Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of
human rationality. Please visit our About page for more
information. Faced with a burning orphanage, you ponder your
next action for long agonizing moments, uncertain of what you
will do. Finally, the thought of a burning child overcomes your
fear of fire, and you run into the building and haul out a
toddler. There's a strain of philosophy which says that this
scenario is not sufficient for what they call "free will". It's
not enough for your thoughts, your agonizing, your fear and your
empathy, to finally give rise to a judgment. It's not enough to
be the source of your decisions. No, you have to be the ultimate
source of your decisions. If anything else in your past, such as
the initial condition of your brain, fully determined your
decision, then clearly you did not. But we already drew this
diagram: As previously discussed, the left-hand structure is
preferred, even given deterministic physics, because it is more
local; and because it is not po