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 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.
I agree that there is no free will, but to act as if that is true is pointless. Nihilism isn’t useful. If it makes you feel better, you are doing what you would have done regardless even if there was free will. I don’t think the fact every action is predetermined matters much. If anything, it makes me have compassion for the worst people, who arguably were fated to be what they are because of the domino effect.
I often wonder if the dominos will ever fall in a way that guarantees us all a positive outcome. Can we heal our monsters? So that every domino thereafter creates no more?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Poetically, you are the universe trying to understand itself.
It’s not even wrong.
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.
Doesn’t matter either way.
I believe we do not truly have agency but have evolved to think and act as though we do. Since inputs to each choice are likely infinite (probably uncountable as opposed to countable), the lack of agency is difficult to observe.
No, we don’t have free will. HOWEVER, I don’t think that arguement will hold up in court.
It doesn’t matter.
Yes.
I observe free will directly. Watch: I will choose of my own free will to type a tilde at the end of this sentence instead of a period~ Behold free will.
Everything that says we don’t have free will depends on indirect observations that blatantly make faulty assumptions. Do our senses accurately tell us about the state of the universe, and ourselves within it? Are our interpretations of this infallible?
Most egregious is the assumption that classical mechanics governs the mind, when we know that at a deep level, classical mechanics governs nothing. Quantum mechanics is the best guess we have at the moment about how objects work at a fundamental level. Many will say neurons are too big for the quantum level. But everything is at the quantum level. We just don’t typically observe the effects because most things are too big to see quantum effects from the outside. But we don’t only look at the brain from the outside.
Nor can we say that the brain is the seat of consciousness. Who can say what the nature of reality is? Does space even exist at a fundamental level? What does it mean for consciousness to be in a particular place? What’s to say it can only affect and be affected by certain things in certain locations? Especially when we can’t pinpoint what those things are?
So yeah I believe in free will. It’s direct observation vs. blatantly faulty reasoning.
Quantum mechanics only says that you can’t predict the spin of certain particles. Those particles are at a vastly different scale of the things we see in everyday life. Yes, a photon might suddenly change direction and I won’t see it because it’s a wave function, right? But only at a really small odd. I bet it has never happened to me or anyone in my continent, if not the entire human race in all time. Let alone neurones in my brains experiencing quantum effects.
Quantum mechanics dismisses no argument of determinism because how low the possibilities are.
Even if macroscopic particles do behave randomly, it is still a random behaviour, not your decision.
Let alone neurones in my brains experiencing quantum effects.
But that’s zeroing in on the idea that quantum mechanics directly affects neurons, which affect free will. Which is only one way one could conceivably argue free will exists. But I’m saying I don’t need to come up with a specific way, because I observe free will more directly than anything else. So there’s basically infinite ways it could happen, including for example:
- Some undiscovered conscious force behind quantum mechanics that has yet to be discovered that is able to affect the brain via microtubules
- Some undiscovered conscious force that exists entirely outside of known physics and is able to affect some part of the brain via a totally novel mechanism not related to quantum mechanics
- The whole world being a simulation which for unknown reasons is set up to hide our own free will from us
- Everyone having the wrong perspective about causality in general, such as the external world being governed and dictated by the self rather than the other way around, much the same way dreams can be controlled by the free will of lucid dreamers. Or being wrong about some other fundamental reality of the universe in such a way that consciousness would make more sense.
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.
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.
There’s an element of free will and an element of instinct and mechanism.
Conceptually I see the mind as a system which takes its own outputs as inputs and also reacts to externalities. I also believe in a stochastic universe so there’s plenty of opportunities for these partially self-decided decisions to be unique, unpredictable and incorporating the sense of self and an introspected mental model. This is a “good enough for me” version of free will in a physical system.
I have some intuition that the brain probably undergoes some level of “cognitive bootstrapping” where at some point it goes beyond just being a mechanism and starts reacting to stimuli as according to its own learned mental model. But this is necessarily limited and the degree to which an individual gets to do this, as opposed to reacting instinctively or reflexively, varies based on their physical and mental state.
There are also instances where an individual loses their personal sense of freed will and submits it to a crowd, such as in the concept of “de-individuation”
We have will, it just isn’t perfectly free. Our consciousness emerges out of a confluence of intersecting forces, and itself has the ability to influence the flows around it. But to pretend it’s removed from those flows and forces, or exists in some vacuum, is nonsensical, as is pretending that there isn’t some essence behind the signifier “self”.
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.
Yes. Every person has to believe in it to accept the notion of good and evil.
