not a philosopher, I didn't even know who daniel dennet was, so while certain that my view was covered somewhere long before I was born, I would…

So you are able to determine the infinite universe, or is this a belief-model?

Yes, but I’ll need more compute

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#93

Post by monkeycantype » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 12:13 AM UTC

monkeycantype wrote: post #92

_y5hn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are able to determine the infinite universe, or is this a belief-model?

Yes, but I’ll need more compute

Or an infinite paper tape

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#94

Post by StanislavPetrov » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

>“This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

This sort of hubris is astounding. It boggles the mind that a "scientist" could make such a definitive statement when there is so much we don't understand about physics, and the universe(s?) in general.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#95

Post by mensetmanusman » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 3:07 AM UTC

kazoomonger wrote: post #71

jakobnissen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's similar to how both people who believe in phlogiston and people who believe in chemistry call fire "fire" - or how people who believe in the life spark and people who don't call life "life", or how people call light "light" regardless of whether they believe in the ether, the standard model or something else. No matter the academic discussion of what free will is or isn't, we still have to address the fact that…

> the fact that dominoes and animals and people appear to behave according to different rules The crux of the issue is that you're wrong here. Humans have this vanity that we're special, but we're really not. We behave according to the same rules, we're just relatively complex systems within those rules compared to dominoes. When most people think of "free will", what they actually mean is "unpredictability". That's…

“ Humans have this vanity that we're special, but we're really not.”

How would one go about proving this statement. Hint: it’s impossible (by definition)

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#96

Post by mensetmanusman » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 3:08 AM UTC

jakobnissen wrote: post #44

dlkf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of disagreement here probably boils down to the perceived significance of what you're calling "free will" in your final sentence (as opposed to "magical supernatural free will"). On my view it is literally nothing. It's the tautological observation that agents with desires, uninhibited, can and will seek to satisfy those desires. It gives us no grounds for responsibility, punishment, etc etc. (Those are all…

That's interesting! In my view, nothing important hinges on magical free will. How could it, when people can't even articulate what it is? In my view, everything we associate with free will: Responsibility, punishment, "do better next time" et cetera, are not only recovered when you reach for a serious answer to what free will is. It's actually better recovered than with magical free will! For example, everyone agree…

Free will isn’t binary, there are gradations.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#97

Post by mensetmanusman » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #91

mensetmanusman wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have no ethical framework to turn the scientific method towards what is going on at the deepest levels of the brain without some crazy cloning stuff or a horrible dystopian future.

I don't think that's entirely accurate. We've done plenty of tests on animals and found nothing that would contradict either known physics or chemistry. Moreover, even if human brains were somehow special relative to animal brains, there's no reason to think they operate in a way that that's separate from all the other matter in the universe. And as the GP said - interactions between matter are either causal or rando…

I agree. Belief in free will is, by definition, supernatural. That it can never be proven is comforting in a sense.

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#98

Post by dwd » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #83

I'm surprised at an article on free will that mentions neither Skinner nor Kahnemann. Skinner's studies on behaviourism and operational conditioning led him to question free will in quite a dramatic fashion - in some ways I think akin to how Darwin was able to reason from "reproduction with modification" to evolution, without ever having a mechanism for modification in mind (gene theory came along much later). More r…

Sam Harris very recently published a podcast where he updated his stance on free will - worth a listen as he explored in depth the direct quote towards the end of the article: "If one pays sufficient attention, one can notice that there's no subject in the middle of experience – there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own."

In saying that he says that most of our actions simply come out of the fast thinking system, and when we think something through slower we have an "illusion of free will" but still act in a way that to an external observer would say was "in character".

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#99

Post by nickcotter » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 6:45 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #79

> “That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.” Huh? Why? Shouldn't it be the opposite? As much as I have a personal will, I will continue to will the same thing if we replay the situation -- all other things being exactly the same. I don't chose someth…

This has always seemed to me to be the inherent contradiction in free will but I struggle to elaborate it. If it’s my choice then doesn’t that mean it’s determined in some way? In which case it’s not free. But if it’s random then that’s not “will” either. What then is the thing that could be both free and willed?

Re: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

#100

Post by rewgs » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 7:19 AM UTC

I think it's pretty obvious that free will is an illusion.

No matter what, every action -- even if that action is somehow clearly defined as an act of free will (I guess the "classic" example being one of rebellion or a wholly unexpected action) -- springs from a cause. That cause has its own cause. And so and on and so forth, until you pass the barrier between what we call consciousness and what we call organic hardware and pass into the realm of the (currently) measurable and predictable.

Just as a technology, sufficiently advanced, appears to be magic, so then does a complexity, sufficiently complex, appear to be something other than what it is. I bet everyone on HN a Coke that Consciousness will one day be understood than to be nothing more than a whole lot of complexity masquerading as something more. Ditto for any concept of free will within the universe, though I suppose that'd be a whole hell of a lot more harder to prove ;)

Free will simply does not exit, no matter how complex reality is or brains are.

Side-note: while they're pretty bad movies over all, the Matrix sequels summed this concept up pretty will with the whole idea of the One being essentially the free will machine of the Matrix, the "Integral Anomaly" -- essentially baked-in variety/novelty/choice/etc, which is still no less part of the machine itself. Just as a random number generator function returns a random number, it's still programmed to do it.