shminux comments on Dissolving the Question - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 March 2008 03:17AM

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Comment author: shminux 28 April 2013 03:26:08AM 1 point [-]

...d-do I get the prize?

You have, in the local currency.

So, you are saying that free will is an illusion due to our limited predictive power?

Comment author: SecondWind 19 May 2013 07:10:35AM 0 points [-]

...hmm.

If we perfectly understood the decision-making process and all its inputs, there'd be no black box left to label 'free will.' If instead we could perfectly predict the outcomes (but not the internals) of a person's cognitive algorithms... so we know, but don't know how we know... I'm not sure. That would seem to invite mysterious reasoning to explain how we know, for which 'free will' seems unfitting as a mysterious answer.

That scenario probably depends on how it feels to perform the inerrant prediction of cognitive outcomes, and especially how it feels to turn that inerrant predictor on the self.