Let's do a little thought experiment

So, if you have an exact, like absolute perfect, copy/clone of someone and you put him in the exact same environment/life as the original one, will he make the exact same decision as the original one? Will he live the exact same life? Does that mean free will isn't real?

is free will the ability to make inauthentic decisions?

have you ever really come to a conclusion without considering anything/consulting yourself? How is that not deterministic thought?


why does it matter?The existence of free will or not does not effect us unless we make it.

>put him in the exact same environment/life as the original one
copy and original can't occupying the same place in space and time simultaneously so that's impossible

Even if you could, most of your decisions are completely arbitrary and could have went either way. Compounding these small differences in choices can cause a divergence in apparent behavior. Eventually, you'd no longer be the same people.

>most of your decisions are completely arbitrary
i've never thought this. To me there has always been a reason for the decisions i make. I know some people dont think this, explain reasons as "just because", but i've always figured they aren't being honest with me or maybe themselves.

You dont think so? Are you saying most choices people make are coin tosses? If so how come?

But how would something arbritarily decide something?

>will he make the exact same decision as the original one?
Yes.

>Will he live the exact same life?
Yes.

>Does that mean free will isn't real?
No. Why would it?

So then why cant we do it with a rat?

Clone the fucker, and put both of them in identical environments with identical stimuli and see what happens.

I bet tiny metabolic errors/mutation/Brownian motion eventually leads to small differences in vivo, that add up to small changes in behavior, which eventually makes the rats behave differently in the same environment.

Say you place an identical smell in each box but only one rat investigates, maybe the other rat couldn't smell it as strongly because it's threshold for perception was somehow changed on some minute biological level due to some metabolic/mutation/brownian motion effect.

>So then why cant we do it with a rat?
We can, conceptually. Realistically, you can't make environments THAT identical.

>I bet tiny metabolic errors/mutation/Brownian motion eventually leads to small differences in vivo, that add up to small changes in behavior, which eventually makes the rats behave differently in the same environment.
Indeed. It only works if the environments are sufficiently equal that even the Brownian motions are identical. Which is completely impossible in real life, which is why you can't do this in practice, and only in theory.

This.

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Idk, but free will isn't real anyway.

Would it eventually be possible to run a computer simulation of this?

I think people misunderstand free will. Of course I will only make one decision when making a decision you can't make both that is just stupid. And of course I will have always made that decision because it is the decision I chose to make. I still make the decision myself which means I still have free will.

Just because a clone decides to make the same choices as me, doesn't mean my personal free will doesn't exist. Life is a series of choices and some of them, any regular idiot would pick item a over item b. Do I eat 3 peanuts or a sirloin steak, knowing I won't get a meal for 2 days? Should I paint the sky blue to impress my parents with my 3 year old art ability? Many of the solutions are merely a matter of how much you put into deriving said solution. With that being said, a clone with my exact past would only solidify the argument of free will existing. One would only be able to complete the choices I've made, had they lived my life. This means, conclusively, that only myself and others who live my life (nobody, by way of impossibility) can make the choices I choose to make.

if Moore's law keeps going (seems like it's not), then in a few decades

They will make the exact same decisions owing to the fact that they have an identical brain interacting with an identical environment.

What does that do to free will? Well it further destroys the already completely destroyed concept of libertarian free will, but for all other models of free will I can think of, it doesn't matter.

We are just atoms, yes.

If they were absolute perfect copies and they were placed in the exact same environment then I don't see why they would do anything diffrently.

That being said, I don't see how the same person with the same life experience making the same decision as their clone when they're both in the same situation disproves free will. That would be like saying free will doesn't exist because my reflection in the mirror does as I do.

>free will
if my decision making process needs to lie outside of physics in order to be free, of course "free will" doesn't exist

This is the only correct answer.

I suggest you look into symmetry breaking bifurcation