Free will
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
One of the easiest hard questions, as millennia-old philosophical dilemmas go. Though this impossible question is fully and completely dissolved on Less Wrong, aspiring reductionists should try to solve it on their own.
Non-spoiler posts
The following posts can be read to set up the problem of "free will" and what constitutes a good solution from a reductionist perspective, without entirely giving away the solution. (When Yudkowsky wrote these posts, he thought he could get away with just leaving it as a practice problem, and some of the posts state that the problem will be left open. However Yudkowsky did eventually find that he needed to write out the whole solution.)
- How An Algorithm Feels From Inside (see also the wiki page)
- Dissolving the Question - this is where the "free will" puzzle is explicitly posed, along with criteria for what does and does not constitute a satisfying answer.
- Wrong Questions
- Righting a Wrong Question
For spoiler posts see free will (solution).