Does dispelling free will do any good?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Because preliminary studies suggest no. When people were shown information that dispelled free will, it ended up making them worse off for it.

Honestly I would have to agree. I know that current neuroscience and psychology is leaning towards determinism but spreading such an idea around would reduce our view of others as machines (and that never works out well). It’s dehumanizing. It would rob us of any sense of achievement and praise would be worthless, it could very well destroy love while we are at it (not the chemical but the concept). I think this is a subject to leave well enough alone.

2

How can you “dispell” free will?

3

Dispel magic spell?

4

What does this even mean? Does fake news constitute information that dispels free will? Does the US army dispel free will?

5

Like so:

e l w f e r i l

6

No, you’ve got to trick free will into saying “lliw eefr”.

7

Was this one of those studies that didn’t hold up under Nature’s close re-examination?

8

Please show us the studies that disprove free will.

Seems like the best place for this discussion to start, I should think! Let’s see some of them.

9

While we are at it, would you like us to disprove flying purple unicorns?

10

Do flying purple unicorns have free will and, if so, how do we go about dispelling it?

11

The flying purple unicorns are the ones that do have free will. The white ones are just slogging through life like automata while the purple ones are those that dare to fly through grapevines.

12

Our weekly “Philosophy makes me sad” thread! Do doctors still offer lobotomies, if you ask them nicely?

Personally, I’ve never heard a definition of “free will” that doesn’t fall apart immediately upon even modest scrutiny, so I certainly don’t see how the lack of one is supposed to make me feel bad. You mean I make decisions based on who I am as a person and the experiences that have shaped my personality over the years rather than, I don’t know, a quantum coin flip? How depressing!

13

I don’t believe that I have free will.

And yet I’m functional. I haven’t leapt off any tall buildings yet. I might not be the most passionate person in the world, but I am not a nihilist either.

I simply don’t believe that my decision-making apparatus is completely knowable to me. So I try to refrain from making up shitty judgmental stories to explain why I am the person I am and why others are the way they are. For instance, I just spent the last couple of weeks on vacation with my manic, hyperactive, emotionally needy older sister. Is she the way she is because she chooses to be? Or are all her quirks the manifestation of her biology? Going with the latter explanation allows me to have more compassion for her.

14

I know, or at least believe, that I make decisions (choices) based on calculations. I calculated the net benefit to me, practically and emotionally (e.g., empathy) and the likely side-effects of my choice which may affect me directly, indirectly, or cascade around me in positive or negative ways. Most of the time, the bulk of these calculations occur in the background, below my level of perception. Sometimes I find myself retracing the route I took to reach a decision, in an effort to improve the quality of my decision making – some of the retracing is difficult, and I might guess at what some of the subroutines were that informed my decision (e.g., “free will”).

If a significant choice cannot adequately be explained, I might ascribe the selection to arbitrary randomness: one or more factors were so evenly balanced that I just tossed a mental coin or rolled a mental die. To me, this is where “free will” fits: it is not distinguishable from randomness; hence, it is not meaningful. If I do a thing knowing that the result will be bad, that simply means that there is something wrong with my facility of reason, which I really ought to fix if I can.

15

I think it likely that I can trace a choice I make to contributing factors. But that does not mean I can predict my choice before I make it, since many of the things that contribute to it are happening in real time.

Being depressed by this is as silly as being depressed by winning the lottery since the fall of the balls that match your number can be accounted for by physics. Doesn’t mean you know them ahead of time.

16

I don’t know why so many people are mocking your (the OP’s) expression of the question. It seems pretty obvious what’s being asked and it’s a valid question.

We aren’t really capable of comporting ourselves in our daily lives as if we were not in charge of ourselves, making our own decisions. The people who believe in free will (as I do) would say that’s because we bloody well are the ones making our own decisions, whereas the people who believe free will does not exist would probably say it’s a compelling illusion, one that, as deterministically bound creatures, we are unable to escape. (There are also some people who claim to be living their lives without any experience of themselves as creatures of free will, but I think there’s a communications breakdown there – that doesn’t even parse, that’s like someone asserting that they are not conscious).

Temporarily setting aside the “free will, real or illusory” debate, yes it does make sense to ask what, if anything, is gained from embracing the belief (or perspective, if you hate to use “belief” in this context) that free will does not exist.

• Does embracing that notion put the person who embraces it more accurately in possession of a valid concept of reality? Assuming (for the sake of argument) that free will is indeed illusory, yes – but yes with an asterisk. If the illusion can’t be set aside, and a person’s life is kind of at the center of their own reality, we’re staring at a Clintonesque “what does is mean?” question here, aren’t we?

• Does seeing the world in those terms make a specific individual a “better citizen” / “better person” in some fashion? Maybe. Here, in particular, I think it is important to completely ignore the question of whether free will does or does not actually exist and look at the impact of the belief itself. It is thought by some people that in considering the behaviors of other people, those folks who think no one possesses free will woud be less judgmental and more compassionate. You see this notion crop up at least tangentially in a lot of debates about free will. The flip side is the notion that people who believe in free will, when considering the behaviors of other people, would be more vindictive, due to being inclined to think everyone is responsible for their own behaviors and hence should be judged for them.

On the other side of this same argument, though, maybe not. So far we’ve only looked at the effects of the belief on how folks might evaluate the behaviors of other people. The OP is focusing our attention on how folks evaluate their own behaviors. It does seem intrinsically nihilistic. If we ourselves do not choose our own behaviors, if we are merely reflexive biological contraptions in a stimulus-response equation, then we can never put our finger on any cause worth fighting for: there is only an internalized patterned response taking the form of a belief that some cause is worth fighting for, and now that the illusion of free will has been exposed, we realize we’ve just been programmed to see it that way. (so why bother; if we’d been born under Adolf Hitler’s exact situation we’d be holding his views, and worse yet there is no possibility of doing an evaluation that can say his views themselves are less good than the ones we hold now. NOTHING MATTERS) Keep in mind that we aren’t studying what it means for no free will to exist but what it means for individual people to believe that no free will exists.

• Does getting ALL (or most of) the individuals to see the world in those terms make the collective SOCIETY a better society, one that is more peaceful or less authoritarian or less chaotic? I dont think so. I think the proliferation of this belief, insofar as it is an individual-level disincentive to seeking social change for the reasons listed above, discourages social progress and creates a milieu in which it is difficult to argue that anything whatsoever is better than anything else whatsoever. It’s an anti-idealistic attitude, ultimately, in my opinion, although well-wrapped in the notion that it reduces judgmental attitudes.

17

I agree with a lot of what AHunter3 says, but I feel like on the whole a disbelief in free will could make society better, though this is admittedly in my own biased and idealistic view.

I tend to think that most people recognize in themselves a conscience that feels bad when others experience pain, but the conscience tends to be tempered by a feeling that some people deserve pain due to their actions.

If the feeling that anyone would deserve pain can be eliminated by eliminating the idea that such people are in fact responsible for their actions, then all that would be left is the conscience and natural empathy.

Of course, as I said before, my belief in this natural conscience and empathy is a really idealistic view of the world.

18

This is the article:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/480750/

19

Man evolved to be a semi-social animal. That is, not capable of living as an individual in complete isolation without cooperative intraspecies support, like a falcon, but also not dependent on group-function like ants or bees. We cannot simply undo what evolution has created.

Free will is just a term that we have coined to describe the capacity and propensity of men to individually find their own way within the fabric or social cooperation. Within limits, an individual can choose or be coerced to shift his own activities within that semi-social range, and it would be “inhuman” to go out of tolerance.

When convicts were sent out to Australia, there were no walls or guards around Botany Bay. Every man was free to walk off into the bush and make it on his own. None did. There is not a single record of a convict surviving more than a few days in the bush, excising total free will.

20

And here is the money-quote
Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements.

“Free will” attempts to divorce the individual from their environment, internalizing the decision process. It must exist unconstrained and must have no foreseeable side-effects for it to be truly “free”. Eliminating “free will” in the minds of people would ultimately enhance our sense of community, which would probably be a good thing.