6 ms·

I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from on

I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from one conscious perspective. Emotionally I don’t subscribe to this view. Rationally I do. My critique for rational people is that they don’t seem to fully take experience into account. It’s assumptions + rationality + experience/data + whatever strong inclinations one has that seems to be the full picture for me.

Retric 1y ago
> no free will That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. To an outside observer free will is indistinguishable from a random process over some range of possibilities. You aren’t going to randomly go to sleep with your hand in a fire, there’s some hard coded biology preventing that choice but that only means human behavior isn’t completely random, hardly a groundbreaking discovery. At the other end we have no issues making an arbitrary decision where there’s no way to predict what the better choice is. So what exactly does free will bring to the table that we’re missing without it? Some sort of mystical soul, well what if that’s also deterministic? Unpredictability is useful in game theory, but computers can get that from a hardware RNG based on quantum processes like radioactive decay, so it doesn’t mean much. Finally, subjectively the answer isn’t clear so what difference does it make?
- mettamage 1y ago
  > That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. Same as that is not the lived experience. I notice that I care about free choice. The idea that there's no free will may be a pessimistic outlook to some but to me it's a strictly neutral one. It used to be a bit negative, until I looked more closely that there's a difference between looking at a situation objectively and having a lived experience. When it comes to my inclinations and how I want to live life, lived experience takes precedence. I don't have my thoughts sharp on it, but I don't think the concept even exists philosophically, but I think that's also what you're getting at. It's a conceptual remnant from the past.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    "Free choice" is the first step towards the solution to this paradox: free will is what a deterministic choice feels like from the inside. The popular notion of free will is that our decisions are undetermined, which must imply that there is a random element to them. But though that is the colloquial meaning, it doesn't line up with what people say they want: you want to make your choice according to your own reasons. You want free choice. But unless your own reasoning includes a literal throw of the dice, your justifications deterministically decide the outcome. "Free will" is the ability to make your own choices, and for most people most of the time, those choices are deterministic given the options and knowledge available. Free will and determinism are not only compatible, but necessarily so. If your choices weren't deterministic, it wouldn't be free will.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      This is the position that is literally called compatibilist. But when you probe people, while a lot of people will argue in ways that a philosopher might call compatibilist, my experience is that people will also strongly resist the notion that the only options are randomness and determinism. A lot of people have what boils down to a religious belief in a third category that is not merely a combination of those two, but infuses some mysterious third options where they "choose" that they can't explain. Most of the time, people who believe there is no free will (and can't be), like me, take positions similar to what you described, that - again - a proponent of free will might describe as compatibilist, but sometimes we oppose the term for the reason above: A lot of people genuinely believe in a "third option" for choices are made. And so there are really two separate debates on free will: Does the "third option" exist or not, and does "compatibilist free will" exist or not. I don't think I've ever met anyone who seriously disagrees that "free will" the way compatibilists define it exists, so when compatibilists get into arguments over this, it's almost always a misunderstanding... But I have met plenty of people who disagree with the notion that things are deterministic "from the outside".
      - adastra22 1y ago
        It is stronger than compatibilism. Compatibilism argues that free will and determinism are orthogonal. The argument I summarized is that free will is and must necessarily imply determinism..
- moron4hire 1y ago
  [dead]
- paleotrope 1y ago
  Divorced from a religious context, it doesn't make any difference.
  - Retric 1y ago
    Which religious context, and why?
- sunshowers 1y ago
  I have much less patience for C++ than I would in a world with free will. Since there's no free will, outcomes are determined by luck, and what matters is how lucky we can make people through pit-of-success environments. Rust makes people luckier than C++ does. I also have much less patience for blame than I do in a world with free will. I believe, for example, that blameless postmortems lead to much better outcomes than trying to pretend people had free will to make mistakes, and therefore blaming them for those mistakes. You can get to these positions through means other than rejection of free will, but the most robust grounds for them are fundamentally deterministic.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    If there is no free will, then all arguments about what should be done are irrelevant, since every outcome is either predetermined or random, so you have no influence on whether the project at work will choose Rust or C++. This choice was either made 13 billion years ago at the Big Bang, or it is an entirely random process.
    - zzo38computer 1y ago
      > If there is no free will, then all arguments about what should be done are irrelevant, since every outcome is either predetermined or random, so you have no influence on whether the project at work will choose Rust or C++. This is not correct. Whether or not you have free will, stuff influences and is influenced by other stuff, so these arguments are not meaningless or worthless. > This choice was either made 13 billion years ago at the Big Bang, or it is an entirely random process. I had thought of this before, and what I had decided is that both of these are also independent of having free will. For example, if the initial state includes unknown and uncomputable transcendental numbers which can somehow "encode" free will and then the working of physics is deterministic, then it is still possible (although not necessarily mandatory) to have free will, even though it is deterministic.
    - Retric 1y ago
      Lack of free will doesn’t prevent logical arguments from seeming to work.
- vidarh 1y ago
  People get emotional about free will because if you come to believe there is no free will it makes you question a lot of things that are emotionally difficult. E.g. punishment for the sake of retribution is near impossible to morally justify if you don't believe in free will because it means you're punishing someone for something the had no agency over. Similarly, wealth disparities can't be excused by someone choosing to work harder, because they had no agency in the "decision". You can still justify some degree of punishment and reward, but a lack of free will changes which justifications are reasonable very substantially. E.g. punishment might still be justified from the point of view of reducing offending and reoffending rates, but if that is the goal then it is only justified to the extent that it actually achieves those goals, and that has emotionally difficult consequences. For example, for non-premeditated murders carried out out of passion rather than e.g. gang crimes, the odds of someone carrying out another is extremely low and the odds that the fear of a long prison sentence is an actual deterrence is generally low, and and so long prison terms are hard to justify once vengeance is off the table. And so holding on to a belief in free will is easier to a lot of people than the alternative. My experience is that there are few issues where people so easily get angry than if you suggest we don't have free will once they start thinking through the consequences (and some imagined ones...).
  - zzo38computer 1y ago
    I think that whether or not you have free will is not so important when making these considerations. Whether or not you have a choice and free will, you can influence and be influenced by other stuff, since that is how anything is doing. > punishment might still be justified from the point of view of reducing offending and reoffending rates, but if that is the goal then it is only justified to the extent that it actually achieves those goals I do agree with that, and I think that whether or not you have free will is not significant. Being emotionally difficult is not what makes it good or bad in this case (and it also does not seem to be so emotionally difficult to me, anyways). Reducing reoffending rates is what is important. (Another issue is knowing if they are actually guilty (you shouldn't arrest people who are not actually guilty of murder); this is not always certain, either.) I also think that it should mean that prisoners should not be treated badly and that prison sentences should not be too long. (Also, they shouldn't take up too much space by the prisons, since they should have free space for natural lands and for other buildings and purposes, but that is not quite the same issue, though.) However, there may be cases where a fine might be appropriate, in order to pay for damages (although if someone else is willing to forgive them then such a fine may not be required). This does not justify a prison sentence or stuff like that, though. Also, some people will just not like them anymore if they are accused of murder, even if they are not put in prison and not fined. This is not the issue for police and legal things; it is just what it will be. And, if it becomes known, people who disagree with the risk assessment can try to avoid someone. And, if someone does commit a crime again and may have opportunity to do again in future, then this can be considered as being wrong the first time and this time hopefully you can know better.
- TheAncientGeek 1y ago
  Randomness based free will still gives you a non-inevitable future.
  - Retric 1y ago
    So does a computer without free will acting on a physical RNG. Therefore it’s the RNG that matters not free will.
    - TheAncientGeek 1y ago
      For naturalistic libertarians , free.will is.partly constituted by indtermimksm, not something entirely different.
lisper 1y ago
If you get down to the quantum level there is no such thing as objective reality. Our perception that the world is made of classical objects that actually exist at particular places at particular times and have continuity of identity is an illusion. But it's a really compelling illusion, and you won't go far wrong treating it as if it were the truth in 99% of real-world situations. Likewise, free will is an illusion, nothing more than a reflection of our ignorance of how our brains work. But it is a really compelling illusion, and you won't go far wrong treating it as if it were the truth, at least some of the time.
- mettamage 1y ago
  > If you get down to the quantum level there is no such thing as objective reality. What do you mean by that? It still exists doesn't it? Albeit in a probabilistic sense that becomes non-probabilistic at larger scales. I don't know much about quantum other than the high level conceptual stuff.
  - lisper 1y ago
    > It still exists doesn't it? It's controversial, but here is the argument that the answer is "no": See https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf Or if you prefer a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
    - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      That's non sequitur. >Under QIT, a measurement is just the propagation of a mutually entangled state to a large number of particles. eyeroll so it's MWI in disguise, but MWI is quantum realism. Illusion they talk about is that the observed macroscopic state is a part of the bigger superposition (incomplete observation). But that's dumb, even if it's a part of a bigger state, it's still real, because it's not made up, but observed.
      - lisper 1y ago
dmbche 1y ago
Look into Chaos Theory - the universe is not deterministic, you're good. Or for a tldr look for the three body problem or try to find a solution to a double pendulum!
NoFunPedant 1y ago
I'd like to believe that there is no such thing as free will, but I just can't decide.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
“ There’s no free will and everything is determined.” Objects without free will aren’t able to come to conclusions like this.

Retric 1y ago

> no free will That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. To an outside observer free will is indistinguishable from a random process over some range of possibilities. You aren’t going to randomly go to sleep with your hand in a fire, there’s some hard coded biology preventing that choice but that only means human behavior isn’t completely random, hardly a groundbreaking discovery. At the other end we have no issues making an arbitrary decision where there’s no way to predict what the better choice is. So what exactly does free will bring to the table that we’re missing without it? Some sort of mystical soul, well what if that’s also deterministic? Unpredictability is useful in game theory, but computers can get that from a hardware RNG based on quantum processes like radioactive decay, so it doesn’t mean much. Finally, subjectively the answer isn’t clear so what difference does it make?

mettamage 1y ago
> That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. Same as that is not the lived experience. I notice that I care about free choice. The idea that there's no free will may be a pessimistic outlook to some but to me it's a strictly neutral one. It used to be a bit negative, until I looked more closely that there's a difference between looking at a situation objectively and having a lived experience. When it comes to my inclinations and how I want to live life, lived experience takes precedence. I don't have my thoughts sharp on it, but I don't think the concept even exists philosophically, but I think that's also what you're getting at. It's a conceptual remnant from the past.
- adastra22 1y ago
  "Free choice" is the first step towards the solution to this paradox: free will is what a deterministic choice feels like from the inside. The popular notion of free will is that our decisions are undetermined, which must imply that there is a random element to them. But though that is the colloquial meaning, it doesn't line up with what people say they want: you want to make your choice according to your own reasons. You want free choice. But unless your own reasoning includes a literal throw of the dice, your justifications deterministically decide the outcome. "Free will" is the ability to make your own choices, and for most people most of the time, those choices are deterministic given the options and knowledge available. Free will and determinism are not only compatible, but necessarily so. If your choices weren't deterministic, it wouldn't be free will.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    This is the position that is literally called compatibilist. But when you probe people, while a lot of people will argue in ways that a philosopher might call compatibilist, my experience is that people will also strongly resist the notion that the only options are randomness and determinism. A lot of people have what boils down to a religious belief in a third category that is not merely a combination of those two, but infuses some mysterious third options where they "choose" that they can't explain. Most of the time, people who believe there is no free will (and can't be), like me, take positions similar to what you described, that - again - a proponent of free will might describe as compatibilist, but sometimes we oppose the term for the reason above: A lot of people genuinely believe in a "third option" for choices are made. And so there are really two separate debates on free will: Does the "third option" exist or not, and does "compatibilist free will" exist or not. I don't think I've ever met anyone who seriously disagrees that "free will" the way compatibilists define it exists, so when compatibilists get into arguments over this, it's almost always a misunderstanding... But I have met plenty of people who disagree with the notion that things are deterministic "from the outside".
    - adastra22 1y ago
      It is stronger than compatibilism. Compatibilism argues that free will and determinism are orthogonal. The argument I summarized is that free will is and must necessarily imply determinism..
moron4hire 1y ago
[dead]
paleotrope 1y ago
Divorced from a religious context, it doesn't make any difference.
- Retric 1y ago
  Which religious context, and why?
sunshowers 1y ago
I have much less patience for C++ than I would in a world with free will. Since there's no free will, outcomes are determined by luck, and what matters is how lucky we can make people through pit-of-success environments. Rust makes people luckier than C++ does. I also have much less patience for blame than I do in a world with free will. I believe, for example, that blameless postmortems lead to much better outcomes than trying to pretend people had free will to make mistakes, and therefore blaming them for those mistakes. You can get to these positions through means other than rejection of free will, but the most robust grounds for them are fundamentally deterministic.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  If there is no free will, then all arguments about what should be done are irrelevant, since every outcome is either predetermined or random, so you have no influence on whether the project at work will choose Rust or C++. This choice was either made 13 billion years ago at the Big Bang, or it is an entirely random process.
  - zzo38computer 1y ago
    > If there is no free will, then all arguments about what should be done are irrelevant, since every outcome is either predetermined or random, so you have no influence on whether the project at work will choose Rust or C++. This is not correct. Whether or not you have free will, stuff influences and is influenced by other stuff, so these arguments are not meaningless or worthless. > This choice was either made 13 billion years ago at the Big Bang, or it is an entirely random process. I had thought of this before, and what I had decided is that both of these are also independent of having free will. For example, if the initial state includes unknown and uncomputable transcendental numbers which can somehow "encode" free will and then the working of physics is deterministic, then it is still possible (although not necessarily mandatory) to have free will, even though it is deterministic.
  - Retric 1y ago
    Lack of free will doesn’t prevent logical arguments from seeming to work.
vidarh 1y ago
People get emotional about free will because if you come to believe there is no free will it makes you question a lot of things that are emotionally difficult. E.g. punishment for the sake of retribution is near impossible to morally justify if you don't believe in free will because it means you're punishing someone for something the had no agency over. Similarly, wealth disparities can't be excused by someone choosing to work harder, because they had no agency in the "decision". You can still justify some degree of punishment and reward, but a lack of free will changes which justifications are reasonable very substantially. E.g. punishment might still be justified from the point of view of reducing offending and reoffending rates, but if that is the goal then it is only justified to the extent that it actually achieves those goals, and that has emotionally difficult consequences. For example, for non-premeditated murders carried out out of passion rather than e.g. gang crimes, the odds of someone carrying out another is extremely low and the odds that the fear of a long prison sentence is an actual deterrence is generally low, and and so long prison terms are hard to justify once vengeance is off the table. And so holding on to a belief in free will is easier to a lot of people than the alternative. My experience is that there are few issues where people so easily get angry than if you suggest we don't have free will once they start thinking through the consequences (and some imagined ones...).
- zzo38computer 1y ago
  I think that whether or not you have free will is not so important when making these considerations. Whether or not you have a choice and free will, you can influence and be influenced by other stuff, since that is how anything is doing. > punishment might still be justified from the point of view of reducing offending and reoffending rates, but if that is the goal then it is only justified to the extent that it actually achieves those goals I do agree with that, and I think that whether or not you have free will is not significant. Being emotionally difficult is not what makes it good or bad in this case (and it also does not seem to be so emotionally difficult to me, anyways). Reducing reoffending rates is what is important. (Another issue is knowing if they are actually guilty (you shouldn't arrest people who are not actually guilty of murder); this is not always certain, either.) I also think that it should mean that prisoners should not be treated badly and that prison sentences should not be too long. (Also, they shouldn't take up too much space by the prisons, since they should have free space for natural lands and for other buildings and purposes, but that is not quite the same issue, though.) However, there may be cases where a fine might be appropriate, in order to pay for damages (although if someone else is willing to forgive them then such a fine may not be required). This does not justify a prison sentence or stuff like that, though. Also, some people will just not like them anymore if they are accused of murder, even if they are not put in prison and not fined. This is not the issue for police and legal things; it is just what it will be. And, if it becomes known, people who disagree with the risk assessment can try to avoid someone. And, if someone does commit a crime again and may have opportunity to do again in future, then this can be considered as being wrong the first time and this time hopefully you can know better.
TheAncientGeek 1y ago
Randomness based free will still gives you a non-inevitable future.
- Retric 1y ago
  So does a computer without free will acting on a physical RNG. Therefore it’s the RNG that matters not free will.
  - TheAncientGeek 1y ago
    For naturalistic libertarians , free.will is.partly constituted by indtermimksm, not something entirely different.

lisper 1y ago

If you get down to the quantum level there is no such thing as objective reality. Our perception that the world is made of classical objects that actually exist at particular places at particular times and have continuity of identity is an illusion. But it's a really compelling illusion, and you won't go far wrong treating it as if it were the truth in 99% of real-world situations. Likewise, free will is an illusion, nothing more than a reflection of our ignorance of how our brains work. But it is a really compelling illusion, and you won't go far wrong treating it as if it were the truth, at least some of the time.

mettamage 1y ago
> If you get down to the quantum level there is no such thing as objective reality. What do you mean by that? It still exists doesn't it? Albeit in a probabilistic sense that becomes non-probabilistic at larger scales. I don't know much about quantum other than the high level conceptual stuff.
- lisper 1y ago
  > It still exists doesn't it? It's controversial, but here is the argument that the answer is "no": See https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf Or if you prefer a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    That's non sequitur. >Under QIT, a measurement is just the propagation of a mutually entangled state to a large number of particles. eyeroll so it's MWI in disguise, but MWI is quantum realism. Illusion they talk about is that the observed macroscopic state is a part of the bigger superposition (incomplete observation). But that's dumb, even if it's a part of a bigger state, it's still real, because it's not made up, but observed.
    - lisper 1y ago

dmbche 1y ago

Look into Chaos Theory - the universe is not deterministic, you're good. Or for a tldr look for the three body problem or try to find a solution to a double pendulum!

NoFunPedant 1y ago

I'd like to believe that there is no such thing as free will, but I just can't decide.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

“ There’s no free will and everything is determined.” Objects without free will aren’t able to come to conclusions like this.