I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.
Your moderating produces negative value.
The problem is that generic topics like "do we have free will" frequently balloon into large discussions that crowd out the more specific topic at hand. If we didn't moderate HN this way, HN threads would consist mostly of the same generic discussions repeated over and over. I'm pretty sure the community wouldn't agree that it "produces negative value" to prevent that from happening, even though we don't always make the right calls.
Honestly, I don’t think we understand enough about consciousness and how it arises from physical brains/bodies to make such an extraordinary claim like “there is no free will,” when the entire history of human thought and philosophy presupposes that there is.
How would we "act as if they don't" ?
Even if I called you a coward?
If you punched me without provocation, with no evidence of mental illness, and did it "deliberately" [1] then I will "blame" you because that's the only way I know of to defend myself against future attacks.
[1] Note that "deliberately" in a world without free will just means "as a result of unknown causes inside your brain". The more we learn about how the brain works, the fewer pathological behaviors can be labeled "deliberate". "Free will" is a sort of "god-of-the-gaps" if neuroscience.
If I don't have a free will then I blame you because that's how my brain is programmed (which is BTW most probably caused by optimization of social behavior by evolution - it's better for our genes if we punish violent behavior, so that's how our brains are constructed). There's no need to assume free will.
There's no difference in behavior that depends on existence of free will.
Ah, but you are forgetting a major part of how brain works. Brain models both our own and others behavior. If your brain knows you don't have free will and I don't have free will, it will not fault me for not having a thing I am supposed to not be having.
If it doesn't have free will, brain can assign a response, but not blame. You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will. Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.
Fun fact, when people read about not having free will, they are more likely to lie/cheat on a test. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-...
Punishment decreases the odds of repeated offence. It doesn't matter if it's because you have free will, or simply because you learnt not to do that because your internal neural network were taught not to do that or it hurts.
I'm pretty sure I can make a simulation with agents punishing each other. Doesn't mean they have a free will.
> You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will
I have a notion of free will. I just don't believe it's true. I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.
> Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.
Bad example. I can express any color I can see with 3 real numbers. There's infinitely many of them and my vocabulary is finite.
> Fun fact, when people read about not having free will, they are more likely to lie/cheat on a test.
And when they drink they are more likely to do stuff they later regret. Environment influences the brain in many ways. Doesn't mean there is a free will.
So does running away. However, the issue here is existence of blame.
> I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.
Yeah, but you can't model belief without knowing what believing in something entails. Same thing with my example. You model behavior of others based on your experience. You think others have free will because you believe you do. Or not.
My own position is that while free will might or might not be illusion, it's a useful one. Like justice, mercy or love - that sort of thing.
There's a old Buddhist story, you're in a small boat on a lake in a thick fog, you can barely see beyond your boat. Out of the fog comes another boat that crashes into yours, and you start to yell at the other boater to be careful, but a break in the fog reveals that no one is in the boat. You've been yelling at nothing.
For me, either the other person is present, and therefore harmless, or they are absent, and therefore blameless. In any event, it's wrong to get upset or angry. However, one should take steps to prevent damage to boats.
Two things: it's been shown that, by the time you consciously decide to act, your neurons have already been increasing in activity for ~100ms. In other words, it's been scientifically shown that our conscious experience of "free will" is preceded by unconscious nervous activity. Make of that what you will. ;-) Pun intended.
Second, when you observe a person while remembering yourself it affects them. I've seen burly lads transform into scared little boys under a mindful gaze. When you're present people don't punch you.
I'm pretty sure that I'm in a better position to know what I actually believe than you are, and I'm telling you, I really do believe this. There are only three possibilities: either free will is an illusion, or dualism is true, or consciousness is the result of unknown new physics. The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.
But just because it's an illusion doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't live your life as if it were real. It's a very compelling illusion as long as you don't know how the trick is done, and so far, we don't.
What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently?
(fwiw, I agree with you; I just think it doesn't particularly matter now.)
Interestingly, my belief in the illusory nature of free will has had a huge impact on my life. I'm a much more laid-back person than I used to be. I don't stress out so much over making mistakes. It has also helped me in a lot of practical aspects of my life. For example, it has helped me lose weight. I think about my desire to eat as my brain playing a sort of a trick on me, and that makes it easier for me to "decide" not to give in to the craving. I treat the part of me that wants to eat the cookie as a separate entity from "me" that just happens to reside in the same brain, and I interact with it through internal dialogs like I would a small child. It sounds weird, but it works, at least for me. I'm almost down to the same weight I was in college (and I'm 54).
Horizontal gene transfer? A literal virus that changes who you are. It's interesting to think that by going paleo or vegan you can perhaps become another "person"...
Not really, few physicists have tried to explain consciousness - Roger Penrose being a notable exception - and no physicist has ever sufficiently explained how artifacts like the complete works of Shakespeare come about. They seem to have been invented by Shakespeare but if Shakespeare had no free will to invent them, then were did they come from? While we're at it, where does the continuum and the mathematical structures between real numbers come from? Are real numbers even physically possible? I've read a paper once that argued that they cannot be physically realized, because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics (and a few others, too). What about the rest of mathematics like perfect squares or functions that cannot be computed? Are these illusions?
In a nutshell, there is a whole lot that physics cannot explain, including all of human culture. That's the gist of Popper's three worlds argument. Physicists surely claim that the physical world is closed, but they haven't provided any arguments that go much beyond "human culture is super complex but we believe we could in principle explain it somehow with our theories".
Now Popper argued for some not too plausible dualism, but the central negative part of his argument still stands.
As for explanations, I agree that not many good ones are on the table and maybe the Philosophy of Mind confuses more than it clarifies. My personal favorite speculative theory is a rare form of computationalism, namely the position that some computations might have consciousness as an emergent property when they run on a suitable physical device, and that in theory we could even be able to determine which class of computations these are by mere analytical insight, provided we have the proper conceptual tools. Computationalism is not very popular in philosophy, though.
Free will isn't an illusion so much as a misleading oversimplification of a complex concept.
The traditional philosophical notion of free will assumes a kind of perfectly rational Platonic ideal of a thinking human who carefully weighs all future options before acting.
This is clearly nonsense, and should have been called out as nonsense much earlier in history.
In reality free will is a mash-up of all kinds of influences - rationality, misguided belief, instinct, genetics influencing brain structure and hormonal balance, culture, previous experience - in varying proportions.
They add up to a kind of meta-freedom - not necessarily rational, but not particularly easy to predict or control with any precision.
Your sense of self isn't aware of these influences, but that won't stop you acting with some form of independent agency - and that's still true even if there's a gap between your conscious model of your motivations, and the soup of real motivations that drives you.
> that's still true even if there's a gap between your conscious model of your motivations, and the soup of real motivations that drives you.
I would say it's true because there is a gap, not "even if".
Who (or more precisely what component of "us") is it exactly is it that has free will? The ethereal eternal soul (which is that anything but an imagined property of conscious beings)? The meat abacus in our heads? the nerves in our arms?
Don't assume we have a free will when debating if we do :)
If we don't have a free will, then the fact that we believe in free will is irrelevant, and you cannot deduce that we believe in it from the fact that we act as if we believed in it.
Free will is most probably a quirk of language, an answer to a misleading question based on wrong assumptions. There are no difference in the state of universe no matter if there is free will or not.
There's no scientific understanding of where exactly consciousness is rooted, so if you take that to assume it means there's no such thing as conscious choice, I conclude you are a fatalistic downer who I don't want to hang with.
It has exactly as much basis as the alternatives, explains the world just as well, gives the exact same predictions, but needs less assumptions.
BTW - why is lack of free will a downer? I perceive is as neutral.
Not the GP, but lack of free will implies that people have no agency over their actions, and hence can't really take pride in anything they've accomplished. They're just squishy robots following their programming and lying to themselves about why they do the things they do.
Or at least that's one depressing way to interpret it.
Imagine we could perfectly map all your brain's neural connections at an instant in time to software. This is not out of the realm of possibility in the future, right? Now imagine we "asked" that model to make a decision. Any decision. Wouldn't that frozen-in-time model give the same answer every time?
For me, the most important aspect of free will is to be able to predict the outcomes and consequences of my choices, use that as feedback to select which decision to make.
I believe it.
My brain is a collection of experiences and my body is a chemical reaction.
In other words, I am not a product of neurons firing, I am neurons firing.
I feel like we should reread Descartes' Meditations. But roughly speaking, "I think therefore I am" can be interpreted as "I am thought."
What is essential to me is the information processing that happens as a result of the neurons firing.
If you define free will as future choices cannot be predicted based on history, then it turns out that if humans have free will, so do elementary particles. To me, this doesn't mean we don't have free will, but instead the linear, deterministic model that's often used to discount free will is just not how the universe works.
Note that this result does not depend on statistical randomness like some of quantum mechanics, but just three simple axioms. I highly recommend reading the full paper, especially the end, "Free Will Versus Determinism".
Talking about free will is just another way to have a conversation about God.
http://blog.rongarret.info/2018/09/the-last-word-i-hope-on-f...
You might find this interesting as well:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...
The fallacy here is in assuming the time perspective of God to be equivalent to our own.
I know, right?
> but in my view knowing an outcome doesn't mean controlling it. It simply means knowing it.
Turns out knowing is enough to negate free will. Take a look at the proof.
I hope I'm not insulting you, none is intended, but it seems to me that most theories that attempt to remove God and/or free will from reality are a thin veneer over a desire to be without responsibility. The only thing I have to add that I think we both agree on is that truth is indeed concrete, and what we choose (or sadly, think we are coerced) to believe has no bearing on it.
http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-ar...
> If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us-like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.
That's like saying "matter is just a bunch of atoms". The reality is not so certain. Our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality (physics) and consciousness (neuroscience/psychology) is still highly theoretical.
Well, it is.
> Our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality (physics) and consciousness (neuroscience/psychology) is still highly theoretical.
It's much more than that. No experiment has ever been done that contradicts either GR or the Standard Model. So unless the operation of the brain depends on new, undiscovered physics, we do in fact have all the information we need in order to completely understand the operation of the brain, at least in principle.
>Well, it is.
Nah, it's much deeper than that as you well know. The word "just" implies there's nothing more to be explained.
>No experiment has ever been done that contradicts either GR or the Standard Model.
The Standard Model is an incomplete theory that fails to explain many physical phenomenon. Let's not pretend otherwise.
>So unless the operation of the brain depends on new, undiscovered physics, we do in fact have all the information we need in order to completely understand the operation of the brain, at least in principle.
So you admit we don't actually know that consciousness is "just neurons firing", you're just extrapolating?
Sure, but atoms are an extremely good approximation to the truth in the regime in which human brains operate.
> The Standard Model ... fails to explain many physical phenomenon.
Yeah? Like what?
> you're just extrapolating?
Of course. Until we have a full understanding of the human brain, there will be things about its behavior about which we must extrapolate (that's what "not having a full understanding" means). But I'm extrapolating from some pretty damned good data and some pretty damned solid math. So I am highly confident in this extrapolation.
>Yeah? Like what?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
>I am highly confident in this extrapolation.
Even still, we shouldn't state theoretical extrapolations as if they are facts. It's the difference between saying "x is caused by y" and "I think x is probably caused by y".
Please say what you sincerely think free will means, and try not to give me strawman or devil's advocate positions on what you think your opponents think it means, if you would be so kind.