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IMO the concept of free will doesn't make sense, at least not without also believing in the existence of a soul.

If you were to make a decision that is not in some sense pre-determined by the structure of your brain (as shaped by biology and past experiences), it would be essentially random and just as meaningless as an uranium atom "deciding" to decay at some specific moment and not another.



Free will, as physicists talk about it, essentially means that my choice to perform some experiments is independent of the state of the system I'm experimenting on.

In other words I want it to be true that looking at the system doesn't tell you anything about when / whether I'm going to be performing experiments on it today, and more specifically I don't want you to be able to predict which measurements I'm going to do based on the system alone (i.e. without asking me).

This notion of free will is (as far as I can tell) completely necessary in order to meaningfully do physics at all.


But even though the arguments supporting free will at the ontological level is unconvincing, free will in the phenomenological sense is not the same.

I am of the hard determinist camp but I'm pessimistic about if we're ever going to be able to predict chaotic systems. Even if someone could predict what I'm about to do, this information would be fundamentally out of reach for me since getting this information would influence the outcome (also, maybe the predicting machine itself would causally perturb me enough to not be able to make meaningful predictions).


Free-will fits perfectly fine into the evolutionary theory.

When prey are faced with predators on the open savannah, they may be in "unconscious mode" when grazing the grass, but if they glimpse a predator, ears and tail go up, head swings, and they have to make a decision.


How is that any different from an artificial neural network taking inputs and making decisions. Are you saying the ANN has free will as well?




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