# Would you give up free will for world peace?

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [September 28, 2023, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800 "2023-09-28T01:17:18Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 336

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### Author: ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2023, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/336 "2023-10-05T20:28:32Z")

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> [@Riemann](#):
>
> I’m glad that you finally understand this after several days of you obsessively proving from first principles that natural selection cannot prove WHY “sense of free will” has a fitness advantage.

I have never said, argued for, or implied anything of that sort, and I remain utterly mystified by why you would think so. Best as I can tell, it has no relational all to anything in this thread, and I’ve pointed this out several times. What I have been saying is that the argument that we have free will because it is adaptive is unsound, if there are other options for obtaining the same fitness benefit. Anything else is your own fantasy.

> [@Riemann](#):
>
> And none of us here ACCEPT the hypothesis either. But if we are going to discuss it, can we be very clear that we are having a conversation about where the fitness advantage of a “subjective sense of something” could derives from, and that conversation is about neuroscience and how our brains work, NOT about natural selection or “affirming the consequent”?

Acceptance of the hypothesis is necessary for the argument to not just be affirming the consequent. Again, all I’m saying is that the sentence “having a subjective sense of freedom provides an adaptive benefit” is (plausibly, at least) true, while the sentence “having the adaptive benefit implies that we have a subjective sense of freedom”, is false, at least as long as there is another option to get the same benefit. But it’s the latter that would have to be true to argue that we have that sense of free will because of the adaptive benefit it confers.

Now, perhaps it helps to point out that this isn’t in conflict with the following: if we start out in a state where a mutation (or series thereof) provides an illusory sense of free will from an ancestral state without any particular commitment, and thus, leads to a new state of higher reproductive fitness, then _of course_ this state will in general eventually dominate the population via selection. And this could plausibly be how we ended up with such a sense of freedom. But this is _not_ what the argument from selection attempts to conclude. From having that particular fitness benefit, one cannot conclude that we must have an illusion of fitness, anymore than from getting the million dollars one can conclude that the die must’ve come up 2.

> [@Riemann](#):
>
> We don’t understand the basis for consciousness at all, we cannot even prove that anyone else is conscious - we cannot tell from their behavior, we just assume they are like us. So it’s very difficult to construct a coherent hypothesis about an ancestral unconscious state into which consciousness evolved and conferred some advantage. But it just seems vanishingly unlikely that our entire complex apparatus of consciousness serves no purpose whatsoever.

Well, I do have a theory of consciousness on which it’s a consequence of a certain kind of access to intrinsic properties by means of self-referential dynamics ([thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/conscious-experience-is-self-representational-access-to-intrinsic-properties/954814)), whose role is, essentially, to break an otherwise intractable regress (leading incidentally to just the sort of mechanism I described for realizing free will). In that sense, consciousness is a prerequisite for a certain sort of behavior, in that there is no other mechanism to produce it (provably: without this mechanism, whether to act in a certain goal-directed way is formally undecidable in the same sense the Halting Problem is). But to call consciousness ‘adaptive’ in some sense is still a dicey proposition; rather, it is a prerequisite for what we call a ‘world’ to appear in any form, to anyone, so in that way, we couldn’t _not_ be conscious, as ‘we’ in this sense wouldn’t even exist otherwise. But that’s all rather beside the present point.

> [@Riemann](#):
>
> If consciousness serves no purpose, why does that make it more likely that any particular subjective state corresponds to reality, why does that imply that our sense of free will is _less_ likely to be an illusion?

I can’t parse that. Could you try and rephrase it?

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