Does no free will necessarily entail fatalism or nihilism?

Great Debates
201

It is the simpler explanation, though. You’re inside yourself, experiencing yourself as the decider of things, the evaluator of things. You’re in a position of making choices (ranging from whether to go to that march for abortion rights or send a contribution to the Defund the Police activists down to whether to make coffee or tea for breakfast). Real, or illusion?

How do you proceed on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis if you select “it’s an illusion” as your conclusion?

Either it has no subsequent effect on your choices, in which case it merely gives you a case of cognitive dissonance, or it leaves you feeling that your decisions don’t matter much, in which case you become politically and morally apathetic and let go of the big stuff.

The latter is an outcome that could be considered a desirable one by certain factions. So, admittedly, is the outcome of having people believe they are morally culpable for their decisions and should worry about doing wrong things.

Sometimes it’s even the same type of social faction, depending on the extent to which people can be drawn into internalizing the belief that the official definitions of right and wrong behavior, right and wrong beliefs, right and wrong attitudes towards certain things, are accurate ones. Hence, the oft-referenced establishment Church thingie about free will.

It’s less attractive to that kind of faction if you use your free will to discard the belief that the laws (secular and otherwise) and moral teachings (religious and otherwise) are starting point truths and take a larger responsibility for sorting out right and wrong for yourself.

202

Yes. Obviously. 100%.

If I went back in time, took you from your bassinet in the hospital you were born at, and dropped you off with a family of completely different cultural and religious background, you would be a completely different person today.

Is that controversial?

203

More so than you’re implying, yes.

If you went back in time, plucked me from my bassinet, and dropped me off with a vastly different family in a vastly different context, I’d do things and choose things and otherwise interact with the world around me and I would change things in that hypothetical world from what they otherwise would have been. That hypothetical world would not merely shape me. It is not causal with regards to me, except in a reciprocal manner whereby I am also causal of it.

204

Sure, and just the fact that your body is in a different location will eventually cause changes to the pattern of airflow around your body and eventually lead to a hurricane on the opposite side of the world, butterfly effect style. Again, I don’t think that’s very controversial.

205

OK, so we’re on the same channel here. There’s no unilateral cause → effect dynamic taking place here.

So, as I said, free will is the simpler interpretation, and to discard it doesn’t give you anywhere useful to go: either it makes no difference in your subsequent decision-making or it generates apathy and disinvolvement and abdication of responsibility due to you thinking it makes no difference what you decide.

206

Is anyone saying it’s “not really you” though?

I neither believe in a nebulous “free will”, nor fatalism.

Your choices are real. It’s just that your choices are also linked to the rest of the universe, because nothing else makes any sense. It doesn’t even matter what kind of universe we’re talking about.

207

You see, this is an example of what I’ve said before; that many people don’t think anything about the mind is “real” unless it’s shrouded in a veil of ignorance. Understanding that our minds develop and make decisions according to external input somehow makes our minds and our decision not “real”, but just a “passive reflexive response system”.

But attributing it to a mysterious and undefinable “free will” suddenly makes it “real”, despite being objectively indistinguishable.

208

I agree with all of the above.

There is a set of language terms anchored to “free will” constructs, and a different set tied to “determinism”. I tend to prefer the connotations of the former, but I think you and I are just dissenting about what to call it, not the fundamentals.

209

I notice you haven’t responded to the assertion that just as the external inputs are shaping me, I’m shaping the external world around me.

I don’t know if seems like a trivial and unimportant additional factor to you, or if you would dissent with it. To me it’s quite nontrivial.

210

I’m not sure of your point? Of course your internal processes affect the world, you aren’t a black hole; information goes in, and it also goes out. That’s true of everything but black holes.

Free will or the lack of it is only relevant to that as far as if the source of outflowing information is a complex thinking brain or some logically incoherent, undefined thing.

211

Well, to my way of thinking — and, I suspect, for many others whose ears flatten when exposed to the assertion of a deterministic world — it makes all the difference in the world.

There is a massive difference between “you are affected by your context, and you affect it in turn, and your interaction with it defines the entirety of your reality” and “you are defined by your context; it defines the entirety of your reality”.

Maybe not for you, I don’t know. Maybe you’re just coming at it from a different starting vantage point or something. But to me (and I doubt that I am alone in this) the former construct leaves all kinds of room for me to say I’m actually understanding the world, right down to having my own assessment of what is right and what is wrong, what direction society should move in, what things should change in order to make things better. And to feel able to act in an informed matter as a responsible participant in this thing called society. The latter, on the other hand, says to me that the entire contents of my mind is arbitrary, constructed by the external world and with me having no input into it; that I didn’t conclude a damn thing, these aren’t my conclusions at all, the world inserted the conclusions along with the presentation of the data, that I’m just programmed to perceive it this way and I’m a passive device that has been so programmed.

To elaborate further (something it doesn’t seem to me like I would have to do, but a lot of things seem self-explanatory to me and then only later do I realize not everyone sees it the same way) — it’s about feeling a duty and an authority and a responsibility to make change happen, on purpose, because this change, it needs to come, that kind of thing.

You can say that is illusory, but for me the deployment of enthusiastic energy depends on perceiving it in these terms.

On the other hand, yeah, I can say it is non-illusory… but for all I know, your deployment of enthusiastic energy, on behalf of the external contextual definers of your perceptions, your determinant environment — your deployment of enthusiastic energy is not affected that way. And you involve in social causes and enact the social role of person with a social conscience while believing free will is an illusion. So I guess in that sense we’re looking as a classic “I might be wrong” from me, and I do need to say that, as fervent as I get on this.

But yeah I am curious about the behaviors and social role of “person with a social conscience”, deliberate change-maker. Regardless of the locus of cause of the behavior, do you think as a sociological phenomenon, this role itself is going to be affected by a perception that free will does not exist, or, more precisely, a shift towards more people holding that viewpoint about free will?

ETA: Because, subject of thread and all that — “does no free will necessarily entail fatalism or nihilism?” — this is my personal take on it. It is so for me’.

212

“Free will” doesn’t mean you somehow make choices more than in a deterministic universe; it means your choices are just a facade for some undefinable chaos pumping itself into your brain. “Choice” is a deterministic concept, one based on concepts like cause and effect; somebody operating on free will makes no choices, things “just happen” for no cause.

213

But that’s what it means to me. I understand you may use terms differently, and up from there, you may use concepts differently as well. I’m trying to understand your perspective, not explain why it’s wrong. (Although as a general rule, I’d like to make sense to people and be understood by them, reciprocally).

214

As I understand it, free will means I make choices, and those choices have effects, but the choices I make are not just reducible to themselves being effects of other causes.

215

^^^ Yeah, this.

216

And the problem is that as has been pointed out by many people that free will does not make sense, so being free willed means that people minds make no sense. I don’t consider it a superior condition to have my mind the puppet of some quasi-Lovecraftian “unknowable” entity like free will. With determinism decisions have reasons and meaning, with free will it’s just the undefined dictating your behavior for unknowable reasons.

217

I would argue that that is the situation we are currently in and I am trying to explain to people how their choices do matter.

In Western culture (I can’t really speak for other cultures) the standard framing of the free will debate is exactly as was described in this thread; that there are only two options:

(1) Free will exists and free will means “could have chosen differently”. So somehow, if you could reverse time, it’s possible for you to choose something different to what you did in fact choose.
(2) The universe is Deterministic therefore free will doesn’t exist and you’re a zombie automaton. When you think you’re making choices, you aren’t, because really the decision has been made and your thoughts are an illusion.

IME, 99% of people agree with this framing – that these are the only two options.
And the issue is that those people hear some new neuroscience finding, or maybe they just watched an infographic about the effect of narcotics on the brain, and panic, because they think now the only option is (2).

Indeed, when I have been to in-person free will debates, it’s often a bit like a support group…it’s not that people want to entertain the possibility that either free will doesn’t exist or doesn’t even make sense as a concept. It’s that they want to believe in option (1) and want to hear ways that (1) can be true despite “so-and-so thing I read on a pop sci webpage”.

I don’t mean this to sound snooty or superior btw. I’m sure there are countless problems where I am reasoning from a bad premise and just need to have a penny-drop moment. Free will just happens to be one where I think I’m on the right side of the penny-drop (if that makes sense in that metaphor) – option (1) doesn’t even make sense, but no, my thoughts are real.

218

I heartily agree and nevertheless come to the opposite conclusion. What a world!

If your choices are not effects of other causes then they are not caused by your preferences, morality, feelings or intellect. At least, if they are caused by those things then those things must not have causes or something up the chain of cause and effect is uncaused.

The choices do not happen because you are a good person or your choice to be a good person is not caused directly or indirectly by anything outside yourself.

So where did this choice to be a good person come from? It’s not related to anything. It just happened. If you had chosen not to be a good person, that choice, or at least one of the choices that led to it, is not caused by anything.

If you had chosen to be a bad person, but that choice has no cause, should I condemn you for it? Was it a matter of luck?

To me, a choice that comes from nowhere is not free. Freedom requires some reason for the choice.

@AHunter3, is your social consciousness uncaused or does it come from your genetics as a social animal? Does it arise because of your empathy for those who suffer at the hands of society? Is it because you were taught you have duty to help others? Is it because of your experience being an outsider because the person you were born to be didn’t fit into the right societal category?

Or were you just lucky that this particular choice appeared in your mind uncaused?

219

Maybe the reason that I keep having so much difficulty letting this go is that I used to be on that same side and thought the same thing, making the same arguments, until the penny dropped again. So I kinda feel like I’m arguing with my own former misconceptions, and keep thinking that it could’ve saved myself a lot of time being wrong if somebody had told me then what I think now. Not to sound snooty or superior, of course.

220

Not at all, that’s great.

Because in that case you might remember what it was like asking people for a clear definition of free will, or for any description of how entities in a free will universe make free will decisions.

A handwave of such questions is not going to get me to the second penny drop.