There is an argument that free will doesn’t exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
no. events and our decisions are abstracted far enough so that the illusion of free will is apparent. I think it’s very well impossible to fully distinguish between free will and fate from our limited perspective
In my opinion humans are biological machines reacting to stimulus based on previous experience.
If we could theoretically perfectly map the brain and understand it, we could predict what a person would do in response to a specific stimulus.
At least that is how I have come to understand my existence.
Doesn’t mean I am off the hook for my poor decisions either. I still have to make the decision, even if theoretically we already knew what I would do.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly how I feel about it. The universe is nothing but dead matter being pushed around by blind force, and any sense of agency is just an emergent phenomenon that exists as an illusion in the brain without having any actual bearing on reality. If you perfectly understood all of the forces and matter involved, you could perfectly predict what any given human (or anything system at all) would do.
That said, I also believe that it’s a completely useless idea when you’re trying to navigate through life, so I mostly just keep it in the back of my head like some half-forgotten piece of trivia and spend most of my time pretending to be in control like everyone else. Cheers!
Me too. The illusion of choice is what makes life interesting I suppose.
This is my favorite take on this topic. I also feel this way and its hard to get people to look at it this way I’ve noticed. People tend to loop back to “If theres no free will why do anything?” Or “If there is no free will why should murderers be punished?” Just because theres possibly no free will doesnt mean we should change the way we live our lives.
Yes I do, because my own experience of existence suggests I have it. Could that all be an illusion? Sure. But believing I don’t have free will would pretty much deny the existence of my self, which, being myself, I’m not really capable of, nor would I want to do that.
You could define self differently. Buddhism has some fun takes on it.
Nope, I don’t.
Doesn’t really matter, though. We certainly have the illusion of free will, we behave as if it exists, so it doesn’t actually matter in a practical sense.
It is fun to think about!
The question is meaningless, the answer doesn’t affect reality, unless you propose an external mind that is controlling or at least influencing our decisions.
Even with the external mind it’d be irrelevant. As long as we have no way of knowing the future or being able to predict it, having or not having free will is observed in exactly the same way.
If there were some external mind, one might at least speculate about its reasons. Which would probably be futile since it would influence those considerations too. Hm. Yeah.
i have yet to see any evidence thatethere is anything that overcomes the deterministic nature of the universe. the rare bit of chaos we get from quantum mechanics is washed away by the law of large numbers.
By and large, I agree with you: I cannot see how free will fits into a deterministic universe. I still want to make some points for the case that there is some form of free will.
Think about scratching your nose right now, and decide whether or not to do it. It’s banal, but I can’t help being convinced by that simple act that I do have some form of choice. I can’t fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.
This brings up the second point: We don’t need to invoke quantum mechanics to get large-scale uncertainty. It’s enough to assume that our mind is a complex, chaotic system. In that case, minute changes in initial conditions or input stimuli can massively change the state of our mind only a short time later. This allows for our mind to be deterministic but functionally impossible to predict (if immeasurably small changes in conditions can cascade to large changes in outcome).
I seem to remember reading that what we interpret as free will is usually our mind justifying our actions after the fact, which would fit well with the “chaotic but deterministic” theory.
Ican’t fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.
so your argument is just personal incredulity?
The issue is not about choice. It is about control. Your next action is purely dependant on the current state of your brain and the stimuli around you. Where is the part that isn’t controlled by this system? How did you cause your brain to be exactly how it is right this moment? Was it not a cause of your previous brain state and the stimuli in the previous moment? How can you shown it’s not turtles all the way down?
The chaos comment is not really relevant. Chaos isn’t choice, I only brought it up to show that at the level of our brains and the interactions we have there isn’t anything random. A world rewound would produce the same outcome.
I have no choice but to believe in it.
You could become convinced your perception of it is an illusion and not reality as it actually is, then you would have no choice not to believe it.
The way I see it, the brain is essentially a neural network that builds a model of the world through experience. It then uses this model to make predictions. Its primary function is to maintain homeostasis within the body, reacting to chemical signals like hunger, emotions, or pain. Our volition stems from the brain’s effort to achieve this balance, using its world model as the foundation for action.
It’s dangerous to tell people that they have no free will.
Those who do not want to think critically will just convince themselves that the world is falling apart and that they can’t do anything about it because it’s all predetermined any way.
Others take advantage of the idea of predetermined future as a license to do whatever they please. Any terrible thing they do is not a problem to them because their actions were already predetermined, they couldn’t help it because they were destined to do these things … at least that is what they tell everyone.
I believe there is a middle ground … our biology, our environment, our genetics and the universe as a whole runs like a mechanical clock with predetermined movements … but we are provided with enough options at every movement or critical point to determine our future.
We will never be able to change how our universe works but we can choose how we can exist in that universe.
Is the opposite of dangerous. Being informed helps people make better decisions, and on a macro scale it helps society progress by not basing the collecting decisions on erroneous or untruths ideologies. The example you gave is theoretically possible and it may have happened once a century but, the reality is that people that does not believe the religious belief of free-will, do not behave like that.
it all depends on how you define a person. Most likely, you think that a person’s consciousness is something inside the brain, and in this case, the “external” body really influences your decisions. But that’s not how it really works. The body is also a part of you, so everything that happens inside it, including “the hormone levels”, is a part of you. And your experience is a part of you too. It’s just that you can’t control it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not your decisions. Otherwise, we will come to the conclusion that muscle memory is also not a part of you, but some kind of external factor. In general, if you are interested in my answer: yes, we always make decisions on our own.
Muscle memory is stored in the brain, if you didn’t know that already.
No. We make choices, we think, but those choices come frome somewhere. And all of the roots are beyond our control. There is no room for free will, it is a magical reduction of why we do things. We don’t say a ball has free will when it is kicked down a hill. I can’t separate myself from the ball in any meaningful way.
There is only one choice: feeling or rationality.
When you feel, you do what feels best.
When you think, you do what is the most valuable.
So no free will but that choice.
As I hear it described, it doesn’t even make logical sense. A thing is either random, or deterministic. People talk about decisions being motivated by something, but also somehow independent of all exterior things.
People will come back that that lets you off the hook for your misdeeds, but that’s only the case if you believe in retribution for it’s own sake. A version of incapacitation and rehabilitation could make sense against something as devoid of “free will” as a bridge or building, and deterrence only needs the target to be capable of strategy.
To answer the question a different way, in light of the post text, how random the universe is will come down to fundamental physics. The simplest way of interpreting the current state of the art is that the universe is deterministic but branching.
If free will was truly non-existent, it would mean that a theoretical entity with access to perfect information would be able to perfectly predict your actions. I don’t believe that is possible; I think that human beings are too irrational. Consider a very simple decision: what am I going to have for dinner? You could know the restaurants I have access to, what food is in my home, what I have discussed in a given day, and even what my current mood is, but it can ultimately come down to a whim. I could choose something I’ve never had before, for no reason, and seek it out.
I believe that we are individual actors in a very complex system that introduces lots of constraints to our decision-making process. We may not even be consciously aware of some of the constraints; however, we are always the ones ultimately making the decisions. You always have the option of a whim.
But your whim wouldn’t really be random. It may seem random to you but there would be a reason behind it. How did you find out about the random place? You would’ve had to of come to the decision that you wanted something different somehow
This implies that every action must have a reason behind it, which I frankly find a laughable concept. Human beings are irrational creatures; our actions don’t require a reason. We have the ability to choose chaos. Unless your argument is that the cells in my stomach have the ability to know what kind of food they want and can unconsciously pass that information to my brain, there’s no reason for me to decide at 8:00 PM tonight “Hey, I want to eat Pakistani food.”
In fact, I could choose an invalid choice! Say I chose Pakistani. I would logically need to find a Pakistani restaurant to order from. What if they all closed at 8? What if I didn’t have a Pakistani restaurant near me? I may make a decision that ultimately, I cannot act upon, and then I would have to introduce some constraints to my decision making process. The decisions that follow would have a reason, but the initial whim doesn’t require one.
How did you hear about pakistani food? Where did you hear about Pakistan recently enough to recall it? Was it food related or not? If you look deep enough, yes sometimes unconsciously, we make these decisions that seem random but they are not. In a real scenario, not one just made up for the sake of debate, theres gonna be underlying reasons for your “random” choice. You could even try your darndest to be random and choose the first thing that comes to mind but you are still digging for things that it ties to “that would be unlikely therefore random” when in reality its just a word or concept you’ve unconsciously defined as unusual or different. I don’t think there is a human element or ability to choose chaos like you think there is. It just appears that way because thats the only way we are capable of perceiving it
Then we must agree to disagree, because there really isn’t any further to debate. My argument is that human beings are irrational and capable of making irrational decisions. Your argument is that irrationality is merely a pretense, and that there must be a confluence of factors that caused these things to happen. I think trying to constantly find a reason when one doesn’t need to exist is a path to madness, and that is why I believe in free will.
I can respect that. Good closure to a discussion!
How would perceived irrationality be counter to a deterministic universe? It just maybe seems irrational without all of the information, but is still perfectly part of the causal chain.
See, now we’re getting into parts that we can’t prove. My argument is that it is irrational. Your argument is that it merely seems that way. There is no reconciling our positions.
What about randomness? Most people would say to be random is not to have free will.
This depends, because there are two different kinds of randomness. A lot of the “randomness” that people encounter is actually based upon something, and our theoretical entity with access to perfect information could predict the outcome of that randomness perfectly. I’m thinking of stuff like computer randomness, number generation, games of chance, that sort of thing.
However, true random absolutely exists; in the words of Terry Pratchett “Things just happen, what the hell.” You see it with mutations in nature; ordinarily healthy cells can spontaneously change without directed input. It is unpredictable, even for our theoretical entity.
Or like quantum systems, in the interpretations that prevent alternate universes. The first kind is called “pseudorandomness” in mathematics.
Usually, when people say free will they don’t just mean that their decisions are random, though.
Even if the universe is nondeterministic like quantum physics suggests you still don’t have free will because your thoughts and feelings are still ruled by physical processes even when they are random.
But you don’t need physics to dispute free will. Schopenhauer already said that you may do what you want. But you cannot will what you want. Einstein used that realisation to not take everything too seriously even when people act infuriating.
your thoughts and feelings are still ruled by physical processes
citation needed
/me gestures in the general direction of the model of particle physics (and neuroscience)
You exist in the brain, which is ruled by physical processes. Not sure what citations you need for that.
