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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the discussion around free will.

In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"?

In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this with complex chemistry. If we rule out souls and spirits and similar, then it's just chemistry.

If we're following a predefined set of chemical rules in response to a set of stimuli, then how is that "free willed" or "intelligent"? The arbitrary line between tropism and intelligence seems very arbitrary.

But on the other had, we are made of meat. We experience free will and intelligence. We think, and make decisions, seemingly unrestricted by the method we use to do that. We are clearly intelligent, and clearly make decisions that we are apparently free to make.

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One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free will, and exceptionally intelligent computers (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, et al) have no free agency.

> Even exceptionally dumb people have free will

“Free will” does not exist because the world is deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision, you couldn’t have made any other decision, so there wasn’t any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do with this.

One may object that at the quantum level, the world really is nondeterministic. Epicurus also argued this over 2000 years ago - that sometimes atoms "swerved" unpredictably in their movements, accounting for free will. Of course, the counterpoint to this argument is that randomness is not free will any more than determinism is; neither offers any space for agency as something that's causal rather than just experienced.

Is there evidence that quantum mechanics is not deterministic?

Yes, the entirety of the math behind it which says that various quantities are unknowable except as a distribution of probabilities. Various experiments have shown these formulas to be 'real', as in, the alternative deterministic version is untenable unless you make new and equally disturbing assumptions.

Sorry if I’m being ignorant, but let’s say you measured a qubit and it collapsed to a certain state. Now, hypothetically, if you rewind the time and re-measure it, would it collapse to a different state? I think it wouldn’t, and in this sense it is deterministic.

You would see a different state. Quantum mechanics is random. It is possible that there is hidden state that determines the outcome, but there is Bell's Theorem that limits local hidden state and it has been tested by experiment.

I define deterministic as only having one possible outcome, predictable or not.

Here is a proof that quantum mechanics is deterministic:

Let there be a time `t`.

Let there be a qubit `q`.

At the time of `t`, we measured the qubit `q`, and the qubit `q` collapsed to the state of `a`.

At the time of `t`, we measured the qubit `q`, and the qubit `q` collapsed to the state of `b`.

`a` equals `b`.

Quantum mechanics is deterministic.

I think you just assumed the result. With quantum mechanics, a and b will be different if could rollback time. Or if made the same measurement with the exact same state.

Quantum mechanics is indeterminate and probabilistic. Some of the most brilliant physicists like von Neumann and Bell, who won the Nobel Prize for this work, have proved it. Unless you have something that will win the Nobel Prize, your intuition is wrong.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy

I always get stuck with this. That yes, I could not have made any other decision, but that decision is still mine to make.

It's like being able to predict what someone is going to do, because you know them and how they think, and what decision they will make when presented with the choice, doesn't stop that from being their choice.

The universe may be deterministic, but my personality is still my personality. It is encoded into the chemical make-up of my brain, and so that complex chemistry behaves in ways that align with my personality. My personality is shaped by my previous experience, but it's still my personality. I still choose, even though the universe can predict all of my choices, because the thing I do the choosing with is part of the process.

And this seems very like the argument about intelligence and instinct. If I respond in a certain way to an event, is it because I am intelligent and "thinking" about my response, or is it instinctual and coded into my meat to respond this way? How would I tell the difference?

Same with free will, how would I tell the difference between a choice I freely made and one I didn't?

You haven't defined this property you call "agency". How then can you definitely determine whether you posses it or that someone else doesn't? The only thing I can be assured of is my own existence.

Well agency is the feeling I have of being able to impact the world. I cannot know if you have it but I have extrapolated that based on my impression of you. For all I know, I'm the only one to exist.

This is an argument for anecdote so feel free to ignore me but if you meditate for long enough or take certain substances you can experience that the conscious experience we are having doesn't actually control things in the way we think it does - you don't actually think your thoughts, you just observe them, like we don't control the sounds we hear - and same with everything else we do. The "only thing one can be assured of" is the experience, not the control of the experience.

This is completely contradicted by the fact I could talk about that experience, which does imply some control from the observer to the physical world. Which makes the whole thing paradoxical. The only way I can square it is with my religious beliefs.

I feel like what you are describing is like letting go of the wheel while driving. Then the car does its own thing but that doesn't mean you don't have control. It's just that you decided (or sometimes were forced) to let go. I agree that we're never fully in control but I don't think we're simple observers either.

> One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of.

Can one? One of the most disturbing short stories I've ever read is "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death" by Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree). It is the first-person narrative of an unusually self-aware member of a non-technological intelligent species trying to make a life different from "the plan", the species' instincts, in the face of an oncoming slow-motion multigenerational catastrophe. His efforts end up, all for contextually rational and agentive reasons, reiterating his species instinctual lifecycle.

My takeaway from that, from other readings, and from self reflection, is that we are puppets that may or may not become aware of our strings; but if we cut them, we die.

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