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?
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.
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.
It’s a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there’s no free will, then why not instead try to “solve” murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We’d all be better off!
On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don’t know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br’er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that’s hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can’t know their mind.
There’s no evidence for free will. Every physical process involved in the function of our bodies and brains has so far proven to be deterministic in every way we can verify. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an original thought though, it just means that any original thought you have was necessarily going to happen and couldn’t possibly have happened any other way. It’s fate.
It doesn’t matter.
Doesn’t matter either way.
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.
We are particles governed by physical laws, so no
No, we don’t have free will. HOWEVER, I don’t think that arguement will hold up in court.
It is an impossible concept invented by humans. Free from what? Literally everything you do is because of things beyond your control. It isn’t predestined, it just isn’t up to you. The question is, at the end of the day, were you kind?
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 a 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.
I think the question is ill defined. The answer is entirely dependent on the definitions you use and i don’t think answering the question really leads to a meaningfully different view of the world or has any real intellectual consequences.
Just based on my observations of my life, I seem to have the ability to choose to do or not do things, and that’s good enough for me. Is my choice just part of the infinite universe’s fixed progression through time and I would have done what I did regardless? Are there infinite parallel universes where parallel versions of me exist that have collectively made every choice I can possibly make? Don’t care. I feel like I have free will and IMO that’s what’s most relevant to my life in this universe.
Every decision you make and everything that happens is based on conditions, and nothing exists outside of conditions.
In the ultimate sense there’s no such thing as free will, because everything has a conditioned existence.
The circumstances that led you to any particular decision are pre-determined at the time you’re making that decision, simply through the fact that those circumstances have already happened prior to the current decision at hand; but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the free will to make that decision in the moment.
To extend on that a little: if you were able to make the same person face the same decision multiple times under identical circumstances, I don’t believe you’d get identical results every time. It may not be an even distribution between the possible choices; but it wouldn’t be a consistent answer either. The Human element introduces too much chaos for that kind of uniformity.
It’s not even wrong.
