Donald Hoffman

But you could say just my quality, but my free will is not.

But here's the trick is that...

groups of conscious agents that satisfy certain conditions are also a conscious agent.

So that means if I think about all the individual smaller agents as having free will, then this new agent also has, if I think about having free will, I would need to have a new notion of free will that's

really quite an interesting one.

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.