Free will

Great Debates
1

I realized something quite odd during my mushroom trip that I wanted to share.

Everyone has an ego and your ego makes up who you are. It defines your interests, desires, is responsible for your perception of the world, and so forth.

With this in mind, ask yourself- who am I? What are my interests, ambitions, what do I like, what do I hate, and so forth. Then imagine if you were born as somebody else, say your next door neighbor, and your next door neighbor was you. Wouldn’t your “next-door-neighbor” you be the same you that YOU are right now? Sorry if this is a kind of mindfuck, but bear with me. Wouldn’t you “next-door neighbor you” have the same interests, desires, amibitions, perspective of life, etc that YOU have right now? Wouldn’t your next door neighbor have the same, identical innermost thoughts that are so dear to you right now?

This kind of makes me question free will. For instance, say I was born as Albert Einstein (let’s define being born as as meaning perceiving sentience from the body of), wouldn’t I have lived the exact same life that he has lived now? Because my sentience would be a product of Albert Einstein’s brain rather than the product of my own, current brain? Does this sort of make sense?

I feel like we often think that if we were born as somebody else (once again, meaning perceiving sentience from somebody else’s body rather than your own), we’d be so different. I hear this all the time from comments like “wow, she’s so pretty, if I was her I wouldn’t be depressed.” But my point is, if you were her, you’d be in the exact same state as her because you would be her and “her” is simply what she is right now, and what she will always be regardless of “who” is “her”.

Any thoughts or am I just spewing bs?

To use an analogy sort of, try reading this: Paul is an A+ student who is ambitious, successful, and happy. Ryan is a C- student who is depressed, unhappy, and slow. If Ryan was born as Paul and Paul as Ryan, would Paul still be an A+ student? Isn’t Paul’s attitude of life and his sentience exclusively a product of Paul’s brain? Therefore if Paul is born as Ryan, he will be a C- student because he will no longer perceive the world as Paul but rather as Ryan.

That little person behind your eyes- the one who thinks and makes decisions and decides how your body should move around is 100% a property of the body that it manifests itself in. Therefore, if you were born as somebody else, that “little person” would be someone completely different.

tl;dr: if you were your best friend, as in your perceived sentience from the body of your best friend, wouldn’t you be the EXACT same person, both inside and out, that your best friend is right now? Because YOU would no longer be YOU, because YOU, right now, are YOUR brain and YOUR genetics and YOUR memories, but if YOU were your best friend, you’d be HIS brain and HIS genetics, and HIS MEMORIES, which would be 100% identical to who he is now.

2

The existence of free will is very unlikely, but this is something I don’t like to think about. (Although since I probably don’t have free will, I either will or will not think about it to some degree and there’s nothing I can do to change that.)

3

If you were born as your next door neighbor (so you grew up as the child of your next door neighbor’s parents, in your next door neighbor’s house, had your next door neighbro’s high school teachers, freckles and big feet, etc.) I doubt you would have the same thoughts as your experiences would be materially different. At a minimum, you would have different things to think about.

I think we have free will within the limitations of our genetic inheritance and our circumstances in life. I cannot choose to be a professional basketball player or a physicist because I don’t have the innate talents required; I can’t choose to be a pioneer in the American West because the frontier was closed before I was born; I can’t choose to contemplate purchasing a $38,000 purse because I was not born to a wealthy family and am not a tv star.

I can choose to have a salad instead of a hamburger for lunch, to not take out my frustrations on my assistant, to spend time with my kid instead of meeting my friends for a drink. It might not be easy to make those choices on a given day, but I am free to make them.

But I

4

Sorry, let me elaborate, I think I led you the wrong way.

My point was this: If I was born as my next door neighbor and he was born as me, wouldn’t the “me as the next door neighbor” be identical to my current next door neighbor in every way imaginable. Wouldn’t “me as the next door neighbor” and my current next door neighbor both have identical interests, desires, and so on?

I

5

Not necessarily. Toss in randomness. Say, one day, you happened to open a magazine to an article on horses, and became really interested in that. But the page might just as easily have opened to the next page, about geology, and that might have caught your attention.

For you to be exactly like your neighbor, the entire cosmos must be exactly the same, and that means nobody has free will of any sort. It suggests a robotic, pre-programmed cosmos.

If you re-wound the tape of time, and let it play again, and if things turn out differently – maybe Kennedy and Kruschev mucked up the Cuban Missile Crisis and we all die – that suggests free will (or at least volition, which is similar but not exactly the same.)

6

It doesn’t sound like you’re questioning free will so much as the soul, some kind of inner you that transcends your body and experience, with a you-ness that would persist through all circumstances.

As to your example, yes, your neighbor would be you, because everything that caused you to be you would have caused him to be you. Beyond genetics and experience, nothing else makes you you.

7

Since there is not (to my knowledge) a way to accurately test for free will, then whether we have it or not is a moot point. If we do, then we do - if we don’t, it still appears as if we do, so there’s no practical difference.

8

You believe randomness is the same as volition?

9

Shrooms are fun, we are a product of nature and nurture its just the mix that is in dispute.

10

Nope. I didn’t say that. I said that randomness causes variations in events, and that, if you could re-wind the tape of history and play it forward again, random changes would probably alter history. A stray arrow might kill Alexander the Great at Arbela, and that would be the end of his conquests.

Volition is probably a result of complexity, but also subject to randomness. The fact that we can surprise ourselves is an interesting key to the matter.

11

The first thing to say about free will is that the very concept doesn’t make sense. The question of whether it exists or not is undefined because the concept is incoherent.

The very way we think about choice – as a willful, reasoned action – implies that it is the product of past information and our specific neurology.
The way “free will” is usually rendered is that it’s not determined from such past causes, but random phenomena don’t count as it still must be a willful choice. This doesn’t make sense.

In terms of the specific question of the OP, I’m not quite sure I get it. If I were different, I’d be different, and sure, I’d make different choices.

I suppose I can imagine myself being smarter, say, and yet keeping my personality intact. But here I would still behave differently both because I would manage to solve some problems that lesser Mijin didn’t manage (all those times I thought of zingers after the window in the conversation where I could have delivered them…no such problem for greater Mijin), and because of a self-awareness of my abilities.

12

I can see why the concept could be called incoherent, but I would offer this as a definition: if I look back at something I did and feel regret because “I could have done better”, that would mean I think I had free will, that I could have done otherwise. But when I really think about it, I don’t think that’s true.

13

The Greater Mijin might have such a remote, detached, zen-like dispassion as to make the delivering of zingers ungratifying. That’s the dickens with enlightenment: the more you know, the less everything seems to matter!

Personally, I see the key to volition as being a big, complicated, messy game of Calvinball, played by hundreds of little sub-brains, each with its own agenda. “Eat the damn candy bar!” “No, no, I’ll gain weight.” “Oooh, yellow cellophane!” “Uncle Joe got one of those stuck in his trachea once.” “If I put it aside for later, I’ll have it available for later.” “I could put this in a slingshot and bean my pointy-headed boss with it.” etc. Eventually, a consensus is achieved, and we eat the damn thing. And believe we did it by choice!

14

Exactly. The whole “could have chosen differently” thing really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Rewind the tape and of course the same thing will happen. Put me back to move 22 when I was too focused on my own attack and getting a little tired, and watch me hang my bishop again. What does “could have” mean?

I recently read the book Incognito by David Eagleman that comes to this kind of conclusion and cites supporting neuroscience / psychology research. Basically the idea being that there are a number of relatively simple “programs” that run in our subconscious, and they have overlapping responsibilities. And in most cases the conscious mind is only informed of the result of these conflicts; it happens before (or instead of) weighing up factors consciously.

<hijack>
It’s a good book, but ironically, he really drops the ball on the free will chapter IMO.
For example, paraphrasing: “Whether our decisions are driven by billiard balls [classical physics] or dice [quantum physics], it doesn’t look like there is room for free will”. It’s infuriating because he doesn’t ask the questions: Can we even think of a universe where there is the possibility of free will? Is the concept itself coherent?

15

If we believe that the brain is a Turing Machine, however complicated, then free will can only be an illusion. You already pointed that out well with your chess analogy.

Sir Roger Penrose has put forward some powerful arguments about why the brain is not merely a Turing Machine; he suggests that there is some sort of “logic” that we do not yet understand that goes beyond our notions of true/false. I like to believe that this is where the soul lives, where “soul” is a stand in for whatever bits that make us individuals that do not fit in a Turing Machine.

16

Or, as your author Eagleman hints at, maybe something different would happen, but only because the dice roll comes up differently the next time. You still do not really have a choice. Only the illusion of one.

Which again I find rather depressing as well as making it confusing as to whether I should be angry at people who do unkind things. It sure feels like that is right, but as I say it does not stand up to intellectual examination. Which is another reason I prefer not to think about this most of the time, though my fundamental argument undermines the notion of whether my “preference” means much.

17

Again, I am not saying free will doesn’t exist, I’m saying the very concept doesn’t make sense. No-one can clearly define it in the first place.

And in terms of it bothering me; not really. Offer me coffee or tea and it is not the case that that decision is already made: I really do think through which one I want, and make a choice. It’s just that that thought process is causally connected with the rest of the universe. I don’t see how any form of reasoning could work any differently.

18

I don’t either, but it really doesn’t bother you that if you make terrible choices in your life there is nothing you can really choose to do to avoid them; or for that matter if you do good things you can’t really take credit by thinking “I didn’t have to do that”?

19

It bothers me that terrible things happen to me and to others. And yeah I have many regrets.

But yeah I recognize that many of the dumb things I did were down to ignorance. If I have to stand trial for my life, for my biggest fuckups I can truthfully say I didn’t know any better.

Though if you learn from an event you can prevent yourself doing it again. This is the crucial distinction between determinism and fatalism.

You can take credit.
Again, your decision-making process is not a sideshow, it’s centre stage. If you decide to do something good, you can and should be credited for it, just as if you decide to buy shares in a company you should earn credits if the share price rises. In neither case does it make any difference whether you could have acted differently.

20

What about anger, or even hate, for someone who commits heinous crimes but is judged pretty universally to be sane?