This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we are talking about something else.
But it bugs me that so many people are eager so claim that because magical free will doesn't exist, that means no free will can exist. Compatibilism is not a new idea either. The usual argument is that compatibilists are moving the goal posts, but I simply don't understand that argument.
Suppose an argument between two sided: "Bigfoot exists" versus "no non-human apes exists". Is it moving the goalposts to point to gorillas?
Or suppose we're in the 1700's, and people are discussing vitalism: The force that separates dead things from living. The two sides debate whether the "vital spark" exists, or whether life is an illusion and it's meaningless to talk about living things at all. Is it moving the goal posts to try to find a non-magical definition of life?
To me it's pretty clear that we have free will, and that has nothing to do with determinism.
It is moving the goal post because it just changes the definition of free will into some triviality. I had a choice between apples and oranges and I picked the apple because I like apples more. Sure, you can call this free will if you want to but what is the point? The max function had a choice between 1 and 2 and picked 2 because it likes bigger numbers more.
Maybe you want to contrast the above situation with a situation where the apples are sold out or someone forces you at gunpoint to pick the orange. But this is now an entirely different thing, now we are talking about external constraints. And you can move into all kinds of directions and define free will to be this or that but the result will always be kind of trivial.
On my view it is literally nothing. It's the tautological observation that agents with desires, uninhibited, can and will seek to satisfy those desires. It gives us no grounds for responsibility, punishment, etc etc. (Those are all good things, but their justification has to come from elsewhere.)
But by continuing to call it "free will," you're invoking the intuitions that many people have regarding the magical bullshit variety, and laundering those intuitions/feelings into the new discussion.
Virus don't contemplate their hosts.
Mature minds handle unknowns properly.
Anyway, you are free to chose your definition (and I bet I can predict what yours will be).
The absolutists are going to explode.
I must have missed that memo :-P
I had a lot of fun with this lecture series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w
Huh? Why?
Shouldn't it be the opposite?
As much as I have a personal will, I will continue to will the same thing if we replay the situation -- all other things being exactly the same.
I don't chose something at random. I express who I am, based on my life story in space time.
To make a light example, if I'm a person who prefers Big Macs over Chinese, I will pick a Bic Mac if I'm asked to make such a decision, no matter how many times we rewind and replay the universe state.
Free will is not about me suddenly picking some random alternative. How would that ever express who I am (and thus, my, _my_ personal will?).
What's "free" about this free will since its inexorably tied to my space-time history? Well, it's exactly the fact that it's my space-time history, and can't be altered based on some external factor.
It's not "free" as in arbitrarily changeable, but free as in "expressing me and only me" (that is: my space-time history who made me what I am).
This realization can be difficult to process. The illusion of free will is intensely persistent, even after we’ve accepted that fact. Personally, I try to focus on the higher-order positives that come with this understanding: increased humility, greater compassion for others and oneself and equanimity via acceptance.
I had once strived to grok Zen Buddhism. I think shedding my belief in free will brought me much closer than drugs, meditation or reading religious texts ever did.
It is free in the sense that it's determined by the essense of you (your journey in space-time) - as opposed to some external factor (e.g. someone making a machine that makes you take a certain choice without it having anything to do with your experiences).
It's not some "action at a distance" that has nothing to do with you, your past, your experiences, etc. If that was the case, it wouldn't be _your_ will (whether free or not).
It's free as in not determined by external factors. Factors pertinent to who you are (like where you grew up, your friends, your parents, your experiences and so on - that is, your space-time history) _are_ pertinent to who you are. You can't separate from them, and I wouldn't call separating from them "free".
So it's not free as in "random" or as in "independent of your history deliberation by something external to your body (e.g. a soul) that's unaffected by your past".
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2018/02/15/scale.ht...
You share most of your specificities with other homo sapiens.
Individualism is a thought system that is centered on liberalism. Watch "the century of the self".
Sure, but that's neither here, nor there - and totally orthogonal to the discussion.
Free will is about expressing the self, not about the self being unique.
If one has will to choose based on a preference is the will free from having that preference?
Was the preference chosen?
What happens before birth (or conception really) is a Mystery.
I believe in anticipation though. A dog may bark in anticipation of owner returning home, before they come home or not.
So you need a frame of reference to speak of. If it's all bounded outcomes are certain. But nothing pragmatic is ever perfectly bounded..
Notice that Free Will doesn't imply we always get what we want!
To live life is to live in servitude. I'm a slave to my own needs of bread, water and circus. To supply this never-ending need I must serve someone else too. I must serve the needs of my family as well : they want and expect things out of me too. So where does that leave me? A never-ending cycle of busy-bodying. I can't even get mad or push back anymore. To what end? I'm simply a spectator to my own fate which unravels before me. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else. Since it wasn't someone else, therefore, it has to be me. I am just a replaceable cog, but this cog still needs to be put to use in a machine.
This made me realize death is the true gift of God to mankind. An end to our seemingly never-ending drudgery.
But I still get to be a part of some really fun games. I still feel shame if I blunder a piece, or the thrill of hunting down a vulnerable king.
And every so often, a pawn makes it to the back rank and promotes to win the game.
However, when we talk about decision mechanisms, we inevitably introduce the question of whether this decision mechanism can work better or worse.
“Free will” may be seen as a computational notion of “health” for this decision mechanism, similar to how we use the term health for our physical bodies. A free will is a healthy will, in the sense that our decision mechanism is not broken by e.g. drugs, electrodes or mental illness.
Second, many people, myself included, hold the assumption that the ordering between options A and B is not purely subjective. If there exists an ordering of options which is objective and external to the agent of choice, then the choices that are actually made can be compared to that external ordering. Free will in this sense denotes the observation that our choices may reflect an ordering which is significantly different from the ordering imposed by reality. This is not a scientific claim and cannot be disproven scientifically. Holding this assumption is in fact a choice.
I think it's more likely that the decision mechanism emerges from a race condition between multiple competing signals. We choose the one that arrives first, even if it takes time to be consciously aware of the choice.
Isn't the drug example a contradiction? If my brain was healthy ("free") when I decided to take drugs, why would the resulting drugged state be less "free"? After all, it was my "free" choice to take the drugs and alter my mental state.
Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness.
> Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness.
Yep, insights and definitions of illness will keep changing. But while insights in the details of e.g. psychosis may vary, few would deny a correlation with chemical issues.
“It is obvious that the world is covered in prisms. It’s obvious that those prisms don’t fit in my eyeballs, therefore the entire scientific edifice is mistaken and we need a metaphysical explanation for my experience.”
> But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings.
Free will or no free will, is not the assumption in point 2 fundamentally flawed?
Quantum mechanics is surely at the heart of all interactions and so at some level is responsible for the ‘illusion’ making any difference between free will and predetermination unknowable.
I'm not a philosopher, I didn't even know who daniel dennet was, so while certain that my view was covered somewhere long before I was born, I wouldn't know which century, but would guess all of them.
I am the deterministic set of operations and coefficients that calculates my choice. My will is not caged by a deterministic universe, the deterministic universe is the the constraint ensures my choice is the true reflection of who I am, the true has of the private key of my character. A quantum magic spinny wheel doesn't liberate me, it would undermine the integrity of my choice.
It's only facts after the action is made.
But in the opinions of some, the laws of physics stop at the neck, beyond which things are neither causal nor non-causal nor random nor non-random but 'free'. Whatever that might mean. (Apparently it's some sort of unmoving mover which moves itself and interacts with the universe without being interacted upon by the universe.)
This is probably the most succinct statement that sums up the problem with "free will". As soon as you start to try to define "free will" in terms of the natural sciences you run into insurmountable contradictions that suggest that it must be an illusion.
Edit: I wonder what proportion of posters here believe both that "free will" is not an illusion and that "strong AI" is possible.
Also the only way to really make random choices is quantum mechanics. Everything else can only look random.
No matter what, every action -- even if that action is somehow clearly defined as an act of free will (I guess the "classic" example being one of rebellion or a wholly unexpected action) -- springs from a cause. That cause has its own cause. And so and on and so forth, until you pass the barrier between what we call consciousness and what we call organic hardware and pass into the realm of the (currently) measurable and predictable.
Just as a technology, sufficiently advanced, appears to be magic, so then does a complexity, sufficiently complex, appear to be something other than what it is. I bet everyone on HN a Coke that Consciousness will one day be understood than to be nothing more than a whole lot of complexity masquerading as something more. Ditto for any concept of free will within the universe, though I suppose that'd be a whole hell of a lot more harder to prove ;)
Free will simply does not exit, no matter how complex reality is or brains are.
Side-note: while they're pretty bad movies over all, the Matrix sequels summed this concept up pretty will with the whole idea of the One being essentially the free will machine of the Matrix, the "Integral Anomaly" -- essentially baked-in variety/novelty/choice/etc, which is still no less part of the machine itself. Just as a random number generator function returns a random number, it's still programmed to do it.
More recent studies of cognition and reaction have provided some of the counter-mechanisms, the things we do without deciding to do them, such as reflex arcs (the mechanism in action that causes us to withdraw our hands from something hot before our brains have realized it was hot, e.g.,), and, more importantly for the free-will discussion, Kahnemann's (and Tversky)'s two-systems model.
The basic idea of that model is that our body and brain do a lot of prefiltering, dealing with much of what we encounter and manage without ever involving the conscious mind. Think of driving on a familiar, quiet road. You never think about it, you might not even be aware of much of the drive, but you drove safely.
That "fast", low-energy-requirement system only flags things to the conscious mind - the slow, high-energy-system that we identify as ourselves - when it cannot make sense of what it encounters or when there are surprising happenings.
The workings of the fast (aconscious) system are inaccessible to the slow (conscious) system.
So we have within us a system that decides a great deal without our being involved, at least not consciously, and that only presents for our conscious consideration things it needs help with.
We make conscious, free-will-like decisions, based on filtered and reduced information. How free is that, really?
Of course, the definition of consciousness is a question all its own.
In saying that he says that most of our actions simply come out of the fast thinking system, and when we think something through slower we have an "illusion of free will" but still act in a way that to an external observer would say was "in character".
I guarantee you that nobody outside of a tiny group of academics would care at all. The only reason that people care about evolution is that they feel insulted at being called monkeys. Call them mammals instead and you’ll get no response, because it doesn’t trigger the same emotional reaction. Call them animals, they’ll protest. Call them vertebrates, shrug. There’s no logic involved. People just react to the connotation of what an “animal” or an “ape” is and then rationalize that reaction after the fact. If you just the word “hominids” instead of apes they wouldn’t care. People are idiots, it takes years of training to be able to think the way a scientist does.
Free will is an airy abstraction. Nobody cares about that. Only someone like Harris could possibly think they would.
Why does my cloud of atoms disagree with yours? ;)
Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either.
Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”.
Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.
Quantum theory is probably not going to save us from this, even if it at some point is fully and entirely proven and understood in a grand unified field theory. Even if something is not deterministic, does not mean that the thing is "will" or even a part of it.
Even on a macroscopic scale we can have unpredictable events, at least practically unpredictable ones, which can change our behavior, but that's just it, external events chainging our internal state. For all I know, a high energy particle may once every so often hit one of my synapses, changing its chargs just-so, making me decide to opt for the smaller menu at Mc.Donalds.
It's a really really nebulous phrase, and that frequently leads to people talking past each other.
This comic illustrates things quite nicely: https://scienceandtheology.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/dilbert-...
Our destiny in this material world is determined by a combination of our partial free will and the three modes of material nature. According to our previous karma, we are destined to face certain situations in this life. In those situations we have a certain amount of freedom to choose how we want to react. Once we choose, we come under the control of the mode associated with our choice, and we are obliged to accept the consequences, be they happy or miserable.
Fate and free will, as described in the Bhagavad-gita, are analogous to the relationship between the state, the law-abiding citizen, and the criminals in prison. A citizen is considered free only if he obeys the laws of the state. If he breaks the law, he goes to jail. A prisoner may enjoy limited freedom to choose between reading a book or writing a letter: between Jell-0 or ice-cream for dessert; between work in the barber shop or in the kitchen. But he is not free to abandon the prison altogether. By comparison, the free citizen is in a better position, but both are controlled by the law. Practically, the only unconditioned exercise of their free will is in their decision to choose between being a good citizen or a criminal.
Better to replace free will with sense of agency.
This sort of hubris is astounding. It boggles the mind that a "scientist" could make such a definitive statement when there is so much we don't understand about physics, and the universe(s?) in general.
Well, he couldn’t....
(Eat this!)
FREE is a loaded word; It can mean free as in no cost, or free as in without restriction. These are interrelated; Restrictions increase cost. Resources diminish restrictions. But no action in the universe is completely without cost nor restriction.
Even when you generate power you're not creating it from nothing, you're extracting it from one form into another, more usable to you. After use it transforms into yet another, waste form, economically unviably unusable to you personally, but not any kind of "absolute waste". One being's waste is another's food.
Even the most powerful systems in the known universe are subject to restrictions of the physical laws. Humans have long theorized the existence of god(s), systems that transcend all limitations. But they have never been observed scientifically. Every system previously thought "ultimate" in any way has been discovered to be a measurable part of our universe. Currently the most "ultimate" thing challenging our comprehension are black holes. Compare them to god(s): They cannot be seen directly. They are the most powerful things we think might exist. They affect everything around them. We know almost nothing about them, besides how they affect the universe.
So then what is FREE WILL? We can intuitively point to instances of it, and it seemes to be some kind of power that facilitates change in the universe. Humans seem to have more of it than other animals, on the basis that we've changed our world in more numerous and complex ways than any other animal. It might be an energy source we can draw from, like the Sun or black holes. Something we're not sure where it's coming from, yet. Once we discover the exact nature of it, what revelations about our universe might we achieve?
Consider that at one point in the evolutionary history of life on this planet, the Sun was this magical, invisible, distant, ambient energy that some organisms learned to harness with a process later named photosynthesis. Plants probably still don't understand the nature of the Sun, but their proliferation of the surface has allowed us to thrive and understand it. And for most of our civilized history we only knew it's a cyclic point energy source that makes everything go more alive when there's enough of it, and increasingly dead when there's too much of it.
Is the Sun an illusion? Of course not. Is free will an illusion? Of course not. We just don't know what it is, yet.
Most likely not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...