Free will -- How and when do you make your first choice?

[monstro]

@Voyager

I’ve already said several times that I don’t know if free will exists or not, but what we do have looks indistinguishable from free will to me.
It is just like the fact that I can’t prove that no god created the universe and then vanished, but I’ll live my life as if no such god exists, because the universe is the same in either case.

And I’m saying that what we do have looks indistinguishable from what animals and crazy people have, so I’m not going to presume I have something special over them.

Your subconscious did filtering. If you were really starving and cat food was the only option, your brain would have come up with a different possibility. Yeah you didn’t consciously filter them out, but you didn’t filter out flying to Paris for lunch either. Our brains would be very inefficient if we had to consciously make all these decisions. Do you drive consciously? Didn’t think so. That you don’t consciously stay in lane doesn’t mean that your brain isn’t making the decisions which cause your car to stay in lane.

You seem to be arguing what I’ve been arguing this entire time. The brain is doing a lot of stuff for me without my awareness or control. My brain is making a lot of decisions on my behalf. So given this, why would I ever declare that I have free will? There is no way for me to know when my brain is doing the decision-making and when I–independent of my brain–is doing it.

You thin that your mind sees only the things that your conscious mind is aware of? Really?

No, of course not. But if I’m not consciously aware of what’s going into my decision-making process, then how can I say that I’m controlling the decision-making process?

That’s why I said that if you only include consciousness in the free will discussion we don’t have it. But if you and a friend go to a restaurant, and are presented with exactly the same menu, you are likely to choose different things. In fact you will filter out most of the options subconsciously.
In fact, people who design menus know that we subconsciously tend to reject the most expensive thing on it - so menus are designed with an expensive option that can be rejected and will thus encourage the choice of the high profit margin second most expensive option.

None of this convinces me I have free will. It’s doing the exact opposite.

My daughter has a PhD in judgement decision making, and we taught a class together on the application of behavioral economics to engineering. Our brains are considerably less rational about making decisions than you think they are. This does not prove we have free will, not at all, but it does prove that your view that we can explain everything through consciousness isn’t correct. In deciding whether we have free will or not we have to consider all parts of our minds. And our bodies.

I don’t know what you mean by explaining “everything through consciousness”. I don’t believe I have used those words. What I have said is that our understanding of our decisions is based on the ideas that enter our consciousness. We believe that we choose a menu item because we are internally fed the line “croissants are so delicious!” But we have no way of knowing if this is the true basis of the decision or whether we are simply confabulating.

Mirror test.

Kids and animals who fail the mirror test may still have a sense of self.

I don’t know if we deny that porpoises and chimps have free will any more. Very primitive animals is another story. Where the dividing line is not clear.

Here’s a a navel-gazer for you. If a space alien visited us and they were able to demonstrate that their consciousness was a million times more sophisticated than ours, do you think we would continue to brag about having free will? Or would we come up with a more humble way of talking about our cognition?

Does he look at you before he does this? My grandson knocking things off the tray while reaching for a bottle or something is different from deliberately dropping something.

Yes! Amigo jumps up on my dresser, looks at my response, knocks over my deoderant, looks at my response, knocks over my earring holder, looks at my response, and then knocks over my mirror–fleeing before I can grab him and wring his furry little neck.

Every cat I’ve ever had has done something like this. They are very willful creatures, those cats.

Sigh.

Sorry for being so exasperating. :rolleyes:

Sociopaths don’t make conscious decisions to do wrong, not in the same context that we do.

How do you know?

They are an example of the subconscious and possibly brain abnormalities affecting their decisions.

How do you know that your decisions are not affected by the “subconscious and possibly brain abnormalities?” Is it the lack of a formal diagnosis that makes you so confident your brain is special?

If you think that all decisions are made consciously, you should think that they could be argued out of their bad behavior.

I don’t think decisions are made consciously. I believe the complete opposite.

If on the other hand you think that they act that way because that is how they are, you don’t lock them up to punish them, but to keep the rest of us safe from them.

I believe they should be locked up, yes. And I think they should be rehabilated, if possible. If they have a problem with their amygdala and we have the technology to repair it, we should do so as long as the patient gives their consent. Otherwise, they should be kept away from the rest of society.

A free choice in the context of your whole mind. If you had two choices and then chose one, would that then not be free assuming there is free will for the second.) That is the same here. Don’t you ever just know what you are going to order, or what you are going to buy? Same thing.

If I had two choices and one of them was tagged “EW GROSS” and the other was tagged “FABULOUS”…and the tagging was done by a process I’m not privy to, that I have no say-so over, that I’m not aware of–then NO. I did not make a “free” choice. My hand was moved by an invisible force.

Do I know that this tagging always happens? No. But our brains are designed such that it is very likely happening. Because as you said earlier, if we had to deliberate over every option presented to us without any supplemental information attached to it, we would waste a whole lotta energy and time. It is more efficient for our brains to do our thinking for us on a subconscious level before granting us the awareness of the thinking. If we can both agree that this happens, then I don’t see why you’d disagree with my position that it is stupid for us to speak of having free will.

Even if we have free will, we have been genetically and socially programmed to limit our choices. My great grandfather would probably get violently sick at the thought of eating the BLT I had for lunch today.
Is it hard for you to accept that evolution has improved the efficiency of our decision making by filtering out choices as early as possible. We can’t choose to hold our breaths until we die - it is physiologically impossible. Is not being able to make equally stupid decisions any harder to accept? A person who makes a decision in 1/10th of a second by having bad choices prefiltered is like to survive longer than someone who takes five seconds to react.

The brain isn’t just “prefiltering”. It’s stacking the deck! It’s not just saying, “Hey mac, youse got two options. Dis one and dat one.” It’s also saying, “Youse got dis one and dat one, but don’t pick dat one! It stinks!” The only way you would buck this coercion is if you were tugged by another subconscious impulse to be contrary. “Wait a minute, bub! This is trick! They want you to pick the croissants. Be the rebel and pick the damn pancakes!!!”

Either way, the will you exert will not be yours. It will be your biology’s. The same biology that controls your breathing, digestion, and blood circulation and is affected by the biotic and abotic environment around it. You will be making a choice the same way I make a choice when I have an embarrassing tic. You will be making a choice the same way that my cat makes a choice when he jumps up on my dresser because his walnut-sized brain knows that’s the best way to wake me up in the morning. In other words, the choice to go with the croissant just isn’t that remarkable. It is not an example of “free” anything.

[monstro]

@Thudlow_Boink

Yeah; as I’ve said in other threads, it sure feels like I’m making choices. Basic introspection convinces me that I have either free will or the illusion thereof.

Maybe I spend way too much time in my head, but introspection convinces me that our perception of free will is illusion.

I can distinguish voluntary and involutary actions, so at least I’m not a total wackjob.

And because I’ve been exposed to psychology jargon, I can distinguish egodystonic from egosyntonic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

But I cannot distinguish the moments when I’m exerting free will from the times when I’m exerting non-free will. Because that would require me to know (not just speculate) why I landed on a particular decision. Did I cross the street at this intersection versus that intersection because I was just bored and in the mood for randomness? Or is it because my subconscious mind registered a mean dog up ahead and steered me away from it? Maybe this is just me being crazy, but it seems to me rather impossible for me to ever know the answer. I can come up with a nice story. But that’s all it would be.

So because I don’t know when my free will is being exerted, it makes sense to me to not speak about it having it. I can talk about choices and decisions and volition without using that nebulous term.

[wolfpup]

I’ve been away from the computer for a bit so my apologies for the late reply, and I also have yet to get caught up in the later discussions. But to address these points …

@monstro

People have their “free will” tested all the time when they go to psychotherapy. A therapist will say, “wolfpup, why did you choose that particular meadow and not another one?” And you will give an answer. If the therapist has been following your narrative long enough, they may discern a pattern that you are unable to see from your vantage point. Like, that all the decisions you seem to make for the apparent reason X are fully consistent with the behavior of a person compelled by deep-seated reason Y.

Now you are certainly free (hehe) to discount the therapist’s hypothesis as pure hogwash. But science does lend support to the idea that people aren’t always aware of their decision-making processes. If a person doesn’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, then how can they say they are operating under free will? All you can really say is that the meadow seemed right to you at the time when that decision was made.

First, I disagree that a therapist uncovering some underlying causative factor(s) is any kind of “test” the way that you can test objective reality (as I previously described, for example). I might have picked creamy white as my preferred color for a car because it subconsciously reminds me of vanilla ice cream that I loved as a kid, but it was still my free choice. (Or I might have picked it for some other reason entirely, perhaps just some indefinable sense of aesthetics.)

Again, rather than taking your position that free will doesn’t exist, I take the modified position that although I agree that we are all deterministic machines, free will is merely a subjective perception. There are cases where it may not be particularly relevant, like an immediate instinctive reaction to something, but when we enjoy the luxury of lengthy ruminations about a choice we are about to make, especially a major choice in life, then we can certainly be said to have free will simply on the basis of that subjective experience. The deterministically computational nature of our cognition is both invisible and irrelevant to us.

@monstro

Well, this isn’t a trivial navel-gazing exercise IMHO. People who believe that our choices are freely made tend to downplay things like education, socioeconomics, and mental health when it comes to things like crime, for instance. Instead of advocating societal changes to improve human behavior, “free willers” blame individuals for their failures. They say things like “We all make choices” as society crumbles around them.

That’s an interesting angle, and you’re absolutely right that many people make those sorts of arguments, but that’s a completely different, sociological concept of “free will” which is more about responsibility rather than the scientific and philosophical concept of free will which is what I’ve been talking about, where free will is merely a subjective emergent property of consciousness. The fact that we all have different definitions is part of what makes these arguments so futile.

Those who try to claim that “we all make choices” in identical contexts and circumstances are just being ridiculous and pushing a political agenda. The more interesting argument comes from those who might try to claim that if we have no (objective) free will because our behaviors are deterministic then we bear no responsibility for our actions. But these folks are just conflating entirely different concepts and ending up with silliness. You end up with contradictions: you can’t claim that a criminal is not responsible for his actions because they were all the result of predetermined circumstances, and at the same time blame the lawmakers and justice system for enacting penalties and imposing punishments, because are lawmakers, judges and juries not also part of the same universe of predetermined circumstances, mere witless agents of determinism?

The reality – and the only way out of this dilemma – is to consider that the only way a society can function is to hold its individual members accountable for actions that are disruptive to the social order, notwithstanding the ultimately intrinsic determinism behind our cognitive processes. An enlightened society will, however, recognize the collective role of circumstances in shaping those processes and consequent behaviors and try to address them through social policy.

Thus, individuals should always be treated equally in being held accountable for their aberrant behavior, but common factors in their backgrounds that have demonstrable causation such as being child victims of abusive behaviors or dysfunctional families should be recognized as being worthy of being addressed collectively through public policy. In short, I completely agree with you that the “we all make choices” crowd is being willfully ignorant. ISTM that the difference beween the far left and the far right is that the former tends to use such factors to try to excuse individual behaviors, while the latter ignores them altogether, and dismisses the beneficial collective influence of sound public policy.

@monstro

I don’t think neuroscience is “fringe”. It is nascent, yes. But “fringe”? Every experiment in every field can be challenged and taken apart. As technology continues to advance and we get a better handle on how our genes interact with environment, I suspect the science will become less speculative and more rigorous.

I didn’t say that at all. My “fringe” criticism was directed specifically to the subcategory of “neuroscience of free will”, certainly not to neuroscience in general nor its many legitimate specialties.

[Trinopus]

@monstro

. . . And because I’ve been exposed to psychology jargon, I can distinguish egodystonic from egosyntonic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. . . .

This thread is the first place I’ve ever encountered the terms. What do they mean?

[Mijin]

@monstro

But if I don’t know what my unconscious mind is doing and can’t tell how it’s distorting my reality and yet it is always involved in my decision-making, how in the hell can I say that I’m in control of anything.

If I’m sleep-walking and get into my car and start driving it around town, I would not say that I’m in control of the car, even though literally I am. Would you say I was in control? If I plead for leniency after smashing my car into a storefront window while in this sleep-walking state, would you, the jury member, say to yourself “Well, we all make choices and monstro made hers.” Or would you say to yourself, “It’s not like she smashed her car on purpose. She wasn’t in her right mind, poor thing.”

Well I still think there are different kinds of action, even if all of them are “you”.

So if I call my boss a jerk while blind drunk, that’s still “me”, even if it’s a slightly different kind of action to telling him while sober. I’d accept the consequences of my action either way even if I think the response to the former should not be the same as the latter.

Likewise with sleepwallking. It was still me but the best response might be a medical route than incarceration say. But if they could not treat my sleepwalking, and it keeps putting people at risk, then some kind of protective care might be mandated.
Note there is no distinction between this and the way I was suggesting we deal with criminals. The only question is what is the best outcome for society.

If you’re asking whether I’m exercising free will while sleepwalking, I’ve already stated that I think the concept is completely incoherent, so you’d have to define for me what you think free will is.

@Voyager

Some religions are already deterministic. Christianity traditionally is in that we are all sinners condemned to hell unless we follow their rules.

I would dispute that.
I went to Catholic school, and “free will” was regularly trotted out as a get out of jail card for numerous philosophical / theological problems, not least of which the Problem of Evil.
Determinism was rarely mentioned, but when it was, it was always in contrast to free will; they’d be describing free will as an exception to determinism.

[Voyager]

@monstro

And I’m saying that what we do have looks indistinguishable from what animals and crazy people have, so I’m not going to presume I have something special over them.

You seem to be arguing what I’ve been arguing this entire time. The brain is doing a lot of stuff for me without my awareness or control. My brain is making a lot of decisions on my behalf. So given this, why would I ever declare that I have free will? There is no way for me to know when my brain is doing the decision-making and when I–independent of my brain–is doing it.

I’m going to cut out most of this exponentially growing discussion for lack of time. Here is the critical thing. If you only include the conscious mind in the free will discussion, I have no problem with agreeing that decisions are if not totally determined then at least extremely limited in scope.
But our conscious mind can’t be considered to be standalone. If we have free will our decisions involve both the conscious and subconscious minds, as well as significant input from our bodies.
Our mind is clearly an integrated whole. Can you explain why in defining free will you exclude most of it?

[msmith537]

@lucid-nonsense

So, I’ve got a question concerning free will. It’s pretty simple: How and when do you make your first choice out of free will?

When I tell you to!

[monstro]

@Trinopus

This thread is the first place I’ve ever encountered the terms. What do they mean?

Egosyntonic and egodystonic

The article gives the example of OCD and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The former is considered “egodystonic” because a patient with OCD recognizes that their thoughts, emotions, and behavior are abnormal and uncharacteristic of their supposed “true” state. Folks with obsessive-compulsive PD, however, do not recognize that their thoughts, emotions, and behavior are problematic because they are perfectly in line with their self-concept. So it is a matter of insight.

A person who compulsively washes their hands does so on their own volition (e.g., they would perceive the action as being one they initiated) but it would be egodystonic because they don’t want to wash their hands but feel compelled to do it anyway. I’m curious how subscribers of free will would describe this behavior.

[monstro]

@wolfpup

I’ve been away from the computer for a bit so my apologies for the late reply, and I also have yet to get caught up in the later discussions. But to address these points …
First, I disagree that a therapist uncovering some underlying causative factor(s) is any kind of “test” the way that you can test objective reality (as I previously described, for example). I might have picked creamy white as my preferred color for a car because it subconsciously reminds me of vanilla ice cream that I loved as a kid, but it was still my free choice. (Or I might have picked it for some other reason entirely, perhaps just some indefinable sense of aesthetics.)

No, therapy is not exactly a test of free will, but I would argue that it challenges it because it exposes the limited awareness we have about our behavior.

Again, rather than taking your position that free will doesn’t exist, I take the modified position that although I agree that we are all deterministic machines, free will is merely a subjective perception. There are cases where it may not be particularly relevant, like an immediate instinctive reaction to something, but when we enjoy the luxury of lengthy ruminations about a choice we are about to make, especially a major choice in life, then we can certainly be said to have free will simply on the basis of that subjective experience. The deterministically computational nature of our cognition is both invisible and irrelevant to us.

I guess I don’t personally feel the need to “enjoy” the illusion of free will. So perhaps that’s why I have no problem saying it doesn’t exist.

When I’m facing a problem, I really try not to ruminate about it. This is diffiicult for me because I have a personality that tends towards obsession and perserveration (hence, the intensity of my posting to this thread :)). But I try to stop myself when I get in this state because the rumination never gets me anywhere. I just get stuck in loops.

However, I always find that I have epiphanies after I go on automatic for a long time. It takes me about an hour to walk home from work. The moment my foot hits the front porch and I start fishing my keys out of my pocket, all the problems I was dealing with before I left the office suddenly have solutions. And there they all are, waitng for me in my consciousness. They are usually the kind of solutions that seem so basic that I feel stupid for not thinking of them sooner.

I’ve been walking home from work about eight or nine years now, and I have not found a better substitute for finding answers to my problems. I suppose this experience is what has made me realize that my decision-making isn’t something my conscious mind–the part of me that I recognize as mysef–can take credit for. It’s my neurobiology that’s doing it.

That’s an interesting angle, and you’re absolutely right that many people make those sorts of arguments, but that’s a completely different, sociological concept of “free will” which is more about responsibility rather than the scientific and philosophical concept of free will which is what I’ve been talking about, where free will is merely a subjective emergent property of consciousness. The fact that we all have different definitions is part of what makes these arguments so futile.

Do you think volition is the same thing as free will? Because those two things don’t mean the same thing to me. I’m curious if they are different for you.

Those who try to claim that “we all make choices” in identical contexts and circumstances are just being ridiculous and pushing a political agenda. The more interesting argument comes from those who might try to claim that if we have no (objective) free will because our behaviors are deterministic then we bear no responsibility for our actions. But these folks are just conflating entirely different concepts and ending up with silliness. You end up with contradictions: you can’t claim that a criminal is not responsible for his actions because they were all the result of predetermined circumstances, and at the same time blame the lawmakers and justice system for enacting penalties and imposing punishments, because are lawmakers, judges and juries not also part of the same universe of predetermined circumstances, mere witless agents of determinism?

Well, I don’t believe in free will at all, but I don’t think this eschews personality responsibility. To go back to the sleepwalking example again, if I am made aware that I do crazy things while I’m sleepwalking, I have the responsibility to keep this from happening by locking the doors, setting up alarms, and checking myself into a sleep clinic so I can get treated medically, if possible. IMHO, once I’m informed that I’m a dangerous person, then I’m culpable for what I do from that point onward. If I don’t do anything to restrain myself, then my ass should go to prison.

I think if people were made aware that their destructive behavior was the result of factors they may not be aware of rather than short-comings in their moral core, then perhaps people would be more open-minded about solutions. Even on the Dope, a bastion of progressive thinking, people will talk about medicine being used as a “crutch.” A decrepit individual just needs an attitude adjustment, dontchaknow. I think if we embraced medical interventions over judgmental shit like this, we would have heathier people because people would feel free to seek out the crutch that works best for them.

The reality – and the only way out of this dilemma – is to consider that the only way a society can function is to hold its individual members accountable for actions that are disruptive to the social order, notwithstanding the ultimately intrinsic determinism behind our cognitive processes. An enlightened society will, however, recognize the collective role of circumstances in shaping those processes and consequent behaviors and try to address them through social policy.

I think you can emphasis personal agency and responsibility without evoking free will and the baggage associated with it. I’m not in favor of telling kids, for instance, that they are mere cogs in a big cosmic wheel. We can teach them that some choices are better than others and encourage them to think before acting. I just don’t think it is helpful to allow them to believe they are above their biology and environment. It is this type of thinkng that makes people loathe to get help when they are having psychological problems, and it keeps people stuck in awful situations they could extricate themselves from, if only they recognized what was truly stressing them out.

Thus, individuals should always be treated equally in being held accountable for their aberrant behavior…

I disagree with this, though I agree with everything else you said afterwards. I think people need to be treated like individuals when it makes sense to do so. In my perfect world, the criminal justice system wouldn’t assign sentences “equally”, but according to an individual’s profile. You have an IQ of 70, raised in five foster homes, you have genes X, Y, and Z, and you score A, B, C on this battery of neurological exams? Then you get prescribed a certain prison program. And it would be a different program than the one prescribed to the smarter, better nurtured, better educated person who has different test scores and genes. Right now, we have a “one sized fits all” type of criminal justice system and then we wonder why there are so many repeat offenders. That doesn’t make sense to me.

[octopus]

@Voyager

I’m going to cut out most of this exponentially growing discussion for lack of time. Here is the critical thing. If you only include the conscious mind in the free will discussion, I have no problem with agreeing that decisions are if not totally determined then at least extremely limited in scope.
But our conscious mind can’t be considered to be standalone. If we have free will our decisions involve both the conscious and subconscious minds, as well as significant input from our bodies.
Our mind is clearly an integrated whole. Can you explain why in defining free will you exclude most of it?

Monstro isn’t. You are either governed by biology and physics or there is supernatural influence. The fact that you can’t analytically calculate what the body will decide doesn’t mean there is a “free” spirit or mechanism that isn’t governed by physical determism making real choices.

[monstro]

@Voyager

I’m going to cut out most of this exponentially growing discussion for lack of time. Here is the critical thing. If you only include the conscious mind in the free will discussion, I have no problem with agreeing that decisions are if not totally determined then at least extremely limited in scope.
But our conscious mind can’t be considered to be standalone. If we have free will our decisions involve both the conscious and subconscious minds, as well as significant input from our bodies.
Our mind is clearly an integrated whole. Can you explain why in defining free will you exclude most of it?

Because free will is supposed to mean something.

A person with free will can override his biology, history, and environmental factors to make decisions.

A person’s “intergrated whole” includes these things, by definition.

This is why claiming everything your brain does to be your free will seems like a colossal intellectual cop-out to me.

[octopus]

@monstro

Because free will is supposed to mean something.

A person with free will can override his biology, history, and environmental factors to make decisions.

A person’s “intergrated whole” includes these things, by definition.

This is why claiming everything your brain does to be your free will seems like a colossal intellectual cop-out to me.

It is. And it’s defined with clearly circular logic.

[Voyager]

@monstro

This is why claiming everything your brain does to be your free will seems like a colossal intellectual cop-out to me.

Never said quite that. There are plenty of things that the brain controls, like breathing, which is not free in the least. What I am saying is that the more or less free decisions have to be evaluated using the whole brain, not the conscious part only.
And we clearly ignore many things in our environment. Each of us ignores different things.
It may be free will or it may not, but ruling out free will because the subconscious is involved is overly simplistic.

[Trinopus]

@monstro

. . . A person who compulsively washes their hands does so on their own volition (e.g., they would perceive the action as being one they initiated) but it would be egodystonic because they don’t want to wash their hands but feel compelled to do it anyway. I’m curious how subscribers of free will would describe this behavior.

When the system is broken, it won’t function correctly. I believe in free will…and also in severe clinical depression. The depressed person cannot “will” himself to be happy. Free will is not absolute. In people with very severe compulsive disorder, the free will is broken down entirely.

People can lose their legs, too, and be unable to walk. But no one says that this proves there’s no such thing as bipedalism.

[monstro]

@Voyager

Never said quite that. There are plenty of things that the brain controls, like breathing, which is not free in the least. What I am saying is that the more or less free decisions have to be evaluated using the whole brain, not the conscious part only.

When free will was first conceptualized by humans, no one knew there was an “unconscious” mind separate from a “conscious”. This division is a recent construct. Free will is an ancient one.

And we clearly ignore many things in our environment. Each of us ignores different things.

Things in our environment slip out of our awareness. But the brain is not ignoring these things. If this were true, we would not be able to go into automatic mode without killing ourselves all the time. Our eyes and ears are picking up all kinds of information and transmitting it to our brain, whether we’re consciously paying attention to it or not.

It may be free will or it may not, but ruling out free will because the subconscious is involved is overly simplistic.

If you’re going to include the subconscious, then I can’t help but conclude that all animals with brains have free will. They may not have a conscious mind, but they sure as hell have a subconscious mind. So if the behaviors that result from human subconscious decision-making process count as exertions of free will, then why not the behaviors of animals? You said upthread that animals don’t have consciousness and so thus don’t have free will. Now you seem to be saying that a “free will” brain has to have both compartments.

According to this piece, we are only aware of 5% of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. What I hear you saying is that a human brain is special because of that 5%–that this small percentage is supposedly big enough to conclude that we are free actors while animals are dictated by rigid programs and thus not free. I disagree. I think it is far safer to assume that we just have more flexibility in our behaviors than animals do because we have a greater capacity to synthesize complex information. Our conscious helps with this. But I don’t think that 5% is enough to make us “free” from millions of years of programming.

What is free will to you, if you don’t mind sharing? We seem to be arguing the same points over and over again, and I’m starting to think we aren’t working with the same definition.

[monstro]

@Trinopus

When the system is broken, it won’t function correctly. I believe in free will…and also in severe clinical depression. The depressed person cannot “will” himself to be happy. Free will is not absolute. In people with very severe compulsive disorder, the free will is broken down entirely.

People can lose their legs, too, and be unable to walk. But no one says that this proves there’s no such thing as bipedalism.

Maybe because there is objective evidence of bipedalism.

There is no proof of free will.

[Trinopus]

I would say there is: we all make decisions every day.

I would also note there is no proof of philosophical determinism. No one has proposed a way to test the idea that tomorrow’s actions are already scripted today. If one could actually make working predictions, the idea might be demonstrated, but that never happens.

So, between two unprovable ideas, I’ll go with the one that better describes the world I live in.

[monstro]

@Trinopus

I would say there is: we all make decisions every day.

Except for animals, children, teenagers, the mentally challenged, the mentally ill, people with brain disorders, the hypoglycemic, the intoxicated, people having intense emotions, people experiencing PMS and menopause, sleep-walkers, and…am I leaving anyone else out?

I would also note there is no proof of philosophical determinism. No one has proposed a way to test the idea that tomorrow’s actions are already scripted today. If one could actually make working predictions, the idea might be demonstrated, but that never happens.

Which is a bigger leap to make? That our actions occur independent of our biology and environment or that they are the direct result of biology and environment?

What is the bigger leap to make? That 5% awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and actions grants us all the ability we need to override our biology and environment when making decisions? Or that 5% awareness isn’t enough for us to know why we’re doing what we’re doing, and so we can’t say whether we are overriding anything or just riding a big-ass wave.

Every single life form on this planet is driven by biology and environment. But I’m supposed to think humans are special because they invented the concept of “free will”? They say that they have it, so it must be so?

No to all that noise, I say. If all other life forms are governed only by sophisticated programs, then I’m going to assume humans are no different until it is proven otherwise. Sophisticated programming is the default.

So, between two unprovable ideas, I’ll go with the one that better describes the world I live in.

There’s way more evidence supporting non-free will than free will. Like 4 billion years of evolution.

If we have already reached the “free will” state with our puny consciousness, how are we going to describe our abilities once our species evolves 50% cognitive awareness? “New and improved” free will? Free will with extra freedom? Maximum strength free will?

The whole thing is ridiculous.

[BeepKillBeep]

I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been stated. I am pro-free will. But I thought I would share this paper by Professor John Searle (John Searle - Wikipedia). It is a favorite of mine with respect to free will and neurobiology. It is a bit long, but it is really good so I suggest reading it. I tried to summarize it, but honestly, I can only make a mess of it, so I deleted what I wrote. If nothing else, maybe try to look at pages 17 to 24.

http://www.summer12.isc.uqam.ca/page/docs/readings/Searle-John/Searle_Free_Will_as_a_Problem_in_Neurobiology.pdf

[Trinopus]

@monstro

Except for animals, children, teenagers, the mentally challenged, the mentally ill, people with brain disorders, the hypoglycemic, the intoxicated, people having intense emotions, people experiencing PMS and menopause, sleep-walkers, and…am I leaving anyone else out? . . .

I already covered that. Some people have damage to the parts of their brains that make decisions. You’re not making any meaningful point here.

Except for animals, children, teenagers, the mentally challenged, the mentally ill, people with brain disorders, the hypoglycemic, the intoxicated, people having intense emotions, people experiencing PMS and menopause, sleep-walkers, and…am I leaving anyone else out?

. . . There’s way more evidence supporting non-free will than free will. Like 4 billion years of evolution.

There is no evidence from evolution that our fates are pre-determined. In fact, I would say exactly the opposite: we have evolved incredibly complicated decision-making apparati (our brains) and that large biological expense must return some advantage. If we were pre-determined, evolution would capitalize on that, instead, and give us no brains at all, since no brains are needed to “follow a script.”