HACKER Q&A
📣 johnwheeler

What does it matter if we have no free will?


The recent Robert Sapolsky articles and Sam Harris - they promote the notion of no free will.

I’ve been thinking about this from a computer science perspective. A psuedo-random number generator is deterministic too. In the grand scheme of things _everything_ is deterministic, even cosmic background radiation all having originated from a set of initial conditions no differently than a human’s brain wiring and the consequences therein.

So, what does it matter if we have no free will? It doesn’t matter to most programmers (aside from cryptographers) that pseudo random number generators are deterministic. They just “work” and have consequence, just like people.

  👤 turtleyacht Accepted Answer ✓
Consider so much of what we've learned in multiple fields concerns the progression from determinism to probability. Free will may end up a "probability cloud," where most things shake out as you'd expect.

But in that tiny, infinitesimal percent of the improbable lies all of human tactics: the wily brain, its spirit and courage, some element that defies, shouts "I" at the unfeeling universe, dares to against the space of nothing, and prove things merely for being there.

So I put AGI by this definition: while it takes the test behind the observer's glass, and promptly throws a chair at it.

Isn't that what we would do, treated as mice?

👤 bediger4000
It's important to society. If we don't have a lot of free will, then blaming work ethic or some morality thing for people being poor doesn't make a lot of sense. That's just a simple example. There's lots of other consequences that make conventional opinions invalid.