Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t writing a book that hopes to persuade people that free will doesn’t exist actually a testament to belief in free will.

View on HN

No. He had no choice but to write it. You had no choice but to interpret it incorrectly, and I had no choice but to correct you.

I reply because I have no choice.

You simply have a supernatural belief about choice. What if choice is material. Then you do have choice, the problem is that someone could calculate what your choice will be. But it's still your choice.

A ball doesn’t choose to roll downhill. Would a sentient ball believe it is choosing to roll downhill?

Depends on the form of computation the ball possessed and at what scale. If it had sufficient computation for agency then I would call it choice. Choice is an emergent property. Just like the ability to freeze is an emergent phenomena of a set amount of particles.

> He had no choice but to write it.

“I had no choice but to write the book” is not a coherent response to the claim that he betrays a personal belief in Free Will via his stated motivation for writing the book.

He had no choice but to state the motivation he stated.

Non sequitur.

It follows directly from lack of free will. Lack of free will does not mean that the author makes correct statements about his beliefs all the time.

Then you are making an irrelevant statement about the causality of him writing a book. Not about how his apparent belief is incoherent or not.

Thus a non sequitur.

I understand what you're saying now. Thanks for spelling out what you meant by your previous comment.

A better response would have been if I spelled out that persuading people not to believe in free will does not require the persuader to believe in free will.

Free will skepticism doesn't mean the future can't be altered by changes in present circumstances. Presenting arguments changes one's circumstances and so can change future belief states. Free will generally means more than just making choices.

I can't vouch for Sapolsky's presentation, but what science tells us is that branching dynamics, the substrate of choice, supervenes on non-branching dynamics. What that means for free will/moral responsibility isn't so obvious.

What are “belief” and “arguments” in a world without free will?

A state of mind that disposes one to various thoughts and behaviors. There doesn't seem to be any tension between belief and a lack of free will.

There is indeed a tension of one defines free will in terms of thoughts and behaviors.

You're going to have to spell it out because it's not obvious.

How are arguments different from physical actions (for example what is the difference between telling someone something and applying electric shocks to them) in a world without free will?

Aren’t they all purely physical stimuli that produce a certain response?

I am sure an electric shock also produces a certain state of mind.

Well, physical actions come in many different flavors. One of those flavors is beliefs, i.e. a particular neural configuration with a certain semantic relationship within its host and the outside world. E.g. one that disposes further relevant neural configurations and relevant behaviors. I don't see the problem.

The same as it's always been. You've just been redpilled. Just as usual, as it's always been since you were alive; its the way your brain is shaped and connected.

Not at all. What do you think free will is? Unless you think there is something beyond the physical world, the belief in free will makes absolutely no sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com