Free Will is a Bug, not a Feature

[x-ray_vision]

^ See post 71.

[monstro]

@drad_dog

That I might choose something over another. And it is not predictable.

What is your definition of free will?

Please read my post (71).

Can you provide an example of a conscious decision you’ve made that wasn’t predictable? Meaning, no one could guess that you’d ever make that decision, given your cultural background, education, neurological wiring, genetics, physiological state, emotional state, and cognitive ability.

[drad_dog]

@monstro

Please read my post (71).

Can you provide an example of a conscious decision you’ve made that wasn’t predictable? Meaning, no one could guess that you’d ever make that decision, given your cultural background, education, neurological wiring, genetics, physiological state, emotional state, and cognitive ability.

There have been many more "How would you define…?"s than "This is what…"s.
OK:
“I define it as the ability to not only act under one’s volition, but also the ability to act in a manner independent of factors external to one’s conscious awareness. As long as one’s behavior hinges on factors that are not under their conscious control, they really can’t say they are free in any meaningful way. They may be a puppet dancing on a really long string–a string that can sway in the pseudo-randomly blowing wind. They may feel free, but they are always limited by a string they aren’t sophisticated enough to detect.”

So it is a human question and not of atoms in the universe?
Are you saying about any human action “It could not have been any other way”?
You are saying that having an unconscious means that you are not free of will?

“Hinges on factors”: Is that saying to you that no one has choices? It just doesn’t say that to me.

Maybe I’m wrong but the Free will debate seems to be duelling definitions. And the non free will side is defining themselves into their unverifiable position.

Your question to me is an example. It simply defines you as right by definition. I could say “I am an enigma to myself” and be truthful. You would say “As an observer I define you as your prior states of mind. Since they affected you, you were not free”
I would say these factors affected but did not determine my action.
You are saying that something “affecting” someone is a lack of free will. That’s a definition problem.

Why would the only possible demonstration of free will be to act not according to ones psyche?

“They aren’t sophisticated enough to detect”? But you are? Why?

[monstro]

@drad_dog

So it is a human question and not of atoms in the universe?

Yes. I don’t know why you think we’re talking about “atoms in the universe.” No one speaks of “atoms of the universe” having free will. We don’t assume that “atoms” have the ability to choose. Only sentient organisms make choices.

Are you saying about any human action “It could not have been any other way”?
You are saying that having an unconscious means that you are not free of will?

Correct on both of these.

Speaking only for myself, I don’t make decisions for no reason at all. I put on a sweater when I feel cold. I turn left when I exit my office because that’s how I get home. I don’t dance if I don’t hear music. When I do things that feel “random”, that is exactly when I feel like I don’t have free will.

By saying you have free will, you’re saying you have the ability to act anyway you want, without being compelled by anything external to you or outside of your awareness. But how can you possibly know this when your awareness is not under your control? You can only assume that you’re not a puppet on a string. But you can’t know you aren’t. And since you can’t know that you aren’t a puppet, you can’t say that you have free will. You can only say it seems as if you do.

“Hinges on factors”: Is that saying to you that no one has choices? It just doesn’t say that to me.

Sure, people have choices. But do they make those choices, or are those choices made for them? In other words, do people consciously make choices, or do they simply carry out those choices and then come up with a story afterwards to justify why they did what they did, because that’s how they’ve been programmed?

Maybe I’m wrong but the Free will debate seems to be duelling definitions. And the non free will side is defining themselves into their unverifiable position.

And what’s your “verifiable” position? “I feel like I make decisions freely, so therefore that’s what I’m going to keep believing”? How is that verifiable?

Your question to me is an example. It simply defines you as right by definition. I could say “I am an enigma to myself” and be truthful. You would say “As an observer I define you as your prior states of mind. Since they affected you, you were not free”
I would say these factors affected but did not determine my action.

How do you come to the conclusion that factors outside of your control/awareness don’t force you to take action? Do you simply assume this can’t be because it’s too disconcerning to think that we act without really knowing why?

You are saying that something “affecting” someone is a lack of free will. That’s a definition problem.

“Free will” is the problem, not my definition of “free will”. Someone who is free is not constrained. Not coerced. Not controlled. If you only act when you’re presented with a reason to act and that “reason” comes from outside of your consciousness, then you are not a “free agent.” You are merely carrying out someone/something else’s bidding.

Why would the only possible demonstration of free will be to act not according to ones psyche?

Because no one creates their own psyche. If you aren’t the creator, you don’t know what makes it tick. If you don’t know what makes it tick, you can’t really control it. And if you aren’t controlling it, then how can you take credit for its actions?

“They aren’t sophisticated enough to detect”? But you are? Why?

I’m not sophisticated to detect all the strings controlling me. I am humble enough, however, to recognize that something is there, causing me to act. I am humble enough to not mistake my own understanding for what’s real and true. But this is only because I have taken the time to read about cool and interesting stuff. To learn and open my mind a little. I recommend you do these things as well.

[drad_dog]

@monstro

Yes. I don’t know why you think we’re talking about “atoms in the universe.” No one speaks of “atoms of the universe” having free will. We don’t assume that “atoms” have the ability to choose. Only sentient organisms make choices.

Correct on both of these.

Speaking only for myself, I don’t make decisions for no reason at all. I put on a sweater when I feel cold. I turn left when I exit my office because that’s how I get home. I don’t dance if I don’t hear music. When I do things that feel “random”, that is exactly when I feel like I don’t have free will.

By saying you have free will, you’re saying you have the ability to act anyway you want, without being compelled by anything external to you or outside of your awareness. But how can you possibly know this when your awareness is not under your control? You can only assume that you’re not a puppet on a string. But you can’t know you aren’t. And since you can’t know that you aren’t a puppet, you can’t say that you have free will. You can only say it seems as if you do.

Sure, people have choices. But do they make those choices, or are those choices made for them? In other words, do people consciously make choices, or do they simply carry out those choices and then come up with a story afterwards to justify why they did what they did, because that’s how they’ve been programmed?

And what’s your “verifiable” position? “I feel like I make decisions freely, so therefore that’s what I’m going to keep believing”? How is that verifiable?

How do you come to the conclusion that factors outside of your control/awareness don’t force you to take action? Do you simply assume this can’t be because it’s too disconcerning to think that we act without really knowing why?

“Free will” is the problem, not my definition of “free will”. Someone who is free is not constrained. Not coerced. Not controlled. If you only act when you’re presented with a reason to act and that “reason” comes from outside of your consciousness, then you are not a “free agent.” You are merely carrying out someone/something else’s bidding.

Because no one creates their own psyche. If you aren’t the creator, you don’t know what makes it tick. If you don’t know what makes it tick, you can’t really control it. And if you aren’t controlling it, then how can you take credit for its actions?

I’m not sophisticated to detect all the strings controlling me. I am humble enough, however, to recognize that something is there, causing me to act. I am humble enough to not mistake my own understanding for what’s real and true. But this is only because I have taken the time to read about cool and interesting stuff. To learn and open my mind a little. I recommend you do these things as well.

I thought that the initial condition is that you can’t predict what Adele is going to have for dinner next Thursday. You are theorizing. So why would one need to demonstrate that one is not a puppet on a string? Why isn’t it the other way around?

“How can you possibly know” ? the converse of what I said?

It may “seem” to you that we don’t have free will. You may “assume” that we don’t, It is no more convincing than that we do, except that you are the moving party aren’t you?

Your argument is that if you make the measuring infinitely small, the humanity is ultimately finite.

I may believe that humanity is infinite and that your measurement is a flawed logical instrument. That string will get longer and longer the more complications come in and arguments you get. Ultimately you’ll just say “It’s infinitessimal” End of your expertise.
I’d like to hear an example of someone acting with free will . Because you have defined all human behavior out of it.

[Voyager]

@monstro

I am a programmer, though this is not my job title. I use programming language to build empirical models of water chemistry. Model-building is something I’m quite familiar with.

You work in a relatively well defined environment, then. My current project is one where there were basically no requirements, and if there were they would have been wrong. Much more like the brain than water chemistry, I’d wager.

These are opinions based on your own subjective experience and limited vantage point. Sorry, but “I can’t imagine it, thus it is not possible!” is not a compelling argument.

No, it is based on the limits of computation in real time.

You’re making my point for me. None of the things you listed that determine your distractability–the nature of the kiss, your history, your hormones–counts as “free will”. They are external variables which can be quantified, measured.

If I know what makes you tick and what influences your decision-making, then yes, I can predict what you’re going to do. The fact that I, monstro, cannot do this for you, Voyager, does not mean that you have free will. Not any more than the inability of pre-historic men to predict the weather was evidence of the Earth’s free will.

Let me remind you of my position. I’m not totally rejecting the possibility that with enough time and enough inputs a program could predict someone’s actions (though I think it unlikely.) I am rejecting the possibility that it can be done in real time. So, no one can tell me or you what you are going to do before you do it, and thus a world with free will where you cannot do this even theoretically is identical to one with free will where you can only, after massive data collection and computation say “I know you were going to do that” long after you’ve done it. And only after a massive number of refinements to your program to take inputs into account you hadn’t thought of.
A better primitive man analogy is that though we can travel a thousand times faster than primitive man, you can’t scale that up to predict we can exceed the speed of light. Which you would pretty much have to do to predict an action in real time.

Let’s say I kidnap you one day. Lock you up in my mad scientist basement and strap you into an instrument that detects and visually represents ultra-sensitive neural activity. Over a few months, I’m able to pinpoint where every concept is stored in your brain. I can look at a real-time scan of your brain and literally read your thoughts, based on what neurons are stimulated.

Let’s say that my “thought detector” works faster than your consciousness. I’m able to read your mind before you’re even aware of what you’re thinking. Moreover, I’m even able to read thoughts that never make it into your consciousness.

For every decision I put in front of you, I can make a very accurate prediction about what you’re going to do before you do.

Only if you pretty much don’t let me do anything. And you’d have to monitor my stomach and a bunch of other things. If I challenge you to predict my movements, and you break both my legs, you can’t say “see, no problem.”
Anyhow your are begging the question by assuming perfect reading and mapping of brainwaves in real time. See the randomness discussion below.

Why do you believe this?

Because neurons fire based on threshold values. Since our brains are not nice, clean, environments, there are tons of neurons tottering on the edge of firing and not firing. By chaos theory we are not going to be able to predict the brain environment well enough to know for sure what each neuron will do - and certainly not in real time. Even if you copy the brain exactly - in hardware or in software - the environment in the two brains will differ enough so that they will react differently. Maybe in small ways at first, but once the impact of this changes the environment, they will diverge.

This is where you lose me.

I know that there are natural systems that I will never be able to model very well, just because they are enormously complex. And state government doesn’t afford me with the start-of-the-art technology needed to handle these complexities. But that doesn’t mean there’s some supernatural consciousness controlling these systems.

It seems you’re equating free will to the ability to behave randomly. But I’m arguing that you never act randomly. You may respond to pseudo-randomly occuring stimuli (flies buzzing). But that does not mean that your reactions to those random events can’t be predicted.

First, let’s use the God analogy. A universe with a God who set things in motion in a way we can measure and then never interfered again is indistinguishable from a universe where creation is purely natural. If someone feels better about there being a god, fine, but they should pretty much act the same as someone not thinking this.
Similarly, a universe where we are unpredictable automatons is indistinguishable from a universe where we are unpredictable non-automatons.
There is nothing supernatural about any of this. And I don’t believe in a little man sitting in my brain making the free decisions.
Our random choices open up various paths, paths which depend on so many factors that we can’t predict them. Our internal computers and genetics to some extent limit these choices or push us one way or another, as do people around us. You see, our fate is also linked in some ways to our parents’ fate. Hell, our very genes are determined in part by when and where our parents had sex.
Your response might be - see, all this can be measured. But you seem to be living in a Newtonian universe. In the quantum universe we live in these things can’t be measured precisely enough to predict our actions perfectly. That is a law of Physics.

[Voyager]

@x-ray_vision

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/intro/Free%20Will.htm

Even if the universe is probabilistic at the sub-atomic level, it might still be deterministic at the macro level. A computer’s behavior is determined by its inputs and its program, despite the tiny size of its circuitry. Why think that human beings are any different? The implications of quantum uncertainty for human behavior, and macro-events in general, are so small as to make no real difference.

Heh. I wish. I deal with the first samples of new processors, which often operate in very different ways under the same program - ways we can determine, if we are lucky, using advanced scanning techniques. And sometimes the behavior is intermittent.
And this is despite the use of design rules and testing and process control to keep this from happening. Our brains don’t get tested except at the grossest level.

· What if quantum uncertainty did make a big difference to our actions, so that it was common that random events at the sub-atomic level resulted in our doing one thing as opposed to another? This would still not support the idea that we have free will. If our actions are random, this doesn’t mean that we are in control of them. Quantum uncertainty would just be another force that is beyond our control; after all, if quantum phenomena are irreducibly probabilistic, then clearly our will cannot make them turn out one way as opposed to another.

Who is this “we” your source is talking about? Does this entity have free will, whether or not it can control the actions of the person? And who is assuming another entity here?

monstro’s position, as I understand it, is that one’s actions are predictable by natural law, not controlled by another entity. I may not agree with that, but it is a logically consistent one, at least. Your quote isn’t.

[Voyager]

Here is an interesting case. Say you have an intelligent in the AI sense self-modifying program. At the beginning one might say it does not have free will. But the self-modifications can happen in (at least) two ways. First, it randomly modifies itself based on truly random factors, of the kind I’ve already described. After enough of these the program is not predictable based on its initial conditions.
Second, it uses some sort of genetic algorithm to modify itself based on its inputs and the success of its reactions to those inputs. The response to a modification is not predictable unless one knows its total environment, so the state of the program is dependent in some sense on the entire world.
In this case the base programming is not free, in that the situations where it modifies its programming will be more or less constant. But the entire system is not free in that it is not a simple function of the base programming. And, if you let the system modify the base programming, then it is even more free.
I’d say this system would act as if it had free will. Whether one says it really does have free will or not is a matter of semantics.

[monstro]

@Voyager

You work in a relatively well defined environment, then. My current project is one where there were basically no requirements, and if there were they would have been wrong. Much more like the brain than water chemistry, I’d wager.

I hardly think environmental science qualifies as a “well defined environment”. We specialize in chaos. And I have no idea what you mean by “requirements”. Surely you’re not saying that there are no limits to the technology you use, or your skillset.

Let me remind you of my position. I’m not totally rejecting the possibility that with enough time and enough inputs a program could predict someone’s actions (though I think it unlikely.) I am rejecting the possibility that it can be done in real time.

Why do you think prediction-making must happen in real time for you to be unconvinced of your free will? If I analyze the genetic, neurological, and physiological information I’ve extracted from you by a covertly-placed monitoring device on Oct 23 2015 @ 9:35 PM and I’m able to use this information to accurately predict how you behaved on Oct 23 2015 9:50 PM in response to a fly buzzing in your ear, why does it matter if I made this prediction the moment you started to “behave” or a year later, once I finally get around to crunching the numbers? As long as my model adequately explains your actions and I didn’t see the answer beforehand, I’ve disproven your “randomness”.

So, no one can tell me or you what you are going to do before you do it…

Of course people can tell you what you’re going to do before you do it, if they know you well enough. If they’ve spent enough time studying your brain, your genes, your cognitive associations, your reflexes, etc. and how these things interact when you’re subjected to a range of stimuli and dilemmas, YES, they can tell you with confidence how you will behave when subjected to a particular stimulus.

…and thus a world with free will where you cannot do this even theoretically is identical to one with free will where you can only, after massive data collection and computation say “I know you were going to do that” long after you’ve done it.

I don’t understand what you mean by a “world with free will”? How can a world have a will? How can a world make choices? Are we back to the bizarre “atoms in the universe” thing again?

A better primitive man analogy is that though we can travel a thousand times faster than primitive man, you can’t scale that up to predict we can exceed the speed of light. Which you would pretty much have to do to predict an action in real time.

I hope after you read about this study, you realize how silly your assertion is.

Only if you pretty much don’t let me do anything. And you’d have to monitor my stomach and a bunch of other things. If I challenge you to predict my movements, and you break both my legs, you can’t say “see, no problem.”

Of course this would defeat the purpose of my examination. I wouldn’t do something so cruel and pointless.

Let’s say that while I have you in my basement, I regularly give you choices. I have a glass cabinet with a lock. One morning, you wake up to discover I’ve placed into the cabinet three boxes that look like they contain cereal. A yellow box. A purple box. A blue box. At first the cabinet is locked, and you can’t get at the cereal until I come down from upstairs and unlock it. Meanwhile, while you’re sitting there thinking about breakfast, I’m sitting in my office, analyzing your thoughts.

I see no food-related concepts being activated in your brain. But I see lots of concepts related to yellow. I also see that your amygdala is activated in a fashion that indicates that yellow has a positive valence. (Months later, once we have a chance to befriend each other under less bizarre circumstances, you share with me that your beloved mother always wore a yellow apron.)

When I unlock the cabinet and tell you to make your breakfast selection, am I going to be startled when you pick the yellow box? Or will you I assume your choice is a willful one, because eh it was just a coincidence, right?

Anyhow your are begging the question by assuming perfect reading and mapping of brainwaves in real time. See the randomness discussion below.

Perhaps. But I don’t know why I should believe someone when they said they made their decision at time t, when I have evidence that the decision was made at t-1. If the decision was made prior to their awareness of it, then how can they claim they made the decision? Perhaps the decision was already made by their programming, and they only became aware of it at time t.

Because neurons fire based on threshold values. Since our brains are not nice, clean, environments, there are tons of neurons tottering on the edge of firing and not firing. By chaos theory we are not going to be able to predict the brain environment well enough to know for sure what each neuron will do - and certainly not in real time. Even if you copy the brain exactly - in hardware or in software - the environment in the two brains will differ enough so that they will react differently.

This sounds good and all, but how do you know that two brains that are copied exactly will not react exactly.

We are not just our brains. We are also our entire nervous systems, which function in conjunction with the rest of our organ systems. All of which interact with our environments. Would two exactly copied bodies existing in exactly copied environments with exactly copied histories react in different ways? What would be causing them to react in different ways, if everything about them is exactly the same?

First, let’s use the God analogy. A universe with a God who set things in motion in a way we can measure and then never interfered again is indistinguishable from a universe where creation is purely natural. If someone feels better about there being a god, fine, but they should pretty much act the same as someone not thinking this.

When you say “should”, do you mean in a moral/ethical sense? Because I would disagree with this. I don’t believe in God, and I feel no obligation to copy the actions of my God-believing brethren. They engage in a lot of rituals and superstitions that seem pointless to me. They will feel fear that I will not fear, and thus our behaviors are going to differ from each other (since emotions and thoughts give rise to behavior).

Similarly, a universe where we are unpredictable automatons is indistinguishable from a universe where we are unpredictable non-automatons.

I also disagree with this. A universe where people have free will would be a world where we truly are responsible for our moral shortcomings and failures. I’d be a fan of the death penalty if we had free will, because there would be no such thing as mitigating circumstances in criminal acts. We would live in a world where everyone who wants to learn something learns it, just by willing it to happen. You know how people say they don’t get women? Well, they would be right. Everyone would be hard to grok, because everyone would be thinking, feeling, and behaving in ways that defied prediction. We’d be in control of our thoughts, feelings, actions. Subliminal messages wouldn’t work on us, and neither would marketing. You wouldn’t be able to link genes to behavorial or personality styles.

There is nothing supernatural about any of this. And I don’t believe in a little man sitting in my brain making the free decisions.

Free will is posited on consciousness. We don’t speak of animals having free will. Or “atoms in the universe”. When you say that you assume you have free will because you believe it’s impossible that anyone can predict what you’re going to do, then the logical conclusion is that you must believe that everything acting “randomly” has free will. But that’s not what free will means. Free will is not just randomness. It is conscious decision-making independent of external (quantifiable, measurable) factors. So to convince me you’ve got free will, you’re going to have to do more than just point to how unpredictable you are.

Our random choices open up various paths, paths which depend on so many factors that we can’t predict them.

I’d love for you to provide an example of a random choice you’ve personally made. Because as I said upthread, every choice I’ve made (or felt I’ve made) was motivated by something. If you can explain why you made a choice, then it ain’t random anymore. “Random choice” doesn’t make any sense.

[Voyager]

@monstro

I hardly think environmental science qualifies as a “well defined environment”. We specialize in chaos. And I have no idea what you mean by “requirements”. Surely you’re not saying that there are no limits to the technology you use, or your skillset.

A lot of misunderstandings in this one. I’m astonished that you don’t understand what I mean by requirements, but that’s not important here.

Why do you think prediction-making must happen in real time for you to be unconvinced of your free will? If I analyze the genetic, neurological, and physiological information I’ve extracted from you by a covertly-placed monitoring device on Oct 23 2015 @ 9:35 PM and I’m able to use this information to accurately predict how you behaved on Oct 23 2015 9:50 PM in response to a fly buzzing in your ear, why does it matter if I made this prediction the moment you started to “behave” or a year later, once I finally get around to crunching the numbers? As long as my model adequately explains your actions and I didn’t see the answer beforehand, I’ve disproven your “randomness”.

Because how else would you know you can really predict and just have gotten lucky with the one prediction? How do you know that you wouldn’t have been wrong about the other 5 million choices I made? And you certainly know that building models involves making choices of what to model. How are you sure that foreknowledge of what I didn’t didn’t influence the weights you put on my inputs., determining which environmental factors are more important than others?

Of course people can tell you what you’re going to do before you do it, if they know you well enough. If they’ve spent enough time studying your brain, your genes, your cognitive associations, your reflexes, etc. and how these things interact when you’re subjected to a range of stimuli and dilemmas, YES, they can tell you with confidence how you will behave when subjected to a particular stimulus.

Since we are creatures of habit, predictions of what someone will do are often correct. You could easily predict when I change radio channels on my drive to work in the morning. But the fact that we program ourselves to mostly do things the way we like to (and thus make our actions predictable) is not an argument against free will.

I don’t understand what you mean by a “world with free will”? How can a world have a will? How can a world make choices? Are we back to the bizarre “atoms in the universe” thing again?

Misunderstaning. A world with free will is a world or universe in which free will exists.

I hope after you read about this study, you realize how silly your assertion is.

I’m quite aware of that study. It is only important if your model of free will is a conscious entity in your brain directing traffic. My model of the mind is the combination of the conscious and subconscious. My subconscious can solve complex problems, write programs, and be very creative, and come up with ideas that I later consciously act on.

Of course this would defeat the purpose of my examination. I wouldn’t do something so cruel and pointless.

The point is that you are limiting my degrees of freedom, which makes your experiment invalid.

Let’s say that while I have you in my basement, I regularly give you choices. I have a glass cabinet with a lock. One morning, you wake up to discover I’ve placed into the cabinet three boxes that look like they contain cereal. A yellow box. A purple box. A blue box. At first the cabinet is locked, and you can’t get at the cereal until I come down from upstairs and unlock it. Meanwhile, while you’re sitting there thinking about breakfast, I’m sitting in my office, analyzing your thoughts.

I see no food-related concepts being activated in your brain. But I see lots of concepts related to yellow. I also see that your amygdala is activated in a fashion that indicates that yellow has a positive valence. (Months later, once we have a chance to befriend each other under less bizarre circumstances, you share with me that your beloved mother always wore a yellow apron.)

When I unlock the cabinet and tell you to make your breakfast selection, am I going to be startled when you pick the yellow box? Or will you I assume your choice is a willful one, because eh it was just a coincidence, right?

I’d say there are four lights.
Your experiment proves nothing. If I made a decision to pick the yellow box as soon as I saw it, you are just seeing the impact of my decision before I have a chance to physically choose it, If I’m cooking, and I’m salivating and you can measure interest in food in my mind, you shouldn’t be too excited at being able to predict I’m going to eat it. As the experiment demonstrates, we make decisions, consciously and subconsciously, before we carry them out.

Perhaps. But I don’t know why I should believe someone when they said they made their decision at time t, when I have evidence that the decision was made at t-1. If the decision was made prior to their awareness of it, then how can they claim they made the decision? Perhaps the decision was already made by their programming, and they only became aware of it at time t.

That may be, but your experiment won’t determine that.

This sounds good and all, but how do you know that two brains that are copied exactly will not react exactly.

We are not just our brains. We are also our entire nervous systems, which function in conjunction with the rest of our organ systems. All of which interact with our environments. Would two exactly copied bodies existing in exactly copied environments with exactly copied histories react in different ways? What would be causing them to react in different ways, if everything about them is exactly the same?

That’s what I’ve been trying to say when I talk about hormones and the state of our stomach. But even if we are just our brains, a simpler case, it doesn’t work. Why? Chaos theory. And even if we get history correct, which I’m actually assuming from copying the synapses correctly, the moment the brains diverge their responses will diverge also.
And copying exactly will never happen. We can’t even copy chips exactly. That they work the same (mostly) is due to them being designed to work even if not copied exactly. Our complex chips are copied so inexactly that each gets a personalized voltage to hit a certain speed. And they are way, way simpler than the brain.

When you say “should”, do you mean in a moral/ethical sense? Because I would disagree with this. I don’t believe in God, and I feel no obligation to copy the actions of my God-believing brethren. They engage in a lot of rituals and superstitions that seem pointless to me. They will feel fear that I will not fear, and thus our behaviors are going to differ from each other (since emotions and thoughts give rise to behavior).

I no more believe in God than you do. Should means that if you believe God has never interfered you probably shouldn’t tell us (you being such a believer, not you) what God thinks of our sex lives. or that God will make prayers come true. A true deist will make ethical decisions making pretty much the same method as you and I as atheists do - but might make different ones, based on the deist’s history and experiences.

I also disagree with this. A universe where people have free will would be a world where we truly are responsible for our moral shortcomings and failures. I’d be a fan of the death penalty if we had free will, because there would be no such thing as mitigating circumstances in criminal acts. We would live in a world where everyone who wants to learn something learns it, just by willing it to happen. You know how people say they don’t get women? Well, they would be right. Everyone would be hard to grok, because everyone would be thinking, feeling, and behaving in ways that defied prediction. We’d be in control of our thoughts, feelings, actions. Subliminal messages wouldn’t work on us, and neither would marketing. You wouldn’t be able to link genes to behavorial or personality styles.

You are assuming an absolutist model of free will, which is a straw man. The influence of our genetics and environment on sexual preference, say, is pretty well certain. But that I didn’t have free will in choosing to be heterosexual does not mean I don’t have free will in what I do with it - and certainly not that this has been predetermined. Hell, a guy who has never seen a French Maid costume is not going to fantasize about French Maids, to choose a fantasy I do not have.

Free will is posited on consciousness. We don’t speak of animals having free will. Or “atoms in the universe”. When you say that you assume you have free will because you believe it’s impossible that anyone can predict what you’re going to do, then the logical conclusion is that you must believe that everything acting “randomly” has free will. But that’s not what free will means. Free will is not just randomness. It is conscious decision-making independent of external (quantifiable, measurable) factors. So to convince me you’ve got free will, you’re going to have to do more than just point to how unpredictable you are.

I think animals have subconscious free will. Or more advanced ones - certainly not amoebas. Guide dogs are trained in willful disobedience - not obeying the commands of the blind person if they would be dangerous, based on very complex environmental issues. My old border collie mix generalized from training we gave him to something beyond what we taught him. And guide dog puppies behave very differently with their coats on and off, just like soldiers in formation versus at liberty.
Do you really think bonobos are automatons?

I’d love for you to provide an example of a random choice you’ve personally made. Because as I said upthread, every choice I’ve made (or felt I’ve made) was motivated by something. If you can explain why you made a choice, then it ain’t random anymore. “Random choice” doesn’t make any sense.

I pick books to read from my collection pretty much at random some times. However, it is like the stock market. Though one days movement is fairly random, we can always look back and find a cause. If we could figure out the cause before the market moved, we’d be rich.