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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29327 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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But you're always going to reject the same ones and chose the one you were always going to, based on everything that has come before that decision point. You will always make the same choice given the same set of conditions. There is no such thing as "free will".

You seem to be constraining the definition of free will to something tautological, while trying to prove some meaningful point.

There are different categories/qualities of free will, specific to any given entity and context. Free will of material+spirit sapients in a material+spirit world looks freer to the philosopher than the free will of material sapients in either a purely material or a material+spirit world, since spirit is (presumably) acausal relative to the material. However, a theologian who presumes original sin is a spiritual condition which constrains the will to the selfish choice will think a purely material AGI a freer will than an unrepentant sinner.

Assuming a purely material world, an agent’s ability to carry out a given choice or to even think of that choice as a choice is naturally constrained in many ways, by fatigue and hunger, by senses and by neurology, by lack of abilities or skills, yet that agent is still functionally free to will whatever he can imagine.

I advise you to consider the concept of Turing completeness before calling my paradox more absurd than your tautology.

I'm aware of the concept. I just don't see how it does anything except back me up. If you can simulate everything a given person is going to do their whole life because you have all available information and enough compute, then how can you claim they have free will?

There is no such thing as free will because their can't be. Either things are causal and you were always going to chose left based on past states, or there are random fluctuations in the aether that somehow fired enough neurons at the same time for you to tip the balance into turning left instead of right. Either way you didn't have any more to do with the outcome than a ball rolling down a hill does.

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