this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
435 points (90.2% liked)
Technology
63547 readers
2400 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
By free will I mean the ability to have done otherwise. This, I argue is an illusion. What ever the reason is that makes one choose A rather than B will make them choose A over and over again no matter how many times we rewind the universe and try again. What ever compelled you to make that choise remains unchanged and you'd choose the same thing every time. There's no freedom in that.
I also don't see a reason why humans would be unique in that sense. If we have free will then what leads you to believe that other animals don't? If they can live normal lives without free will, then surely we can too, right?
I don't know where our curiousity or the desire to help the less fortunate comes from. Genes and environmental factors most likely. That's why cultural differences exists too. If we all just freely chose our likes and not-likes then it's a bit odd that people living in the same country have similar preferences but the people on the other side of the world are significantly different.
Also, have you read about split brain experiments? When the corpus callosum is severed which prevents the different brain hemispheres from communicating with each other we can then with some clever tricks interview the different hemispheres separately and the finding there is that they tend to have vastly different preferences. Which hemisphere is "you"?
Free will comes from the “heart”, not the brain. It doesn’t fit in the materialistic view of science. Our bodies are quantum electric fields, and those fields interact. In my own experience I would say emotions or intentions don’t translate fully from video, but in person I can feel them.
Maybe if they add a quantum processor to the computer it can gain free will (disguised as random chance). But I think we have more to learn about the nature of consciousness before AGI is anywhere close to having free will.
And why is free will necessary for intelligence? New discoveries require curiosity. Scientific breakthroughs require new connections and discernment of truth. If the computer is doing research, it needs to decide when to stop looking, who to ask questions to, how far to dig, designing further experiments. Without free will you just have a big fancy encyclopedia.
The dangerous side of free will is manipulation, subversion, exploitation, deception, etc. So yeah I hope they don’t figure it out.