If you can predict, but not controll what I'll do, I still consider that free will.

If such an intelligence existed, I would simply call it a nerd and spray whipped cream in its face

"Now, your honor, as the jury will have read in this clinical, peer-acknowledged study, our superintelligent quantum AI regional supercluster determimes guilt accurately in over 98.9% of cases, in various scenarios, in thousands of simulations.

"With no margin of error, this system has determined the defendant would have acted within the next few days, perhaps even hours!"

Your brain IS you. It's the one choosing

People who try to apply game theory to fictional super AIs and David Chalmers can both fuck off.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will

I like to replace the concept of "free will" with that of "agency".

The Britannica definition of free will is "the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe". But it seems to me that any state where you temporarily cannot act or communicate would automatically rule out free will, at least while that condition persists. Do you lose free will every time you fall asleep? Are people who are aware but whose bodies are nonresponsive - people who are "locked in" - lacking free will? Certainly both conditions lack agency, but these are still inarguably people - yet free will is so tightly bound with the concept of personhood, that it's supposed lack is often used to imply one is "less human"!

Frankly, free will seems like too broad and binary a concept to match what people actually do and deal with day to day. Agency comes in degrees, and can be gained and lost - which seems to me a much closer match to what people were trying to describe with the phrase "free will".

I am reading “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahniman.

This seems to be way more true than I am comfortable admitting to myself.

I'm going to knock your shoes off with real science.

All our senses, touch, hearing, seeing, smell, taste, vision, are all based on a delayed system where a thing is sensed and then a little later the brain gets that information and processes it. In other words we live in the past while our bodies are in the present reacting to the future.

After smelling a bear the brain reacts and sends a message to the legs to run like hell. However the bear has already grabbed you so as a result someone else who did run far away enough hears your cries from a few milliseconds in the past, turns around and sees your legs waggling like you wanted to run.

We are basically only aware of the recent past from a few milliseconds ago.

Did anyone here, including myself, post a comment because we had no choice?

Early into college I convinced a few people there isn't free will because it contradicts everything we know about psychology. That said, I also explained it didn't matter since there's so much going on that it's difficult to predict a person's behavior with absolute certainty, even with a multitude of information about them.

To simplify, a coin flip is considered random even if all the forces are physical and deterministic. The angle and strength of the flip, the air resistance, gentle breezes, the precise gravity where it takes place given the pull from the earth and hell, even the moon... you can factor in so much and be right maybe 99.9% of the time with proper controls and yet there's always something.

Human brains have magnitudes more going on, so even if some factors are strong predictors, there's always an illusion of free will since there are so many other factors we haven't even imagined.

I wish I still believed in free will. It would make getting stuff done a lot easier. Feeling like you are fighting the universe to accomplish something you don’t want to do is much harder than feeling like you just don’t want to do something today. It’s the exact same situation either way, but the illusion of free will is, imho, valuable psychologically.

I don't think it needs to convince you about anything. brains run on less energy than a friggin lightbulb seems like it would be pretty open to suggestions

Meh I wouldn't call it that super

How would that work? What if I gain access to the AI and predict my own choices? Would the AI be able to predict that I am using it, and somehow come to a conclusion even though its conclusions would change my behavior?

Let's say the AI says that I'll do thing A, and then I see that and choose to do thing B, the AI is wrong.

But if AI had predicted thing B, I, the smartass, would've chosen to do thing A, the opposite, so the AI is wrong.

How intelligent would it need to be to realize that my behavior depends on its output, and that it could control me with its predictions? Maybe the AI predicts that I'll use it, so it deliberately shifts its predictions in a way to make me act in its favor somehow...

Is there a name for this kind of paradox? Can a machine predict itself?

This is the issue I have with machines that predict the universe, because if the machine itself influences the universe (even if in a relatively small way), the machine would have to replicate itself in its simulation, which would be a problem as the simulated machine would also have to predict itself, etc, etc... this seems like it'd require infinite computing power. So by extension, if the super-intelligence wants to predict my actions, but I have access to the machine, then the machine would need to predict itself.

Often it hides the fact that it's a superintelligence by acting like a complete dumbass.

Honor of Kings: The Way of All Things episode did a great take on this.

Its a choice to you because you don't have that power