# Does no free will necessarily entail fatalism or nihilism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 29, 2024, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940 "2024-04-29T19:37:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 13
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2024, 10:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940/241 "2024-05-29T10:34:28Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > That’s not true at all, physics is well developed enough that there’s a very detailed account as to how past states lead to future states. Physics concerns itself with the pattern of how things happen, but not with why they do—with what is it about one event that makes another occur necessarily, or influences the probability of its occurrence. It just observes that it does, in some limited observational frame, and from there formulates a generalized rule by an inductive process. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Also, if there’s no cause and effect that’s not “free will”, it’s chaos and disassociation. As noted above, that’s not right: > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > And even in ‘totally’ indeterministic settings, prediction needs not be impossible. Consider a large grid of cells, that can be either black or white, and where, at each timestep, one of those cells randomly selects its state. If we initialize the whole grid as all white, and look only at its overall ‘color’ rather than at each individual cell, it’s simple to predict that it will evolve towards a grey state, and even calculate a timeframe for it to do so. > > That’s of course an artificial example, but it’s not unrealistic; in particular, the second law of thermodynamics works pretty much in this way: any random change to a system is overwhelmingly more likely to lead to a higher entropy state, so overall, systems will tend to increase their entropy. And that (and the rest of statistical mechanics) is enough to find many intriguing ways to make our will known in the world, such as building steam engines powering great industrial processes. Indeed, to the extent that physics has an explanation of how things happen, it’s given through the least (or stationary) action principle: everything occurs such as to minimize the total action. Note that this doesn’t answer the question of _why_ this should be the case, and indeed, leads to a troubling teleology: how should the system, at the start of its evolution, know what path to take such as to minimize the action? Does it look into the future? The answer is in the statistical, indeterministic nature of quantum mechanics: in the sum-over-paths formulation, the action determines the relative phase difference between different paths, such that large values of the action lead to destructive interference between them; this makes the path of least action the most likely one. So this indeterminism underlies all of our predictions in the macroscopic world. Indeed, you can formulate quantum mechanics as a completely indeterministic theory. Nelsonian stochastic mechanics is a theory of a fundamentally stochastic diffusion process (‘random walk’) over possible system configurations, and recovers the usual predictions of quantum theory (with a small technical caveat I won’t go into here), together with all its predictive successes. On the other hand, you can also formulate quantum theory in the De Broglie-Bohm way, where it is completely deterministic (indeed, in a sense this and the Nelsonian formulation are opposite ends of a spectrum of formulations)—so whether you have predictive ability is a distinct question from whether the world is fundamentally stochastic. No cause and effect does not mean chaos. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2024, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940/242 "2024-05-29T19:28:17Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > OK but bear in mind that “souls” are normally defined as being non-physical. > My position anyway is that souls don’t actually help, so let’s continue. I didn’t mean anything religious or metaphysical by that term, just an alternate word often used for the locus of self. The core identity, the part doing the thinking and choosing. The “me”. I can certainly do without that word. > [@Mijin](#): > > nimals. > Because animals, particularly higher mammals, often do have competing instincts on what we would call good and evil. And they do demonstrate compassionate or empathetic behaviours at times. Yes, mammals display behaviors that indicate complex emotions similar to humans, and studies have revealed complex social behaviors reflective of a sense of right and wrong, and a conception of fairness. What that tells _me_ is that animals might have free will, too. The notion that animals blindly follow instinct is an error. Thinking on this more, I think this, more than anything, is the driver for creating the free will concept. So perhaps this is where we get into what the term relates to. Essentially, “animals follow their instincts, but humans can choose their behavior.” If we assume humans are natural evolutionary development of animals, it follows that any experience that we have had to arise from somewhere. And given what we know about brain structure and the similarities and differences with different types of animals, and what e know about how brain structure relates to things like personality, moral sense, emotional connection, etc, it makes sense to consider mammals as having those same experiences, at least in rudimentary form. Humans have a moral sense. Other mammals seem to display this as well. Humans make decisions based upon desires and predicted outcomes. Animals seem to show this, too. Where animals seem to be limited is in self-reflection, contemplating long-term outcomes and not just immediate wants. But the process of decision making seems to be the same. Ergo, we should consider the possibility that animals have free will, too, and the steely attempt to separate us from them is flawed in one more way. > [@Mijin](#): > > My own view is this: humans are a social species. But we aren’t _that_ social. We’re quite tribal and more aggressive than many other primates. In the modern world, societies have done a good job of promoting cooperation and trying to make you feel like your tribe is “everyone”. > But we still have inner conflicts and/or want to find other humans to fight. This kind of conflict is what we call good and evil. I think you are correct about the psychology of our species, but I look at morality as the interface between self- centered needs and wants, versus social needs and wants. As social animals we have developed traits that help us interrelate to the group, and that provides survival value. So factors that cause us to share, to look to the group a well as our own self, lead to conflicts in desires. Morality is a way to sort out and prioritize motives and desires, and group versus self. And because we are animals with language, we can conceptualize, and share these competing drives, and build social structures to develop priorities as decided by the group. Long tangent, but I think it is fundamental to trying to define what is meant by “free will”. It means an ability to decide - to have a will - and for that to not be fully constrained by our biology and instincts, but be open to factors of our group and culture, and choosing welfare of others or the group over self. To me, getting hung up on the mechanism of choice as whether a decision is free or not is on the wrong track. Whatever the mechanism, we experience making choices, and allowing ourselves to contemplate different ones, and to prioritize others over self. Free will, then, isn’t in the mechanism, it’s in the ability to choose other factors besides immediate self gratification. Sorry for the long- winded post. This is me hashing out my thoughts. > [@Mijin](#): > > In general I don’t like trying to rehabilitate terms. Free will has a lot of baggage. So while I absolutely could define something like it that makes sense (as you have done), it’s just going to cause confusion if I use my version of free will in conversation. And also mean no-one ever acknowledges the issues with things like free will as a “solution” to the problem of evil. I don’t see myself as trying to rehabilitate the word or concept, but rather decipher what the intent of the concept is by breaking it down and coming at it from a different direction. Because the goal is twofold. First, a better understanding of our nature and how the universe works, and second, a way to communicate what that means. Because I think with this take on free will, we see the question of fatalism or nihilism don’t arise. Free will isn’t about determinism, it’s about the notion of what it means to be able to make a moral decision. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940/243 "2024-05-31T09:55:08Z")
@Irishman I basically agree with everything that you’ve said, all well put. I think the only remaining disagreement is that you want to define “free will” in this completely sensible way, and I would rather just avoid the term altogether as it has too much baggage. But to each their own. Good luck to you in being in free will debates and trying to steer them into a more concrete concept. > [@Irishman](#): > > Free will isn’t about determinism, it’s about the notion of what it means to be able to make a moral decision. Well any decision, in my view. The prior example of going to college or spending a year travelling is a big one for many people; the kind of considered decision where we feel most free. And it’s nothing (inherently) to do with morality. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940/244 "2024-05-31T19:21:52Z")
I decided to do a little light and dirty reading on Free Will, so I went too wikipedia. I see questions about free will arise by the Greeks, so predate Christianity. > **[Free will](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will)** > > Free will is the capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action. > Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free will exists, what it is and the implications of ... That article discusses a lot of different attitudes about free will. Many of the positions have been demonstrated in this thread. We could argue forever over what a deterministic universe ( i.e. everything plays out for precise reasons of direct cause and effect at the base physics level) means with regard to our consciousness and our decision- making ability. We could argue whether the universe is solidly deterministic or not. I’m left with what is essentially what @Exapno_Mapcase said in the first response. We have an internal experience that feels like we make choices. We accept that all humans have the same experience. However our identity arises, we seem to have choice. That is essentially free will, everyone is morally responsible for their actions. We may have limits on our choices based upon our life experiences, the situation, our culture, etc, but that’s bit what free will refers to. Free will means we experience that we make choices, _we_ make the choice. If at some fundamental level our consciousness is an illusion and our lives are just the physics running through the progression like dominoes falling, it doesn’t matter because we are in the experience. So we live our lives, we make our choices, and we hold people responsible for those choices. Worrying about the philosophy is pointless. Our lives have whatever meaning we find or choose for them. Morality is based inside the experience of our existence. If at some ultimate level underlying it all it’s all meaningless, well, so what? We experience it as if it matters. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940.md?page=12)