Donald Hoffman

It's going to be a scale, in some sense, a scale-free notion of free will that can go for... What is a scale-free notion?

That it'd be true at all scales, no matter how many conscious agents I put together to make a big conscious agent, I would still be able to talk about this agent has free will, but all of the constituents also have their own free will.

My guess is that that might be able to be made to work.

So that the question is, if I say, is it only the one big consciousness that has free will and we're all puppets, or do all the little consciousnesses have free will, the answer might be both.

But there'd be this new mathematics that shows in some sense that the free will of the one is made of all the genuine free will choices of the individuals.

And so it's not like...

an autocratic God saying you must do this.

It's rather a God exploring all of its own possibilities, so to speak, freely through all of the components which are also freely interacting.

But their free interactions are all part of the one freedom of the one.

In other words, I think that there could be a mathematically consistent notion of free will that doesn't say either or, but both and.

So we get this scale-free notion.

I haven't written it down yet, but that's why I'm saying that these are deep waters.

And this is where we're going to have to, to answer your question, we're going to have to go after some deep mathematical theories of what we mean by free will.

My guess is that it's possible, but we'll have to see.

Okay.

that we could have genuine free will at the smaller agent level.

And that's not incompatible with free will at higher levels and even the free will of whatever the super, I mean, I can't even describe the one agent.

It transcends any mathematical description.

So we could never actually get this mathematical model in the final limit that I'm describing.

But could we get it in the