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Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of you

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some mental gymnastics, define free will as being able to do what you want, define it as being free of various kinds of constraints, call it free if the choice is not computable in advance, if you can not measure all necessary variables, in practice or in theory, ... If you are happy with any of those definitions, fine, then you might have this kind of free will, but I would not consider any of those particularly interesting.

wruza 5y ago
I prefer to think that it's a soulspace dynamically mapped onto a physical space at stochastic points designated by a wave function density distribution. So that at any point in time we have zero, one or more random souls influencing our behavior. So it wasn't particularly me, your honor.
V-2 5y ago
The typical source of confusion is conflating "free" with "unpredictable". But they're not the same thing at all.
- vidarh 5y ago
  "Unpredictable" is imprecise to the point of being meaningless. If a black box is fully deterministic to the point that you can construct a model that is entirely accurate, then there's nothing "free" about it. What you're modelling has no agency. For the notion of "free will" to have any meaning at all, it doesn't need to be "unpredictable" in the sense that it keeps confounding someone trying to predict it all the time, but it does need to deviate from predictions sometimes or you have just an automaton, and it needs to do so in a way that is fundamentally impossible to model, and it needs to do so without just injecting randomness. I've yet to see anyone present a definition of "free will" that doesn't reduce to smoke and mirrors, because that would mean coming up with some fourth category in a venn diagram of determinism, randomness and the combination of the two where they intersect, that is non-deterministic in a way that can't be explained by layering a deterministic model and randomness.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    > What you're modelling has no agency I see no reason to think that just because something is predictable it is not free. That seems like such a strange constraint to me that I can only assume that we have different understandings of what it means to be free. If I know someone well, I might predict that when offered a free choice between an ice cream and a brussels sprout they will choose the ice cream. The fact that I was able to predict that with an incredibly high degree of certainty didn't stop them from being free.
    - danbruc 5y ago
      I understand why you would call your offer a free choice, the are no constraints attached to the options that could obviously influence the decision, for example picking the ice cream also requires paying a million. Different people with different preferences would make different choices. But pick one specific person, why would you call their pick a free choice? There choice might not be influenced by your offer but it will be by their preferences. Let them choose, rewind the universe a minute or two, let them choose again. They will make the same choice over and over and over again. Maybe not if there is true randomness in the universe and this choice happens to be influenced by some random event.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      Given the same starting state, either you get the same outcome every time, or there's randomness involved, that is the point. I challenge you to describe a selection process that is not fully deterministic but where the lack of determinism is caused by something other than randomness. That is what you need to be able to come up with to define free will in a way that isn't smoke and mirrors. There's no agency. Nothing but automatons.
      - kybernetikos 5y ago
        > There's no agency. Nothing but automatons. Only if you define 'agency' as requiring magic. If you think that there's no conflict (as I do) between being an automaton and having agency, then there's no problem here.
kybernetikos 5y ago
You've put the dilemma nicely - it can't be both 'free' and 'your will' by your definitions (well, without admitting supernatural beings that can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it). Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'. Despite being happy with those other definitions that you aren't, I'm equally skeptical of the idea that free will has to be rescued just because different points in time can be observed simultaneously. What does someone even mean by free will if it can't cope with that?
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Our “soul” is that being which “ can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it”. You can feel it as you are one of these “supernatural being”. Case closed.
- vidarh 5y ago
  > Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'. There's certainly a duality here where it's fine to talk about people having choices even if one strictly believe they don't, but my experience is that if anything people tend to often get exasperated or outright agitated if you try to question to what extent their decisions are free. A whole lot of human society is organised around the idea that we have agency and that we're the product of choices we've made of our own volition. E.g. if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others, because the logical conclusion of thinking people don't have agency is that there was no way other than other external stimuli in their lives that they could have come out making other decisions. It's a very uncomfortable thing to view society through a lens of seeing free will as an illusion. But it's also very hard to unsee the lack of any kind of coherent theory of free will that could justify anything else. The reality is that if you actually talk to people about this, you'll quickly find that most people go through life with a very strong belief that they have agency and that people around them have agency, but the moment you start to question what that belief is based on, the basis for it tends to start to crumble very, very quickly. As I've said elsewhere, in decades of discussing this subject I've never seen someone come up with a definition of "free will" that still looks either "free" or like "will" under scrutiny. Usually you end up with people trying variations of arguments that just leads to infinite regress (e.g. arguing our soul gives us free will, at which point the question just shifts to a definition soul that would give it agency).
Guessnotgauss 5y ago
How about, the fact you can even argue that free will exists is a demonstration of it.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Creating something that can argue that free will exists requires an eliza-level chatbot, nothing more.
- coliveira 5y ago
  I can think of a world without free will too. And I can imagine a large amount of things that don't exist.
prmph 5y ago
Well free does not exist only if logic is bound by what the human mind can conceive. It may be possible for something not be random, and to have no antecedent at the same time. Also, the concept of free will is bound up with the concept of consciousness. What is the entity that may or may not have free will? Until we define and understand that, free will will be an ill-defined concept not amenable to proper analysis
- RHSman2 5y ago
  Amazing that all this conflab about free will and you seem to be the first to bring up consciousness. "Free Will" is a construct of consciousness don't you think? With varying degrees of conscious capability comes increasing amounts of free will. But absolute free will? For example, I choose to end my life, because I choose too is going to be a very hard push. It is only going to happen if I really want it, and will only want it if I am in a situation that calls for such drastic action. Those situations, we can see, are generally on the peripherals (although way too common these days). So our free will is a function of the Human Condition, which is relative to our levels of consciousness.
michalf6 5y ago
>call it free if the choice is not computable in advance Is it not essentially equivalent to "actual" free will? I am perfectly happy with just this.
- danbruc 5y ago
  You are free to call this free will, I would not. For a good hash function there is no way of predicting the output for a given input besides executing the hash function. But I don't see why I would call the output free. If there is no better way to figure out what you will do than letting your brain go through its internal calculations, fine, your behavior is unpredictable, but how is it free?
  - syki 5y ago
    Your points are well stated and succinctly out. They’ve made me think about this issue more than I ever have. It’s not a question I’ve ever been interested in but I like the reasoning you are giving. The first sentence above though helps to illustrate a problem when thinking about this stuff. You wrote, You are free to…. From your perspective no one has that freedom but our everyday experience is such that it’s hard to really follow through with this belief. Perhaps consciousness and self awareness comes at a cost of not being able to fully embrace the notion that we don’t have free will. It certainly feels like I have exercised free will but that is likely just an illusion.
    - danbruc 5y ago
      I also behave and talk all day long as if we have free will, it's just a useful abstraction. But my world view will not shatter if someone puts me into an MRI machine and tells me what I will choose for dinner later that day.
antattack 5y ago
If your definition of free will existed, how would you prove it?
- awb 5y ago
  Exactly. Free will (or lack thereof) is an untestable theory, better categorized as a thought experiment or philosophical debate.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Free will isn't a theory before someone comes up with an actual definition. That is the problem. I keep asking people for a definition, and the outcomes are generally either "smoke and mirrors" (complexity hiding something not at all "free"), appeal to a "soul" which just leads to infinite regress, or failure to even try. Without someone willing to actually define what they mean, the discussion is moot - it makes no sense to claim that an undefined concept exists.
    - awb 5y ago
      Wikipedia has a definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will > Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        That statement at all doesn't say anything, because what does "choose unimpeded" mean? That is at the core of this discussion, and why what then follows is a wall of text to set up compatibilism vs. incompatibilism and determinism vs indeterminism, including addressing the issue that many of the proponents of various variants would interpret "choose unimpeded" in entirely different ways. You'll see that the page itself introduces a number of different interpretations, and you'd struggle to get most people to agree with those definitions. E.g. many compatibilist views "work around" the determinism issue by separating our internal view of our ability to choose with the physical reality of the choices. In that case I'd agree that that kind of "soft" free will is possible, but it's also meaningless. E.g. a murderer may have exercised such "soft" free will, but that does not create any moral responsibility for their action if determinism meant they had no actual control anyway. As such, while that kind of "free will" is reasonable to say it exists, it is not the kind of free will usually debated, because it doesn't actually address the important question of whether or not we actually have the ability to make a genuinely free choice. E.g. if we were to rewind time, could we choose differently? On the basis of what? With the added caveat that merely another outcome in line with e.g. probabilistic effects from quantum effects are not a choice - so let's say we repeat the experiment many times: can you introduce a bias that is inconsistent with randomness; when you start diving into this you start quickly seeing that even trying to define a way of determining if something meaningfully is a "choice" gets at the core of the issue. So let's restate it: If we can agree that a an "unimpeded choice" is a decision that is something other than a pure deterministic or probabilistic effect caused by the preceding physical state, then how can you restate that in a way that makes its existence or nonexistence testable? Because without that it's just woo.
cjameskeller 5y ago
This is conflating causation and determination. It is true that one's choice must have a cause, and this can either be internal or external to oneself. But it is not true that the choice must be _determined_ by the cause. The Agent Causation [0] view denies the notion that only states or events can serve as causal priors, and instead asserts that substances themselves may be the terminal "cause" [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/#3 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/...
- vidarh 5y ago
  That just introduces infinite regress [1] into the mix. In order to justify why that would introduce free will you now need to justify why the substance itself has free will. It's not a solution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_regress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_regress
- jasperry 5y ago
  What is a substance? Does it have a definition in any testable theory? You claim that causation and determination were conflated, but if the distinction between them depends on terms that can't be defined scientifically, then you haven't shown that they are different in what they refer to in the universe. It's conceivable that on a physical level causality is just a word for a property of a deterministic system.
awb 5y ago
A few issues with the “free will” debate. 1) Define “free” 2) How do you test your hypothesis? You’re trying to apply logic to an untestable philosophical debate. If you believe free will doesn’t exist, you can’t design an experiment that would invalidate that belief. And if your theory is untestable and unfalsifiable, then what good is it other than a creative exercise? However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic: https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/quantum-universe-fundamentally-probabilistic-not-deterministic/#:~:text=The%20quantum%20universe%20is%20fundamentally,laws%20must%20be%20strictly%20deterministic.&text=It%20was%20this%20kind%20of,new%20theory%20of%20quantum%20mechanics https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/quantum-universe-fundam.... So, we do know that the universe is not pre-determined and cannot be calculated in advance, but if you want to believe in humans as fully deterministic (or some other definition of no free will) inside of a non-deterministic environment, I haven’t heard anyone propose an experiment that could test that, at which point the debate of “free will” is relegated to the realm of thought experiments rather than science. So, perhaps the better question is: Does it serve you better to believe there is free will or no free will? And leave it at that.
- vidarh 5y ago
  > You’re trying to apply logic to an untestable philosophical debate. If you believe free will doesn’t exist, you can’t design an experiment that would invalidate that belief. And if your theory is untestable and unfalsifiable, then what good is it other than a creative exercise? This is reversing the burden of proof. The issue with "free will" is getting those who think there is a meaningful "free will" concept to actually define what they mean. Look through this discussion and see the comments trying to justify the existence of free will, and look for definitions of what they actually mean by that. > However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic: That's a meaningless distinction in this context. The point is that nobody has presented a mechanism whereby you can inject any form of agency that fits a definition of "free" (see your own point: define "free") that doesn't devolve to smoke and mirrors that way. In order to do so, there'd need to be something that would lead to measurable biases in outcomes that can not be explained by the probabilities. The rest of your argument devolves to Russel's teapot: As long as nobody has posited a reasonable definition that'd give rise to a theory of what free will might mean, the notion is so absurd that it is entirely reasonable to say that free will makes no sense. If you can present a definition that can't easily be shown to be just smoke and mirrors and which somehow makes sense to people, even without coming up with ways of actually testing it, I might be tempted to moderate that claim, but I've had these discussions with people for decades, and in none of them have anyone ever managed to come up with a cohesive definition of what free will would even mean that doesn't very easily start looking distinctly "unfree". There are clearly definitions of free will that would allow something you label with that term to exist. But I challenge you to come up with one that people would agree is both "free" and "will".
hsn915 5y ago
> Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free This is as free as you can get and I don't think anyone ever posited "free will" as something other than this.
- danbruc 5y ago
  This is as free as you can get and I don't think anyone ever posited "free will" as something other than this. I would not call this free, it's a choice completely determined by you and the environment. Same situation, same resulting choice. Every single time. And people have certainly used free will to mean many different things.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    People mean that if you go back to the past knowing something you didn't know the first time around you would have the ability to make the "better" choice the second time around because of the new information.
syki 5y ago
Regarding your either/or line of reasoning in your first paragraph. Are you sure these are the only two possibilities? Could there be partial dependence on the current state of one’s mind and environment? Does the same exact state always lead to the same exact decision? That is, if a universe began exactly as ours did and everything was the same up until time t when a decision is made by someone is that decision always the same? It seems to be to yes and that would support your view but does it have to be yes. Also, I wonder if your either/or line of reasoning depends on the Law of the Excluded middle. What happens to your reasoning if that law is not true?
- danbruc 5y ago
  One can certainly also imagine a mix of both option, for example your preferences deterministically determine which options you consider but a random event determines the choice you make. But that doesn't make a big difference, it's still a mix of predetermined and random things. A third option would have to be a wild thing - a choice would have to neither depend on the state of the universe, i.e. be determined, nor be independent of the state of the universe, i.e. be random. I personally don't see any room for a third option but there are probably a lot of things you could try to poke holes into. Is the state of the universe a meaningful concept? How does it relate to time? Does true randomness exist?
  - syki 5y ago
    I was thinking of the third option. I don’t have anything intelligent to say about that option but posed it as a possibility. I imagine that believing in the third option would roughly be equivalent to a religious belief. That is, one believes that option because the alternative is unpalatable.
CuriouslyC 5y ago
Free will implies agency, and isn't disproved by predictability. I love pizza and hamburgers, and just because you can predict that I will eat either pizza or hamburgers with 95+% likelihood, that does not imply that I did not actively choose one of the two. I had the freedom to choose tofu, I just decided not to because I hate it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
_0w8t 5y ago
Free will just cannot be described by physics. This is very similar to the perception of the time flow. Time in physics is static. There is no now. Surely one can plug any time value into physical equations, but that will not explain, for example, why when we look at a thrown ball, we perceive a movement, and not, say the whole trajectory of the ball at the same time. And given that the free will and now are connected it is easy to see why we cannot describe the free will using physical equations. Well, at least until we will manage to describe now.
- burnished 5y ago
  Pardon, but your argument does not appear to be coherent. Your example in particular does not seem connected to your thesis in any way. I would suggest reformulating an argument that does not depend on a hazy refutation of physics.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    Time in physics is similar to the number of a frame in video. For example, from two frames of a video of a thrown ball one can deduce the its whole trajectory. But it does now explain why when we see the video we see ball's movement. In a sense from a physical point of view the whole trajectory exists at once, there is nothing special about a particular point of a trajectory. There is no now. Now back to the freedom of will. Its feeling originates in now as if it exists, it is about changing the future following the now. But since the notion of now is not reflected in physical equations, those cannot describe the freedom of will. In physics the whole timeline exists at the same time. In other words time is static and future has already happen. Thus there is literally no choice in physics.
    - burnished 5y ago
      >>Time in physics is similar to the number of a frame in video. For example, from two frames of a video of a thrown ball one can deduce the its whole trajectory. But it does now explain why when we see the video we see ball's movement. In a sense from a physical point of view the whole trajectory exists at once, there is nothing special about a particular point of a trajectory. There is no now. Here you are conflating a perceptual task with a kinematic equation. What makes you think that these two concepts make sense to tie together so intimately?
snowwrestler 5y ago
You can dismiss them as “mental gymnastics” but defining the term is the heart of the discussion. Philosophers argued about gravity and heat a lot too before we settled on rigorous physical definitions that could be expressed mathematically. At a first approximation there are obviously limits to our “free” will as no one has yet been able to will themselves to float through the air without support, go without food or water indefinitely, pop a pet dragon into existence, survive the physical destruction of their brain, etc. So it’s hard to start from a position that anyone ever seriously thought “free will” meant no limits or dependencies.
- danbruc 5y ago
  Mental gymnastics was probably not the best choice for the wording. What I really meant is defining free will as something that is in a certain sense trivial. If you want to call making choices according to your personal preferences free will, fine, but this is a triviality and we don't need to debate over this for centuries. And the next guy looks into the predictability of decisions and assigns free will to an entity if its future behavior can not be determined with certain resource constraints. Fine except that the term is now overloaded, you might have the first but not the second kind of free will and both properties are not well described by the term free will.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
This argument has always sounded like a strange bit of gerrymandering of identity. I suppose for some definitions of the terms you used that 'your current state' could be different from the 'you' that is deciding, but I wouldn't call any of those distinctions intuitive.
bena 5y ago
First, even constrained choices can be meaningful. Just because I can't choose to fly by flapping my arms, wouldn't mean I don't have free will. If free will exists, I can still choose among the options available to me. I don't think anyone operates by the definition of "free will" that you seem to be proposing. Free will is the ability to select from among the options you are given. The opposite of that would be that you'd always make the same pick every time, because your decisions are actually the results of forces acting upon you. If you had the choice between red, green, and blue; you'd choose red every time if we could rerun your life up to that moment in time. Which is what makes the question kind of unknowable. Because we can't rerun our lives to see if we could make different decisions with all of the exact same conditions as before. Even running the choice twice isn't the same. Because the second time you do it, you're now a person who has previously made this choice. And that makes the scenario different, because you are different. We have no real way of testing free will. But better still: the question does not matter at all. Either free will exists or it doesn't. There's no spectrum of "50% will" or whatever. You can either make choices or you're essentially the result of all the forces acting upon you. So, what are the consequences of both scenarios? If free will exists, then fine, we can make choices. We can choose to do whatever. There's nothing really interesting to be said about this branch. However. If free will does not exist, then there's something weird going on. Because if free will does not exist, I don't have any choice in whether or not to post this message. I post this message because your post elicits that response in me. Just like you made your post for the same reason. And we just keep pulling this thread all the way back to the big bang. But we also don't have the choice in how we feel about this discussion either. You will either accept this or not based on the various physical, biological, and chemical processes going on inside of and around you. So you will either agree or disagree and that decision itself is preordained. Regardless if it is true or not. You're either the type to believe in free will or not and you can't choose that. Because if you could choose that, you'd have free will. Even if you believe you are making a change, you're not. Because you were going to make that change due to the forces at work on you. Forces that were eventually going to interact with you because those forces themselves are the products of other forces, etc. So if you hear all this, take it to heart, and decide to live a life of apathy because you have no free will and nothing matters. Then that's what was going to happen at this point and time regardless.
naasking 5y ago
> You can do some mental gymnastics, define free will as being able to do what you want, define it as being free of various kinds of constraints, call it free if the choice is not computable in advance, if you can not measure all necessary variables, in practice or in theory, ... If you are happy with any of those definitions, fine, then you might have this kind of free will, but I would not consider any of those particularly interesting. It is quite interesting in fact, as it lets you sensibly assign moral responsibility to those who were acting of their own free will, even if the world is deterministic. Arguably that's the only kind of free will worth having, and what people mean when they talk about free will (not what people say they mean).
vnorilo 5y ago
What is free will but an experience? I think it is completely plausible that organisms that exist in a fully deterministic physical reality still have the experience of free will. Or vice versa for that matter. Why do "I" have this experience of having a viewpoint and making decisions? That is a mystery that I am not close to solving. However why would any of that define how the universe must work? Much like a finite being can hold thoughts of Cantor's classes of infinities in her finite brain. The domains in question are unrelated.
- stevenhuang 5y ago
  This comes to the definition of terms that much of the free will debate wastes cycles on. Those that deny the concept of free will do not deny the subjective experience of free will. The subjective experience of free will was never under question. The debate has always been about 'hard' free will, i.e., if the universe is fully deterministic, if 'choice' is an illusion.
guelo 5y ago
I think your argument against free will can be boiled down to the question of if true RNGs exist. Even leaving out quantum probability, we can easily consider systems of such high entropy that a computer the size of the universe would be unable to deterministically calculate the results.
- stevenhuang 5y ago
  Not true since that would then be a random will. Nothing free about that.
omazurov 5y ago
> Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent... That line of argument makes no difference between the free will of humans and that of animals, insects, bacteria or rocks. But that can't possibly be true: we humans invented free will after all. That's the mental gymnastics that keeps me mentally strong. No beast, nor angel. "Freedom evolves" (DD).
nextaccountic 5y ago
Forget people. Let's suppose we're all robots. Free will means our actions depend at least partially on our internal state; that is, our internal state can somehow influence our actions (the opposite is terrifying: being able to watch your actions but having no meaningful input on them). With this definition, free will is perfectly compatible with determinism (this is called compatibilism [0]). It's also compatible with probabilistic theories like quantum mechanics or every other branch of physics. It's like in chess. If you are running an algorithm that plays chess, you will just play the moves mindlessly, so no free will right? Except that per my definition your internal state is influencing your moves, so, you are free (in this sense). But there are situations where you're forced into a move. For example, the king is in check, there is only one move possible, then this move is forced. It's precisely in this forced case where there is no free will: you are being compelled to move by forces beyond your internal state. "Forced" moves can have some shades of gray in chess as well. For example, you may be forced to sacrifice a piece to defend the Queen, because sometimes the game is just lost if you don't do so. So.. the rules of the games allow you do to something else, but you can't meaningfully choose if we suppose you're playing for winning. And, of course, you can only play legal moves: some board states have few legal moves left so you're comparatively less free. In those cases, you have your free will partially constrained. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

wruza 5y ago

I prefer to think that it's a soulspace dynamically mapped onto a physical space at stochastic points designated by a wave function density distribution. So that at any point in time we have zero, one or more random souls influencing our behavior. So it wasn't particularly me, your honor.

V-2 5y ago

The typical source of confusion is conflating "free" with "unpredictable". But they're not the same thing at all.

vidarh 5y ago
"Unpredictable" is imprecise to the point of being meaningless. If a black box is fully deterministic to the point that you can construct a model that is entirely accurate, then there's nothing "free" about it. What you're modelling has no agency. For the notion of "free will" to have any meaning at all, it doesn't need to be "unpredictable" in the sense that it keeps confounding someone trying to predict it all the time, but it does need to deviate from predictions sometimes or you have just an automaton, and it needs to do so in a way that is fundamentally impossible to model, and it needs to do so without just injecting randomness. I've yet to see anyone present a definition of "free will" that doesn't reduce to smoke and mirrors, because that would mean coming up with some fourth category in a venn diagram of determinism, randomness and the combination of the two where they intersect, that is non-deterministic in a way that can't be explained by layering a deterministic model and randomness.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  > What you're modelling has no agency I see no reason to think that just because something is predictable it is not free. That seems like such a strange constraint to me that I can only assume that we have different understandings of what it means to be free. If I know someone well, I might predict that when offered a free choice between an ice cream and a brussels sprout they will choose the ice cream. The fact that I was able to predict that with an incredibly high degree of certainty didn't stop them from being free.
  - danbruc 5y ago
    I understand why you would call your offer a free choice, the are no constraints attached to the options that could obviously influence the decision, for example picking the ice cream also requires paying a million. Different people with different preferences would make different choices. But pick one specific person, why would you call their pick a free choice? There choice might not be influenced by your offer but it will be by their preferences. Let them choose, rewind the universe a minute or two, let them choose again. They will make the same choice over and over and over again. Maybe not if there is true randomness in the universe and this choice happens to be influenced by some random event.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Given the same starting state, either you get the same outcome every time, or there's randomness involved, that is the point. I challenge you to describe a selection process that is not fully deterministic but where the lack of determinism is caused by something other than randomness. That is what you need to be able to come up with to define free will in a way that isn't smoke and mirrors. There's no agency. Nothing but automatons.
    - kybernetikos 5y ago
      > There's no agency. Nothing but automatons. Only if you define 'agency' as requiring magic. If you think that there's no conflict (as I do) between being an automaton and having agency, then there's no problem here.

kybernetikos 5y ago

You've put the dilemma nicely - it can't be both 'free' and 'your will' by your definitions (well, without admitting supernatural beings that can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it). Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'. Despite being happy with those other definitions that you aren't, I'm equally skeptical of the idea that free will has to be rescued just because different points in time can be observed simultaneously. What does someone even mean by free will if it can't cope with that?

ngcc_hk 5y ago
Our “soul” is that being which “ can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it”. You can feel it as you are one of these “supernatural being”. Case closed.
vidarh 5y ago
> Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'. There's certainly a duality here where it's fine to talk about people having choices even if one strictly believe they don't, but my experience is that if anything people tend to often get exasperated or outright agitated if you try to question to what extent their decisions are free. A whole lot of human society is organised around the idea that we have agency and that we're the product of choices we've made of our own volition. E.g. if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others, because the logical conclusion of thinking people don't have agency is that there was no way other than other external stimuli in their lives that they could have come out making other decisions. It's a very uncomfortable thing to view society through a lens of seeing free will as an illusion. But it's also very hard to unsee the lack of any kind of coherent theory of free will that could justify anything else. The reality is that if you actually talk to people about this, you'll quickly find that most people go through life with a very strong belief that they have agency and that people around them have agency, but the moment you start to question what that belief is based on, the basis for it tends to start to crumble very, very quickly. As I've said elsewhere, in decades of discussing this subject I've never seen someone come up with a definition of "free will" that still looks either "free" or like "will" under scrutiny. Usually you end up with people trying variations of arguments that just leads to infinite regress (e.g. arguing our soul gives us free will, at which point the question just shifts to a definition soul that would give it agency).

Guessnotgauss 5y ago

How about, the fact you can even argue that free will exists is a demonstration of it.

vidarh 5y ago
Creating something that can argue that free will exists requires an eliza-level chatbot, nothing more.
coliveira 5y ago
I can think of a world without free will too. And I can imagine a large amount of things that don't exist.

prmph 5y ago

Well free does not exist only if logic is bound by what the human mind can conceive. It may be possible for something not be random, and to have no antecedent at the same time. Also, the concept of free will is bound up with the concept of consciousness. What is the entity that may or may not have free will? Until we define and understand that, free will will be an ill-defined concept not amenable to proper analysis

RHSman2 5y ago
Amazing that all this conflab about free will and you seem to be the first to bring up consciousness. "Free Will" is a construct of consciousness don't you think? With varying degrees of conscious capability comes increasing amounts of free will. But absolute free will? For example, I choose to end my life, because I choose too is going to be a very hard push. It is only going to happen if I really want it, and will only want it if I am in a situation that calls for such drastic action. Those situations, we can see, are generally on the peripherals (although way too common these days). So our free will is a function of the Human Condition, which is relative to our levels of consciousness.

michalf6 5y ago

>call it free if the choice is not computable in advance Is it not essentially equivalent to "actual" free will? I am perfectly happy with just this.

danbruc 5y ago
You are free to call this free will, I would not. For a good hash function there is no way of predicting the output for a given input besides executing the hash function. But I don't see why I would call the output free. If there is no better way to figure out what you will do than letting your brain go through its internal calculations, fine, your behavior is unpredictable, but how is it free?
- syki 5y ago
  Your points are well stated and succinctly out. They’ve made me think about this issue more than I ever have. It’s not a question I’ve ever been interested in but I like the reasoning you are giving. The first sentence above though helps to illustrate a problem when thinking about this stuff. You wrote, You are free to…. From your perspective no one has that freedom but our everyday experience is such that it’s hard to really follow through with this belief. Perhaps consciousness and self awareness comes at a cost of not being able to fully embrace the notion that we don’t have free will. It certainly feels like I have exercised free will but that is likely just an illusion.
  - danbruc 5y ago
    I also behave and talk all day long as if we have free will, it's just a useful abstraction. But my world view will not shatter if someone puts me into an MRI machine and tells me what I will choose for dinner later that day.

antattack 5y ago

If your definition of free will existed, how would you prove it?

awb 5y ago
Exactly. Free will (or lack thereof) is an untestable theory, better categorized as a thought experiment or philosophical debate.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Free will isn't a theory before someone comes up with an actual definition. That is the problem. I keep asking people for a definition, and the outcomes are generally either "smoke and mirrors" (complexity hiding something not at all "free"), appeal to a "soul" which just leads to infinite regress, or failure to even try. Without someone willing to actually define what they mean, the discussion is moot - it makes no sense to claim that an undefined concept exists.
  - awb 5y ago
    Wikipedia has a definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will > Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      That statement at all doesn't say anything, because what does "choose unimpeded" mean? That is at the core of this discussion, and why what then follows is a wall of text to set up compatibilism vs. incompatibilism and determinism vs indeterminism, including addressing the issue that many of the proponents of various variants would interpret "choose unimpeded" in entirely different ways. You'll see that the page itself introduces a number of different interpretations, and you'd struggle to get most people to agree with those definitions. E.g. many compatibilist views "work around" the determinism issue by separating our internal view of our ability to choose with the physical reality of the choices. In that case I'd agree that that kind of "soft" free will is possible, but it's also meaningless. E.g. a murderer may have exercised such "soft" free will, but that does not create any moral responsibility for their action if determinism meant they had no actual control anyway. As such, while that kind of "free will" is reasonable to say it exists, it is not the kind of free will usually debated, because it doesn't actually address the important question of whether or not we actually have the ability to make a genuinely free choice. E.g. if we were to rewind time, could we choose differently? On the basis of what? With the added caveat that merely another outcome in line with e.g. probabilistic effects from quantum effects are not a choice - so let's say we repeat the experiment many times: can you introduce a bias that is inconsistent with randomness; when you start diving into this you start quickly seeing that even trying to define a way of determining if something meaningfully is a "choice" gets at the core of the issue. So let's restate it: If we can agree that a an "unimpeded choice" is a decision that is something other than a pure deterministic or probabilistic effect caused by the preceding physical state, then how can you restate that in a way that makes its existence or nonexistence testable? Because without that it's just woo.

cjameskeller 5y ago

This is conflating causation and determination. It is true that one's choice must have a cause, and this can either be internal or external to oneself. But it is not true that the choice must be _determined_ by the cause. The Agent Causation [0] view denies the notion that only states or events can serve as causal priors, and instead asserts that substances themselves may be the terminal "cause" [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/#3 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/...

vidarh 5y ago
That just introduces infinite regress [1] into the mix. In order to justify why that would introduce free will you now need to justify why the substance itself has free will. It's not a solution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_regress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_regress
jasperry 5y ago
What is a substance? Does it have a definition in any testable theory? You claim that causation and determination were conflated, but if the distinction between them depends on terms that can't be defined scientifically, then you haven't shown that they are different in what they refer to in the universe. It's conceivable that on a physical level causality is just a word for a property of a deterministic system.

awb 5y ago

A few issues with the “free will” debate. 1) Define “free” 2) How do you test your hypothesis? You’re trying to apply logic to an untestable philosophical debate. If you believe free will doesn’t exist, you can’t design an experiment that would invalidate that belief. And if your theory is untestable and unfalsifiable, then what good is it other than a creative exercise? However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic: https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/quantum-universe-fundamentally-probabilistic-not-deterministic/#:~:text=The%20quantum%20universe%20is%20fundamentally,laws%20must%20be%20strictly%20deterministic.&text=It%20was%20this%20kind%20of,new%20theory%20of%20quantum%20mechanics https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/quantum-universe-fundam.... So, we do know that the universe is not pre-determined and cannot be calculated in advance, but if you want to believe in humans as fully deterministic (or some other definition of no free will) inside of a non-deterministic environment, I haven’t heard anyone propose an experiment that could test that, at which point the debate of “free will” is relegated to the realm of thought experiments rather than science. So, perhaps the better question is: Does it serve you better to believe there is free will or no free will? And leave it at that.

vidarh 5y ago
> You’re trying to apply logic to an untestable philosophical debate. If you believe free will doesn’t exist, you can’t design an experiment that would invalidate that belief. And if your theory is untestable and unfalsifiable, then what good is it other than a creative exercise? This is reversing the burden of proof. The issue with "free will" is getting those who think there is a meaningful "free will" concept to actually define what they mean. Look through this discussion and see the comments trying to justify the existence of free will, and look for definitions of what they actually mean by that. > However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic: That's a meaningless distinction in this context. The point is that nobody has presented a mechanism whereby you can inject any form of agency that fits a definition of "free" (see your own point: define "free") that doesn't devolve to smoke and mirrors that way. In order to do so, there'd need to be something that would lead to measurable biases in outcomes that can not be explained by the probabilities. The rest of your argument devolves to Russel's teapot: As long as nobody has posited a reasonable definition that'd give rise to a theory of what free will might mean, the notion is so absurd that it is entirely reasonable to say that free will makes no sense. If you can present a definition that can't easily be shown to be just smoke and mirrors and which somehow makes sense to people, even without coming up with ways of actually testing it, I might be tempted to moderate that claim, but I've had these discussions with people for decades, and in none of them have anyone ever managed to come up with a cohesive definition of what free will would even mean that doesn't very easily start looking distinctly "unfree". There are clearly definitions of free will that would allow something you label with that term to exist. But I challenge you to come up with one that people would agree is both "free" and "will".

hsn915 5y ago

> Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free This is as free as you can get and I don't think anyone ever posited "free will" as something other than this.

danbruc 5y ago
This is as free as you can get and I don't think anyone ever posited "free will" as something other than this. I would not call this free, it's a choice completely determined by you and the environment. Same situation, same resulting choice. Every single time. And people have certainly used free will to mean many different things.
- hsn915 5y ago
  People mean that if you go back to the past knowing something you didn't know the first time around you would have the ability to make the "better" choice the second time around because of the new information.

syki 5y ago

Regarding your either/or line of reasoning in your first paragraph. Are you sure these are the only two possibilities? Could there be partial dependence on the current state of one’s mind and environment? Does the same exact state always lead to the same exact decision? That is, if a universe began exactly as ours did and everything was the same up until time t when a decision is made by someone is that decision always the same? It seems to be to yes and that would support your view but does it have to be yes. Also, I wonder if your either/or line of reasoning depends on the Law of the Excluded middle. What happens to your reasoning if that law is not true?

danbruc 5y ago
One can certainly also imagine a mix of both option, for example your preferences deterministically determine which options you consider but a random event determines the choice you make. But that doesn't make a big difference, it's still a mix of predetermined and random things. A third option would have to be a wild thing - a choice would have to neither depend on the state of the universe, i.e. be determined, nor be independent of the state of the universe, i.e. be random. I personally don't see any room for a third option but there are probably a lot of things you could try to poke holes into. Is the state of the universe a meaningful concept? How does it relate to time? Does true randomness exist?
- syki 5y ago
  I was thinking of the third option. I don’t have anything intelligent to say about that option but posed it as a possibility. I imagine that believing in the third option would roughly be equivalent to a religious belief. That is, one believes that option because the alternative is unpalatable.

CuriouslyC 5y ago

Free will implies agency, and isn't disproved by predictability. I love pizza and hamburgers, and just because you can predict that I will eat either pizza or hamburgers with 95+% likelihood, that does not imply that I did not actively choose one of the two. I had the freedom to choose tofu, I just decided not to because I hate it.

deleted 5y ago
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_0w8t 5y ago

Free will just cannot be described by physics. This is very similar to the perception of the time flow. Time in physics is static. There is no now. Surely one can plug any time value into physical equations, but that will not explain, for example, why when we look at a thrown ball, we perceive a movement, and not, say the whole trajectory of the ball at the same time. And given that the free will and now are connected it is easy to see why we cannot describe the free will using physical equations. Well, at least until we will manage to describe now.

burnished 5y ago
Pardon, but your argument does not appear to be coherent. Your example in particular does not seem connected to your thesis in any way. I would suggest reformulating an argument that does not depend on a hazy refutation of physics.
- _0w8t 5y ago
  Time in physics is similar to the number of a frame in video. For example, from two frames of a video of a thrown ball one can deduce the its whole trajectory. But it does now explain why when we see the video we see ball's movement. In a sense from a physical point of view the whole trajectory exists at once, there is nothing special about a particular point of a trajectory. There is no now. Now back to the freedom of will. Its feeling originates in now as if it exists, it is about changing the future following the now. But since the notion of now is not reflected in physical equations, those cannot describe the freedom of will. In physics the whole timeline exists at the same time. In other words time is static and future has already happen. Thus there is literally no choice in physics.
  - burnished 5y ago
    >>Time in physics is similar to the number of a frame in video. For example, from two frames of a video of a thrown ball one can deduce the its whole trajectory. But it does now explain why when we see the video we see ball's movement. In a sense from a physical point of view the whole trajectory exists at once, there is nothing special about a particular point of a trajectory. There is no now. Here you are conflating a perceptual task with a kinematic equation. What makes you think that these two concepts make sense to tie together so intimately?

snowwrestler 5y ago

You can dismiss them as “mental gymnastics” but defining the term is the heart of the discussion. Philosophers argued about gravity and heat a lot too before we settled on rigorous physical definitions that could be expressed mathematically. At a first approximation there are obviously limits to our “free” will as no one has yet been able to will themselves to float through the air without support, go without food or water indefinitely, pop a pet dragon into existence, survive the physical destruction of their brain, etc. So it’s hard to start from a position that anyone ever seriously thought “free will” meant no limits or dependencies.

danbruc 5y ago
Mental gymnastics was probably not the best choice for the wording. What I really meant is defining free will as something that is in a certain sense trivial. If you want to call making choices according to your personal preferences free will, fine, but this is a triviality and we don't need to debate over this for centuries. And the next guy looks into the predictability of decisions and assigns free will to an entity if its future behavior can not be determined with certain resource constraints. Fine except that the term is now overloaded, you might have the first but not the second kind of free will and both properties are not well described by the term free will.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

This argument has always sounded like a strange bit of gerrymandering of identity. I suppose for some definitions of the terms you used that 'your current state' could be different from the 'you' that is deciding, but I wouldn't call any of those distinctions intuitive.

bena 5y ago

First, even constrained choices can be meaningful. Just because I can't choose to fly by flapping my arms, wouldn't mean I don't have free will. If free will exists, I can still choose among the options available to me. I don't think anyone operates by the definition of "free will" that you seem to be proposing. Free will is the ability to select from among the options you are given. The opposite of that would be that you'd always make the same pick every time, because your decisions are actually the results of forces acting upon you. If you had the choice between red, green, and blue; you'd choose red every time if we could rerun your life up to that moment in time. Which is what makes the question kind of unknowable. Because we can't rerun our lives to see if we could make different decisions with all of the exact same conditions as before. Even running the choice twice isn't the same. Because the second time you do it, you're now a person who has previously made this choice. And that makes the scenario different, because you are different. We have no real way of testing free will. But better still: the question does not matter at all. Either free will exists or it doesn't. There's no spectrum of "50% will" or whatever. You can either make choices or you're essentially the result of all the forces acting upon you. So, what are the consequences of both scenarios? If free will exists, then fine, we can make choices. We can choose to do whatever. There's nothing really interesting to be said about this branch. However. If free will does not exist, then there's something weird going on. Because if free will does not exist, I don't have any choice in whether or not to post this message. I post this message because your post elicits that response in me. Just like you made your post for the same reason. And we just keep pulling this thread all the way back to the big bang. But we also don't have the choice in how we feel about this discussion either. You will either accept this or not based on the various physical, biological, and chemical processes going on inside of and around you. So you will either agree or disagree and that decision itself is preordained. Regardless if it is true or not. You're either the type to believe in free will or not and you can't choose that. Because if you could choose that, you'd have free will. Even if you believe you are making a change, you're not. Because you were going to make that change due to the forces at work on you. Forces that were eventually going to interact with you because those forces themselves are the products of other forces, etc. So if you hear all this, take it to heart, and decide to live a life of apathy because you have no free will and nothing matters. Then that's what was going to happen at this point and time regardless.

naasking 5y ago

> You can do some mental gymnastics, define free will as being able to do what you want, define it as being free of various kinds of constraints, call it free if the choice is not computable in advance, if you can not measure all necessary variables, in practice or in theory, ... If you are happy with any of those definitions, fine, then you might have this kind of free will, but I would not consider any of those particularly interesting. It is quite interesting in fact, as it lets you sensibly assign moral responsibility to those who were acting of their own free will, even if the world is deterministic. Arguably that's the only kind of free will worth having, and what people mean when they talk about free will (not what people say they mean).

vnorilo 5y ago

What is free will but an experience? I think it is completely plausible that organisms that exist in a fully deterministic physical reality still have the experience of free will. Or vice versa for that matter. Why do "I" have this experience of having a viewpoint and making decisions? That is a mystery that I am not close to solving. However why would any of that define how the universe must work? Much like a finite being can hold thoughts of Cantor's classes of infinities in her finite brain. The domains in question are unrelated.

stevenhuang 5y ago
This comes to the definition of terms that much of the free will debate wastes cycles on. Those that deny the concept of free will do not deny the subjective experience of free will. The subjective experience of free will was never under question. The debate has always been about 'hard' free will, i.e., if the universe is fully deterministic, if 'choice' is an illusion.

guelo 5y ago

I think your argument against free will can be boiled down to the question of if true RNGs exist. Even leaving out quantum probability, we can easily consider systems of such high entropy that a computer the size of the universe would be unable to deterministically calculate the results.

stevenhuang 5y ago
Not true since that would then be a random will. Nothing free about that.

omazurov 5y ago

> Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent... That line of argument makes no difference between the free will of humans and that of animals, insects, bacteria or rocks. But that can't possibly be true: we humans invented free will after all. That's the mental gymnastics that keeps me mentally strong. No beast, nor angel. "Freedom evolves" (DD).

nextaccountic 5y ago

Forget people. Let's suppose we're all robots. Free will means our actions depend at least partially on our internal state; that is, our internal state can somehow influence our actions (the opposite is terrifying: being able to watch your actions but having no meaningful input on them). With this definition, free will is perfectly compatible with determinism (this is called compatibilism [0]). It's also compatible with probabilistic theories like quantum mechanics or every other branch of physics. It's like in chess. If you are running an algorithm that plays chess, you will just play the moves mindlessly, so no free will right? Except that per my definition your internal state is influencing your moves, so, you are free (in this sense). But there are situations where you're forced into a move. For example, the king is in check, there is only one move possible, then this move is forced. It's precisely in this forced case where there is no free will: you are being compelled to move by forces beyond your internal state. "Forced" moves can have some shades of gray in chess as well. For example, you may be forced to sacrifice a piece to defend the Queen, because sometimes the game is just lost if you don't do so. So.. the rules of the games allow you do to something else, but you can't meaningfully choose if we suppose you're playing for winning. And, of course, you can only play legal moves: some board states have few legal moves left so you're comparatively less free. In those cases, you have your free will partially constrained. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/