Free Will: Does it Exist?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
594

Yes, when I saw this topic, I wondered about that. The question that most strongly recommends itself to me is, is this “will” a property of ‘the mind’, or of our conscious minds? I.e. of all of the mind, or just the bit of it that we’re aware of?

There are (many) other questions that we might also wish to answer, but to me this is the central one. There’s a lot of mentions here of “I”, and my will, so I just wanted to clarify who “I” am, in this topic/context. :wink:

So often people mean to limit their ideas to the conscious mind, neglecting all the rest…

595

I don’t remember either Patterner or PatternChaser addressing the other before. :smiley:

I assume our definitions and explanations for free will, mind and consciousness differ. Still, I think you’re right about this being an important question. And my answer is that free will is due to what you are calling the conscious mind:the bit of it that we’re aware of.

596

I think it quite clearly and evidently exists. There is a massive transparent gap between willingly raising your arm and having a doctor tap your sholder and your arm raising by mere reflex.

The problem is that explaining free will is impossible. We cannot introspect into its possibility, which makes determinism more appealing cause it allows you to deny something you cannot understand.

597

Maybe the mind is a property of the will.

598

Nice to make your acquaintance! :grinning_face:

An interesting thought. But, whether it’s so or not, doesn’t that just lead us to question what we mean by the words and terms we’re using here? :thinking:

599

Yes, I think that’s the essence of this thread, questioning what we mean with these words. There’s nothing wrong with that, It’s what Plato’s dialogues consist of.

1 Like
600

Isn’t it so, that if you believe you have no control over the experience, you’re hypocritical to claim to have the knowledge of ‘I’?

If you say, “I experience this, but it is determined”, isn’t that use of ‘I’ a contradiction?

(Taken from the closed thread in the Lounge).

601

Continuing the discussion from My Argument against Determinism:

Maybe replacing “negative” with “paradoxical” would have redeemed it?

So, if determinism is false, our actions thereby (lacking the requisite sense of agency) nonetheless cease to make a difference: cease to make the path of history distinct from that determined by some perfect physics; and if determinism is true then our actions (lacking the requisite sense) cease to make the difference which compatibilists claim results (albeit in accordance with physics) from the ‘free’ application of will.

Is either of these what Sartre et al mean by bad faith?

602

Perhaps is difficult to answer whether free will exists, as it’s in the same realm as consciousness.

For the hell of it, for discussion, I’ll confirm that my personal experience of will has an element of freedom to it.

Per risk of my vessel(the human body), and environment, there is a web-of-things I can do which only cost what I can afford (i.e. energy), which is already in my possession; I consider this ‘free will’.

And ‘I’, is definitely present, there something specific I refer to when using that pronoun.

603

Continuing the discussion from My Argument against Determinism:

Possessing an intent is a disposition to behave in some particular (or general) way. A disposition may or may not necessitate the behavior, but it at least makes it more likely. Behavior is a consequence of dispositions, some conflicting and some complementing.

A disposition could be programmed as a set of factors that contingently determine the committing of some action (e.g. a physical deed or a thought). A stronger disposition is more likely to result in the action. Complementary dispositions are collectively stronger;
conflicting dispositions weaker.

Imaginings are more difficult, but I’ll give it a shot (reserving the right to refine this later). They entail third order thoughts. First order thoughts entail the brain reacting to a stimulus by inducing a response (easily programmed). A second order thought entails consideration of the consequences (following a flow of logic, that may or may not be valid). A third order thought entails similar processes to second order thoughts, but in the absence of a current stimulus.

604

That’s kind of a compatibilist definition. An action is due to your will and not external compulsion. The libertarians want the action to not be a function of any physical process at all, distinguishing one from say a computer which chooses its actions based on physical state.

Don’t think so. I can say that I choose my experiences. I can choose to touch this hot thing and thus experience heat. No idea why experience would be any different than choosing some action, or why ‘I’ matters one way or another. If for some reason one doesn’t feel they have free will, they still would have an ‘I’ to meaningfully talk about.

Me too. But I use compatibilist definitions.

Even if it’s only a mental (subjective) construct, yes there’s something specific it refers to.

Our chosen actions make a difference regardless of determinism or lack of it. To say otherwise is to say that the action is in no way a function of our will, which is pretty easy to demonstrate otherwise. The agency is there. That’s not the question. I guess the question depends on definitions: what kind of agency we’re talking about. Is it free from physics?

Anyway, I agree that determinism being true or not is irrelevant to the case, despite so many harping on it.

605

But you agree it can be hard to be accurate around the topic of free will because, alike the topic of consciousness, we have no evidence?

606

I must have been unclear. I’ll try again.

So, this could be saying: if determinism is false in general, it could nonetheless be that by believing it true in general a person could end up failing to think non-deterministically, so that their thoughts and decisions were exactly as some perfect deterministic physics would in principle determine, moment to succeeding moment. Whereas, by hypothesis, other people believing determinism to be false in general might be making thoughts and decisions not determinable in principle by a perfect deterministic physics from one moment to the next.

Equally, if determinism is true in general but compatibilists are right to distinguish free will as a special kind of deterministic thought process, it could conceivably be the case that holding a (true) belief in determinism might somehow impair a person’s competence to conduct the special kind of thought, so that their actions became more easily predictable and perhaps manipulable.

Some of my brief and failed encounters with Sartre’s musings had left me curious as to where he would stand in the current debates of this kind. Hence my comment/question/shout-out about bad faith.

I don’t know what @I_dont_know will think of my intervention.

But yes,

I tend to assume that non-compatibilist libertarians must be hypothesising that some neural events are slightly out of reach of deterministic physics? Which may or may not be true. Is that the question you were saying is

? If so, then sure, I see that the hypothesis of non-determinism would be uninteresting to you.

607

Kant is a libertarian I take it? If so, then his free will is merely that we start a new chain of casual events in a domain we do not understand.

I don’t think physics tells us much here, regardless of the “physical” label. But I also wouldn’t say that free will is anti-natural, I don’t see a good reason to believe that.

608

I don’t know how anybody would go about choosing to think or not think deterministically. Perhaps you can give an example. On the other hand, one’s beliefs do affect one’s choices, so there’s that.

… so that their thoughts and decisions were exactly as some perfect deterministic physics would in principle determine,

This implies predictability, which is known false. Regardless of determinism or not, subsequent states are not predictable, at least not at the quantum level. On the classical level, yea, things are pretty predictable, and since vertebrae thought is implemented by classical means, it’s not unheard of to predict choices.

Nothing special about compatibilist FW. It just means your actions are your own, not compelled by something not you. Determinism is irrelevant to it. Libertarian FW seems to require the last 120 years of science to be wrong. A new theory is needed, and nobody seems interested in investigating it, because they know what they’ll find (besides unemployment).

They won’t always admit this, and again, it has to be out of reach of known physics, deterministic or not. That means all of quantum theory is wrong. But no, they try to wedge it into quantum uncertainty, except the theory does not allow deliberate collapse to non-random outcomes. If it did, one could send messages faster than light, send them to the past even.

Context was removed. It’s pretty easy to demonstrate that our will affects outcomes. What that has to do with non-determinism is unclear since it’s true regardless.

I had to look it up, but apparently so, yes. Kant also predates modern physics, so I care little about his assessments on the topic.

That sounds horrible. Who would want that? Imagine trying to cross the street safely by starting a new chain of events rather than letting the gaps in the traffic influence our choice of when to go.

Mind you, physics is full of uncaused events. They’re normal. Biological physiology doesn’t leverage them because they contain no useful information, so brains, much like a computer, are implemented with classically deterministic components. That’s what works.

But I also wouldn’t say that free will is anti-natural

Of course not. If it actually worked that way (shudder), then it would be natural by definition, which illustrates a funny dichotomy of the word ‘natural’ in science. Naturalism kind of presumes that what we know is natural, instead of how it is being natural. The dark ages ended when magic stopped being presumed as an explanation for what was unexplained. So where’s the line? It’s magic if there’s no testable theory behind it. God of the gaps and all that.

609

If we say that free will, is simply that I in at least some sense, decided it. I obviously didn’t decide my birth, my parents, my nationality, and the very basic circumstances that I find myself in, having arrived on this earth.

Constantly, and always through life I must negotiate with the environment, other people, and my own capacities when attempting to make decisions. I cannot always do what I decide because the world doesn’t let me, because people don’t let me, or because I am personally incapable of it. I need to have the facts, and know what to do with them to be able to make decisions properly, or discern how to enact them. False information, or false reasoning processes complicate or prevent the proper formation of and enacting of my decisions.

I think that “wanted it”, is a little difficult, or more complicated an idea than decided it. Because I may decide to do plenty of things I don’t want to, that people or the environment is not necessarily forcing me to do. Daily chores, doing something scary, or that gives me anxiety, and the very complicated struggle with ourselves over cravings, biological drives, appetites, desires and addictions. We can want things, that we decide not to do, because we have concluded those wants to be unreasonable inappropriate, or bad consequentially. Conversely, we may chose to do things we don’t want to, because we have concluded them to be reasonable, appropriate, or good consequential.

Will power is something of a finite resource. It can be whittled away, so that resistance to outside influence, or our own cravings or immediate impulses is less. It can also be strengthened, and fortified against those things.

So, I do believe that we have free will, with respect to somethings, sometimes, and to varying degrees, yes.

610

Well predictability is known false, but I didn’t imply it? Or at least I tried to avoid the implication by saying what I said. If you bear that in mind, will you be able to grok the rest of the sentence?

According to determinism there is, in principle, a unique path from one moment to the next that a perfect physics would, in principle if not in practice, predict. We say ‘determined’ to mean ‘predicted in principle by the physics being true about the world even though prediction in practice is proved impossible’. Don’t we? Or how is a chaotic system deterministic yet unpredictable?

Then, if, by hypothesis, free will is the intervention of uncaused causes (insights, decisions etc) into an otherwise deterministic sequence of events or global states, then it’s plausible and interesting to conceive of the free will ceasing to occur, leaving the history of events exactly as determined (predicted in principle) uniquely by the perfect physics.

That such a cessation might follow from a belief in determinism would then suggest further questions with a flavour of paradox. Hence my suggested tweak of the OP.

611

I took your comment (an answer to ‘how does one choose to act deterministically or not?’) to say: “Predict what determinism says I’ll do and choose that, or choose otherwise”. It’s the predicting part that cannot be done. Not even Laplace’s demon (full access to state and infinite resources) can predict itself, or predict anything which it affects.

Determinism is not about prediction. It says that a given initial state (and a closed system) will evolve over time identically, every time. That wording is more or less in line with the official definitions. There’s no in-principle about it either. All the non-deterministic interpretations involve randomness, but never deliberate (information bearing) collapses.

So ‘determined’ means some future state is inevitable. The alternative is that the future state involves randomness, but in neither case can one choose other than how the system is to evolve. So if a future state might randomly be A,B,C,D, one cannot choose C. It’s up to the dice, not you. In this sense, there is no libertarian free will under quantum theory.

Or how is a chaotic system deterministic yet unpredictable?

Chaotic systems are unpredictable because 1) they evolve faster than can be simulated, and 2) they require knowledge of exact state to infinite precision, which is impossible twice over.

Whether free will works or not is not a function of one’s beliefs. Laws as we know them are descriptive, not proscriptive. So if it works, the laws as we know them (all of quantum theory, deterministic or not) is wrong. Start over. Retrocausality is back on the menu, boys.

612

Do you think there is a difference between someone “deciding” which choice to make, and, say, a rock rolling down a hill? If the rock hits a patch of sands that leans to one side, it’s course will probably be affected. If it hits a slab of slate leaning to one side at three same Sandler o, it’s course will probably be affected more stringless strongly. Those seem like weaker and stronger dispositions. The rock encounters thousands or millions of dispositions on the way down, and it ends up where they all sum up.

Do human intentions amount to the same thing, and what we think about it all is an epiphenomenon?

No backsies!!

Ok

Is the stimulus of a 2nd order thought a 1st order thought? We’re thinking about the consequences of the 1st order thought?

3rd order thoughts are uncaused?

613

Yes. You said predict, not me, in that context.