This topic has been buzzing around my mind for a while, so I figure it's time to externalize it. "Free will is an illusion" is a meme that I've seen quite a lot on this site especially. I don't think most people who repeat it have thought much about it.
Yeah, materialism (which I hear is popular around here) suggests a mechanistic universe, one without true randomness, defined solely by predictable input and output. That contradicts our intuition about independent free will, which seems unpredictable (or at least not fully predictable) when we experience it. I don't think a fully mechanistic universe is incompatible with free will, though - in fact, I think that any coherent definition of free will must necessarily exist even under a materialist lens. Those of you who are (like me) pop-philosophy dilettantes probably know that this position is called "compatibilism".
Obviously, though, people disagree. I want to know why. If you don't believe that free will exists, under what circumstances do you think it would exist? What do you think would change if it did exist according to your definition?
Yeah, I give this thread low odds of changing minds. I'm mostly just curious about how people justify their position. And there's always a chance that it'll at least get people to think about it in a way they haven't before.
I have the outlier position of free will absolutist, though I'd readily admit my rationale isn't necessarily the strongest.
tl;dr: Qualia and phenomenal sensation are non-physical phenomenon; thus if we are able to perceive non-physical phenomenon then that must logically entail we can react to non-physical phenomenon which means the machinations of our minds / consciousness aren't necessarily bound to physics or notions of casuality as we understand them.
Why do you say that qualia are necessarily non-physical? I think it's plausible that advances in neuroscience (far into the future, probably) could provide a robust physical description of how we experience sensation.
This is conjecture more than anything and I could be proven wrong, but I don't this is another 'science will figure it out when it gets advanced enough' issue.
You can theorize of a hypothetical being that knows the exact atomic make-up of a red object down to the smallest molecule and exactly how it triggers the color-cones in our eyes but that being would not phenomenally know the experience of redness unless they had observed it for themselves subjectively.
I think the problem here is, where do you cram the non physical portion in? Is there an interaction point with the physical?
Either the being with qualia never interacts meaningfully with the object, in which case conscious beings are just floating spirits pretending they make decisions and free will is irrelevant.
Or Qualia interacts with the physical body in some way that a direct simulation does not, producing a different result, in which case we can design an experiment to test where that interaction begins and the needed components for that.
I agree that any simplified or limited understanding of sensation wouldn't be the same as subjective experience - even fully simulating a human mind wouldn't be sufficient - but I don't think that means experience can't be physical.
Imagine an impossibly complex computer, purely composed of physical and electrical components. Imagine it's capable of self-observation, that it has a basic form of consciousness. We could document every bit of that computer's innards, understand every input and output. We could scrutinize its self-observation. We still wouldn't know what it feels like to "be" that computer. We couldn't access its qualia, even though it would be purely physical.
And yeah, the obvious rejoinder to that is that it wouldn't be experiencing qualia, and wouldn't be actually conscious. To me that feels like solipsism, but I admit that it's impossible to know. This whole thought experiment might be circular, actually. If a purely physical thing can experience qualia, then qualia must be physical, but if qualia aren't physical then a purely physical thing couldn't experience them. That question might be irresolvable.
And yeah, the obvious rejoinder to that is that it wouldn’t be experiencing qualia, and wouldn’t be actually conscious. To me that feels like solipsism, but I admit that it’s impossible to know. This whole thought experiment might be circular, actually. If a purely physical thing can experience qualia, then qualia must be physical, but if qualia aren’t physical then a purely physical thing couldn’t experience them. That question might be irresolvable.
This is essentially what it comes down to, and why I say my theory is mostly just conjecture; there's simply not enough information at the moment nor is it clear there will ever be.
This is conjecture more than anything and I could be proven wrong, but I don’t this is another ‘science will figure it out when it gets advanced enough’ issue.
Agreed. I always felt like assuming science is capable of infinite progression to be pure hubris. There's no guarantee we don't hit an intractable problem in every single field, and I'd be willing to wager real cash money we eventually do.
You can theorize of a hypothetical being that knows the exact atomic make-up of a red object down to the smallest molecule and exactly how it triggers the color-cones in our eyes but that being would not phenomenally know the experience of redness unless they had observed it for themselves subjectively.
I disagree with this though, or rather the more general variant that gets passed around. I see absolutely no reason qualia couldn't be, or arise from, purely physical interactions. In the more general example I've seen it's usually phrased as something like "A being that possesses omniscience of the concept of Red, but has not experienced vision of it." Which seems like a either a non-sequetor or misses the point entirely.
In the first interpretation I cant see how you could have a being that has "Knowledge of all possible notions of a concept" without experiencing qualia, because if it had it wouldn't have had "Knowledge of all possible notions." Congrats, you made a god that cant lift stones and gave it a rock.
In the second interpretation im just like "Ok? What now though?" Visual qualia and cognitive qualia aren't the same thing, cool, agreed. Somebody that can see but has no idea of how vision works is also lacking the qualia of seeing within that context, or having thoughts related to it. Locked out of entire possible mind-space. Simply seeing Red is a different qualia than understanding Red, which is yet still a different qualia than doing both or neither. A blind person and an infant are both qualically(?how tf do you adverb qualia?) starved.
Edit: I should probably say I think materialist panpsychism is dope and good. Probably should have lead with that. Sorry.
Like with other things, the emergentist aspect of consciousness might not be fully explained, even with advances in science
This whole convo has been poisoned by the idiotic ramblings of Sam Harris unfortunately. So now you got all these reddit dorks who think they're deep philosophers cuz they regurgitate something from a 15 minute Sam Harris talk.
What happens, do they get owned big time on the askphil reddit by people who have actually read philosophy?
‘nothing means anything anymore cause i just wanted to meditate and sam harris app told me everything is meaningless and i have no agency please help’
Lol. Got any interesting story in particular I should check out?
I don't even think I exist, "I" am just the collection of qualia that "I" experience.
I find talking about this stuff super interesting and relevant, since my opinions on these things are essentially what informs all my political beliefs. Long post time:
I feel like im in a fairly unique position because lack of free-will is actually the intuitive answer to me. I can't quite explain why but it feels more correct. It's mostly to due with the slight dissociative feelings I had when I was younger, and to a lesser degree now, where I feel "like im just watching a movie of myself living my life". I now see that as me unconsciously and intuitively being aware of my thoughts popping into my head as purely coded reactions to things, or thats my analysis at least. Regardless, I feel that sooooo much of how a person acts, their choices, their preferences, and their reactions to things can be traced back to external stimuli that even if compatibilism is more correct, things are close enough to a lack of free will that for practical purposes it can be assumed that we just have an illusion of free will but dont actually.
This then leads into my political beliefs. I feel that a deterministic no-free-will view of things is the best justification for an anti-hierarchical stance. If people don't choose their environments and experiences then everyone is just a victim of consequences. When im talking to friends and get to this point they like to point out that "so we just let criminals go free then?" to which I have a less scientific response to. My username references a quote from Night in The Woods where a character says "I believe in a universe that doesnt care, and people who do", which I also believe in, and I think is quite profound when you consider the utter vastness of the universe. If the universe is a near endless void of bleakness, then the actions of humans, passion, love, caring about fictional characters, is just flat out absurd. Despite that though, humans (and lots of other life) still does it, and this brave defiance in the face of the void I personally think creates meaning in itself. Almost a sort of "romantic nihilism" I say, where what matters in this universe is the passions of lifeforms that thrive in defiance of the void.
To thrive then is to explore passion and love and art and other things that are best achieved by ensuring that as many people (and other animals :im-vegan:) on earth can do so. And to do that means finding out why so many people are stuck working awful office jobs. Its not because of some people being bad and some people being good and/or choosing to do so, the systems that perpetuate these awful lives are propped up by "bad" people who are victims of circumstance of that same system. This wraps back around to my arguments on determinism where I feel that when trying to justify being anti-hierarchy, the most meaningful takeaway is that the focus should always be on the systems and environments that create "bad" people. And to give an answer to the many times people tell me "but like you cant just let a murderer walk free because they are a victim" I say that it becomes a complicated legal question to determine if they are harming more people's ability to "thrive" as described earlier, and if so then whatever actions to stop them are therefore justified because the net thriving is kept as high as possible. But if all the systems and environments that create criminals and "bad" people are fought against I believe that there will be very very few people, only the most unlucky, to have to put in fancy personal hotel prisons to let them enjoy their lives without hurting others.
My last thought in regards to free will is a response to a friend of mine that said "I worry that your viewpoint cheapens the good actions of people, because they are just lucky in their circumstances". I think my takes kinda lead to a healthy form of humility, recognizing that privilege runs very deep and in many forms but isn't always an issue, because those who are in a better position have the responsibility of leveraging their lives to help the less fortunate thrive as well. And the benefit of showing those who are "bad" the source of their problems instead of telling them to self loathe is absolutely worth it.
I feel like im in a fairly unique position because lack of free-will is actually the intuitive answer to me. I can’t quite explain why but it feels more correct. It’s mostly to due with the slight dissociative feelings I had when I was younger, and to a lesser degree now, where I feel “like im just watching a movie of myself living my life”.
I think my own neurodevelopmental disorders definitely led me to intuitively rejecting free will. When you have ADHD and BPD and you can't fucking clean up your house over and over despite wanting to because there ain't enough molecule in your brain, you start to understand how that applies across the board. The well functioning brain doesn't have to consider that the rewards it receives determines the actions it engages in, and that the response to the reward is entirely beyond them, for instance.
If you're anxious and how you act, who you are, what you've done has been fundamentally conditioned by overactivation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, the friends you have and the environment you find yourself in and the jobs you can perform, good luck finding the freedom in that. The obverse is still true, an HPA system that works well is still determining these things, just positively and without friction.
Zizek thinks that materialism involves contingency, non-predictability. I don't know but he probably thinks this is because of how he (mis)understands quantum physics, so I am wary. Maybe someone here knows.
Free will is compatible with a material only universe.
The consciousness in your head that you experience as you is an active information process, in any way that matters you have free will. The only way someone could "peek ahead" to see what you would do in response to stimuli is by implementing a version of you that will also be making free choices. Say someone knew the velocity, state, etc of every particle in the universe. They could determine what you would do in the future by calculating the progress of these particles - but in doing so, would implement you in those calculations and ultimately that version is making free choices even though it's being worked out on paper or silicon (because you are an active information process).
I've never encountered anyone who doesnt believe in free will, but I'm a little curious why they think that. And if their answer isn't "just because" then I think they probably dont really disbelieve in free will at a fundamental level, lol!
I don't, because I don't think lack of predictability is free will as long as the system is still deterministic. If you ran the same person in the same sim 20 times you'd get the same result. Even if you added an RNG to mix up decision making, that's still not free will, it's just an RNG. Broadly, I can't think of a definition of Free Will I'd accept that does not also break both causality and locality. There would need to be an "air gap" between sensory and rational processes.
On top of that, I expect human behaviour could be predicted at a pretty much perfect level given a known sensory input without creating a conscious simulation of that person.
But what's doing the predicting? Whatever it is, all it's doing is implementing a version of a free willed conscious being. That being has free choice, the only way to figure out what its decision will be is to progress the simulation and perk ahead. If you just keep repeating everything, that being had free choice each time and chose to do the same thing (regardless if it knew it is was in a simulation or more likely that they didnt know), in my view anyway.
If you know enough about someone that you can perfectly predict what theyll do, theres only one way to do that. Make a high fidelity copy of them and run out the simulation - which implies that we all walk around with varying quality copies of loved ones, friends, that we use when considering a gift or what they would have thought and I fully accept that and think it's true (my little strange loop copy of my partner for example isnt very good because I frequently get their order wrong for coffee and stuff). If you mean we can predict human behaviour in the aggregate, yeah I agree, but that doesnt have anything to do with individual free choice. It just means we can generally predict the activity of large enough populations of free actors.
You dont have to accept my premise that consciousness isnt something immaterial or special and that it is a purely mechanistic thing that emerges as a function or a state machine, but if you do then how that function is implemented shouldnt really be affected by if it's being run on biological hardware, in someone else's head, silicon, or being hand cranked out page after page by a room of graduate students. And in every case, there was indeed a conscious being that made free choice. At least that's what I think.
Ok I have several issues with this, but the main one is that you've just defined a rock as having free will.
A rock tumbles through the air due to a complex and hard to see combination of properties, any simulation of a rock is essentially the rock, thus, when we throw a rock we have recreated the qualia of the rock to predict the rock's arc. Even a computer who has watch the rock being thrown a hundred billion times in all sorts of conditions, and just uses a big look up table to see what the rock will do is essentially replicating the rock.
There's no self to even have a will, so nah it doesn't exist.
Life's just a 3D qualia movie
No one. Experience doesn't happen to a watcher, it just exists.
Stuff happens which causes experience, but experience, the qualia itself, isn't observed. It's observation itself
If no one is experiencing, where does experience come from? If no one is observing, how can observation exist? This is just kicking the can down the road.
I think you're internally defining a "self" in a more restrictive way than I am. It's entirely plausible that consciousness is made up only of observation. That still means that consciousness exists.
Yeah consciousness definitely exists, and what we mean by "consciousness" points to what we mean by "seeing" or "experience" or "thinking"
There's no division between these
it was a bad deal. wish i could be an automaton with a fat ass.
Honestly, I've always thought of free will from the perspective of the past. Someone before I was born essentially has everything they've done "locked in" to history, and if you look at the present in a similar way, then free will doesn't actually exist. To a person 100 years from now, your actions are just as locked in as a person 100 years ago is to you. And at least right now, there's no going back in time and changing that. I know the "destiny" of those of the past merely because I live in a time after.
But, and this is an important but, in that same way, it doesn't mean we act as if people don't have control over their behavior. While the course of things might be already set in the grand scheme of life, those actions were still your actions. Destiny in this sense doesn't work like "You were destined to die on april 7th 2044" no matter what. Your choices with the upcoming future will have consequences that impact the world. Even if you aren't real and your actions weren't "yours" in the historical sense, they still were by any general meaning of the words. I'd blame a person in the 1900's for being a racist piece of shit no matter if it's already locked in or not.
I do have a pretty unorthodox take which is that we can transition from a determinist world to a free will one, which I guess matters because i’m more of a hard determinist otherwise. The whole thing is a mess though because I also don’t believe in the unicity of beings over time.
it’s pretty complicated, I don’t want to dox myself but i have an article (fingers crossed) in review on that. I’ll take the example of social determinism, this all goes out of the window if we’re all in an equal simulation, we wouldn’t be socially determined anymore, you can infer from that parcellar example how we can escape other forms of determinism or determinism in general
Something I heard from a religious teacher is that free will is consistent on the environment and social context (family, community, religion, society, nation, time period) in which an individual is based in to instruct that person on their values from social cues and pressure.
Therefore to become the person you want to be, you must surround yourself with the type of people who can guide you on that path. And so, like Abraham, you must force yourself to live in a community - or leave one - where you can accomplish just that. Abraham left Sumer, a place of idolatry, to Canaanite deserts to be closer to God.
One's values and behavior will be shaped by that social context, and so your free will is exercised in your capacity to relocate and seek new communities and people to establish yourself in.
I thought about this, and notice this is true when people go to college, study abroads, or work. They change as their environment and social relationships do. Your free will is in a constant state of flux as your environment, nurture, and social relationships and predispositions clash in rational and non-rational decision making.
Which is to say that free will is legitimate as long as you exercise them through actions because each action changes who you are.
I've thought quite a bit about this and see no way to preserve free will outside of immaterial or religious thinking.
Essentially it boils down to, is the existing state of affairs determined by the preceding state of affairs? The domicile you're in right now is there because somebody gathered the materials, put it together, and now it's a place to live, you're in it. Seems obvious and straightforward enough. But if the existing nature of things is a direct result of what came before, that's going to apply to everything, not just bits and pieces. Every element of your brain in the position it is in right now was determined by a preceding state of affairs. Every neuron firing, every neurotransmitter present or absent, the motivation you have, the memory you have, the personality you have, the options you have, all are directly determined by, and the result of, what happened previously. And you do not get decide this, you don't have any say in this.
If we want to posit that there's something in the human brain that is outside of causality -- how? Why? This requires what seems to be incredible assumptions which don't stand up to scrutiny. Where is the "will" that's independent of its conditions? How does it operate outside of cause and effect, but still somehow influence cause and effect?
"Choice" as in the competition of alternatives is insufficient for a free will as well. Imagine a fox running through the woods comes up against a fork in the road; on the left hand side is a small rabbit, on the right a small squirrel, whichever animal the Fox hunts, the other escapes. It's confronted with two options and goes after either left or right (or hell maybe it ends up paralyzed by indecision). Is the fox asserting its free will, because the choice was not made externally? I wouldn't say that's what I understand to be free will, but that is the extent of the "choice" we humans have as well: competing alternatives which are then collapsed into one outcome based entirely on intrinsic, non-chosen motivations.
Look at any action you've done or choice you've made. It's been done because of causes outside your influence. Imagine you have a friend Bob and a friend Jane and are confronted with the more complex choice of going to the gym or eating a large meal of McDonald's. Bob says "hey, come work out" while Jane says "I'm so high, I'm going to eat 2 Big Mac's and 20 nuggs, wanna come?" You're confronted with a choice and now have the opportunity to employ your faculty of free will. Say you end up deciding to go to the gym -- but why? Maybe it's because you want to be healthy and are afraid of dying, maybe it's because you want to impress members of your preferred sex, maybe you enjoy the release of endorphins, whatever motivates you in particular. But you didn't choose to want to impress members of your preferred sex or choose to desire intimacy. You didn't choose to want to prolong your life and fear death. You didn't choose that the release of norepinephrine is pleasurable to you. The same applies if you end up deciding to go for fast food -- if you go because you're starved, you didn't choose to crave food and consume it for sustenance, you didn't choose the fact that the oils and salt release dopamine in your brain, you didn't choose that you enjoy the comfort of sitting and the lack of strain.
This applies to every choice we've ever made, motivations and desires underlying them we cannot choose and do not. Spinoza says the issue is because we simply aren't aware of the complexity of our motivations and reasons for doing things and it's the gap in between that produces the error of thinking we have free will. Or put another way by Schopenhauer, "man is free to do as he desires, but he is not free to desire as he desires" (paraphrasing from memory).
It's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, which has not and probably cannot be forthcoming.
Free will doesn't require any part of a person to exist outside of causality. Really, the idea of anything existing outside of causality is sort of incoherent.
To exposit a bit on compatibilism, the idea is that a self-consistent idea of free will must be compatible with a mechanistic world. The only requirement for free will, in this view, is that a free-willed actor must control their actions - that is, what you are decides what you do. A rock isn't free-willed because it can't take make decisions or take actions. A person is free-willed because they make decisions that lead to actions; a person would not be free-willed if their decisions had no effect on their actions (e.g. they were mind-controlled by a compliance chip). Yes, in a mechanistic world, those actions might be pre-determined, but they are pre-determined in part by the actor. A person is part of the universe; a free-willed actor is a cause in itself. Having unchosen desires doesn't negate this. (Side note - the idea of "chosen desires" is shaky too; in the absence of pre-existing, unchosen desires, why would anyone choose to desire anything? Inherent value doesn't exist, so without at least one unchosen first-principle desire, there would be no reason to choose to desire one thing over the other. And without desire, why exercise free will?)
The problem with most people's concept of free will is that it assumes its own negation. If free will means being outside causality, unaffected by the universe, then it can't meaningfully affect anything in the universe. Free will can't mean making decisions regardless of causal input, because those decisions would be baseless. Really, fully baseless, to the point of incoherence - how could anyone make a decision without knowing what they're deciding between? If part of the human mind was "outside causality," what would that even look like? Either the acausal mind is internally consistent, and would make the same decisions as an identically conditioned causal mind (in which case there would be no real difference), or the acausal mind would make decisions randomly. I don't think randomness is a requirement for free will - the exact opposite, actually. If actions are essentially random, then the actor has no agency.
This is why I'm asking people to define free will in their terms. Almost no one here has.
The only requirement for free will, in this view, is that a free-willed actor must control their actions - that is, what you are decides what you do
So a fox has as much free will as a person. Sure, if your definition of "free will" is what you are (the current state of your configuration) determines what you will do (the actions or inactions that then follow), free will absolutely exists and is possessed by mice and flies as well.
Yes, in a mechanistic world, those actions might be pre-determined but they are pre-determined in part by the actor
If those actions are pre-determined by the actor, but the state of the actor is *itself * is also fully pre-determined, it's... Determinism, the outcome is determined, the actor is determined, it's a chain of causality. In a mechanistic world, it's not "those actions might be pre-determined" they are.
a free-willed actor is a cause in itself [...] the acausal mind
A human being as an actor in the world causes things to happen, and that human is also entirely an effect of previous causes. If you're claiming they are a cause but that cause is itself undetermined, that's the crux of the debate, and leads to all that I've said above. There is no acausal mind -- if there is, how did it come to be, what part of it is outside of causality, how is this possible, and what evidence do we have to make that claim?
that human is also entirely an effect of previous causes
What else could they be? You've missed the more important part of my argument. How can you define free will in a way that is independent of previous causes?
How can you define free will in a way that is independent of previous causes?
Forgive me if I misunderstood but you asserted choice and will were determined in part but not fully.
Your brain and will are entirely, fully the result of things outside of your control, the previous state . If you're claiming there is some element of the will, or mind, or brain, outside of causality whatsoever that's the extraordinary and immaterialist claim. If you're claiming the will and mind are entirely determined and the outcomes that occur because of that determination are "free will", that's just rephrasing determinism as free will.
The human mind can be entirely deterministic and still possess free will, for any coherent definition of free will. That is literally my entire point. What definition of free will are you using?
What definition of free will are you using?
The one you gestured towards when you mentioned an "acausal mind", something which causes but in itself is not caused. So my definition of free will is a mind that is in part somewhere not subjected to causality. What exactly is your definition?
You keep sidestepping the basic question of do mosquitoes possess free will? By what you've offered as a definition, they absolutely do. And if so, I hope you might see why the implications of that present a problem for how most people view the freedom of the will. I'm completely cool with it though, flies and toads have as much free will as humans. If that's how we're defining it, absolutely, free will exists.
In what sense is an entirely determined mind "free"? What is it "free" from?
Here's the SEP on the basic critiques of compatibilism, or what compatibilism is in attempt a response to, the approach you have here:
the thesis of causal determinism tells us, that everything that occurs is the inevitable result of the laws of nature and the state of the world in the distant past. If this is the case, then everything human agents do flows from the laws of nature and the way the world was in the distant past. But if what we do is simply the consequence of the laws of nature and the state of the world in the distant past—then we cannot do anything other than what we ultimately do. Nor are we in any meaningful sense the ultimate causal source of our actions, since they have their causal origins in the laws of nature and the state of the world long ago. Determinism therefore seems to prevent human agents from having the freedom to do otherwise, and it also seems to prevent them from being the sources of their actions. If either of these is true, then it’s doubtful that human agents are free or responsible for their actions in any meaningful sense. These lines of argument, which have been regimented in the work of Ginet (1966), van Inwagen (1975, 1983), Wisdom (1934), Mele (1995), and Pereboom (1995, 2001), among many others, present a real problem for those who are inclined to think that we are free and responsible for our choices and actions and that the natural world might operate as a deterministic system (or if not completely deterministic, one in which an indeterminism is merely stochastic noise that is causally irrelevant at the level of human agency).
Did you read the third paragraph of my first reply? I already addressed the acausal mind idea. It's untenable - either it would be indistinguishable from a purely causal mind, or it would make decisions randomly (which sort of defeats the point of free will).
And sure, mosquitoes have free will. So do trees, mushrooms, and bacteria. To a much lesser extent than humans (their decision space is way more constrained), but it's there.
And sure, mosquitoes have free will. So do trees, mushrooms, and bacteria. To a much lesser extent than humans (their decision space is way more constrained), but it’s there.
I think then our only disagreement is actually nomenclature honestly
