9 ms·

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

40 points by zachlatta 10y ago

calebm 10y ago
I think if you accept a materialistic ontology, you have no choice* but to accept that you have no real choices - instead, your choices are illusions - every action you take is purely a function the gears of the universe turning (cause/effect). * some people "choose" to believe in Compatibilism, which I consider a cop out.
- klodolph 10y ago
  The problem is not merely ontology, but the definition of free will itself. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a reasonably long page on compatibilism. "Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism" is an interesting take on the subject which is worth familiarizing yourself with, if you are interested in the subject. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ReaResCom http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ReaResCom
- Swizec 10y ago
  Even if every action is purely a function of the gears turning, you still have state. As soon as you have state (memories/mood/etc), you have some level of free will in the immediate sense. Event X happens. How you react depends on your state of mind. Same problem as with coding. As soon as outputs are not wholly dependent on inputs, and they can have side-effects, all bets are off. Anything could happen.
  - pbh101 10y ago
    But your state is also deterministically a function of your prior experiences, per this model. If you consider the input the entire stream of events, rather than each individual event, the output stream will be deterministic even with state.
    - mercer 10y ago
      So basically it's still a 'pure' function in the end?
      - pbh101 10y ago
        Per the materialist/deterministic 'there is no free will' mental model, yes: the function taking the input stream is pure. On the per-event basis, this model boils down to a 'function' evaluating each event with multiple outputs and inputs: Inputs: the stimuli, mental state prior to stimuli Outputs: your actions and resultant mental state The output mental state is then the input for the next iteration/evaluation.
  - edko 10y ago
    Internal state makes understanding the output more difficult: your output is now a function of the input plus the internal state. However, it does not make it freer: the same input paired with the same internal state will always produce the same output.
    - Taren 10y ago
      But if your actions still could change randomly with your personality, memories and everything else that defines you how would that allow for free will? Say the universe is perfectly deterministic. You could look into the future by simulating everything perfectly but why would that prohibit free will? Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?
      - edko 10y ago
        I think randomness would undermine the "will" part of "free will", whilst perfect determinism would undermine the "free" part of "free will".
      - khedoros 10y ago
        > Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different? I'd argue that an all-knowing God is something that can't really be reasoned about. It's the introduction of an infinite value into the discussion (or maybe more like a division by zero?). You end up with logically contradictory statements when describing the properties of such a being.
        Taren 10y ago
        But isn't it essentially just taking away time as a factor which is pretty much what predicting via determinism would do? Maybe the general definition of free will most people seem to go with just doesn't deal with weird edge cases because it basically developed to fit reality.
- r00fus 10y ago
  I had this revelation when I was 10. Then about 6 months later I realized that the "grand equation" (didn't know about state machines at that age) was irrelevant as I would never be able to see/know all of it (at least in my lifetime). Consequently, people have "effective" free will - because the knowledge space "to know all outcomes" is too vast to control/comprehend completely.
- kybernetikos 10y ago
  Most of the reasonable definitions I've heard of for what it would mean to have 'choice' can work with Compatibilism, so I don't consider it a cop out. What definition of free will and 'choice' are you using that causes the problem? A algorithm can choose something (e.g. netflix will choose a particular film to recommend), and it doesn't cause anyone to worry about free will. My favourite way of thinking about 'free will', is that it is what it feels like from the inside of an algorithm that is choosing.
  - jflatow 10y ago
    I sort of buy this. Anyone that doesn't should put forward a definition of free will that doesn't contradict itself.
forkandwait 10y ago
It seems a false dichotomy in the article that either we have "free will" or we are driven completely deterministically. No chaos? No probabilistic? No subtlety....
- putzdown 10y ago
  The problem goes even deeper than this. It's not merely a false dichotomy but a false continuum. The implication is that minds are machines, and that as machines they may be, at one extreme, deterministic (like a software program that doesn't use `rand()`) or, at the other extreme, non-deterministic (like a software program that does), or, somewhere in the middle, "chaotic" (like a software program that doesn't use randomization but is sufficiently complex to produce results that seem magical). But surely we believe in "free will" not because we observe it in a lab but because we experience it directly. Pick up a menu at a restaurant. Sure there is mechanistic cause and effect going on in your selection—memories, sights, smells—but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself. Science is always compelled to dismiss these individual and personal experiences and perceptions, and as science rightly so. But as people we can take them into account. And so we should. To dismiss the sense of "I" that makes us, in fact, people is to cast away perhaps the most important part of our world. We retain a sense of choice, of free will, not because it's a compelling illusion but because it is in fact in large part what we are and what we recognize others to be. Be careful with that word "illusion": you can call something an illusion, but you then have to account for where the illusion came from and why it functions so powerfully. I'd say that free will is not an illusion so much as a thing that science deals badly with and is therefore tempted to dismiss. Well, dismiss free will from the laboratory, sure, but don't pretend we aren't free-willing things or you'll be left with nothing but a lab, populated by not-quite-people.
  - mercer 10y ago
    > but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself. Is this sort of what is meant with 'qualia'? I could never quite wrap my head around what that concept means, in what context, and what its value is.
damienkatz 10y ago
Give me a concrete definition of free will. This is where such discussions fall over, inadequate definitions.
- gnashville 10y ago
  An agent's ability to do and not do without external influence or coercion. The other side of this though is if the agent believes he or she has the ability to do or not do, but actually doesn't, is it still free will? An example being you enter your office with the intention of working for five hours. Without realizing it, the door locks behind you from the outside, leaving you effectively trapped. Even if you never attempt to leave the room, are you staying at your own free will?
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    I agree that "An agent's ability to do and not to do without external influence or coercion." in the context of a social or political theory of free choice. But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here. I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.
    - gnashville 10y ago
      > there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here. This is really interesting. Thanks for the reply.
- talles 10y ago
  Wittgenstein anyone?
Phithagoras 10y ago
"there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams." is quite a strong argument against mental dualism and traditional ideas about free will. But research also supports the plasticity of the brain/mind and we know that we can build/change habits and personality traits (apparently) through conscious effort. Perhaps "free will" should be defined more specifically as the ability to consciously shape the deterministic systems that are our minds?
- StanislavPetrov 10y ago
  Exactly, which is why this article is tripe. It basically boils down to, "the driver does not control the car, the steering wheel controls where the car goes, not the driver". That's true, but the driver controls the steering wheel, or at least has influence over it.
  - jsmith0295 10y ago
    A self-driving car is probably a better thing to compare to. And in that case, most people would probably argue that it's behavior would be deterministic, even if it could learn in some capacity. Although, after making that point, is there really a difference between a self driving car and a car and a driver in your example? Probably not. They're both being driven by something, and the answer shouldn't change based on what the driver is.
  - Amezarak 10y ago
    It's a self-driving car. There is no driver. You are indeed conscious, and do indeed have thoughts. What the article discusses is that the overwhelming evidence seems to show your thoughts are generated by deterministic/proabilistic physical processes, and that in fact your conscious thoughts occur after your decisions are already made and often serve only as post-hoc justifications of what you already did. Consciousness is just another component in the car. It doesn't determine or influence where the car is going. Perhaps the most valuable part of consciousness is it provides an effective way to use reflection which can communicate data about the internal state of the car to the other cars. (Often this data is objectively inaccurate, but still serves the interest of the car or the fleet.)
tumbas 10y ago
there is no proof that author is not fucktarded indivudial that mother can not love
exolymph 10y ago
I've written about this before with respect to mental illness -- I call it the "illusion of autonomy": http://sonyaellenmann.com/2015/04/free-will-mental-illness-abuse.html http://sonyaellenmann.com/2015/04/free-will-mental-illness-a...
carsongross 10y ago
> There’s No Such Thing as Free Will > We’re better off believing in it anyway. Nihilism is easy to start but hard to finish.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  I would disagree that we're better off. Well, maybe some people would be. But personally, that information has actually had the ironic effect of making me more effective at using my 'free will'. It's easier to try and be something other than what you are if you believe you think you have more control than you actually do, and that's a potentially huge waste of energy.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    You do realize the hysterically funny contradiction in your comment, correct?
    - jsmith0295 10y ago
      Yes, that was very much the point lol
      - carsongross 10y ago
        Excellent. :)
- Amezarak 10y ago
  I don't think disbelieving free will requires nihilism. It's not that there's unfreedom of the will, it's that the idea and its converse never made any real sense.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    See? Hard to finish.
Amezarak 10y ago
What we've learned through neuroscience is definitely invaluable, but it's not like this is a new idea even in the philosophic community. It's telling that the article opens by quoting Kant, who, as Nietzsche said: > Kant's joke - Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people. The idea of free will is a "popular prejudice" that has been supported almost entirely by this type of philosopher. There is a quick way to identify them: the appeal to intuition as the supreme arbiter of truth. Most of western civilization believed in free will (in part for reasons of theology), therefore the belief in free will was inculcated in the populace, therefore philosophers found their intuition ultimately verified the existence of free will and used their incredible intellects to rationalize what that confused idea even was and how it worked in the face of obvious paradoxes. Many philosophers, for thousands of years, did not accept these arguments. I quote Nietzsche because he is eminently quotable: > Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego [I] (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true. Nietzsche was in some ways more of a psychologist than a philosopher and is worth reading on those grounds alone. In fact, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is mostly interesting as a reflection of the philosopher's health and therefore his psychology.
- forkandwait 10y ago
  Could you give us citations? I love nietzsche...
  - Amezarak 10y ago
    I think The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and A Genealogy of Morality are very readable and thought-provoking without going into esoteric ism or experimental style like Thus Spake Zarathustra. I prefer the Kaufman translations, but I understand there are many new, possibly better translations available now. Translation can make-or-break Nietzsche - he was one of the best German prose writers and makes use of a lot of wordplay and neologisms. The first quote was from Gay Science - I grabbed the second of Wikipedia, but I was sure it, or something to the same effect, was also in Gay Science. I don't have a searchable copy of my favorite translation, unfortunately, but Nietzsche talks a lot of psychology in Gay Science.
hcayless 10y ago
Doesn't the observation that people who believe in free will act differently than people who don't demonstrate that free will exists? I'm perfectly willing to accept that we have less free will than we think we do, and that there's a physical basis for our mental processes. But why should that mean we have no free will at all?
- Strilanc 10y ago
  No. Why would it demonstrate that? Beliefs affect actions whether or not those beliefs are accurate. Consider: 'Does the observation that people who believe in [demons] act differently than people who don't demonstrate that [demons] exist?'
  - hcayless 10y ago
    Not a good analogy. I'll put it another way: People who believe they can make decisions for themselves act differently than people who don't. Are the former not exercising some level of control over their actions? The belief itself is neither here nor there. It's the fact that it makes a difference that I think argues for the ability to control one's impulses to some degree. Is that not free will?
    - mercer 10y ago
      I think it's actually a pretty good analogy. The vast majority of people I know, regardless of whether they believe in free will or not, cannot help but act as if they do. I'm one of them. I think there's little correlation between belief and action in this particular issue, even more so than when it comes to belief in demons. But perhaps I'm not getting exactly what you're trying to say?
- khedoros 10y ago
  It demonstrates that different internal mental states influence actions in predictable ways. I don't think that it kills the concept of free will, but I don't think that it provides evidence for it, either.
pessimizer 10y ago
"Free will" is just a phrase that people made up to rationalize their desire for retribution, punishment, and forcible conversion. People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms. edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made. And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad. [1] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/Books/HB/HowBrains.html http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/Books/HB/HowBrains.htm... [2] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/ http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/
putzdown 10y ago
Why the animosity toward free will, I wonder? I can see why it's not helpful to neuroscientists. It's not a neuron, after all. It's not a material thing, and so the material sciences don't reckon with it. But why does that make anybody want to dismiss it from reality generally? Is there an assumption that if it can't be studied in the lab, it can't exist? Boy I hope they're teaching scientists better than that these days.
jasonwatkinspdx 10y ago
This article presents determinism as certain. That's not the case. In terms of fundamental physics we know probabilities are determined, but the exact outcomes are not. There's strong evidence that this isn't a matter of us being ignorant of some hidden deterministic state (Bell's inequality experiments) but rather is fundamental to how our universe works, though it's not a totally settled debate. Whether this gives an escape hatch where our brains are capable of free will is way too complex a question for me to think it'll be settled empirically any time soon, but I personally suspect it's true in a faint way. We're mostly reactive, but have some way to influence those reactions over time.
gpderetta 10y ago
I strongly belive the universe is for all intent and purposes casual [1], I reject dualism and accept that free will objectively doesn't exist (in fact I don't even think you can rigourously define it without invoking supernatural entities). Still I have no problem to accept free will as a subjective experience, the same way I accept love, fear, hope, despair, and other states of mind, including consciousness. They are just the way our mind work, byproducts in a way. That doesn't mean that in principle one couldn't imagine mind without them, but it would be alien to us an we would probably not even recognise as intelligence. I guess that makes me a compatibilist. [1] modulo quantum indeterminism which seems to have surprisingly little effect to the macro world.
charlieflowers 10y ago
I must be missing something. If coming to doubt the existence of free will causes people to behave less responsibly, doesn't that demonstrate that those people do indeed have free will?
skilesare 10y ago
The reductionist falacy. It is ignoring the fact that the constituent systrms, while built on the operations of subsystems, evolved specifically to overcome the behavior of those sub systems.

40 points by zachlatta 10y ago

I think if you accept a materialistic ontology, you have no choice* but to accept that you have no real choices - instead, your choices are illusions - every action you take is purely a function the gears of the universe turning (cause/effect). * some people "choose" to believe in Compatibilism, which I consider a cop out.

klodolph 10y ago
The problem is not merely ontology, but the definition of free will itself. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a reasonably long page on compatibilism. "Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism" is an interesting take on the subject which is worth familiarizing yourself with, if you are interested in the subject. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ReaResCom http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ReaResCom
Swizec 10y ago
Even if every action is purely a function of the gears turning, you still have state. As soon as you have state (memories/mood/etc), you have some level of free will in the immediate sense. Event X happens. How you react depends on your state of mind. Same problem as with coding. As soon as outputs are not wholly dependent on inputs, and they can have side-effects, all bets are off. Anything could happen.
- pbh101 10y ago
  But your state is also deterministically a function of your prior experiences, per this model. If you consider the input the entire stream of events, rather than each individual event, the output stream will be deterministic even with state.
  - mercer 10y ago
    So basically it's still a 'pure' function in the end?
    - pbh101 10y ago
      Per the materialist/deterministic 'there is no free will' mental model, yes: the function taking the input stream is pure. On the per-event basis, this model boils down to a 'function' evaluating each event with multiple outputs and inputs: Inputs: the stimuli, mental state prior to stimuli Outputs: your actions and resultant mental state The output mental state is then the input for the next iteration/evaluation.
- edko 10y ago
  Internal state makes understanding the output more difficult: your output is now a function of the input plus the internal state. However, it does not make it freer: the same input paired with the same internal state will always produce the same output.
  - Taren 10y ago
    But if your actions still could change randomly with your personality, memories and everything else that defines you how would that allow for free will? Say the universe is perfectly deterministic. You could look into the future by simulating everything perfectly but why would that prohibit free will? Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?
    - edko 10y ago
      I think randomness would undermine the "will" part of "free will", whilst perfect determinism would undermine the "free" part of "free will".
    - khedoros 10y ago
      > Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different? I'd argue that an all-knowing God is something that can't really be reasoned about. It's the introduction of an infinite value into the discussion (or maybe more like a division by zero?). You end up with logically contradictory statements when describing the properties of such a being.
      - Taren 10y ago
        But isn't it essentially just taking away time as a factor which is pretty much what predicting via determinism would do? Maybe the general definition of free will most people seem to go with just doesn't deal with weird edge cases because it basically developed to fit reality.
r00fus 10y ago
I had this revelation when I was 10. Then about 6 months later I realized that the "grand equation" (didn't know about state machines at that age) was irrelevant as I would never be able to see/know all of it (at least in my lifetime). Consequently, people have "effective" free will - because the knowledge space "to know all outcomes" is too vast to control/comprehend completely.
kybernetikos 10y ago
Most of the reasonable definitions I've heard of for what it would mean to have 'choice' can work with Compatibilism, so I don't consider it a cop out. What definition of free will and 'choice' are you using that causes the problem? A algorithm can choose something (e.g. netflix will choose a particular film to recommend), and it doesn't cause anyone to worry about free will. My favourite way of thinking about 'free will', is that it is what it feels like from the inside of an algorithm that is choosing.
- jflatow 10y ago
  I sort of buy this. Anyone that doesn't should put forward a definition of free will that doesn't contradict itself.

forkandwait 10y ago

It seems a false dichotomy in the article that either we have "free will" or we are driven completely deterministically. No chaos? No probabilistic? No subtlety....

putzdown 10y ago
The problem goes even deeper than this. It's not merely a false dichotomy but a false continuum. The implication is that minds are machines, and that as machines they may be, at one extreme, deterministic (like a software program that doesn't use `rand()`) or, at the other extreme, non-deterministic (like a software program that does), or, somewhere in the middle, "chaotic" (like a software program that doesn't use randomization but is sufficiently complex to produce results that seem magical). But surely we believe in "free will" not because we observe it in a lab but because we experience it directly. Pick up a menu at a restaurant. Sure there is mechanistic cause and effect going on in your selection—memories, sights, smells—but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself. Science is always compelled to dismiss these individual and personal experiences and perceptions, and as science rightly so. But as people we can take them into account. And so we should. To dismiss the sense of "I" that makes us, in fact, people is to cast away perhaps the most important part of our world. We retain a sense of choice, of free will, not because it's a compelling illusion but because it is in fact in large part what we are and what we recognize others to be. Be careful with that word "illusion": you can call something an illusion, but you then have to account for where the illusion came from and why it functions so powerfully. I'd say that free will is not an illusion so much as a thing that science deals badly with and is therefore tempted to dismiss. Well, dismiss free will from the laboratory, sure, but don't pretend we aren't free-willing things or you'll be left with nothing but a lab, populated by not-quite-people.
- mercer 10y ago
  > but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself. Is this sort of what is meant with 'qualia'? I could never quite wrap my head around what that concept means, in what context, and what its value is.

damienkatz 10y ago

Give me a concrete definition of free will. This is where such discussions fall over, inadequate definitions.

gnashville 10y ago
An agent's ability to do and not do without external influence or coercion. The other side of this though is if the agent believes he or she has the ability to do or not do, but actually doesn't, is it still free will? An example being you enter your office with the intention of working for five hours. Without realizing it, the door locks behind you from the outside, leaving you effectively trapped. Even if you never attempt to leave the room, are you staying at your own free will?
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  I agree that "An agent's ability to do and not to do without external influence or coercion." in the context of a social or political theory of free choice. But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here. I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.
  - gnashville 10y ago
    > there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here. This is really interesting. Thanks for the reply.
talles 10y ago
Wittgenstein anyone?

Phithagoras 10y ago

"there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams." is quite a strong argument against mental dualism and traditional ideas about free will. But research also supports the plasticity of the brain/mind and we know that we can build/change habits and personality traits (apparently) through conscious effort. Perhaps "free will" should be defined more specifically as the ability to consciously shape the deterministic systems that are our minds?

StanislavPetrov 10y ago
Exactly, which is why this article is tripe. It basically boils down to, "the driver does not control the car, the steering wheel controls where the car goes, not the driver". That's true, but the driver controls the steering wheel, or at least has influence over it.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  A self-driving car is probably a better thing to compare to. And in that case, most people would probably argue that it's behavior would be deterministic, even if it could learn in some capacity. Although, after making that point, is there really a difference between a self driving car and a car and a driver in your example? Probably not. They're both being driven by something, and the answer shouldn't change based on what the driver is.
- Amezarak 10y ago
  It's a self-driving car. There is no driver. You are indeed conscious, and do indeed have thoughts. What the article discusses is that the overwhelming evidence seems to show your thoughts are generated by deterministic/proabilistic physical processes, and that in fact your conscious thoughts occur after your decisions are already made and often serve only as post-hoc justifications of what you already did. Consciousness is just another component in the car. It doesn't determine or influence where the car is going. Perhaps the most valuable part of consciousness is it provides an effective way to use reflection which can communicate data about the internal state of the car to the other cars. (Often this data is objectively inaccurate, but still serves the interest of the car or the fleet.)

tumbas 10y ago

there is no proof that author is not fucktarded indivudial that mother can not love

exolymph 10y ago

I've written about this before with respect to mental illness -- I call it the "illusion of autonomy": http://sonyaellenmann.com/2015/04/free-will-mental-illness-abuse.html http://sonyaellenmann.com/2015/04/free-will-mental-illness-a...

carsongross 10y ago

> There’s No Such Thing as Free Will > We’re better off believing in it anyway. Nihilism is easy to start but hard to finish.

jsmith0295 10y ago
I would disagree that we're better off. Well, maybe some people would be. But personally, that information has actually had the ironic effect of making me more effective at using my 'free will'. It's easier to try and be something other than what you are if you believe you think you have more control than you actually do, and that's a potentially huge waste of energy.
- carsongross 10y ago
  You do realize the hysterically funny contradiction in your comment, correct?
  - jsmith0295 10y ago
    Yes, that was very much the point lol
    - carsongross 10y ago
      Excellent. :)
Amezarak 10y ago
I don't think disbelieving free will requires nihilism. It's not that there's unfreedom of the will, it's that the idea and its converse never made any real sense.
- carsongross 10y ago
  See? Hard to finish.

Amezarak 10y ago

What we've learned through neuroscience is definitely invaluable, but it's not like this is a new idea even in the philosophic community. It's telling that the article opens by quoting Kant, who, as Nietzsche said: > Kant's joke - Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people. The idea of free will is a "popular prejudice" that has been supported almost entirely by this type of philosopher. There is a quick way to identify them: the appeal to intuition as the supreme arbiter of truth. Most of western civilization believed in free will (in part for reasons of theology), therefore the belief in free will was inculcated in the populace, therefore philosophers found their intuition ultimately verified the existence of free will and used their incredible intellects to rationalize what that confused idea even was and how it worked in the face of obvious paradoxes. Many philosophers, for thousands of years, did not accept these arguments. I quote Nietzsche because he is eminently quotable: > Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego [I] (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true. Nietzsche was in some ways more of a psychologist than a philosopher and is worth reading on those grounds alone. In fact, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is mostly interesting as a reflection of the philosopher's health and therefore his psychology.

forkandwait 10y ago
Could you give us citations? I love nietzsche...
- Amezarak 10y ago
  I think The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and A Genealogy of Morality are very readable and thought-provoking without going into esoteric ism or experimental style like Thus Spake Zarathustra. I prefer the Kaufman translations, but I understand there are many new, possibly better translations available now. Translation can make-or-break Nietzsche - he was one of the best German prose writers and makes use of a lot of wordplay and neologisms. The first quote was from Gay Science - I grabbed the second of Wikipedia, but I was sure it, or something to the same effect, was also in Gay Science. I don't have a searchable copy of my favorite translation, unfortunately, but Nietzsche talks a lot of psychology in Gay Science.

hcayless 10y ago

Doesn't the observation that people who believe in free will act differently than people who don't demonstrate that free will exists? I'm perfectly willing to accept that we have less free will than we think we do, and that there's a physical basis for our mental processes. But why should that mean we have no free will at all?

Strilanc 10y ago
No. Why would it demonstrate that? Beliefs affect actions whether or not those beliefs are accurate. Consider: 'Does the observation that people who believe in [demons] act differently than people who don't demonstrate that [demons] exist?'
- hcayless 10y ago
  Not a good analogy. I'll put it another way: People who believe they can make decisions for themselves act differently than people who don't. Are the former not exercising some level of control over their actions? The belief itself is neither here nor there. It's the fact that it makes a difference that I think argues for the ability to control one's impulses to some degree. Is that not free will?
  - mercer 10y ago
    I think it's actually a pretty good analogy. The vast majority of people I know, regardless of whether they believe in free will or not, cannot help but act as if they do. I'm one of them. I think there's little correlation between belief and action in this particular issue, even more so than when it comes to belief in demons. But perhaps I'm not getting exactly what you're trying to say?
khedoros 10y ago
It demonstrates that different internal mental states influence actions in predictable ways. I don't think that it kills the concept of free will, but I don't think that it provides evidence for it, either.

pessimizer 10y ago

"Free will" is just a phrase that people made up to rationalize their desire for retribution, punishment, and forcible conversion. People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms. edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made. And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad. [1] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/Books/HB/HowBrains.html http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/Books/HB/HowBrains.htm... [2] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/ http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/

putzdown 10y ago

Why the animosity toward free will, I wonder? I can see why it's not helpful to neuroscientists. It's not a neuron, after all. It's not a material thing, and so the material sciences don't reckon with it. But why does that make anybody want to dismiss it from reality generally? Is there an assumption that if it can't be studied in the lab, it can't exist? Boy I hope they're teaching scientists better than that these days.

jasonwatkinspdx 10y ago

This article presents determinism as certain. That's not the case. In terms of fundamental physics we know probabilities are determined, but the exact outcomes are not. There's strong evidence that this isn't a matter of us being ignorant of some hidden deterministic state (Bell's inequality experiments) but rather is fundamental to how our universe works, though it's not a totally settled debate. Whether this gives an escape hatch where our brains are capable of free will is way too complex a question for me to think it'll be settled empirically any time soon, but I personally suspect it's true in a faint way. We're mostly reactive, but have some way to influence those reactions over time.

gpderetta 10y ago

I strongly belive the universe is for all intent and purposes casual [1], I reject dualism and accept that free will objectively doesn't exist (in fact I don't even think you can rigourously define it without invoking supernatural entities). Still I have no problem to accept free will as a subjective experience, the same way I accept love, fear, hope, despair, and other states of mind, including consciousness. They are just the way our mind work, byproducts in a way. That doesn't mean that in principle one couldn't imagine mind without them, but it would be alien to us an we would probably not even recognise as intelligence. I guess that makes me a compatibilist. [1] modulo quantum indeterminism which seems to have surprisingly little effect to the macro world.

charlieflowers 10y ago

I must be missing something. If coming to doubt the existence of free will causes people to behave less responsibly, doesn't that demonstrate that those people do indeed have free will?

skilesare 10y ago

The reductionist falacy. It is ignoring the fact that the constituent systrms, while built on the operations of subsystems, evolved specifically to overcome the behavior of those sub systems.