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What Search Engines Tell Us About Free Will
It also tells us a lot about life
Ah, the humble search engine. A set of algorithms designed to facilitate human efforts to find information. The search engine is not intelligent, and neither is its overhyped child, ChatGPT, but it can tell us a lot about being human.
The Ghost Is in Us, not the Machine
Imagine this scenario. A person wants to find something on the Internet so that person goes to a search engine and types in a couple of words. Easy to imagine because we choose to do such a thing quite frequently. The search engine does as it is programmed to do — it returns a set of Web site addresses that allegedly answer the person’s search terms.
Then what happens? The person chooses which, if any, of the suggested Web sites to visit. The number of suggestions is finite, so the person’s possible choices are also finite. Of course, the person can also choose not to decide, but they still have made a choice.
Such is life. We are beings who must make choices and act on them. We make choices. We constantly are forced to make choices in response to our environment.
A mistake some people make is feeling that because circumstances force us to make choices and give us only a finite number of choices that…
