Nazi’s/Serbs/Hutu’s were monsters, not really people. There’s a fundamental difference between these not-people who will commit atrocities under certain circumstances and me.
Well, then, the next time a bunch of “fundies” try to deny you your “rights,” they can reply, “What rights? You don’t even have free will. You said so yourself. So, why not sit back at let us tell you what to do, since your free will is a delusion?”
So you didn’t have a choice to post this comment?
Or I didn’t have free choice to buy groceries this morning (which I did?)
I don’t have any comforting myths I believe in. I’m totally rational.
That makes no sense. If I decided to allow other people to direct what I do, against my own self-interest, I would be making a choice. Since I do not have free will, I can only do what the algorithms in my brain determine is the best choice at the time.
Let’s say you’re playing a video game. Would you expect the game to let you win every time, since it doesn’t have free will? Of course not - you would expect it to do exactly what it is programmed to do.
Of course you bought groceries. You MUST buy groceries, because you know that if you do not eat, you will become very hungry, which is an unpleasant feeling. You did what best served your own self-interest at that particular time.
Ha ha ha ha ha no.
Granted I do not want to be very hungry. Do I buy groceries from the supermarket and restock thoroughly? Do I figure I have enough in the house to whip up something edible… for my cupboard is never wholly bare? Do I stop at the convenience store and get enough tor the next day or two? Do I just say “sod it” and grab a McMeal? Do I pick this instead of that at the grocery store? And more to the point, what dictated each one of the words I decided to type?
Like I said, you do whatever is in your own self interest at the time. You are incapable of doing anything else. It’s certainly easier to pretend it’s free will, so why not pretend? Laugh all you want; that changes nothing.
Surely the ability to do whatever I perceive as being in my own self-interest (and I only wish everything I did actually was in my own self-interest!) is the essence of free will. I certainly can’t imagine what else free will could mean.
I know what it’s like to do something unintentionally, either by accident or reflex or because I was coerced. When I speak of free will, I mean that my actions are at least sometimes NOT caused by one of those things, but are a result of a decision, that is to say, a result of my own assessment of my self-interest. Pointing out that I couldn’t decide something that wasn’t the result of my own assessment of my self-interest, or that the assessment itself is the result of deterministic and stochastic physical processes within my brain is interesting inasmuch as it tells me how my free will works (though again, it’s hard to see what else it could be) but it certainly doesn’t mean I don’t have free will at all.
I’ve been in countries where both of those attributes were deficient or largely missing. People are, for the most part, even better, because there is no overlay of of authority to steer them all as a herd, and each person has to take it upon himself to structure social order within his personal space.
Law and order generates a flow-chart morality, where people behave according to authoritarian rules, rather than basic principles of kindness and fairness. Economic infrastructure engenders a mindset of doing what is good for business, not what is fair and honest.
No.
If we had free will, it would be possible for us to act in a way NOT in accordance with our wants, urges, and compulsions–most of which are subconscious.
Every unpleasant actions we carry out results in a benefit to ourselves. We get some reward, even if it’s on a subconscious level, for everything we do.
Since we don’t determine what is or isn’t rewarding to us, how can we say we behave with “free will”? If I experience a burst of dopamine after doing exercise but another person doesn’t, am I am a more disciplined person for being able to commit to a exercise regimen. Or am I just luckier?
That is what Killer Time means when he says we don’t have free will, and I agree that this is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. It’s almost impossible to speak in an unintelligible way without summoning up this lie.
So free will is a willful action against our own will? Or if not, what is it?
If we’re defining free will to be something that’s inconsistent and incoherent, the statement “free will does not exist” is meaningless.
Semi-nitpick, but there’s a common idea people have of a reward mechanism governing everything we do, and of the subconscious somehow knowing why we do things.
But this would be slow and wasteful compared to the alternative of just evolving hard-wired mechanisms within the brain.
Pleasure is only necessary for those actions where a conscious decision needs to be made, and no part of the brain needs to know why a given action is good / pleasurable.
People fixate on “will” but conveniently ignore the adjective in front of it. What does free mean to you?
To me, “free will” would imply that not only do I carry out what I want to do, but that I consciously dictate that which I want to do. And this is the part that is bullshit. One’s “will” is not under anyone’s conscious control.
No, you just misunderstand me.
I would consider the diminishment of pain to also be a reward (or something akin to one).
For instance, if I hear the wail of a puppy, I could tune it out if given a good enough reason to. But I can’t choose whether the sound evokes a painful reaction in me. If given the freedom to do so, the pain might compel me to jump into the raging river and save the drowning puppy. So where does the free will come in? My reaction to the drowning puppy is no more contemplative than when I curse and jump around in response to stubbing my toe. Sure, you can say I have a “choice” with both reactions. But they are pretty much the same type of choice you have when being coerced by any other external factor (like a gun held to your head or the threat of being fired). Coercion is the farthest thing from “free” as you can get.
So if not free will, what is it? The hell I know. I just know it ain’t “free”.
I try to avoid ever using the term, since people usually make statements about “free will” that don’t even seem to have a consistent concept of what they mean in mind.
You OTOH have said a lot of things about why free will can’t exist in your opinion. But what actually do you mean by free will? Forget about our pretty-much-Deterministic universe: could you conceive of any universe that has it?
But you would have no basis for setting such a want. You’d need some “bolt out of the blue” that for no reason at all makes you want to want to*, I dunno, go take a shower instead of jump off a cliff. But then of course we could say that bolt out of the blue is an event outside of “you” so we don’t have free will because of that.
But personally, long before getting this far, I suggest we step back and ask ourselves whether the concept of free will, the thing you’re saying doesn’t exist, makes any sense at all.
- And that’s a deliberate repeat of “want to”, because we’re already talking about meta-wants.
Well that’s certainly an example of a reward because by and large the whole concept of physical pain exists as a stick to help guide the decisions of the conscious mind.
Like I said, when we’re discussing conscious decisions there are indeed rewards, but you were talking about everything having a reward in the subconscious. What reward is there for the knee-jerk reflex, and why did we evolve such a reward?
You have a choice in both cases, it’s just in one scenario the pros and cons are stacked more heavily on one side.
All I’m saying WRT our choices, is that when you make decisions, it’s not that your decision has already been made and any feeling of choice is an illusion. The brain isn’t your puppet-master, you are your brain. And I cannot predict (with certainty) what your next decision will be without simulating your mind and its processes.
But of course your brain is causally linked to the rest of the universe. What else could it be?
Free will means not only carrying out the actions that follow from an individual’s wants, urges, and compulsions, but it also means consciously choosing which wants, urges, and compulsions an individual has.
Free will is being able to freely choose what one will do. A person with free will can choose from an near-infinite number of options how they will behave, irrespective of how that person is fundamentally constructed or what they’ve experienced in the past.
No, I can’t conceive of a universe that has free will. But whether or not I could conceive of such a place doesn’t seem that super-important to my argument. I can’t conceive of a universe where time moves backwards. But that doesn’t mean my perception of time is nothing more than an illusion.
Exactly. So why talk about “free will” at all?
Huh? How can abstraction be assumed to exist if it doesn’t make any sense? Isn’t it incumbent on those who say it is exists to prove it?
All I’m saying is that the very notion is ridiculous. Our scientific understanding of the world and ourselves supports this opinion. If you’ve got scientific evidence that supports the concept of free will, I’m all ears. But I’m not going to assume it exists just cuz that’s how we perceive it to be. Our perceptions are screwy about a lot of things.
You’d have to ask my subconscious mind that question.
I wasn’t thinking of physiological reflexes when I said “everything we do is associated with reward”. However, I am intimately familiar with actions that resemble involuntary reflexes, as someone who has Tourette’s Syndrome. And I will tell you, as embarrassed as I sometimes feel when I’m ticcing, I will cop to feeling a sense of well-being as well. Not pleasure so much as relief. The same when I fidget and stim.
I can control myself when social pressure coerces me to “behave” (when I’m in an important meeting, for instance). So in that way, my movements aren’t like reflexes. But take away my self-consciousness and I will tic away. If someone ever tries to shame me by telling me I am free to decide whether to tic or not, I’d tell them I can’t force my brain to inhibit my dopamine receptors on command. But perhaps if they held a gun to my head, it would.
Science isn’t in the business of “why” as much as it is “how”. Why do our knees jerk? Who the hell knows.
My feelings about free will are not based on physics and the belief that this is a deterministic universe. They are based on what we know (and don’t know) about the mind and brain. We are not just our brains. We our brains + genes +environment. None of which are under our conscious control. If they are not under our conscious control, then we don’t have choices. We are just following an elaborate program that our conscious minds are not privy to.
Of course, it is practically impossible to have a conversation with someone without implying we actually do have choices. And since our language influences how we think, it is practically impossible not to believe that we have choices. Which goes to the heart of the OP and why Killer Time wins the thread. Even the people who don’t believe in free will, such as myself, speak and act as if we do.
See, guys ? That’s what I was talking about when I said the whole free will shit was gonna take ages back in post #67 
Does it? Are you sure?
Because we have some of that now. I can control whether a wailing dog bothers me, just not very well. But I can practice meditation, I can take drugs or drink alcohol, I can practice CBT, and I can to some extent decide whether the sound of the wail is painful. And I have no doubt that at some point we will have “Penfield mood organs” that allow us to directly control our own neural structures and chemistry and to dial up any brain state on a whim.
Will that give us free will? It will give us exactly what you define “free will” to be, but I suspect you’ll answer that it won’t, because you’ve already decided a priori that free will can’t exist in a deterministic universe, and so you’ll redefine free will into existence like a theist shrinking God to fit the ever-diminishing gaps.
But determinism (both physical and biological) is irrelevant to free will.
Sure, if you ask people what they mean by free will, they’ll often describe something that requires some sort of absolute ontological indeterminacy. But if you look at how people actually use the concept of free will, when they’re saying “I did it of my own free will,” or asking “Do animals have free will?” or “Will robots ever have free will?” and contrasting it with other states of being such as “The rape victim didn’t consent of her free will but was coerced,” or “the Parkinson’s sufferer doesn’t mean to shake; they can’t help it,” or “I felt my hands reach out and strangle him, but I had control over them; I tried to stop, but I couldn’t,” you will find that they are usually making valid, meaningful, and useful philosophical distinctions between different states, that they call one set of those states, “free will,” and that those distinctions are not made moot because, like Howard the Duck, we find ourselves trapped in a world (and a self) we never made.
Furthermore, even though people, when asked, often say that they mean absolute ontological indeterminacy, if you convince people that they do not in fact have free will, they typically change their behavior in a way that would be rational only if you had convinced them that they lack the sort of partial, deterministic agency that I think we agree people do possess. (Sorry I don’t have a cite handy for this, but I think it’s mentioned in Sam Harris’s book Free Will.*) This tells me that that’s what people actually mean when they say “free will.”
Free will in the ultimate ontological sense only becomes important when people start discussing whether free will exists, and one side insists that only the ultimate ontological kind is really free will because we all agree that we have the other kind. But that other kind is the one that is actually a useful philosophical concept that draws meaningful distinction in the real world. So if you don’t want us to call that thing “free will” anymore, you’d better come up with something else equally catchy that people can use, because the rest of us are going to want to keep talking about it. You can keep talking about your ontological indeterminacy thing and calling it “free will” if you want, but I think that you’ll find that once you’ve clearly divorced that term from all the meaningful and useful stuff, you’ll find that the conversation about it becomes much less interesting.
*Harris’s book, BTW, tries to make the same argument for the non-existence of free will as you do. It fails so spectacularly, IMO, that I think it actually makes an excellent primer on my position, compatibilism.
It’s true: we have no self-control. The question is, is that our fault?
But your “free will” didn’t direct you to do any of those things; you did whatever you did in response to the dog’s actions. If you were raised in a environment that had resulted in you being a sociopath, you might have shot the dog, thus solving the problem. So whatever values were instilled in you when you grew up would affect how you react to the dog. How is that free will?
I don’t want to hijack the thread, so I’ll stop talking about this…right after I respond to Alan Smithee.
Lots of people try meditation, take drugs, and practice CBT, and are still unable to soothe themselves in response to pain. You may try any number of these things and find success, but it’s not because you have consciously willed yourself to respond to them. It’s because you are programmed to respond to them. The same way that some babies are programmed to cry in response to loud music while other babies are programmed to laugh.
Nor did you choose to be the type of person who would try a novel approach. That you were able to come up with a long list of strategies is the result of your educational and cultural background, as well as your memory and cognitive ability. No one chooses how smart they are. And your willingness to experiment is the result of your grit and self-confidence, neither of which can be “willed” either.
Please don’t presume to know what I’ve decided, especially since you don’t seem to grok my argument (hint: it ain’t got nothing to do with the determinism of the universe.)
I would tell you that we have something called “will”. A drive, an impulse, an urge, a compulsion, volition, what have you. I just don’t call it “free”, because that adjective comes with a bunch of implications–like that an individual is free to decide what he wants to do or that he is free to act in a way that is not driven by his internal governor, whatever that may be. I don’t believe either is the case.
Today I took a hike in the woods. Though it seemed like I had no bias in the direction I chose at every fork in the road, I know that my track was predictable enough for any outside observer who had enough information about me. I’m fine with saying I made “decisions” or “choices” because the English vocabulary doesn’t really offer any better, non-crazy alternatives. But I know they weren’t freely made decisions or choices. Just because I don’t see the gun being held to my head doesn’t mean it’s not there.
I can’t see how you could possibly believe this.
I’m not so bothered by those examples. I am more bothered by people who presume to know the state of mind of other people.
“He killed despite knowing that murder is wrong. He had free will. Let’s execute him!”
We give ourselves permission to vilify and punish people all the time because we presume we know they are fully responsible for their actions–that they are free agents. It amazes me how easy it is us for to rag on someone else’s personal failings when we too have those same failings, just manifest in a different way. I think the illusion of free will allows something like this to happen. Because we can’t imagine that we’d ever kill someone, we feel we are in the position to judge the murderer in our midst as an inferior human being. When for all we know, if we had that murder’s same upbringing, life experiences, and mental state, we’d have made the same choice. But you can’t go through life letting everyone off the hook for their personal failures. So we tell ourselves that there’s such a thing as free will so we can sleep peacefully at night.