AI Doesn't Have Free Will, Not Sure About Humans

Per LessWrong contributor mike20731, artificial intelligence confidently lacks free will—its responses are entirely determined by inputs, model weights, and any random numbers used in computation. Run the same AI twice with identical conditions, and it produces the identical output every time. The philosophical puzzle starts with humans. The author has a strong intuitive sense that consciousness gives us real agency—that we can choose in ways deterministic physics doesn't account for. Yet that intuition conflicts with physicalism, the view that everything, including mind, reduces to physics and randomness. So we face a dilemma: either free will is a sophisticated illusion built atop neural computation, or physicalism itself is incomplete. The author remains genuinely unsure which. But of this they're certain: if humans do possess such metaphysical agency, AIs emphatically don't.

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