Comment by dgfitz

This is an interesting question. The common theme between computers and people is that information has to be protected, and both computer systems and biological systems require additional information-protecting components - eq, error correcting codes for cosmic ray bitflip detection for the one, and DNA mismatch detection enzymes which excise and remove damaged bases for the other. In both cases a lot of energy is spent defending the critical information from the winds of entropy, and if too much damage occurs, the carefully constructed illusion of determinancy collapses, and the system falls apart.

However, this information protection similarity applies to single-celled microbes as much as it does to people, so the question also resolves to whether microbes are deterministic. Microbes both contain and exist in relatively dynamic environments so tiny differences in initial state may lead to different outcomes, but they're fairly deterministic, less so than (well-designed) computers.

With people, while the neural structures are programmed by the cellular DNA, once they are active and energized, the informational flow through the human brain isn't that deterministic, there are some dozen neurotransmitters modulating state as well as huge amounts of sensory data from different sources - thus prompting a human repeatedly isn't at all like prompting an LLM repeatedly. (The human will probably get irritated).

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of...

> Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people?

Give an LLM memory and a source of randomness and they're as deterministic as people.

"Free will" isn't a concept that typechecks in a materialist philosophy. It's "not even wrong". Asserting that free will exists is _isomorphic_ to dualism which is _isomorphic_ to assertions of ensoulment. I can't argue with dualists. I reject dualism a priori: it's a religious tenet, not a mere difference of philosophical opinion.

So, if we're all materialists here, "free will" doesn't make any sense, since it's an assertion that something other than the input to a machine can influence its output.