Comment by Sukotto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sukotto | Hacker News Reader

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I recently started reading through his work. And although I've enjoyed his stories in general, they have all been solidly in the "depressing" category for me.

So far I have read "Story of your life", "Exhalation", "72 letters", "Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", "Divide by Zero", "Understand", "What's Expected of us", and "Hell is the Absence of God". I am about 50% through "Lifecycle of Software Objects".

So far, the stories all seem built on the foundation that we reside in an immutable clockwork universe and that the notion of "Free Will" is a complete illusion. It is this combination of absence of free will and "the future is already set and there is nothing you can do about it" that I find depressing. That I am merely a meat robot programmed to act in specific ways and that my actions therefore have no real meaning (because they are no chosen, but simply a result of my program).

The only real exception so far as been "Hell is the Absence of God" which was a black comedy exploration of "what if there really was a God, and he was a complete asshole?" which was depressing in it's own special way :)

That said... On the whole I find Chiang's stories engaging, imaginative, and well crafted. Recommended reading if you like near-future science fiction, AI, time travel, or genetics.

Slight spoilers for Exhalation ahead.

> So far, the stories all seem built on the foundation that we reside in an immutable clockwork universe and that the notion of "Free Will" is a complete illusion.

I do not find this depressing, because that is how reality appears to me. I can't say for sure if that's what Ted Chiang thinks as well, but the way I interpret his work is that he is attempting to point out the beauty in the universe as it is, not as it might appear to be. The protagonist of Exhalation is a perfect example. Having pulled aside the veil to the inner workings of his mind (the movement of air through intricate channels is in principle, deterministic, there is hardly room for "free will"), he finds greater understanding and an expansive wonder at what life is, not depression.

I wholeheartedly agree. I just read Exhalation, and I actually found the end rather uplifting. When presented with the same realities we face, the focus on the positive and the still unknown exemplifies the best of the human spirit (even if presented through the lense of an alien).

I didn't get anything about a lack of free will from that story -- it's more a reflection of the inevitability of thermodynamics. Their life is driven by a pressure gradient, we're driven by a similar entropy gradient.

There's a story I read a few years ago, I think from Wilson, about the universe as it stretches out in time, hundreds of trillions of years from now, into the heat death of the universe. It's the same concept, thermodynamics, but a different scope.

[rot13 spoiler]Gur ebobg qvfpbiref gung vg unf ab frys. Vg vf whfg gur pheerag fgngr bs gur pbzcyrk, culfvpny fgngr znpuvar vafvqr vg'f urnq.[rot13]

... which is not precisely an argument against free will. Imho it's a close cousin though.

It's an argument for materialism and against dualism. It's a physical process that gives rise to consciousness, not a soul like thing that's separate from the material world.

Stepping back though, it's a voyage of inquiry and discovery and subsequent changes in civilization. None of that challenges free will, any more than fMRI does in our world. We have peered into the brain, and seen electrical signals that we don't understand. When we die, these go away, never to return.

(ob not xkcd: stimulus, response, stimulus response. Don't you ever think?)

Well, does it matter if you actually have free will, or does just feeling like you do suffice? If it does matter, what if the state machine is so complex that the future can't be known? If you can't determine the difference between free will and the alternative, and nobody and nothing else can, what's the difference?

To me, lack of free will isn't a problem as long as there aren't entities that can (or will) take advantage of that. It feels like worrying about the heat-death of the universe (appropriately enough).

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