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DonaldMcIntyre comments on Is Determinism A Special Case Of Randomness? - Less Wrong
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My connection between randomness and free will is that I think free will wouldn't be possible in a deterministic system since everything happens as a consequence of previous events rather than as a consequence decision making.
I think that in the two branch universes above it is still random on which side the heads or tails would fall therefore it still seems random together or forked.
I don't understand the distinction between "consequence of previous events" and "consequence of decision making". If your decisions aren't a consequence of previous events, then they are just meaningless randomness.
Your decisions should ideally be as correlated as possible with your values and with the information you have. The more random your actions, the less likely they are to result in anything desirable.
And randomness is very distinct from the old concept of free will. Randomness is not your will. You have no control over it. Rather it controls you.
Consequence of previous events: when things pass from state to state as a consequence of a causal chain of actions that are not initiated or continued by a living decision maker that purposely provoked them.
Consequence of decision making: when a living being acted on a chain of physical events and modified them according to its will and therefore the pattern of the sequence is not consistent with random mechanical events.
I agree with the idea that living things make decision based on the observation of reality and must not initiate actions out of nowhere.
When I mention free will on my OP I am not referring to the ideological concept,but just my personal opinion that decision making in our brains must obey to some randomness in order to be free of regular certainty in physics.
I don't think that randomness is in our brains,I think there must be randomness in the mechanics of physics.
What makes you think that decision making in our brains is free of "regular certainty in physics"? Deterministic systems such as weather patterns can be unpredictable enough.
To be fair, if there's some butterfly-effect nonsense going on where the exact position of a single neuron ends up determining your decision, that's not too different from randomness in the mechanics of physics. But I hope that when I make important decisions, the outcome is stable enough that it wouldn't be influenced by either of those.
People are not as random as you may think they are. You can test your own randomness here.
There is no need for true randomness to create random seeming behavior. Famous example is the weather. Even totally deterministic simulations of the weather are chaotic. Even slight changes to the initial conditions will result in totally different outcomes. Or in cryptography hashing functions, which generate random and irreversible strings from an input.
There are a number of examples of this covered in the book A New Kind of Science, but you can only view a few pages online for free without using incognito mode.
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!)
P1 is wrong because it's impossible to observe free will. If free will equals randomness, and randomness is indistinguishable from non randomness for all practical purposes, then it's impossible to know if you live in a universe with free will or not.
However defining free will as randomness is really weird, which is what I tried to argue above. If randomness is determining your actions, that's not your will, and the result is meaningless. You don't gain any useful information by watching a coin flip.
I agree, both P1 and P2 are false because free will is unobservable to begin with.
This post and the exchanges with you and others have helped me advance my thinking a lot about these issues.
I am reading the Free Will Sequence too.