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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is particularly true in the rather terrible physics-meets-free-will literature. It seems every few months a physicist "scientifically discovers" some viewpoint on free will that has been widely known for centuries, or even worse claims something absurd like that they've disproven free will, for some totally naive definition of "free will".

In particular, almost nobody seems to bother dealing with compatibilist arguments, of the sort made by Daniel Dennett and many others, which make the physicists' research mostly irrelevant for free will, unless compatibilism can be refuted: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

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I'm not a fan of compatibilism mostly because their strategy seems to be to just redefine free will to be something very weak. Of course, most debates about free will are merely debates about what free will means.

I can see that, but the opposite approach seems even more absurd. Most of the physicists (and neuroscientists) who claim their work refutes or could potentially refute free will, seem to be using a definition of "free will" that's inherently magical. Something like: free will means that The Human Mind is an entity outside the universe, and can poke holes into the universe and move matter in a way that cannot be accounted for by the laws of physics.

If you start from that assumption, it seems like a foregone conclusion that free will doesn't exist.

It seems to be that an event is either random or determined, and neither option gives us what we want out of free will. I don't think there is any middle ground, and since it doesn't seem like our decisions are random, then they must be determined. Which also fits nicely with other things like psychology. Psychology shows that our actions can be predicted, which wouldn't be possible if they were random.

Why not? The Miller-Rabin primality test is both random and, for all intents and purposes, predictable.

How predictable? Do you mean that for any input x you can predict y?

I should probably stress that I agree with you on pretty much everything except that last sentence.

As for the Miller-Rabin test, it's basically a case where you can get a correct answer with an arbitrarily low probability of error. So I guess the tie in is that just because our decisions are predictable (or at least mostly so), doesn't mean there isn't randomness involved.

I'm starting to suspect that I'm responding to an interpretation you didn't intend, though.

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