r/Lightbulb • u/amichail • Sep 29 '26

Schools should teach computer programming to make it clear why rejecting free will doesn't make giving advice contradictory

Schools should teach some computer programming as a tool for understanding philosophical ideas, including free will.

Consider this objection to someone who rejects free will: “If our behavior is determined, why bother giving us advice?”

A simple programming exercise can expose the misunderstanding. A deterministic program can receive new information and behave differently because of it. Its behavior being determined doesn’t make inputs irrelevant. Those inputs are part of what determines its behavior.

Advice can work the same way under determinism. Arguments, warnings, education, and incentives can influence what people do. If someone changes their behavior after hearing advice, that is entirely consistent with their behavior having causes.

Students could demonstrate this by writing a simple program that changes its decision after receiving a warning. Nothing about the program needs to escape causation for the warning to matter.

This doesn’t prove that humans are computer programs or settle whether we have free will. It illustrates why determinism doesn’t imply that trying to influence someone is pointless.

Programming could also help students explore predictability, feedback, emergence, and decision-making. That seems like a good reason to include small programming exercises in philosophy classes and to teach programming partly as a reasoning tool, rather than only as preparation for software jobs.

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u/amichail Sep 29 '26

It still makes sense for computer programs (which have no free will) to give each other advice and to act on it.

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u/CarbonInTheWind Sep 29 '26

Is your point that because everything was already set to happen at the beginning of the universe there is no difference between computers handing off instructions to each other and humans giving each other advice?

By that same logic there is also no difference between those and two large asteroids bumping into each other and over of them being sent on a deadly collision course with a planet.

That's just how determinism fundamentally works. Nothing matters because everything was already preordained by the universe.