> debating whether or not we have free will

Free will is an abstraction. It's not something that's concrete enough to say it does or doesn't exist, but a tool for reasoning about certain systems that are to much of a pain to fully calculate.

Free will is about deciding and executing actions contrary to your determined nature:

* Not eating until your body fails.

* Not breathing until automatic breathing kicks in.

And not being able to perform dematerialization doesn't count as non-free will, for example.

The issue there is that if we are capable of doing something it is hard to say whether or not it is part of our determined nature. For example, maybe we have an evolutionary adaption to famine where elderly people are biologically tweaked to be OK with starving themselves to death. That'd be pretty gruesome and I doubt they'd be excited at the prospect even if a mechanism does exist, but it is the sort of thing that evolution is perfectly capable of encoding into us.

It is less direct to the examples you give; but I'm confident that parents are psychologically designed to sacrifice themselves in the event it helps their children and many men, famously, are built to go to the frontlines and sacrifice themselves for family and community. Hard to make an assessment of whether those sort of choices is free will or determined nature.

Right. But free will is anti-deterministic, instead of undeterministic. That's why the "free" part gets confusing, because we are always limited, and yet free will is an intelligence power. Parrots can't lie, they reproduce sounds, humans can lie and encode lies as sounds. LLM's don't currently lie, since lying is strategic. Free will is about strategically choosing actions. Free will doesn't tell us anything about the (non)deterministic nature of the universe or ourselves.

Your determined nature is the ability to creat interim goals.

Schopenhauer would disagree. In his world model the Will with capital W is probably best described as the driving force behind all movement. While abstract, it has concrete species (think color vs red, where color is will, and red is your concrete human will, that you can feel concretely by pinching your finger). About freedom of the will Schopenhauer also has a clear opinion: will is free in the sense of uncaused, random. That does not help humans though, because while they can do what they want, they cannot want what they want. I'm not saying that this is a good model, but it's quite concrete. Nietzsche build on it, Einstein had a portrait of him in his Berlin study alongside Faraday and Maxwell, and while Freud denied any influence, there are a lot of topics in common between them.

I agree with most of what you said. However it is not correct to say they are executing algorithms, just as it is not correct to say that a water fountain is executing an algorithm.

It is correct to say that in theory a water fountain can be modeled by an algorithm. It can either be modelled at a high level by simplified model. Or in theory you can simulate every possible atom that makes up that water fountain.

The model that reconstructs these simulations are certainly algorithms.

A map is not the territory.

"Nor does this seem to present any significant argument against the concept that biological organisms are self-replicating evolving machines that are faithfully executing straightforward algorithms."

I think three things go against that:

1. We've never observed evolution happen in any large-scale way. Just minor adaptations. Papers like this speak axiomatically about it like everything was observed to do that. So do movies, TV, games, etc. You can see the power of institutional politics with hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing is more powerful than observational science.

2. The designs of even the simplest, biological organisms are not only so complex that we can't replicate them from scratch: we tend to find more complexity over time. Many models also ignore behavior that shows up in the real world which might require messier algorithms. Probably not straight-forward algorithms in many cases.

3. Faithfully executing seems to contradict how operators like mutation allegedly drove improvements. If anything, you'd want it mostly to faithfully execute algorithms, then execute them while sort of executing their replacement, and then be executing their replacement. This is all an emergent behavior of simple interactions between cells in environments with a certain amount of chaos. Then, we find that chaos includes external organisms or features interacting with the primaries in unknown ways, like human brains and gut bacteria.

So, the sentence itself is a product of fantasy endlessly repeated by both proponents of evolution theory and A.I. researchers. Observed reality keeps contradicting such claims. An alternative thesis starting from observed reality will lead to more interesting observations.

Thanks to His revealing it, we Christians arrived at God's design for specific purposes. That includes the overall story of redemption (Jesus Christ's), showing off His power, beautiful art, creating us personally, sustaining us, etc. Multi-variable optimization at a universe scale. Within this design (or story), the organisms also have a limited, adaptation process which our Creator also allows us to wield in small ways (eg genetic engineering).

That also explains how some features in this paper could form and stabilize despite how a truly-random universe would either not exist or rip natural laws to pieces. The authors weren't reductionist enough. If it the universe was godless and randomly-generated, we'd be dead. Their patterns wouldn't exist either. Accounting for stability, and why it is, they have to redo their arguments to build on a combination of divine design with observed, natural laws.

1. Observations of genetic drift and biodiversity are consistent with our model of evolution at every scale. This model is the best fit to the data regardless of politics and media

2. Our ability to replicate something gives zero information on its origin. I’m not sure I understand the algorithm comment

3. Sure, GP simplified a bit too much there. Your comment is consistent with modern models of evolution. Each genome has a pool of random variations, which may or may not be expressed in an organism. Each organism is a test of those gene expressions. A genome changes over time when an organism passes this test (e.g. reproduces), increasing the expression of its genes across the population. This occurs in parallel for many possible variations.

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Ah, I should have read the rest of your comment first, but I’ll leave this here anyway. I don’t think your explanation is valid— we are biologically and socially primed for religious ideology, but its use as a world model is very limited. We will eventually find answers to these questions, as the ratchet of scientific progress clicks along. Religion has never been useful in the same way

"Observations of genetic drift and biodiversity are consistent with our model of evolution at every scale."

We've actually seen observations of some similar features across species. We see that in most human designs, too. So, it's isnt proof of evolution if it could be the designer reusing tools, techniques, or design patterns across their designs. They'll have to prove those processes actually produce those artifacts.

2. Evolutionists claim these things can be produced by chance events without a designer. They're so complex and advanced they humans can't produce them. They argues against their premise. It also favors God having designed them.

3. I'd have to let a biologist non-evolutionist speak to that one. They'd have more expertise.

"We will eventually find answers to these questions, as the ratchet of scientific progress clicks along. Religion has never been useful in the same way"

God's Word gave us truth, humans' inherant dignity, loving others, character education plus knowledge, wisdom, and justice. Old Testament also had most concepts in our legal system today. These drive human progress to be done in a beneficial way. These principles, though not scientific, are highly valuable both to please God and help people.

Science is a tool that's morally neutral. It uses controlled, replicated experiments to make empirical claims. It can only tell us what we're wrong about or might be wrong about later. Other tools include reason (eg logic), first-hand experience, eyewitness testimony, and supernatural revelation. (Most of science is actually faith-based belief in eyewitness claims that are never done first-hand.)

Godless, evolutionary science... taken to its conclusions of everything being pointless and survival or reproction of the fittest over all other principles... led to the most atrocious things people have done. The Holocaust aiming to boost a "master race," atheist communists killing over 50 million people (torturing many), forced sterilization by liberals in California, Genesis Khan's mass rapes spread his genes everywhere... each can be supported as morally good under godless evolution. If opposed, you need a reason to say such things are 100%, objectively wrong.

So, God gave us an objective reason to do right, even with science, when His Word came through Moses with supernatural events. Later, He confirmed it when the one, perfect man proved He was God by miracles and being raised from the dead. All who repent and commit to Him are transformed by the power of God. Over 4,000 people impacted by the same message. So, we keep sharing it on top of doing solid science. :)

> This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models

One general impression I have, having read the reactions by biologists to stuff like Kurzweil and people who believe we're close to a computational understanding of biology is that all the computer science people massively, MASSIVELY underestimate the extent to which we still do not understand how even a single cell works.

Sure, we can model things stochastically, or fiddle with DNA and be able to predict the results, but there's a bunch of stuff in the middle that we only have a functional understanding of. We know with <xxx> input, you get <yyy>, etc..., but the how is still a mystery.

This is everywhere in biology.

If you think biologists are underestimating complexity, you have the sign wrong.

I expect the conclusion is correct, but the argument isn't really valid. Our knowledge of cells tells us only and precisely about our knowledge of cells. We have some gaping holes in our fundamental knowledge of the universe (what is it, how did it happen, etc) and nobody can claim with any certainty to understand how any of the basic things happen. It is a mystery of such epic proportions it is hard to even articulate what an answer could look like, let alone how we would work it out. That hasn't stopped the development of a bunch of useful models and theories of physics that explain a lot of local observations really well.

yeah I'll believe we are close to cracking biological intelligence once openworm gets at all close

https://www.wired.com/story/openworm-worm-simulator-biology-...

I don't believe we are close to a computational understanding of biology. However, there is a difference between not having the understanding and claiming that because we don't understand it, there is definitively some Aristotelian non-computational anima in all life.

If I handed someone who had never seen an artificial neural network, and handed them a PCB with some giant LLM hard-coded into it, I suspect they would struggle to define how it reacts to its inputs, despite the fact that modern silicon designs are extremely regular compared to biological systems.