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Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions without being coerced by third part

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions without being coerced by third parties or external factors - any other meaning seems to require dualism, the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept. It seems it is just a nebulous, ill-defined concept used to soothe discomfort with the idea that people's decisions are caused by physical processes, governed by the same laws as the rest of the universe.

B1FF_PSUVM 6y ago
I think there's quite a bit of historical philosophical, and theological, debate on the topic. Boils down to "there is an immutable, foreordained destiny" vs. "each actor chooses freely and history is the sum of those vectors".
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  This needle is threaded by contemplation of what it means for someone to “choose.” If one freely chooses whatever one wants, then one has free will but one will always choose their desires.
  - taneq 6y ago
    I tend to drive that relation backwards - what people choose is what they ACTUALLY want (out of their given options).
  - B1FF_PSUVM 6y ago
    ... and if the desires were foreordained ...
maest 6y ago
I don't think you can define free-will in the absence of a definition for causality, and I have yet to see that.
- benibela 6y ago
  Judea Pearl won a Turing award for a definition of causality
  - squibbles 6y ago
    For reference, Judea Pearl won the ACM Turing award in 2011 "[f]or fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning."[1] [1] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
I am also of the opinion that the concept is either incoherent or meaningless.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events? In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events? I don’t think it deterministic, at the lowest levels the physics is probabilistic. But I’m sure you can imagine how to express “opinion” as a subjective experience of a brain state that is wholly determined by deterministic factors. > In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity. You’re right, I’m convinced that belief in “free will” is the default naive psychological reaction to awareness of one’s own nature as a physical system, but I try to be mindful that one day someone could express “free will” as a concept that is both meaningful and coherent.
    - konschubert 6y ago
      The Copenhagen-Style quantum collaps isn't really Physics. Other than that, where is Physics probabilistic?
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        The Copenhagen interpretation is an interpreation. The thing being interpreted has probabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#Uncertainty_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#Uncertainty_...
peterburkimsher 6y ago
The late John H Conway deduced a consistency proof that if people have free will, so do elementary particles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem He discusses it more in the following lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be&t=712 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be... Free will doesn't mean "I can do anything." I'm not good at singing, so I can't ever be a famous rock star. Free will is to make a choice between a finite number of options (will) without that choice being influenced by external factors (free). I thought about this a lot last year, shortly after Conway died, and I think that it's possible to prove that free will is finite, the universe is finite, and therefore we have free will. "If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained." https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clu... MIP* = RE https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-proof-cascades-through-physics-and-math-20200304/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro... "Prior to the new work, mathematicians had wondered whether they could get away with approximating infinite-dimensional matrices by using large finite-dimensional ones instead. Now, because the Connes embedding conjecture is false, they know they can’t." Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers. Therefore: - Assuming that the universe is finite -> Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers (MIP* = RE) -> Numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits -> The future can never be perfectly preordained (Gisin) -> Free will exists (Conway) This is not a proof that free will exists! But I think this is a consistency proof that free will is finite.
- chr1 6y ago
  > If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained. Why? A simple cellular automaton like Rule 30 doesn't use any infinite data but it's future is perfectly preordained. But being preordained doesn't mean that there can't be free will. Because having the initial state, and being able to predict later state are very different. Even simplest cellular automata are computationally irreducible, meaning that there is no shortcut, and the only way to find out their future states is to run the full computation. So if physics can be described by finite computation, and all the future states can be obtained from initial state, the only way to obtain them would be running the whole simulation, which would be equivalent to people in that simulation living and making their choices themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30
LatteLazy 6y ago
It's the same as intelligence or pornograph: you can't measure or really define it, you just know it when you see it. Aka, it's not within the realm of science and people should stop pretending it is.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  I never really liked that quote because of course you can define pornography. Just because it exists on a spectrum and there are grey areas doesn't mean you can't define it. That's the case for just about everything.
  - Thiez 6y ago
    It's a lot like Loki's wager. We can't decide where the head ends and the neck begins, so these things must be outside the realm of science. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Pornography isn't just a spectrum though it is? It requires a multi variable analysis and even then different people disagree a out what is or isn't pornographic. Or is there some algorithm that will take a jpeg and 100% correctly tell us if it's porn or not? The same is true of intelligence or free will.
analog31 6y ago
I wonder if the notion of free will owes itself to theology, notably the question of God's responsibility for evil, and similar puzzles. Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Do you "wonder", or were you just mechanistically made to write this sentence, due to a deterministic chain of events? >Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem. Well, it's also a solution for the empirical experience we all share, that we're not just automata, but that we e.g. weight decisions, and so on.
- gwd 6y ago
  > Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem. I don't think it's a theological problem; I think it's the way we think about things every day. Consider four situations: 1. You walk into the kitchen and a pan which you'd placed on top of the fridge at a precarious angle falls on your head. 2. You walk into the kitchen, and your spouse, who honestly thinks you're a burglar who has broken into the house, hits you on the head with a pan. When they realizes it's you, they apologize. 3. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, grab a pan, and smack you in the head with it. 4. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, and you see their eyes briefly flit to the pan; but instead they calm themselves down and refrain from hitting you with it. Although the injury to your body may be the same in cases 1-3, our attitudes towards these things are completely different. In the case of #1, the pan indeed had no choice but to fall on your head; it cannot be blamed in the least. In the case of #2, a human being did it, but they had a good justification for it. In the case of #3, we say your spouse is at fault and blame them. In the case of #4, we recognize that your spouse resisted the temptation to hit you, and honor them for their restraint (or at least say they were doing what they should have). And if that was you whose eyes flitted over to the pan, you are aware of a struggle, and of making a choice to lash out or show restraint. But if the universe is a combination of determinism and randomness, then what's the actual difference between #1 and #3? All of them are physical processes which, given the circumstances, really couldn't have been any different. In other words, free will is not some arcane theological concept: a description both of our daily experience of making moral choices ourselves, and our expectations and attitudes towards others.
finghin 6y ago
I never understood this line of argument. It is difficult to see why something being hard to define makes it nebulous. The use of the concept of free will (which is incredibly intuitive—try asking a stranger if they have it, and they will certainly be able to answer) is only in this rather useless discussion associated with physical determinism (which is certainly not being thought of by the mentioned stranger). Can you define a "decision" either? That is a word you use effortlessly and apparently without irony in the same breath as free will, which shows you really do understand what we are talking about when we talk about it. It is hard to pin down but that doesn't stop it from being at least linguistically related to other, more grounded and—I must emphasise—_extremely_ basic concepts of human life and behaviour, let alone psychology. Of course, some people in a particularly zealous "scientific" mood feign ignorance about folk-psychology ideas, even basic ones like "decisions". But this is as self-defeating, really, as solipsism (at least, I have never known anyone who simply did not make decisions ever).
- joefourier 6y ago
  I can define a decision: the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options. The process can be conscious, unconscious or a computer programme. Semantics can be tiresome but if you are unable to define a concept and must resort to “try asking a stranger” then how am I supposed to know what you are referring to? You could be referring to the legal definition of free will, the compatibilist one as espoused by Daniel Dennett, the dualistic one where consciousness exists beyond the physical universe, or one that I have not thought of. Most likely, a stranger would respond with the legal definition or a vague reference to the dualistic one. If you cannot define it, then perhaps it has no real meaning.
  - PixyMisa 6y ago
    Exactly. If you are unable to define your terms, you can't know if your discussion is meaningful.
  - blue_potato 6y ago
    > the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options Doesn't this just kick the can down the road? Can you define it without "select", "choose", and other synonyms?
taneq 6y ago
> Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? No, never! We must just argue endlessly whether we do or don't have it.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Well, if we don't have it, then it's not up to us to chose between providing a definition or merely arguing about having it or not...
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    So are you unable to produce a definition because there isn’t one, or because the universe where your brain is mechanistically caused to define your terms is not inside this light cone?
voxl 6y ago
Given any decision, you have t amount of time to consider how to decide it. Suppose everything the same, if you were given `t + k` time but with no other external input, could you choose something different? If you could, you have free will (internal inputs _only_ can augment your decision).
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  There's no such thing as just internal inputs though, because those inputs are there because of external factors from the past. They're permanently entangled. If the universe is deterministic, the results of that experiment were always going to happen.
- joefourier 6y ago
  By that definition, chess engines would have free will, as they would be able to search a through larger amount of possible moves given the extra time and thus find another move. The problem with that definition is that time itself is an external input of sorts. Therefore, everything is not the same since you have +k time. Your definition would also apply to many trivial decision processes, e.g. a computer programme that randomly switches between each possibility and picks the one it ends on when the allotted time has elapsed. I doubt that programme would be considered to have any will at all, let alone free will.
  - voxl 6y ago
    Sure, its probably a better definition of "free action" but I am very convinced that those are necessary conditions (though probably not sufficient). Additional time can be an external input, that's fine, its only important that its the _only_ one. Any definition of free will that doesn't appeal to dualism will allow programs to have free will, that's just par for the course.
mcswell 6y ago
"...the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept." I can see why you wouldn't believe this, but why do you think it is illogical? Consider the contrast between a tape recorder + tape, vs. a radio. In the one, the sounds that come out of the speaker are purely internally produced (considering the tape to be part of the recorder). In the other, the sounds coming out originate from a radio station somewhere else, perhaps thousands of miles away, and to which the radio receiver is tuned. Why couldn't a brain be like this: it is a receiver for signals sent from a mind somewhere else, and specifically tuned to that mind. Perhaps someone will say Occam's Razor. Ok, but if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter. But that of course is wrong, which shows that Occam does not necessarily lead to the correct answer. At any rate, I don't mean to get into a discussion of whether the brain + mind work like this, I just want to suggest that it's not at all illogical.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain. Occam's Razor doesn't say the simplest explanation always wins. It only says the simplest explanation that covers all the facts wins. That means you can't apply it until you have all the facts.
  - mcswell 6y ago
    "Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain." The neutrino was hypothesized back in the 1930s solely on the basis of missing mass/energy in beta decay. (One of the papers describing this was rejected by Nature on the grounds that it was too far from reality.) It was only decades later that the neutrino was found (in whatever sense a weakly interacting uncharged particle can be "found"). At any rate, I'm just saying that it's not illogical to hypothesize that the brain is more like a radio receiver than a tape player; whether it really is, is a different question.
pdonis 6y ago
The legalistic definition pretty much is the definition used by philosophers who are physicalists (such as Dennett). Basically, the question is not whether physical processes determine what you do; of course they do. The question is, which physical processes? The ones that are going on in your brain, that we label with words like "perception", "cognition", "decision", etc? Or other processes, like the process of someone holding a gun to your head? The only real difference I can see between the legalistic definition and the philosopher's definition is that the legalistic definition of "coercion" is broader. For example, I mentioned someone holding a gun to your head just now. Legally this would be coercion and wouldn't count as a free decision on your part. But to a physicalist philosopher, this might still count as a case of free will on your part--just free will based on a highly constrained set of acceptable choices given the circumstances. But that's a fine distinction that doesn't change the basic point.
amelius 6y ago
> Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Can someone provide a definition of a "individual"? Aren't we all just a big soup of atoms, where the boundary between two individuals is made arbitrarily based on convenience? Perhaps we should solve this problem first before we start talking about free will. Because when viewed like this, a bunch of atoms could have more than one free will.
- byecomputer 6y ago
  Yeah, but we're a bunch of unionized atoms. They all vote on what I should do and then I execute their will by going in the kitchen and making spaghetti or whatever.
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  I'll provide some definitions, from Oxford: individual: "single; separate"; "of or for a particular person"; "a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family" free will: "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion" From these definitions, we must question whether a single human, Homo Sapiens, can possibly act at their own discretion, without fate or necessity as the cause. The history of studying free-will is extremely lengthy, everything non-biological that can be said has likely been said. We've been blessed by modern science to have a lot more understanding of organisms and neurology, so we know the "inner workings" better than Descartes or Locke or any of the old Christian theorists.
karaterobot 6y ago
The thing I always want to know in discussions of free will or determinism is whether a determinist believes that the initial conditions of the universe lead to the creation of the world we live in, such that (to choose some absurd examples) the Lego movie, candy corn, and Youtube were all 100% inevitable and predetermined by physics, and could not have failed to have been created exactly as they are, at the exact moment they were created. That's what seems unbelievable to me. Maybe I don't get what determinism is?
- simiones 6y ago
  Yes, essentially that is what the laws of physics as we understand them lead to as a conclusion[0]. An equivalent view is that the whole universe is a static object, including "the future" just the same as the "the past". At first this seems difficult to accept, but if you spend some time thinking about it and thinking of the laws of physics, even the intuitive ones such as classical mechanics, it's actually difficult to imagine an alternative. How could a law even look like that allowed some agents (humans? mammals? all living things? all things in general?) any amount of behavior that is not pre-determined by the past? Could a billiard ball that is hit by the tip of the cue decide not to move? And if the billiard ball can't, why could you? Try to imagine your brain in that moment of decision: this one neuron may fire or not. If it fires, you'll watch the Lego movie right now, if it doesn't you'll eat some candy corn instead. Looking even deeper, inside that neuron, some electro-chemical processes are building up a particular neuro-transmitter - if they build up enough, the neuron will fire, otherwise it won't. Looking even deeper, photons are "flying" around between electrons and nuclei - if one gets absorbed by this electron, the potential will be met, otherwise it won't. Who could decide whether the photon is absorbed or not, except for the past states of the photon, the neuro-transmitter soup, the neuron, the brain? How would that extra decision be factored into the laws of motion of the photon? Of course, there is always the possibility of postulating extra-physical notions, such as God or the simulation hypothesis, that would not necessarily bend to any of the laws of physics, and are not required to be understandable in any sense. It's also possible to believe that there exists some kind of law of free will and that we have just not come to understand it yet, though maybe some day we will. [0] though possibly there is some pure randomness built-in depending on the what the solution will turn out to be for some problems in Quantum Mechanics (the measurement problem and its possibly random outcomes), and on your preferred interpretation of it. This doesn't fundamentally help or hinder determinism, it just means that instead of a single fixed outcome being pre-determined, some dice are thrown and one of many possible outcomes happens. The Lego movie, candy corn, Youtube, they are all predictable from the initial conditions at the Big Bang, but they are just not uniquely determined.
andagainagain 6y ago
it's not just illogical, it's an infinite regress. It's purposely adding in an extra layer that by definition can't be discounted. So if you disprove one layer of free will, you still have an infinite number of possible ways you still have (or don't have) free will at yet deeper levels.

B1FF_PSUVM 6y ago

I think there's quite a bit of historical philosophical, and theological, debate on the topic. Boils down to "there is an immutable, foreordained destiny" vs. "each actor chooses freely and history is the sum of those vectors".

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
This needle is threaded by contemplation of what it means for someone to “choose.” If one freely chooses whatever one wants, then one has free will but one will always choose their desires.
- taneq 6y ago
  I tend to drive that relation backwards - what people choose is what they ACTUALLY want (out of their given options).
- B1FF_PSUVM 6y ago
  ... and if the desires were foreordained ...

maest 6y ago

I don't think you can define free-will in the absence of a definition for causality, and I have yet to see that.

benibela 6y ago
Judea Pearl won a Turing award for a definition of causality
- squibbles 6y ago
  For reference, Judea Pearl won the ACM Turing award in 2011 "[f]or fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning."[1] [1] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

I am also of the opinion that the concept is either incoherent or meaningless.

coldtea 6y ago
Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events? In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events? I don’t think it deterministic, at the lowest levels the physics is probabilistic. But I’m sure you can imagine how to express “opinion” as a subjective experience of a brain state that is wholly determined by deterministic factors. > In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity. You’re right, I’m convinced that belief in “free will” is the default naive psychological reaction to awareness of one’s own nature as a physical system, but I try to be mindful that one day someone could express “free will” as a concept that is both meaningful and coherent.
  - konschubert 6y ago
    The Copenhagen-Style quantum collaps isn't really Physics. Other than that, where is Physics probabilistic?
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      The Copenhagen interpretation is an interpreation. The thing being interpreted has probabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#Uncertainty_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#Uncertainty_...

peterburkimsher 6y ago

The late John H Conway deduced a consistency proof that if people have free will, so do elementary particles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem He discusses it more in the following lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be&t=712 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be... Free will doesn't mean "I can do anything." I'm not good at singing, so I can't ever be a famous rock star. Free will is to make a choice between a finite number of options (will) without that choice being influenced by external factors (free). I thought about this a lot last year, shortly after Conway died, and I think that it's possible to prove that free will is finite, the universe is finite, and therefore we have free will. "If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained." https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clu... MIP* = RE https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-proof-cascades-through-physics-and-math-20200304/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro... "Prior to the new work, mathematicians had wondered whether they could get away with approximating infinite-dimensional matrices by using large finite-dimensional ones instead. Now, because the Connes embedding conjecture is false, they know they can’t." Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers. Therefore: - Assuming that the universe is finite -> Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers (MIP* = RE) -> Numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits -> The future can never be perfectly preordained (Gisin) -> Free will exists (Conway) This is not a proof that free will exists! But I think this is a consistency proof that free will is finite.

chr1 6y ago
> If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained. Why? A simple cellular automaton like Rule 30 doesn't use any infinite data but it's future is perfectly preordained. But being preordained doesn't mean that there can't be free will. Because having the initial state, and being able to predict later state are very different. Even simplest cellular automata are computationally irreducible, meaning that there is no shortcut, and the only way to find out their future states is to run the full computation. So if physics can be described by finite computation, and all the future states can be obtained from initial state, the only way to obtain them would be running the whole simulation, which would be equivalent to people in that simulation living and making their choices themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30

LatteLazy 6y ago

It's the same as intelligence or pornograph: you can't measure or really define it, you just know it when you see it. Aka, it's not within the realm of science and people should stop pretending it is.

Trasmatta 6y ago
I never really liked that quote because of course you can define pornography. Just because it exists on a spectrum and there are grey areas doesn't mean you can't define it. That's the case for just about everything.
- Thiez 6y ago
  It's a lot like Loki's wager. We can't decide where the head ends and the neck begins, so these things must be outside the realm of science. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Pornography isn't just a spectrum though it is? It requires a multi variable analysis and even then different people disagree a out what is or isn't pornographic. Or is there some algorithm that will take a jpeg and 100% correctly tell us if it's porn or not? The same is true of intelligence or free will.

analog31 6y ago

I wonder if the notion of free will owes itself to theology, notably the question of God's responsibility for evil, and similar puzzles. Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.

coldtea 6y ago
Do you "wonder", or were you just mechanistically made to write this sentence, due to a deterministic chain of events? >Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem. Well, it's also a solution for the empirical experience we all share, that we're not just automata, but that we e.g. weight decisions, and so on.
gwd 6y ago
> Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem. I don't think it's a theological problem; I think it's the way we think about things every day. Consider four situations: 1. You walk into the kitchen and a pan which you'd placed on top of the fridge at a precarious angle falls on your head. 2. You walk into the kitchen, and your spouse, who honestly thinks you're a burglar who has broken into the house, hits you on the head with a pan. When they realizes it's you, they apologize. 3. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, grab a pan, and smack you in the head with it. 4. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, and you see their eyes briefly flit to the pan; but instead they calm themselves down and refrain from hitting you with it. Although the injury to your body may be the same in cases 1-3, our attitudes towards these things are completely different. In the case of #1, the pan indeed had no choice but to fall on your head; it cannot be blamed in the least. In the case of #2, a human being did it, but they had a good justification for it. In the case of #3, we say your spouse is at fault and blame them. In the case of #4, we recognize that your spouse resisted the temptation to hit you, and honor them for their restraint (or at least say they were doing what they should have). And if that was you whose eyes flitted over to the pan, you are aware of a struggle, and of making a choice to lash out or show restraint. But if the universe is a combination of determinism and randomness, then what's the actual difference between #1 and #3? All of them are physical processes which, given the circumstances, really couldn't have been any different. In other words, free will is not some arcane theological concept: a description both of our daily experience of making moral choices ourselves, and our expectations and attitudes towards others.

finghin 6y ago

I never understood this line of argument. It is difficult to see why something being hard to define makes it nebulous. The use of the concept of free will (which is incredibly intuitive—try asking a stranger if they have it, and they will certainly be able to answer) is only in this rather useless discussion associated with physical determinism (which is certainly not being thought of by the mentioned stranger). Can you define a "decision" either? That is a word you use effortlessly and apparently without irony in the same breath as free will, which shows you really do understand what we are talking about when we talk about it. It is hard to pin down but that doesn't stop it from being at least linguistically related to other, more grounded and—I must emphasise—_extremely_ basic concepts of human life and behaviour, let alone psychology. Of course, some people in a particularly zealous "scientific" mood feign ignorance about folk-psychology ideas, even basic ones like "decisions". But this is as self-defeating, really, as solipsism (at least, I have never known anyone who simply did not make decisions ever).

joefourier 6y ago
I can define a decision: the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options. The process can be conscious, unconscious or a computer programme. Semantics can be tiresome but if you are unable to define a concept and must resort to “try asking a stranger” then how am I supposed to know what you are referring to? You could be referring to the legal definition of free will, the compatibilist one as espoused by Daniel Dennett, the dualistic one where consciousness exists beyond the physical universe, or one that I have not thought of. Most likely, a stranger would respond with the legal definition or a vague reference to the dualistic one. If you cannot define it, then perhaps it has no real meaning.
- PixyMisa 6y ago
  Exactly. If you are unable to define your terms, you can't know if your discussion is meaningful.
- blue_potato 6y ago
  > the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options Doesn't this just kick the can down the road? Can you define it without "select", "choose", and other synonyms?

taneq 6y ago

> Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? No, never! We must just argue endlessly whether we do or don't have it.

coldtea 6y ago
Well, if we don't have it, then it's not up to us to chose between providing a definition or merely arguing about having it or not...
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  So are you unable to produce a definition because there isn’t one, or because the universe where your brain is mechanistically caused to define your terms is not inside this light cone?

voxl 6y ago

Given any decision, you have t amount of time to consider how to decide it. Suppose everything the same, if you were given `t + k` time but with no other external input, could you choose something different? If you could, you have free will (internal inputs _only_ can augment your decision).

Trasmatta 6y ago
There's no such thing as just internal inputs though, because those inputs are there because of external factors from the past. They're permanently entangled. If the universe is deterministic, the results of that experiment were always going to happen.
joefourier 6y ago
By that definition, chess engines would have free will, as they would be able to search a through larger amount of possible moves given the extra time and thus find another move. The problem with that definition is that time itself is an external input of sorts. Therefore, everything is not the same since you have +k time. Your definition would also apply to many trivial decision processes, e.g. a computer programme that randomly switches between each possibility and picks the one it ends on when the allotted time has elapsed. I doubt that programme would be considered to have any will at all, let alone free will.
- voxl 6y ago
  Sure, its probably a better definition of "free action" but I am very convinced that those are necessary conditions (though probably not sufficient). Additional time can be an external input, that's fine, its only important that its the _only_ one. Any definition of free will that doesn't appeal to dualism will allow programs to have free will, that's just par for the course.

mcswell 6y ago

"...the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept." I can see why you wouldn't believe this, but why do you think it is illogical? Consider the contrast between a tape recorder + tape, vs. a radio. In the one, the sounds that come out of the speaker are purely internally produced (considering the tape to be part of the recorder). In the other, the sounds coming out originate from a radio station somewhere else, perhaps thousands of miles away, and to which the radio receiver is tuned. Why couldn't a brain be like this: it is a receiver for signals sent from a mind somewhere else, and specifically tuned to that mind. Perhaps someone will say Occam's Razor. Ok, but if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter. But that of course is wrong, which shows that Occam does not necessarily lead to the correct answer. At any rate, I don't mean to get into a discussion of whether the brain + mind work like this, I just want to suggest that it's not at all illogical.

pdonis 6y ago
> if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain. Occam's Razor doesn't say the simplest explanation always wins. It only says the simplest explanation that covers all the facts wins. That means you can't apply it until you have all the facts.
- mcswell 6y ago
  "Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain." The neutrino was hypothesized back in the 1930s solely on the basis of missing mass/energy in beta decay. (One of the papers describing this was rejected by Nature on the grounds that it was too far from reality.) It was only decades later that the neutrino was found (in whatever sense a weakly interacting uncharged particle can be "found"). At any rate, I'm just saying that it's not illogical to hypothesize that the brain is more like a radio receiver than a tape player; whether it really is, is a different question.

pdonis 6y ago

The legalistic definition pretty much is the definition used by philosophers who are physicalists (such as Dennett). Basically, the question is not whether physical processes determine what you do; of course they do. The question is, which physical processes? The ones that are going on in your brain, that we label with words like "perception", "cognition", "decision", etc? Or other processes, like the process of someone holding a gun to your head? The only real difference I can see between the legalistic definition and the philosopher's definition is that the legalistic definition of "coercion" is broader. For example, I mentioned someone holding a gun to your head just now. Legally this would be coercion and wouldn't count as a free decision on your part. But to a physicalist philosopher, this might still count as a case of free will on your part--just free will based on a highly constrained set of acceptable choices given the circumstances. But that's a fine distinction that doesn't change the basic point.

amelius 6y ago

> Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Can someone provide a definition of a "individual"? Aren't we all just a big soup of atoms, where the boundary between two individuals is made arbitrarily based on convenience? Perhaps we should solve this problem first before we start talking about free will. Because when viewed like this, a bunch of atoms could have more than one free will.

byecomputer 6y ago
Yeah, but we're a bunch of unionized atoms. They all vote on what I should do and then I execute their will by going in the kitchen and making spaghetti or whatever.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
I'll provide some definitions, from Oxford: individual: "single; separate"; "of or for a particular person"; "a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family" free will: "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion" From these definitions, we must question whether a single human, Homo Sapiens, can possibly act at their own discretion, without fate or necessity as the cause. The history of studying free-will is extremely lengthy, everything non-biological that can be said has likely been said. We've been blessed by modern science to have a lot more understanding of organisms and neurology, so we know the "inner workings" better than Descartes or Locke or any of the old Christian theorists.

karaterobot 6y ago

The thing I always want to know in discussions of free will or determinism is whether a determinist believes that the initial conditions of the universe lead to the creation of the world we live in, such that (to choose some absurd examples) the Lego movie, candy corn, and Youtube were all 100% inevitable and predetermined by physics, and could not have failed to have been created exactly as they are, at the exact moment they were created. That's what seems unbelievable to me. Maybe I don't get what determinism is?

simiones 6y ago
Yes, essentially that is what the laws of physics as we understand them lead to as a conclusion[0]. An equivalent view is that the whole universe is a static object, including "the future" just the same as the "the past". At first this seems difficult to accept, but if you spend some time thinking about it and thinking of the laws of physics, even the intuitive ones such as classical mechanics, it's actually difficult to imagine an alternative. How could a law even look like that allowed some agents (humans? mammals? all living things? all things in general?) any amount of behavior that is not pre-determined by the past? Could a billiard ball that is hit by the tip of the cue decide not to move? And if the billiard ball can't, why could you? Try to imagine your brain in that moment of decision: this one neuron may fire or not. If it fires, you'll watch the Lego movie right now, if it doesn't you'll eat some candy corn instead. Looking even deeper, inside that neuron, some electro-chemical processes are building up a particular neuro-transmitter - if they build up enough, the neuron will fire, otherwise it won't. Looking even deeper, photons are "flying" around between electrons and nuclei - if one gets absorbed by this electron, the potential will be met, otherwise it won't. Who could decide whether the photon is absorbed or not, except for the past states of the photon, the neuro-transmitter soup, the neuron, the brain? How would that extra decision be factored into the laws of motion of the photon? Of course, there is always the possibility of postulating extra-physical notions, such as God or the simulation hypothesis, that would not necessarily bend to any of the laws of physics, and are not required to be understandable in any sense. It's also possible to believe that there exists some kind of law of free will and that we have just not come to understand it yet, though maybe some day we will. [0] though possibly there is some pure randomness built-in depending on the what the solution will turn out to be for some problems in Quantum Mechanics (the measurement problem and its possibly random outcomes), and on your preferred interpretation of it. This doesn't fundamentally help or hinder determinism, it just means that instead of a single fixed outcome being pre-determined, some dice are thrown and one of many possible outcomes happens. The Lego movie, candy corn, Youtube, they are all predictable from the initial conditions at the Big Bang, but they are just not uniquely determined.

andagainagain 6y ago

it's not just illogical, it's an infinite regress. It's purposely adding in an extra layer that by definition can't be discounted. So if you disprove one layer of free will, you still have an infinite number of possible ways you still have (or don't have) free will at yet deeper levels.