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Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by Swizec on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:07PM (#11740085)
Even if every action is purely a function of the gears turning, you still have state. As soon as you have state (memories/mood/etc), you have some level of free will in the immediate sense.

Event X happens. How you react depends on your state of mind.

Same problem as with coding. As soon as outputs are not wholly dependent on inputs, and they can have side-effects, all bets are off. Anything could happen.

Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by pbh101 on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:14PM (#11740135)
But your state is also deterministically a function of your prior experiences, per this model. If you consider the input the entire stream of events, rather than each individual event, the output stream will be deterministic even with state.
Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by mercer on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:28PM (#11740269)
So basically it's still a 'pure' function in the end?
Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by pbh101 on Friday May 20, 2016 @03:09PM (#11740577)
Per the materialist/deterministic 'there is no free will' mental model, yes: the function taking the input stream is pure.

On the per-event basis, this model boils down to a 'function' evaluating each event with multiple outputs and inputs:

Inputs: the stimuli, mental state prior to stimuli

Outputs: your actions and resultant mental state

The output mental state is then the input for the next iteration/evaluation.

Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by edko on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:16PM (#11740160)
Internal state makes understanding the output more difficult: your output is now a function of the input plus the internal state. However, it does not make it freer: the same input paired with the same internal state will always produce the same output.
Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by Taren on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:39PM (#11740369)
But if your actions still could change randomly with your personality, memories and everything else that defines you how would that allow for free will?

Say the universe is perfectly deterministic. You could look into the future by simulating everything perfectly but why would that prohibit free will? Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?

Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by edko on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:46PM (#11740430)
I think randomness would undermine the "will" part of "free will", whilst perfect determinism would undermine the "free" part of "free will".
Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by khedoros on Friday May 20, 2016 @03:13PM (#11740610)
> Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?

I'd argue that an all-knowing God is something that can't really be reasoned about. It's the introduction of an infinite value into the discussion (or maybe more like a division by zero?). You end up with logically contradictory statements when describing the properties of such a being.

Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by Taren on Friday May 20, 2016 @04:16PM (#11741126)
But isn't it essentially just taking away time as a factor which is pretty much what predicting via determinism would do?

Maybe the general definition of free will most people seem to go with just doesn't deal with weird edge cases because it basically developed to fit reality.