If this is the argument you want to make, then lets follow it down the rabbit hole: Who says that your subconscious isn't making choices of its own free will? Picking a wide variety or narrow variety of animals seems a bit irrelevant as to whether 'a choice was made' or 'no choice was made'. It seems to me you have circled around to refute your first idea that the 'self' doesn't exist, and instead identified the 'self' which makes 'free will choices' is the subconscious.

Edit: Almost missed this juicy bit:
Interesting idea - I think if this could be proven I for one might be inclined to agree with there not being free will. Any thoughts on how to prove this is true?



Just to beef up the discussion a little more, above it seems like all choices are either made of free will or not - why can't some choices be made deterministically and some other choices be made of an expression of free will? I would say that even if 999 out of 1000 "choices" are deterministically made or somehow not made of free will, that last 1/1000 (choose your rarity) seems awfully hard to conclusively disprove. If I take a look at my day, I'm not very much bothered if choosing to have a Coke or a can of Orange Soda isn't made of my own free will, but I would be quite distressed if somehow I hadn't chosen to marry of my own free will. To me, not all choices are created equal, and as long as the important ones are made of free will, then I would say that free will is also important and meaningful. Can this meditation provide some guidance on something more meaningful?

Man being unable to want what he wants also seems quite dubiously asserted and not supported. Better yet - why does it even matter what man wants, if free will can be expressed by choosing to not act to gain what he wants? Restraint is presumably a choice and expression of free will.

Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Sep 11 2024, 1:41 pm by Vrael.

Did you just disprove God exists? (sorry, just had to)

On a more serious note, your argument is based on an omniscient being existing. We have no evidence that such a being exists (if you don't count the bible).

Also I don't necessarily agree that because the being knows what you're gonna do, that your choice is predetermined (in the past). I imagine it more like a power that can look into the future. It will know the result, but not determine the result.

But in the end, the point is moot, because it's a fantasy construct anyway, we can't know the rules.

Yes, so the answer to if we have free will or not is really going to be some consequence of how you answer the question: "Do we have a 'self' which is 'outside of' the observable universe?"

If you answer no, then (assuming the universe follows a set of rules which governs the behaviours of everything - including us) in that case, the answer is no, we don't have free will.

^^There are caveats to this however, in the sense of quantum randomness. This indicates that actually no, the universe doesn't exactly always behave the same way all the time - it 'flips coins' continually, on usually inconsequential levels.

But you're right: you could try to convolute the existence of these into some semblance of free will, but ultimately if it's not up to us how quantum fluctuations fluctuate, then in this view we aren't exercising free will.

Some addendums to the trains of thought: As Vrael points out, we might as well just examine the 1/1000 decisions we make that are supposedly free, if we assume that some decisions are free and others not. I don't think this changes the core ideas of what we're considering though if we just think "modulo the string of consequences which follow decisions made via free will"

The thing is then, if we go to what I think is the real question "Do we have a 'self' which is 'outside of' the observable universe," we quickly get outside of the scope things we know how to test. We would ideally concoct theories which would give an answer to this and then make some observations to test them, narrowing down which theories work and which don't. If you can do figure out how to do that in a systematic, rigorous way, then sure - but I don't think anyone knows how.

I don't think people should dismiss God so out of hand when it comes to these questions though.

As a side note: I do believe we have a self which is outside the observable universe which can exercise free will in regards to some things and can't in regards to others. For instance: God doesn't influence our inconsequential decision, like if there's a pothole on the road and you go around it to the right or left. But other decisions we make are inseparable from God's influence on us, and do not fall into the category of what we would consider free will. It's pretty clear in the bible, imo, that God can do things to us which causes us to do things which we, apart from God's intervening, would not (could not) do.

Zoan I understand you believe in those things but I already know those things not to be true. I know the Christian god of the bible is a work of fiction via biblical scholarship of the New Testament (I challenge you to watch some of biblical scholar Bart Ehrman's videos on Youtube.) The bible is written by humans of that time for humans of that time, it is far from inerrant and rarely profound, and, in fact, often grotesque. Not that there's anything amazing about inerrancy in the first place. Look, here's an innerant sentence right now: One plus one equals two.

And the soul concept is rejected simply through my studies of psychology, where we find the brain, an organ in the material world, wholly responsible for every aspect of our personality, our intelligence, our memories - everything. Anything ever ascribed to be the soul's purview has always been found in the brain.

So it would be a waste of time to entertain these already disproven hypotheses any further, from my point of view.

Yes, that is correct, and that is what so many people reject. They claim to be the ones in control when they are not. It is subconscious forces that make every decision. We merely have the illusion of control. Many people who claim we have free will reject this.

The illusion of self and illusion of free will are interconnected concepts. Yes, we can prove it is true experientially. Ie, if you just listen to me honestly right now, I will show you how to do it.

Now meditation is a skill, like golfing. You might not succeed in actually doing it, but hopefully I can explain how to do it and you can at least understand the concept even if you can't achieve the experience yourself.

One more disclaimer, the word self can be a source of confusion. Let's get our definitions right. When I'm saying illusion of self I'm NOT saying that there's no such thing as you Vrael, and me Oh_Man. Yes, we are separate "selves" occupying different positions in space.

The illusion of self is more accurately described as one's tendency to identify themselves with their own perceptual thoughts. THAT is the illusion.

When meditating, try to 'pull back' from these thoughts. It's sometimes described as "look at the one who is looking". IF you try to only focusing on your breathing (pure sensation) you SHOULD be able to soon realise that thoughts are just coming and going in your head. They arise, and then they disappear. And then another thought arises. You have ZERO control over what thought is going to pop into your head next. You're basically just a witness. Sometimes, you can get lost in thought, because thoughts are often chained together with other thoughts. You have to then realise 'oh wait, I was lost in thought' and return back to the sensations of breathing. And you shouldn't be lingering on self-judgment "god damn it, I was supposed to be meditating, instead I was thinking about what I should have for dinner" because that in itself is just becoming lost in thought again. You have to try and calmly accept you were lost in thought and then return back to trying to just experience sensation.

Another analogy is it's like we are mirrors. We can reflect these thoughts, but we never become these thoughts. This can actually give you a lot of power over your own mind. People who are under the illusion of identifying with their thoughts as their self get wrapped up in guilt or angst over having thoughts they are not supposed to have, or being angry all day, etc. This all comes from identifying with your thought. Remember, a mirror does not become ugly when something ugly stands in front of it. It is merely reflecting that which is in front of it. Picture these thoughts now: red bus, the first president of the US, a burning candle. These are just thoughts. They come into your brain as I put them there, and then they go again. How can they be what you are?



This is a guided meditation you can do where he tries to get you to realise this.

This realisation doesn't mean there's no such thing as a choice, or that one should embrace fatalism. It just means understanding what we truly are: we're just a field of consciousness, our every action dictated by our past experiences and genetic makeup, of which we have zero control of either. The reality we see, we're just perceiving it through our senses and our brain is creating a representation of it in our consciousness.

I will wrap up with a real life example of what happened to me just today. I was leaving my workplace, last one out as usual. I got halfway down the stairs when I realised my bladder was kinda full. This literally stopped me dead in my tracks for a couple seconds while my dumbass slowly weighed up the options. Do I double back up the stairs and relieve myself so I have a more comfortable trip home, or do I prioritise expediency over comfort and continue on? I opted for the former.

I made a choice there, but I know from memory I have been in the same situation and yet made the other choice. Why? I don't even know, but I presume that the bladder's fullness is directly correlated with making the first choice more compelling. But notice how there's no room for I here? I'm ultimately just reacting to external forces (external to my brain ie my bladder). I could even curse my bladder for not alerting me to this fact earlier in my journey.

TLDR: Free will is an illusion because the self is an illusion. We are driven entirely by factors of which 'we' have no control. Even our conscious choices are just appearances in consciousness, and we have no idea why they appeared (which I tried and seemingly failed to illustrate with the animal thought experiment).

There are so many mundane external factors that go into this it's not even funny. My own wife, for instance. I only know of her existence because I met her through a friend through work. If I did not have that job, I would almost certainly never have met her. Even the event/events I met her at are also just pure chance. If I had not gone to that event, that meeting would not have happened, an so on.

So even before getting to the point of making a conscious decision, there are so many external factors beyond your control there which even got to that point. So why is that distressing?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 20 2024, 1:42 pm by Oh_Man.

I find significant contradiction in these two statements - having zero control of anything seems to preclude the ability to choose. Care to elaborate?

I also am finding your terminology a bit difficult to work with, the earlier posts say there is no self (and by extension, there is no free will because there is no self), but you also seem to allow that there is a self which is some sort of accumulation of subconscious forces. Why does the self being this accumulation of subconscious forces mean that that particular definition of self has no free will? I would be quite interested to hear why such a 'field of consciousness' either has some level of control on its environment, or is unable to control or decide anything. I would like to clarify as well - you've given a number of examples posed as 'this is a small anecdote where I thought I made a choice but didn't', but what I'd like to understand is why no choice was possible. Any situation and two or more branches of possibility can be taken as an example, but to show there's no free will I think I would need to understand why only one of the two branches could only ever be taken. Your justification for this seems to be:
But this is a claim, not evidence or reasoning. I think you would need in your bladder example for instance, to show that you *couldn't* have made the opposite choice. We'd probably arrive at some kind of circular questioning/justification: Why is it not possible to have made the opposite choice? -> Because of past/present external factors. -> Why do these external factors preclude the opposite choice? -> Because the external factors indicated the other choice. -> But why do they 'preclude' the other choice? -> Because the other choice would require different external factors for it to be made. END CYCLE FOR BREVITY. This would say to me that this is an assumption, and not a justification. How do you justify that all choices are made in concurrence with the external factors if you aren't allowed to assume that is true? Do you think this can be done?


This bit is distressing, because if I do not actually make my own choices, then how can I have any pride or take any joy in the good works that I thought I have done (or be happy that I chose the right person to marry). If I am not making the conscious decision, how can I say it was something I did and take any responsibility for it? It would seem that I am nothing more than a powerless observer to my own life, with only luck to provide good fortune or bad things for me to experience.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 20 2024, 4:20 pm by Vrael.

Benjamin Libet in the 1980s did a pioneering study which has been verified many times since called: Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action.

He showed with an EEG you could predict peoples' choices 300 milliseconds before their conscious mind made the choice. This is the subconscious we are talking about that is controlling everything.

If you want to call that the self, then I am not going to argue with you. We're not really disagreeing there. I'm arguing with the people who say we are the conscious authors of our actions. We are not. Our conscious choices are illusions controlled by the subconcious which this experiment has proven and you can kind of see for yourself if you do the thought experiments and meditations I outlined above.

So I hope that experiment shows that my claim is in fact, backed by evidence replicable by that study, not asserted baselessly.

Now if someon wants to point at the subconscious and go - there! That's where the soul is! Notice it doesn't invalidate anything I have said above - that free will, ie, the belief that we are the conscious authors of our actions, is false. An illusion. And if someone wanted to make that claim, we'd have to start diving into other experiments on brain anatomy, etc, and show how subconscious can be manipulated in all manner of ways via the brain. There is no room for the soul hypothesis, because the physical brain can be shown to be responsible for everything.

Maybe it is distressing, but let's not reason backwards. We should NEVER have thought processes that go something like this: This truth about the reality is distressing to me, therefore, it cannot be true and I will not believe it.

We MUST place the truth of reality above all else, for that is truth with a capital T. And if the truth of reality is distressing, we must confront it and tackle it head on, because otherwise we are just ostriches sticking our head in the sand.

EDIT: On choices. Choices still exist in this understanding. People still make choices every day. It's just when they are making those choices they are doing so based on subconscious forces of which they have no control which have been shaped by a lifetime of experiences and their genetics, and not by some mythical notion of free will.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 20 2024, 4:39 pm by Oh_Man.

That's only true, if our consciousness can't influence our subconscious mind, and I'm pretty sure that the opposite has been proven.

But since our conscious mind is always controlled by the subconscious, it would be more accurate to say it's the subconscious influencing the subconscious, wouldn't it?

both, actually. People are probably more strongly influenced by their subconscious than they realize but I wouldn't go as far as claiming total control. On the other hand it's difficult to gain access and even more difficult to influence your subconscious but there's well known examples like trauma therapy.

This seems like an inviting point in the conversation to discuss the ramifications of there being no Free Will. In my estimation, they are huge: the "ought" part of is-ought arguments and the whole basis of morality seems like quite a meaningless husk without free will. If we remove the power of the individual to control their response to a situation, from this follows, that all 'good' people merely do 'good things' because of their circumstances and luck drawn from their past, and all bad people are similarly (un)lucky. If your goodness or badness is entirely based on luck and external forces, what's the difference between a murderer and a hurricane? A good samaritan and striking oil? If there is no free will and no individual agency, why consider any person differently than we'd consider cogs in a machine? I don't blame my car when it breaks down, and similarly we can't blame a murderer for fulfilling his or her urges right? Of course here is where the argument from utility comes in - even if we are free-will-less, obviously we still act, and experience will usually give us some sort of self-preservation instinct or similar behavior, but it seems awfully like there is no basis on which to distinguish one behavior from another in terms of rightness. Who is to say tyranny is wrong or exploitation is bad if the tyrant has no control over his tyranny and exploitation is simply a result of a system of thousands or millions of individuals who act in the way they are supposed to?

If there is no free will, this seems quite backwards. If I cannot control my actions, then why not believe a convenient lie in order to maximize my happiness? Why should we not stick our heads in the sand rather than face the horror of being the plaything of external forces over which we have no control? Won't our experiences and external forces often condition us to act this way to maximize utilitarian goals (i.e. self preservation)? How can we say we should not do these things if we have no control to do anything differently?


Bit of a leap to cite a study that shows its possible to detect decisions, to saying that we can't control our decisions. Also I for one am not trying to say you're asserting anything baselessly, you've got an interesting topic here to work through, for whatever my opinion is worth. The bit I am interested in here for example, is how do you take the next step, or what is the evidence to show that the subconscious is not in control of itself.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Sep 26 2024, 5:28 pm by Vrael.

Our concious decisions have subconscious origins, of which we have zero concious control*. The EEG studies show you can predict what the subject is going to say before they know what they are going to say by 300 ms. It's not merely showing "it's possible to detect decisions".

If you do the animal thought experiment you can see this for yourself. Just look at your own thoughts. Pick a movie. Notice how movies start coming to mind. Notice how there are plenty of movies you know that didn't come to mind. Notice how when you finally decide to make a choice, you can't fully explain why you made it. If you decided to pick a movie you thought was really good, you can't explain why you didn't decide to pick a movie you thought was really bad instead. Can you know what movie you're going to finally settle on before you've settled on it? Is this thought experiment making any sense or am I just sounding like a crazy man??

And notice how this entire sequence of events has an EXTERNAL 'first cause': me, asking you the question.

Maybe you're already aware of this, but I feel the need to point out that these are different questions. The question "is free will an illusion/nonsensical concept?" is different to the question "ok, there's no free will - what do we do about it?" which is different AGAIN to the question of "should I believe in convenient lies to maximise my happiness?"

You must take care not to fall victim to the argument from adverse consequences fallacy (argumentum ad consequentiam). However unappealing you find discovering the illusion of free will obviously has no bearing on the actual truth of the matter.

Now as for your question. I am usually knee-jerk reaction opposed to any sort of proposed worldview where the truth must be suppressed or ignored. But I also recognise that there's totally valid reasons to do so in certain situations. For example, it's surely a good thing that governments try to suppress knowledge on how to construct nuclear weapons, because if detonating a nuke became as common as shooting up a school we'd all be dead. Now, is free will one of these sorts of situations? Well, that's a difficult question, and I'm not sure I even know the answer, but here are some of my thoughts:

1. Enforcement - how do you enforce suppressing this truth? You would have to start banning determinism-type arguments in universities, or start interfering in universities and silencing certain professors. You'd have to start banning talk on determinism. Not a good look. Also, with the thought experiments I've mentioned, you can kind of come to this conclusion yourself. How do you stop that??
2. Punishment - what would be the punishment you would want to inflict on people who believed or tried to spread their belief of the illusory nature of free will?
3. Have you ever actually tried believing in something you know to be not true? I haven't, but it seems impossible. I know 1+1=2. I may profess to some sort of torturer that 1+1=3 (George Orwell 1984), but inside my mind I will always know the truth. Is it even possible to actually do this? Once you know something, how can you unknow it? The only thing that comes to mind is forgetting, or some sort of sci-fi mind erasure stuff.
4. Decision-maker - who is the person/persons making this decision to ban all discourse on free will and why should we listen to them?
5. Is discovering the illusory nature of free will actually harmful to society? How did we come to this conclusion, what studies did we perform to confirm this, how do we cover it all up afterwards?

So all in all, I just think it's highly impractical if not downright impossible to achieve what you are proposing. And that's not even getting into the whole obvious unethical nature of it.

I am glad you are moving the conversation to here because I find it a lot more interesting. I certainly won't pretend to have all the answers to it either, but I do have some thoughts.

1. At the risk of stating the obvious, I want to point out that we're merely discovering that free will/the self is an illusion. It's not like reality is suddenly changing to this new paradigm. It's only our perspective that has changed. So the only things that are going to change in reality is what we the individual and we the society DECIDE to change based on our newfound discovery. And seeing how much of society still operates under the assumption of free will, nothing is going to change there for awhile until enough individuals generate 'critical societal mass' or w/e you want to call it. The zeitgeist? You know what I mean. And don't be taken in by argumentum ad populum at this moment here - lots of people believe in things that are not true (man-made gods, vaccines give you cancer, etc.). Free will is just another one of those false beliefs. In the grand scheme of things, when it comes to us as a species understanding reality, we're barely out of our diapers!

2. on ethics. To wrap up your examples, I think I would summarise them all as "responsibility". The issue of responsibility. You are right, that some things will have to change, but interestingly, some things would also stay the same. But we are also primates who evolved from a vicious background of kill or be killed, natural selection, etc, that give us powerful instincts that are almost impossible to ignore. Let's take it to the extreme, someone murders my wife, burns down my house, whatever. Obviously, I wanna strangle this fucker with my barehands. But intellectually, I understand that she and even he are just victims of a series of unfortunate events. A causal chain stretching back to ?the beginning of time which resulted in this moment. What can I as the individual do about this? Maybe not much, except to try and get on with my life. But what can society do? Society can try and research what are the causal events that lead to this situation, and then try to prevent them (mental health, poverty, etc). Society can employ general and personal deterrences - imprisonments/death penalties/fines to try to deter unwanted behaviour. Lastly, death penalty/imprisonments also serve to remove the threat (the murderer) from society, either until his death by old age or electric chair. Then there's the sticky issue of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is probably more acceptable for 'lesser' crimes and then becomes more abhorrent the more severe the crime. I mean, I wouldn't really care even if you could 100% prove to me my wife's murderer was fully rehabilitated, I would want that guy to die. But is that just my monkey brain talking? Anyway, all this stuff is already happening to one extent or another even with an assumption of free will.

3. On ethics again. I have always leaned more towards consequentialism to deontology, but ethics for me is still a very much unsolved question. I suspect it actually just comes down to power. The persons or people who are in power will be able to exert their will and shape reality as they see fit, and everyone else will just have to try to conform or resist in the way they see fit, and that's how life has been and will be - an eternal power struggle. But thankfully, humans tend to be on equal footing with each other, so this pushes societies in certain ways. If you check out Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, he shows, quite convincingly if I may say, that humanity has rapidly been getting less and less violent. It circles back to what I said in the chatbox, "beliefs that more accurately reflect reality are likely going to become dominant, because they give individuals/societies an advantage over individuals/societies who have less accurate beliefs. I suspect being 'typically moral' may be one of those advantageous type beliefs.

4. on more general subjects - I think the power of stripping the illusion of free will is, outside of the extreme example i mentioned above, it does allow you to become a more forgiving person, not just for others but also for yourself. I think that shouldn't be forgotten. It's not all bad news. It also allows you to think about things differently. Like, I view adverts as a kind of mind rape now. It's trying to inject stuff into your subconscious without your permission. It also makes you look at your place in society with more responsibility. if we're all just concatenations of external sources, should I guard my words more carefully? What sort of thoughts/ideas will I be putting into other people's heads when I speak? What sort of complex series of casual events will I be activating? I mean, all of this I kinda already knew, but I never actually thought about it properly before, until this realisation.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Sep 29 2024, 6:29 pm by Oh_Man.

Ah I think I see now - if you assume the subconscious can only act in concert with the external forces, and does not actually have any self-regulating or self-controlling properties, this supports the idea that all 'conscious decisions' are not really made consciously, but due to the prior subconscious actions. However, going back earlier in the conversation, to when we were refining the idea of 'self', what is the evidence to show that the subconscious must act in concert with the 'external forces' and is not capable of 'making its own decision.' With this as the context, is why I said this study still 'simply detects' the decision. I think to cite a study as evidence for this idea, the study would probably need to involve examining the course of a person's whole life and show how each of their contemporary decisions was nothing but the predictable result of some past event(s). At a basic level, I would be willing to waive the necessity for such a study, as I agree that many decisions are completely and utterly predictable, but I would also return to the idea that not all decisions are created equal, which would raise the bar for such a study to a probably impractical level. Like, you'd probably need to set up hundreds of Truman Show scenarios, if you're familiar with that movie.


Naturally it's a logical fallacy to try and change what 'truth' is because we don't like the consequences of that truth, but if the 'truth' is known, then it is not a fallacy to argue we should act a certain way based on the consequences of that truth. If we assume there is no free will, we know the 'truth' is there is no free will in the context of the thought experiment, and if a consequence of that is unhappiness, we can act accordingly, even if that action is 'believe in a lie'. Furthermore, people are not restricted to act based on logic in reality (oh what a world though, amirite?). If reality is so distressing that it overrides the capacity for logical action, then the logic isn't very meaningful, and so such consequences ought to be an important part of any thorough consideration.

I didn't mean to claim that I know the impact of 'discovering there is no free will' on society at large. Most of this is 'argumentum ad ego' anyway - I'm most interested in the impact to Me! And I'm happy to put myself forth as an example - I would say I live my life on the assumption that there is free will, and what that means to me is I can choose at any moment to do good things or bad things. Every time I choose to do something I see as good, I get to feel good about that, and every time I choose to do something bad, (depending on the severity of course) it generally means I have to try and do better. But the point is I can view myself as an accumulation of choices and weigh that in hindsight against some internal score for what I think the best choices were. If I had to change my worldview to 'there is no free will', I would lose the claim on those choices as some kind of good that I did, and I'd have to lay the credit for those things at luck's doorstep, presumably. There's room in this worldview for outside forces, I know I am not some kind of Superman where if someone came and tortured me they could get me to act against this for instance. Interestingly, there is also a sort of 'progression of importance' (where maybe I think I had less free will at some point?), because I certainly view my younger decisions as less weighty than my current decisions, based on the idea I have more personal experience with life now than I did then. So to soothe my aching ego, how would I keep this tally if I change my worldview to not include free will? Who gets the credit for what?


And on consequences again:
1. On point 1, woof lot to unpack there. Definitely agree, regardless of whether free will exists or not, we can characterize our actions based on a belief in something, regardless of whether that something is true or false, so it would take quite a campaign of education to flip things (that 'critical societal mass') in whatever the 'other' direction is.
2. A fair summary, and probably my biggest concern with there being no free will. A huge part of society comes down to 'who takes responsibility' for something, whether its caring for elderly parents, balancing the national budget, or providing slave wages to your employees while you reap millions in bonuses.


Lastly, to revisit the 'believe in a lie' thing one more time, regardless of whether free will exists or doesn't, the societal model of every individual possessing free will is certainly entrenched in the world. Other people make decisions, even if perfectly deterministic, that are based on chains of causality so deep and complex that it seems unlikely that they will ever be predictable. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and flaps like a duck, why does it matter that it isn't a duck?

Well, I think clearly something is happening in human brains that is not merely a pure regurgitation of what has gone into it. Otherwise, how could we ever create anything new? But are we still talking about free will here?

When people claim they have free will, they're usually making two assumptions:

1. That each of us were free to think or act differently in the past.

2. That we are the conscious source of many of our thoughts and actions in the present.

If you're in agreement that both of these assumptions are false, then you'd be in the "we don't have free will" camp for the vast majority of people. But if you're wanting to define free will as 'that thing going on in the subconscious" well I'd say that's a pretty atypical definition of free will, and then it also is really just an argument from ignorance. You don't understand what's happening in there, I don't understand what's happening in there, so how can you claim to know that that's where free will is?

I think you're a bad example because you assume free will. I can't see that you've engaged with the thought experiments about picking a movie, or tried to meditate with the reframing device of not identifying yourself to your thoughts. You have to first understand that the self and free will are illusions before asking yourself if you can "believe in a convenient lie to maximise your happiness". How can you lie to yourself if you don't think it's a lie?

I'm trying to understand this. Are you saying: even if we are deterministic machines, our every action preordained, no one understands the causal chains well enough to be able to predict people's future actions, so we should just treat everyone as if they have free will anyway?

1. This seems like a non sequitur to me.
2. People actually ARE predictable, to varying degrees. That's why it's so shocking when people behave "out of character". The very notion of personality and behaviour is instrinctly tied up with notions of predictability. People who behave 'randomly' or 'unpredictably' are usually considered dangerous, mentally unwell, or on some sort of drug.
3. If people look like they have free will why does it matter that they don't have free will? I would say (1) it's a reframing of the situation - they actually never had free will because free will was ultimately shown to be a nonsensical concept, and (2) it matters because you understand reality and your own inner workings more than you did before, it's one less bit of fictional baggage cluttering up your truth-seeking mind.


We're almost veering into 'meaning of life' territory here I feel. But it makes sense because the concept of free will really does weigh in on 'why am I living my life the way I'm currently living it' as well as the ethical questions of 'who is responsible for their actions'.

I would say yes we maybe your worldview would have to change. BTW just so you don't think I'm being some arrogant A-hole let me just disclaim that once we are past the 'is free will an illusion' question and onto the question of 'how ought we act/reshape society if there's no free will' question I am a lot less confident about everything. I don't know for sure what is the right choice, what to do or not do, etc. So all I can do is just give you my thoughts here.

1. Your worldview probably will have to change, but not just for you alone, but for everyone else. You have to admit that all your successes were essentially just luck, and all your failures just bad luck. So too with everyone else. When you step over that homeless person on the street, you shouldn't really judge him as having made bad choices. If you were born with his genes and his parents/etc you would literally be where he is now.
2. You ever heard the phrase "it takes a village"? This is really it. We need to stop placing so much importance on individualism. We are a byproduct of external factors. It's like when people stand up on stage to accept their Oscars and they start thanking this, that, their parents, etc. You have to recognise that everything you are is because of your place on the vast social web.
3. Many people run around thinking they're making free choices all day long when they're just puppets on strings. Bad actors can take advantage of you if they know how to manipulate you properly. If you're cognisant of the illusion of free will, you can try and be more selective about what sort of things you let come into your brain, and thus ultimately shape your mind.
4. A watch tells the time. It has a purpose, a function, usefulness. But of course, it's entirely deterministic. You can think of yourself as a watch: even though you have no free will you can still have a function, have usefulness.

On meaning of life, for me I like to think that we live in a great moment of human history, but it's also a turning point. I think it's the end of the reign of the individual.
1. STEM - It is getting harder and harder to be an Isaac Newton. All the 'low hanging fruit' of discoveries have mostly been picked, and now only the hard problems are left to solve. These sorts of problems require huge manpower and budgets. So it makes sense to check your ego at the door in this era, and be satisfied as being a small cog in the machine, and hey, we can be envious of Isaac Newton - but hey we enjoy a lot of luxuries he didn't have so there's that.
2. HUMANITIES - Lord of the Rings came out less than a hundred years ago. We have had an explosion of fantasy since. Movies, TV shows, video games - we have basically been right on the very edge of these inventions, and what a wonderous time it has been, but even now in 2024 it starts to feel stale. Can you imagine what humans in a thousand years will be doing to entertain themselves? At least for us, we got to experience these things as they were novel. The poor future humans will also be in the same situation as STEM with all the low hanging fruit gone and just in a world of remakes, reboots and so on.
3. JOURNEY OR DESTINATION? - if you accept the current evidence, things look grim for us. We're staring down the barrel of some hard truths. The heat death of the universe is the ultimate grim reaper. What does it mean to work towards anything, when one day everything will end? Fermi's paradox and drake's equation - all signs point to either (a) we're alone, (b) we're destined to destroy ourselves or (c) the vast distances between solar systems and the hard limit of light speed means we are never going to be able to explore the universe, unless...

TRANSCENDING HUMANITY
Our biological bodies were never evolved to survive in space, not just its harsh conditions but also the great lenghts of time required to get anywhere. I see two options:

1. Genome modification - not even scifi anymore, this is literally possible. Instead of evolution by natural selection, it becomes evolution by artificial genome modification. It becomes a simple engineering issue. Solving a bunch of problems to make our DNA create some sort of biological body that is immortal and can survive the rigors of space.
2. Successor machine race - if the engineering constraints of biological modification are too difficult, we could try to design a successor race of robots. We have already made great stride in artificial intelligence. These robots would go on to explore the stars, and we would be left behind on our dying planet.

But heat death renders all this moot anyway, so ultimately I think if the destination is off the edge of a cliff, all that we can do is enjoy the ride. If enjoying the ride for you means inventing and discovering and creating, pushing humanity's progress further and further, that's good for you and everyone else If enjoying the ride for you means living a purely hedonistic lifestyle, that's good for you. If enjoying the ride for you means doing so at the expense of others, then others will ultimately try and stop you. But ultimately how you decide to enjoy the ride is going to be based on a great chain of prior causes, because the self is an illusion, and there is really no such thing as 'freedom of will'.

I can agree this is argument from ignorance, but I would like to point out that at least it is a symmetric argument - if we don't know what's going on in there, we really can't rule out "free will" happening in there either. For argumental purposes, we could delve into "burden of proof" at this point, but I rather like to think that I am on a journey of exploration with you (and anyone else who wants to participate) in this discussion, and not trying merely to prove a point. Of course I am also inherently assuming we're unlikely to find proof either way, but I would be very interested if we did.

Let me attempt to engage with this better then: By way of analogy, I would like to compare the human brain to a computer. A typical programmer who sits down to write their code (many exceptions of course) actually knows very little about the inner workings of the machine - from the physics of flipping a transistor, to the structure of registers and caches and algorithms the CPU uses to execute the code they write; nevertheless they write their code and largely are able to use the system. From a simple 'boostrapping' process which ultimately boils down to providing electrical current springs a complex system capable of however many trillions of different operations and purposes. But what does the actual computer consist of? It has physical components (the actual silicon and so forth), supporting and protective structure (the case), and many abstract components which don't have any physical representation (the way the physical parts of the CPU are used for example, there are algorithms which the folks at Intel and AMD have built into their devices which you can't easily back out from the physical layout of memory and compute units, not to mention the same parts have been used in a variety of ways since the early days of computing, I am not entirely certain but it may literally be impossible to determine the particulars of a cpu algorithm just from its physical parts without some kind of a priori knowledge about its design, maybe an expert computer engineer could weigh in on that detail). With this background, on to the analogy - a computer processes external stimuli much like a human does. Streaming data from Youtube is kind of like a human brain having a stray thought - information which passes through the processing components of the brain or the components of the computer. This streaming data occupies some of the memory addresses of the computer for sure, but if we are being careful with our definitions, we can confidently say it is not part of the computer. This data is completely irrelevant to the definition of the kernel of the computer (operating system), its just something being processed. I don't think there is any mention of YouTube in the POSIX operating system spec, for instance. To complete the analogy, I would say that just because a brain or a kernel processes data (even in a deterministic way) doesn't mean it is 'meaningfully dependent' on the presence and the capabilities of those data or thoughts. The kernel (brain) can still decide what to do with that data. One way this analogy breaks down of course is we know the computer kernel is not sentient, and only 'decides' to do what it has been programmed to do, but the user can still decide to watch the video, or close the webpage, or navigate to a different web page, and so forth. This also doesn't necessarily support the idea that there is free will - what if, at the end of the day we aren't all that different from a computer kernel? We could simply have internalized 'decision algorithms' which are independent from the presence of thoughts, but like the typical programmer, we are unaware of the massive complexity which makes it seem instead like our thoughts are unpredictable. So I do agree, that 'we are not our thoughts', or in the analogy, 'we are not the data we process.' If we are the kernel instead, I also unfortunately don't see that this idea somehow supports free will being an illusion. 'We are our choices' (Sartre), not the random thoughts we observe or data we process. So to me your experiments don't really address the question: Do we make choices or not?

So the next step, is can we refine your experiments? I have said in a previous post that I don't consider all decisions equal - maybe there are some decisions where we can lay bare the workings of this supposed 'inner kernel' right? There are certainly interesting cases in real life to draw on, like what happens when a person gets brain damage, are they really still themself? If you have additional studies to cite or discuss that would be fun.

Counterpoint: Donald Trump


Much of my philosophical interest is motivated by how these ideas affect us in our real, day-to-day lives. If a world with free will is indistinguishable from a world without free will, and free will is a convenient model of approximating the world and assigning responsibility to individuals and such, why not use it? Like with any model, if it does a poor job or results in bad outcomes we would be motivated not to use it. And yes I was also suggesting that the actual complexity of determining why any particular person makes any particular decision relies on a chain of events which is impossible to know, which could be a basis for using free will as a model. I don't mean to say that statistically we can't predict behaviours to some degree of accuracy, but as I've mentioned multiple times, I don't think all decisions are created equal. There are certainly some frustrating Marketing departments for example that rely on this predictability, but that's a far cry from predicting say, what Vladimir Putin is going to do next in his war on Ukraine. I will say I do enjoy the idea of one less bit of fictional baggage cluttering my mind though, I need more room to remember more Monty Python quotes.


I don't think you're being that way. I'm enjoying the discussion. Thank you for your thoughts.


I think I can agree with you on these points without discarding free will as my model for viewing the world. Perhaps we can discuss a more poignant example, or perhaps we need a broader collection of examples to examine the implications. Maybe I should elaborate on my model of free will as well? In my view, as a person is born and they move through the world, their future state is influenced by their current state, and at any given moment they make choices based on their current state. The 'current state' (for example being rich or poor, who your parents are, your peers, etc) certainly has a bearing on I'll say 'what options are available to choose from.' A homeless person doesn't have the option to become the next Taylor Swift, for instance, because of their current state. However, they could choose that to be their goal, and potentially make a sequence of choices and take a sequence of available options which eventually lead to that, but many of their 'available options' will not be dependent on their choices, but the state of many other agents and external factors. I suppose at this point free will really hasn't even entered the description - so far this is just a model of action and reaction. However, I think if you want to be able to take some measure of the situation (did this person do good or bad at any particular point), you have to hold that person responsible for their choices in the context of their options. I think treating that person as if they made the choice, allows you to give credit for a good decision in bad circumstances, and negative credit for a bad decision in good circumstances. I'll admit I'm a little confused now, I think I just redefined free will as 'attributing a person's actions to themselves.' Well maybe you can chew on this and sort me out.

Well, we can. What exactly are you supposing goes on in there? If everything is a series of causes and effects (leaving aside random quantum fluctuations which gets you nowhere) then you don't need to know precisely how the brain functions. You can assume that it too is a product of a series of causes and effects.

What are you even saying that free will is? I've been trying to say this whole time that the entire notion of free will isn't just illusory - it's nonsensical. There's literally no such thing as free will.


As I have said earlier:

I have said earlier in this discussion that free will is an illusion. I think this is poor language on my part. What I should have been saying is that there is actually no illusion. Free will is actually a nonsensical concept. Once you analyse it in the context of the self being an illusion, you will see there is no 'illusion' of free will. The concept of free will just doesn't even make any sense anymore. So it's not an illusion; it's a nonsensical concept. It can't actually be married to reality at all. Hopefully that makes some measure of sense...

And to reiterate on choices: yes choices exist an yes we make choices. But these choices do not come from 'free will' (whatever that is). They come from a series of causes and events stretching back to the beginning of time (and some percentage of them may also come from random quantum fluctuations but that has by no means ever been proved in any study I know of).

On more example:
Saying what choice is this human going to make? is no different to asking what number is this dice to land on?

Both outcomes are coming from a series of causal events. The fact that the human is a thinking intelligent being does not change this fact. Both outcomes are pre-ordained (assuming no random quantum fluctuations affecting the determinism). And if you could somehow 'wind back the clock' both outcomes would occur again precisely as they did before (again assuming no random quantum fluctuations in this analogy).

I can't believe yall voted him in again. Gonna be an interesting 4 years.

As I've been saying, I no longer believe free will is event a coherent concept. So what exactly is your model and how does it differ from mine? Where exactly are you getting 'free will' from, and what even is it?

Oh wait, you answered this below.

Where I will point to in this is the homeless person making a choice. Yes, he is making a choice. But that choice is not coming from nowhere. It's not coming from the mythical 'free will'. His brain's neurons are firing based on a past series of causal events whether they be biological or experiential to all lead to one inevitable outcome: the choice he makes.

When you are making a choice, no matter how hard you think on it, how hard you mull it over and weigh up the options, the choice you eventually make has been made because of a series of prior causes. There's no escaping that (even accounting for quantum randomness).

Ok, I can assume free will doesn't exist for the nonce, seems to me to be the most interesting path to follow. I've got a big follow-up question then:

How can you say there are choices made, if everything is a causal sequence? This idea that you can have both choice and complete predetermination seems contradictory to me, but you also seem certain it is possible. I don't dispute that at any given time you can come up with many possible outcomes given a complex enough situation, but to make a choice is to see those many possible outcomes and select one of them, with the intent of making that outcome reality. A causal chain does not make selections nor have intent. Even if we assume you can introduce some quantum fluctuation to break the chain into multiple sub-chains, I would still say that's just "changing the state" and not "re-selecting" or doing any kind of selection, since the selection is completely dependent on the state and does not in any way respect the possibilities.

Perhaps the answer is just nomenclature - I know a number of times above you specifically said we make 'choices', but maybe you're saying we don't make 'choices' at all, but simply have some number of possible (potentially unknown) 'future states'?


I am ashamed for my country.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 13 2024, 3:28 am by Vrael.

Yes, I think it's an issue with the definition of the word 'choice'. Most of the time when I am talking about the importance of choice I am trying to push back against fatalism, which is an 'ought' stance from the 'is' of no free will. Hopefully that clarifies.

Let's go back to my analogy.

The dice doesn't have a brain, so it doesn't go through this complex decision-making process of making a choice that thinking beings do.

A dice is influenced by the forces applied to it which result in what it lands on.

Thinking beings are influenced by other thinking beings talking to them among other things. A dice isn't influenced in this way. You can't talk at a dice and convince it to land on a different number.

But you can talk to another thinking being and convince it to change its action.

That's the difference between us and inanimate objects in this context - even though we both are all conclusions of a series of causes and effects.

Hopefully that makes sense...

FATALISM
Keeping the above in mind, I urge the importance of choice because some people have a very dare I say bizarre reaction to the revelation or assertion of 'no such thing as free will' and that is to assume a fatalistic stance.

This can come in the form of someone deciding "well, if I'm not really in charge of anything, I'm just going to wait and see what happens". "Everything is inevitable and outside of my control." I think this is an incorrect conclusion and that's why I argue against this.

1. By adopting this stance you have in fact made a choice - to adopt that stance.
2. It's basically impossible to truly adopt this stance. You have to interact with the world to do all sorts of things. You can't just be a purely passive observer and let the external factors of your environment buffet you around. Your mere presence is itself influencing your environment.
3. Certain actions cannot happen unless you make a certain series of decisions. If you decide fatalistically "my teeth will either rot or be fine, the outcome is inevitable. Hopefully they will be fine." and then never go to the dentist, you will bring about the outcome you hoped not to get.

In summary, fatalism is a stance some people take if they accept determinism, but I think it's an obviously bad stance. And choices are important because we as thinking beings can influence each other. We can bring about outcomes we want by trying to influence others. If you decide to just be passive you're just turning over your fate to even more external forces than they are already.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Nov 13 2024, 11:38 am by Oh_Man.

I think your push against fatalism can be summed up fairly succinctly - "Assuming there's no free will, you still have to do the best you can, because otherwise things will be worse." Quite simple, but doesn't lend much weight for or against the existence of free will.

Perhaps this is a bit pedantic of me, but aren't you implying here that there is some non-zero amount of 'other' besides external forces which is driving your life? Also if this is just a bad turn of phrase, why is the underlying idea here of having some measure of control over your fate - which we already posited we don't, external forces control it completely - why is this still important?

To hold you to your own principles - why does any of this make a difference? The brain isn't more complex than say, the number of interactions between particles on an ocean wave which crashes on the coast. Talking to another human isn't any less physics-based than exerting a force to turn over dice. There is a practically infinite pool of extremely complex causal chains we can draw upon as examples to refute the idea that complexity is in some way meaningful to making a choice. Also in this frame of reference of no free will why would we be any different than inanimate objects? We've taken it as an axiom that we react according to the same laws of cause and effect as everything else. Saying we are influenced by others is like saying an asteroid's path is influenced by the gravity of a nearby star, or the particles in a nuclear reaction influence nearby particles towards participating - why are we any different? We simply emit waves (mostly audio in this case) or kinetic excitations when reaching certain energy states, which influence others nearby, just like any particle. An atom doesn't 'decide' to emit a photon, it just depends on prior state and external forces - similarly we don't 'make decisions' we simply endure a complex sequence of neuron activations (well most people do, obviously there are exceptions like Donald Trump) which is entirely based on prior state and external forces.

Sent from my ph:

 

"quite simple, but doesn't lend much weight for or against free will"

Yes, that's because it's an ought argument, not an is argument. I'm already assuming no free will in that argument and arguing what we ought to do about it.

 

"language issues"

Just like atheists still say thank god and jesus christ and holy hell, I think there are some inherent assumptions of free will baked into our language. I am speaking to you fairly casually. If I was really precise about my language I could construct my sentences without these assumptions, but it would probably come out as very stilted and clumsily formed sentences. So forgive me for the confusion.

When I say turning your fate over I just mean that you can influence the environment less then you currently are if you wanted. Suicide is the most ultimate form of this - completely taking yourself out of the environment. Though ironically even this act will have a massive effect on your environment.

 

"final paragraph"

I agree with everything you said. Fundmentally, we are no different. Fundmentally. But that doesn't change the fact that tomorrow you have to get out of bed and make hundreds of choices throughout your day. It's really important to make a distinction between the is and the ought arguments. Is = does free will actually exist or not? Ought = What ought we do?

I also wante to point out you can do this "reduce to fundamentals" thing to arrive at all sorts of absurd conclusions.

Example: theres no difference between men and women, we're fundamentally just biological organisms

Theres no difference between republicans and democrats, we're all just voters

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Nov 14 2024, 12:33 am by Oh_Man.