[ohum]

Please don’t take this as a personal attack. Your comment and certainty sound like religious fanaticism. The belief that consciousness is merely computation is unproven, and a matter of faith. It always seems a little short sighted when people claim to know something about consciousness and the mind based on a belief that the brain amounts to a biological computer. As an example of an alternative possibility to brain as a biological computer: in a holographic universe the brain itself is an emergent system. Or, Buddhists say that the material world as we perceive it is interdependent with mind, which is more fundamental than form. Some interesting phenomena that present problems with mind as programming running on a biological computer are the placebo/*cebo effects and Wim Hof :). Mind over matter, man.

[The_rationalist]

qualias (consciousness, feelings, senses) might be impossible to create through transistors. But it does not matter, we can build something functionally equivalent in a computable way. This is called: a philosophical zombie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

[ohum]

A computing machine (not taking environmental factors like cosmic rays into account (though, why not?)) is deterministic, unless it interfaces with a truly random source of entropy. My physicist friend has said, there may be no randomness, only complexity.

Is all deterministic or do conscious entities have free will, or...?

The decisions made by your philosophical zombie will either be predetermined by the programming, or seeded by randomness. The decisions made by such a machine cannot be proved to be functionally equivalent to the decisions made by a conscious entity, and belief in such is a matter of faith.

Belief in randomness itself is a matter of faith. It’s impossible to prove that any event or measurement is truly random, and yes, there may be hidden variables- there’s no way to test.

There is no rational reason to believe that conscious behavior, consciousness, feelings, and all the activity of the mind, are functionally equivalent to a program and/or randomness.

Sounds like you are believer in the religion of materialism.

[lostmsu]

> There is no rational reason to believe that conscious behavior, consciousness, feelings, and all the activity of the mind, are functionally equivalent to a program and/or randomness.

On the contrary, the number of tasks, that a human can do, but a machine can't is shrinking. That recently started including art.

[The_rationalist]

Is all deterministic or do conscious entities have free will? Free will vs determinism is a fun debate for beginners in philosophy. But it is not a debate per se, the answer is obvious once asked seriously in a well defined manner. So firstly you will agree with all scientists on earth that the world, that matter is causal and totally predictable on each of it's properties though calculus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics) Something contra-causal has never been observed in all humanity history. The conception that a human (made of matter after all) is totally deterministic is consistent and explain human behavior. It is epistemologically weak to ask an alternative (free will) that needs another premise. Let's define free will : "Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events." This means: the free choice come not from the past, it comes from nowhere. To make such a thing possible a brain would need to create primary cause (sorry the English Wikipedia page does not yet exists https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_premi%C3%A8re). A prymary cause is a cause that come from nowhere and create consequences and causes that are determined by the primary cause. Only the primary cause has "free will power". So are there primary cause in the universe? Happily not, otherwise science would be broken and the world chaotic, unpredictable. There is one true candidate for primary cause: the big bang. To think that a brain is able to break the law of physics to create a primary cause is maybe not impossible but highly unlikely, and totally unscientific, mostly religious Many things can be said this premise: When does it start? Does a bacteria has this power? An ant? A fish? A cat? Or only humans? Because language allow free will? Or because language allow Suffisant complexity to hidden the deep causes between or choices and create an illusion of choice? So free will has no explanatory power, determinism is the most observed thing empirically, only humans have it? (because it is trivial to model deterministically mammals) which add even more ad-hoc-ness. Another question is: what is the frequency of free will on a human ? Are 80% of your thoughts free? Or PI%? Another ad-hoc Ness but the more frequency of free will you believe the more epistemologically weak your belief is.

But even after all this, let's say that free will exist, what does it change? Can it allow things that determinism cannot? Firstly free will is NOT free.. Imagine you ask me to solve a problem. Let's say that knowledge about A is necessary to find a solution. If I don't know A and is undeducible from my prior knowledge then I can't solve the problem, free will or not. My past is unsufficient, and a primary cause cannot give me knowledge (sadly ;)) Humans choices and thoughts are bounded by knowledge. They are also bounded by fluid intelligence. Humans have two single goals in their lifes: Maximize their happiness and maximize others Hapinness. It is the only meaningful thing in life (qualias). So it is important to understand that for each situation in life there is an optimal choice and maybe competing <= choices. The goal of a human is to find the most optimal choice, it necesssiate a lot of knowledge and a lot of rationality training e.g learn cognitive biases, logical fallacies, skepticism, the scientific method, learn more words, etc. The more you gain erudition and rationality the less choices appear as interesting as what you know is the most optimal you can find. The ideal omniscient person has no choice to make, she knows what choice is optimal. A choice is a choice when you don't know enough the consequences and so you make a bet (which e.g can maximize risk/return or minimize it) Once you know the optimal choice what does free will means? It means the freedom to make an irrational, worse choice than the optimal one. Such a useless concept (when you know the optimal one)

Free will would only apply on a list of choices when you cannot rank any of those choices, you don't know if any choice from the list is better than any other. In such a (rare) situation, free will would allow true randomness of choice. What's the point? And more than that, it's refuted. Humanity has built pseudo random number generators that are by far good enough and if you wanted from such a list of choice make a random choice, you better use a PRG! Because if we empirically measured your believed random choices, they would not at all be random. A common proof of that is the game paper scissor rock where people have big difficulties to not repeat patterns.

So I have shown that 1) free will is one of the weakest possible belief on earth, epistemologically. And 2) that it has no explanatory power (does not explain even one thing that determinism cannot) And 3) that it necessarily reduce to true randomness and that it would useless (cf "what's the point") and that it is empirically shown to be wrong. Sadly, when you have since a long time a strong belief, with emotional affect, reading a sound refutation does not allow the reader to change it's belief. You have probably not the cognitive freedom to now thinks "free will doesn't exist and if it would it would be useless" (see the irony about freedom?)[1] because human brains are buggy. Firstly when not trained we have an inability to see (on others and on ourself) logical fallacies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

And we cannot see our cognitive biases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases which is in itself a bias called the blind spot bias.

[1]This does not apply or less, if you are trained to rationality. Lesswrong.com Rationalwiki.org And Wikipedia are good places

"Sounds like you are believer in the religion of materialism." You got me! Well to be precise, materialism is now called physicalism and it is synonymous to be a believer of the scientific method. I'll take that as a compliment. But it is anthitetic to" religion", Popper would have a heart attack reading your sentence ^^ You know what, you are a physicalist too even if you ignore it. All human progress is driven by science, it would be time to recognize that.