Freedom evolves

What Hacker News says

1. jibalAug 2025
   This bogus argument has been refuted numerous times--read Dennett's book "Freedom Evolves" for one sort of response. And whether people are "pretending" something is irrelevant (and ad hominem, and not even true). The plain fact remains that all evidence and logic supports physicalism, and even if you entertain dualistic ideas like those of David Chalmers they don't give you free will, they don't counter determinism.
   thread
2. wool_gatherJul 2019
   I recommend Dennett's review of Harris's book to people who recommend it: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13814

   Also Elbow Room, or, better, Freedom Evolves.

   thread
3. wool_gatherJul 2018
   > I find this very implausible. So does Douglas Hofstadter

   Dennett does a good refutation of Penrose. There's some in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (I think; might be confusing it with Consciousness Explained), but he finishes the job in Freedom Evolves

   Long story short, his assertion is that the contradiction between determinism in physics and free will in humans is a category mix-up, not a true contradiction. There are so many layers between the two levels, so many interactions, that when you get to the top level at which we consider an coherent blob of "matter" called an "organism" -- with a "brain" even -- there really are things called "thinking" and "free will". But way down at the level of molecules, those concepts aren't even nonsensical; they're just meaningless. To talk about free will, you have to have a very high vantage point. And that's why it gets confusing when you go back down to the building blocks.

   This is similar to the systems argument against Searle's Chinese Room: the phenomenon we find so interesting disappears when the system is broken down, exactly because it's an emergent product of the system.

   There are analogies I could make, but I'd probably miss something, so I'll leave it to Dennett (he actually uses the Game of Life to make his point). I highly recommend reading Freedom Evolves if you're into these ideas. Very thought-provoking, especially for its compact length.

   Show morethread
4. firmgentlyApr 2018
   So many comments pointing out the difference between luck and hard work, or saying it's all about taking opportunities when they arise etc. I can't compute.

   The entire point of the article was to say if you work harder, your propensity for hard work is the result of luck (or 'the sum of external circumstance and genetics that led to your being a hard worker'). If you are good at taking opportunities when they arise, the thing that makes you be that kind of person can be described as 'luck' (because if not, what is it? Where does it come from? Intuitively people put it down to some kind of magical inner 'you-ness' but that's ill-defined and wishy-washy).

   If you're using the idea that your success in life is due to your personal flavour of 'free will' being 'better', you're arguing for something supernatural, causeless and which originated somewhere other than The Big Bang. I'm not saying you're wrong but you've got quite a lot of arguing to do as philosophers have been trying to prove free will exists for centuries. The best argument for it that I've read is from Daniel Dennett in 'Freedom Evolves' where he suggests free will is a kind of emergent behaviour which while not being real is 'real enough'. Obviously I'm nowhere near doing it justice as it's an entire book by a proper philosopher but it's a great read if you're interested in this stuff.

   I'm not saying I like the idea that free will doesn't exist (I don't!) but I can't come up with an argument for it being non-deterministic (and if it's pre-determined then it's not free will). It's essential to our sense of self. It seems like an obvious thing when you think about it in floppy ways but as soon as you start trying to define it properly as anything other than a 'ghost in the machine', emergent behaviour of a deterministic system, it moves further and further away from you. Hence the long-standing philosophical musings!

   Show morethread
5. jrlockeJan 2014
   Does such a detector imply that there is no freewill? Would determinism imply it?

   Imagine the predictor works, what does that mean? One second prior to the action, the course you would take is set. This is actually probably a point in favor of the possibility of freewill; humans are course-taking machines, we have a whole life (and our evolution before that) to acquire dispositions that will one day help us survive. What kind of freewill do we want? Do we want to be "free to dodge a brick when thrown at us" or "free, one second before the brick arrives, to duck or not duck". Which of these is the important one? The kind of freewill we really want isn't the kind where we are free floating actors, it is the kind where our history, personal and evolutionary, dictates our present. The point is, real freedom is not about being without limits, it is about having sensible responses to ones environment; creatures evolve the freedom to avoid being eaten, the freedom to anticipate others' actions, the freedom to manipulate other agents with our clever words. Dan Dennett makes a better case for this than I, please look into his wonderful books on the topic.

   Daniel Dennett: --Elbow Room --Freedom Evolves

   Show morethread
6. mjgoinsAug 2010
   I say this every time this topic comes up, which seems to be often, so I'm sorry to sound like a broken record, but y'all need to read 'Freedom Evolves' by Dan Dennett, followed up by his longer more important work, 'Consciousness Explained.'

   You might not agree with his conclusions, as they're fairly radical, but it answers the question of the original post.

   thread