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Meh I wouldn’t call it that super
If you can predict, but not controll what I’ll do, I still consider that free will.
Research 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.
Nah that’s horseshit, and lowkey is predicated on maintaining the hypercapitalist notion of individualism. If I have a decision premade off of my own sensory input, that’s one thing. But to call that a negation of free will is to discount the addition of input outside of my sensory input vis-a-vis other community members. If I packed my lunch, then David comes up to me and says “hey, I got a bogo coupon for wings, wanna come?” I didn’t pre-decide to join him. He literally added this information to my life, and I immediately decided to join. Now I have friends, and wings, and the free will to enjoy them both.
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
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.
I have proven free will because my brain would never opt to drink as much as I do. check! mate!!
I choose to start drinking, my brain choses to continue.
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
basically. well you see like you said you can define some higher order that could exert some control over your will and that could be physics or something metaphysical. in case of some religions that is a devine force, while others say devine forces relegate the power of free will to humans and in most cases they don’t interfere with the decision making processes of people. i would say if any sort of higher order retains perpetual control over your decision making process that calls the concept of free will into question. if you believe your brain is the sole source of your decisions and is bound by deterministic physical processes then that’s not free will in it’s purest form. you could say it’s free will in the sense that no other being of the same level can accurately predict or manipulate your choices but i would say that only grants the illusion of free will.
i personally believe that the source of consciousness and as such free will is metaphysical in nature and is not generally manipulated by any process, so it’s free will as per my definition.
edited in everything after ‘basically’ because i decided i had more to say
wait till you get one of those neuralink chips and you’re forced to like all of elon’s tweets
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
Pshh, how will my subconscious dictate my free will if it’s pushed into a locker?
Your brain IS you. It’s the one choosing
Not technically…
Cutting edge (and relatively proven) theory is:
“You” is the quantum superposition that exists inside 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.
https://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.
Quick edit:
Microtubules are basically biological nanites too, they’re in every cell of the body and to give you an ideal of their size, they’re what pulls DNA apart during cell replication. So these incredibly tiny little buggers link up to basically form a fiber optic cable which is how we can have quantum superposition in warm/wet environment like the brain.
Which if you know anything about how hard it is to sustain quantum superposition, well, anywhere, it explains why it considered a crazy theory for decades till we actually observed it just a couple years ago.
Holy shit that’s nanners. And this has been observed? I gotta read that paper.
Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger.
Too late!
The electricity’s already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self ‘chose’ to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.
But it’s not in charge. You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space with the likes of you.
Insight, then. Wisdom.
The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that 's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn’t spring fully-formed from the sub conscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night’s sleep.
It’s the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem . Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.
Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing.
Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go , let the body run itself.
Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
Don’t even try to talk about the learning curve. Don’t bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there’s no other way? Heuristic software’s been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience ? You’re Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality.
The electricity’s already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self ‘chose’ to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion
What is this from?
I remember, years ago, hearing part of a (I think) Radiolab episode that was about this… Something about how our brains send the signal seconds before we’re conscious of the thing, but I was never able to find the full episode after (and I definitely looked).
Anyone happen to know what episode I’m referring to, or did I hallucinate the entire experience?
This is an excerpt from the excellent book “Blindsight” by Peter Watts. I cannot recommend it enough.
I don’t think it needs to convince you about anything. brains run on less energy than a friggin lightbulb seems like it would be pretty open to suggestions
"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!”
But what about the 1.1% that determines innocence? You know, the minority in the report.
If you don’t go full Minority Report on it, having something that could predict crimes with 98% certainty 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.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free willPeople who try to apply game theory to fictional super AIs and David Chalmers can both fuck off.
I 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 the old man with the white beard, noooo
… and usage of candles in fictional video, one of my pet peeves!
Did anyone here, including myself, post a comment because we had no choice?
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
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.
there was a vsauce video about a machine that was trained on his brain and could then predict which button he would press before he did.
i can’t find the video rn but it was cool and creepy as fuck.
