Shane_Legg comments on Thou Art Physics - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 June 2008 06:37AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (86)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Shane_Legg 06 June 2008 12:34:19PM 1 point [-]

@ a. y. mous.

I don't see the straw man. In the classical sense "freewill" means that there is something outside of the system that is free to make decisions (at least this is my understanding of it). If you see yourself, your will, your decision making process and everything as all existing within the system and thus governed by physics, then that answers your question: in a classical sense the answer is no. There are many other ways to define "freewill", however, and under some of these definitions the answer to the question will be "yes". Thus, rather than focusing on whether the answer is "yes" or "no", you should first worry about what the question really means. Once you have straightened that out, your answer could be "yes", "no" or that your question no longer makes any sense, i.e. it is a "wrong question".