I was going to ask this in the latest ‘free will’ thread but it seems to be something of a train-wreck.
The question of free will pops up fairly regularly on the SD but there is one aspect I was wondering about, what would the possession of free will on a human everyday level actually look like? If I’m following the anti-free will argument correctly it seems to be along the lines of ‘every action we take is the result of a long chain of causually linked events’, so what would acting with free will actually look like, and would it be different to what we actually experience every day?
Thank you in advance! (for the record I believe we do have free will, but I suspect definitional terms are being used differently in these subjects and I’m not smart enough to follow the arguments properly).
Since we do in fact possess free will, it would look like what we’ve got.
Free will threads can be confidently predicted to be train wrecks.
Causal determinism is a useful way to view occurrences and events, but it doesn’t invalidate explanations of behavior that are not deterministic in nature.
Free will is kind of a meaningless term–it is like saying “I don’t understand how my calculator works, so it can say 2+2=5 if it wants to.” So what you are asking is “what would happen if people acted in ways that weren’t determined by the experiences they have had in their lives and the wiring of their brain.” “What if people were to do things utterly unrelated to how they think or what they think about.” It doesn’t have much more meaning than asking what if a calculator could choose for two plus two to equal five.
But let’s play with the idea a bit–in a world with free will, there would be no mental illnesses, addictions, or behavior-related health issues. Because if you are smoking, drinking, using meth, eating too much, thinking “bad” thoughts, etc., and you want to stop doing that, then you could stop, cold turkey, because you wanted to. OCD people could loose their crippling behaviors because they want to. Autistic people could understand the interactions of neurotypicals because they want to. Because, after all, why wouldn’t people want to do all of those things, if their choices weren’t for constrained by history and biology?
Complete insanity, probably leading to severe injury or death very quickly. If a person’s thoughts and behavior aren’t basically deterministic then there really isn’t any other way it can go.
They’d go immediately insane because there’d be no connection between recent thoughts and prior ones, while their actions would bear no relation to their needs, desires or experience.
AHunter, you are very open about struggling with your gender identity. Things would be much simpler for you if you were a vanilla cis-het. So you really should choose to do that.
AHunter is right, kinda: we behave and feel as if we have Free Will so it is our Reality, to answer your OP.
The question of “Ah, but does it really exist?” is what leads to all the debatefulness ;).
That’s why, in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=813828
I asked how important the debate truly was. If I feel as if I experience Free Will, even if that feeling is illusory, how should I go about my day if I want to feel like I am trying to be a Better Person, as defined by me?
You currently ARE experiencing what feels like Free Will. Now what? Isn’t that the more important question?
Unless we’re also no longer constrained by the limits of physics and biology, real free will and the illusion of free will that anti-free will believers say we’re under now aren’t going to differ a whole lot.
I recently did a personal study looking at the biblical perspective of free will. In short, my findings are a choice of what emotion to respond in. God is defined as a emotion (God is Love), and we are asked to respond with Love. Other things is God judges the heart (the figurative seat of emotions), man judges (incorrectly) actions. God calls people out on their emotional choices.
Now that does not always mean we are in control of them, but at points we can chose emotions. If we let a pattern go to far however that emotion (Which is a spirit) will consume us.
It also doesn’t mean we can’t feel other emotions, but to channel them towards the good and beneficial stuff.
It does not biblically mean making logical/thoughtful decisions like to take a vacation or not, or to go this way or that, as God clearly is in control and directs our steps regardless of man’s intent to do so.
Given that most of those things have little in common with each other, people do indeed stop cold turkey all the time w.r.t. addictions at least. As a % of those who say they want to stop, yeah it is low, but it isn’t zero.
Indeed; anyone asking about free will vs. determinism is assuming from the start that those are two different things.
If I build a clockwork mechanism, wind it up, and then let it act on its own without further interference from me, then it is both exercising its free will and acting deterministically.
Why do you imagine that volition is either zero or 100%? Why can’t it be limited – as, in fact, in the real world, it is.
Some things are hard for us to do. Dieting, quitting smoking, turning a friend in to the police for a major crime, etc. Sometimes, we fail completely and lose our tempers, swearing at and even hitting people we dearly love.
These don’t mean that choice and volition don’t exist; they only show that our will is not absolutely free.
(You, personally, can’t run a mile in two minutes. So I guess that proves you can’t run a mile in fifteen minutes.)
There is a huge difference between quitting smoking and reporting a crime. You never hear tales of someone who desperately wants to not report a crime finding themselves unconsciously picking up a phone and reporting it before the have even noticed it, hating themselves for it, but lacking the willpower to not do it. You do hear of people desperately wanting to quit smoking lighting up out of habit, constantly fighting it, and constantly failing. That happens because a part of the mind below the conscious level is driving it to happen, which is exactly what free will isn’t.
Free will means no addictions, no behaviors that you don’t want to have but can’t break.
It is not primarily AHunter3 who is struggling with his gender identity, that’s just a local node on which that conversation can be tuned in. It is the species human that is struggling with gender identity.
Less than 1% of the thoughts that AHunter3 has had about gender and gender identity (his own or in general) are uniquely his.
But that’s a 1% that reflects the fact that there really is an individual there who makes independent assessments in conjunction with the backdrop of social thoughts surrounding him, does some critiques and edits rather than just aborbing the social flow like a sponge and regurgitating it back.
And the social milieu itself? It’s a part of the identity of AHunter3.
Free will isn’t housed in the individual AHunter3 but in the entire self, of which the individual is just one component.
The possessor of free will is not constrained by the limites of physics and biology becaue the possessor of free will is physical and biological – those aren’t (merely) the context in which the self operates, they are immutable parts of the self, itself.
Actually, if there is one thing that I consider to be centrally part of the self, it is the experience of emotions. Emotions are definitely not merely the context and are massively and importantly part of the self that is acting with free will.
Addictions, behaviors that (part of you) doesn’t want, and so forth can best be understood as locations of ambivalence. The free willed self feels a mixture of inclinations (all the damn time, by the way, not just in response to whether or not to pick up a pack of cigarettes). There is no “real” self doing the thinking whose free will is being corrupted by some other bunch of feelings and inclinations that, in some sense, are NOT prt of the free-will self – these are ALL aspects of the self.
Dont’ (by the way) confuse the self (and free will) with the so-called rational / conscious mind. That aspect of self isn’t by any means more “real” than anything else involved here.
The common notion of free will is the idea that I (as a volitional agent of some kind) could have done otherwise in a re-run of the universe with precisely identical circumstances. This contra-causal free will (aka libertarian free will, nothing to do with political libertarianism) is the kind that does not exist. This is not a question of evidence. It is not an empirical matter, the whole idea is simply nonsense - it could not possibly exist in any conceivable universe, because it’s an incoherent concept:
When the decision making agent (whether we regard it as a physical brain, an immaterial soul, or whatever, it doesn’t matter) interacts with the world, it may either follow cause and effect, i.e. doing things for reasons; or it may choose randomly. What other kind of way is there for two things to interact? And since contra-causal free will does not inhere in either acting for reasons (deterministic computation), or in rolling a dice, it is just nonsense.
So, if you want to ask what the universe would look like with free will, you need to give a sensible definition of what it means.
Isn’t this an argument from ignorance: I can’t understand how it could work, therefore it doesn’t?
How about if we simply define free will as the capacity to make decisions that are neither purely determined by cause-and-effect nor purely random?
What causes the characters in a video game to make the choices they make and behave the way they do? One or more of the following:
They behave the way they are programmed to do in the current state of the game.
There is a random element involved.
The character is controlled by a human player outside the game, whose choices control (at least to some extent within certain constraints) the actions of the character.
I think of a world without free will as one which is analogous to a video game in which only 1 and (possibly) 2 apply—a computer simulation that runs by itself. Free will is the analog to 3.
Sure; but they’re both decisions that can be hard to make. Hard in different ways, but still hard.
Absolute free will means that. Limited free will means something else, and that’s what we (seem) to have. You still insist in an “all or nothing” standpoint, but there are alternatives.
I am not just claiming that I don’t understand how it could work. I’m claiming that nobody has ever described how it is supposed to work.
And that’s certainly the nature of reality. So what? The deterministic factors are deterministic, and the random elements are random. Neither comports with the notion of could-have-done-otherwise free will.
This is a homunculus argument. You have not addressed the problem at all. How does the external player make its choices?