>OK, but if we're just atoms that obey physics, where does free will come into play?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism . Or to say more on the matter, free will is the ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning, and thus select actions according to motivations and understandings of the world rather than having actions determined without an understanding of the world. "Free will" says that the causal path from our circumstances to our actions passes through our motivations and our knowledge, thus making our intentions causal factors in the world.
That just sounds like a redefinition of free will to me. Free will and determinism aren't combinable, in my opinion. If you say there's free will alongside something else, then that's the free will view. Determinism says only one thing is possible, and free will says anything is possible. If you say that both just one thing is possible and also anything is possible, well, to me, that sounds a lot like you're saying anything is possible.
>That just sounds like a redefinition of free will to me.
Only if you start by assuming that "free" will must, necessarily, be supernatural. But of course, if you start that way, you've started everything in bad faith, because you're going to reject any possible view of the world that relies on science instead of magic.
>free will says anything is possible
No sensible definition of free will says that you can will yourself to desire slood (a substance you've never heard of because it doesn't actually exist and has no properties even as a hypothetical) or will yourself out of the influence of gravity.
> Only if you start by assuming that "free" will must, necessarily, be supernatural. But of course, if you start that way, you've started everything in bad faith, because you're going to reject any possible view of the world that relies on science instead of magic.
I'm willing to admit there are parts of science we don't understand, and that people often label this as "magic". In my opinion, sometimes humans call it religion and use it as a form of hope as we continue in the quest to know the unknown. Admittedly, any tool can be used to do harm too, and clearly in 2016, many of us can see how many religions have been perverted. Yet at the same time I think religious folks tend to levy the same criticism of strict scientists.
Anyway, I have no beef with either side, and I know I won't be able to convince anyone here that science can also be viewed as a religion with its own biases. Plus I believe that most of the time science is great. I just don't know about this quest for true AI. It feels religion-y to me.
> No sensible definition of free will says that you can will yourself to desire slood (a substance you've never heard of because it doesn't actually exist and has no properties even as a hypothetical) or will yourself out of the influence of gravity.
Right, no, I didn't mean it like that. The thing I wanted to share is that free will and determinism cannot co-exist, in my opinion, for the reason stated in my last comment.
Say I have a choice - pizza or pasta. If I choose pizza, then free will says I also could've chosen pasta. Determinism says if I chose pizza, then the "choice" was always going to be pizza. If you say both that I could've chosen pizza or pasta, and that I was fated to choose pizza, that makes no sense to me.
[aside]
It sounds like quantum mechanics, which I'm unable to observe myself because I don't have the training or equipment to do something like a double slit test as demoed here [1]. Also I haven't studied quantum mechanics at all.
And, I'm not sure how trustable Dr. Quantum is as a source of information =). It's the first I've learned of quantum theory. I found another that says the same thing from the Royal Institution [2], which seems more reputable, but something tells me these findings haven't been replicated sufficiently to be fact. Or I could be 100% wrong.
[/aside]
Anyway, I'm interested in learning more, so if you have resources you think can point me in an interesting direction, I'm happy to check them out.
>Anyway, I have no beef with either side, and I know I won't be able to convince anyone here that science can also be viewed as a religion with its own biases. Plus I believe that most of the time science is great. I just don't know about this quest for true AI. It feels religion-y to me.
People definitely have a tendency to anthropomorphize "true AI" that is very religion-y. This doesn't mean that we need to throw out science as a religion among religions, it means that we need to throw out quasi-religous thought about "true AI" and be careful whenever we step off the sure ground established by current scientific knowledge.
>Say I have a choice - pizza or pasta. If I choose pizza, then free will says I also could've chosen pasta. Determinism says if I chose pizza, then the "choice" was always going to be pizza. If you say both that I could've chosen pizza or pasta, and that I was fated to choose pizza, that makes no sense to me.
That's not what compatibilism says. Compatibilism says: you weren't fated to choose pizza, period, and if we reran the whole experiment enough times, so to speak, you would in fact choose pizza some of the time and pasta some of the time, without our being able to predict better than just collecting percentage statistics.
> People definitely have a tendency to anthropomorphize "true AI" that is very religion-y. This doesn't mean that we need to throw out science as a religion among religions, it means that we need to throw out quasi-religous thought about "true AI" and be careful whenever we step off the sure ground established by current scientific knowledge.
Okay, I agree with that. I like the description of religion-y AI as anthropomorphizing. I'd say the same thing about throwing out pieces of religions rather than the whole thing. I'm not religious myself, by the way. I just think if they went back to being just about hope and support then that would be a good thing. So many other values have been tacked on that some seem to have desecrated themselves.
> That's not what compatibilism says. Compatibilism says: you weren't fated to choose pizza, period, and if we reran the whole experiment enough times, so to speak, you would in fact choose pizza some of the time and pasta some of the time, without our being able to predict better than just collecting percentage statistics.
Still sounds like free will to me. I guess my brain's not ready to interpret what you're saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism . Or to say more on the matter, free will is the ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning, and thus select actions according to motivations and understandings of the world rather than having actions determined without an understanding of the world. "Free will" says that the causal path from our circumstances to our actions passes through our motivations and our knowledge, thus making our intentions causal factors in the world.