# Free will doesn't exist, what does this even mean? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 30, 2013, 6:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791 "2013-01-30T06:59:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2013, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/61 "2013-01-31T19:38:54Z")
Can you explain how that answers my question? I’m not quite understanding the connection. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2013, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/62 "2013-01-31T20:28:12Z")
It doesn’t. There isn’t a logical answer to your question - only an explanation of _why we might wish there were_. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/63 "2013-02-01T04:07:27Z")
If our decisions are deterministic…why would we have big brains, with lots of image recognition and pattern recognition neurons, in the first place? Why would evolution produce gigantic “thinking machines” for us, if they don’t work? Creatures that made the same decisions in an instinctive or reflexive manner would function exactly as well, with far fewer resources dedicated (wasted!) on the illusion of reasoning and judging. We live in the kind of world where there is a real advantage to being able to spot “spam” and “phishing” email, no matter how well the senders have tried to disguise it. Our brains are actually pretty good at it. (Tempted to link to a penis-enhancement web site, but chose – freely? – not to.) ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 7:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/64 "2013-02-01T07:01:49Z")
‘deterministic’ is not the same as ‘doesn’t work’. Quite the opposite, in fact. ---
**Author:** ![Doggo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/87869e/32.png) [@Doggo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doggo)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 9:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/65 "2013-02-01T09:10:05Z")
Had you chosen not to post the OP, that would be free will. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 9:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/66 "2013-02-01T09:10:41Z")
> [@si\_blakely](#): > > 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. The Many-Worlds interpretation makes my head asplode. At every moment, a very large (possibly infinite) number of new universes would have to be spawned, representing every permutation of every possible variable. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/67 "2013-02-01T09:33:04Z")
Lets be very clear - fully deterministic systems can be infinitely complex. Linked pendulums have simple inputs (gravity, simple harmonic motion) but the output is chaotic and complex. Conways _Life_ is pretty straightforward (you can do it with graph paper if you are patient) but the output is wonderfully complex, but you can get self limiting or stable configurations amongst the complexity. The human brain is a state machine with a massive number of interconnects, states and feedback loops. We have no hope (at an individual level) of understanding the variables at play that produce outcomes, so in that sense we are not deterministic at a practical level. So **acting** as if we have free will is perfectly fine. The research I linked to upthread seems to show that some network in the brain is responsible for choosing the left or right button. But that determination was made about 7 seconds before the action, and the participant believed their conscious choice was made about half a second before their action. So their _choice_ actually reflects a selection made much earlier by a process they were not aware of. Of course, this was in idle time, with no pressure (and in a fMRI machine). But I suspect that under more time pressure, the time between selection and actual action decreases, with consciousness catching up later. Experiments need to be designed to determine if the initial selection is fixed or if it can be altered by later inputs (or by deliberate conscious choice). At a societal level, we can do a little more. Statistical methods are getting better at isolating factors involved in choice (Nate Silver wasn’t the only statistician to predict the US election outcome). Asimov had a concept of psychohistory - if you collate enough historical and current data and apply statistical methods, you can make predictions about future societal behaviour. It is early days, but such analyses also point the way to future lines of enquiry. For example, studies of abused and neglected children showed that there was a proportion of children that were particularly sensitive to abuse, and a similar proportion that thrived and excelled when in supportive loving situations (so-called orchid children). Another proportion managed to do ok no matter what their upbringing (so-called dandelion children). This indicates that there are some factors (probably genetic) controlling this response to adversity/nurture - research into these factors may help treatments that mitigate the affects on abuse/neglect on children. But it does show a hidden variable in the equation that determines how some people respond to an adverse childhood, and affects the measure to which they have any sort of _free will_ about their destiny. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 9:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/68 "2013-02-01T09:48:33Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > The Many-Worlds interpretation makes my head asplode. At every moment, a very large (possibly infinite) number of new universes would have to be spawned, representing every permutation of every possible variable. I’m not a fan, myself. It implies that energy isn’t actually real, because the entire universe can replicate without cost at the collapse of a wave-function. Do not like. However, it reminds me of a scifi book I read back in the 70s - there was a way to traverse the many-worlds. However, in most worlds the technology to make the traverse collapsed the wrong wave-function and destroyed the entire timeline. So the many-worlds was pretty sparse. The protagonist travels to a earth-parallel where a dictator rules Europe, who is himself in the alt timeline. His plan is to kidnap and replace his doppleganger, institute democracy and save the alt-world. What he doesn’t know is that due to a small change in history, his alt took an arrow (oops, bullet) to the knee(s) during D-Day and has no lower legs (a fact carefully hidden from the populace). Plan fails and shambles ensues (but the alt-world is saved for democracy). ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/69 "2013-02-01T13:10:24Z")
I think to truly embrace the illusionary nature of free will, one first needs to embrace the illusionary nature of the unitary self. Or as Dennett calls it, the “Center of Narrative Gravity”, a useful fiction not a real thing. If there’s no real one self to do the willing, how can there be one will to be “free”? ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/70 "2013-02-01T14:05:34Z")
Lots of great posts here guys and gals. Seems the only way out to still manage some sort of free will is to make a claim that the whole of the mind/brain is more than the sum of its parts. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/71 "2013-02-01T14:42:34Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > Lots of great posts here guys and gals. > > Seems the only way out to still manage some sort of free will is to make a claim that the whole of the mind/brain is more than the sum of its parts. That’s a general description of an emergent system though - I think the notion of true free will almost automatically becomes a supernatural claim - that there is _some hidden part_ that has ‘volition’ as one of its fundamental properties. ---
**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:** [February 1, 2013, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/72 "2013-02-01T18:33:18Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > That’s why this is an emotive topic. It _feels_ like we’re in control, that we’re the originators of ideas, actions, thoughts; that we _cause_, not just that we are an effect. I’d still like an answer to my question (and I’m just using your post as a jumping-off point): What would it feel like if it didn’t feel like we have free will? > [@Trinopus](#): > > If our decisions are deterministic…why would we have big brains, with lots of image recognition and pattern recognition neurons, in the first place? Why would evolution produce gigantic “thinking machines” for us, if they don’t work? But they do work, perfectly well. What you have in your head is essentially a computer: it takes a set of inputs, and generates an output from this. In fact, if that weren’t deterministic, then it wouldn’t function, as input and output would become less correlated (and thus, reactions to a given situation less appropriate). Our big brains are the reason that we’re intelligent (by and large): we certainly can do things with them animals, lacking them, can’t, such as build computers, write symphonies, or heck, having this discussion. And it’s perfectly well possible for evolution to select for such qualities (or for qualities with which these come part and parcel), if they produce a survival advantage. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/73 "2013-02-01T19:41:46Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I’d still like an answer to my question (and I’m just using your post as a jumping-off point): What would it feel like if it didn’t feel like we have free will? I think for most people, the notion of free will is intrinsically wrapped up with conscious inner thought-life. So I think the answer to your question is that it would feel like nothing - because an entity without a conscious inner thought-life is an automaton (or a rock). ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/74 "2013-02-01T21:53:39Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > If our decisions are deterministic…why would we have big brains, with lots of image recognition and pattern recognition neurons, in the first place? Why would evolution produce gigantic “thinking machines” for us, if they don’t work? Creatures that made the same decisions in an instinctive or reflexive manner would function exactly as well, with far fewer resources dedicated (wasted!) on the illusion of reasoning and judging. Nobody said it didn’t work. Advanced attern recognition certainly provides us with quite the sizeable survival advantage. So does advanced & conceptual thinking, the mastery of tools, language and so on. That being said, as far as I’m aware the scientific consensus seems to be that the “thinking” part of our brain is something of an accident, what an earlier poster called an emergent property - that is to say (and while naturally evolution doesn’t have an “end goal”) it organically sprung up from the coalescence of improvements over various sensory systems and mechanisms. We didn’t evolve _to_ think, we evolved to remember which red berry is the one that doesn’t give you the shits or how to tell the other monkeys where to find them good red berries ; and thought/consciousness just kind of happened as a side product along that peculiar biological path. Or it didn’t - psych studies, notably the study of people whose heads _don’t_ work quite right have amply demonstrated that our brain is _very_ adept at crafting seamless and coherent experiences out of disjointed or unexpected inputs. “Free will”, “consciousness”, “thought” might all be such illusionary artefacts of a brain juggling with millions of inputs and data, making a coherence up as it goes along. It’s not better than “simple instinct” (the workings of which are themselves a big mystery to biologists in many cases - it doesn’t seem all that simple when you really look into it), it’s not inferior either. It’s just what \*we \*got. And we’ve been making the best of it so far. As for the notion that it’s a “wasteful” process, study organic biology for a while and you’ll very quickly realize that this shit is emphatically _not_ optimized or streamlined :). ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2013, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/75 "2013-02-02T01:48:48Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > I think to truly embrace the illusionary nature of free will, one first needs to embrace the illusionary nature of the unitary self. Or as Dennett calls it, the “Center of Narrative Gravity”, a useful fiction not a real thing. > > If there’s no real one self to do the willing, how can there be one will to be “free”? Depends on whether you mean in a reductionistic sense (as Dennett clearly does), or in a Buddhist sense (which is a completely different concept altogether, and in Buddhism-strictly speaking-ultimately it isn’t a concept at all). ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2013, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/76 "2013-02-02T01:59:51Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > If our decisions are deterministic…why would we have big brains, with lots of image recognition and pattern recognition neurons, in the first place? Why would evolution produce gigantic “thinking machines” for us, if they don’t work? Creatures that made the same decisions in an instinctive or reflexive manner would function exactly as well, with far fewer resources dedicated (wasted!) on the illusion of reasoning and judging. Only if they had access to the future, which they don’t. You can’t have such a device /organism without perfect knowledge of the future. And what makes you think that reasoning and judging are illusions? Neither of those has anything to do with “free will”; free will doesn’t have anything to do with anything. It’s free will that is the illusion, not them. ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2013, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/77 "2013-02-02T02:17:24Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I’d still like an answer to my question (and I’m just using your post as a jumping-off point): What would it feel like if it didn’t feel like we have free will? Here’s a question. How could conciousness look or feel like anything other than the appearance of free will in general? (besides the obvious moments of homicidal rage/putang you can’t resist/giant pile of money “free” for the taking type scenarios). ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2013, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/78 "2013-02-02T02:24:31Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > Here’s a question. How could conciousness look or feel like anything other than the appearance of free will in general? If we were conscious of our entire mind and could see our entire decision making process. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2013, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/79 "2013-02-02T05:26:14Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Only if they had access to the future, which they don’t. You can’t have such a device /organism without perfect knowledge of the future. > > And what makes you think that reasoning and judging are illusions? Neither of those has anything to do with “free will”; free will doesn’t have anything to do with anything. It’s free will that is the illusion, not them. “Intelligent” decision-making works because we can form an imperfect knowledge of the future. We can perceive cause and effect, and thus make decisions. (If I put my hand on the stove, it will hurt…) But if we can’t actually choose – if my putting my hand on the stove is determined – then what purpose can there be in having all this decision-making machinery? I can put my hand on the stove (or, more specifically, decide not to) with an insect’s brain! Again, why expend all the resources in deluding the brain that it has volition, if it doesn’t really? Instead, having direct access to the mechanisms of determinism would be vastly better, in terms of survival. In fact, that’s what I think volition is! We do have access to the mechanisms of cause-and-event, and thus they are no longer purely deterministic. Volition isn’t an illusion; it is the awareness of alternative outcomes. The insect doesn’t have this knowledge…but the insect also doesn’t tend to make complicated decisions. Mammals…much more so. > [@si\_blakely](#): > > Lets be very clear - fully deterministic systems can be infinitely complex. . . . > > The human brain is a state machine with a massive number of interconnects, states and feedback loops. . . . > > The research I linked to upthread seems to show that some network in the brain is responsible for choosing the left or right button. But that determination was made about 7 seconds before the action, and the participant believed their conscious choice was made about half a second before their action. . . . This is all stuff I wish I had been articulate enough to have said! I agree. The fact that we aren’t conscious of the underlying gear-work of decision-making doesn’t mean we aren’t really making decisions. It only means that consciousness itself is a process that takes time to produce. We aren’t conscious of anything more recent than half-a-second ago. We will always live 1/2 second in the past. Some people have tried to use this to say we have no volition; I merely say volition is an operation that’s slower than we realize it is. > [@si\_blakely](#): > > [re Many Worlds interpretation] I’m not a fan, myself. It implies that energy isn’t actually real, because the entire universe can replicate without cost at the collapse of a wave-function. Do not like. I like it! Also, the idea isn’t quite that the universe replicates. Yeah, it does…but since the new universe is absolutely isolated from “our” universe, it doesn’t matter. It isn’t as if a whole new cosmos is physically being constructed, but only virtually. Only if you actually pump in enough energy (a whole cosmos worth!) would that cosmos be “realized.” > [@](#): > > However, it reminds me of a scifi book I read back in the 70s - there was a way to traverse the many-worlds. However, in most worlds the technology to make the traverse collapsed the wrong wave-function and destroyed the entire timeline. . . . . Do you remember, or can you look up, the story and author? One I’m very fond of is “Rumfuddle” by Jack Vance, where a guy has devised a way to travel among alternate universes. The punch-line, at the end, where he beats the odds on infinity is, in my opinion, one of the most clever bits of sf sophism – and drollery! – ever. There was also a story in Weird Tales, “The Ultimate Anthropic Principle,” which says that the entire cosmos is the way it is solely to support the existence of _YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS_. (e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis had to end the way it did; if it had ended in war, you’d be dead right now, and thus unable to perceive the cosmos.) This principle hints that everyone is immortal…but only in their own winnowed-down set of universes. I might live in a universe in which I saw Muammar Khaddafi die – but in his set of universes, he only exists in the ones in which he did not die. He is alive today…there. The principle, of course, glides ineluctably into solipsism, and is therefore either tautological, or bogwash! (Or even both!) ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2013, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791/80 "2013-02-02T06:43:40Z")
Why does my cat suddenly decide that she wants to run around the house very fast for no apparent reason? Why did the deer choose to run in front of _your_ car? Do even animals exhibit signs of “free will”? “_Why?_” is the question we always ask when someone does something we fail to understand. “_What were you thinking?_” We make choices for a reason. We choose friends because they make us feel good. We choose a house because it is available and suits our needs. We post on SDMB because we feel it needs to be said (or is good snark). We murder someone because we think things will be better with them not in the picture (or we are just demented and like to kill people). In the end, our actions and choices are for a reason. “Free will” is primarily an invention based largely on the fact that humans have non-estrus sexual behavior, allowing us to be a little more selective about whom we copulate with. Not having an intense-drive rutting season makes us seem somehow more elegant than mere animals. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/free-will-doesnt-exist-what-does-this-even-mean/648791.md?page=5)