this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
359 points (89.8% liked)
Technology
63386 readers
4036 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I strongly disagree there. I argue that not even humans have free will, yet we're generally intelligent so I don't see why AGI would need it either. In fact, I don't even know what true free will would look like. There are only two reasons why anyone does anything: either you want to or you have to. There's obviously no freedom in having to do something but you can't choose your wants and not-wants either. You helplessly have the beliefs and preferences that you do. You didn't choose them and you can't choose to not have them either.
Free will is what sets us apart from most other animals. I would assert that many humans rarely exert their own free will. Having an interest and pursuing it is an exercise of free will. Some people are too busy surviving to do this. Curiosity and exploration are exercises of free will. Another would be helping strangers or animals - a choice bringing the individual no advantage.
You argue that wants, preferences, and beliefs are not chosen. Where do they come from? Why does one individual have those interests and not another? It doesn’t come from your parents or genes. It doesn’t come from your environment.
It’s entirely possible to choose your interests and beliefs. People change religions and careers. People abandon hobbies and find new ones. People give away their fortunes to charity.
I want chocolate, I don't eat chocolate, exercise of free will.
By your logic no alcoholic could possibly stop drinking and become sober.
In my humble opinion, free will does not mean we are free of internal and external motivators, it means that we are free to either give in to them or go against.
Our universe is predeterministic. Block Universe (aka Eternalism).
Check mate.
It's not according to quantum physics we observe
There’s a reason you don’t eat chocolate - likely health concerns or fear of weight gain. Your desire to stay healthy is stronger than your desire to eat chocolate. But you can’t take credit for that any more than you can blame an alcoholic for their inability to resist drinking.
I am curious to hear why you insist it's inevitable. What intrinsic properties of the universe make you believe that we don't have any choice and all our actions are set in stone?
What is inevitable? At no point have I claimed that our actions are set in stone. That would imply fatalism which equally suggest that things can happen without anything causing them to happen.
Your choice of words is an analytical failure it says that the the will somehow sitting on top of all those processes rather than being a function of them.
I don't think my wording implies that the will is sitting on top of those processes, but rather that it's an emergent property of them. You're the one who's implying a false dichotomy - just because our choices might be influenced by prior causes doesn't mean we don't have agency. I'm asking what makes you think our actions are predetermined, not what makes you think we have some kind of magical free will that defies causality. Can you actually address the question I asked, rather than nitpicking my phrasing?
If your choices are a function of prior events and an emergent property of complex but deterministic processes where does agency come in? We are a complex deterministic process that simulates our own self to both predict a much more complex unconscious self and write rules to influence it going forward.
We call this process being conscious even when its writing just so stories after the fact.
For me. I think everything is physical, and there's always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the "choices" you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.