I’ll ask you the same question that clarified my thinking on this: what is it you want from your free will? For me, it’s that I want to be the one to decide my actions.
Do you want your actions to follow no laws at all? Then they’re essentially random. You cannot possibly be in control of what you do, in that world.
Since I don’t think most people want that, what kind of laws do you want them to follow? Because whatever laws determine your actions, and whatever you are, you exist within them, not outside them. In order for ‘you’ to freely choose your actions, they must be sufficient to determine what you choose.
Do you want to not be influenced by anything outside yourself? Then you have no ability to take account of the state of the outside world in deciding what to do. You’ve given up any chance of steering the future state of the world you live in, or of achieving goals involving anything outside your own body.
What I want is for the primary locus of control, the proximal cause of my actions, to be within me. I want to minimize certain kinds of external influence on my decision-making processes, which I loosely categorize under labels like “coercion” or “violence” and so on, despite not having or expecting precise definitions of those things. That list also includes minimizing certain biases built into me by history and evolution from before I was conscious, which is how I first ended up here on lesswrong. None of this has much of anything to do with what the laws of physics are. I have a lot of that, and I get more of it the more I learn about what things influence and determine my thoughts, choices, and actions.
I’ll ask you the same question that clarified my thinking on this: what is it you want from your free will? For me, it’s that I want to be the one to decide my actions.
Do you want your actions to follow no laws at all? Then they’re essentially random. You cannot possibly be in control of what you do, in that world.
Since I don’t think most people want that, what kind of laws do you want them to follow? Because whatever laws determine your actions, and whatever you are, you exist within them, not outside them. In order for ‘you’ to freely choose your actions, they must be sufficient to determine what you choose.
Do you want to not be influenced by anything outside yourself? Then you have no ability to take account of the state of the outside world in deciding what to do. You’ve given up any chance of steering the future state of the world you live in, or of achieving goals involving anything outside your own body.
What I want is for the primary locus of control, the proximal cause of my actions, to be within me. I want to minimize certain kinds of external influence on my decision-making processes, which I loosely categorize under labels like “coercion” or “violence” and so on, despite not having or expecting precise definitions of those things. That list also includes minimizing certain biases built into me by history and evolution from before I was conscious, which is how I first ended up here on lesswrong. None of this has much of anything to do with what the laws of physics are. I have a lot of that, and I get more of it the more I learn about what things influence and determine my thoughts, choices, and actions.