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Scott Aaronson on Free Will

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• u/xamueljones:

  Whenever I hear about the debate on free will and the idea that if your actions are predetermined then you have no free will, I always think to myself that it doesn't matter. The idea that if someone knows what you are going to do in advance renders your choice meaningless is virtually gibberish to me.
  
  Everyday I interact with people who know me very well and have above-chance ability to predict what I would choose for all possible choices. However, just because my best friend can easily guess that I would choose scrambled eggs for breakfast, procrastinate my course work by typing this comment on /r/rational, read a fantasy book instead of going to a football game, and that I one-box in Newcomb's problem does **not** make the choices I made meaningless.
  
  All my friend is doing is predicting the choices I make, not choosing *for* me. It doesn't make a difference to my thought processes whether I tell her what I chose afterwards, or if she guesses ahead of time without telling me what I would choose. I would still make the same choice regardless of her knowledge about me.
  
  People have this weird idea that predictions somehow lead to control. As if we were hapless puppets dancing to strings of an invisible puppet-master.
  
  The only reason I can think of for this odd confusion is that people draw a casual arrow from prediction to choice as if the prediction caused the choice. However, even though the prediction occurs temporally before the choice, the casual arrow actually leads from choice to prediction, in the opposite direction of time. The choices you make are what causes the prediction, not the other way around.
  
  Note that I'm only stating my thoughts on how free-will can still exist despite the existence of a perfect predictor, not the question of whether free-will can exist in a deterministic universe (Hint: Yes!).
  

  • u/696e6372656469626c65:

    > However, even though the prediction occurs temporally before the choice, the casual arrow actually leads from choice to prediction, in the opposite direction of time.
    
    Nitpick: You're not allowed to draw backward-pointing arrows in your causal diagram.
    
    Exercise: Devise a way to make the same argument *without* making reference to backward-pointing causal arrows. (It's quite possible to do!)
    

    • u/fubo:

      Easy. There is something in the past that gives rise both to future behavior and to present prediction. For instance, habit formation.
      

  • u/narfanator:

    Dude, take this the right way: Read the lecture. What you're talking about is... like, it's part of the launch point, only he goes orthogonal from there.
    

• u/Frommerman:

  The only times when I personally argue about free will are with theists, specifically ones who try to use the existence of free will as a means of absolving God of responsibility for evil.
  
  This is really cool and has convinced me that there's more to the debate of free will than I previously thought, but it doesn't help the theists with the problem of evil. This is because it isn't a model which addresses God's decision to make a universe where evil was likely and common. Sure, human decisions may well be impossible to predict in particular, but in general it is possible, for a being of sufficient computational complexity, to predict that beings with our general brain structures and histories will often make evil choices, and it should fall upon the being creating such beings to think about what he is doing beforehand. It also, naturally, doesn't help at all with the fact that horrific diseases exist which have nothing at all to do with human choices.
  
  So yeah. I liked this. I was kind of afraid, going in, that I'd have to reconsider a ton of positions I hold on a bunch of different topics, but now I don't. Yay?
  

  • u/narfanator:

    I'll pop back on when I'm not supposedly working for a better, longer discussion, but for now: 
    http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/anti-theodicy
    

• u/narfanator:

  I just came across this via HackerNews. I think it's bloody amazing, and I'm still trying to get my head around it.
  
  Also, Scott Aaronson.
  

• u/xamueljones:

  Does anyone recommend me buying the textbook by Scott Aaronson, *Quantum Computing Since Democritus*? If so, would the Kindle edition be fine? If possible, I would prefer to buy the Kindle version,  but I know that not all textbooks translate well from dead tree format to electron format.
  

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