Freedom evolves

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If you're interested in these topics, I highly recommend a couple of books by philosopher Daniel Dennett: 'Consciousness Explained' and 'Freedom Evolves'. His way of reconciling determinism with free will goes something like this. Assuming determinism, then we are living in one of a huge number of possible universes. As limited intelligences, we have no way of figuring out exactly which history we live in, and so no way of accurately predicting the future. That's the free will we have -- the ability to 'play the game' and participate in this deterministic world, using our limited knowledge to try and understand what's going on; and how we can affect it, within the rules of physics. Yes, this means that we don't have total free will in an unlimited fantastical sense; and, from the point of view of an all-knowing being who knows which histo…

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…understand why we think it's a game, and not a static work of art. People also think that nondeterminism is somehow an important ingredient in whatever it is we mean by "free will". This doesn't make much sense to me. If you want it to not make sense to you as well, read Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves . You might want to budget more than a couple hours for that book, though.

…art, which is why I suspect that this Aaron guy is misunderstanding his argument. I note that his summary is in fact a summary of somebody else's summary. I haven't read Freedom Evolves, but my guess is that Dennett was actually making an argument that it's possible to simulate, in a deterministic universe, entities which have "free will", or at least which believe they do. I doubt he really makes an argument based on confusing two different meanings of the word "unavoidable". Though I'm happy to be proven wrong if anyone can post some actual quotes from the book.

I haven't read Freedom Evolves, but I intend to. Judging by the list of points that Aaron provides and Dennett's other books, I bet Dennett's actual point was to say: 'Look, this is plausible , and you can't dismiss it out of hand. Yes, obviously the data still needs to come in to determine whether this is the actual truth, but you shouldn't consider it a foregone conclusion that this isn't a valid option.' Here's some "primary source" Dennett material in contrast to Aaron's angry "tertiary source" rant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101017 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101024 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66917

If Dennett's argument (in the ordered list in that post) is stated accurately, it is obviously wrong. Having not read _Freedom Evolves_, I can't say whether this is an accurate summary, but it's clear that "to avoid the actions you'll deterministically take" and "to avoid objects" are not using "avoid" in the same sense.