u/Kupo_Master

Here is a thought experiment:
- You are the god-king of 2 worlds
- World A has libertarian free will. Don’t ask how it works. Magic probably. Humans in this world are a true causality source that cannot be fully determined by past events
- World B is deterministic. All human decisions are entirely driven by their environment and past.
- That said, the following also applies:
+ even though world A has free will, the ability to exercice free will is linked to the ability of reasoning. Someone with low intellectual ability will not suddenly be making better decisions because they have free will. People can use free will based on bad reasoning, incomplete information or stupidity. Mental illness, physical diseases (eg brain tumours) damages the ability to reason and thus affect people’s decisions.
+ even though world B is determined, the future is too complex to be forecasted. This means that while all future human choices are fixed, there is no way to predict someone’s choices with perfect precision.
- As god-king, the task falls to you to define both morality and the laws of both worlds. Your goal is to create the “best society” in both worlds. As god-king, you get to define what “best society” means however this definition has to be the same for both worlds. The rules you set out are the optimal rules you can come up to achieve your goal.

Which rules do you set for world A and B? Are they the same or different? Be specific when you can. For example don’t say “prison sentences should be more lenient in world X” but “jail time should be roughly 50% shorter in world X”

For decades, neuroscience taught that the brain makes decisions at the top. Sensory information travels upward through layers of increasing complexity, and somewhere near the frontal cortex, a decision gets made. The sensory regions at the bottom do their job and pass the information along.

Researchers at the University of Illinois recorded what is actually happening in the brain while a decision forms.

The decision does not wait for information to reach the top. It starts at the very first sensory layer, earlier than the model says is possible, driven by signals flowing downward from higher brain regions before the sensory processing is even finished.

The bottom of the hierarchy and the top are talking to each other simultaneously, not in sequence. And that bidirectional conversation appears to be what a decision actually is.

The implications for how AI is built, and why it uses so much more energy than the brain, are significant.