kali_fornicationnot sure if i chose to post this
Brave Little Hitachi WandPeople who try to apply game theory to fictional super AIs and David Chalmers can both fuck off.
halvarI have proven free will because my brain would never opt to drink as much as I do. check! mate!!
wait till you get one of those neuralink chips and you’re forced to like all of elon’s tweets
Free always needs a qualifier… Free from what? Free from other people, for now… Free from physics? No.
I consider free will to be the concept that whenever you make a choice A/B you as in a subjective consciousness have the power to decide any way and are not bound by a deterministic system to always give one output for the same input.
For example if we were to decide the universe is deterministic except for the conscious beings that are humans it would mean the universe looks exactly like it does in all timelines after it’s start but those timelines diverge once free will enters, since the deterministic system gets random input from free will.
So free from physics
So now I’m at the mercy of quantum physics. I would honestly just get rid of my free will, and always do the right thing (within my pussy-self’s limits).
It’s interesting, because some people are doomed to say, be evil. But that still counts as free will, even though they literally can’t just choose their way out of it.
So now, that means the punishments, and torments we put on those people for being evil, they can do nothing to actually prevent.
So now we have another interesting idea: what’s the difference between putting down a bad person for doing something bad, and a “bad” person, for “being” bad. Like say, disabled people, people of a skin color you don’t like, country origin…
Neither of them really get to choose, you can argue now that skin color is free will.
Of course, I don’t really want this to happen.
edible_funkResearch and brain scans indicate that your choices are already made and decided in the decision making portion of your brain before you’re even consciously aware that you have a decision to make in the first place. The sum total of individual experienced reality is just your brain post-hoc rationalizing your sensory input and reactions.
Even if that’s true, there’s a bootstrap paradox with that though because the decision was still made in the decision making part of your brain. So what made that part of your brain make that decision?
What it implies is that decision making is entirely subconscious and the whole conscious experience of making a decision is just our brains way of providing a sense of agency where none seems to actually exist. You really wanna bake your noodle look into split brain experiments. There might be more than one person in our heads.
Think of it like this: once Goku and Vegeta did the fusion dance, there was only Gogeta.
Yeah but when they cut the corpus callosum it’s like they’re unfused but still one body. We’re all Pacific Rim gundams.
There might be more than one person in our heads.
But of course. Not more than one person, but certainly more than one part, right?
If you ever have meditated or attempted to meditate, you see this immediately. There is the portion of you that is trying to get you to concentrate on your breath or mantra, and there is the meandering parts of your mind that are more susceptible to moods and drawing your thoughts to other things.
The same thing goes for reading. Sometimes you’ll be passing your eyes over the words on the page but most of your mind has vacated the premises.
There’s also things like instances where you drive to a place where you used to live or used to work.
There are different processes running for certain, and the mind isn’t a singular thing, but ultimately I’m not sure that anything is. I’m not sure that any of this says much definitive about free will though.
"Now, your honor, as the jury will have read in this clinical, peer-acknowledged study, our superintelligent quantum AI regional supercluster determimes guilt accurately in over 98.9% of cases, in various scenarios, in thousands of simulations.
“With no margin of error, this system has determined the defendant would have acted within the next few days, perhaps even hours!”
SneezycatIf you don’t go full Minority Report on it, having something that could predict crimes with 98% certainty it could be amazing.
Imagine if instead sending everyone to jail, you could use the predictions to just prevent the crime. For example, if someone was likely to commit murder as passion crime, maybe society could have a team of trained councillors to mediate the conflict before it happens.
Imagine finding out your wife is cheating on you, because a supercomputer sent a shrink over to your house, to help you come to terms with it.
If you are already going to get bad news anyway, might as well get them from a professional.
A_norny_mousseNot the old man with the white beard, noooo
… and usage of candles in fictional video, one of my pet peeves!
most people can’t stand the idea that they’re not in control, which is funny, because a lot of those people can’t even be bothered to try and take control of themselves
Well, I’m more than happy to be some AI’s pet human.
lumpenproletariatI can plan to do something X years in advance, long after any chemical impulse has stopped dictating to me. I am my brain and my brain is me.
Not technically…
Cutting edge (and relatively proven) theory is:
“You” is the quantum superposition that exists between connected microtubules.
That’s why for anesthesia or just getting knocked unconscious, you don’t need to remove the brain, you just do something to break up the connection of microtubules and boom: the person is unconscious but their brain is still functioning which keeps the body alive. Eventually the microtubules reassemble and you’re able to be conscious again.
The brain is just another organ the “you” manipulates to interact with your surroundings.
It’s also the only way we could actually have free will.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12060853/
For bonus 80s coolness tho, it would mean that what is “us”, is a laser zooming around an incredibly tiny race track in our brains.
A quantum microtubule substrate of consciousness is experimentally supported and solves the binding and epiphenomenalism problems
Recent experimental evidence, briefly reviewed here, points to intraneuronal microtubules as a functional target of inhalational anesthetics. This finding is consistent with the general hypothesis that the biophysical substrate of consciousness is a ...
Holy shit that’s nanners. And this has been observed? I gotta read that paper.
Microtubules are structural and exist throughout the whole body, not just in the brain. They are part of the scaffolding of cells. If you broke them up, you’d die, because your cells would fall apart. They also have not much to do with the actual information processing in the brain, as again their role is strictly structural.
ZachariahHonor of Kings: The Way of All Things episode did a great take on this.
I wish I still believed in free will. It would make getting stuff done a lot easier. Feeling like you are fighting the universe to accomplish something you don’t want to do is much harder than feeling like you just don’t want to do something today. It’s the exact same situation either way, but the illusion of free will is, imho, valuable psychologically.
zarkanianI think if somebody truly understood this, they would just quit fighting. What would be the point?
Exactly the problem. It’s very easy to fall into doing nothing, and the question of whether that would be a problem if I actually still believed in free will, or at least didn’t actively disbelieve it, is a big one.. that knowledge or belief is now part of my operating system, a core feature of who I am that impacts the choices I don’t think I actually get to make. One of the known variables that influences behavior.
I don’t think that “not fighting” is the same as doing nothing. Like I said, if somebody could truly understand this, there would be no reason to fight, not no reason to act. They would simply think and then act.
I’ve heard a kind of enlightenment described this way. Some people have claimed to attain it. It may not be possible in a pure state, but perhaps you can get close to it by degrees.
Life, joy, friends, love, art, pleasure, dopamine, oxytocin, etc.
Anything we're doing now can still be done without the concept of free will, because we're already doing it without free will.
I just dont understand this admittantly common argument.
Free will seems like such a psychologically damaging lie. As if blaming yourself for the outcome of every sad movie you've watched is somehow motivational.
Since coming to accept that free will is farcically impossible, I feel free to just go about my actions with a sense of curious enthusiasm as to what will happen next, safe in the knowledge that que sera sera - whatever will be, will be.
cally [he/they]How would that work? What if I gain access to the AI and predict my own choices? Would the AI be able to predict that I am using it, and somehow come to a conclusion even though its conclusions would change my behavior?
Let’s say the AI says that I’ll do thing A, and then I see that and choose to do thing B, the AI is wrong.
But if AI had predicted thing B, I, the smartass, would’ve chosen to do thing A, the opposite, so the AI is wrong.
How intelligent would it need to be to realize that my behavior depends on its output, and that it could control me with its predictions? Maybe the AI predicts that I’ll use it, so it deliberately shifts its predictions in a way to make me act in its favor somehow…
Is there a name for this kind of paradox? Can a machine predict itself?
This is the issue I have with machines that predict the universe, because if the machine itself influences the universe, the machine would have to replicate itself in its simulation, which would be a problem as the simulated machine would also have to predict itself, etc, etc… this seems like it’d require infinite computing power.
☂️-If such an intelligence existed, I would simply call it a nerd and spray whipped cream in its face
you fool it manipulated you into getting bukkaked
Early into college I convinced a few people there isn’t free will because it contradicts everything we know about psychology. That said, I also explained it didn’t matter since there’s so much going on that it’s difficult to predict a person’s behavior with absolute certainty, even with a multitude of information about them.
To simplify, a coin flip is considered random even if all the forces are physical and deterministic. The angle and strength of the flip, the air resistance, gentle breezes, the precise gravity where it takes place given the pull from the earth and hell, even the moon… you can factor in so much and be right maybe 99.9% of the time with proper controls and yet there’s always something.
Human brains have magnitudes more going on, so even if some factors are strong predictors, there’s always an illusion of free will since there are so many other factors we haven’t even imagined.
_lilithMeh I wouldn’t call it that super
I am reading “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahniman.
This seems to be way more true than I am comfortable admitting to myself.
I like to replace the concept of “free will” with that of “agency”.
The Britannica definition of free will is “the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe”. But it seems to me that any state where you temporarily cannot act or communicate would automatically rule out free will, at least while that condition persists. Do you lose free will every time you fall asleep? Are people who are aware but whose bodies are nonresponsive - people who are “locked in” - lacking free will? Certainly both conditions lack agency, but these are still inarguably people - yet free will is so tightly bound with the concept of personhood, that it’s supposed lack is often used to imply one is “less human”!
Frankly, free will seems like too broad and binary a concept to match what people actually do and deal with day to day. Agency comes in degrees, and can be gained and lost - which seems to me a much closer match to what people were trying to describe with “free will”.
I’m going to knock your shoes off with real science.
All our senses, touch, hearing, seeing, smell, taste, vision, are all based on a delayed system where a thing is sensed and then a little later the brain gets that information and processes it. In other words we live in the past while our bodies are in the present reacting to the future.
After smelling a bear the brain reacts and sends a message to the legs to run like hell. However the bear has already grabbed you so as a result someone else who did run far away enough hears your cries from a few milliseconds in the past, turns around and sees your legs waggling like you wanted to run.
We are basically only aware of the recent past from a few milliseconds ago.
Often it hides the fact that it’s a superintelligence by acting like a complete dumbass.