Humans are Just Self Aware Intelligent Biological Machines
post by asksathvik · 2025-02-21T01:03:59.950Z · LW · GW · 3 commentsThis is a link post for https://asksathvik.substack.com/p/ai-is-just-computation-are-you-scared
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3 comments
If you read Robert Sapolky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will or even the more subtle Behave he makes a very clear argument for why there is no free will and that humans are just self aware intelligent biological machines
Free will in the general context means that you are in complete control of the decisions you make, that is farthest from the truth.
- Sure you can hack your body and brain to listen to you more, but you cannot be free from it completely.
When I say humans are just self aware biological intelligent machines, I am also making the most subtle point that all living things are also biological machines with different levels of self awareness.
- Cells have no self awareness but are definitely intelligent, they can adapt to various living conditions pretty easily so they are not just a simple set of basic rules.
- DNA somehow has all the information needed for the cell to do this.
- At the other end we have humans - with the most self awareness and high intelligence.
- But in the middle we have the whole evolution tree from fish to reptiles to amphibians to mammals..
- Consciousness or more simply self awareness is definitely a spectrum.
When Robert Sapolsky says there is no free will, he means that if we know your current body state perfectly, we can predict with 100% accuracy what you will do in the next moment given an input.
- What is means that any choice you are making is pre-determined by your past, right from milliseconds before making that choice to millions/billions of years of evolutionary conditioning.
Say you go to a new restaurant and your wife is reading the menu to pick an item if you know your wife well enough, you can predict what she would like, even if it’s a restaurant which you never went to.
- Doesn’t mean that she’s not making that choice. It’s just been pre-decided.
- Yes, even though she is actually going through some options and trying to make a choice, if you know her, you can definitely predict it - this is a very simple argument for there’s no free will behind that choice.
- If you can replicate her brain and body states perfectly, you can in the next moment, predict with 100% accuracy what she will do next, of course we need the algorithms that your brain and body is running as well.
And to clarify this doesn’t mean I can predict what she will do in an hour/day/month so on:
- Human brain is actively learning from the environment, and our lives can turn upside down in a second.
- Because environment is so unpredictable (at least with the current tech) its not possible to predict her body + brain state far in the future.
- But if we can predict environment perfectly as well, then yes everything is pre-determined.
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comment by Seth Herd · 2025-02-21T03:25:18.527Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Try it. Try predicting what someone you know well will get from the menu. You will be right only a portion of the time (unless your friends are super predictable; but I bet you can't predict what they'll say on their favofite topics).
We technically have no "free will" by that definition, but why should anyone care?
Predicting human behavior is extremely difficult, because any one of a million ideas could be floating in our heads while we make a given decision. Those ideas are often important; we have them for reasons.
So we have self-determination, which is more important than "free will" by this definition.
The care and effort with which we make decisions has an important impact on our futures. That's the type of free will worth wanting.
Now, there are also limitations to that. Biases and cognitive limitations keep us from making good decisions.
So our self-determination is limited.
These seem much more worth thinking about and understanding than some abstract in-the-limit determinism. Why would anyone ever care if a god could predict their actions, when no such god exists, and humans can only make bad guesses?
comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2025-02-21T13:10:18.305Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You can't even predict the weather more than a few days in advance, and you can't predict the movement of individual gas molecules for longer than a tiny fraction of a second, even if you knew their exact positions and velocities, which you can't. So these hypothetical determinations are of no consequence. Add quantum indeterminacy and your hypothetical exact prediction of the future becomes a probability distribution over possible worlds, i.e. an exact calculation of your ignorance.
The question I am more interested in is, why are all these people in recent years — Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and others — proclaiming that no-one can really choose anything? Because regardless of all the careful explanations of what they really mean, which amount to denying their own headlines, it's the headline bailey that people will remember, not the tiny, empty motte on the hill that leaves normality unaffected [? · GW].
comment by Caprica (susana-guzman) · 2025-02-21T13:41:14.963Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Potentially, but at least for now I don't think we have enough evidence to back this. For what we see it seems the universe is not deterministic. So even if you could know 'your current body state perfectly' you would still need to include some randomness. If we could predict the future state of a system by its initial configuration then we basically solved chaos theory.
But I agree we are 'just' biological machines, and we can predict with high accuracy