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There was a relevant post on Lemmy the other day:
The origin and nature of existence is an epistemological black hole that some people like to plug with "a ~~wizard~~ god did it".
The sensation of free will is an emergent property of a lack of awareness of the big stuff, the small stuff, the long stuff, and the short stuff.
I like to look at the illusion of free will as if you're falling down a pit. You can try to flap your arms or swim, and maybe move yourself a little bit, but at the end, you're still falling down.
Warning, I came up with this while very high one time, lol, but it's kind of stuck with me:
Consciousness is a 4-dimensional construct living in a 3-dimensional world. What we experience as the passage of time is just our consciousness traveling/falling along the surface of the 4-dimensional plane/shape that defines our existence.
Feel free to poke all the holes you want in that. lol
There is an old Taoist story about two people floating down a river. One has already decided where he wants the river to take him and is constantly swimming against the current to try to get there, the other just floats along taking in the sights.
They both end up wherever the river takes them, and they both went through the same obstacles and rapids, but when asked how the trip was, one of them is complaining about the whole trip being frustrating and exhausting, while the other had a pleasant time and tells you all about the amazing things they saw on the way.
I love that!
Really illustrates the saying, "go with the flow," too.
Couldn't it also be argued that our lack of awareness of the big stuff also leaves open the possibility of free will?
On a sufficiently large billiards table, it does become hard to prove that some balls don't spontaneously sink themselves.
Confabulation.
Look at split-brain patients: divide the corpus callosum down the middle, and you effectively have two separate brains that don't communicate. Tell the half without the speech centre to perform some random task, then ask the other one why they did that - and they will flat-out make up some plausible sounding reason.
And the thing is, they haven't the slightest idea that it isn't true. To them, it feels exactly like freely choosing to do it, for those made up reasons.
Bits of our brains make us do stuff for their own reasons, and we just make shit up to explain it after the fact. We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we've primed our muscles to carry out the choice.
I think a chunk of this comes down to our need to model the thoughts of others (incredibly useful for social animals) - we make everyone out to be these monolithic executive units so that we can predict their actions, and we make ourselves out to be the same so we can slot ourselves into that same reasoning.
Also it would be a bit fucking terrifying to just constantly get surprised by your own actions, blown around like a leaf on the wind without a clue what's going on, so I think another chunk of it is just larping this "I" person who has a coherent narrative behind it all, to protect your own sanity.
If you throw a pair of dice, do they still have to roll if their final positions are predetermined from the point that you let go?
One view is that even a deterministic mind still must execute. An illusion of the capacity to choose between multiple options might be necessary to considering those options which leads to the unavoidable conclusion.
A better question is, is there any difference between the illusion of free will and actual free will. Is there some experiment you could conduct to tell the difference?
Depends, who's choosing the experiment?
Maybe look up "compatibilism". It's a philosophy proposing that both exist.
Our brains cannot store all the experiences we ever make. It rather only stores 'hunches' (via many weightings of neurons). In particular, it also mixes multiple experiences together to reinforce such hunches.
This means that despite there being causal reasons why you might e.g. feel uneasy around big dogs, your brain will likely only reproduce a hunch, a gut feeling of fear.
And then because you don't remember the concrete causal reasons, it feels like a decision to follow your hunch to get the hell out of there.
This feeling of making a decision is made even stronger, because there isn't just the big-dog-bad-hunch, but also the don't-show-fear-to-big-dog-hunch and the I'm-in-a-social-situation-and-it-would-be-rude-to-leave-hunch and many others.
There is just an insane amount of past experiences and present sensory input, which makes it impossible to trace back why you would decide a certain way. This gives the illusion of there being no reasons, of free will.
Just going to throw out a really good read: Determined by Robert Sapolky. (Behave is also really good.)
He doesn't really convince me of the core thesis that free will doesn't exist, or that some of his proposed changes to the legal system to "recognize the absence of free will" in the second half are good courses of action, but he does do a great job of demonstrating what makes us tick from a variety of lenses, how much environmental factors play a role in behavior, and generally arguing to approach people with more empathy and recognition that we might be more like them in a similar situation than we think.
(It is heavy. It's long and goes into some depth on different fields. But he lays out the main ideas you need to know and doesn't assume that much knowledge, just a will to learn.)
I personally think the debate over the existence of Free Will is simply an extraordinary debate over semantics.
If you look at a human being from its basic biological and cellular makeup, a human being is a walking bundle of competing desires that appears to present itself as a single cohesive corporate entity.
The people who are against the concept of free will say that because you have innate desires for food sex and entertainment, that you have no choice to not act upon those in a desires and therefore any delusion that you carry about the choices that you make being done of an entirely unencumbered and Free Will are false.
Then there are people who say that Free Will doesn't exist for religious purposes, that God is an all-knowing creature who knows the beginning and the end and everything in between and so you cannot make a choice that he or she or it does not already know that you will make and therefore your choices are not free.
The people who say Free Will does exist on a biological level will point to people who choose to self-immolate or to starve themselves to death in protest of a spiritual or psychological issue, valuing the ideals that life has imprinted upon them over the biological necessities of continuing to live.
The people who say Free Will does exist on a spiritual level say many things, such as we carry a spark of the Divine in us and therefore we are as little gods ourselves, capable of creating and destroying in roughly the same proportional magnitude as the greater gods above are, or they say that since we have the ability to make choices and we are judged by those choices than our choices must be free otherwise judgment is meaningless.
I personally tend to lean into the Free Will side, while understanding simultaneously that sometimes there are exigencies that induce us to choose one option over another on a more likely than not basis, or to phrase it another way, our will is as free as we choose it to be.
The people who are against the concept of free will say that because you have innate desires for food sex and entertainment, that you have no choice to not act upon those in a desires and therefore any delusion that you carry about the choices that you make being done of an entirely unencumbered and Free Will are false.
That's not the argument against free will. The argument is just that there's a physical process to every thought in your head. When you think of a tree, inside your brain a specific pattern of neurons and chemical messengers activate which is what creates the thought of a tree.
When you're consciously deciding whether to eat a donut or a salad, a specific pattern of neurons and chemical messengers are the mechanism by which that decision process is occurring. The pattern of neurons and chemical messengers happening in your brain is the physical mechanism that is performing the decision making process.
There are no thoughts outside of the ones generated by your neurons and chemical messengers. The pattern of neurons and chemical messengers IS the thought that you're thinking. Your brain (and the thoughts that occur within it) is a physical object that obeys the laws of nature, the same as all physical objects do.
For the same reason that I feel like I'm still right now, while I'm actually spinning and hurtling through space at incredible speed.
I forget which philosopher said this but he said something along the lines of if you have the desire and the capacity for an action you do, then deterministic or not, you chose that action. If the tide pulls me where I was already swimming, I still chose to swim there, even if some other force took me half of the way.
But where does your desire and capacity to do that thing come from? It arises from the physical arrangement of neurons/hormones/etc. in your brain and body
Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist
He thinks consciousness has to do with "quantum bubble collapse" happening inside our brains at a very very tiny level.
That's the only way free will could exist.
If consciousness is anything else, then everything is predetermined.
Like, imagine dropping a million bouncy balls off the hoover dam. You'll never get the same results twice.
However, that's because you'll never get the same conditions twice.
If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level... You'll get the same results every time
What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole "quantum bubble collapse" was a fundamental part of consciousness.
That still wouldn't guarantee free will, but it would make it possible.
There's also the whole thing where what we think of as our consciousness isn't actually running the show. It's just a narrator that's summarizing everything up immediately after it happened. What's actually calling the shot is other parts of our brains, neurons in our gut, and what controls our hormones.
We don't know if that's not true either. But if it was, each person as a thing would have free will, it's just what we think of as that person does not have free will.
Sounds batshit crazy and impossible, until you read up on the studies on people who had their brains split in half at different stages of mental development.
There's a scary amount of shit we don't know about "us". And an even scarier amount we don't know about how much variation there is with all that
Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist
I would recommend reading the philosophers Jocelyn Benoist and Francois-Igor Pris who argue very convincingly that both the "hard problem of consciousness" and the "measurement problem" stem from the same logical fallacies of conflating subjectivity (or sometimes called phenomenality) with contextuality, and that both disappear when you make this distinction, and so neither are actually problems for physics to solve but are caused by fallacious reasoning in some of our a priori assumptions about the properties of reality.
Benoist's book Toward a Contextual Realism and Pris' book Contextual Realism and Quantum Mechanics both cover this really well. They are based in late Wittgensteinian philosophy, so maybe reading Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good primer.
That’s the only way free will could exist...What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole “quantum bubble collapse” was a fundamental part of consciousness.
Even if they discover quantum phenomena in the brain, all that would show is our brain is like a quantum computer. But nobody would argue quantum computers have free will, do they? People often like to conflate the determinism/free will debate with the debate over Laplacian determinism specifically, which should not be conflated, as randomness clearly has nothing to do with the question of free will.
If the state forced everyone into a job for life the moment they turned 18, but they chose that job using a quantum random number generator, would it be "free"? Obviously not. But we can also look at it in the reverse sense. If there was a God that knew every decision you were going to make, would that negate free will? Not necessarily. Just because something knows your decision ahead of time doesn't necessarily mean you did not make that decision yourself.
The determinism/free will debate is ultimately about whether or not human decisions are reducible to the laws of physics or not. Even if there is quantum phenomena in the brain that plays a real role in decision making, our decisions would still be reducible to the laws of physics and thus determined by them. Quantum mechanics is still deterministic in the nomological sense of the word, meaning, determinism according to the laws of physics. It is just not deterministic in the absolute Laplacian sense of the word that says you can predict the future with certainty if you knew all properties of all systems in the present.
If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level… You’ll get the same results every time
I think a distinction should be made between Laplacian determinism and fatalism (not sure if there's a better word for the latter category). The difference here is that both claim there is only one future, but only the former claims the future is perfectly predictable from the states of things at present. So fatalism is less strict: even in quantum mechanics that is random, there is a single outcome that is "fated to be," but you could never predict it ahead of time.
Unless you ascribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation, I think you kind of have to accept a fatalistic position in regards to quantum mechanics, mainly due not to quantum mechanics itself but special relativity. In special relativity, different observers see time passing at different rates. You can thus build a time machine that can take you into the future just by traveling really fast, near the speed of light, then turning around and coming back home.
The only way for this to even be possible for there to be different reference frames that see time pass differently is if the future already, in some sense, pre-exists. This is sometimes known as the "block universe" which suggests that the future, present, and past are all equally "real" in some sense. For the future to be real, then, there has to be an outcome of each of the quantum random events already "decided" so to speak. Quantum mechanics is nomologically deterministic in the sense that it does describe nature as reducible to the laws of physics, but not deterministic in the Laplacian sense that you can predict the future with certainty knowing even in principle. It is more comparable to fatalism, that there is a single outcome fated to be (that is, again, unless you ascribe to MWI), but it's impossible to know ahead of time.
Even if the brain is a quantum computer, it's quantum dice rolls controlling your neurons. So quantum consciousness doesn't enable the possibility free will.
Things can be true on different levels and false on others. The earth is locally flat, it is as a whole a near sphere.
I don't know if we have free will or not, I strongly suspect that physics can explain our minds fully, but I don't know. At the same time even if physics could fully explain our minds in practice we are so complicated we give the impression that we have a limited amount of free will. So yeah the earth is round but it is easier for us to assume flat most of the time.
Because it's not an illusion.
Determinism seems reasonable only because people have an inaccurately simplistic conception of causation, such that they believe that consciousness and choice violate it, rather than being a part of it.
Causation isn't a simple linear thing - it's an enormously complex web in which any number of things can be causes and/or effects of any number of things.
Free will (properly understood) is just one part of that enormously complex web.
How is our experience of decision making different to one where we reach an inevitable outcome based on a complex set of parameters?
Because there are points at which, exactly as seems to be the case, we consciouly choose to follow one particular path in spite of the fact that we could just as easily have chosen another.
If I found out that I don't have free will, I would start trying to gain it back immediately.
What if you found out that free will is an inherently flawed concept and therefore impossible to conclusively obtain
if you found out that free will is an inherently flawed concept
I also cannot imagine finding out that the hole in my ass is bigger than I am.
What if you never had it and never can have it because its not a havable thing
We know.
The most accurate answer is: We don't know.
But there are pieces of scientific evidence that suggest our sense of free will is just another perception process that happens in our brains. Specifically I'm thinking about people who have problems in their brain that make them feel like they AREN'T the one controlling what they do. For example people suffering from derealization - https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonalization-derealization-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352911
EDIT
As to why our brains have a process that gives us a perception of free will, that's a much harder question that i think science currently only has conjecture on. If i had to guess I'd guess that either there's an evolutionary advantage to it, or it's an emergent property that arises from all the parts of the brain being connected in the way they are
Here's my take: the answer is emergent phenomena. We live in a very complex system and in complex systems there are interactions that can only be predicted using systems of equal or higher complexity. So even in case everything is predetermined, it would still be unpredictable and therefore your decisions are basically still up to you and the complex interactions in your brain.
I think this is probably it. I think this argument is strongly related to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of sensory experience. I find it simple to imagine the idea of a body with no will or no consciousness (i.e., a philosophical zombie). But I find it very difficult, almost impossible, in fact, to imagine a consciousness with no will, even if it's only the will to think a given thought.
Assuming we don't have free will, why do we have the illusion that we do?
You experience the world through your senses.
What sense that your body has would you expect to give your brain a different set of inputs if your brain's actions were not deterministic, not set by the laws of physics? How would you expect it to feel different?
You wouldn't expect to feel like some invisible force is in control of your limbs, which I think is perhaps what some people intuitively expect if someone says that their actions are pre-determined.
It's not talking about anything that your brain can sense; it's talking about how your brain works.
Simple: We cannot predict the future. If you don't know what's going to happen nor whether it is being controlled, you do not know whether your actions are predetermined. Every movement you make might be the result of universal programming. What I'm typing, have sent, and you are reading might be the sequence of events that was always supposed to happen.
Free will is, IMO, as unknowable as whether an almighty being exists. That "almighty being" might have created this existence, but might also exist in its own realm that was created by another "almighty being". The chain might be infinite and it might not be. Asking these questions is like asking "can we reach infinity".
Why are we assuming we don't have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.
The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, "assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?"
You're conscious of the decisions you make. Sure they're the result of a million different variables, chemicles, memories, and predetermined traits, but some of that is active. You are making the choice. Whether you could have made a different one or not doesn't affect what the choice feels like
Yes, there's an evolutionary purpose for the concept of purpose. If you believe you can do something and show some initiative then you're more likely to get it. The early bird gets the worm, and the bird that anticipated the worm is the early bird. This is true both for humans and cells in a petri dish.
I enjoy either the free will or the illusion thereof not to torment myself with such unanswerable questions!
Gooooood choice
