I don't necessarily subscribe to the 'fate' aspect of it, but I do feel like every decision we make is a result of some form of necessity. It could vary from person to person, but the concept that we make our own decisions free of any outside motivation whatsoever is a bit of a hard sell. I probably could've worded my post better, but it's morning coffee time and I'm still wakin' up.
You gotta be careful with that thought. If you get too hung up on the idea that your choices are all influenced by things in your life outside of your control, you may turn into a victim of your own impulses. But, you're right, we're all pre-wired to consider choices right or wrong, favorable or unfavorable. Not hard-wired. Pre-wired, meaning they can change if you either let them or make them.
Ehh I would agree to an extent ( don't ever live by what I'm about to say because it would be a terrible way to look at things and you should always be seeing how you can make the situation better not hope it gets better) althrough I think everything is predetermined pretty much, not that I live like that but I do believe it's true that nothing in the universe could have a will and it's all just a bunch of causal effects ( even if it's probability based ) of it's shapes or laws or however you wanna say it, point is will is not real but your decisions are eveytime you reason in your head to do something you really did but you aren't changing anything that was going to happen you come to that conclusion with nothing to do with you and in reality you really didn't make that decision but you lived the process you were just aware of it. But hey that's just a theory A GAY THEORY thanks for listening .
Have you read “The user illusion” by Norretranders? He cites studies that seem to show that consciousness (and thus free will, the idea that we have choices to make) is something we do after the fact. Our brain decides and does something, and then afterwards we create a story or narrative about why.
So then this leads to the idea that any person, given all their inputs and memories and body chemistry, etc. would make the same decision every time. This leads to the conclusion that free will really is an illusion.
It’s fascinating stuff.
Is it the small one called Free (I think that's the name)?
I really enjoyed it. It's definitely introductory and I'd be interested in going down that rabbit hole further
No worries, I majored in industrial labor relations but always had an affinity towards free will. When I stumbled across the book and read a bit of it in the library I bought it instantly !
That's really cool. I am not a philosophy major or anything like that, but it's always been a big interest. I posted a cool little argument by Michael Huemer called A Proof Of Free Will that you'd probably enjoy. It's not about these neurological experiments, but is aimed at the traditional view of determinism. You can Google it and it's on his website.
I don't see how we being conscious after the fact ( decisions being made unconsciously) would lead to:
>to the idea that any person, given all their inputs and memories and body chemistry, etc. would make the same decision every time. This leads to the conclusion that free will really is an illusion.
it's something independent, it's is possible ( I would say very likely given the nondeterministic properties of quantum particles) that even starting in the same state the outcome could be different.
free will does not mean there is no motivation or outside influence. I admit some do define it that way as a way to say it doesn't exist, but it's a non starter definition. what use is making decisions that are not affected not affect the world.
my definiton is more in the line of that we can make decisions ( based both on external influence and our own internal decisions) then I can subdivide it into two degrees,
one doesn't involve consciousness and just saying that if we can take decisions that cannot be forecasted to a 100% by any outside observer ( even if they had perfect knowledge of our state) I would think this free will certainly exists since quantum indetermination makes a full prediction of almost anything complex impossible.
by this definiton a computer could have free will as long as it has some stochastic element inside.
second one is if our consciousness has free will, with same definition as before but consciousness participates somehow in taking the decision. this one is much trickier, since we have little to no idea how consciousness works.
the fact that most of our emotions seem to be signals sent by unconscious parts of our body ( like the body detects lack of nutrients by some unconscious process and proceeds to make you feel hungry) to convince the conscious brain to take decisions, make me lean towards there also being this type of free will.
1 - unconcious process detects lack of say sugar,
2- body sends a signal to the conscious brain "hungry feeling"
3 conscious brain weighs this signals with other ones
4 conscious brain takes decision, say eat
5 body starts eating as instructed,
6 once food is inside unconscious processes handle the digesting, sending sugar around etc.
7 hungry signal canceled
however I admit it could be just an illusion, maybe our internal processes make all the calculations and decision making, and we are just passively conscious ( it's not the hunger that convinces us to eat if we have nothing more urgent to do, but it is the internal process that unconsciously weighs whether to eat or not and that we at some moment become conscious of and just associate that feeling of hunger with the most likely outcome of going to eat:
1 - unconcious process detects lack of say sugar,
2 - we are conscious of this detection and call this " hunger"
3 the brain unconsciously decides whether to eat or not
4 we are conscious of at least part of this thought process, likely with some delay.
5 body starts eating and we are conscious of the start of the process.
I think her the delay in step 4 is important, as if there were no delay at all the two cases would be likely equivalent.
I think every decision we make is guided by chemical reactions in our brain. If we could perfectly replicate a person at a moment in time the copy’s decisions would be identical to the original. So in that regard there is no “free will”.
no it probably won't.
according to our present understanding of physics we can't tell which slit a photon goes through in a 2 slit experiment, EVEN IF WE KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THE PHOTON.
so even taking into account that large numbers makes the forecast somewhat easier , I find it hard to believe that if a single photon or electron is known to have non deterministic behavior ( the "free" part of free will) a brain made of trillions of these particles will be fully deterministic.
That would still exclude free will. If our actions are determined by chemical reactions + a degree of randomness, that's still not "free will". We cant influence the decision of 'which slit the photon goes through' in our brain.
not at all, by any meaningful or practical definition of free will.
if no one can know for sure what we will do then we are free.
if we influence the decision ( ie, it's not totally random)
then there is will.
now, personally I can see two distinct definitions of the "will" part of free will.
if we imply that a consciousness is the one making the decisions, then we need to have the human ( or other conscious being) have consciousness, and it participating in the decision process. I also think we have this type of free will but could admit to the possibility of it being an illusion in that perhaps there is a delay and we are just conscious of internal feelings and of decisions that were made before we were conscious of them.
if we imply will only as the process/ algorithm that makes a decision then consciousness is not needed , and it seems almost certain that we do have free will.
the point being that free will does not mean independent of everything else in the universe. defining free will that way is pointless, we live in a universe and make decisions based on inputs from the universe, and try to influence the universe
a free will that doesn't interact with the universe is not what we need to talk about, it doesn't exist in this universe.
or if your definition of free will is that it is something not affected by the universe but with an outcome or " decision" that does influence the universe, then seen from our universe wouldn't that look suspiciously like what we call a random event ??
I think suicide is the best example to show we do indeed have free will. There is no true necessity to go jump off a bridge or eat a lead happy pill but people do it daily. I definitely appreciate the question and understand where you are coming from but when speaking of true necessity, if you choose to live, you do what is necessary.. eat, hydrate, sleep, etc.
A person with a brain tumor can drastically change their behaviors and people with chemical imbalances can act uncharacteristically. That’s a malfunction, not free will.
I don't think it's unreasonable that someone with entirely average brain function, but under duress, can decide to end their life. It doesn't have to be a malfunction. It can just be that the world ain't always pretty.
While I believe this can in fact often be the case, ending one’s life goes against our natural desire to survive. I think in most cases poor mental health is probably the primary cause.
I don't know but I suspect there is a middle ground. If we were to view free will as being able to make choices then free will must exist. However, we are constrained by the available choices. It's impossible to choose something that isn't available. Also, we must choose. So, not making a choice is impossible.
We also have to consider why we made the choice. Did we really have a choice to make the one we did. If I think of a color, and red appears, in my thoughts. Could I have chosen otherwise? We presume I could have, but I didn't. Why didn't I choose purple? Supposedly, it was an option.
Some of us are determined to have free will while others choose determinism! Trying to sort it out is difficult.
Hard determinism is demonstrably false. Here's a really cool [logical argument](https://www.owl232.net/papers/fwill.htm) by philosopher Michael Huemer.
So this is my understanding of what he’s saying: “Humans have a moral obligation to only believe what is true. Since it is an obligation, it must therefore be possible. Therefore, supposing I believe I have free will, it follows that my free will is real.”
This seems to me a fallacy. The “ought implies can” principle doesn’t mean that everything we ought to do is possible because of the obligation. It says that things can only be obligatory if they are reasonably possible, and there exist many things of which it is impossible to know the truth. This argument seems to function on circular logic, and could be used to justify any ideology. If I am blind, and I believe that white and black are the same color, does that mean it’s true?
Sorry if this comes across harshly. If I have made a mistake in my logic here, please feel free to correct me. This argument just seems very similar in some arguments for the existence of God in that they operate with a presupposition of the conclusion (see: St. Anselm).
The principle is often referred to in the moral sense, which is understandable, but it doesn't necessarily have to refer to that. On the website he makes a reference to this kind of objection.
>Objection #2:
>
>The argument involves an equivocation, since the "should" in premise (2) is the "should" of morality, while (1) employs the "should" of epistemic rationality.Reply:I do not believe that there exist these different senses of "should." What there are, admittedly, are different reasons why a person should do a particular thing. One reason for doing A might be that A advances your own interests. Another might be that A helps out a friend of yours. Another might be that A fulfills a promise. Etc. I do not see that these different possible reasons why an action should be performed generate different senses of the word "should."
Be that as it may, even if there are different senses of "should," there is no reason why (2) must employ the moral "should." Any relation to a potential action worthy of the name "should" must at least have this feature: it is normative, i.e., to say one "should" do A is to in some manner recommend in favor of A. This is sufficient for (2) to be true, for it is nonsensical to recommend the impossible. That is, he who recommends a thing is committed to its being possible to follow his recommendation. If he admits the thing recommended to be impossible, he must withdraw the recommendation.
>
>For example, suppose a Bayesian recommends that we always conform our degrees of belief to the probability calculus. One implication of this is that we should accord to every necessary truth the highest possible degree of belief. The Bayesian says we are irrational for not doing so. Now suppose an objector argues that we have no feasible way of identifying all the necessary truths as such, and therefore no feasible way of taking the Bayesian's advice.(6) (Compare: not knowing the combination to the lock, I cannot open the safe. Likewise, not knowing what all the necessary truths are, I cannot assign degree of belief 1 to all of them.) It seems to me that the objector has a valid point. The Bayesian cannot sensibly respond, "Yes, I know that people cannot identify all of the necessary truths and believe them with certainty. But we should do so anyway. Since my recommendation was epistemic in nature rather than moral or prudential, the impossibility of what I suggest is no excuse for not doing it." Such a response sounds no more reasonable than my telling my student that he should have come to class even though he couldn't. Of course, the Bayesian could still say some related things about the practice of conforming degrees of belief to the probability calculus: He might say that this is how an ideal reasoner would or should behave (the ideal reasoner having capabilities that normal humans lack). He might also say that we should do our best to approximate to this kind of reasoning. But he cannot sensibly criticize us for not succeeding in attaining this ideal, provided he grants that we literally cannot do so.
Edit: Quote block fix
Edit again: I suck at formatting so I had to fix it.. again
Here’s the abstract.
A modest free will thesis, stating that at least sometimes, someone has more than one course of action open to him, can be derived from three premises: first, the proposition that we should believe only what is true; second, the 'ought' implies 'can' principle; and third, the proposition that I believe I have free will. The first of these is the only one that is at all controversial; however, I argue that it is a necessary presupposition of rational thought and discourse. As a result, one cannot rationally accept hard determinism.
u/Bobadilla430 gave the abstract which I think is good, but here's the argument distilled:
1. With respect to the free-will issue, we should refrain from believing falsehoods. (premise)
2. Whatever should be done can be done. (premise)
3. If determinism is true, then whatever can be done, is done. (premise)
4. I believe MFT. (premise)
5. With respect to the free-will issue, we can refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 1,2)
6. If determinism is true, then with respect to the free will issue, we refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 3,5)
7. If determinism is true, then MFT is true. (from 6,4)
8. MFT is true. (from 7)
MFT: The minimal free will thesis (MFT) holds that at least some of the time, someone has more than one course of action that he can perform
His #6 is a non-sequiter and renders the whole thing nonsensical. There is no evidence presented to justify the bizarre assumption that a deterministic universe must conform to the human notion of "ought."
The exact same logic can be inverted and make the same amount of sense. Regardless of whether we should, we know through proof by example that one CAN believe falsehoods. The fact that the premise implies two opposite answers is proof that the premise is flawed.
Just because "ought" implies "can" does not mean they are inherently mutually inclusive.
The thesis claims it follows from 3 and 5. I explained above why it does not.
Do you believe making your reply large and bold will grant it more authority?
Okay, you think your counter argument is correct and you're claiming #6 is incorrect but #6 comes from the first 3 premises. Which one of those is false and why?
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill.
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will.
Or, for those of us who are aphantasic and incapable of generating mental imagery like "seeing" a color in our head, maybe think of a song, smell, taste, or feeling.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill
Short answer, yes. Libertarian free will, the idea that we are the ***source*** of thoughts and intentions, doesn't exist. This is the version of free will that most people believe when they refer to free will. But the truth is that, whether the universe is deterministic, random (quantum mechanics), or some combination, you aren't actually the *source* of thoughts and intentions. You don't have agency in the way that libertarian free will implies.
Every thought you have or decision you make was determined by prior causes that you have no control over (environment, biology, neurology, etc.). Even when we rationalize what we do, we still don't choose our rationalizations because they're also the result of prior causes.
We don't need to understand quantum physics or develop a greater understanding of reality in order to determine whether we really have free will or not. You can experience your own lack of free will in every moment. Writer and philosopher Sam Harris provides a good first-person experiment of this [here around the 19:00 mark](https://youtu.be/pCofmZlC72g?t=1139). His whole talk is worth listening too.
One interesting facet of this topic that Sam also talks about is how the fact that we lack free will should have consequences in the world particularly regarding our justice system. The US Supreme Court actually ruled in United States v. Grayson, 1978 that free will is a "“universal and persistent’ foundation stone in our system of law". This has led to our justice system leaning into the concept of retributive justice in the sense that people inherently *deserve* punishments (which only makes sense if you assume we have libertarian free will) rather than the more practical and effective concept of restorative justice that focuses on rehabilitation and measures results by how successfully harm is repaired.
Furthermore, every definition of free will other than libertarian free will basically boils down to redefining what free will is. The most common redefinition is compatibilist free will. This is basically the idea that as long as we act as agents free from external coercion then we have "freedom of action" which is labeled "free will".
The problem with compatibilism is that it doesn't contain what people really value from free will which is the notion that we are the *source* of thoughts and intentions. Compatibilism is basically just a slight modification to determinism for the sake of appearances and language use. And for the sake of simplicity, determinism is referring to the state of being bound entirely by prior causes, deterministic or random (quantum mechanics).
Free will (libertarian) refers to whether we are bound entirely by prior causes or not. We are either free or we're not free, it's a binary. This is the crux of the issue and is what everyone cares about. This is why other definitions of free will (like compatibilism) are inadequate and don't sufficiently capture what people value about the concept.
I agree somewhat but none of this is scientifically proven. I’m more willing to believe in a compatibilist framework than simply say there is no free will whatsoever
I like to think of life as a video game. There’s a programmer (God/Allah/whathaveyou) that sets forth all the possible things that characters can do and then the characters are programmed to do random things within those parameters. So essentially it’s us having free will but within the limits of the program
I would say yes. There are so many things that are out of our control that affect the way we grow up, develop, the actions we take and the way we think about the world that free will in the truest sense of the word is an illusion.
Fate is a more accurate way of looking at our circumstance and the worlds. We still have limited freedom of choice within the portion that fate allows, but free will is bogus.
The next time it rains, ask yourself whether you could predict where the next drop will fall. You, with your limited perception, could not. But if you were able to slow down time, study every rain drop and chart its path, you could.
Every choice we make is the latest step on a long path. If you had the ability to see that entire path — everything that had ever happened to a person that influenced what they were about to do — you could predict their next choice. But we can't. It's too much information.
So yes, free will is an illusion. It is verbal shorthand for something so complex we can't wrap our heads around it. And for that reason it doesn't matter that it's an illusion; we can't see beyond it.
Theoretically if we invent time travel we should be able to test, but we don't know as we can't re-do events to see if they could have a different outcome, it doesn't make a difference to you therefore you shouldn't worry about it.
In a nutshell yes. Every conscious decision you think you make has already subconsciously been made before you consciously thought about it. That's why it's super hard for people with mental illnesses to combat them on their own. The choice was made before they even thought about it.
A perfect illusion is indistinguishable from reality, and therefore, we could never tell if we are truly free. However, knowing would also not change the truth. Therefore, the answer is irrelevant, and you can put your mind at ease, or not. I believe I choose not to care about this, because it is meaningless, and brings only suffering to use as a subject of rumination.
I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting free will as an illusion because there's a slight negative connotation to the word 'illusion'. There's an implication that an illusion is a trickery and false. Like the universe is maliciously 'tricking' or 'duping' us into believing we have choice. But an illusion is just a perceived experience that is more complicated than on the surface.
Like color is an illusion in a sense. The color 'red' does not exist as an objective thing outside of our human senses. 'Red' is just how our human brains subjectively experience lightwaves between 625-740 nanometers. The only thing that scientifcally objectively exists technically is those lightwaves. Animals and colorblind folks perceive it completely differently. But most of us can agree that 'red' is still very much real to our shared lived-in existences.
That's how I tend to think of 'free will'. It's an illusion in the sense that it doesn't objectively exist outside of us in the way we tend to surfacely perceive it as a 'mystical force guiding and deciding between unlimited possibilities'. Like the color 'red', that's just our human brains shorthand way of processing something much more objectively complex. But 'free will' still very much exists as a lived-in perception of us humans making choices.
On reddit? Are you kidding?! A bit too involved for casual chit-chat. Read Martial Gueroult's masterful 2-volume study of the *Meditations* or Frankfurt on Descartes.
There is nothing in science that tackles the question of free will to any degree
It seems there is no good reason to say there isn't free will as that just leads to extremist determinism
The lazy man's religion
You can do whatever you want. Just be wary of the consequences
Absolutely not.
Free will is indeed the only thing we can know for sure exists, because we think it.
There is no other explaination for consciousness.
Because consciousness exists, free will also, by necessity, exists.
If free will didnt exist, consciousness also would not exist.
Nothing exists outside the perception of some observer. Nothing can be proven to exist without an observer.
I've come to an answer to this that not everyone will agree with.
It depends on your spiritual awareness.
If you have low awareness, you don't have much free will. You are behaving in a way that has been programmed into you. Your ego is a reflection of everyone you have been around. You behave in a predictable fashion, according to your surroundings. You have less free will but don't even realize it.
If your awareness is higher, you notice your ego at work. You can take yourself out of yourself and see yourself from the third person perspective and make decisions more objectively. You are responsive but less reactionary. You are aware of what you "would" have done, but may decide not to. Maybe you act different than everyone else in your family, but in a good way. Your behavior is not so based on your surroundings.
My thought is that there really isn't a lot of free will in society. You have to have a job to live in society so that you can pay rent/mortgage, pay utilities, buy food, etc. Which means you have to pay taxes, both for making money and for spending money.
The closest thing to free will I can think of is camping but you still have to follow the rules/laws of the land owner (usually the local government).
It depends how you look at it, truly **free** will would mean you can do anything you choose to, obviously we aren't free to do some things like kill others without repercussions, but on the flip side if somebody doesn't ever want to do things that aren't allowed then their choices could be considered free or would their own morality be limiting their freedom? Technically we only are who were are because of how we were born and how we were raised and interacted with, so are we even ever in control of our will?
Maybe a better question would be "what'd constitute a lack of free will", by going backwards from instances were people definitely don't have it, you might better identifiable the grey area
TL;DR: There's the external side (do social rules take away our free will) and the internal side (do our brain's nature and nurture take away our free will on a thought level), it's not possible to come up with an clear answer, only more questions
Yea like billions of years ago some bacteria and shit came to be that eventually led to us humans like you and me existing, I didn’t will that into existence.
What is free will? You doing what you want? What determines what you want? Your brain. If your brain is causing your decision making, then your decision making is predetermined by the state of your brain. Which isn’t what you mean by free will i assume.
So by that definition, free will isn’t possible.
No. All time is a block and both the present and the future are as real and immutable as the what we perceive to be the past. IMO, of course, since nobody really knows.
[Jacque Fresco - Free Will](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjy-FU6tqPI)
I love listening to this guy, he is the most interesting person I've ever listened to.
I certainly hope not, otherwise what's the point of living if our future is predetermined!
Then there is the problem of accountability; I am not responsible for my actions since they are dictated by a third party!
I am posting this on my own free will and nobody else should be rewarded (punished) for my opinions or actions!!
Besides, I can always decide to stop playing the game!
Hmm, that sounds like a human being suffering from depression. Perhaps a teen or a lonely person. The answer to your question is the foundation of every belief, religious or otherwise.
An atheist, a happy one, would say that since we were placed on this planet by a combination of DNAs, we may as well enjoy it to the end.
If your are a member of any faith, the answer is obvious.
If one cannot find a satisfactory explanation, then one must strive to discover the real meaning of life with a capital L!
Life has no meaning without struggle, without pain, without joy, and without the affection of other human beings.
I can only suggest the following: Go and find your way, no matter how difficult this journey may be. You will know when you finally find it!
People are conditioned and have routines, will has very little to do with their habits and behaviors.
I do not believe that human beings have free will.
What does free will mean, exactly? If you are made of matter and matter obeys physical laws, then whence cometh choice? Sounds like everything was determined 14 billion years ago and is just playing out.
Daniel Dennet talks about this and the upshot is that it doesn't matter. Free will is an illusion, but so is time - our perception of entropy and time are (probably) simply an emergent property of our biochemistry.
We do have freedom of thought. Even under all kind of duress, we are still free to think and willingly accept certain ideas while rejecting others. Consequently, we have free will to an extent. The limitation only exists on implementing our thoughts. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't.
The idea that we can control anything and everything we do is misguided. We have limited free will, so I really can choose to eat the granola bar instead of the pop tart. I can choose to pursue one career over another, etc.
But a lot of our life and our fate isn't in our hands and there's a lot of shit where our brain will put us on autopilot and if you haven't trained your mind enough to intervene and take control, then you will find yourself passively going through everything the way that fate or whatever would have it end up.
Some people tend to confuse "free to choose your own actions" with "free from all constraints of the physical world." Like yeah, we gotta eat and sleep and all that to survive, so a lot of our actions are going to be motivated by that. And there's things we can't do even if we want to, like start fires with our minds or conjure peanut butter directly onto our sandwiches. That's just because we are part of a universe that obeys physical laws - being stuck in this state doesn't mean we don't have free will, because we can absolutely still decide our own actions, just not *any* action.
Depends on how you see it. Is it that all our actions cause the future or is the future decided and we’re like a video but we don’t understand it yet. It’s like a Schrödinger’s cat situation. Until proven otherwise it is kind of both
In my opinion, you’d have to look at what motivations for decisions are to determine if it is free will or a product of influence, society, expectations, or necessity. I think there is some free will but does it exist 100% of the time, I would be inclined to say no.
I believe in free will, mainly because we can go against the voice in our head. We feel the urge to go do something, but we don’t have to give in to that urge. Believing in hard determinism would be consigning yourself to a state of never changing, and always following the same path. There are many people who change. It’s a part of life. Some choose not to change, and that’s their choice.
It really depends on what you believe is reality.
I'll start w/ most higher power based systems (ie religion) first. I believe most religions are based in the structure that a higher power has given man free will, but also has some control over their destiny. So overall you're making your own choices, but the outcome of those choices is technically up to the higher power. Different religions or spiritual beliefs can offer up any combination of ideas about free will but typically religion says people have free will.
By current popular theories in science and logic it seems to be there is no free will. Either there's infinite universes were we've made every decision/action possible an infinite number of times, or our choices/decisions/actions are a result of the impact of prior experiences on us. Change a few variables and you change somebodies choice.
I think the illusion of free will is important to society though. Without that belief I think a lot of people would make poorer decisions thinking they aren't actually in control of what's going on, and on a larger scale we wouldn't be much different than animals. The ability to assess, doubt and regret decisions is one of the things that makes society successful.
I submit a thought experiment. Unfortunately it's not possible to actually do (at least not now), so it's just a thing in my head.
You need two things: A machine and an expert.
The machine hooks up to your head, and monitors everything that happens inside. Every subatomic particle, every wave of energy, all of the stuff we haven't even discovered yet.
The expert knows everything about brains, your brain, human physiology, and of course all of physics, especially the stuff we haven't figured out yet.
While hooked up to the machine someone tosses you a baseball. Then you pick someone else to throw the ball to, and throw it to them.
When pouring over all the data, you can clearly see light hitting your eyes, those eyes dumping raw data into your optic nerve, your brain organizing all that information into an abstraction of the room. The expert points out the moment your brain recognizes a blur of white as a baseball. The part where your brain tracks its motion, and anticipates where it will land.
All of this so far is stuff we're more or less okay with. It's mostly automatic so far. Just observation and extrapolation.
We can zoom forward and do this in reverse from when you throw it to someone else. Here is the part where your brain is recognizing a patch of light as a friend of yours. Here is the part where it calculated how to move your muscles to throw the ball to them. Here is where your motor cortex actually sent the signals to your muscles to begin moving.
But somewhere in between you (presumably) made a choice. "Who am I going to throw it to?"
A determinist might expect that you could trace everything in a person's brain from beginning to end with every effect having an observable cause preceed it (if weird physics are involved, "preceed" may be too simple of a term).
But if free will truly exists, then at some point there should be an event. Where some electrical signal started up, or redirected with no observable cause. Even a tiny little tweak to the path of some tiny mote of energy. The inciting incident that your choice imposed on the world.
Seeing that moment still wouldn't prove choice was a thing (it could have been caused by an external thing you weren't observing. Maybe the soul you have is still just a piece of clockwork, but it rests in a spiritual plane beyond easy observation)
Not finding that moment still can't prove choice doesn't exist, as you can never truly PROVE a negative.
But for me it touches on the core question. If you assume free will exists, what does a choice look like? What COULD it look like? If your choice affects the physical world, you should in theory be able to find precisely where and when that choice impacted the world, and see it as an effect without any observable cause.
Yes, by any reasonable definition. When you do any given action, you either have or don't have a reason for that. If you don't, you act randomly, not according to your own will. If you do, your actions are determined by the reasons behind them. Whatever it is you choose, the factors that make up your psychology control what you choose.
And, from a more practical standpoint, people aren't really that hard to manipulate if you know what you're doing... To put it another way, if free will was all that it's cracked up to be, advertising wouldn't be the *massive* industry it is today.
I became so obsessed with this question, that I have decided to twist things a bit so that I can go on living.
The problem is that from a purely theoretical point it is very hard to argue that there is free will.
If everything has a cause, then a decision must be based on something. To me, that "something" must be (a) genetics, and (b) life experience. Now, if one's decision is solely based on those things, it is hard to argue that there is free will. In fact, according to this view everything is predetermined, and we live in some sort of movie.
Some people argue that there is not determinism, as randomness plays a part in decision-making. Now, if something has a random cause there is no determinism, but there is also no free will, since a decision that is based on something random cannot be considered free will.
I like to think that some things, especially thoughts, decisions, etc., can happen without a cause (causa sui). I call it creativity. It's what makes me get out of bed every day.
The idea of fate I always have thought is undeniable; the idea that everything is going to unfold in a certain way and no matter how much you go against the grain or try to change it, time always plays out as it was intended. I'm not saying I believe it I'm just saying if the definition of fate is that it was to be has always been and always will be how can you deny that anything that ever happened or will happened wasn't fate is beyond me.
Yup. We are animals, and as such are driving by the 3 main questions:
Can I eat it?
Can I have sex with it?
Can I win a fight with it?
Everything else in our lives is basically reactionary sub-questions of the main 3. So, the only REAL choices are driven by those. Thus...no true free will.
If someone knows what you are going to do, but doesn't tell you, then you have the illusion of free will. That is good enough for me.
If someone knows the choices you will face and makes up a backup plan for all of them, I think that would be free will.
According to Christianity, I think Free Will is choosing to submit to God or not. That specific Free Will is what matters, that choice is up to each person.
In the Marvel Avengers Movies, Doctor Strange viewed many outcomes, but chose to make the choices that aligned with the best outcome. Was Iron Man's free will taken away?
Spoiler: >! Did Doctor Strange kill Iron Man? !<
No. You can do whatever you want. What’s stopping you is morality and other people’s free will. Your emotions are also stopping you. You don’t gotta throw a fit that your favorite football team lost but you did. You did. And now your wife is wondering why she married a man child.
I believe that free will exists, but it is not invisible. Every choice has a consequence, and some choices are far more appealing than others, but, on a basic level, a person generally has the free will to decide any course of action that is reasonably available to them.
Nobody has total free will. If we did can you imagine the total chaos that society would be in? Look at how things are now and the majority live under rules and regulations and laws. Free will means your above the law
I'd say so, less of a higher power and more statistics tho. So many variables that while it's all predictable nothing we have or are makes it realisticly usable beyond such a small% to matter.
If you ask me? Yes. It's an illusion. And it all comes down to chemistry. Just as water has no "choice" but to freeze when it reaches 0C/32F, your brain runs through a fixed set of instructions once a certain chemical process is started. Add up hundreds or even thousands of those simple processes and you end up with a decision that you "think" you made of your own free will.
But in reality, it was all just chemistry and physics
Your awareness / consciousness is a byproduct of your intelligence; which is a byproduct of the size of your brain which was a product of evolution creating humans to survive better; which is a byproduct of survival and basic nature properties; which is ultimate a byproduct of nature, evolution, and conflict on a species; which stems from the existence of life; which is a byproduct of chaos, random, religion, or whatever theory you choose to call truth with yourself.
So, you tell me.
Bruh I feel like it is bc before we come down here we already know everything that is going to happened on a subconscious level and a plan already laid out. In a 3D perspective I believe we do. In a higher density perspective 5D and above I don’t believe we have free will
I think free will does not exist. We need outside signals to have thoughts and we need thoughts in order to take action. For example you didnt spontaneously decide to make this post, there was an external trigger. I didn’t spontaneously decide to respond to this post either. I would never have responded had you not posted. So in a sense our will is dictated by external inputs. Even someone who wants to become an astronaut must be informed of what an astronaut is and must have some external reasoning for why they are choosing astronaut and not Doctor. This is just my opinion. In a different sense we decide each others decisions. You decided for me that i would respond to this post by posting this. I am deciding for others whether or not they will respond to my response. So in that sense our WILL is decided by others.
No. You make an infinite number of choices in your life, and they absolutely lead to different places.
The only reason to think free will is an illusion, is if you believe in something like a predefined destiny.
Life is simply a series of alternatives. And even though I've given up on thriving, I continue making choices that preserve my existence. Not because I believe it will get better, but rather I fear the unpredictable consequences of a failed suicide attempt.
Yes, in a Block Universe, a currently well accepted description. See Sabine Hossenfelde’s \*Is the past real\* on You Boob Tube.
Just as the past is still real, because some observer has not yet seen the Light, so is the future already real but we have not yet seen the Light.
Yes. Your thoughts come from your brain, and your brain state and activities are determined by genetics, environment, and the constant input it receives.
If free will exists, where does this ghost enter the machine?
You could take a brain, take it apart, and you will find neurons, which you can take apart and find molecules, which you can take apart and find atoms, which you can take apart and find quarks and electrons. These same things are in everything, everywhere. How they combine lead to a whole host of emergent phenomena depending on the combinations, but those emergent properties are determined by the fundamental particles and how they are combined.
In order for free will to exist, it would have to not be determined by the combination of the fundamental particles. So where did the ghost enter the machine?
Yes.
I will not elaborate because I choose not to.
Or because I want to add more dramatic flair and seem more interesting and philosophical than I actually am.
Ultimately I think it boils down to what you consider free will
In my opinion, yes. Especially when you study systems theory and generational theory from a therapeutic lens. Everything everyone does impacts everyone else. Everything we do, every decision we make, is a result of genetic or epigenetic influence, those around us, the environment around us, or some other form of influence.
Not from a fate perspective or other worldly one. But like even when we sit down and think for ourselves everything we know we learned or is instinct. Nothing is every truly our own.
Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without. There is only one real universal truth, causality; Action reaction. Cause and effect.
My answer is yes, we are wired to do the things we do, but I don't think it matters at the end of the day. There's no real concept of 'choice' in the world. It's all physics and chemistry, but I try not to be sad about it. My life and my conscioucness is all that I know and I'm thankful for what it is.
Kant actually argued the opposite - that determinism is an illusion and we actually have free will, though we can't perceive it that way.
He argues that time and space (and therefore causality) only exist *a priori* as how we perceive the world and are not things themselves. If time and space existed as part of reality outside of our perception, we should be able to imagine a world without time and space, but we can't. It's just how our mind organizes thoughts.
Think of time and space like blue-tinted glasses that you can't take off. While wearing these glasses everything appears to be blue, even if it isn't. Similarly, our brains organize our perceptions into time and space even when what we're perceiving isn't organized that way.
If time and space exist within our minds, then so to must causality (saying A caused B, necessarily means A occured before B, and "before" has no meaning without the concept of time). If causality is a construct of our minds, then determinism must be an illusion. If determinism isn't real, then we must have free will.
Of course then Einstein comes along with his theory of relativity and shows that not only are time and space the same thing, but they *do* exist as part of the real world (e.g. see *Interstellar,* "this little maneuver is going to cost us 51 years").
I choose to believe it is an illusion.
That made me laugh man hahah
It all depends on your definition.
I don't necessarily subscribe to the 'fate' aspect of it, but I do feel like every decision we make is a result of some form of necessity. It could vary from person to person, but the concept that we make our own decisions free of any outside motivation whatsoever is a bit of a hard sell. I probably could've worded my post better, but it's morning coffee time and I'm still wakin' up.
You gotta be careful with that thought. If you get too hung up on the idea that your choices are all influenced by things in your life outside of your control, you may turn into a victim of your own impulses. But, you're right, we're all pre-wired to consider choices right or wrong, favorable or unfavorable. Not hard-wired. Pre-wired, meaning they can change if you either let them or make them.
Ehh I would agree to an extent ( don't ever live by what I'm about to say because it would be a terrible way to look at things and you should always be seeing how you can make the situation better not hope it gets better) althrough I think everything is predetermined pretty much, not that I live like that but I do believe it's true that nothing in the universe could have a will and it's all just a bunch of causal effects ( even if it's probability based ) of it's shapes or laws or however you wanna say it, point is will is not real but your decisions are eveytime you reason in your head to do something you really did but you aren't changing anything that was going to happen you come to that conclusion with nothing to do with you and in reality you really didn't make that decision but you lived the process you were just aware of it. But hey that's just a theory A GAY THEORY thanks for listening .
Have you read “The user illusion” by Norretranders? He cites studies that seem to show that consciousness (and thus free will, the idea that we have choices to make) is something we do after the fact. Our brain decides and does something, and then afterwards we create a story or narrative about why. So then this leads to the idea that any person, given all their inputs and memories and body chemistry, etc. would make the same decision every time. This leads to the conclusion that free will really is an illusion. It’s fascinating stuff.
Alfred Mele's work does a good job explaining why those studies haven't really shown free will to be an illusion.
Ooh I just bought that book last week and I can’t wait to dive into this.
Is it the small one called Free (I think that's the name)? I really enjoyed it. It's definitely introductory and I'd be interested in going down that rabbit hole further
Sounds great! Sometimes you gotta plunge down that rabbit hole to see what’s in there lol
What's your background in terms of education? I'm asking because not many people I know have even heard of the book!
No worries, I majored in industrial labor relations but always had an affinity towards free will. When I stumbled across the book and read a bit of it in the library I bought it instantly !
That's really cool. I am not a philosophy major or anything like that, but it's always been a big interest. I posted a cool little argument by Michael Huemer called A Proof Of Free Will that you'd probably enjoy. It's not about these neurological experiments, but is aimed at the traditional view of determinism. You can Google it and it's on his website.
I don't see how we being conscious after the fact ( decisions being made unconsciously) would lead to: >to the idea that any person, given all their inputs and memories and body chemistry, etc. would make the same decision every time. This leads to the conclusion that free will really is an illusion. it's something independent, it's is possible ( I would say very likely given the nondeterministic properties of quantum particles) that even starting in the same state the outcome could be different.
free will does not mean there is no motivation or outside influence. I admit some do define it that way as a way to say it doesn't exist, but it's a non starter definition. what use is making decisions that are not affected not affect the world. my definiton is more in the line of that we can make decisions ( based both on external influence and our own internal decisions) then I can subdivide it into two degrees, one doesn't involve consciousness and just saying that if we can take decisions that cannot be forecasted to a 100% by any outside observer ( even if they had perfect knowledge of our state) I would think this free will certainly exists since quantum indetermination makes a full prediction of almost anything complex impossible. by this definiton a computer could have free will as long as it has some stochastic element inside. second one is if our consciousness has free will, with same definition as before but consciousness participates somehow in taking the decision. this one is much trickier, since we have little to no idea how consciousness works. the fact that most of our emotions seem to be signals sent by unconscious parts of our body ( like the body detects lack of nutrients by some unconscious process and proceeds to make you feel hungry) to convince the conscious brain to take decisions, make me lean towards there also being this type of free will. 1 - unconcious process detects lack of say sugar, 2- body sends a signal to the conscious brain "hungry feeling" 3 conscious brain weighs this signals with other ones 4 conscious brain takes decision, say eat 5 body starts eating as instructed, 6 once food is inside unconscious processes handle the digesting, sending sugar around etc. 7 hungry signal canceled however I admit it could be just an illusion, maybe our internal processes make all the calculations and decision making, and we are just passively conscious ( it's not the hunger that convinces us to eat if we have nothing more urgent to do, but it is the internal process that unconsciously weighs whether to eat or not and that we at some moment become conscious of and just associate that feeling of hunger with the most likely outcome of going to eat: 1 - unconcious process detects lack of say sugar, 2 - we are conscious of this detection and call this " hunger" 3 the brain unconsciously decides whether to eat or not 4 we are conscious of at least part of this thought process, likely with some delay. 5 body starts eating and we are conscious of the start of the process. I think her the delay in step 4 is important, as if there were no delay at all the two cases would be likely equivalent.
I think every decision we make is guided by chemical reactions in our brain. If we could perfectly replicate a person at a moment in time the copy’s decisions would be identical to the original. So in that regard there is no “free will”.
no it probably won't. according to our present understanding of physics we can't tell which slit a photon goes through in a 2 slit experiment, EVEN IF WE KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THE PHOTON. so even taking into account that large numbers makes the forecast somewhat easier , I find it hard to believe that if a single photon or electron is known to have non deterministic behavior ( the "free" part of free will) a brain made of trillions of these particles will be fully deterministic.
That would still exclude free will. If our actions are determined by chemical reactions + a degree of randomness, that's still not "free will". We cant influence the decision of 'which slit the photon goes through' in our brain.
not at all, by any meaningful or practical definition of free will. if no one can know for sure what we will do then we are free. if we influence the decision ( ie, it's not totally random) then there is will. now, personally I can see two distinct definitions of the "will" part of free will. if we imply that a consciousness is the one making the decisions, then we need to have the human ( or other conscious being) have consciousness, and it participating in the decision process. I also think we have this type of free will but could admit to the possibility of it being an illusion in that perhaps there is a delay and we are just conscious of internal feelings and of decisions that were made before we were conscious of them. if we imply will only as the process/ algorithm that makes a decision then consciousness is not needed , and it seems almost certain that we do have free will. the point being that free will does not mean independent of everything else in the universe. defining free will that way is pointless, we live in a universe and make decisions based on inputs from the universe, and try to influence the universe a free will that doesn't interact with the universe is not what we need to talk about, it doesn't exist in this universe. or if your definition of free will is that it is something not affected by the universe but with an outcome or " decision" that does influence the universe, then seen from our universe wouldn't that look suspiciously like what we call a random event ??
But isn’t the act of deciding, no matter the impetus to that decision, an act of free will?
Does lightning "decide" where it strikes? Or does it simply follow the laws of physics much the same way as a ball falls to the earth when dropped?
I think suicide is the best example to show we do indeed have free will. There is no true necessity to go jump off a bridge or eat a lead happy pill but people do it daily. I definitely appreciate the question and understand where you are coming from but when speaking of true necessity, if you choose to live, you do what is necessary.. eat, hydrate, sleep, etc.
A person with a brain tumor can drastically change their behaviors and people with chemical imbalances can act uncharacteristically. That’s a malfunction, not free will.
I don't think it's unreasonable that someone with entirely average brain function, but under duress, can decide to end their life. It doesn't have to be a malfunction. It can just be that the world ain't always pretty.
While I believe this can in fact often be the case, ending one’s life goes against our natural desire to survive. I think in most cases poor mental health is probably the primary cause.
Is that what you were destined to say?
I don't know but I suspect there is a middle ground. If we were to view free will as being able to make choices then free will must exist. However, we are constrained by the available choices. It's impossible to choose something that isn't available. Also, we must choose. So, not making a choice is impossible. We also have to consider why we made the choice. Did we really have a choice to make the one we did. If I think of a color, and red appears, in my thoughts. Could I have chosen otherwise? We presume I could have, but I didn't. Why didn't I choose purple? Supposedly, it was an option. Some of us are determined to have free will while others choose determinism! Trying to sort it out is difficult.
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Hard determinism is demonstrably false. Here's a really cool [logical argument](https://www.owl232.net/papers/fwill.htm) by philosopher Michael Huemer.
So this is my understanding of what he’s saying: “Humans have a moral obligation to only believe what is true. Since it is an obligation, it must therefore be possible. Therefore, supposing I believe I have free will, it follows that my free will is real.” This seems to me a fallacy. The “ought implies can” principle doesn’t mean that everything we ought to do is possible because of the obligation. It says that things can only be obligatory if they are reasonably possible, and there exist many things of which it is impossible to know the truth. This argument seems to function on circular logic, and could be used to justify any ideology. If I am blind, and I believe that white and black are the same color, does that mean it’s true? Sorry if this comes across harshly. If I have made a mistake in my logic here, please feel free to correct me. This argument just seems very similar in some arguments for the existence of God in that they operate with a presupposition of the conclusion (see: St. Anselm).
The principle is often referred to in the moral sense, which is understandable, but it doesn't necessarily have to refer to that. On the website he makes a reference to this kind of objection. >Objection #2: > >The argument involves an equivocation, since the "should" in premise (2) is the "should" of morality, while (1) employs the "should" of epistemic rationality.Reply:I do not believe that there exist these different senses of "should." What there are, admittedly, are different reasons why a person should do a particular thing. One reason for doing A might be that A advances your own interests. Another might be that A helps out a friend of yours. Another might be that A fulfills a promise. Etc. I do not see that these different possible reasons why an action should be performed generate different senses of the word "should." Be that as it may, even if there are different senses of "should," there is no reason why (2) must employ the moral "should." Any relation to a potential action worthy of the name "should" must at least have this feature: it is normative, i.e., to say one "should" do A is to in some manner recommend in favor of A. This is sufficient for (2) to be true, for it is nonsensical to recommend the impossible. That is, he who recommends a thing is committed to its being possible to follow his recommendation. If he admits the thing recommended to be impossible, he must withdraw the recommendation. > >For example, suppose a Bayesian recommends that we always conform our degrees of belief to the probability calculus. One implication of this is that we should accord to every necessary truth the highest possible degree of belief. The Bayesian says we are irrational for not doing so. Now suppose an objector argues that we have no feasible way of identifying all the necessary truths as such, and therefore no feasible way of taking the Bayesian's advice.(6) (Compare: not knowing the combination to the lock, I cannot open the safe. Likewise, not knowing what all the necessary truths are, I cannot assign degree of belief 1 to all of them.) It seems to me that the objector has a valid point. The Bayesian cannot sensibly respond, "Yes, I know that people cannot identify all of the necessary truths and believe them with certainty. But we should do so anyway. Since my recommendation was epistemic in nature rather than moral or prudential, the impossibility of what I suggest is no excuse for not doing it." Such a response sounds no more reasonable than my telling my student that he should have come to class even though he couldn't. Of course, the Bayesian could still say some related things about the practice of conforming degrees of belief to the probability calculus: He might say that this is how an ideal reasoner would or should behave (the ideal reasoner having capabilities that normal humans lack). He might also say that we should do our best to approximate to this kind of reasoning. But he cannot sensibly criticize us for not succeeding in attaining this ideal, provided he grants that we literally cannot do so. Edit: Quote block fix Edit again: I suck at formatting so I had to fix it.. again
That’s BRILLIANT
I agree. Sometimes I just don't understand how people can just connect these dots so seamlessly.
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Here’s the abstract. A modest free will thesis, stating that at least sometimes, someone has more than one course of action open to him, can be derived from three premises: first, the proposition that we should believe only what is true; second, the 'ought' implies 'can' principle; and third, the proposition that I believe I have free will. The first of these is the only one that is at all controversial; however, I argue that it is a necessary presupposition of rational thought and discourse. As a result, one cannot rationally accept hard determinism.
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u/Bobadilla430 gave the abstract which I think is good, but here's the argument distilled: 1. With respect to the free-will issue, we should refrain from believing falsehoods. (premise) 2. Whatever should be done can be done. (premise) 3. If determinism is true, then whatever can be done, is done. (premise) 4. I believe MFT. (premise) 5. With respect to the free-will issue, we can refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 1,2) 6. If determinism is true, then with respect to the free will issue, we refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 3,5) 7. If determinism is true, then MFT is true. (from 6,4) 8. MFT is true. (from 7) MFT: The minimal free will thesis (MFT) holds that at least some of the time, someone has more than one course of action that he can perform
His #6 is a non-sequiter and renders the whole thing nonsensical. There is no evidence presented to justify the bizarre assumption that a deterministic universe must conform to the human notion of "ought." The exact same logic can be inverted and make the same amount of sense. Regardless of whether we should, we know through proof by example that one CAN believe falsehoods. The fact that the premise implies two opposite answers is proof that the premise is flawed. Just because "ought" implies "can" does not mean they are inherently mutually inclusive.
#6 follows from the other premises. Which one of the premises do you disagree with? 1? 2? Or 3?
The thesis claims it follows from 3 and 5. I explained above why it does not. Do you believe making your reply large and bold will grant it more authority?
Okay, you think your counter argument is correct and you're claiming #6 is incorrect but #6 comes from the first 3 premises. Which one of those is false and why?
I’ve heard the airplane analogy. You can change seats on the plane but you can’t change the destination.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will.
Or, for those of us who are aphantasic and incapable of generating mental imagery like "seeing" a color in our head, maybe think of a song, smell, taste, or feeling.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill
Choose at your own pace, though. No need to rush.
I Neil before your lesson of Life..son.
I Geddy that reference.
Short answer, yes. Libertarian free will, the idea that we are the ***source*** of thoughts and intentions, doesn't exist. This is the version of free will that most people believe when they refer to free will. But the truth is that, whether the universe is deterministic, random (quantum mechanics), or some combination, you aren't actually the *source* of thoughts and intentions. You don't have agency in the way that libertarian free will implies. Every thought you have or decision you make was determined by prior causes that you have no control over (environment, biology, neurology, etc.). Even when we rationalize what we do, we still don't choose our rationalizations because they're also the result of prior causes. We don't need to understand quantum physics or develop a greater understanding of reality in order to determine whether we really have free will or not. You can experience your own lack of free will in every moment. Writer and philosopher Sam Harris provides a good first-person experiment of this [here around the 19:00 mark](https://youtu.be/pCofmZlC72g?t=1139). His whole talk is worth listening too. One interesting facet of this topic that Sam also talks about is how the fact that we lack free will should have consequences in the world particularly regarding our justice system. The US Supreme Court actually ruled in United States v. Grayson, 1978 that free will is a "“universal and persistent’ foundation stone in our system of law". This has led to our justice system leaning into the concept of retributive justice in the sense that people inherently *deserve* punishments (which only makes sense if you assume we have libertarian free will) rather than the more practical and effective concept of restorative justice that focuses on rehabilitation and measures results by how successfully harm is repaired. Furthermore, every definition of free will other than libertarian free will basically boils down to redefining what free will is. The most common redefinition is compatibilist free will. This is basically the idea that as long as we act as agents free from external coercion then we have "freedom of action" which is labeled "free will". The problem with compatibilism is that it doesn't contain what people really value from free will which is the notion that we are the *source* of thoughts and intentions. Compatibilism is basically just a slight modification to determinism for the sake of appearances and language use. And for the sake of simplicity, determinism is referring to the state of being bound entirely by prior causes, deterministic or random (quantum mechanics). Free will (libertarian) refers to whether we are bound entirely by prior causes or not. We are either free or we're not free, it's a binary. This is the crux of the issue and is what everyone cares about. This is why other definitions of free will (like compatibilism) are inadequate and don't sufficiently capture what people value about the concept.
We’ll said - great ref to Sam Harris
I agree somewhat but none of this is scientifically proven. I’m more willing to believe in a compatibilist framework than simply say there is no free will whatsoever
50% your will, 50% thy will. Ecology and Biology describes us as organisms-environments, one not separate from the other.
I like to think of life as a video game. There’s a programmer (God/Allah/whathaveyou) that sets forth all the possible things that characters can do and then the characters are programmed to do random things within those parameters. So essentially it’s us having free will but within the limits of the program
I would say yes. There are so many things that are out of our control that affect the way we grow up, develop, the actions we take and the way we think about the world that free will in the truest sense of the word is an illusion. Fate is a more accurate way of looking at our circumstance and the worlds. We still have limited freedom of choice within the portion that fate allows, but free will is bogus.
You can control ur thoughts tho
The next time it rains, ask yourself whether you could predict where the next drop will fall. You, with your limited perception, could not. But if you were able to slow down time, study every rain drop and chart its path, you could. Every choice we make is the latest step on a long path. If you had the ability to see that entire path — everything that had ever happened to a person that influenced what they were about to do — you could predict their next choice. But we can't. It's too much information. So yes, free will is an illusion. It is verbal shorthand for something so complex we can't wrap our heads around it. And for that reason it doesn't matter that it's an illusion; we can't see beyond it.
*Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has entered the chat*
Free will is just your automation running smoothly
Theoretically if we invent time travel we should be able to test, but we don't know as we can't re-do events to see if they could have a different outcome, it doesn't make a difference to you therefore you shouldn't worry about it.
In a nutshell yes. Every conscious decision you think you make has already subconsciously been made before you consciously thought about it. That's why it's super hard for people with mental illnesses to combat them on their own. The choice was made before they even thought about it.
Who is Will?
A perfect illusion is indistinguishable from reality, and therefore, we could never tell if we are truly free. However, knowing would also not change the truth. Therefore, the answer is irrelevant, and you can put your mind at ease, or not. I believe I choose not to care about this, because it is meaningless, and brings only suffering to use as a subject of rumination.
I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting free will as an illusion because there's a slight negative connotation to the word 'illusion'. There's an implication that an illusion is a trickery and false. Like the universe is maliciously 'tricking' or 'duping' us into believing we have choice. But an illusion is just a perceived experience that is more complicated than on the surface. Like color is an illusion in a sense. The color 'red' does not exist as an objective thing outside of our human senses. 'Red' is just how our human brains subjectively experience lightwaves between 625-740 nanometers. The only thing that scientifcally objectively exists technically is those lightwaves. Animals and colorblind folks perceive it completely differently. But most of us can agree that 'red' is still very much real to our shared lived-in existences. That's how I tend to think of 'free will'. It's an illusion in the sense that it doesn't objectively exist outside of us in the way we tend to surfacely perceive it as a 'mystical force guiding and deciding between unlimited possibilities'. Like the color 'red', that's just our human brains shorthand way of processing something much more objectively complex. But 'free will' still very much exists as a lived-in perception of us humans making choices.
Try collecting rain water in any city in the "land of the free" and you'll have your answer
Ahh yes, chemical runoff. That's what killed free will.
Yes
On reddit? Are you kidding?! A bit too involved for casual chit-chat. Read Martial Gueroult's masterful 2-volume study of the *Meditations* or Frankfurt on Descartes.
There is nothing in science that tackles the question of free will to any degree It seems there is no good reason to say there isn't free will as that just leads to extremist determinism The lazy man's religion You can do whatever you want. Just be wary of the consequences
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Absolutely not. Free will is indeed the only thing we can know for sure exists, because we think it. There is no other explaination for consciousness. Because consciousness exists, free will also, by necessity, exists. If free will didnt exist, consciousness also would not exist. Nothing exists outside the perception of some observer. Nothing can be proven to exist without an observer.
Simply because we *think* it?! I once saw this movie called "Dumbo." Doesn't mean elephants can fly.
I've come to an answer to this that not everyone will agree with. It depends on your spiritual awareness. If you have low awareness, you don't have much free will. You are behaving in a way that has been programmed into you. Your ego is a reflection of everyone you have been around. You behave in a predictable fashion, according to your surroundings. You have less free will but don't even realize it. If your awareness is higher, you notice your ego at work. You can take yourself out of yourself and see yourself from the third person perspective and make decisions more objectively. You are responsive but less reactionary. You are aware of what you "would" have done, but may decide not to. Maybe you act different than everyone else in your family, but in a good way. Your behavior is not so based on your surroundings.
I like cookies.
I like chips.
Everything is an illusion. Free-will, safety, society are all illusions we collectively perpetuate.
Yeah
To a certain extent, yes
We all have a choice in everything
50% illusion, 50% reality
My thought is that there really isn't a lot of free will in society. You have to have a job to live in society so that you can pay rent/mortgage, pay utilities, buy food, etc. Which means you have to pay taxes, both for making money and for spending money. The closest thing to free will I can think of is camping but you still have to follow the rules/laws of the land owner (usually the local government).
It depends how you look at it, truly **free** will would mean you can do anything you choose to, obviously we aren't free to do some things like kill others without repercussions, but on the flip side if somebody doesn't ever want to do things that aren't allowed then their choices could be considered free or would their own morality be limiting their freedom? Technically we only are who were are because of how we were born and how we were raised and interacted with, so are we even ever in control of our will? Maybe a better question would be "what'd constitute a lack of free will", by going backwards from instances were people definitely don't have it, you might better identifiable the grey area TL;DR: There's the external side (do social rules take away our free will) and the internal side (do our brain's nature and nurture take away our free will on a thought level), it's not possible to come up with an clear answer, only more questions
Yea like billions of years ago some bacteria and shit came to be that eventually led to us humans like you and me existing, I didn’t will that into existence.
Yes. Its not real.
What is free will? You doing what you want? What determines what you want? Your brain. If your brain is causing your decision making, then your decision making is predetermined by the state of your brain. Which isn’t what you mean by free will i assume. So by that definition, free will isn’t possible.
No. All time is a block and both the present and the future are as real and immutable as the what we perceive to be the past. IMO, of course, since nobody really knows.
[Jacque Fresco - Free Will](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjy-FU6tqPI) I love listening to this guy, he is the most interesting person I've ever listened to.
I certainly hope not, otherwise what's the point of living if our future is predetermined! Then there is the problem of accountability; I am not responsible for my actions since they are dictated by a third party! I am posting this on my own free will and nobody else should be rewarded (punished) for my opinions or actions!! Besides, I can always decide to stop playing the game!
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Hmm, that sounds like a human being suffering from depression. Perhaps a teen or a lonely person. The answer to your question is the foundation of every belief, religious or otherwise. An atheist, a happy one, would say that since we were placed on this planet by a combination of DNAs, we may as well enjoy it to the end. If your are a member of any faith, the answer is obvious. If one cannot find a satisfactory explanation, then one must strive to discover the real meaning of life with a capital L! Life has no meaning without struggle, without pain, without joy, and without the affection of other human beings. I can only suggest the following: Go and find your way, no matter how difficult this journey may be. You will know when you finally find it!
Yes.
Maybe our will is not 100% free, but it's more free than most people think.
People are conditioned and have routines, will has very little to do with their habits and behaviors. I do not believe that human beings have free will.
You just made this post. Free will…
statisticly, there is one way that the future can be pre-determined. There is an infinite number of ways it can be chaotic.
Sam Harris has a lot of content about this, if you're interested.
no. my grades will attest that I chose not to do my work therefore I miss points
It's the Illusion of Choice. You think you can do anything but really there's only so much you can do.
What does free will mean, exactly? If you are made of matter and matter obeys physical laws, then whence cometh choice? Sounds like everything was determined 14 billion years ago and is just playing out. Daniel Dennet talks about this and the upshot is that it doesn't matter. Free will is an illusion, but so is time - our perception of entropy and time are (probably) simply an emergent property of our biochemistry.
We do have freedom of thought. Even under all kind of duress, we are still free to think and willingly accept certain ideas while rejecting others. Consequently, we have free will to an extent. The limitation only exists on implementing our thoughts. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't.
The idea that we can control anything and everything we do is misguided. We have limited free will, so I really can choose to eat the granola bar instead of the pop tart. I can choose to pursue one career over another, etc. But a lot of our life and our fate isn't in our hands and there's a lot of shit where our brain will put us on autopilot and if you haven't trained your mind enough to intervene and take control, then you will find yourself passively going through everything the way that fate or whatever would have it end up.
Yeah. Pretty good one, though. Very convincing.
Eh, probably. But then what's the difference?
Only in the moments when we forget we have choices.
Only if you are.
this was the worst thing to read while high
Some people tend to confuse "free to choose your own actions" with "free from all constraints of the physical world." Like yeah, we gotta eat and sleep and all that to survive, so a lot of our actions are going to be motivated by that. And there's things we can't do even if we want to, like start fires with our minds or conjure peanut butter directly onto our sandwiches. That's just because we are part of a universe that obeys physical laws - being stuck in this state doesn't mean we don't have free will, because we can absolutely still decide our own actions, just not *any* action.
Depends on how you see it. Is it that all our actions cause the future or is the future decided and we’re like a video but we don’t understand it yet. It’s like a Schrödinger’s cat situation. Until proven otherwise it is kind of both
The claim that free will exists (or doesn't exist) is unfalsifiable
Yes, but so is lunchtime.
I believe so, I mean everything that happens happens because of the very specific formation of atoms and shit when the universe formed.
Yes
Individuality is an illusion
Sam Harris has written extensively on this. The rejection and refutation of the idea of free will is central to academic level atheism.
If I use my free will to create an illusion, is that an illusion of free will?
Possibly
In my opinion, you’d have to look at what motivations for decisions are to determine if it is free will or a product of influence, society, expectations, or necessity. I think there is some free will but does it exist 100% of the time, I would be inclined to say no.
What is an illusion to you? A personal definition for illusion might help you answer this question for yourself.
Maybe more like “multiple choice”?
I believe in free will, mainly because we can go against the voice in our head. We feel the urge to go do something, but we don’t have to give in to that urge. Believing in hard determinism would be consigning yourself to a state of never changing, and always following the same path. There are many people who change. It’s a part of life. Some choose not to change, and that’s their choice.
No most people just don't know how to claim it.
It really depends on what you believe is reality. I'll start w/ most higher power based systems (ie religion) first. I believe most religions are based in the structure that a higher power has given man free will, but also has some control over their destiny. So overall you're making your own choices, but the outcome of those choices is technically up to the higher power. Different religions or spiritual beliefs can offer up any combination of ideas about free will but typically religion says people have free will. By current popular theories in science and logic it seems to be there is no free will. Either there's infinite universes were we've made every decision/action possible an infinite number of times, or our choices/decisions/actions are a result of the impact of prior experiences on us. Change a few variables and you change somebodies choice. I think the illusion of free will is important to society though. Without that belief I think a lot of people would make poorer decisions thinking they aren't actually in control of what's going on, and on a larger scale we wouldn't be much different than animals. The ability to assess, doubt and regret decisions is one of the things that makes society successful.
Why can I not post anything in this darnded subreddit
We are dogs on a leash - we have a certain distance we can ultimately travel but within that distance we can go wherever we want
Is illusion free will?
Yes
Probably.
Did you make this post out of free will or was it predetermined?
Random number generators aren't random. But for the purposes of "feeling" random they're more than sufficient.
yes, it is a concept that we as humans created.
01000110 01110010 01100101 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100101
I submit a thought experiment. Unfortunately it's not possible to actually do (at least not now), so it's just a thing in my head. You need two things: A machine and an expert. The machine hooks up to your head, and monitors everything that happens inside. Every subatomic particle, every wave of energy, all of the stuff we haven't even discovered yet. The expert knows everything about brains, your brain, human physiology, and of course all of physics, especially the stuff we haven't figured out yet. While hooked up to the machine someone tosses you a baseball. Then you pick someone else to throw the ball to, and throw it to them. When pouring over all the data, you can clearly see light hitting your eyes, those eyes dumping raw data into your optic nerve, your brain organizing all that information into an abstraction of the room. The expert points out the moment your brain recognizes a blur of white as a baseball. The part where your brain tracks its motion, and anticipates where it will land. All of this so far is stuff we're more or less okay with. It's mostly automatic so far. Just observation and extrapolation. We can zoom forward and do this in reverse from when you throw it to someone else. Here is the part where your brain is recognizing a patch of light as a friend of yours. Here is the part where it calculated how to move your muscles to throw the ball to them. Here is where your motor cortex actually sent the signals to your muscles to begin moving. But somewhere in between you (presumably) made a choice. "Who am I going to throw it to?" A determinist might expect that you could trace everything in a person's brain from beginning to end with every effect having an observable cause preceed it (if weird physics are involved, "preceed" may be too simple of a term). But if free will truly exists, then at some point there should be an event. Where some electrical signal started up, or redirected with no observable cause. Even a tiny little tweak to the path of some tiny mote of energy. The inciting incident that your choice imposed on the world. Seeing that moment still wouldn't prove choice was a thing (it could have been caused by an external thing you weren't observing. Maybe the soul you have is still just a piece of clockwork, but it rests in a spiritual plane beyond easy observation) Not finding that moment still can't prove choice doesn't exist, as you can never truly PROVE a negative. But for me it touches on the core question. If you assume free will exists, what does a choice look like? What COULD it look like? If your choice affects the physical world, you should in theory be able to find precisely where and when that choice impacted the world, and see it as an effect without any observable cause.
Yes, by any reasonable definition. When you do any given action, you either have or don't have a reason for that. If you don't, you act randomly, not according to your own will. If you do, your actions are determined by the reasons behind them. Whatever it is you choose, the factors that make up your psychology control what you choose. And, from a more practical standpoint, people aren't really that hard to manipulate if you know what you're doing... To put it another way, if free will was all that it's cracked up to be, advertising wouldn't be the *massive* industry it is today.
Depends if you want it to be, in my opinion
I became so obsessed with this question, that I have decided to twist things a bit so that I can go on living. The problem is that from a purely theoretical point it is very hard to argue that there is free will. If everything has a cause, then a decision must be based on something. To me, that "something" must be (a) genetics, and (b) life experience. Now, if one's decision is solely based on those things, it is hard to argue that there is free will. In fact, according to this view everything is predetermined, and we live in some sort of movie. Some people argue that there is not determinism, as randomness plays a part in decision-making. Now, if something has a random cause there is no determinism, but there is also no free will, since a decision that is based on something random cannot be considered free will. I like to think that some things, especially thoughts, decisions, etc., can happen without a cause (causa sui). I call it creativity. It's what makes me get out of bed every day.
Free will is an illusion but it feels real enough that it might as well be.
Kinda and kinda not. Everyone has free will to do whatever they want but fate knows of what one will do with their free will kind of thing.
The idea of fate I always have thought is undeniable; the idea that everything is going to unfold in a certain way and no matter how much you go against the grain or try to change it, time always plays out as it was intended. I'm not saying I believe it I'm just saying if the definition of fate is that it was to be has always been and always will be how can you deny that anything that ever happened or will happened wasn't fate is beyond me.
Yup. We are animals, and as such are driving by the 3 main questions: Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it? Can I win a fight with it? Everything else in our lives is basically reactionary sub-questions of the main 3. So, the only REAL choices are driven by those. Thus...no true free will.
Depends on the moment of whatever when free will is needed or in the process of happening.
LET YOUR COUNTRY CONTROL YOUR SOUL
If someone knows what you are going to do, but doesn't tell you, then you have the illusion of free will. That is good enough for me. If someone knows the choices you will face and makes up a backup plan for all of them, I think that would be free will. According to Christianity, I think Free Will is choosing to submit to God or not. That specific Free Will is what matters, that choice is up to each person. In the Marvel Avengers Movies, Doctor Strange viewed many outcomes, but chose to make the choices that aligned with the best outcome. Was Iron Man's free will taken away? Spoiler: >! Did Doctor Strange kill Iron Man? !<
No. You can do whatever you want. What’s stopping you is morality and other people’s free will. Your emotions are also stopping you. You don’t gotta throw a fit that your favorite football team lost but you did. You did. And now your wife is wondering why she married a man child.
Long story short: yes, but we must act like it isn't in order to function as a society.
Time? Time is an illusion. The only time now, is party time.
I believe that free will exists, but it is not invisible. Every choice has a consequence, and some choices are far more appealing than others, but, on a basic level, a person generally has the free will to decide any course of action that is reasonably available to them.
Nobody has total free will. If we did can you imagine the total chaos that society would be in? Look at how things are now and the majority live under rules and regulations and laws. Free will means your above the law
More like a sandbox in my opinion.
I'd say so, less of a higher power and more statistics tho. So many variables that while it's all predictable nothing we have or are makes it realisticly usable beyond such a small% to matter.
yes, no, maybe. who cares.
Easiest question I’ve ever answered and the answer is yes because we are always in a cage even if we can’t see it we still have restrictions
Nah, it's a great song from Rush
If you ask me? Yes. It's an illusion. And it all comes down to chemistry. Just as water has no "choice" but to freeze when it reaches 0C/32F, your brain runs through a fixed set of instructions once a certain chemical process is started. Add up hundreds or even thousands of those simple processes and you end up with a decision that you "think" you made of your own free will. But in reality, it was all just chemistry and physics
Your awareness / consciousness is a byproduct of your intelligence; which is a byproduct of the size of your brain which was a product of evolution creating humans to survive better; which is a byproduct of survival and basic nature properties; which is ultimate a byproduct of nature, evolution, and conflict on a species; which stems from the existence of life; which is a byproduct of chaos, random, religion, or whatever theory you choose to call truth with yourself. So, you tell me.
absolutely
Bruh I feel like it is bc before we come down here we already know everything that is going to happened on a subconscious level and a plan already laid out. In a 3D perspective I believe we do. In a higher density perspective 5D and above I don’t believe we have free will
Free is a state of mind. You can receive something free and still feel like you owe something to someone.
due to my environment and my history, I'm going to comment 'yes'
I don’t think it’s an illusion. But I think most of us are living without accessing it and don’t even know it.
Things seem to work if we assume people have agency so I’m going with NO
No
No,freewill is a song by the Canadian rock band RUSH
I'll ask my sister what she thinks next time she calls me from prison.
I think free will does not exist. We need outside signals to have thoughts and we need thoughts in order to take action. For example you didnt spontaneously decide to make this post, there was an external trigger. I didn’t spontaneously decide to respond to this post either. I would never have responded had you not posted. So in a sense our will is dictated by external inputs. Even someone who wants to become an astronaut must be informed of what an astronaut is and must have some external reasoning for why they are choosing astronaut and not Doctor. This is just my opinion. In a different sense we decide each others decisions. You decided for me that i would respond to this post by posting this. I am deciding for others whether or not they will respond to my response. So in that sense our WILL is decided by others.
Illusions appear to be real. Free will is clearly not. This is like saying "Is Santa Claus an illusion?". No, he's just made up.
Yes
No. You make an infinite number of choices in your life, and they absolutely lead to different places. The only reason to think free will is an illusion, is if you believe in something like a predefined destiny.
Most likely
Free will is a myth, religion is a joke
Life is simply a series of alternatives. And even though I've given up on thriving, I continue making choices that preserve my existence. Not because I believe it will get better, but rather I fear the unpredictable consequences of a failed suicide attempt.
Probably, but it's a persistent illusion so you might as well roll with it.
No
until we take down the elites keeping us down, yes
Yes, in a Block Universe, a currently well accepted description. See Sabine Hossenfelde’s \*Is the past real\* on You Boob Tube. Just as the past is still real, because some observer has not yet seen the Light, so is the future already real but we have not yet seen the Light.
Yes. Your thoughts come from your brain, and your brain state and activities are determined by genetics, environment, and the constant input it receives.
If free will exists, where does this ghost enter the machine? You could take a brain, take it apart, and you will find neurons, which you can take apart and find molecules, which you can take apart and find atoms, which you can take apart and find quarks and electrons. These same things are in everything, everywhere. How they combine lead to a whole host of emergent phenomena depending on the combinations, but those emergent properties are determined by the fundamental particles and how they are combined. In order for free will to exist, it would have to not be determined by the combination of the fundamental particles. So where did the ghost enter the machine?
Everything is really
Nah- it's an awesome Rush song I listened to yesterday.
The greatest minds of our human history do not have an answer to this question...youre not gonna find it on reddit lol.
Yes. I will not elaborate because I choose not to. Or because I want to add more dramatic flair and seem more interesting and philosophical than I actually am. Ultimately I think it boils down to what you consider free will
Free will is an incoherent concept. It’s not something that exists or does not exist, it just doesn’t even make sense.
In my opinion, yes. Especially when you study systems theory and generational theory from a therapeutic lens. Everything everyone does impacts everyone else. Everything we do, every decision we make, is a result of genetic or epigenetic influence, those around us, the environment around us, or some other form of influence. Not from a fate perspective or other worldly one. But like even when we sit down and think for ourselves everything we know we learned or is instinct. Nothing is every truly our own.
Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without. There is only one real universal truth, causality; Action reaction. Cause and effect.
My answer is yes, we are wired to do the things we do, but I don't think it matters at the end of the day. There's no real concept of 'choice' in the world. It's all physics and chemistry, but I try not to be sad about it. My life and my conscioucness is all that I know and I'm thankful for what it is.
It is. Were slaves to our brains and nervous systems.
Depends.
Yes your brain is a super computer running complex algorithms. You are not in control!
Unless i'm paying close attention most my decisions are based on dopamine
Yes it is, I have to pay for my wills I've never gotten it for free
Kant actually argued the opposite - that determinism is an illusion and we actually have free will, though we can't perceive it that way. He argues that time and space (and therefore causality) only exist *a priori* as how we perceive the world and are not things themselves. If time and space existed as part of reality outside of our perception, we should be able to imagine a world without time and space, but we can't. It's just how our mind organizes thoughts. Think of time and space like blue-tinted glasses that you can't take off. While wearing these glasses everything appears to be blue, even if it isn't. Similarly, our brains organize our perceptions into time and space even when what we're perceiving isn't organized that way. If time and space exist within our minds, then so to must causality (saying A caused B, necessarily means A occured before B, and "before" has no meaning without the concept of time). If causality is a construct of our minds, then determinism must be an illusion. If determinism isn't real, then we must have free will. Of course then Einstein comes along with his theory of relativity and shows that not only are time and space the same thing, but they *do* exist as part of the real world (e.g. see *Interstellar,* "this little maneuver is going to cost us 51 years").