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Comment by Strilanc | Hacker News Reader

Why would this put an end to that line of reasoning? I'd expect it to flare up the debate, not end the debate. They didn't disprove behavior being computed, they demonstrated that a class of data supporting it was useless. The natural reaction to this isn't "okay we give up", it's "better go get some good data".

(Also, I don't like mixing the question "Is our behavior computed?" with the question "Does computed behavior imply no free will?".)

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The problem with free will debates has to do with its definition. I think once people start hammering out the definition, free will either becomes a wimpy variant that people didn't want to talk about in the first place, or it becomes so ambitious that it's outside the scope of science to discuss.

If you define free will as the ability to generate and choose options based on constraints, then people get bored of that discussion because it seems to lack the freedom they want. If you define free will as the ability to escape biophysics, then it becomes an unscientific discussion of metaphysics.

But what people really want is the freedom from biophysics, not a discussion of a bounded system to generate and choose options. People want a reality where this state does not need to relate to the one before it, a non-markovy world.

That's why people mix the discussion of behavioral computation and free will. People want the most ambitious form of free will, something too special for computers -- freedom from biophysics, freedom from the prior state's tyranny over its future state.

Well put. Serendipitously, Dan Dennett and Sam Harris just discussed this last week and released the recording of their conversation[0].

The conversation was interesting and disappointing.

Harris argues that the commonly-held notion of 'free will' is nonsensical. Dennett doesn't disagree but worries that people may construe this to mean that 'all bets are off' and the world will descend into chaos. Harris attempts to explain why this would not be the case; that we'd still have good reasons to imprison people who want to do harm. Dennett agrees but then restates the same worry differently. They never manage to get past this.

Still, a good listen.

[0]https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/free-will-revisited

Every time I see Dennett deliver his, "free will exists, but it's not what you think it is" line. I imagine him in a Santa suit, with his grandchildren, when they realize that that is grandpa Dan in there. He must certainly say, "no no children, Santa exists, he just isn't who you thought he was."

Listened to that whole thing as well, and was just as frustrated. I prefer Brian Greene's 1 minute case for the absence of free will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBNzaXx6eKg

When a future state does not depend on previous states, it's called "randomness". Not quite unattainable, but does not sound too desirable either.

Whenever people claim we have free will, the first thing I do is generally to ask them to define it, and that is usually where that conversation ends up in a quagmire.

This has little to do with the study in question. It wasn't about weird metaphysics, it was that MRI scans could predict what choice people would make, before they reported making a choice. Showing that the unconscious mind makes choices before our conscious mind is even aware of it. I don't think this result is affected by this new issue, because it seems to have been done with old fashioned EEGs too.

You can read more about this stuff here: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-...

This adds to other work from split brain patients, that our right brain explains away the choices we've made even if those explanations are totally false. E.g. they ask the left brain to pick up a toy soldier, and ask the right brain why they did that. They say "well because I always liked toy soldiers when I was a kid", or some other made up explanation. There's even cases where one side of the brain is paralyzed and can't move its arm, and the other side makes up explanations why it doesn't want to move its arm and refuses to believe it's paralyzed.

I think it's possible humans don't have Free Will. Not just in a philosophical, or determinism vs nondeterminism sense, but in a very practical sense. That our actions are highly predictable. And that once you start to see the inner workings of the machine that is our minds, it starts to seem a whole lot less magical.

This intuition is hard to explain, but in general many systems seem to have "agency" until you understand how they work, and then they start to seem just like normal "non agency" things. As we learn more about how humans work, we start to look a lot less agenty. More on that here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb0/agency_is_bugs_and_uncertainty/

Conway and Kitchen have defined a theory of free will.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.3286

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