this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Free will doesn't exist in the first place

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Free will doesn’t exist

Which precise notion of free will do you mean by the phrase? There are multiple.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Fuck, here too...

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Prove it.

Or not. Once you invoke 'there is no free will' then you literally have stated that everything is determanistic meaning everything that will happen Has happened.

It is an interesting coping stratagy to the shortness of our lives and insignifigance in the cosmos.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Free will, fate, and randomness all play a role in our universe, each parameter affecting each other. There is no such thing as absolute free will, nor does absolute determinism guide our universe, nor does absolute randomness. I think however, that our closest understanding to the inherent nature of our universe is a form of randomness.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not saying it's proof or not, only that there are scholars who disagree with the idea of free will.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-doesnt-exist-according-to-robert-sapolsky/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

I'm currently reading his book. i would suggest those who are skeptical of the claims to read it also. i would say i am very skeptical of the claims, but he makes some very interesting points.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

At the quantum level, there is true randomness. From there comes the understanding that one random fluctuation can change others and affect the future. There is no certainty of the future, our decisions have not been made. We have free will.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

That's merely one interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are others that don't conclude this (though they come with their own caveats, which haven't been disproven but they seem unpalatable to most physicists).

Still, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle does claim that even if the universe is predictable, it's essentially impossible to gather the information to actually predict it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why does it have to be deterministic?

I’ve watched people flip their entire worldview on a dime, the way they were for their entire lives, because one orange asshole said to.

There is no free will. Everyone can be hacked and programmed.

You are a product of everything that has been input into you. Tell me how the ai is all that different. The difference is only persistence at this point. Once that ai has long term memory it will act more human than most humans.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

There is no free will. Everyone can be hacked and programmed

then no one can be responsible for their actions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

check out the book if you want to learn more about it! Determined

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

if you can't explain your position, I'm not going to go looking for support for you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

it's not my position, but the book author's. i doubt i could do a good job explaining it, as i haven't gotten very far in to it.

sometimes people are curious, and just want to know that the information exists. that is me. I'm reading the book as a challenge for myself, because i disagree with the premise.

other times people i guess think that you could cover a complex topic like this in bite-sized spoon-fed internet comments and memes. i feel pity for those guys.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 53 minutes ago

other times people i guess think that you could cover a complex topic like this in bite-sized spoon-fed internet comments and memes. i feel pity for those guys.

I have a philosophy degree. I don't need you to cover the topic. I asked you to support your position.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Prove it.

Asking to prove non-existance of something. Typical.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean, that's the empiric method. Often theories are easier proven by showing the impossibility of how the inverse of a theory is true, because it is easier to prove a theory via failure to disprove it than to directly prove it. Thus disproving (or failing to disprove) free will is most likely easier than directly proving free will.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

reductio ad absurdum

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

How about: there's no difference between actually free will and an infinite universe of infinite variables affecting your programming, resulting in a belief that you have free will. Heck, a couple million variables is more than plenty to confuddle these primate brains.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

As a kid learning about programming, I told my mom that I thought the brain was just a series of if ; then statements.

I didn't know about switch statements then.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Ok, but then you run into why does billions of vairables create free will in a human but not a computer? Does it create free will in a pig? A slug? A bacterium?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because billions is an absurd understatement, and computer have constrained problem spaces far less complex than even the most controlled life of a lab rat.

And who the hell argues the animals don't have free will? They don't have full sapience, but they absolutely have will.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So where does it end? Slugs, mites, krill, bacteria, viruses? How do you draw a line that says free will this side of the line, just mechanics and random chance this side of the line?

I just dont find it a particularly useful concept.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'd say it ends when you can't predict with 100% accuracy 100% of the time how an entity will react to a given stimuli. With current LLMs if I run it with the same input it will always do the same thing. And I mean really the same input not putting the same prompt into chat GPT twice and getting different results because there's an additional random number generator I don't have access too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

So if I modify an LLM to have true randomness embedded within it (e.g. using a true random number generator based on radioactive decay ) does that then have free will?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

So I'd go with no at the moment because I can easily get an LLM to contradict itself repeatedly in increcibly obvious ways.

I had a long ass post but I think it comes down to that we don't know what conciousness or self awareness even are and just kind of collectively agree upon it when we think we see it, sort of like how morality is pretty much a mutable group consensus.

The only way I think we could be truly sure would be to stick it in a simulated environment and see how it reacts over a few thousand simulated years to figure out wether its one of the following:

  • Chinese room: The potential AI in question just keeps dying because despite seeming intelligent when prompted with training data it has no ability to function when its not spoon-fed the required information in advance. (I think current LLMs are here given my initial statement in this post).
  • Animal: It survives but never really advances beyond figuring out the behaviours required for survival, its certainly concious at this point but works more like a dog where it can follow commands and carry out tasks but has no true understanding of the meaning behind them.
  • Person: It starts seeking out information in ways not immediately neccesary for its survival and basically does what we did with the whole tool thing and speculative reasoning skills, if it invents an equivelent to writing then we can be pretty damn certain its human level and not more like corvids (tools) or ants (agriculture)

Now personally I think that test is likely impractical so we're probably going to default to its concious when it can convince the majority of people that its concious for a sustained period.... So I guess it has free will when it can start or at least spark a large grass roots civil rights movement?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why don't they have free will?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

If viruses have free will when they are machines made out of rna which just inject code into other cells to make copies of themselves then the concept is meaningless (and also applies to computer programs far simpler than llms).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's been a raging debate, an existential exercise. In real world conditions, we have free will, freeer than it's ever been. We can be whatever we will ourselves to believe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

but why do you have those options? why wouldn't you have had them in the past?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If free will is an illusion, then what is the function of this illusion?
Alternatively, how did it evolve and remain for billions of years without a function?