No Free Will is preferable!

Great Debates
1

Bear with me on this; I just thought of all this today, so it might be full of flaws; please point them all out and castigate me for being an idiot. :slight_smile:

Imagine a world where we do not have free will. Our decisions and actions aren’t guided by our soul, or some other agent, but entirely by our experiences and outside factors. For example, say someone points a gun at someone I hold dear and tells me to give them all my money. In a world where I do not have free will, I don’t have a choice; my decision will be affected by my love for the person, my fear of them or I being shot, my selfishness, etc. And in turn, all these factors are created by causal factors; I may love this person because I grew up with them; I could be selfish because of some event in my youth. All of these factors will add up to my action; i’d hand over the cash. If there were an infinite amount of parallel universes, all the same, where I faced that decision, i’d make exactly the same choice; and it’s no choice at all really, since (thanks to the factors affecting me) I must make that choice.

So imagine that same situation, but in a world where we do have free will. Now there are still all those factors as a part of me, but I have an genuine choice; I can choose to not hand over the money. Of course, being me, I would choose to fork over the cash to save my loved one.

But would I? I have free will, which means I’m able to make the choice and am not dictated to by affecting factors. But if i’m not affected by those factors, what makes me choose to save my friend? Because I like them? Nope, because I have free will - i’m free to go act against that factor. As a person with free will, I cannot choose what I want because I do not want anything; i’m free of all those affecting factors. If i’m not free of them all, I don’t have free will.

So in a world where I have free will, I’m perfectly able to choose to just walk away and leave my friend to be killed. And it gets worse; just because I am not dictated to by affecting factors doesn’t mean I don’t still feel them. So I might choose to walk away even though that makes me feel horrible. And i’m just as likely to make that choice as I am any other possible choice, since outside factors don’t affect me.

I put it to you that a world with free will would be worse than a world without free will.

2

I think most understandings of human free will include a review process, werein we’re allowed to think of all the crazy reactions we might have, weigh them, and discard the ones with unplatable outcomes. So you wouldn’t get a lot of people going “I feel really bad about how I decide to kill 50% of the people I meet. Too bad my free will is making me choose wether or not to kill so randomly.”

The point of free will is, without out it, what meaning do our lives have? And to have been deterministically foredestined to desire meaning in a meaningless life, well, that’s a rotten deal.

3

Those who believe free will exists probably won’t be swayed. With free will, whenever they “decide” to do a “good” act, they can then take credit for being a good person rather than a meat computer that happened to produce an inevitable result.

4

A world without free will would let you avoid all responsibility for your choice, good or bad. For some, not having responsibility for their choices is preferable to having responsibility. Free will isn’t all positive, but I’d rather have free will than not.

5

No. Free will does not let you avoid responsibility. Laws and social norms are external forces that affect your programming - influencing you to weigh some outcomes more favorably than others. If you still produce outcomes society deems unacceptable, they just use more coercive methods. The laws and society themselves are just manifestations of our most common programming.

6

Any argument about Free Will hinges on the question of whether we even have it or not. To me, Free Will may be an illusion, but a compelling one. Every decision I make is based on previous decisions in similar circumstances, as well as my mood at the time. It’s not so much that everything is pre-ordained as that I’m always bound by what’s previously occurred in my life and even if I opt to be “contrary” I’m still acting based upon my built in personality traits and a “predictable” tendency to go against convention on occasion.

In any case, I prefer the possible illusion of Free Will to the certainty of predestination.

7

I would agree that living within the illusion of free will is easier and in day-to-day activities even necessary. But I claim it is also limiting. It leads us to conclusions like “we’ll never know why he shot those little girls.” It smothers inquiry as it feeds our egos.

8

You’re defining having free will by saying we don’t have it, though. Your review process is in itself a lack of free will, since we’re taking into account all the outside and inner factors that will help us to make a decision.

And you don’t get a lot of people saying that because we don’t have free will. :wink:

There would be no meaning - and yeah, that’s a pretty bad deal. I consider it better than the alternative, though.

It wouldn’t let you avoid all responsibility, because you yourself wouldn’t let it. I don’t believe free will exists, yet I still feel bad if I do something immoral or that I don’t like. There’s a big difference between convincing yourself of something intellectually and convincing yourself practically; because as photopat says there’s still the illusion of free will -

…and I actually agree totally with this; the illusion of free will is very important, and I would certainly not want to live in a world without that illusion. It’s just important on occasion that we’re able to pierce that illusion.

9

Actaully, what I’m trying to point out is that the defintion of free will that you appear to be using in your OP bears little relation to how most people think of the concept. By setting it up and shooting it down, you’re either doing a strawman or an excluded middle, I’m not sure which.

It’s my understanding that most people consider having any free will to be “having free will”. Lack of free will is thought to be the total absence of the same. By painting free will as a condition where your actions are totally unconstrained by morals, personality, awareness of consequences, past history, surrounding enviromental factors, the laws of physics, etcetera, you do indeed present an easily dismissed absurdity. But you also completely fail to address the issue of what most people think of as ‘free will’.

Now, it might actually be interesting to discuss what most people do think of as free will. In my entirely uninformed opinion, I’d guess that most people think of it as “having an intelligent unique soul, unconstrained by the limitations of simple mechanical processes, guiding us in the manner that a lump of grey matter cannot”. This of course makes large negative assumptions about the guiding power of grey matter. I don’t think many people think of ‘free will’ as ‘a totally random factor’; most people don’t consider themselves literally random, I think; they prefer to think that they are ‘in control’, which is denied by both determinism and randomity.

Perhaps “objectively not predictable to an absolute degree” would be the best way to describe it. Even though in mechanistic terms that pretty much equates back to the unpalatable ‘random factor’, mitigated by various internal and external factors.