3 ms·

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.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    In any case, it has no place in any meaningful discussion of quantum mechanics.
- dalmo3 5y ago
  That's how I see it too. Determinism for human action is very popular among science enthusiasts because we've decided that determinism elsewhere in science is true, and since our brains is part of the universe then it must also be deterministic. But we only perceive determinism insofar as we only measure what we're able to measure. Then you arrive at quantum probabilities, and it seems to me the multiverse theory is as scientific as believing quantum particles have free will.

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.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  In any case, it has no place in any meaningful discussion of quantum mechanics.
dalmo3 5y ago
That's how I see it too. Determinism for human action is very popular among science enthusiasts because we've decided that determinism elsewhere in science is true, and since our brains is part of the universe then it must also be deterministic. But we only perceive determinism insofar as we only measure what we're able to measure. Then you arrive at quantum probabilities, and it seems to me the multiverse theory is as scientific as believing quantum particles have free will.