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gordon_wrigley comments on Thou Art Physics - Less Wrong
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I think the core problem when talking about freewill is that at some level the notion of freewill just by definition requires a system where the mind exists out side of physics and manipulates it. It's seems like that's what people really mean when they say freewill.
I'm not sure of a good way to explain my thoughts on this. Lets try it this way, imagine you had an AI computer program. And it really was genuine strong AI, and you were quite happy to assert that it was intelligent, self aware and sentient. It thinks, it learns, it loves, it hates, it has doubts and fears it is a full and complete artificial personality. Now given that would you even think to ask if it had freewill? It seems to me that you wouldn't, instead you'd say "it's a machine of course it doesn't have freewill, we can dig up the code that makes all of that stuff happen".
Now what is the difference between the machine and the person, well really all your left with is that the person has freewill and the machine doesn't. So freewill is that which makes us more than just really spectacularly complex organic machines. And people who think that need to take a long hard look at their predecessors who asserted that the earth is the center of the universe and man is not a type of animal.
Um, why would you say so certainly that the computer doesn't have free will? After all, if we're talking about a computer that learns and is intelligent, then we can't dig up the code that makes all of that stuff happen directly - some of the code must trigger the learning, that learning then changes something (as a technical matter I can think of several ways to store the changes). I don't think I'd definitely say that the computer has free will, but I don't think I'd definitely say that the computer doesn't, either. Especially as we don't have a clear definition of free will.
Yes, naive libertarian free will is silly, but that doesn't explain why people go around saying "free will".
Because that -- "the mind exists out side of physics and manipulates it" -- is what it feels like.
From a certain point of view that may even be true :-)
If you're okay with thinking of your mind as an algorithm, then note that any algorithm exists "outside of physics", having instantiations in many different physical worlds and outputting bits into all of them. As Wei Dai once said, "there are copies of me all over math". This idea is controversial, but not obviously false.
Also, Nesov has suggested that physics might arise anthropically from the makeup of our minds ("laws of physics are as complex as minds, but complex details have too little measure to matter"). This idea is even more controversial, but also not obviously false.
None of that has any bearing on libertarian free will, though.
Interesting; do you have a reference link?
Nope. It doesn't feel like we can generate an antigravity fieldand fly aroung. I do feel as though I can make choices. What has that got to do with being "outside physcis"? The issues of physical (in) determinism and their relation to FW are technical and complex, and not something that can be intuited. We can't have an intuition of being outside physics because we can't have an intuition of physics that is worth anything.