I’m honestly curious how anyone could think freewill doesn’t exist, or what exactly is the position? That everyone is preprogrammed from birth to do…what exactly?
I would tell you but I haven’t been preprogrammed to answer.
What people mean when they say this is that effects have a cause. Anything you decide to do is actually the end result of a complex set of chemical, electrical and physical interactions, and when you drill down to the minute level of those, you’re not in control of them - they’re in control of you.
The concept as commonly believed is undefined and logically incoherent. If something isn’t random, and isn’t deterministic, then what does that even mean? “Free will” as usually spoken of is a term that sounds all deep and meaningful and important, but means nothing.
? What does this mean though, I’m not making any choices in my life just being carried along by chemical and electrical interactions?
Can someone give a concrete example of how freewill doesn’t exist?
Funny because I think it’s absurd to believe that we COULD have free will. Here are the two possibilities as I see it:
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Universe (including our thoughts) is non-deterministic, only probabilistic. This is inspired from quantum mechanics. If our thoughts and actions are non-deterministic, then there cannot be free will. With a perfect understanding of the universe we would be able to assign probabilities to certain thoughts given certain underlying conditions.
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Universe & our thoughts are deterministic. They are simply the results of all the inputs into the system up until a given moment of time, and with perfect understanding, a 100% accurate prediction could be made. Thus, we have no free will.
If you define free will as something like “being able to choose your own thoughts, beliefs and actions” then you’d have to propose a mechanism, a cause, for what allows us to choose our beliefs. And if you can describe that mechanism, you can make predictions for how it will function… but if you can make predictions about the mechanism which allows a person their free will, then you are proving that there is no such thing as free will, aren’t you?
So I don’t see how there is any non-contradictory way to explain how we could have free will.
It’s relatively easy to impugn free will – to demonstrate that it isn’t all we’d like it to be. For instance, dieting! It’s hard work! Two different parts of our brains are in conflict: the part that wants to stick to the diet…and the part that wants a candy bar. Now.
Free will isn’t absolute, as anyone knows who has lost his temper, especially after making every moral effort not to.
Free will isn’t absolute…and anyone knows who has suffered from writer’s block…
But, all this said, I believe that we really do have something like volition. We do make choices. You can observe it in yourself, especially when you are conflicted, or caught on the horns of a dilemma. You want to do X, but you also want to do Y.
“Free Will” per se is a theological issue, limited to temptation, sin, and the like. But “Volition” is, I think, something meaningful and real.
grude, take this thought experiment into consideration.
Imagine 10 identical universes, ABSOLUTELY identical in every single way. Now, in each universe you (and 9 other exact copies of you) are standing in front of a freezer deciding between chocolate or vanilla ice cream, both flavors you enjoy nearly equally. Then, one of the following things happen:
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In all 10 universes you choose chocolate ice cream. Is this evidence of free will? It almost seems the opposite, doesn’t it? Did you freely choose in all 10 universes the chocolate icecream, and it was just a mere coincidence?
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In some of the universes you choose chocolate, in the others you choose vanilla? Does this provide evidence of free will, or does it show that the universe is non-deterministic, and you have no real control over what flavor you pick, even if it feels like you do?
In short, there’s just no experimental way to show that free will exists, perhaps even in a thought experiment… and since we shouldn’t assume things exist without any evidence, free will doesn’t exist.
There is so much we don’t know about how the human brain works, but we do know that genetics and environment influence us to a large degree. We don’t know that about “free will” or have any way to know it exists. There’s no way to know you COULD have done something you didn’t do. You feel like you could have chosen to wear a different shirt today, but there’s absolutely no evidence for that, and we do know that our perceptions are very frequently not accurate.
Suppose you had a choice between cornflakes and bacon for breakfast. You chose bacon - the reason you chose bacon is because you wanted it, but that’s only a condition of your brain, brought about by a particular pattern of neurons doing their thing, which is a result of their electrochemical properties and configuration - all of which happened as a result of the physical laws of the universe.
How could it have been any different? What would have caused those electrochemical interactions to have been any different? It felt like you chose bacon, but you could not have done anything else.
But these thought experiments seem to presume that freewill doesn’t exist, it is like a post hoc explanation that every happened the way it was meant to due to everything up to that point.
Basically any choice someone makes is held up as the choice they always would have made because of genes/their brain, etc.
No, it’s saying that the things that we’re made of are mechanical - and we are part of the mechanism - it’s just cause and effect.
If free will exists, where does it come from? Where does choice enter the equation?
I can totally get behind the idea that freewill is not absolute and you are strongly influenced by both genetics, life experience, social conditioning etc. But I don’t know that I can buy that everything a person does is predetermined, such that say with a sufficiently advanced software you could figure out whether someone will order sushi or a pita for lunch 43 years from their birth.
But as DT noted, things either interact in a predictable, deterministic way, or they are random. Neither of these things resembles freewill.
That’s not to say that ‘deterministic’ means ‘easy to predict’ - the huge number of interactions involved in even the simplest actions makes it practically impossible to calculate the outcome.
Why does freewill have to be an outside supernatural force? Why can’t is also be part of the mechanistic universe and the human brain? I’m not positing a supernatural freewill, just that even if everything is mechanistic it is as of right now so complex it might as well be random to how we understand it. Or in other words why are we so poor at predicting what will happen?
If it’s mechanistic, how does it exercise a choice? How does the outcome ever turn out different to the deterministic output of the mechanism?
Ongoing research indicates that we do not choose to act in a certain way - our actions are determined by action potentials in our brain long before we are aware of choosing to act. Of course, the significance of these results are debated.
The universe, too, seems to know about our choices before we make them. If you run a two-slit experiment, but make your choice to observe which slit the photon went through after it has gone through the slits (you need long light paths to do this and fast signalling equipment), you still get the expected results (single line if you observe the photon path, interference pattern if you do not). From a strict causality point of view, your decision to observe must have been set as the photon passed the slits but before your actual choice to do so. So you actually had no control over your choice. Or the universe is much weirder than we can imagine.
And if you subscribe to a Many-Worlds QM interpretation, you don’t actually ever make a choice - at every juncture mediated by a quantum collapse, the universe splits. So you don’t make a choice between vanilla and chocolate icecream, you have both, just in different universes.
If you had enough information, under any model of the universe, you could trace backwards the cause of every action. This cause would likely be able to go back thousands, or perhaps millions of years…possibly even to the beginning of the universe (assuming there was in fact such a ‘beginning’), as you observe the interactions of every particle that interacted over the entire history of time to come to that decision. Our brains function in a mechanical manner, as noted - chemicals and electrical signals determine our actions, therefore every particle interaction that led to those chemicals and electrical signals functioning was part of the cause for our apparent decision.
The difference between models determines whether, with such information, you could extrapolate forward or not. If there is no randomness, then with that information you can extrapolate forward until the end of time (again, if there is such a thing). Under this model, once you have perfect information about everything in the universe, you can determine every single thing that will ever happen.
If there is randomness, you can’t extrapolate forward except by probability, and the further into the future you get, the more unreliable your probability estimates are, because at each step they wind up built on more levels of estimates, so every time your estimate was wrong, it skews the model. After a certain number of steps, the probability of your estimate being wrong exceeds the probability of it being right by several orders of magnitude.
Neither of these possibilities seems to indicate that our decisions are outside this system. Therefore, everything we decide may not be predetermined, but it’s also not under control (if the second model is correct). I don’t know of any way to assume that our actions are the result of free will, unless there is an element in our decision making process that is not bound by the known physical laws of the universe as we currently understand them.
Actually that article is full of the kind of doublespeak I’ve been annoyed at.
Freewill is an illusion because our mind is making the choice ahead of time.:dubious: I thought it wasn’t a choice at all?
Der Trihs put it very succinctly. The problem is that there is no room between “random” and “determined” – they are complementary. In fact, all “random” means is “not determined.” Nobody actually mentioned any supernatural force, and in fact, invoking a supernatural force does not help the case for free will at all – it only expands the size of the system which, again, either behaves the way it does according to its nature, or else exhibits random behavior.
People say “free will” a lot as though it means something, but unless they’re using it as an odd synonym for “randomness,” everything they say concerning it is incoherent. A non-random, non-determined thing makes about as much sense as a simultaneously non-blue and non-non-blue object.