Eliezer wrote:
The thoughts of your decision process are all real, they are all something. But a thought is too big and complicated to be an atom. So thoughts are made of smaller things, and our name for the stuff that stuff is made of, is "physics".
I agree that decision making is a physical process occurring in our brain, but I think that by calling it "physical" we are also implying that there is certainty in the mechanics of that process and that its just that we can't yet reach it or explain it.
What I was trying to say when I wrote "determinism is a special case of randomness" is that there must be non-certain processes in physics and that would explain, in my mind, why we can make arbitrary decisions that seem to change the determinate course of physical processes.
And what makes you think our decisions are "arbitrary", and in need of explanation?
I was trying to reconcile the fact that in a deterministic universe there could be life with free will, but I am going full circle now and am starting to think that everything is really random, if not I don't see how there could be free will in a deterministic universe.
If mathematicians measure randomness with probability, then there must be some things that have a 100% occurrence probability (in the current universe above atomic levels I presume), which now I see as special cases of randomness rather than opposites to randomness, and these lead us to think that there is determinism.
I think we may have this cognitive bias (deterministic views of reality) because it is extremely helpful to use these 100% probability occurrence things to model the universe rationally, learn, and to predict the future, but it is not the whole story or at least a complete description of reality.
What do you think?
EDIT 1: Thank you all for the comments below. I recognize I am naive in this topic.
Although I am not convinced yet, I think my possible argumentative error is:
P1: I observe free will in the behavior of living things.
P2: Deterministic physical mechanical processes don't permit free will.
C: Therefore physics must include random processes.
I think I only see a solution of free will in randomness, but maybe there are other solutions ( I will read the Free Will Sequence here on LW!)
EDIT 2: After reading some articles of the Free Will Sequence I realize the problem of investing energy around free will questions if free will is just a mistake in our thinking process.
It is something like why ask about time travel if time doesn't exist? or, why explore the mechanics of randomness vs determinism if randomness doesn't exist and thus the dichotomy "randomness vs determinism" doesn't exist in the first place?