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MaxChaplin t1_j98cfuv wrote

Compatibilism clicked for me once I realized it's basically talking about emergence. When you input "2+5=" into your calculator and it displays "7", is it because 2+5=7, or because the buttons changed the pattern of electric current in the calculator's circuits and caused a chain reaction resulting in the digit appearing on the display? Both answers are true, but the former one operates on a higher level than the latter. The same works for the question of whether you do what you do due to your soul's desire or due to neurons firing - both are true, but work on different levels. (This line of thought is used in Hofstadter's I Am A Strange Loop)

A different way to look at it - free will, in Berlinesque terms, is a form of negative freedom - an absence of constraints. Since the freedom worth talking about is the one that affects our lived experience, the only constraints that matter are those we actively feel, or know about. Free will can therefore be violated only when the levels cross, e.g. the Oracle of Delphi tells you your fate and you want to change it but unable to; a company targets you with effective subliminal advertising, and so on. As long as the level where determinism is located is untouched by the level where you live, your freedom is intact. This is why randomness, chaos and fuzzyness feel liberating.

Here I should mention the best Existential Comic in years (almost on par with SMBC at its best), according to which an AGI would see randomness as more detrimental to freedom than determinism, because it hinders its ability to have control over its environment.

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frogandbanjo t1_j98vd93 wrote

> is it because 2+5=7

And what if you get a calculator that says 2+5 = 6? Is that because it's 6, or is it then only because of that other shit?

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MaxChaplin t1_j99fx5g wrote

Then the calculator's functionality is not isomorphic to arithmetic, and only the physical explanation is true.

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frogandbanjo t1_j9czlnh wrote

So there's something special about calculators that produce correct answers using virtually indistinguishable physical processes from calculators that produce incorrect answers.

Explain what significance that "higher level" actually has when we're trying to figure out what's going in the real, physical world.

Before you do, you might want to remember that analogies relying upon things that everybody already concedes are true are weak and shady.

Maybe you should think about two calculators that give two different answers to a math problem that absolutely nobody and nothing knows the correct answer to - and, possibly, can never.

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MaxChaplin t1_j9ec2i7 wrote

The higher level doesn't need to be able to explain the physical level in order to be useful. If substrate independence applies, it really is unable to. A calculator built correctly is like a window into the platonic world of arithmetics.

The analogy doesn't decisively prove that people have free will. It's point is to show that determinism doesn't contradict it.

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frnzprf t1_j99z8hk wrote

> The same works for the question of whether you do what you do due to your soul's desire or due to neurons firing - both are true, but work on different levels.

Even if someone knows nothing about neurons, they could argue that free will doesn't exist, because it determined either by randomness or by reasons. "I choose strawberry icecream because I like the flavor. I like the flavor because I'm born that way, or maybe because my mother fed them to me as a baby." (nature/nurture)

> Since the freedom worth talking about is the one that affects our lived experience, the only constraints that matter are those we actively feel, or know about.

This is a good idea that I haven't thought about before! We say that a glass is empty, even though there is air inside it. Language is practical. There is probably a practical distincion between some causes of will (or actions?) and others.

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[deleted] t1_j9agqhh wrote

Almost on par?

Existential comics is the bomb!

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MaxChaplin t1_j9aidol wrote

It's too "I'm this and this, and I believe in such and such" for my tastes. I like the early long serious ones.

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Nameless1995 t1_j98fvw0 wrote

> Here I should mention the best Existential Comic in years (almost on par with SMBC at its best), according to which an AGI would see randomness as more detrimental to freedom than determinism, because it hinders its ability to have control over its environment.

In RL, stochasticity through some level of (pseudo-)randomness can be useful to balance exploitation-exploration. However, I am not sure "true randomness" is particularly any more or less helpful than "pseudo-randomness" in most of those contexts (what is gained, if we map out an unfolding of a pseudo-random process and change it to a world where the exact same sequence of actions is unfolded from a true-random process?)

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