Comment by tpetrina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpetrina | Hacker News Reader

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> we know so little about the universe But free will doesn't fall in the realm of "things to research". It's an escape mechanism devised by religious people wanting a perfect mechanistic universe designed by God with an escape hatch from it in the form of "free will" that somehow enables us to sin. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just a for of saying "universe is mathematic, we are not".

If you are willing to claim "but the universe isn't even causal" then you don't even need free will anymore since the sole intent for it was to claim independence from causality. It's a broken metaphor for explaining the world. So by implying causality is an illusion free will doesn't give you anything that you wouldn't get with such "un-causal" universe. It has exploratory power of zero.

> And yet, you attribute an agency to this humanity Agency is an attribute of source - to differentiate whether this post was written by me or you. The idea that free will is a requirement for agency is not obvious nor true. It is just your requirement, one with which I will never agree.

> they just come to predistined conclusions No, technically they come to whatever they come. The opposite of free will is not determinism. One thing that baffles me even more than proponents of free will is the insistence of determinism as the alternative. Let's repeat, free will is not synonym for indeterminism. At best we can say that things happen and there are bunch of correlations in the system. For all intents of purposes, what we call causality in this universe is a bunch of beliefs in the uniformity of the universe. If the stone fell yesterday, then it sure will tomorrow.

- Free will doesn't explain anything.

- Nor can anyone claim that they "feel" free will - that is such a blatant non-truth.

- Nor you can "prove" free will by raising your hand. You can at most just point to the fact that you raised your hand. Through your existence, reasoning, internal and environmental pressures.

>But free will doesn't fall in the realm of "things to research". It's an escape mechanism devised by religious people wanting a perfect mechanistic universe designed by God with an escape hatch from it in the form of "free will" that somehow enables us to sin. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't think so. If anything it's the opposite: free will is a direct experience we all have (whether true or illusionary).

The idea of no free will, on the other hand, is pure rationality. It's us ignoring what we empirically experience, in favor of the theories we have devised to explain the world.

So, it's the latter (no-free-will) that is more religious in nature, to the extend that is ideological and not empirical in origin. At best it's based on a distillation of isolated empirical observations into general laws.

But while any empirical observation is enough in itself to support its own existence (if I feel X, I feel X - there's no two ways about it. X might or might not exist, and I might have felt it because I took drugs or whatever, but there's no denying that I felt X), any general law cannot be proved logically by any number of empirical observations (see e.g. Russel, re: the problem of induction). Heck, it can't even be supported, except in an uncertain degree (what if you see 1 million white swans and the 1.000.001 is a black one?).

>If you are willing to claim "but the universe isn't even causal" then you don't even need free will anymore since the sole intent for it was to claim independence from causality.

Well, I'm not bound by some rational neat ordering of things , where the universe follows our rational bias, things go by the simplest explanation, and so on (Occam's razor is just a heuristic, not a law of nature).

I'm not saying free will necessarily exists. But if it existed, it could exist whether we "only need it to claim independence from causality" or not. Casuality for example could not exist AND free will could be a thing. The same way two physical objects can XOR exist, not the same way two inter-connected exclusive theories do. Or there could be zero, or 10 different mechanisms alonside free will that are all independent from casuality in different ways.

>- Nor can anyone claim that they "feel" free will - that is such a blatant non-truth.

Well, we do. Whether correct with the "world as such" or not, it's only an ideological rational bias that says otherwise, not felt experience.

>- Nor you can "prove" free will by raising your hand. You can at most just point to the fact that you raised your hand. Through your existence, reasoning, internal and environmental pressures.

Well, the same is true for causuality. It's not something provable.

Which is why Wittgenstein once quoted "causality is a superstition".

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