4 ms·

How is this experiment related to free will at all? Sounds to me like something about sensory/motor latency.

penagwin 8y ago
Yeah I would've done the one were you have everyone in the room close their eyes and think of a "random" number, write it down, then compare the distribution. Results like those are what make me question free will (My mind "weighted" my answers in ways I can't control).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  How does being a bad random number generator mean that we don't have free will? I don't see these two as contradictory.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    At least when I did it in class we had lots of certain numbers, essentially none of certain numbers. A lot of them lined up with common "lucky" or "unlucky" numbers, even if everyone said they didn't pick it for that reason. To me that shows us how outside forces influence our thoughts. Did I want to buy this garbage bag because it's a good value, has a good design, or because I've heard "DONT GET MAD, GET GLAD!!" 1000 times? Every thought we have is affected by our experiences, and many experiences can be controlled - they call these advertisements. I find this topic fascinating. I suffer from depression, and my thoughts during a major depressive episode can be the stark opposite from when I feel well (Let's say it's about suicide). How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences?
    - solipsism 8y ago
      How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences? You don't have actually free will, if by free you mean "uninfluenced by anything". There's no evidence that such a thing exists, and anyone who claims such a thing invariably appeals to supernatural or hand-wavy explanations. Note that many thinkers who claim free will exist actually are saying "what most people mean by 'free will' does exist", and usually that means "an agent capable of making choices without outside influence". This idea is compatible with determinism, so these people are called compatibilists.
      - bellerose 8y ago
        How is being an agent capable of making choices without outside influence compatible with determinism? My understanding is nobody can ever be an agent capable of making choices without outside influence. A person is fundamentally influenced at birth by external forces and moulding the person by deterministic process without the person having any real control. Furthermore one could only say they had free will if before life one agreed to take role of birth as a specific person and with knowing how life will play out till the end. Compatibilists are people who don't understand determinism because free will doesn't work with determinism. /hard determinist.
        solipsism 8y ago
        I said "what most people mean by 'free will'" For most people, "outside influence" means, "at this point in time, only the contents of my brain affect the choice I make" and "no force or agent outside myself is compelling me to make a different choice than the one I'd make otherwise". It's a word game of course. Even if you try to be extremely precise with your definitions, to avoid this kind of thing, most people won't quite follow. Compatibilists believe what you believe. They just agree to use the popular, vague definition of free will instead of the strict one you're using.
    - cat199 8y ago
      > How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences? because you can recognize this as a pattern, make a supposition that this is related to previous conditioning, and retrain yourself at picking numbers randomly to eliminate the previous bias that you yourself recognized as 'problematic' here.
      - bellerose 8y ago
        That's fated to happen by the external forces making it happen.
  - solipsism 8y ago
    These are good examples of the fact that our common intuitions about free will are disconnected from reality, often silly, and usually plain wrong. For example, it's common to have the intuition that the choice when picking a number from 1 to 10 is completely unbiased and independent. That would imply a perfectly uniform distribution. Of course that doesn't match reality, and it raises more questions for the intellectually honest thinker, but most people don't think about it beyond the simple intuition.
    - baddox 8y ago
      Yes, but that's just some humans being uneducated about how the human brain works. It doesn't really say anything about the existence of free will. In fact, the reason untrained humans are bad random number generators has little to do with the abilities of the human brain and more to do with how random distributions work. Untrained people just don't know, for example, that long streaks of heads and tails are actually quite likely in a sequence of random coin tosses. If they did know the likelihood, and they were tasked with writing down a sequence of random coin tosses, they would probably do a much better job. If you take this to the limit, a human could learn to compute a pseudorandom generator in their head (at least in theory, although it may be very slow going) or perhaps figure out an effective way to gather entropy from the environment and turn it into a truly random sequence.

Yeah I would've done the one were you have everyone in the room close their eyes and think of a "random" number, write it down, then compare the distribution. Results like those are what make me question free will (My mind "weighted" my answers in ways I can't control).

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
CydeWeys 8y ago
How does being a bad random number generator mean that we don't have free will? I don't see these two as contradictory.
- penagwin 8y ago
  At least when I did it in class we had lots of certain numbers, essentially none of certain numbers. A lot of them lined up with common "lucky" or "unlucky" numbers, even if everyone said they didn't pick it for that reason. To me that shows us how outside forces influence our thoughts. Did I want to buy this garbage bag because it's a good value, has a good design, or because I've heard "DONT GET MAD, GET GLAD!!" 1000 times? Every thought we have is affected by our experiences, and many experiences can be controlled - they call these advertisements. I find this topic fascinating. I suffer from depression, and my thoughts during a major depressive episode can be the stark opposite from when I feel well (Let's say it's about suicide). How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences?
  - solipsism 8y ago
    How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences? You don't have actually free will, if by free you mean "uninfluenced by anything". There's no evidence that such a thing exists, and anyone who claims such a thing invariably appeals to supernatural or hand-wavy explanations. Note that many thinkers who claim free will exist actually are saying "what most people mean by 'free will' does exist", and usually that means "an agent capable of making choices without outside influence". This idea is compatible with determinism, so these people are called compatibilists.
    - bellerose 8y ago
      How is being an agent capable of making choices without outside influence compatible with determinism? My understanding is nobody can ever be an agent capable of making choices without outside influence. A person is fundamentally influenced at birth by external forces and moulding the person by deterministic process without the person having any real control. Furthermore one could only say they had free will if before life one agreed to take role of birth as a specific person and with knowing how life will play out till the end. Compatibilists are people who don't understand determinism because free will doesn't work with determinism. /hard determinist.
      - solipsism 8y ago
        I said "what most people mean by 'free will'" For most people, "outside influence" means, "at this point in time, only the contents of my brain affect the choice I make" and "no force or agent outside myself is compelling me to make a different choice than the one I'd make otherwise". It's a word game of course. Even if you try to be extremely precise with your definitions, to avoid this kind of thing, most people won't quite follow. Compatibilists believe what you believe. They just agree to use the popular, vague definition of free will instead of the strict one you're using.
  - cat199 8y ago
    > How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences? because you can recognize this as a pattern, make a supposition that this is related to previous conditioning, and retrain yourself at picking numbers randomly to eliminate the previous bias that you yourself recognized as 'problematic' here.
    - bellerose 8y ago
      That's fated to happen by the external forces making it happen.
- solipsism 8y ago
  These are good examples of the fact that our common intuitions about free will are disconnected from reality, often silly, and usually plain wrong. For example, it's common to have the intuition that the choice when picking a number from 1 to 10 is completely unbiased and independent. That would imply a perfectly uniform distribution. Of course that doesn't match reality, and it raises more questions for the intellectually honest thinker, but most people don't think about it beyond the simple intuition.
  - baddox 8y ago
    Yes, but that's just some humans being uneducated about how the human brain works. It doesn't really say anything about the existence of free will. In fact, the reason untrained humans are bad random number generators has little to do with the abilities of the human brain and more to do with how random distributions work. Untrained people just don't know, for example, that long streaks of heads and tails are actually quite likely in a sequence of random coin tosses. If they did know the likelihood, and they were tasked with writing down a sequence of random coin tosses, they would probably do a much better job. If you take this to the limit, a human could learn to compute a pseudorandom generator in their head (at least in theory, although it may be very slow going) or perhaps figure out an effective way to gather entropy from the environment and turn it into a truly random sequence.