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Comment by air7 | Hacker News Reader

> Where my personality was called into question perhaps my working-class background, my northern accent, and my Asperger's could be a reasonable explanation.

It's quite likely that ones background and developmental disorders shape one's personality. However, it's still their personality. So what if it has a reason?

This touches on the dark abyss of "free will". In some sense all we are is a cellular-automata chugging along according to the laws of physics. In that sense everything one does has a "reason". Yet we live our lives, and shape our societies, with the idea that sane adults have an ability to chart their own course, in some sense. (in contrast to children or "insane" people who are considered more reactive/automatic hence not responsible for their actions).

What part of my actions are my responsibility (and therefor have consequences) and what part is beyond my control (and should be forgiven, at least partially)?

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“There but for the grace of God go I”, a sentiment even atheistic people should share. Maybe in dry scientific speak, “if it weren’t for the entirety of human culture, evolution, and the specific conditions of the Earth from prehistory until the present, I would not be here where I am today in my particular frame of mind. I didn’t even get to choose which ‘I’ I am, I could have been the person I hate or pity instead”

People that don't believe in the supernatural can still appreciate the usefulness of God as a metaphor and concept. Provided they don't take things too seriously :)

This is a fascinating thing to think about. Some properties like missiong legs are thought of as disabilities and often compensated for by the state. But where is the line? Is depression (hindering ones ability to work or lead a happy life) a disability, or just being not intelligent enough to be a good programmer?

In the UK, depression can be considered a disability under the Equality Act 2010. Anyone with such a disability would be entitled to appropriate compensation from the state (social security benefits) and adjustments in the workplace, if necessary.

In England autism counts as a disability if the autistic person thinks it is a disability: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/6

Depression can be a disability if it lasts long enough. Otherwise it's a simple illness and employers should deal with it in the same way as other illness.

WE ARE NOT cellular-automata chugging along according to the laws of physics. In any sense, degree, or verified theory. In my OPINION, cellular automata fascination is an obsessive disorder that geniuses are at risk for, ca. Fredkin, Feynman, Wolfram. The operant word is disorder.

Free will is an illusion and simply it doesn't exist.

You cannot make either a choice or decision that's truly your own. Simply, you cannot without being effected by the system you're in.

People don't choose the life they're born into and why does anything that comes after birth be assumed differently. The answer cultural conditioning and from religious ideology that has rooted deeply into society. The belief that god gave humanity free will.

No part of your actions are truly the responsibility of you as a person but the fate of cause & effect and everything outside one's control. The system of society with genetics & environment being imperfect makes bad people. Otherwise we would just have 'people' in a system of perfect equality.

I agree with you 100%, but I think it's better to 'choose' to believe you can do better, despite knowing, factually, that you are just a product of your environment.

In other words, "I can improve myself" is a pragmatic outlook.

Of course, you can respond with "but you can't even choose that outlook", which I don't disagree with.

> but I think it's better to 'choose' to believe you can do better

I disagree, I theorize it's the same as when the majority of humanity wanted to believe the world is flat and or there is a God that judges us all. Society is the outcome of the majority consensus. So basically I assume many lives are being punished because the majority consensus doesn't understand cause & effect.

Let's suppose you're right and non-determinism doesn't exist. (Quantum physics apparently disagrees, but never mind that.)

It doesn't matter. Treating people as though they have agency is still necessary, because how we treat them would affect their deterministic state function.

If someone commits murder and we say it was only a product of their environment and they have no agency, therefore we shouldn't punish them, well, that's the sort of "choice" that, on a systemic level, causes more people to commit murder. Even if they have no "choice" in the matter -- especially then -- creating an environment in which murder has personal benefits outweighing the personal costs is societally maladaptive.

And so it is with everything else. If we want people to give to charity and go to college and not steal from others then we have to act as if they chose whether or not to do those things and reward or punish them accordingly.

Also, the paradox is that it doesn't matter one bit whether free will exists or not.

Because either it does and we are making conscious choices and everything that normally follows with that. Or it doesn't and everything we say, do, and think is predetermined.

However, if that's the case, then you are predetermined to be someone to be swayed by certain arguments. You are predetermined to either believe or not in free will. And you cannot change that. Because even if this convinces you one way or the other, I had no choice in typing it, and you had no choice in reading it. This was going to happen based on whatever determines things.

So free will not existing wouldn't change anything. Because some people are predetermined to believe that regardless of the reason, murderers should be punished.

Well, I'm proclaiming free will doesn't exist. Neuroscience exhibits supporting evidence that we don't have free will. There hasn't been anything exhibiting that we have free will.

Your rhetoric that nothing matters could have been used when people assumed the world was flat and others were challenging that popular assumption. Nonetheless, the world gets better overtime and when people have a realistic understanding of reality.

So change does happen but yes it's going to happen whether we like it to or not. That's a thrilling thing to observe and to be aware of that nature of reality is a good thing.

> murderers should be punished.

No, they should be rehabilitated and educated of the cause & effect for their actions. Otherwise humanity is failing the unfortunate that didn't have any real control.

If there's no free will, the people punishing murderers have no choice to rehabilitate instead. Choosing between punishing or rehabilitating requires free will.

I'm writing from a cause & effect mindset. So it definitely makes sense that rehabilitation is better than punishment.

To answer what you're trying to point out that has already been answered by me in another post.. Yes, everything is fated to happen. The majority consensus is how society is structured to be and yes the outcome is by fate. Everything may change in the future if fate allows enough people being educated of cause & effect and where the current majority consensus is overcome by understanding of cause & effect. I assume this will happen as technology creates the bridge of data from & to the brain.

My objection is with the word "should", because (and maybe I'm wrong) it implies choice. Nobody says a falling rock should avoid hitting a child - the lack of agency of the rock makes that statement meaningless.

Similarly, if you posit that we have no free will, saying that humanity should rehabilitate and not punish is meaningless.

No, I think the point made above is that you can still choose punishment because even with no free will involved, the future decision calculations need to observe a strong penalty to deciding yes for murder. This doesn't require free will any more than an if-then I write in code requires it.

But your if-then exhibits no independent action. It just is. It can't "choose", it just takes input and gives a predetermined output based on that input.

If free will does not exist, you do not have a choice. It's disingenuous to both argue that free will does not exist and to proclaim that we should do anything. Or that we can make any sort of choice.

> It's disingenuous to both argue that free will does not exist and to proclaim that we should do anything.

Not at all.

Maybe you are a free-will-lacking if-then bot that takes whatever suggestions someone says we should do and executes them, and maybe I am a free will lacking robot that periodically burps out suggestions. No disenguity or "true choice" required.

But if free will does not exist and you believe that, then you would know that whomever you're making the suggestion to is incapable of changing whatever path they were going on in the first place.

By suggesting a course of action, you are implying there is an actor with agency out there.

Now, while the actor itself may not actually have agency, that does not absolve you. Any attempt to persuade is an implicit acknowledgement of free will.

> Any attempt to persuade is an implicit acknowledgement of free will.

> But your if-then exhibits no independent action.

Attempts at persuasion don't imply free will, they just change the input to the if-then in a downstream deterministic process.

If bash script A calls bash script B with a command line flag to make it follow an alternate behavior, nothing is implied about the free will of either bash script.

Yes, the argument would be that someone was forced by circumstance to rehabilitate.

And then, if free will does not exist, you are predetermined to believe that murderers should be rehabilitated.

You took one snippet out of context. The point of the statement wasn't that "murderers should be punished".

The point of the post was to highlight that if free will does not exist, then agency is not something that exists. You don't get the choice. Morality does not exist because like someone else's rock example, you don't ascribe motive to the rock. So if our actions are entirely preprogrammed, and all of our reasoning is post-hoc rationalizations, then you can't really ascribe motive to us either. Because none of us have any real control.

We're either people who do A or people who don't do A. And no matter how much your belief that murderers can rehabilitated, there will be a segment who are just predetermined to not be swayed by such arguments.

You can't simultaneously say free will does not exist and say that we have any kind of control.

Yes, like I said fate decides. I'm not saying we have control and I wrote responses but they're dead. I think they're still good responses and even if fate decided.

The issue is that you're talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Free will's existence not mattering doesn't do anything for the "thrilling observations" or whatever. It says nothing to whether things get better or worse.

Not to mention, you have no choice whether you find it thrilling or not. So trying to convince someone else that it is thrilling is also implicitly figuring people have some sort of free will or discretion.

And you're assuming that you're right and that people need to get on board because "being aware of the nature of reality is a good thing". Well, the nature of reality is that whether free will exists is pointless.

You don't even address your cherry-picking of my other comment.

I don't think there is a disagreement here. I agree with your long post conveying it's all fate in the end. I can still write about what I think while observing everything and knowing fate has made my impression. I just like the discussion because who knows if today will be the day to read something thought provoking around it.

Anyways, I'm not trying to convince anyone something is thrilling. I just find it thrilling and even while knowing I don't have free will in any regard of my life.

I think nobody can be right in the traditional sense (traditionally assuming free will exists and one person can be right). My views are just of how I wish society functioned because I think I would prefer to live in a society that cared about the misfortunate by fate. Maybe that's how the multiverse would work for people moving (after death) to a universe more suited for how they turned out. Still wouldn't bring free will but would be cool.

Anyway I'm not trying to cherry pick. I just thought I would express myself best with what I pulled out to write more. Thanks very much for the discussion!

Free will exists or it doesn't. There's no middle ground. Someone is going to be right and someone is going to be wrong. But, like I said, it doesn't matter. The answer doesn't change anything. It's a purely academic question.

If you weren't trying to cherry pick, then why did you do it so blatantly?

> Let's suppose you're right and non-determinism doesn't exist. (Quantum physics apparently disagrees, but never mind that.)

Quantum physics doesn't "apparently disagrees" with what I wrote.

> It doesn't matter. Treating people as though they have agency is still necessary, because how we treat them would affect their deterministic state function. If someone commits murder and we say it was only a product of their environment and they have no agency, therefore we shouldn't punish them, well, that's the sort of "choice" that, on a systemic level, causes more people to commit murder.

That's an arbitrary view because we haven't viewed a society that understands everything is cause & effect. I will assume a society of that nature would agree upon needing a rehabilitation modal of justice and not a punishment modal.

> Even if they have no "choice" in the matter -- especially then -- creating an environment in which murder has personal benefits outweighing the personal costs is societally maladaptive. And so it is with everything else. If we want people to give to charity and go to college and not steal from others then we have to act as if they chose whether or not to do those things and reward or punish them accordingly.

Once again this is an arbitrary view and without being able to observe a society that understands cause & effect. Stealing is an outcome from inequality of society & genetics is factored into the problem. A society understanding cause & effect would restructure because inequality becomes understood as the real causes for why bad events happen. Charity, going to college, and not stealing can only be viewed within the current system we live in but would be vastly different in a society understanding cause & effect between all members.

> If someone commits murder and we say it was only a product of their environment and they have no agency, therefore we shouldn't punish them, well, that's the sort of "choice" that, on a systemic level, causes more people to commit murder.

I agree with the direction of your analysis, but I don't think this part is true. Recidivism is really high, especially in more 'punishment' oriented criminal justice systems. I think if you took your argument to its conclusion, you would probably look at systemic causes of murder, since agent-oriented approaches are so demonstrably ineffective.

I think this is a consequence of living in a society with a mostly effective justice system.

If you have a law against larceny which is vigoriously enforced with proportionate penalties, it's going to deter a lot of thefts. But none of the thieves it does deter can show in your recidivism stats, because none of those people commit any thefts.

It's only the people who are desperate or irrational who steal when it means going to jail for it. And if you put that set of people in jail for a while and let them back out into a situation where they're exactly as desperate or irrational as they were before, it's no surprise you see a high recidivism rate in that population, and the only way to prevent those thefts is to remove the desperation or address whatever e.g. mental illness or drug addiction is causing the irrationality.

This is also why disproportionate penalties don't really reduce crime. Because anyone doing the math even remotely accurately will be deterred by proportionate penalties, and anyone not doing the math at all won't be deterred by any penalties, and that doesn't leave a lot of people who can only be deterred by disproportionate penalties.

But that's a different thing than saying there shouldn't be a law against murder or theft at all because punishment is totally ineffective. It's only ineffective against the people it was ineffective against to begin with, who are only a small percentage of the population.

I like your argument, but I think it's specious. Unless you can show some evidence that in the absence of deterrence, ordinarily law-abiding citizens commit crimes massively more frequently (for instance, when it's very unlikely they get caught), then you're just chalking up every non-crime-committing citizen up to 'deterrence' without demonstrating any causal relationship.

I think the relevant data would be crimes that were at one point very common, and are now not. Some things, like forgery, became prohibitively technically difficult. Others, like corruption in public offices, are basically inversely related to pay and pensions for public servants. I could see how vigorous enforcement would make crime more unattractive, since it's a given crime is likely to work out, but I don't think this would always be more economical than simply providing stuff like pensions and benefits so people have social investment they don't want to lose.

That's going to depend a lot on what the offense is. If you pass a law against suicide, the impact that has on the suicide rate is likely to be negligible, because most people don't have any interest in suicide to begin with and the people who do are not likely to be deterred by the prospect of criminal penalties.

But you can certainly find a lot of instances of things that a lot of people did before there was a law against it (e.g. polluting rivers) which now far fewer people do precisely because there is now a law against it.

I think pollution is a bit of a strange case, since it isn't typically directed at individuals, but rather firms, and in cases where such laws are not enforced they're typically universally ignored. Firms are funny because they're both highly invested in society, generally very rational (in a narrow sense), and generally not particularly interested in ethics. I think that's pretty much the opposite profile to your typical criminal.

I'm not in any case saying that such causal relationships don't exist: just that they only exist in a subset of crimes, and probably aren't major drivers in the really interesting ones (theft, violent crime, organized crime, etc).

>Free will is an illusion and simply it doesn't exist.

I'll ante with Pascal's wager and say it does exist.

If I'm right, then I'm right.

If I'm wrong, then the whole notion of right and wrong aren't applicable to reality, no different than CH4 + 2O2 => CO2 + 2H2O just being and not having a right or wrong to it.

Unless there is an alternative to the options free will exists and free will does not exist, then this wager does not suffer the same flaw that the original does.

Pascal's wager (the original) has a flaw in it. One doesn't know and or can prove if God is evil. So I don't really know how else to respond to what you wrote.

Free will as a concept is much simpler than God as a concept, and thus the flaws in the original wager don't apply (as far as I can tell, if you can find one that does apply let me know).

> Free will as a concept is much simpler than God as a concept

How so? I assume the opposite when it comes to what's simpler. A person sees creation by God as cause & effect. The free will concept doesn't even make sense if thought about. Your actions are cause & effect from the summation of all events experienced.

For starters, generally the view is that free will either exists or doesn't exist with free will being the concept that we have some control over our actions.

Compare this to God, where you have plenty of religions, many with their own distinction God, some with many, some with concepts that may or may not quite count as God. Even with just Christianity, you have God, but then you have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit which makes up God. With some belief systems you have spirits which are kinda like a god but kinda not and with other systems you have demigods which are part human.

So with free will, you options are:

    Option | Free Will
    1      | N
    2      | Y

With gods, you options are

    Option | God | Trinity | Allah | Shiva | Zeus | Thor | ...
    1      | N   | N       | N     | N...
    2      | Y   | N       | N     | N...
    3      | N   | Y       | N     | N...
    ...

And that isn't even counting the difference within a given religion. It is like comparing the cardinality of boolean options with the cardinality of the reals.

It's impossible to actually know whether or not we have anything approaching free will.

We could be a simulation, there could be an omnipotent deity, we could be the product of a bunch of processes unique to ourselves.

None of it matters.

We can only act on the world as we perceive it.

If the world is controlled by some outside force that can manipulate it at will, including our perception and memory of events, there is nothing we can do about that. We are merely constructs under something else's control. If we were ever capable of "piercing the veil" so to speak, the controller could just roll us back to when we didn't know. If gravity was too much, they could change it. Etc.

However, we're going to do our best to understand the world as perceived. And that's the best we can do. We have to operate as if the universe is not being arbitrarily modified according to unknowable rules.

And it's not like any sort of record will prove that it's not. Because the capability of creating this universe also includes the capability of altering the past as well as the present and future.

Similar with free will. Like I explained elsewhere, if free will does not exist, then you can either be persuaded by an argument or not. For any position. Maybe you're predestined to like Joe Dirt. No matter what anyone says about it. You don't get the choice.

Same thing regarding the concept of free will. If it does not exist, you don't actually have a choice in whether you can accept that it doesn't. Either you're predestined to believe in it or not. Because all of your actions are the results of the forces that act upon you, all of which are also the results of actions, etc, etc, all the way to the initial big bang. That one moment essentially wrote it's own epitaph as everything goes back to that moment. Without free will, me writing this and you reading it isn't a chance or coincidence, it's just the result of the forces from the big bang.

So. If free will doesn't exist, it doesn't change anything. Because we cannot change the path we're on. We have no choice. Even if you say, "Yeah, well, I'm going to do X and save the world". Well. You were going to say that in response to this post. I didn't convince you anymore than any other object in motion "convinces" any other object it collides with to change direction. It's what always was going to happen.

>So. If free will doesn't exist, it doesn't change anything. Because we cannot change the path we're on. We have no choice.

Which is why if I say there is free will and I'm right, then I'm right, and if I'm wrong, then I never had a choice and so right and wrong doesn't apply.

But Pascal's wager is about risk vs. reward. Here, there is neither risk nor reward. The entire question of whether free will exists or not is pointless.

If it exists, nothing changes. If it doesn't exist, nothing changes. And regardless whether you believe it exists or not: If you're right about whether it exists, nothing changes. If you're wrong about whether it exists, nothing changes.

So no matter the truth, no matter the outcome, everything is exactly the same. That means the question itself is pointless.

And right and wrong would still apply, it's just that if free will does not exist, we couldn't morally fault you for choosing wrong, you had no choice. But then again, I wouldn't have the choice in whether or not to morally fault you.

>Here, there is neither risk nor reward.

I consider being wrong or right risk and reward within themselves. Most others act in such a way that seems to agree even if they don't conceptualize such a thought.

>That means the question itself is pointless.

How does one determine what does and doesn't have a point? If free will does exist then we can modify our government based on the notion it does exist if we think it does. If it does exist and we think it does not, then such modifications might be incorrect. That alone is enough for us to determine if there is a point to the question, even outside of any more abstract interest in the question.

Consider someone who crashes a car into a person because they didn't like how the other person looked at them and someone else who crashes a car into a person because of an epileptic seizure.

Should they be treated the same? If free will does exist, then the actions of the first are consider a bad choice while the actions of the second are deemed an illness beyond control, and while there needs to be actions to safeguard against either case from happening again the liability of the second individual is reduced (though not as much if they knew of the risk and choose to drive anyways).

But if free will doesn't exist, then why is the first guy any more responsible for the wreck than the second guy, and why should we even take action?

Can you articulate those risks and rewards? If you can't, then you don't really have risk or reward.

And it doesn't matter if you consider "being right or wrong" as risks and rewards themselves. It doesn't make it so.

> How does one determine what does and doesn't have a point?

A simple metric is the fact that regardless of the answer, the consequences are the same. And with the question of free will, the consequences are the same whether or not it exists. Nothing changes.

> If free will does exist then we can modify our government based on the notion it does exist if we think it does. If it does exist and we think it does not, then such modifications might be incorrect. That alone is enough for us to determine if there is a point to the question, even outside of any more abstract interest in the question.

You're ignoring the real fundamental point. If it doesn't exist, all that happens anyway. Because we would be fated to do so. If free will does not exist, we can't prevent ourselves from making the decisions we're making. We lose choice.

If we were to discover free will did not exist, there still could be people who are predetermined to not accept the result. They would still believe they had choice. And since free will does not exist, they can't choose to change.

Your crash example relies on free will existing in both cases. Because if free will doesn't exist, we cannot choose to not punish the first guy if we believe he should be punished because we don't get a choice in our beliefs.

One of the flaws in Pascal's wager is that it is equally applicable to any religion where the punishment for disbelief is eternal torture.

Another is that an omnipotent being can be fooled by worship without belief.

Pascal's wager is essentially a long-winded "Yeah, but what if you're wrong?"

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