# 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:** 1\ **Showing post:** 4
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2024, 12:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940/4 "2024-04-30T12:41:15Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Oh, it’s a bit worse than that. If you are mechanically determined and are just carrying out your predetermined responses to stimuli, you don’t exist. There is no “you”. I mean, seriously, in taking into account all calculations necessary to capture everything meaningful that’s going on here, why should I account for “you” at all? “You” don’t contribute anything. Your consciousness doesn’t contribute anything. Your set of experiences don’t contribute anything except as a chronological depiction of events as they transpired at your locus, and if I already have all the events I don’t need that. There is no “you”. Oh, no! How horrifying! Except of course there is a “you”; the fact that “you” emerge from the interaction between physical elements, which are all hard determined, changes nothing about that. Anyways, presumably your consciousness isn’t _free_ - the processes that make it arise cost your body energy to regulate and execute. So, decision making with a consciousness likely offers some kind of evolutionary advantage, whether as a property of consciousness itself or because when you do X, Y, and Z which are useful themselved consciousness arises. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-no-free-will-necessarily-entail-fatalism-or-nihilism/1000940)._