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A moment of silence please for all the text in this image that’s been mangled by JPEG compression.
Thank you.
That’s the free will of the universe in action.
From all the discussions I’ve read about Free Will, I’m convinced the term actually doesn’t mean anything at all. What would a world with free will look like? What would a world without free will look like? How would a person with/without it behave? Would there be any tangible difference between them?
As far as I can tell, free will is supposed to be a property of a person, which may or may not have something to do with physics, either everybody has it or nobody has it, and nobody has a definition that would let them measure it (without reducing the question to a disagreement over semantics). I think that whether someone believes in free will is a trick question; you can’t believe or disbelieve in a something that isn’t even a real concept to begin with.
It’s like the “are we living in a simulation” question. It’s impossible to prove or disprove and ultimately does not affect our lives in any way that we can control. Just a thought experiment.
It may be possible to prove if one day we can prove whether universe is or isn’t deterministic.
It can in theory be disproved - if we ever manage to prove that universe is deterministic, free will by definition cannot exist.
What is the definition of free will that is only possible in a non-deterministic universe? Is non-determinism the only requirement for a universe to qualify as having free will?
What is the definition of free will that is only possible in a non-deterministic universe?
If the universe is deterministic, every particle has a mathematically determinable path, meaning you can fully predict where each particle will be in a billion years. Our thoughts and everything are carried by neurons in our brain, as is our will. So if the universe is deterministic, every neuron had to fire at exactly the same moment it did and it could’ve never happened otherwise, meaning every thought and action is predetermined.
Is non-determinism the only requirement for a universe to qualify as having free will?
No idea.
meaning every thought and action is predetermined.
Sure, but that isn’t a definition of free will, and it is unclear why this should have something to do with free will. Whatever it is, why can’t you still have it even as a part of a deterministic system? A definition that allowed this wouldn’t be surprising to me, and some people do seem to support such definitions.
No idea.
This reinforces my point; I don’t think people talking about free will have a very specific idea of how what they are talking about relates to anything else.
I find it very clear. If you can’t really decide because everything was already decided, you don’t have free will. A definition that grass is meat wouldn’t be surprising to me either. It wouldn’t be correct, but it wouldn’t be surprising. I wasn’t talking about what free will is, I was talking about one specific case of what it isn’t.
If you can’t really decide because everything was already decided
You can demarcate the boundary of decisions however you like. My decisions can still be called decisions while being part of a larger system that those are inherited from, or not, depending on how you arbitrarily choose to use the word. Either way it doesn’t change what is actually happening.
The problem with “free will” is that it isn’t used to make claims about what is actually happening. It is undefined, just a vehicle for semantic assertions.
I wasn’t talking about what free will is,
I don’t think you can, because it isn’t anything.
Are you trying to sound really deep? “I don’t think you can, because it isn’t anything.” - what kind of pseudo-intellectual stuff is that?
There are so many cases like that. For example, define intelligence. If you try to, you’ll run in loops of equally undefined abstract concepts.
And that’s basically what philosophy is about.
Even though intelligence isn’t precisely defined, people still have enough of an idea about it to have some consensus about how it should be measured. An animal that keeps running into a wire fence trying to get through is showing less intelligence than an animal that notices an opening a few feet away and walks through that instead. Free will is much less defined than even that.
Well, intelligence is defined as what the intelligence test measures.
But lets try a different one: sentience. Or consciousness.
Well, intelligence is defined as what the intelligence test measures.
Right, so where’s the Free Will test?
sentience. Or consciousness.
IMO these are a bit worse defined than intelligence, but still more so than free will. I don’t think it would mean anything to say I don’t believe in free will, but when I say I don’t believe in consciousness, the delusion I deny is one people actually have. The state of your brain is only that, a state, but people are possessed by an overpowering intuition of having experience that is independent from the physical reality and data structure.
Free will on the other hand isn’t even a delusion, it isn’t anything more than rhetoric.
Absolutely right. There are of course definitions of free will that would grant us free will, like one could argue that a traffic light has free will, but there is no reason to believe that humans are not just reducible to a set of (complicated) biological processes. People of all religions and even plenty of atheists believe that somehow human consciousness is something special that transcends the material laws of the universe. That is what most people still seem to think, so it seems. Even I would dare to say that most people, including you, who know that this is likely false still have some deep rooted belief in the illusion. You may not believe in truly free will, but that is only the top of the iceberg part of your mind. The rest is deeply invested in the notion.
Interestingly Buddhists have as one of their central tenets that there is not only no free will, but not even a self. The idea of a self is nothing more than an idea. It has a function, but is inherently an empty construct. What it means to be a human can only be experienced in the moment. If one looks closely enough at that experience, the illusion of free will can be relented even at its deepest root. Paradoxically, I can report, this is incredibly freeing.
Oooooo You cannot go against nature Because when you do (Go against nature) It’s part of nature too
*See page 72
Our little lives get complicated It’s a simple thing Simple as a flower And that’s a complicated thing
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Sam Harris and Jay Garfield have a great podcast about free will. Saint Augustine came up with the idea of free agency in order to get God off the hook for Eve’s fall. Fascinating stuff.
Pretty sure that “free will” is just our monkey brains attempting to rationalize what we mostly do based on instincts.
I was into a choose your own adventure books when I was a kid, there was one in particular that you are told in the beginning that there is a perfect ending but you can’t get there by choice. There was no path in the book that got you to that page. You had to just decide to not follow the rules and turn to that page.
I think I remember that one, unless it’s a reoccurring element in choose your own adventures. It was about ice cream and parallel universes or time travel or something right?
It’s not the book that OOP was thinking of, but you’re probably thinking of Meanwhile by Jason Shiga.
Yep, that’s the one. Remember I picked it up in the library years ago because of the cover saying any path is correct. I remember If you open to the page not connected to anything it shows the main character riding a colossal squid with no context.
Slams book shut in disgust
When I first played Life Is Strange I already knew about the choice at the end, but without context it didn’t really mean much to me. I thought that over the course of the game I’d come to prefer one option over the other.
By the time the final mission started I was still very much on the fence, so I went and choose the third option: Closing the game and leaving it’s characters in a limbo of uncertainty
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That’s not an argument for free will. Chaos is just a mathematical property of certain systems.
We can mathematically prove that the complexity of certain systems means that their outcomes are unpredictable if you look far enough into the future because of exponentially how many possible outcomes there are.
That’s all chaos theory is, the idea that even if the universe behaves according to deterministic or probabilistic physics, and we could map the position and properties of every single particle in the universe, we still wouldn’t necessarily be able to predict the future in X years.
That’s not an argument for free will though, tons and tons and tons of relatively simple systems (like the famous three body problem) that do not involve free will produce chaotic outcomes.
oh yeah that’s good content baby
Due to quantum mechanics, we know this is not true. There is a level of uncertainty and probability and the smallest level of our universe. The deterministic model of the universe has been put to rest a century ago.
Although it’s worth mentioning that randomness doesn’t make “free will” real.
To be unfunny:
The whole idea of a balls hitting each other universe went out the window when we hit the quantum era. We have had to adapt to a reality where matter is somehow a statistical phenomena, and the details are always hidden from us in one way or another. Entanglement is another confusing thing, and its super common - not just some rare phenomena in a lab, it’s more of a fact of particle interaction
So our brains are somehow statisical-chemical-electric sugar powered supercomputers that have entangled state. And the brain actually stretches across the body, with various chemistry being produced throughout
In short, nobody has any idea how brains really work, it’s way more elaborate than current AI. It’s also likely impossible to fully simulate a brain - it would have to BE a brain
There’s a separate question about the nature of randomness in the universe, but all we can know is that follows a normal distribution over time. It seems truly random from our point of view. Of course, who’s to say if God likes to fudge the numbers a little
Yes, but none of that refutes the argument that we lack free will. The trillions of interactions leading up to an ‘action’ on our part can be random, determined, or some mixture - but they still ‘cause’ our next action, rather than our 'free will ’ causing the action. If you believe in free will, you believe in a magical quality we possess which is somehow neither random (else it wouldnt be ‘will’) nor determined (else it wouldn’t be ‘free’)
I personally find all discussion around free will annoying. Whether or not I have free will I still have to decide to do shit. I can’t just go on autopilot.
