Without free will, what exactly would be the point of living? If my every thought, word, and deed are predetermined (or determined for me by some other agency), how do ‘I’ differ from a robot?
[chortle]
I don’t feel unable to affect the world. If I trusted the way I feel, I’d have absolutely no doubt that free will exists. It’s by trying to reason out what that “free will” that I feel like I have actually is that I come to the conclusion that it is an incoherent concept.
“What the hell are you getting so upset about?” he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”
-Catch-22
God sounds remarkably like Richard Nixon promising us he had a plan for peace in Vietnam but couldn’t reveal it.
God and his minions are just too obsessed with denying us free will with one scheme or another.
I mean, aren’t they?
Let’s say you are trying to decide what to have for dinner. Your choices are constrained - you can’t want something that you have no concept of, right? If you’d been raised from infancy in a commune where not only were you vegan but you were never even exposed to the concept of eating meat, you’d surely never have a craving for a hamburger, right?
Even without such hypotheticals - when you think about what you want to eat, perhaps you consciously think of a food, then gauge how you feel about it. But are you controlling those feelings? Surely not, they just spring up, right? Maybe you can say “I don’t need the calories from ice cream tonight” but you can’t control whether or not ice cream sounds good, can you?
As I said before, some of you folks have a notion of who the self is versus “that which is not me but constrains my choices” that I find peculiar.
A lot of people seem to think that they’re only their conscious/language-using/“rational” minds.
Is that what you mean?
You can certainly define free will so that it includes biological impetus and prior experience, but in that case I am not sure what exactly your will is supposed to be free of.
In that context, the only thing that makes sense is to separate your will from God’s. But even under the theistic worldview’s logic this falls apart completely. If your “free will” is free from divine influence, but is not free from biological impetus or prior experience (as those are part of you, like you say) then you may be free from God puppeting you directly, but he still placed you on rails, since he’s the one who determined how biology should work and created the world such that it led to those prior experiences mentioned.
Well, that’s part of it. ← ETA: replying to thorny_locust /ETA
But I keep seeing formulations like “You don’t have free will — you can’t make yourself prefer something different than what you prefer”. Or “You don’t have free will — your feelings control you”. Or “You don’t have free will — the chronological events of your life dictate what you think and feel”. Or “You don’t have free will — your chromosomes determine your fundamental priorities and all your ‘choices’ stem from that”. And so on and so forth.
And if you look at all these formulations, they all posit that there’s a ‘you’ and then, controlling that ‘you’, some supposedly external pressure or force or stimulus or driving impetus that is the real mover and shaker that causes ‘your’ behaviors.
I think it’s an excellent idea to unpack the conventional notion that the Self is this unitary individual, as if we assemble the thoughts inside our heads in some kind of vacuum. But that’s not the same thing as upending the notion that volitional choices are being made.
Most of the people citing their opposition to ‘free will’ exert an admirable intellectual effort in examining all the outside forces that challenge the unitary indivual concept, but then they embrace the latter anyway as their unspoken definition of the ‘you’ they refer to when they say you don’t have free will.
Good, now we’re getting somewhere.
Question for you, Babale: does free will exist? I don’t mean do I have it or do you have it. I mean does it exist regardless of where it inhers? Does anyone or anything in the entirety of Universe make volitional choices and do something not because something else caused it to do so but because it so chose?
I suspect you experience it as otherwise — whether you call it illusion or whatever, that in your day-to-day life, just as I in mine, your sense of things is that you’re conscious and making choices. Instead of discarding that as illusory, doesn’t it make at least equal, if not more, sense, to question “who is this ME who is making these choices? This ME actually seems all entangled in the so-called external world when I look closely at matters”.
The latter line of inquiry doesn’t discard your felt experience as a maker of choices, while still acknowledging the important observations you’ve made about the interplay of causal forces.
Of course the unitary being that I experience the world as is an illusion. There are tons of experiments we can do to demonstrate ways in which our consciousness lkes to us, and justifies decisions post-hoc.
The fact that I reject this unitary being is exactly why I reject the idea of free will as being incoherent.
I see this as a false dichotomy. Volition is what I exercise or experience (I think both terms are appropriate) when I pick up my burger and bite into it. But that volition is causally connected to biological realities about my body, my past experience with burgers, the cultural context that lets me see a burger as food and bacon as gross (whereas a Hindu Indian may disagree on that last point).
You said (bolded bit is added by me for clarity:
This is an incoherent question. If you are choosing to do something (ie not acting completely at random) you are doing so because of something else. Obviously - we live in a causal universe. Your very act of decision is made through physical interactions of particles and fields inside your brain.
This is what I interpret “free will” as. “Free will” requires you (whatever “you” is) to act free of cause, which is obviously completely impossible.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that I should understand ME to be not just the conscious mind but instead the system that includes the unconscious, those biological realities and past experiences, etc.
And sure, that’s a valid way to think of things I suppose, but that system isn’t making decisions free from causal influence either, so I still don’t understand what this will is “free” from.
I know I’m choosing something. I’m there for the event. What’s less obvious is who I am. All that “something else” you refer to is in some meaningful fashion a part of the “me” that is doing the choosing.
It’s entirely possible that we’re just dissenting about what words to use to describe the same thing, but I’m not convinced that it’s quite that trivial.
I don’t make that distinction because I think it is a proper distinction to make. I think it is a bad distinction to make. I just can’t make any sense of the concept of free will without doing so.
If you are saying “You is not just your conscious experience, it is that plus your past plus your biology plus your upbringing” - I agree with you. Consciousness alone is not “You”.
I made the distinction, despite the fact that I think it is illusory, because I understand the “You” which is generally discussed by free will proponents to be that consciousness, and I wanted to show that it is not free of other things.
You are saying, if I follow correctly, “These other things are also You; the whole package is You, and it has free will.”
My question is - free of what?
If your past and your emotions and anything else that might be taken into account during decision making is you, what are you free of?
That’s why I’m not saying “free will doesn’t exist”, I’m saying “free will is an inherently incoherent concept”.
Would you give up free will […]?
I see a logical difficulty there already: If I have free will (debatable and debated here convincingly), and I give it up, do I do so out of free will? Or because I must? Is it still free will if I don’t understand the consequences? Because if not chaos theory negates free will. At what moment of giving up my free will does my free will become unfree, or causally bound? And to what? I agree with a lot of what Babale has written: free will is an incoherent concept, and giving up free will even more so.
[…] for world peace?
What do you mean by world peace? No more wars between armies in uniform? OK, nice goal, but not enough for me to give up my (illusion of) free will. No more guerrilla warfare when things get unjust? Just accepting injustice like a sacrificial lamb does not sound like peace to me. No more terrorism? Then you’ll miss the freedom fighters too, as that is what terrorists become when they succeed. No more murders? No more self defense! No more greed, jealousy? Thus no more ambition, no more desire, lust, perhaps even no more love, if taken to the extreme. I refuse on all counts.
So no, I refute the premise. But you can cancel free will after I am dead, whatever you call world peace then, I won’t care. Make a desert and call it peace, or cancel humankind and call it peace, I will be fine with that when it no longer matters to me.
They all posit that there’s a “you” that doesn’t include your feelings or your history or your body. But I am made up of all of those things, as well as of the part that thinks in words and types them; and the part that thinks in words and types them is in no way “me” on its own. To say that I either decide to eat icecream entirely with the “rational” mind or else “I” don’t decide it at all is like saying that I either walk entirely with my nerve impulses and not with my muscles (or vice versa) or else I can’t walk at all.
Huh? How did God even get into this?
I mean, if you’re a theist, then of course God’s in there. If you’re not a theist, God’s got nothing to do with the question.
So if I take God out of the above, and take it to mean something along the lines of (note this is no longer a direct quote from you): " If your “free will” is free from [ . . .] outside influence, but is not free from biological impetus or prior experience (as those are part of you, like you say) then you [are still placed] on rails, since [ ] how biology [ ] work[s] and [how the world works] led to those prior experiences mentioned."
Maybe. That’s the whole question of what “free will” is. But that’s the same question if “I” is considered only as the small part of me that tries to work out logical answers to that question, or if “I” is considered to be all of me; all parts of the nervous system, glands, muscle sense, history. What considering “me” to be all of me does is to remove the stuff about ‘but you can’t decide not to like icecream!’ Sure I can. I decided not to like macaroni, and not to like icecream with cookies in it anywhere near as much as icecream without cookies in it. Those decisions weren’t arrived at by logical thinking, but they were still made by me. Or, of course, by the entire history of the universe; or, I suppose, if one’s a theist, by God. But that’s just as true as it would be if it were only the conscious mind deciding something.
Can’t speak for @AHunter3, but that reads like what I mean.
Or maybe not quite.
I’m saying it’s my conscious mind, and whatever part of my mind it is that dreams, and whatever part of my mind (it might be the same part as the dreaming mind, not sure) leapt to the front when I took acid leaving the language-using mind going along for the ride as a passenger, and all the parts of my body that like (some kinds) of icecream and need natural sunlight and love cats and hate crowds and still love to walk fast up hills as much as my heart will now let me because my leg muscles want to use themselves – I could go on. That’s all me.
I think it generally means something not so much about free from, as about free to: free to make choices.
And maybe we’re not. Maybe it just feels like it. But I don’t think humans function properly unless we feel like we’ve got it. And I’m not at all sure that’s only humans. I strongly suspect that the cat who studied me for weeks from a distance before taking the chance to come up to me felt like he was free to choose whether or not to trust me. At the time when he finally came up to me: if some force had picked him up and forcibly put him within my reach, I’m 99.99999+% sure he’d have reacted entirely differently.
Great, I agree - that’s all YOU (gonna use all caps YOU for this Me concept).
So, there’s YOU - all parts of your mind and body. There’s the sum of all the experiences you’ve ever had, and how they taught you to deal with the world. (Really, I suppose your actual experiences matter less than your recollection of them and the impact they had on your psyche (conscious and subconscious), which is part of your mind - so we could actually probably simplify back down to just YOU, all of YOU.
This YOU includes absolutely everything that could possibly influence your decision. So saying “this conception of YOU has free will” is, to me, completely meaningless. Of course this YOU can make decisions free from external influence. It includes everything that could possibly impact your decisions, so there’s nothing left externally that is capable of influence. Saying that this YOU has free will is a tautology.
Why, though? Don’t get me wrong — I understand how utterly different it is from the classic “you” that’s conventionally associated with free will.
But just because the meaning is different doesn’t make it meaningless, does it? It’s an assertion that some entity, some consciousness, possesses free will. That conjures up a different picture of the universe than the notion that the entire universe is a giant wind-up toy that’s here by accident and all of its various moving parts are caused by previous or larger moving parts acting upon them, without an iota of deliberate intentionality to be found (at least not if we bracket off illusions). You don’t see that as a meaningful distinction?
All I’d say is that you’re engaging in wild speculation to “explain” something when there is no observed phenomenon to explain. Contracausal free will is an untestable hypothesis. And it’s not a hypothesis that’s motivated by plausibility, what does contracausal even mean? It’s not that it’s lacking a mechanism, it’s logically incoherent. The free will delusion is motivated solely by a subjective internal intuition that we “could have done otherwise”, when all that we ever actually observe is the doing. And the doing is perfectly well explained as computation that does not require exotic mechanisms that incorporate infinities.
What does it mean for it to possess free will? That it can decide things? But again, what does deciding things mean? It’s all tautological.
Lota of entities and consciousnesses possess “free will” if that’s how you choose to define it. All those entities are ALSO part of a giant wind-up toy where every last action is caused by prior actions.
When you decide to do something, however we choose to define you, you do so because of a nunch of factors - you want to define those factors as internal vs external, fine, it doesn’t free you from the tyranny of those factors.
When I deliberately and with intentionality do something, I am nevertheless a slave to causality, to the laws of physics, etc.
No, I don’t see a distinction.