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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the connection between being impossible to predict and being actuated by will instead of the underlying physics.

Even if no being in the universe could possibly predict the behavior of a system that includes an intelligent being and even further suppose that due to true randomness it was in fact not predetermined. I don't see how it would make the entity's actions determined by their own thoughts instead of the smaller scale pieces of the system.

If its truly impossible to predict and we have the perception of having free will and in fact if many things including our own life experience truly are explicable in terms of thoughts, will desires, actions does it really matter if the particles made me do it?

What is the practical differences between free will and not?

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Bell's Theorem basically says that there isn't a deterministic system underlying quantum mechanics. Therefore the universe is fundamentally unpredictable. You could take that to mean everything is random, or that everything has "free will" (constrained by the need to coexist with everything else).

Personally, I find the idea that the universe is a living thing that can feel and act all scales of complexity to be delightful, and it certainly has massive ethical ramifications.

Chaos theory (and I mean the real thing, with the real math) also shows that "deterministic" does not imply "predictable", either. Even classical systems can be fundamentally unpredictable.

I think one of the problems with this question is that the experiments are fundamentally impossible. You can't put an identical person in identical situations 100 times and see what they do. That wouldn't necessarily even solve the problem since exactly what any given result would even mean would still be up for debate, but you can't even get that far. You can deny free will all you like and you'll never be able to prove it by predicting everything in advance. You can claim it all you like and you'll never be able to show the existence of the counterfactual world where you freely chose differently. Doesn't matter how much word chopping you do.

Bell's Theorem doesn't say that at all. It just puts constraints on what such a deterministic system would have to be. For example a non-local deterministic system could well be compatible with Bell's Theorem.

Local deterministic system is compatible too. Only Newtonian system is incompatible.

Thanks for mentioning this. To be fair, locality of information is a pretty common assumption but I should definitely qualify this a bit more in the future.

I think, it's a naming mistake. If impredictable will was called random will few people would deny its impredictability.

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