Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for November 17, 2018

I don’t have free will, and I will have a beer.

“I am a human, and I say ‘the simulation will buy me 8 beers.’”

If it was a perfect simulation, they would’ve spoken simultaneously and the question of free will would be even more complicated.

Missing end quotation mark.

I can use my free will to purchase goods and services? AND NOBODY TOLD ME‽

This is problematic and question-begging on various levels.

1. The “perfect simulation” of the human doesn’t really look or act like her, so how can it be a “perfect” simulation?

2. If it only perfectly simulates her intangible aspects, that begs the question of whether such simulation is possible. (I doubt it.) Yet the perfection of the simulation is crucial to the thought experiment.

3. If it’s a perfect simulation, why is its response surprising to her? Shouldn’t she think, “That’s exactly what I would have said”?

4. “I am identical to the human, from which it follows that I must say, ‘I have free will, and I use it to buy a beer.’” Would she really say that? She affirms her free will, but the simulation “must” copy her: it is merely a parrot without free will, so the simulation fails. (It should at least claim, like her, that it has free will, and act accordingly.)

And so on.

We are shown the concept of perfect copies and free will do not go along.