this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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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.
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.