
Yes, Determinists, There Is Free Will - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/72/quandary/yes-determinists-there-is-free-will
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c3534l
So the argument is basically "there appears to be free will so long as you
don't look at the details, so free will is not an illusion, so long as you
ignore the details." Even if you accept the argument that unpredictability
implies free will (which I don't, a mindless algorithm which behaves according
to a pseudorandom number generator no more has free will than one that uses
quantum noise for it's RNG), is basically equivalent to saying "I don't
understand how free will could arise from simple atoms, so I'm just going to
ignore the atomic nature of the universe."

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atemerev
From the outside point of view, free will is indistinguishable from the
stochastic algorithm. As a functionalist, I believe that free will is not some
mystical property of living organism -- it is an emergent property of
sufficiently complex stochastic systems with feedback loops and reflectivity;
someday, we'll create machines capable of free will.

~~~
sametmax
This assume there is such a thing as chaos, and not just a state with so many
variables it seems chaotic to our limited eyes. I'm open to it, but let's not
pretend we have certitudes.

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chr1
The chaos is not related to the number of variables, it is sensitivity to
initial conditions. Even system with one variable, and the simplest evaluation
rule can be chaotic
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map).
The only requirement is that after some time all the points in the phase space
are mixed so heavily that to find one you need to do exactly the same
calculations the system itself had to do.

And btw this gives a plausible explanation of free will, it is not that the
future behavior of the system is not completely predictable from the past, but
the fact that to predict it you need to simulate the system faithfully, which
is equivalent to that system living and making its own choice.

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sametmax
If you want to make the case that complexity => free will, you need to
demonstrate it, not just say it is.

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chr1
My hypothesis is: computational irreducibility => free will. Unfortunately i
don't see any way to prove it other than creating a simulation that contains a
real human that can pass turing test. But perhaps arguments in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19944362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19944362)
can convince you that the hypothesis is not a total bs)

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YjSe2GMQ
How is this defensible? I'm out of words.

 _> Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and
alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the
fundamental physical level._

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chr1
This sentence indeed doesn't make much sense, but it has a grain of truth in
it.

Indeterminism at the physical level can't be translated to free will, it could
be translated only to randomness, because if say your choice is affected by
the way the wave function collapses, it is as much your choice as tossing a
coin would be.

But there is one property of complex systems that looks very much like free
will:

For simple systems like planets rotating around sun, it is easy to accurately
predict the future behavior thousands of years forward by using a formula.

For more complicated systems like weather there is no analytical formula, but
a simplified numerical simulation can give predictions for several days.

For truly complicated systems (like brain) accurate predictions are impossible
for even short time spans. The only way to make accurate predictions is to
have 100% exact simulation.

But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means
you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make
its choice and tell you about it!

~~~
zaat
>For truly complicated systems (like brain) accurate predictions are
impossible for even short time spans. The only way to make accurate
predictions is to have 100% exact simulation.

>But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means
you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make
its choice and tell you about it!

If rerunning the simulation will always give result the same outcome, wouldn't
that mean that there is no free will, that the system is deterministic?

And how could any of the reruns possibly give different outcome?

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chr1
If you put a person into exactly same situation, with same memories, why would
he make different choices? Making different choices would not be free will but
absence of will/random choice.

After running the simulation once you know the outcome, but it is simply
equivalent to knowing the history. And if even a tiny thing is changed in the
initial conditions, you again won't know what choice the system will make.

Basically the system is deterministic, but you do not have any way to know how
it will behave based on initial conditions other than letting it live and
observing the result.

~~~
zaat
If the system is deterministic I have no idea what the free in Free Will refer
to. If we don't assume that the current situation is the product of the
person's free will, his determined reaction to it isn't freely decided either.

Me having or lacking means to predict behavior entails nothing about the
freedom of will, is is only outcome of my limited knowledge and technical
ability. If the system is deterministic it is possible in principal to
perfectly predict person's behavior and if that is the case, he has no freedom
but to act in the way he does.

> Making different choices would not be free will but absence of will/random
> choice.

Perhaps I'm not understanding what you mean by free will.

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chr1
I don't know of any good definition of free will, intuitively it should be
something that would allow to say "this person made a choice and that choice
wasn't something that i could predict simply with some machine or equation".

Say the system is deterministic, and we have the technical ability to
perfectly predict its future. There are several ways to predict that future,
for instance for a dropped stone, we simply put a number into a simple formula
and get the position, for water flow we have to compute some integrals. In
both cases what we do, is not exactly equivalent to the process we are trying
to simulate, and we omit all the things that happen during the process. My
conjecture is that for a system containing a person, the computation is
irreducible, and the only way to predict the future is to simulate it with
100% faithfulness which makes the process of prediction equivalent to that
person living an making a choice.

This explains the paradox of god knowing everything, but people making their
own choices, because even though all the information about the future exists
at current time, the only way to extract that information is to let people
live and see what they do.

The system being indeterministic doesn't seem to give a more useful
interpretation to the vague definition above. It either doesn't fully describe
the person (something from outside the system makes the choice like in games),
or adds some randomness to the choice.

Do you know a better definition of free will?

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zaat
I don't find any definition of free will as coherent, so I don't have any
favorite one, but I don't see how the definition you proposed carries the
common properties associated with free will, for an instance the list of
properties mentioned at the beginning of the original article.

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percentcer
I think his counterpoint with the weather/meteorology undermines his whole
argument and gives the determinism side much more weight. Just because you're
modeling something probabilistically doesn't mean that its outcome is truly
uncertain. It's merely a means of managing complexity for beings that don't
have the processing power to deal with the raw data.

~~~
zaat
like you say, from the article:

>That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to
focus on the most salient regularities.

Isn't the need for explanation is driven by our ignorance?

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Barrin92
I think the point that the author makes it sensible, but I think the defence
of free will itself isn't really addressed.

What I agree with is that intentionality and free will are useful concepts to
describe how agents behave. There is no need to 'physicalise' things, when
description at a higher level is useful for understanding or conduct, and he
draws from Dennett who has described the concept of a "useful fiction" like
money, which is not physically real, but it makes sense to believe in it
nonetheless.

In the beginning of the article the author says that "the practical need for
assuming free will is not an argument in itself.", but then every argument
that follows draws precisely on the subjective need of humans to assert free
will to make sense of something at a high level of abstraction.

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yorwba
Discussed to death yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927911)

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hugh4life
I disagree... our will is bound by the will of others... consciously and
unconsciously. Our selfhoods are fictions that emerge in dialogical
relationships and every significant relationship in a way changes both your
selfhood and your will. Our wills are neither free nor determined but
negotiated.

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atemerev
> "if the universe is deterministic, as at least some of our best physical
> theories suggest"

But the universe is most certainly _not_ deterministic. Indeterminism is
required at the fundamental quantum level. Why it is even a line of argument?

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yhoneycomb
Not a fan of article titles that take a controversial topic and boil it down
to "I'm right, you're wrong"

Incredibly obnoxious

