
Free Will might be nothing more than a trick the brain plays on itself - twsted
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-neuroscience-says-about-free-will/
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audiodude
Free Will Is an Illusion, but You're Still Responsible for Your Actions --
[http://chronicle.com/article/Michael-S-
Gazzaniga/131167/](http://chronicle.com/article/Michael-S-Gazzaniga/131167/)

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kinkdr
Unless one believes in dualism, I can't see how one can believe that there is
such think as free will.

~~~
mac01021
Does dualism make a difference?

Suppose there are nonphysical entities (whatever that means) that interact
with the physical world (for example to control our bodies). Either those
interactions follow some set of laws of nonphysics and are deterministic (or
maybe stochastic), in which case free will has the same problems it has under
materialism, or they are nondeterministic/random, in which case does that
qualify as free will?

~~~
_0ffh
Dualism is a crock of, anyway. If there is any kind of interaction between the
physical and the "nonphysical" world, then per definition this influence must
be measurable in the physical world. But dualists want to eat the pie, and
have it too: "It's nonphysical, that explains why you can't find any physical
evidence! But it still influences you!".

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MrQuincle
Suppose, our mind is indeed designed to have a postdictive illusion of choice,
does it make sense to equip an AI with it?

Does an AI need to feel in control? What kind of role can an illusion of
choice have in reinforcement learning? Wouldn't it introduce errors on smaller
time scales, e.g. when catching a ball? Or in building up procedural memory in
general?

~~~
nibs
Another: What would an AI be afraid of?

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kordless
Running out of power.

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dmh2000
so if my brain made me think i chose to pick up a box of cereal, after the
fact, what made me pick it up?

~~~
MikeHolman
Chemistry.

~~~
JustUhThought
Physics

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bobwaycott
Philosophy has been tackling this issue _forever_. And, in my opinion, plenty
of brilliant minds have provided excellent cases throughout philosophical
history that make it clear we most certainly do not have free will. Oh, we
certainly love to feel and think that we do. Primarily, this provides us a
sense of control over our lives, over the space we inhabit across a given time
period. We also love to punish others as if they did, as free will is the
foundation of determining and adjudicating moral responsibility for one's
actions. But that's more a reflection of how we want to see the world
operating according or in opposition to our whims or, as the article puts it,
a product of tricks our brains play on us that helps us feel like we have
control.

The problem is we have no satisfactorily logical and coherent case for
explaining how a human agent exerts controlling causality on itself and the
space around it through time. Because of this, most attempts at
defending/arguing the existence of free will typically hinges on altering the
definition of _freedom_ that must be obtained in willing, an effort to carve
out a defensible position that _looks like_ free will, but is a rather amusing
game of endlessly moving the goal posts toward a compatible definition of
freedom.

For compatibilists, this pretty much always turns into a logical playground of
arguing that being able to do otherwise _would_ be the case if some
increasingly creative number of things about oneself _had been_ different.
Peter van Inwagen's replays-by-god are a pretty amusing example here.
Compatibilists accept causal determinism outside the human agent, but seek to
carve out a space within for the human agent to will and act freely.[1]

Incompatibilists, naturally, reject the notion that freedom and causal
determination can co-exist. So they typically argue over a number of varying-
strength propositions that seem to more often accept agent freedom as a given,
but causality as the thing worth arguing over.

For some time yet, I imagine we will continue to argue over and shift the
lines of where the human will may be considered the causal source of human
action. But I don't think we're ever likely to come up with a definitive
argument that is intelligible enough to be satisfactory.[2]

\---

[1]: There are, of course, some who like to differentiate between acting and
willing freely, of course.

[2]: I can't help but wonder where this conversation would be if we hadn't had
many intervening centuries of religious dominance in various human endeavors,
including philosophy, that sent us on centuries of building gods into our
arguments, and then subsequently taking gods back out and winding up nowhere
closer to a decision. Well, maybe a bit closer, but we're still dealing with
the implications of gods on human will and action in the 21st century.

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kaid
nah, quite a relief after reading this, there must be some other subject to
blame, for all my wrongdoings.

