this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Free will doesn't exist in the first place
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
then no one can be responsible for their actions.
check out the book if you want to learn more about it! Determined
if you can't explain your position, I'm not going to go looking for support for you.
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.
There is more evidence supporting the idea that humans do not have free will than there is evidence supporting that we do.
Then produce this proof.
Yeah, no.
You can go ahead and produce the "proof" you have that humans have free will because I am not wasting my time being your search engine on something that has been heavily studied. Especially when I know nothing I produce will be understood by you simply based on the fact that you are demanding "proof" free will does not exist when there is no "proof" that it does in the first place.
I tend not to waste my time sourcing Scientific material for unscientific minds.
Hahaha yeah the philosophy of free will is solved and you can just Google it
That's not a mature argument
feels like a very reddit interaction, this doesn't belong on lemmy imo
Your comment is more useless than the one demanding "proof" of something that isn't proven either way, and very much adds to the "Reddit" vibes that in your opinion do not belong here.
I guess you should see yourself out by your own standards eh?
Asking to prove non-existance of something. Typical.
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.
reductio ad absurdum
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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?
Why don't they have free will?
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).
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.
but why do you have those options? why wouldn't you have had them in the past?
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?