logoalt Hacker News

tbrownawtoday at 4:07 AM2 repliesview on HN

> debating whether or not we have free will

Free will is an abstraction. It's not something that's concrete enough to say it does or doesn't exist, but a tool for reasoning about certain systems that are to much of a pain to fully calculate.


Replies

kbrkbrtoday at 6:18 AM

Schopenhauer would disagree. In his world model the Will with capital W is probably best described as the driving force behind all movement. While abstract, it has concrete species (think color vs red, where color is will, and red is your concrete human will, that you can feel concretely by pinching your finger). About freedom of the will Schopenhauer also has a clear opinion: will is free in the sense of uncaused, random. That does not help humans though, because while they can do what they want, they cannot want what they want. I'm not saying that this is a good model, but it's quite concrete. Nietzsche build on it, Einstein had a portrait of him in his Berlin study alongside Faraday and Maxwell, and while Freud denied any influence, there are a lot of topics in common between them.

gamescrtoday at 4:23 AM

Free will is about deciding and executing actions contrary to your determined nature:

* Not eating until your body fails.

* Not breathing until automatic breathing kicks in.

And not being able to perform dematerialization doesn't count as non-free will, for example.

show 2 replies