[geophile]

> There can be no mechanical or materialistic explanation of free will.

Of course there is: Free will is the feeling you have when you become aware of a decision made by your subconscious mind, (which is deterministic).

Why did you order the salmon and not the steak? Sapolsky would identify all the factors, on various timescales, leading to the action that you took. You think that you chose freely, but you didn’t. You became aware of the subconscious decision, and that’s when you believe that you exercised free will and “decided”.

[haltist]

That would mean that free will is reducible to a mathematical structure and if that's the case then an existence proof of such a structure would be very useful for the development of artificial general intelligence. If that's not the case and there is no algorithm for free will then it is, by definition, irreducible to a deterministic computational implementation which means that no algorithm will ever have free will.

I'm sure Sapolsky can guess as to why some people are impulsive decision makers based on factors he has found in his research that correlate with impulsivity but I don't think that means such people have no free will. If you don't believe people can make free choices then that's equivalent to what I posted originally about biological automatons and admitting to being one.

[haltist]

Follow up to this is that I will probably write something about the general confusion around algorithms (special mathematical structures) and how these terms are used to make nonsensical arguments about intelligence, consciousness, and free will.