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In my opinion, the concept of Free Will makes no sense. It makes no sense to make a decision which is not based on the things happening around us, inside of us, in the past of us or in the genes of us.
The only way to make a decision that’s not fully based on these inputs, is to make a decision involving randomness. And randomness is not actually a willful decision.
It really is a question of definition. When you define it like most people think of it, that there was an alternate possibility in which they had not made the decision, then yes, the concept doesn’t make sense.
But a more useful definition might just be the ability to act according to one’s own desires, a common stance held by many compatibilists, which corresponds quite closely to what people are actually referring to when they speak of “free will”.
Edit: more info here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
But “desires” derive from the things happening around us, inside of us, in the past of us or in the genes of us.
It’s just shoving an additional layer into the argumentation, thinking it somehow doesn’t need to be explored, which is a logical fallacy.Nobody is saying that desires are not based on anything, that would be quite silly. It’s just that if you redefine free will in terms of desire instead of some metaphysical independence you might get a more useful definition.
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Not quite, agency is to what degree someone acts to their own “moral judgement” (an unuseful term in my opinion, since it is a social construct), rather than desires.
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The opposite of determinism is called metaphysical libertarianism iirc.
The definition of free will is obviously very tricky even among compatibilists, and depending on who you ask you will get very different answers. But usually yes, there are no absolutes, as there are always many factors involved in making decisions, and personal interests (however you might define them) will be different proportions of that.
Yeah, alright, I get what you’re saying. Most people don’t have as clear/isolated of a definition of Free Will as those who strongly oppose it anyways, so we could just start ignoring the ‘Free’ and pretend nothing happened. I guess, I can accept that being a strategy.
However, personally, I feel like humanity does need to be bonked with the fact, it does not have Free Will, because we’re behaving like absolute buffoons, because of it.
For example, many people believe Free Will makes us different from animals and we should apply different morals, when we’re not. And it makes us feel like we’re somehow ultra special and need to be billionaires or whatever, when it would be less of a waste of money, if we shared with others instead.Obviously, a massive amount of our modern moral understanding and laws and such, foot on Free Will. It will be a painful bonk. But yeah, I don’t think, continuing unbonked is a valid option either, not when we’re so convinced that we’re doing things correctly…
Yes, I do agree that the world could do with some more humility in its worldviews. Oh, if people could just understand that they’re nothing beyond the physical, that movement of time makes no sense or that knowledge is impossible (see Münchhausen trilemma)… when you take a stap back, so many of today’s struggles, both verbal and physical, suddenly appear completely nonsensical.
But you must realise that the vast majority of the world population still believes in a religion that puts themselves at the centre, and that it can be clearly seen that people, upon being challenged, just cling harder to their egocentric worldview. Worldviews, being a social phenomenon, are formed after what people want to believe, and don’t have to be restrained much by reality, however logical your argument is.
And, I mean, the truth is inevitably nearing us because of the progress of science. So don’t push your ideas too hard; faster, more forced change is just going to create even more tension than there already is, since people who believe feel more and more challenged and more and more obliged to fight back through dangerous extremism.
Yeah it needs to be better defined. You do have free will but that doesn’t mean it’s not subject to the limitations of the system in which u exist.
U can’t decide to jump off the planet cuz gravity will pull u back down but that doesn’t mean u don’t have free will.
In my mind if you didn’t have free will you wouldn’t have any control over your body at all.
If you can move within the system unfettered to any extent then you have free will. Any reduction in movement is considered entropy within that system.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Decisions can be based on more than one factor. Nobody doubts that the things around you affect your decision, the question is whether they fully determine your decision.
Which is not to say that free will definitely does or does not exist. But you’ve described all decisions as necessarily predetermined or random. Technically that is correct, since formally a “random” variable is simply one without a fixed value (ie something that is not predetermined and should be described as a range of possible values). Using the formal definition, “randomness” is exactly what you would expect if free will exists.
The more common understanding of “random” is “completely arbitrary” or “outside anyone’s control”, in which case you have presented a false dichotomy. If free will exists, then a decision could be non-arbitrary, within one’s control, yet not predetermined.
I can definitely see why one might read my comment as presenting a dichotomy, which is why I was actually very careful to not do that in my formulation.
Well, except that I am talking about true randomness (which I doubt exists, but we haven’t proven that on the quantum level). The more colloquial definitions of randomness, I count towards badly understood inputs or just a lack of inputs.Thing is, if we add true randomness to an input-based decision, it stops being predetermined, but there’s still a logically conclusive choice you’re going to make, based on the incomplete inputs you have. You cannot ‘freely’ decide to not pick that choice, because you have literally no reason not to pick it.
Even if you think, you’re going to pick the ‘illogical’ choice for a change, that is still part of your inputs. It’s likely even baked into our genes, because what appears logical is often not actually the best choice and those who successfully experimented, ultimately survived+procreated.
if we add true randomness to an input-based decision, it stops being predetermined, but there’s still a logically conclusive choice you’re going to make, based on the incomplete inputs you have. You cannot ‘freely’ decide to not pick that choice
I think you are contradicting yourself. If you cannot freely choose something else, then your choice is predetermined.
Whereas if a choice stops being predetermined, then there is no “logically conclusive choice” that you are definitely going to make. There is a range of possible choices, one of them is chosen by you, and the others could have been chosen but weren’t.
For example, you choose a tuna salad sandwich for lunch, but you could have chosen a ham sandwich. That choice was quite possibly not determined by logic, considerations of evolutionary fitness, or genetics. If it were, then you would probably always choose tuna salad over a ham sandwich.
I feel as if the answer to this is, by general consensus, yes. You have free will.
Like, does Evil exist? Scientifically? No, absolutely not, but the word still has meaning. If I say, “that man is evil!” And you look at him and recognize his terribleness, then, sure: he is IS evil.
Just because something isn’t objectively, physically quantifiable, doesn’t mean that it’s not a valid rational construct.
I think the actual argument which has been making the rounds recently, is not, “do humans have free will?” But, Rather is, “are humans accountable for their actions, given that thier will is significantly biased by factors outside of their control / awareness?”
It’s just that doesn’t get people’s attention.
Ps, I believe that fundamentally, all physical interactions are deterministic in practice. Any conscious or rational being is fundamentally set in motion with the arrow of time, and if you could develop a fuzzy quantum state based intelligence, you’d only succeed in creating a person with slightly more random ideas. There would be no meaningful uplift in “free will.” However, I also Believe that this is an absurd deconstruction of heady topics. It’s akin to telling someone that a table doesn’t exist because it’s just a decomposing tree. Free will is a rational idea for human animals, and judged by that standard, fulfills it’s purpose in describing the experience of conscious decision making.
For people arguing they have free will, they typically mean they have the ability to do other than what they did do. That is, whenever they make a choice, they do so under the belief that they could have, in principle, made a different choice. As far as science is concerned, such a free will does not exist, because the behaviors you exhibit appear to be completely explainable in terms of the environment impressing upon you, and the effects that impression has on your neural activity. There is no “you” making free decisions in this picture. There’s just stuff bumping into other stuff, and how is that free?
Regarding a general consensus of free will, that’s just not even an argument anyone should care about. Plenty of people are flatly told they have free will because, “they don’t have a choice, God made them with free will”. Others/most are simply uneducated or under-read on the subject. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean their opinion should weigh on our conclusions. If you show most people an optical illusion and ask them if it appears to be moving, they’d say yes, even though science will tell you there’s nothing moving.
I personally am a hard deterministic regarding free will. I think we have a will but nothing about it is free. It is subject to natural laws just as a rock rolling down a cliff. That’s fine. There’s a related philosophical position of compatibilism, which believes that we have a determined will, but that the truth of the determination does not undercut our ability to talk as if and use the phrase free will as if we really do have such a thing. In this sense, compatibilists would say we don’t have the ability to do other than what we are determined to do, but since we might not yet know what we are determined to do, then that ignorance captures what is meant by free will. So compatibilists are determinists, they just think free will as a concept is compatible with that determinism.
I guess a hard determinist would say that humans have as much “free will” as a rock. There is nothing useful to saying these systems are similar in that regard.
This is because there is such a thing as “causal inertia”: there is a difference in agency where a human system bases its decisions on a large spatial, time range of experiences (moments to life-long experiences and multi-generation planning, tiny tools all the way to architecture planning, a large number of connections by multiple means to other humans’ experiences) to make “decisions”. What do you call that?
Because it exists and if it’s not called free will, that’s probably the closest thing that scientifically can be measured and associated with “free will”.
We may just be “transistors” responding to the environment, but we are complex enough to introduce chaos by connecting lots of unrelated things to the point of being as close to being unpredictable as any random system in the universe.
there is a difference in agency where a human system bases its decisions on a large spatial, time range of experiences (moments to life-long experiences and multi-generation planning, tiny tools all the way to architecture planning, a large number of connections by multiple means to other humans’ experiences) to make “decisions”. What do you call that?
I would call this determinism as much as anything else. Whatever you discover by reflecting on memories, you make your decision based on those memories, ergo there was a reason that determined your choice.
Because it exists and if it’s not called free will, that’s probably the closest thing that scientifically can be measured and associated with “free will”.
I would just agree that we have a “will”. It’s the “free” qualifier that’s disputed.
We may just be “transistors” responding to the environment, but we are complex enough to introduce chaos by connecting lots of unrelated things to the point of being as close to being unpredictable as any random system in the universe.
Sorry, I can’t agree. We have ignorance about the future, but that doesn’t mean my decisions are undetermined. As far as I can tell, everything is either determined or not determined. If it’s determined, then I was not free to choose it. If it’s not determined, then it’s random, in which case I again could not have freely chosen it. You seem to be moving towards compatibilism, which accepts determinism but believes determinism can still be compatible with a notion of free will, e.g. our ignorance of the future is what we mean by free will.
Personally, I think life is very interesting bring a wet robot! However, I understand why most reject the concept out of hand.
I don’t like the “There’s just stuff bumping into other stuff, and how is that free?” Argument. I feel like it’s unessisarily reductive.
A stone washing down a river might be guided deterministically by fundimental forces, as are all of the actions of a human brain.
However, the stone was dislodged by erosion. My will was set into motion by abstract human concepts. My memories, biases, emotions, education, habits, etc. these are not fundamental or physical forces. I was free, uninhibited by state or peers, to decide based on these internal factors.
Sure, if you rewinded time and replayed it, I would always make that decision, and so would the stone wash down the river, but the human had a meaningful perception of free will.
I would argue that free will is not a physical concept, but a phycological one. It succeeds in describing the experience of mulling over a decision, and freely acting upon it. It is fair and reasonable to say it, just like in my example it is fair and reasonable for me to say a terrible person is evil.
If you twist the definition of free will contain some mention of subatomic autonomy, then sure, it doesn’t exist, but the concept predates such ideas…
Heck, even the Bible- I’m an atheist- but the point of writing that God gave humans free will was the expression of the human experience. The writers wanted to explain why being a human FELT different from being a stone. They were grappling with the experience of consciousness in a spiritual way. The original text never claims to be the ultimate expression of physics. It’s reductive to dismiss the text as meaningless just because some later “free will” proponents claimed that the brain is quantum or whatever.
Sorry, I agree with you about the nature of the universe. I just think these reductive debates are, in general, unproductive. I believe they misrepresent the subject from both sides.
That’s what it is to be a compatibilist. They are determinists who believe that there is still a meaningful use of the phrase free will, despite the apparent determinism of the universe. They would redefine free will to not mean I have the ability to supervene on the natural laws, but that when you make a decision absent certain forces compelling a particular choice, that’s what we mean by free will.
Sure, if you rewinded time and replayed it, I would always make that decision, and so would the stone wash down the river, but the human had a meaningful perception of free will.
Perception of free will and actual free will are not the same. It feels like you understand this by the part of your comment I just quoted, but are trying to redefine them as the same as a way to rationalize your want for free will to exist
Determinism would mean there is no free will, since your thoughts are also influenced and controlled by the random nature of particles and such, meaning you don’t actually control your own thoughts but simply are at the mercy of “fate.” This is part of the debate the article is about.
Hmm. I disagree a bit with this idea, but more on the grounds of semantics. In a deterministic world, you might fret over a decision for weeks, taking influence from several factors. You are free to make any decision, and your will may be driven by rational desires.
In this model, at an atomic level, you have no special, privileged position. A magical being with a perfect physical simulation could perfectly predict your actions in the same way as the movement of a falling stone.
However, unlike a stone, your mind is tuned by all sorts of important human factors. Your memories, habits, biases, education, relationships, and perception. Just because they are the result of the same fundimental physical properties doesn’t mean they are suddenly devoid of meaning or random.
Alternatively, if we imagine a world where the human mind is dependent on non physical, non deterministic factors. Does it actually change our previous hypothetical decision? Probably not. You’d still make a similar decision based on all of those human factors. Perhaps, this hypothetical non deterministic human might occasionally decide to “flip a coin” so to speak, and do something truly random, but to me that feels uninformed and uninteresting to my own experience. Few definitions of free will demand that we be able to make random decisions.
Determinism doesn’t mean you’re at the will of some particles, it just means that you were always going to make that decision
I mean Causal Determinism.
A decision can be based on either determinism or randomness. Neither is what people consider free will.
If there was a third option, what would that be? Explain how a decision can be neither determined nor random nor a mixture of both.
interesting take. i doubt we’ll ever resolve this, but might be good to continue the conversation
It’s only relevant for some specific religions. It’s not particularly important for most people who have or will exist.
i’d extend that to anyone who ponders philosophy as well. it’s doubtful to be a binary, yes or no, but how much does one have at any given moment
Many scientists and philosophers beg to differ. Prominent among them is Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Trinity College in Dublin.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with his argument.
What? Neuroscience has a lot to do with Mitchell’s argument.
Confirmation bias, maybe.
Confirming what? Neuroscience?
Are you unaware that confirmation bias in science is real?
I am aware it’s real, but I’m not aware why it specifically applies to Mitchell.
Do you not like his conclusions? Because that would be confirmation bias - on your part.
Indeed it would be! Delighted! Perhaps you’re correct.
ETA: Some religious institutions don’t interfere in research. I think I’ma but gunshy in the states with “Bob Jones” graduates and the ilk.
LOL, fair enough!
And don’t worry. Trinity College, aka the University of Dublin, is the top research university in Ireland. It is the Irish counterpart to Oxford and Cambridge, and it was founded by Queen Elizabeth I, not the church.
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If free will is an “illusion” by whatever standard is used to determine that, then free will doesn’t functionally exist anywhere that we know of outside of that “illusion” anyway, which means the concept is meaningless, even in a negative, at that point. It’s like telling people they aren’t unicorns while no unicorns are around to even compare their not-unicornness to.
