Okay Hubski, I have a question. First, a bit of background on my philosophy: if a person can accurately predict the future, then they can choose to betray that future and have potential for free will. However, that choice is subconsciously predetermined due to past events/factors that ultimately decide that person's choice.
What do you all think about this?
For example: Susie wants to buy a bike. Susie knows that she has trouble committing to purchases, and knows that in the future she will never buy the bike. She (supposedly randomly) decides to buy the bike instead (betray her prediction). Here's the thing: Susie doesn't remember this in current times, but when she was a child, her now deceased father used to take her on bike rides and she has a subconscious soft spot for bike riding, which ultimately caused her to "decide" to buy the bike (subconscious predetermining factor).
In discussions of abstract concepts like free will it helps to try to more concretely define the term. Although I do realize that that's no small task, and you did give some indication of what free will means to you. Anyway, my thoughts: Everything in the universe is subject to physical laws. This includes human brains, in all their multi-layered, recursive, looping complexity. This doesn't seem to allow for "real" free will. The two ways around this are extra-universal influence/interaction and strong emergence. I'm not religious, and strong emergence reeks of bullshit to me. It's often used exclusively in relation to consciousness which seems awfully arrogant. Some people just really want to be in control... But I don't think about free will much anymore. I just live, man.
I'm disappointed that so many people shared this without saying anything. What's the point? It's a discussion thread, not an article with content. Personally, I've always found the question of free will to be one of the dullest that philosophy has to offer. In my opinion it is entirely self-evident that humans have free will, and if we don't it is just as entirely impossible to talk about it logically.
I was under the impression humans do not have free will. All evidence points to this. Sam Harris has a good speech on the topic. Basically, no matter how you put it it can't possibly be. You can have logical cause/effect thinking and decision making, which isn't free (this is what we have) or you can have completely random and arbitrary decision making, which isn't free. Either way, the decisions made are not free. Unless you mean the act of controlling our bodies is "free". But that still is hard to say. Our bodies and minds follow the laws of physics. Sure, they can do a variety of things, but you can't simply break physics just to make a decision. And even if you could, it'd be arbitrary. And that's without getting into the topics of what makes up the mind, the law of cause and effect, time and relativity, etc. Edit: I forgot to mention that I voiced my opinion and thoughts (although briefly). But I agree, people should comment rather than just share. But some people may not be able to comment right away but still want to see where the discussion goes.
I like the argument about cause and effect being an indicator of no free will. People make decisions based upon a variety of factors and every input of a new factor changes that decision to a certain degree, no matter how off the wall that factor may be. You can try to fuck with the end decision as much as you want but every new input is still a defining element of your decision. Imagine a scenario like the OP explained where the subject is thinking about purchasing a bike. Childhood memories are clearly a factor, as are ease of travel, thrill-riding, and exercise. Those inputs are all internal, within her mind. Externally, inputs might be that it's wonderful weather for a ride, bike sales are on, or her friends are into it. Regardless of of the quantity, variety, or type of inputs, they all determine her decision to some degree. Even if she has the ability of foreknowledge and can "know" her final decision, she is still determining her decision through another input. And even if she tries to change that decision, that change is inspired by the foreknowledge (cause) which is another input. It's impossible to act arbitrarily because - as said earlier - any attempt to fuck with "fate" or the established flow of time takes conscious thought: the impulse to act. Coming up with an original idea that might interrupt time flow - like swinging my hand for no reason - is still caused by a reason: the desire to screw with pre-established order.
I don't have time to watch what I assume is a video you linked. Maybe later. But free will is not, I think, freedom of choice. A child born in Mogadishu has the same free will that an American billionaire has -- but the gap in freedom of choice is apparent. I think that making the argument that because we are bound by gravity, or by the consequences of our actions, we don't have free will -- that's semantic silliness. I may not be giving your idea due diligence; if not, I apologize, feel free to correct me.
My main point is that "free will" is not clearly defined. Once you define what you mean by the question, then we can answer. However, the idea that there is some separate non-causal entity that is making decisions is ridiculous. Okay then. Yes, it's semantic silliness. But that's all we really have until a clear definition is provided. The question of "free will" is really only one by those who don't understand how brains work. We have clear evidence (and many experiments) of various sections of the brain and how they affect consciousness. It's very clearly tied. Our current and past experiences add up, and go through various biological "calculations" and then fire off the correct nerves and muscles in order to respond. None of that is really "free". The same thing would have happened every single time. Since that's what the body/brain calculated to be the "correct" response. The body could have calculated a different answer, had it been in a different state or if any other parameter was changed. But with the same parameters, and the same internal configuration, the brain arrived at it's conclusion. The video I linked to discusses this a bit further in detail (a lot better than I could probably explain). But it boils down to this: Your thoughts and actions are tied to your brain activity. Your brain activity is based on and modifies itself based on various experiences and perceptions. Each person has different perceptions and experiences, so we come up with different decisions. But if we trace it back far enough, we can clearly see where the thoughts came from. So if we were to "rewind" time, the decision would be the same, every single time. You could argue that due to the nature of quantum mechanics and stuff being "random" that we could theoretically pick something else. Our brains don't really work like that. But if they did, we'd simply randomly make decisions, rather than being based on internal logic and perceptions. Neither of those are really "free". One is pre-determined based on the state of the environment and person. The other is arbitrary and random. So when you come and say "we have free will", I'm wondering what the hell do you mean by "free will"? I know plenty of people subscribe to the body-mind duality hypothesis. But we've already proven that to mostly be false (physical things affect consciousness). But even if mind were separate from body, there's still no proof or evidence that "free will" is even there. And logically, the idea doesn't make sense. TL;DR: Free will isn't adequately defined. Once we come across a definition we can say whether it's true or not. But the seemingly most common definition is nonsensical.But free will is not, I think, freedom of choice.
I think that making the argument that because we are bound by gravity, or by the consequences of our actions, we don't have free will -- that's semantic silliness.
I'm always willing to entertain an argument that endeavors to answer social science with actual science, which is what my skim of your post is suggesting. I also agree that 'free will' is a strange phrase, which is why I'm not a fan of this debate like I am of so many others in philosophy. However, I have to go to work. But I'll leave this in my notifications and read it later. EDIT: unfortunately, I think we know a lot less about the brain than you seem to think. And I don't think you can predicate an entire argument against free will on 'the brain will always do the same thing in every situation'. I'll try to watch that video at some point, though.
"Wow, this is a great song to dance to" Then why don't you dance? "I don't want to be the first to do it" Then turn up the song, maybe someone else will. "Okay".
A year ago I talked to a professional cold reader who did some "mentalist" show in theatres where he baffled everyone with his so-called psychic powers. To him the trick was to make people belief they chose letters, numbers or playing cards for themselves but actually it was his own manipultation doing it for them. He could make people choose red cards over black ones and hearts over diamonds. He could also see if a member of the audience was unwilling or lying and could act accordingly. It felt like a frightening thing to be so easily fooled into believing that you will is free. Many years ago I used to read all the books by swedish writer Stig Dagerman who said that the only evidence for free will is the choice to commit suicide. But if that is a last choice you make what's free about that?
Your philosophy sounds like a thought experiment, not a philosophy. I can accurately predict the future: the sun will rise tomorrow. I can inaccurately predict the future: the earth will stop in its tracks at 4am PST. More, I can find a spectrum everywhere from accurate to inaccurate: if the sun stops in its tracks at 4am PST, it will have risen for three time zones in the United States and several more across Europe, Africa and Asia. As demonstrated, I don't have a hope in hell about "choosing" anything above. It'll happen or it won't entirely without my ability to impact it. But let's choose another condition to illustrate the fallacy further: I predict I will get out on my own side of the bed tomorrow, instead of crawling over my wife. Now - if I choose to crawl over my wife, does that demonstrate free will? What if instead I predict that I will crawl over my wife? If I do it, do I lack free will? If I instead get up on my own side of the bed, does that demonstrate free will through defiance? ...See, I think it merely demonstrates indecision. Your lady Susie isn't "predicting" anything - she's letting you wrap her velocipedal choices in a metaphysical dilemma. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.First, a bit of background on my philosophy:
if a person can accurately predict the future
then they can choose to betray that future and have potential for free will.
Let's start with this idea: The subjective experience (aka phenomenal experience) is a hypothetical model of reality. The brain represents the world to itself, itself being another representation. A combined simulation and emulation. But we are naive realists; the brain does not represent the representing; we intuitively believe our given experience is a direct experience with reality. Our intuitions are wrong. We mistakenly believe what we see is the external reality and not our brain flipping a grid of optical nerves firing and calling it real. To our intuitions, freewill exists. We definitely have a sense of freewill. I perceive I can direct my attentional resources to all sorts of phenomena, concepts, and engage in all sorts of actions. I cannot perceive the physics determining my freewill. Neither does my brain represent to me it's subconscious processes which the conscious percept of freewill emerges. Right. And those subconscious processes emerge from physics, if we are to accept materialism. Let's accept materialism. Freewill is an extension of physics. Physics is ultimately in control of freewill. If someone had the proper information, they could predict your every action and could manipulate physics to produce whatever result they wanted given it fits the constraints of what's possible. Feels crappy doesn't it? It directly clashes with our intuition. It feels we aren't really in control. And now what happens to the concept of responsibility? Can any brain be guilty of what physics determines? Here's a pretty interesting quote from this discussion from r/depthhub on freewill: Our intuitions are wrong, but we have them for a reason: they work. A sense of agency is a key part of consciousness in humans because it helps to form the gestalt of ourselves as dynamic agents in a world of branching paths. Could we make sense of ourselves without it? Responsibility, blame, guilt are feelings and concepts made of the intersection between value systems and causal relationships. Could we function intelligently without them?>If every 'bad' act is committed by a brain bound to obey its own physics, is a human ever truly guilty of such an act?
I think the problem here lies in some confusion, as if guilt exists outside the universe, rather than being a description of something in it. If it turned out that physical determinism was absolutely and obviously true, would it change how we treated guilt and innocence? The crime and the punishment would all be part of the same clockwork; the meaningfulness of the crime and the punishment, if they're at all dependent on determinism, move in lockstep with it.
>the one that most people seem to believe in / hope for: being free from any third party's control, including the laws of physics - making choices and performing actions from pure will alone.
There's a fundamental confusion here. You're not competing with the laws of physics (I don't think that's even a well-defined state of things); you are made out of the laws of physics. Your "pure will" is made out of physics. The ill-defined idea of "pure will", like a glowing ball bearing in the center of your skull, is an artifact of the way we think; it doesn't necessary have any meaningful correlates in reality.
I think you asked the right question. Free will historically has been defined as either a sort of free action, that we can act upon our desires without someone else stopping us, or a free choice between two actions. If you are ever in question of whether something is down to free will or not then consider the act of a person morally. Do you think they're responsible for their action, if not, why not? If I agree to meet you at the bus stop and oversleep, you might feel that I've wronged you because I am responsible for me getting up on time and being there.
If I told you that I wasn't there on time because I was mugged on the way to meet you, you (hopefully!) wouldn't think I'd wronged you because it was outside of my control. This encompasses the first definition, that it is my action independent of others. What about if I agree to meet you at the door of my house and I wake up on time, but because of my severe OCD I am late to meeting you. You may feel wronged that I took so long, but upon realisation that I have to check all the light switches are off before I can come to meet you, you may feel that this was outside of my realm of control. In this example I didn't have any other choice to checking all my light switches, it feels intuitively that if someone is to be held morally responsible they ought to have had an option to refrain from the action. So you might hold that free will is the ability to do as we want and the ability to have a choice in what we do. That's a standard compatibilist view. Compatibilists believed that we might be in a deterministic universe; one where the facts of the past and the laws of physics entail what will happen in the future. It's easier to imagine it like a billiards' table where if one ball is hit with that knowledge and the knowledge of physics you can predict where everything will go.
The compatibilists said that if we were in a deterministic universe, although current scientific findings predict that we aren't, we might still have free will in the sense already given. Okay, I should back up to why Science says we aren't. Billiards and conventional rules work absolutely fine for Newtonian physics, but the second you even edge in quantum physics all our rules hit the wall. I'm a hundred percent sure I could be rightfully called out on this one, but quantum effectively shows us that there are some things we can't predict through laws of physics, we just have to measure them and see what they are. We don't know how nuclear particles decay, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle kinda screws us over in humans ever knowing what these minute details of the universe are; the closer we measure the velocity of an atom the less we can know about the location of it and vice-versa. If there were a Laplacian demon in existence that could know all these things, it couldn't exist in our universe as any physical entity for fear of adjusting something about the universe and having a recurring issue of predicting. Heisenberg's UP doesn't show it can't be deterministic, but it does show that we could never be the determiners and it does show it's really unlikely that the universe is deterministic. The compatibilist stance is just one of the many stances on the issue. If you're really interested in a light book on the topic, Dennett writes quite well on modern Compatibilism (I personally really enjoyed Elbow Room) and argues our free will is controlling our future so that we may not do otherwise than what we would want to do. So a drug addict may lock himself away so that he cannot fall into temptation, or Martin Luther King may claim that he can do no other than he does and both could claim to have greater free will for it. There are a buttload of issues for any form of compatibilism, but this debate was pretty dry and I didn't really get here on time. Hopefully this summary is slightly helpful. If anyone's particularly interested I could probably write a load on what it means to be able to have the ability to do otherwise and suggest topic reading, but it's just because this is what I'm writing an essay on this week.
How would that be possible? Wouldn't you need to remove all input? Yet even the removal of input is input. IMO it is nonsensical to describe a material entity functioning in a non-material manner. It's a paradoxical notion that only arises if you suppose a dualist nature of mind, of which we have no evidence.
I can agree with that. However, I don't think the statement is very useful. That is, it doesn't prove a corollary, i.e. Laplace's demon.
I believe that if you know the future, that knowledge will lead you to a different course of events meaning your initial prediction was wrong. Unless your prediction accounted for you learning of the future and adjusting your actions. Essentially, you're fucked either way. It's all deterministic.
being aware of what will happen in the future is certainly going to shape the opportunities one jumps at in the present moment. if one knows that situation x is going to end situation x way, he or she will be burdened, relieved, etc. by the awareness of what is going to happen. having a mental forecast of the future can change one's mindset and approach, because he or she is AWARE of striving towards (or against, or whatever) some goal. is this an example of schrodinger's theory? essentially, you do not know the possible outcome of something until you solidify the theory in your mind. it then reduces the idea of a surprising outcome / decreases the idea that something can be chalked up to free will or fate.
The best way of looking at it is like this: Say X can predict the future. X doesn't account for his being able to predict the future in his predictions. X learning of the future then changes X's actions (since he has new information). The future is now changed and X's predictions were incorrect (since he changed it). If he were to incorporate his own actions and knowledge of it (insanely difficult, but possible), he'd be unable to change his actions, since it'd be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The movie "Paycheck" goes into this quite well. The guy builds a machine that views the future, and he then "changes" (not really) the future to allow himself to become rich and to live (the company tries to kill him). He then proceeds to fulfill the prophecy that he saw. I'm not familiar with "schrodinger's theory", so I can't answer that. But it boils down to either having an imperfect machine, or being a self-fulfilling prophecy (so that you can't change it).