Yeah, I get that point. That is why I started the sentence with “no one else knows” so that the society hasn’t gained any knowledge about the situation. Thus letting her go doesn’t show others anything. But maybe the thought experiment is so convoluted that it doesn’t really work.
Julius
Karma: 209
I agree that free will probably just isn’t the right term. This whole thing started as a response to Sam Harris, and that’s the term he used. I imagine switching to “self-determination” might resolve half of the dispute, so I like that. I think Gary Watson used that term as well, so you’re in good company.
Yeah, I also agree that telling someone their future would change it. That’s why I had that footnote about blanking their mind after you tell them Men-in-Black style. You tell them their future, tell them you’re going to blank their mind in five minutes, then ask how much free will they feeling. This isn’t the strongest response and I think that’s because this is a real weakness of what I said. Both the thought experiments (telling the boy his future and the woman who kills her children yet somehow has “nothing wrong with her”) are so outlandish that I think it’s fair to just say, “I reject the experiment”. Definitely a weakness for sure. Thanks for reading it and commenting.
Contra Myself on Free Will
Robert Sapolsky Is Simply Not Talking About Compatibilism
Yeah, I think in that case the best thing to do would be to use log-odds aggregation. That would be symmetric.
Yeah, there’s not much disagreement about the physical world here. But I do think a framework that leads to distinctions between choosing orange juice and having a muscle spasm, and being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff, is a better framework (e.g. has more explanatory power) than one that doesn’t. So I was thinking these were also conceptual differences, in addition to semantic ones. Like I said in the other comment, I don’t see how his framework makes sense of the pathologies I mentioned.
Sometimes it seems like there’s an empirical difference regarding the conscious mind, but I also agree with you that he wouldn’t really make the claim that it does NOTHING, although at times he seems to.
Either way, I still think this matters for more than free will debates. It definitely has implications in law. The Radiolab episode Blame talks about some of these.
I guess I was thinking it included semantics, but I was thinking (hoping?) that these were more conceptual than purely semantic. (I admit there’s very little empirical difference here.) I tried to call them out in the cruxes section, where I have things like whether consciousness is causally efficacious or merely a witness and whether deliberated actions and reflexes differ in kind or only in degree.
I think the question of does something (consciousness) do causal work is an empirical claim. We could (in theory) find a bunch of p-zombies and test it.
I was trying to show that some definitions really do lead to more natural distinctions that intuitively feel like different things, like the difference between being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff.
Do even these ultimately collapse into semantics? (Is this ultimate about what we define as “you”?) Of course we could define free will any which way, so it’s always partially semantic. I was thinking they didn’t, but could be wrong.
Re: the framing, I understand the sympathies towards his framing. If your goal is “help people stop hating criminals as self-created monsters,” then “you have no free will” is a much better reply than “read my long essay please”.
Sometimes I was wondering how much I was rebutting and how much we were agreeing. I think it ended up being less rebutting almost because Sam ends up in essentially compatibilist positions. For example, I would regard someone who believes they’re just watching their body move without their control (i.e. alien hand syndrome) as a pathology. My guess is Sam would call that a pathology as well, although I don’t know how that conclusion would follow from his framework. But doesn’t this implicitly concede that consciousness normally does something functional?
Thanks for reading it and commenting.
Contra Sam Harris on Free Will
Yeah, I mentioned this in a footnote. Not sure what the best way to handle it is either, but I suggested subbing in some small non-zero value.
> Note that the use of geometric mean requires non-zero values, so if anyone responded with 0%, this would have to be replaced with a small, non-zero value.
No, Americans Don’t Think Foreign Aid Is 26% of the Budget
Thinking in Predictions
Yes, I did. Thanks for letting me know it comes off that way.
Book Review: The System
San Diego book club for “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”
Probiotics For Traveler’s Diarrhea Prevention
San Diego – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2025
AISN #44: The Trump Circle on AI Safety Plus, Chinese researchers used Llama to create a military tool for the PLA, a Google AI system discovered a zero-day cybersecurity vulnerability, and Complex Systems
I originally had an LLM generate them for me, and then I checked those with other LLMs to make sure the answers were right and that weren’t ambiguous. All of the questions are here: https://github.com/jss367/calibration_trivia/tree/main/public/questions
Another place that’s doing something similar is clearerthinking.org
I like this way of thinking about it.