[FeepingCreature]

No, I disagree with this conclusion. The problem is very much solvable if one simply keeps the map/territory split in mind, and for every thing asks himself, "am I perceiving reality or am I perceiving a property of my brain?" That is, we "experience free will" - this is to say, our brain reports to us that it evaluated multiple possible behaviors and chose one. However, this does not indicate that multiple behaviors were physically possible, it only indicates that multiple behaviors were cognitively evaluated. In fact, because any deciding algorithm has to evaluate a behavior list or even a behavior tree, there is no reason at all to expect this to have any connection to physical properties of the world, such as quantum mechanics.

(The relevant LessWrong sequence is "How An Algorithm Feels From Inside" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg... which has nothing to do with free will, but does make very salient the idea that perceptions may be facts about your cognition as easily, if not more easily, as facts about reality.)

And when you have that view in mind, you can ask: "wait, why would the brain be sensitive to quantum physics? It seems to be a system extremely poorly suited to doing macroscopic quantum calculations." Once the alternative theory of "free will is a perception of your cognitive algorithm" is salient, you will notice that the entire free-will debate will begin to feel more and more pointless, until eventually you no longer understand why people think this is a big deal at all, and then it all feels rather silly.

[margalabargala]

> However, this does not indicate that multiple behaviors were physically possible

Okay, fine, but what indicates that multiple behaviors were not physically possible?

Our consciousnesses are emergent properties of networks of microscopic cells, and of chemicals moving around those cells at a molecular level. It seems perfectly reasonable that our consciousness itself could be subject to quantum effects that belie determinism, because it operates at a scale where those effects are noticable.

[FeepingCreature]

> Okay, fine, but what indicates that multiple behaviors were not physically possible?

I don't follow. Whether multiple behaviors are possible or not possible, you have to demonstrate that the human feeling of free-will is about that; you have to demonstrate that the human brain somehow measures actual possibility. Alternatively, you have to show that the human cognitive decision algorithm is unimplementable in either of those universes. Otherwise, it's simply much more plausible that the human feeling of freedom measures something about human cognition rather than reality, because brains in general usually measure things around the scale of brains, not non-counterfactual facts about the basic physical laws.

[margalabargala]

Well, no, your hypothesis is not automatically the null hypothesis that's true unless someone else goes through all goalposts regardless of where you move them to.

I know you thought about it for a moment, and therefore had an obvious insight that 40% of the profession has somehow missed (just define terms so to mean things that would make you correct, and declare yourself right! Easy!) but it's not quite that simple.

Your argument that you just made basically boils down to "well I don't think it works that way even though no one knows. But also it's obvious and I'm going to arbitrarily assign probabilities to things and declare certain things likely, baselessly".

If you read elsewhere in this thread then you might find that exact approach being lampooned :-)

[FeepingCreature]

Okay, you know what?

I'll let my argument stand as written, and you can let yours stand as written, and we'll see which one is more convincing. I don't feel like I have any need to add anything.

edit: Other than, I guess, that this mode of argument not being there is what made LessWrong attractive. "But what's the actual answer?!"

[margalabargala]

The attraction of LessWrong is that they take unanswerable questions with unknowable answers and assign an "actual answer" to them?

That my friend is a religion.

[FeepingCreature]

The attraction is that they say "actually, this has an answer, and I can show you why" and then they actually do so.

Philosophy is over-attached to the questions to the point of rejecting a commitment to an answer when it stares them in the face. The point of the whole entire shebang was to find out what the right answer was. All else is distraction, and philosophy has a lot of distraction.