[rssoconnor]

> All [Goedel] says is that there are statements that are true that cannot be proven within the constraints of a finite set of axioms. It's not a limitation of math, it's a limitation of what can be proven true within the confines of a set of axioms.

Minor correction. Goedel's theorem applies to decidable (a.k.a. computable) sets of axioms. e.g. Peano's axiom, when written in first order logic, contain an infinite set of induction axioms that follow a specific and recognizable (i.e. decidable) pattern.

In fact, Goedel's theorem applies even beyond that including any set of axioms whose syntax can be specified by some (first order) mathematical predicate, even if that predicate is not computable in any way.

> Meaning there could be another set of axioms under which the limitation to prove that such a statement is true disappears. But it doesn't make math any less true.

Indeed, when studying logic it is common to consider the set of all true first-order (arithmetic) statements, which necessarily forms a complete and consistent set of axioms. Of course, given Godel's incompleteness theorem it must be the case that such a set of axioms isn't computable. Not only that, but it cannot be even defined in a first-order (arithmetic) way, which leads the the corollary of Tarski's undefinability theorem[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theo...

P.S. There is no free will and one's thoughts are indeed out of one's control. I'm not certain that implies one should never trust one's thoughts. Though it does make sense to take them with a grain of salt. See for example, "The past is not true" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798854).

P.P.S I'm not saying your argument is invalid. It can both be the case that materialism is contradictory and there is no free will.

[ezion]

I disagree with your claim there's no free will and one's thoughts are out of one's control. I do not believe all of our actions and behaviors are determined. That's, like, just your opinion man ;)

Where determinism truly fails is at the transcendental argument level. The act of affirming determinism is self-defeating like affirming materialism: to rationally accept something as true you must have the freedom to weigh the evidence, but if determinism is true there's no true deliberation as everything is the result of prior causes, including its acceptance.

So you cannot trust your own belief system and thus your worldview is inconsistent at its core.

It also fails to account for our mental lives, given the experience we all have.

[rssoconnor]

While it is true that one cannot trust one's belief system, I don't think that makes it inconsistent. I cannot know with complete certainty that the world is without free will, but that doesn't prevent me from concluding and thus believing the in the lack of free will, in as much as I believe anything else. It is, like, my opinion man, although I claim it is a reasonably informed opinion.

Like, maybe the world is inhabited by leprechaun's holding up cardboard facades of the city when I'm walking through it always hiding themselves. Or maybe my brain is in vat, hooked up to a computer that is making me believe that I'm experiencing typing out this comment. Or maybe I have no brain at all and I'm just an improbably quantum fluctuation in unfathomably large dead universe that just for a fraction of a second creates an experience of typing on a keyboard and the sensation of having a history that never was, a Boltzmann brain.

I accept that all the above are possible, but I don't "believe in them". I do believe in determinism (plus randomness) with about the same conviction that I believe the keyboard that I am tapping on exists.

> It also fails to account for our mental lives, given the experience we all have.

So this is what got me quite recently.

I remember a while back Henk Barendregt remarked something to the effect that everything that happens either follows deterministically from past event or happens randomly, and in neither case is there any free will.

I remember accepting that from what I know of physics this does seem to be the case. I'm not aware of any violations of the Borne rule that would allow for any event to be neither random nor deterministic. But, that the time, I remember thinking that it did seem strange that I feel like I have free will.

But recently, I've been listening to Sam Harris's Waking Up app, and, in addition to meditation practices, he has a section where he argues, convincingly in my opinion, that if you pay attention, there isn't actually any feeling of free will either.

For instance, if I am sitting and meditating and I am trying to pay attention to my breathing, or trying to pay attention the the bird chirping outside my window, then often, usually only after a few seconds, I suddenly find myself thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner, or remembering that time I was talking with my aunt about her birdwatching hobby, or any number of a million possible intrusive thoughts.

I certainly do not freely will these thoughts into existence. My will is supposedly to be paying attention to what I am hearing, or the experience of breathing. Yet inevitability I eventually end up distracted by whatever pops into my head at any given moment.

And after spending some time paying attention to my experience, I cannot help but see that Harris is right. He suggests taking the example of picking a movie, any movie. Just pick one and pay attention to the experience of freely choosing a movie title. For me, just now, I picked "Ghostbusters". But it was simply the first title that popped into my head.

Is this free will? The title popped into my head the same way that thoughts intrude into my meditation, just appearing in consciousness with no source in sight. No particular explanation as to why one title appears and not another.

Try again and think up three songs and choose one of them. Take as much time as you want. Make this choice as freely as you like. But also watch as the titles just appear in your consciousness from nowhere to be seen. Watch as you /deliberate/ about which one to pick. Reasons, like all thoughts, just start popping into one's head from nowhere to be seen. "I really enjoy X song" or "X song is quite popular" or "I haven't listened to X in a while, maybe I'll pick it then go listen to it". All these reasons for freely picking a title are just popping into consciousness in just the same way that the titles appeared in the first place. Maybe the thought pops into your head that you should just roll a die to choose one of the three.

Upon examination, my experience of deliberation is just the same as my experiences of other kinds of thoughts. I simply experience reasons popping into my head relating to the choice at hand, but I have no real control over which reasons will appear. They all just start to show up. Maybe eventually a thought appears, "Ah, that is a good reason to do X". Did I just freely come to a choice? Am I in control of that thought? That last thought just popped into my head in the same way that every other thought did, and I don't recall choosing to come to a final conclusion.

Anyhow upon this recent introspection on my own mental life, it now feels completely compatible with the lack of free will. While it doesn't conclude that I for sure have no free will, it doesn't actually look like I have it. The thoughts that enter my consciousness don't directly appear to have any origin. They just appear in consciousness in a way not so different from the appearance of the sound of a bird chirping outside my window does. I don't have any direct control over what thoughts will appear in my consciousness. And what type of thoughts that do appear in my head seem to be at least somewhat influenced from past experiences. i.e. they do kinda look like something that is offered up based on some combination of determinism and randomness.

[ezion]

If you cannot trust your belief system then maybe you should change it, instead of calling yourself an NPC.

It's clear circumstance and your memory will impact your present - that doesn't mean you did not choose to reply to my comment with your thoughts.

The whole point of a belief system is for it to correlate with reality and truth, and if there's an obvious contradiction in it, it clearly doesn't.

[rssoconnor]

I'd certainly prefer it to be the case that I have free will. However me having free will is neither not compatible with my current understanding of physics, nor is free will something that I've noticed having when I carefully consider my experiences.

Free will or not, I don't see how I can change my belief system in such a way to exclude the possibility that I'm a brain in a vat, so in that sense I don't see how I can ever 100% believe my experiences match reality short of attempting to tautologically define my experiences as what reality is.

Since you claim have free will, I'd be interested in how you experience the sensation of freely choosing a movie or song title and where exactly your free will comes into play within those sensations, and of how your sensations of the task differ from mine.

[plorkyeran]

Declaring something to be a contradiction because you don't like the conclusion they came to is not the most compelling argument.

[ezion]

If your set of beliefs implies that your set of beliefs are not true, that's a contradiction.

In this case, thinking all of reality is material implies that you cannot believe your thoughts, including the thought that all of reality is material. But that was your original belief, meaning through your own worldview you've reached a contradiction.

[strogonoff]

That your thoughts are not fully under what you believe would be your direct control, and supposed absence of free will, do not strike me as particularly following from one another (at least as long as you allow that as a conscious agent you are more than just what you identify as your thoughts).

[rssoconnor]

For me, the lack of free will follows from my study of physics, which seems to allow no room for free will.

That my thoughts are not under my control is the counter argument to the claim "But then how is it that you feel like you do have free will?" The answer to this is that, upon more careful introspection, it seems I don't even really feel like I have free will either.

[vacuity]

> For me, the lack of free will follows from my study of physics, which seems to allow no room for free will.

We don't understand enough about thinking/consciousness to reduce them entirely to physics (the literal brain).

> The answer to this is that, upon more careful introspection, it seems I don't even really feel like I have free will either.

Why did you write the above reply then? I posit that I have free will because I perceive my typing this as occurring due to my free will. Maybe everything is (effectively) deterministic, but at the very least I exist in a reality where I can think and act in ways that demonstrate free will. That's more fundamental than any scientific finding, which is necessarily an approximate view of reality. Think of a computer that can somehow emulate computers such that apps in the emulated computers have no way to discover a distinction (timing and side effects are emulated too, I guess). What difference does it make to those apps that they're running in an emulated computer or the base?

[AnimalMuppet]

> We don't understand enough about thinking/consciousness to reduce them entirely to physics (the literal brain).

We don't understand enough to know whether (or how) they reduce entirely to physics. But if the materialist position is correct, then matter (including energy particles) and the laws of physics all there is. So thinking and consciousness have to reduce entirely to physics, because there's nothing else for them to reduce to. We may not know how, but we know they do - if the materialist position is correct.

> > The answer to this is that, upon more careful introspection, it seems I don't even really feel like I have free will either.

> Why did you write the above reply then?

Because he had to, of course! (/s, or not, depending on your philosophical position...)

[strogonoff]

Looks like a good summary and a balanced take (except without additional context it could’ve been a she).

I find materialism weird because it seems like a given that all we do is motivated by our minds, including physical models—but then we are tempted to make a leap and claim that metaphors from those models (particles flying, strings vibrating, fields permeating, wave functions collapsing) are objective facts about environment rather than metaphors that try to predict how our environment would behave (in order to satisfy our minds’ curiosity and increasingly achieve some goal relevant to our minds), and that our environment and our mind itself completely reduces to those metaphors. I blame it on lack of philosophical sophistication.

That is not to claim it’s one way or another—just that we should at least be aware that it is a leap without positive proof.

[AnimalMuppet]

> except without additional context it could’ve been a she.

True. And sometimes I even say "he/she" or "they". But 1) the vast majority of people on HN are male (I'd guess 90%, but I have no hard data), 2) the default "she" for doesn't fit on a male-dominated site, especially when referring to a real individual, 3) "he/she" sounds more inclusive, but it still misses nonbinary people, and 4) "they" just sounds off to me when referring to an individual.

I could have, instead of saying "he", gone up-thread and used the name of the poster, but... sometimes I'm lazy.

[rssoconnor]

> Why did you write the above reply then?

After reading his comment, I had the thought and an urge to type up a response to attempt to clarify that I indeed understand the idea that thoughts not under my control and my lack of free will are somewhat independent aspects (it is certainly possible to imagine both having free will at some subconscious level and also seeming to have no direct control over one's thoughts that appear in consciousness), and add that my primary reason for doubting free will is physics based.

No serious counter-thoughts or other considerations appeared, i.e. it didn't seem dangerous or harmful to reply. So I ended up succumbing to my urge type up a reply and in fact did so.

TL;DR: I couldn't help myself.

[strogonoff]

It can’t follow from physics, because it is not in scope of physics in the first place. Physics, as all natural sciences, does not make statements about existential status of entities described by its models.

You can make a hypothesis that perhaps you have no free will, but you should acknowledge that it is a philosophical thesis unfalsifiable within the scope of physics.

[rssoconnor]

If I have free will, then, when calling a flipped coin in the air, I am completely free to choose whether to uttering either the word "heads" or "tails". And, if somehow identical circumstances were to arise again, I would again have a free choice and could possibly choose to call out a different word, "this time around".

But my act of calling out a word isn't just mental, it is physical. It causes physical vibrations in the air, and choosing different words causes different physical vibrations. And according to physics we can trace back the events leading up to the vibration in the air, which are caused by vibrations in my larynx and the shape of my mouth, each pulled in turn by contractions of muscle fibres that are happen when they are bathed in acetylcholine released by neurons attached to those fibers. The neurons are in turn linked together by electrical and chemical connections, all in turn following the laws of electrical and chemical potentials though their interactions with each other, each in turn following the laws of physics.

If I had a free choice, then somewhere that free choice interacts with the physical environment. If the same situation were somehow to truly arise again, as in the state of my brain is the same, the wind touching my skin is identical, the radiation falling from the sun on my face is identical, and I have a free choice, then the evolution of the state of me and the entire worlds diverges at some point, the point at which I make a free choice.

Quantum mechanics does allow divergence similar to this. In the observation of measurements in quantum mechanics, quantum theory says that identically prepared experiments can yield different results in which the probability of each result following the Born rule. However these results are random, and not based on a free choice. If we try to use measurement as a way to cause the state of the world to diverge based on my free choice, then I could be using my free choice to violate the Born rule, which could then in turn let me freely violate the conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, etc.

I acknowledge that our understanding of quantum physics isn't complete. The so-called vacuum catastrophe remains unexplained as just one example. And what the heck is qualia anyways? So it may be possible that a later theory does, somehow, give an opening for free will.

But just as the theory of the earth being flat was refined to be a sphere and then later refined into an oblate spheroid, each refinement of physics theories cannot stray too far from the previous one, as all the previous experimental results have to be maintained. Thus any updated version of quantum physics will need to maintain something close to unitary evolution of quantum states and it will need something close to the Born rule to make quantum events that appear to follow a random distribution, and will want to at least nearly respect conservation of energy and momentum.

Thus I remain skeptical of any refinement of physics ever enabling free will. But yeah, maybe it isn't entirely impossible.