You Do Not Have Free Will

General Philosophy
1

Hey everyone,

I have noticed overtime that us humans sometimes accept concepts that we do not understand well. And that is fine honestly, for tons of reasons. But there are some concepts that… before even talking about understanding, we fail to properly conceptualize. Yet we believe in them. Free will is one of these concepts to me.

Disclaimer: Whenever I think of something, I look for the purest form of the idea. That is what do we mean to express at a core by this word or expression. I am aware that people have their own definitions, but what I am aiming to address here is the purest form of “free will” I was able to identify, which subsequently should underlie most if not all individual definitions that do not straight up change the concept.

There are various ways people define free will. The most straight forward way is “control over one’s actions,” which is something we have. Yes, if that is how you define free will, then we have it. I am controling my fingers to type this very sentence, and every day I perfectly control my body to get by. I am moving according to what I want without problem every single day. And I will continue to do so. The real question is: “Do I choose what I want?” Or “Why do I want what I want?” The problem with free will isn’t “Why did you carry out murder?” But rather “Why did you even want to carry it out?” Given that you would naturally carry anything out controllably… as long as you decide to do so.

At a core it seems to me that we use free will to refer to: “The ability of a thinking agent to make decisions freely, aka uninfluenced.” Not to be confused with carrying out an action freely. Indeed, free will happens in the mind. I perceive it to serve the purpose of achieving near-full absolute responsibility for one’s actions, such that, for instance, justice / punishment (whether divine or human) would be warranted in the absolute.

The problem is the following: it is impossible for an agent to be uninfluenced.

If you disagree with that here is the actual reasoning:

Let’s suppose you have a choice (equivalent to your want) to make between two or more alternatives.

Your choice is based on a natural number x of factors (whether finite or infinite).

Your choice is either predictable / deterministic, (a) or unpredictable (b). Under a deterministic lense, all these factors together fully determine your choice. You may be in control of all the factors leading to your choice, and therefore in hypothetical perfect control of your choice. But were you in control of each and every factor behind those factors? Perhaps, but were you in control of the factors of the factors of the factors (3 layers back)? You will eventually reach a stage where the factors behind your ultimate decision were out of your control (such as when you were a baby). Thus, under determinisim, you cannot have absolute free will.

Under (b), we may not be able to reduce your choice to a number of factors x. Also, there may still be at least one factor behind your choice, but however many they are, it may not be enough to predict your choice. This is equivalent to saying that knowing ALL relevant information is NOT enough to know the outcome (if there is even any information or factor to be known). The only case scenario that I have seen in life where this happens is when randomness is involved. When there is randomness, there can be uncertainty even in the face of perfect knowledge. And if a process is fully random, then there is a complete lack of knowledge regarding its outcome. Thus under (b), your choice is at least partially random, meaning even you would be unable to predict it. That may pass the test of uninfluence, but it voids you of your agency, nullifying the free will of such a choice.

If you disagree with the outcome of (b), then I challenge you to tell me what else could possibly induce unpredictability without it being randomness. Remember, any reasoning, information, or causality / factor of any kind behind your choice hinders absolute free will. Randomness too. What else is out there? I’ll wait.

In short, it is impossible to choose one’s want from scratch, and thus despite perfect control of the actions we carry out, we do not have any complete control over the decisions to carry such actions.

If you did, something in logic and reality would probably break.

This bothers a lot of people because if someone didn’t choose to want bad things, how can you fairly punish them for it? Well, reality doesn’t work mike we want… and justice is a very human concept.

But hey, let’s not despair. If our wants are that uncontrolled, at least once we have them, we can decide what to do to satisfy them. I posit that people constantly choose the best path forward they can come up with (the best path to satisfy their wants based on the efforts they’re willing to put in and based on what they know). But sometimes, we aren’t able to reach what we’re technically capable of. The efforts we’re willing to put in may be too low, and we find ourselves straying from the optimal path we found. To me, the ability to stick with that optimal path is the true free will we should pursue. The one I like to call practical free will. Not some grand impossible cosmic version, but rather a very down to earth attempt at being the best versions of ourselves, and succeeding. The ability to consistently carry out the best actions we can come up with, based on what we happen to want to achieve in life.

2

I met this argument in the exercise section of a book on logic. Either it’s determinism or it’s randomness. Amd here endeth our first lesson.

The Epicureans floated what they called a swerve, unpredictable motion in atoms. They were materialists, compatibilists.

The Lbiet experiment conducted in the 1980s has results that are ominous (our bodies seem to move before we intend to). He drew a lot of criticism but I believe his paper is available for all who want to read it.

1 Like
3

I don’t understand your proposed division. “Control over one’s actions” implies an agent which controls, usually it’s referred to as “self” or “I”. And if there is an agent, which controls the actions, then the agent must choose or else it is not properly “in control”. If it is forced by deterministic powers, then it is not in control. Therefore, “control over one’s actions” implies, and makes it logically necessary, that the controller chooses. So I believe the separation you propose is illogical.

The absolutely “free” choice could have no factors leading to it, so I agree that this is a deterministic lens. We must reject this description, and the infinite regress you refer to as irrelevant for “free choice” to be properly conceived. The necessity of “factors” is a deterministic assumption.

I think we may need to define “random”. Generally, it is a descriptive term, implying that the cause of the act cannot be determined, or even that there is no cause. So for example, in radioactive decay the exact nucleus which will disintegrate, or reduce itself to radiation, is impossible to predict, therefore it is described as “random”. On the other hand, some people talk about “random chance”, as if it is a cause. In this case, a person might say “the cause of that quantum fluctuation was random chance”. To use “randomness” as a descriptive term, and to use “randomness” as a causal explanation, are two different ways of using the term.

It appears you use “random” in the descriptive sense. As such, I don’t see how your conclusion “it voids you of your agency”, is valid. The choice may only appear to be random, because the act of the agent, the act of choice, is not empirically observable. The uninfluenced act of the agent may be completely unobservable, even to the individual subject making the choice, rendering the action describable as “random”, but still caused by the agent. Being unable to predict one’s own actions does not void a person of their agency, it only means that the person does not understand one’s own agency.

4

I think a lot of of the work in your argument is actually being done by a few assumptions that I’d like to examine first.

The ability of a thinking agent to make decisions freely, aka uninfluenced.

Why should “free” mean “uninfluenced”? I mean that already seems to settle the debate before the argument even began. Most of our decisions are influenced in one way or another. To me the question is what kind matters and what kind doesn’t.

Your choice is based on a natural number x of factors

Again here you left me wondering what counts as a factor. Are beliefs,desires, reasons,habits,emotions,values and social pressure all factors? They don’t all seem to function in the same way so lumping them together risks explaining very little.

any reasoning, information, or causality / factor of any kind behind your choice hinders absolute free will.

This surprised me the most. Why should reasoning reduce freedom? I’d almost be inclined to say the opposite. If my action follows from the reason I endorse rather than from coercion or compulsion that seems like a stronger case for agency.

So in my opinion before getting to determinism or randomness I think I’d first those concepts unpacked a bit. At the moment terms like “factor”, "influence"and “free” seem to be doing a lot of work without being explained

5

Influence is not a full-override. Influence is a partial bias.

I may be over or under the influence.

If I’m under the influence, I make lesser choices, by the command of the influencer.

However, decisions I make under the influence are not without my control.

I have first decided on this burden (the influencer’s bias), and decisions I make are made under that weight.

6

Sure. And what cannot be boiled down to influence must be randomness is what I am saying. The control you speak of is undefined. Nobody has been able to tell me what it actually is if neither determined somewhere down the road or random.

7
  1. I differentiate between control over one’s wants and control over one’s actions. No it is not illogical. I establish that you do have control over your actions, given that you know what you want (which is tied to who you are). But, you do not have control over what you want, as that cannot be chosen. To choose what you want you would need to want to want something. And to choose to want to want something, you would need to want to want to want that thing… I hope you see the problem.

In short, you just are a certain way. Given that you want something, you will freely go and get it. But at a core free will isn’t eating a fruit, it’s the very decision of doing so. And that rests on wanting to do so, which nobody chooses.

  1. Sure, I agree that I sort of impose these factors on the reader. But my point with (b) is that the alternative to let’s say having any factor cause a decision is randomness. So I do allow you to posit the absence of factors. It’s just that even then, it still does not help the free will case. If you reject that, please explain to me how your decision can rest on nothing (the absence of ANY factor), without being random. If there are some factors, but they do not fully determine your decision, then what else does, if not some randomness?

  2. Now, you say don’t think that said descriptive randomness actually hinders free will. You say it may be that the choice of someone could only appear random while not actually being random? I am saying it IS random if not deterministic. If it is not, but could be coming from the person, how does that work? If there is no way to verify or falsify this sort of fuzzy 3rd alternative, then it may as well not exist. But even if it did, it doesn’t make actual logical sense to my brain. You would call a being that doesn’t know or understand their own decision an “agent?” To me agency rhymes with control. And not knowing or understanding one’s decisions that are still somehow not deterministic nor random doesn’t sound like control to me. It sounds like a fuzzy undefinied concept.

That is why the control free will proponents talk about seems so illusory to me. It is undefined. It’s like magic. We just choose “freely?” Even when we have no idea how? Or especially when we have no idea how… because knowing why may undermine free will under the terms I previously discussed.

8

  1. I agree. Free does not need to mean uninfluenced. This is what I identify the most “pure” idea behind free will to be. You may believe in a more watered down version like the practical free will I talk about at the end. That is not what I am treating of in this post.

  2. We can group factors however we like. How we group them is subjective and doesn’t matter. But whether it is beliefs, desires, reasons, habits, emotions, values or social pressure, ANYTHING will trace back to factors outside of your control… partly because these factors may even define you. So before there is a you to be free, that same you couldn’t have caused themselves to be. That is why those factors are outside of “your” control. And I don’t see why it would explain very little simply because there are lots of different factor… some of them may have stronger explanatory powers than others in various situations. If they are a factor, it just means they contribute to a decision. I don’t really see the problem here, unless that was more of a comment than a critique.

  3. I said that these things hinder free will (in this context uninfluenced decisions) exactly because they are influences. A reason to make a decision makes that decision predictable (specifically by factors ultimately outside their control), and thus strengthen the deterministic view. It is by no mean a bad thing, but whether coerced or rational, a predictable choice outside of one’s control hinders uninfluence. All of this in an absolute lens. If we considered this from a more local perspective, everything changes.

Please keep in mind that I am treating of a general concept. That is why those terms remain general. Remember, I am treating of what I think we mean by free will at a core. I find that unpacking those concepts adds very little to the actual argument being made, but who knows. In reality, I consider rational decisions to be essential part of that practical free will I talked about (an example of a local perspective on free will). Those are just two different “free wills” so to speak.

9

In a way empirical data may someday get us to a point where science rejects the very concept of choice… that would be a wild era to live in :sob:

1 Like
10

That’s compatibilist FW. There are those that spin it differently, saying that my finger movements is due to evolution of physical state. I disagree with that spin since it’s likely that your will and physical state are not separate things. The counter only has teeth if the will is not physical and has no control over it, but that’s epiphenomenalism.

Anyway, your definition above seems to define what will is, not distinguishing will from free will. To me, that distinction is the real question, and my answer to it is: Given definitions where the two are distinct, no, I don’t think my will is free, and I cannot see how anybody would want it since it makes one not fit. Evolution would not select for it.

That’s a meta-question, and it seems wrong to say it’s the real question since it leads to infinite regress: Do I choose how to choose what I want?

So for the murder question, it’s not why you did it. The point it, you presumably chose to do it, not something else. Legally, that’s enough. If you were compelled by outside circumstances, then it probably isn’t murder.

That’s just it. FW seems required for divine responsibility. That’s the reason it is rationalized. It seems to serve no other purpose. It requires that my body doesn’t choose my own action, but rather my controller (the entity that gets held responsible by the divine entity) is doing the choosing. It reduces a human to an avatar, all that brain for nothing since the work is contracted out to something else.

This can’t be right. Choices should always be influenced by the situation at hand. I cannot think of a choice better made without such consideration.

Predictable by what? Humans are pretty predictable in short duratins. But perhaps you’re talking about predictable by something like Laplace’s demon which can perfectly predict the future, the demon being outside of physics. It can for instance just look at subsequent states given a block universe because it’s just sitting there open to being viewed.

Another meta-question.

Nothing to do with determinism. The same reasoning goes for the alternative: randomness. You’ve no more control over that. It does not open any doors to what you’re now calling ‘absolute free will’ instead of just calling free vs normal will.

Maybe you can. Maybe you can choose who you want to be born as, kind of like choosing which movie to watch, which protagonist to relate to. Makes sense given that you’re going to be judged for this choice in some afterlife, and physics doesn’t allow you to exert your will after making this one choice.

Did they mention that this distinction is irrelevant? Randomness yields no more freedom than does determinism.

The Epicureans floated what they called a swerve, unpredictable motion in atoms.

Unpredictable is part of theory. Determinism is not. We don’t know. The two words mean different things.

The Lbiet experiment conducted in the 1980s has results that are ominous (our bodies seem to move before we intend to).

That’s probably because in the end, choices are not enacted by the conscious part of you, but rather the subconscious, which is the boss. It may or may not take suggestions from the conscious part, but the driver has final word, so you begin to act, and then only become aware of it.

11

Without wings, brains, air molecules, fluid dynamics etc. birds couldn’t fly.

I think free will is enabled by our ability to be conscious of things, e.g. aware of our desires and beliefs about our situations, options, probable outcomes etc.

A belief is a mental representation, i.e. an abstraction of something that it represents, e.g. a situation, available options, and probable outcomes. Beliefs form a layer of abstraction between the physically determined situation in which one lives, and forthcoming situations.

Conscious awareness is an ontologically subjective domain in which we can form abstractions, compare them, and freely (e.g. arbitrarily or by inferences) decide whether to act etc. I think this is compatible with a physical and causally deterministic world.

12

I do not buy into compatibilist FW either.

I get that it feels wrong but if the answer to that question is obvious, then see the question as a way do demonstrate intuitive knowledge. I can’t prove that we can’t want to want, but this is meant to show why it just doesn’t seem to be possible and thus why in the bigger picture nothing is fully free (there is always influence).

And you understand my point exactly.

Yeah legally that’s enough. I think human justice should serve to protect society from criminals and rehabilitate people. Not punish for the sake of punishing. I would argue that nothing is fully justified to punish for the sake of punishing, since it would be akin to punishing a toaster for making toast, if decisions are ultimately the result of influence. Again, I am speaking in the absolute.

Yes, predictable by a sort of all-knowing being. That is why I use the term deterministic. But you call down below whether deterministic or not, the alternative framework won’t allow a decision to lack of influence in the absolute

Yeah exactly. Your tone is critical, but so far you seem to just repeat / agree with my points I am confused.

So here you are just shifting the problem. First off who is “you” before you are born? But let’s suppose “you” had a soul and could choose to be born somewhere. Okay, on what criterions do you make that decision? And did you choose to want to to value those criterions? No. Hence after my argument I believe the conclusion stands.

To me it’s either one accepts that choosing to want something is impossible, thus absolute free will goes down the drain, or one rejects it. But then good luck explaining how choosing what to want makes any sense and isn’t just denial or magic or faith and wishful thinking.

13

Then you are talking about the free will of carrying out actions: You are aware of what you want, so you go and get it. I agree. My whole point is that choosing what one wants is critical for absolute free will specifically, not just any concept of free will.

Same thing I just said right above. I think you’re right but it seems to me this is not the same free will I am talking about.

14

But you seem to, per your OP:

Compatibilist FW is just that: Control over one’s actions, and you say we have that, and I agree. Maybe you think you have more than that, but that doesn’t make the compatibilist definition wrong.

This is distinct from compulsion, for example, “Sign this document or we kill you child”, and example of will that is not free, and thus not legally binding.

You make it sound like lack of influence is a good thing, or at least that especially some definitions of libertarian free will describes a good thing.

Whole nuther topic. What I am is a mental convention, so before conception (not birth) I could arguably be a horny thought by my parents. What I am to myself is again a mental convention, seemingly lacking in physical backing. Am I the person that did deed X yesterday? It’s not hard to argue against that, but the justice system doesn’t care about philosophy, they care about that shared convention.

OK, a dualist might posit a classical immaterial mind waiting for a body to possess, but I think most suggest it is created along with the body, nonexistent before conception. That view is also not hard to challenge. For one, the world is probably not classical, and so many professional philosophers don’t take that into consideration.

15

Good points, but I think this is more of an argument against voluntarist conceptions of freedom than of freedom per se.

Obviously, a choice conditioned by absolutely nothing will be arbitrary, and in essence random.

2 Likes
16

This boils down to ones belief on the concept of a soul. And if a soul exists, where it lies in relation to the body and physical stimuli.

If there is no soul, the question comes down to your definition of free will.

However if there is a soul, then you must define how it exists. If it exists “through” the body, or the body being an agent, then the free will of the soul becomes “tainted” and influenced by an uncountable number of things.

17

But this is what is illogical. A person does not need to know what one wants in order to have control over one’s actions. We can, and do act, without knowing what is wanted form that act. But this doesn’t mean we do not have control over our acts. Furthermore, it doesn’t make sense to think that a person could have control over what one wants, that’s not human nature. We can however have control over how our wants influence our choices. So I really cannot see the problem.

I think that this is your mistaken premise. At the core of free will, is that one can make decisions free from the influence of what one wants. That’s what “free” means here. If one’s choices were determined by what one wants, this would be determinism.

My point was that this is not “randomness”. It appears like randomness because the outcome of the choice would be an act which appears to be without a cause. It is not randomness though because an agent selected it. But this does not necessitate the conclusion that the agent was caused to make that selection.

This is nonsense. You are just saying that if we can’t see it, we might as well assert that it doesn’t exist. The fact is that it is not “fuzzy” at all, but a very clear option. We simply assume that the nature of time is such that it provides very real possibilities as time passes. And, for any specific possibility to be actualized, it needs to be chosen. The choice must be free from prior causation, or else the actualization would be predetermined, and not a real possibility. Therefore what does the choosing is a free will agent. The action which follows from the choice appears to be, and would be described by some, as random, but it is not, because it is selected.

You said that an agent must have knowledge of its actions. I said that one could act without such. Control over your actions does not require having knowledge of what you are doing. This is what Socrates demonstrated in a number of platonic dialogues, people are doing things without knowing what they are doing.

If the capacity to freely choose from a world of possibilities is magic, then what’s the point in trying to take the magic out of life? Isn’t life magical to you?

18

Words seem to be a barrier to our understanding here. By control over one’s action, I am referring to being able to raise my hand if I want to. It’s all that I mean. But compatibilists attempt to imply more than this rudimentary observation by the notion of control. This is a reasoning trap. I said in my post that the goal of proponents of absolute free will is to justify punishment as just by giving enough responsibility to the agent. But being able to follow through what I want with an action does not justify punishment if the want is not within my control. So what I said, despite the way I am phrasing it, is not compatibilist.

If you want to argue that I am doing mental gymnastics, and that I shouldn’t even distinguish between control over one’s actions and control over one wants, then sure forget about what I said then. I find the distinction useful, but we can also just say that if you don’t control your wants, then you don’t control your actions. The word control just shifts meaning a little bit here.

I don’t care whether it is a good thing or not. That’s irrelevant to what I am arguing.

19

A soul in this context seems to me like a cop-out. Until it is defined and explained (like how it solves the problem), it appears to be a fuzzy way to avoid the binary setup I laid out and keep an agent’s want undeterministic without any actual proper reason.

Indeed.

Exactly yeah!

20

So you do agree with me that in a rudimentary way, we control our actions (meaning I can decide to physically jump if I want). You also do agree with me that we cannot choose what we want. The only way you could be misunderstanding me is missing the fact that I am talking about absolute free will which I defined as uninfluenced agency across the board. So you or your wants being influenced do stand in the way of that. I am using a specific definition. Please read carefully.

First off, I reject your claim that one can make a decision independent of what they want. I believe we always do what we want → most ← in a given situation. The reason you feel as though you go against your want is because people have multiple wants that are sometimes contradictory with each other. If you truly do not want something at all and still do it, like waking up to go to work in the morning you do it out of coercion.

That being said, you are free to disagree about what the more core or pure concept of free will is. I told you that I am addressing what I think pure free will is. Your proposed definition is not the most fundamental idea behind free will. It is merely your specific idea about free will.

You are just saying words here, respectfully. You are saying my setup is not binary. So you are proposing a 3rd alternative. Here is the problem: As I have explained in other replies under this post, I have still yet to see this 3rd alternative defined. It is precisely why this is an illusion for free will proponents. I am saying the person deciding is not an agent because in real life, lack of predicatabilty ALWAYS correlates with randomness. So the person’s decision either has factors (which make it predictable when known) or is random, making them NOT an agent. If you disagree, don’t just say words but define properly this 3rd alternative and explain how it works. Even better, give me just 1 example of an unpredictable situation in real life that is unpredictable by virtue of something other than hazard / randomness. You will simply not be able to.

Is this your attempt at defining it? If so, I am not quite sure what you are talking about and what time has to do with it. But it seems you are saying that we can freely choose from a world of possibilities. Again, those are just words, respectfully. I would even go as far as saying it is wishful thinking. The problem is on what basis does one chooses. If there are factors / reasons behind it, then knowing these factors / reasons allow one to predict your choice, making it deterministic (thus absolute free will – the thing I am talking about and NOT your personal definition, goes down the drain). If factors / reasons alone do not determine your choice, then it must be random. If you disagree, read what I said above and show me what else there is.

I define magic to be “something with no explanation whatsoever.” If even God wouldn’t be able to tell you how it works, then it’s magic. And I do not believe in magic. I think everything is ultimately understandable.