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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> No one actually believes this, including 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.

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I don't think the evidence is overwhelming at all.

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.

I actually agree with most of what you say here. This is more about semantics than science. But I would put this differently:

> 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".

I think what _nardi_ is trying to say is that there's no functional difference between having free will, and acting as if you do.

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.)

Well your ethics should shift considerably. Retributive justice is morally repugnant for someone who does not believe in absolute free will.

+1. The moral basis for much of our societal rules and behaviors is unsound if free will is incompatible with biology. We in the US do so many things based on Puritan moral views that are so very harmful and counterproductive to our goals, based on an incorrect understanding of how the world works.

The existence of punishment changes the inputs to the system and, thus, changes the outputs of the system. The system in this case being the mind and it's output being behavior.

Right which is why I specifically said retributive justice. Other penal forms may still be morally justified for the sake of the “system” as it were.

But the very existence of ethics is in danger in absence of free will. Existence : as in, whom do you blame for hanging the terrorist ? The lawyers, judges, jury, witnesses did not have free well : so it was inevitable that the terrorist be hanged.

> What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently?

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).

Erm ... it seems to me that if there was no free will then your beliefs couldn't have any actual consequences at all, they and your cookie cravings are just different aspects of the unfolding of the universe

His beliefs are also a part of the unfolding of the universe, and as such his beliefs also have consequences even if he has no control over what he actually believes.

Dockerized micro-services for the self!

It's a throwaway comment, but perhaps (as with most problems of philosophy) the problem is really semantic? What does "will" really mean, in free will? It imagines a little person sitting in my head piloting my body. It seems equally plausible that there is no central "me", I'm just a competing mess of programs running in my brain (at varying levels of abstraction), with the gut biome being the BIOS. There may be a hypervisor in there somewhere, but that's the most you can hope for in terms of rational direction. Everything runs in parallel, and the part I think of as "me" rationalizes decisions after the fact.

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"...

You can be a monist and still believe in physics and free-will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism

> The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.

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.

I don't understand why we would look to physics when consciousness is a product of neurobiology. Yes the principles of chemistry are physical principles and biology is based around chemistry, but that doesn't mean looking at the behavior of particles can explain the entire system besides some minor insight on how parts of it physically interact.

Roger Penrose begs to differ. See "Shadows of the Mind", where he argues for the third option in your list. Based on scientific evidence, of course.

I'd argue that there are more than three possibilities. One addition, for example, is that the concept of free will is under-defined and an intelligible conversation can't be had about it. I encourage you to define free will without resorting to synonyms like volition, free choice, and the likes.

In order to define "free will" as in "I have free will" or "We have free will" first we have to define who "I" or "We" is and I'm not sure we have accurately done that yet.

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?

Notice that in my OP I was actually very careful to talk about the perception of free will, and not free will itself.

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