…and we’ll all float on okay.
No. It means that I can’t say I’ve consciously made any choices, since my choices are the result of processes that I am not consciously in control of or even aware of.
If I wake up with a taste for pancakes, did I make a choice to eat pancakes under my own free will? I would argue I did not, since the thought “let’s eat some pancakes!” was not one I came to with great deliberation. It, along with its associated valence, just popped into my head. Now I believe that thoughts pop into one’s head due to subconscious/unconscious associations. Others might attribute thoughts to supernatural forces, like souls or God’s voice. Whatever the source, it’s external to one’s conscious (their apparent control center). If a person cannot know how they came to a particular decision, how can they say they have “free will” to make decisions? That’s like saying you’re driving a car, but you don’t if you’re sitting behind the wheel or in the passenger’s seat.
If our brains are being controlled remotely by entities on another planet, this says nothing about the nature of the universe. Removing someone’s agency and replacing it with yours doesn’t remove chaos from the world. It just means that the person isn’t the author of their actions and thus they are unable to exert their own will.
If I can never know with any certainty how my thoughts and feelngs come together to form particular ideas and decisions, I’m really not that different from the person who is obliviously being controlled by an alien entity. We both think we’re operating with free will. But we’re both wrong.
Noted, but I think unless the OP doesn’t want those of us who think “free will” is a misconception to state that objection, it needs to be an explicit premise.
Otherwise it seems like anyone responding implicitly agrees “free will” is a thing. Besides, I’m not even sure how to answer it if I assume that’s true.
Forget about our universe for a moment.
Think of a universe where free will exists. It can have magic, souls, whatever you like.
How are choices made in this universe?
Not just influenced, but actually made? Does prior knowledge come into it? Are individuals allowed to have different predispositions or are they all blank slates?
My position is that it’s not really possible to conceive of any scenario where there is free will because the concept itself makes no sense. It’s not a fact about our universe.
No, it just shifts responsibility down a level. Consider the following:
Scenario 1)
Bobby is a bad person. Bobby decided hit Sally, so Bobby deserves to go into time out so he can think about what he did learn the consequences of his actions and make better decisions about hitting people in the future.
Scenario 2)
Bobby has bad programming. Bobby followed his programming to hit Sally, so Bobby should go into time out so that by the negative feedback of this experience his programming will be altered in such a way that it will be less likely to tell Bobby to hit someone in the future.
No real difference.
If I had free will, I would be in full control of all my thoughts and emotions.
Thoughts woud not just “pop” into my head, eliciting reactions that equally pop out of nowhere. Instead, I would have a metacognition aspect to my conscious which would allow me to choose which thoughts I have before I have them. I would will myself to wake up with “let’s eat pancakes!” scrolling across my consciousness. I would be able to will myself to feel happy or sad about this idea.
Moreover, the possible solutions that I come up with to fix my breakfast dilemma would be virtually unlimited. An observer would not be able to predict that I will likely choose pancakes because I’m a person with experiences X, Y, and Z, with biological propensities X,Y, and Z. Because my choices would be free. As long as someone can predict what I’m going to do based on everything that’s knowable about me, I cannot say that my decision-making process is nothing more than a very sophisticated algorithm.
If we had free will, why do we turn to therapy to address our psychological issues? Isn’t this an admission that our consciousness has limited awareness and thus control? If we had free will, we wouldn’t care so much about educating children about ethnics and morality. Because good people would be born, not made. Yet we know this isn’t true. We know that people usually turn out “bad” because they weren’t raised right, or their brains don’t permit “good” behavior.
If we had free will, it wouldn’t be so damn easy for us to be sloppy. But we make lots of mistakes everyday. I know that for me, personally, my mistakes usually happen when I’m not consciously aware of what I’m doing. And this happens not because I’m being “willfully” careless. It’s because most of the time, I’m operating on automatic. I’m typing right now on “automatic”. If I can make decisions while I’m in this state, then how can I say that were choices I made freely? I’m not even aware I’m making them!
I don’t think it is that hard to conceive of a universe where people have free will. Superficially it would be similar to this one. But in a “free will” world, people wouldn’t say stuff like “I don’t know why I did that!” nearly as often as they do in this world. And people wouldn’t be nearly as impressionable.
monstro, that’s not what I understand “free will” to mean. Having free will doesn’t require that I have full control, just that I have some control. It doesn’t require that I never be operating “on automatic,” just that I can override that. It doesn’t require that my actions not be influenced by factors beyond my control, just that they not be completely determined by factors beyond my control.
First, thank you all for the interesting replies.
This is pretty much what I mean. The “will” part of free wil means that free will must be controlled by your personality or your soul, or else you didn’t really “will” it. But up until you’ve made your first free will choice, you haven’t chosen your personality or your soul. So you can’t make a free will choice. And so you can’t make your first choice, because that would require having already made one.
How do you break that loop?
Do you see what I’m getting at? Either our choices are determined by our personality or our soul, in which case they’re not free up until we’ve made a free will choice to modify our personality/soul, and how do you make that first one? Or they’re determined by something else, in which case they’re not will.
But since you didn’t choose your soul, it doesn’t really answer the question…
Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear enough. I was asking, if there is free will, how would it work?
I think Bobby is a bad person even in scenario 2. To me, a bad person is a person who does bad things, regardless of whether or not they have free will. Now, you could argue it’s not their fault they’re a bad person.
Thanks, but it seems like it’s more about when you start believing in free will rather than when you actually get free will.
Would a baby’s first experience with curiosity be considered free will?
If your choices however are not based on predispositions and your past experiences, then you are flipping a coin; you have no basis for saying eating pancakes is a good or bad option.
Alternatively, if you are allowed to take such things into account, then that’s the status quo…that’s how your decision-making works right now.
I’d say this is largely accurate, but I’d also say the way your decision-making works is the only meaningful sense of the word “choice”. As I was trying to say, even with souls or magic, the only kind of choice we can conceive of is one based on knowledge and predispositions so you end up with some kind of determinism whichever way you spin it.
But importantly, when you’re thinking through options, those thoughts are “real”. I could not predict what you were going to do without emulating your brain state including those conscious thoughts.
But that point makes more sense when you are considering “choices” you’ve already made. Was that choice a free will choice, or was it deterministic? Choices made in the future have all sorts of irrelevant baggage.
That’s not the meaning of chaos in this context. Chaos theory says it is impossible to predict perfectly due to small actions which have massive and unpredictable impacts. It says nothing about why something happened.
Your prediction that you are going to sleep in your bed tonight turns out to be false because a little birdie landed on a branch which caused the rotting tree to break which brought the large limb down through your roof. But looking back you can tell why you have a tree in bed no problem.
I personally am agnostic about this - it is impossible to know whether we have free will or not, but the world kind of looks like we have partial free will.
By that definition no one has free will, since we are all at least partially influenced by our hormones, how tired we are, alcohol, etc. That is way too strict a definition.
What does “free” connote to you? To me, it connotes the lack of restraint and inhibition.
If the difference in the agency of a child and an adult is just a matter of degree rather than kind, then what is the point of using a loaded term like “free” to describe the will of an adult? It’s like saying that a person who gets around with crutches has “free mobility”, something the person in a wheelchair lacks. I’d argue that both of them are constrained. The adult is only “freer” because they have accumulated more experiences and thus more potential solutions will “pop up” in his mind. But he’s still imprisoned to whatever ideas those are.
When I’m operating on automatic, I don’t consciously override it. That would require me to deliberate about what my brain is going to do. That would require me to consciously plan a thought before I even have it…to scrutinize my cognition outside of my cognition. I don’t know how I’d do this. No, when I come out of the “zone”, it always just kinda happens. Just like the onset of the “zone” always kinda happens. I’d like to say that I can control the comings and goings of this state, but I simply cannot. Just like I wish I could take credit for when my brain decides to go to sleep, but I can’t.
I would argue that you have no way of knowing that your decisions aren’t the result of coercive forcing. What you may perceive as mere influence may actually be coercive. You may think you prefer pankcakes over bacon and eggs because pancakes are delicious. But what if embedded in your subconscious, you’ve associated bacon with heart disease and heart disease with death? Have you made a free choice to go with pancakes? Or are you behaving just as you would if someone were to put a gun to your head and forced you to pick the pancakes?
Just because you aren’t consciously aware of the coercion does not mean you are operating free from it.
See, I think “free will” is way too loose a term. “Free” is supposed to mean something. So is “will”. If a person’s range of choice is always dictated by something he has no control over, then he cannot say he’s free. If he is not consciously coming up with the ideas that justify his decisions, then he cannot say he’s exerting his own will. What does “free will” mean to you, if it doesn’t mean these things?
We are creatures who are governed by biochemical reactions. There is no part of a person that is separate from these things. “Partially influenced” my behind. We are nothing but our hormones, cells, tissues, organs, etc. To argue against this is to posit that there is an element to us that lives outside of our bodies. Like a soul. I don’t believe in such hogwash. Do you?
There are “limited” concepts of free will, where the will still exists, but the control is not total.
I drive a car. I don’t have “full control of all its functions.” Some times, the tire goes flat, and I had no role in causing that to happen.
Sometimes we lose our tempers, or panic, or fall foolishly in lust. These reduce the totality of free will, but they don’t prove we don’t have it at all.
Free will does exist.
What is less certain, or less easy to explain, is where it exists.
It is also useful to define our terms, wouldn’t you say? When I say “free will”, I’m positing it as the opposite of what it is not, and that may or may not coincide with how someone else conceptualizes it:
The absence of free will is where a behaving entity (person or whatever)'s behavior is caused by something entirely exterior to their own self. That “something entirely exterior” could be
•physical determinism: the grand sum total of the location and momentum and energy level and etc of every particle in the universe as the cause of every subsequent action
• social determinism: the conscious person’s location in a social context, surrounded by the sum total of the cuture’s ideas, ideas that are not only shared but expected to be shared, ideas embedded in the language and supposedly therefore the matrix outside of which the brain can’t formulate any ideas anyway; the individual as tabula rasa, blank slate that was socialized by the surrounding culture etc
• nonspecific determinisms: the individual is in a context — a physical context, a social context, a context of choices and possible outcomes, etc, and these CAUSE the individual to act. No one can behave in a total vaccuum, one is instead always in a position of responding to one’s context so the context causes all
I’ll get back to those in a moment.
Meanwhile, the “something entirely external” is NOT legitimately formulated as some part of the Self that is, at the same time, NOT considered to be the Self in a sufficiently appropriate sense but instead are repositioned as the CAUSE of the behavior of the Self. I regard these as definitional cheats, where first the Self is carved up into slices and then each slice is treated as other than the Self:
• your emotions: that they CAUSE the Self to behave rather than the Self having free will
• your DNA or equivalent: that you are hardwired by biology to behave as you do and therefore do not possess free will
•your subconscious or unconscious mind: that these have your Self on some kind of leash and are secretly directing the traffic
•pleasure and pain: that the Self is a slave to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain and therefore cannot act out of free will
etc
Do you see why those are all arguments that make unstated (and hence undefended) arguments about what the “real” Self is, in the course of slicing off these segments of the Self and saying some other part of the Self is the “real” Self but that it doesn’t possess free will?
Now back to the exterior stuff.
The problem with the exterior stuff is that here also there are unstated and undefended postulates about what the Self consists of. (Because we’re distinguishing between Self and exterior). I would argue that the individual Self that we tend to think of ourselves as is not, in fact, who any of us actually are. We are that, but we are also plural. (I just said “we” — it’s a legitimate first person pronoun. The Self is plural whenever “we” is being used authentically). As a sociologist, I believe individual humans’ thinking is mostly the local manifestation of the species mulling stuff over — the individuals each add some bits of experiential testing and critique in the process of absorbing it, spongelike, and passing it on imitatively. That small bit of critique invalidates a total social deterministic picture but the “hive mind” phenomenon is quite real also; the Self is a distributed phenomenon and includes the social connections. So as with the versions I called “cheats” up above and said they are slicing off chunks of Self and saying this chunk which (somehow) isn’t Self is the real cause of the Self’s behavior hence no free will, I say the same about attempts to slice off Other People with whom individuals interact and treat them as Not The Self yet attribute causality to Them. (And for each of those Other People, this local individual is a member of their “Other People” experience, after all. Each individual is a component of an aggregate interactive phenomenon and none are simply passive puppets of the social context).
It’s a little less intuitive but equally true that the entire “external” context of the individual is, to the extent that it is in a state of interaction with that individual, ALSO part of an inclusive plural phenomenon. It’s less intuitive because we don’t conceptualize rocks and pencils and subatomic particles as “thinking”. But if the thoughts and choices and so on are processes that involve those things, such that the experience we dub “Self” is actually something that integrates all this shit together, slicing off the external context and calling it nonSelf and saying it causes the Self’s behaviors is again a kind of cheat.
The only real “free will” negation is the assertion that nowhere, at all, does anyone or anything do anything whatseover volitionally, that instead it is all a mechanical outcome of prior causation. That intentionality and purpose do not explain any outcome. And I say that is not the case. Where, exactly, the consciousness that makes choices and does things on purpose actually resides is, as I’ve attempted to illustrate, difficult to nail down, but Self exists and chooses and acts with intent, and whether the resulting behaviors can also be described by dividing up the components into “subject” and “context” and describing the “contest” as the cause of the “subject’s” behavior, the latter does not invalidate the former.
A person who has free will weighs all the options before they make a decision, correct? They don’t just study the two or three options that someone has directed her attention to. That would be like me giving someone a gift card to spend “freely”, but the card only works at three stores in the entire world.
I would argue that’s exactly what happens to us, though. When we face a problem, we don’t study all the options available. Just those options that come to mind. And since a person doesn’t choose which options come to mind, then they can’t necessarily be blamed for not choosing the best option. Maybe they only considered crappy options because they ddn’t know any better.
A person who has free will can make a decision that goes counter to their influences, correct? They can decide to eat the big pile of poo instead of the fluffy stack of pancakes.
But no one–except very bizarre individuals*–would ever make this choice without something pushing their hand big-time. And the reason is simple: most people are programmed not to eat big piles of poo. Whether this is a evolutionarily or socially-programmed aversion, I have no idea. But it’s undeniable that most people cannot will themselves to prefer pancakes over poo. Coercion would have to be involved for someone to eat poo (gun to the head or promise of 10 million dollars).
So if a person only has a small number of possible choices and some (if not all) of those choices are negatively weighted to a degree they aren’t capable of discerning and that they have no control over, then just how freely do we make decisions? It may seem like we’re operating free from constraints. We may be able to tell ourselves that we went with a certain decision for reasons A, B, or C. But we cannot know these things are true, from our vantage point. So if we can’t know for sure we aren’t puppets on a string, we shouldn’t proclaim that we aren’t. We can speak of making choices without saying those choices are “free”.
*It’s funny that “very bizarre individuals” are the very ones we deny having free will. The crazier and more “random” a person acts, the less agency we believe he has.
The fact that we never start off with “free” anything is all the proof I need to say we don’t have free will.
A person tells me he’s a billionare because there might be a buried treasure chest in his backyard that he hasn’t uncovered yet. I would argue that he can’t make any claim to being a billionare–temporarily embarrassed or not–until he actually has that money in hand. The fact that sometimes he has $100 in the bank and sometimes he has $1000 doesn’t really convince me he’s any richer than the poor people he laughs at.
If you have a thousand theoretically possible choices, but in fact are limited to just a few options, freely choosing among those is still free will. If I’m deciding to turn left or right on my walk, the fact that I can’t leap over tall buildings in a single bound doesn’t really restrict my choice much.
Of course there is no soul. But we seem to have several cooperating minds within our brain. (There was a psychologist on NPR last night who said this, and I think it is a good insight.)
If our subconscious decides for us - like when you suddenly realize what the best option is - isn’t that still free will?
A little man or woman sitting behind your eyes making free decisions is absurd. But so is that I’ve been evolutionarily programmed to choose one data structure over another when I program.
How about this model - decisions are made using a neural net like structure where factors are processed according to a certain weighting function. For a single decision, you made say that this is deterministic. But the weights are set based on other decisions, possibly made years before. Maybe I chose to go to data structures class one day instead of sleeping in, and learned something which directly affects my choice 30 years later.
This complex set of influences over time seems not at all simply deterministic. Whether it is free or not really depends on how you interpret that word.
If every decision we make is a function of decisions made in the past, we are masters of our destiny but in a way we can’t possibly precisely predict. But we can predict in broad outlines, which is why we tell kids to do their homework and eat their veggies.