Three possibilities come to mind:
Is there an evolutionary purpose?
Does it arise as a consequence of our mental activities, a sort of side effect of our thinking?
Is it given a priori (something we have to think in order to think at all)?
EDIT: Thanks for all the responses! Just one thing I saw come up a few times I’d like to address: a lot of people are asking ‘Why assume this?’ The answer is: it’s purely rhetorical! That said, I’m happy with a well thought-out ‘I dispute the premiss’ answer.
Confabulation.
Look at split-brain patients: divide the corpus callosum down the middle, and you effectively have two separate brains that don’t communicate. Tell the half without the speech centre to perform some random task, then ask the other one why they did that - and they will flat-out make up some plausible sounding reason.
And the thing is, they haven’t the slightest idea that it isn’t true. To them, it feels exactly like freely choosing to do it, for those made up reasons.
Bits of our brains make us do stuff for their own reasons, and we just make shit up to explain it after the fact. We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we’ve primed our muscles to carry out the choice.
I think a chunk of this comes down to our need to model the thoughts of others (incredibly useful for social animals) - we make everyone out to be these monolithic executive units so that we can predict their actions, and we make ourselves out to be the same so we can slot ourselves into that same reasoning.
Also it would be a bit fucking terrifying to just constantly get surprised by your own actions, blown around like a leaf on the wind without a clue what’s going on, so I think another chunk of it is just larping this “I” person who has a coherent narrative behind it all, to protect your own sanity.
We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we’ve primed our muscles to carry out the choice.
Where can I read more about this?
Perhaps it is the illusion of choice and the choice you make was always going to be that one due to all of the events that shaped you and the events that shaped the people that shaped you etc all the way back to the big bang.
I contemplate this from time to time.
Here’s my take: the answer is emergent phenomena. We live in a very complex system and in complex systems there are interactions that can only be predicted using systems of equal or higher complexity. So even in case everything is predetermined, it would still be unpredictable and therefore your decisions are basically still up to you and the complex interactions in your brain.
exactly. that for me is in fact the definition of free will
actually this is the definition that first came up on a search
“the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion”
so yeah we do have free will. the rest is philosophical masturbation
You can also find the definition of magic or telekinesis, but that doesn’t mean we have them, and not all philosophical question are just “masturbation”. It is an interesting question. It is worth taking free will at least axiomatically as our perception of that freedom even if it is truly deterministic.
I think this is probably it. I think this argument is strongly related to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of sensory experience. I find it simple to imagine the idea of a body with no will or no consciousness (i.e., a philosophical zombie). But I find it very difficult, almost impossible, in fact, to imagine a consciousness with no will, even if it’s only the will to think a given thought.
Do we have free will to think a given thought? All of my thoughts just suddenly appear in my mind or are connected to previous thoughts that suddenly appeared in my mind.
I mean, if I said to you, ‘Calculate 13x16’ (or some other sum you don’t know off the top of your head) you could either do it or not do it. That would be a willed choice, whether or not you knew the answer.
My thoughts would be presented based the fact that you’ve asked me to calculate something. At that point, past experiences would guide my path forward. If I felt like doing math, I may do it, if I had poor childhood experiences in math class, I probably wouldn’t. At the end of the day, it’s all based on history or current questions/feelings. In every scenario my thoughts are presented to me. To prove it, ask yourself what your next thought will be. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see you can’t answer that question and when you try and force a thought direction, that direction itself is based on your knowledge from the past and that thought was also presented to you.
It’s wild because it absolutely feels like we have free will, but it sure doesn’t look like it. 🤷♂️
This is the problem of original intentionality. There are studies on it, for instance they found that with an mri they can detect when you have come to a decision before your conscious mind realizes you have. Some processes in our brain are outside of our control, because the brain is not just the neocortex but also includes tens of other structures that evolved separately with specific hard-coded purposes, but that doesn’t mean they are not working as a team. I think in any case you are still reaponsible for the decisions you take.
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Weird, now I know kung fu.
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The most accurate answer is: We don’t know.
But there are pieces of scientific evidence that suggest our sense of free will is just another perception process that happens in our brains. Specifically I’m thinking about people who have problems in their brain that make them feel like they AREN’T the one controlling what they do. For example people suffering from derealization - https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonalization-derealization-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352911
EDIT
As to why our brains have a process that gives us a perception of free will, that’s a much harder question that i think science currently only has conjecture on. If i had to guess I’d guess that either there’s an evolutionary advantage to it, or it’s an emergent property that arises from all the parts of the brain being connected in the way they are
We don’t have a free will.
We do have a free won’t.
Why are we assuming we don’t have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.
The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, “assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?”
This is a nice and brief video that I’ve found persuasive. https://youtu.be/eELfSwqJNKU
If you throw a pair of dice, do they still have to roll if their final positions are predetermined from the point that you let go?
One view is that even a deterministic mind still must execute. An illusion of the capacity to choose between multiple options might be necessary to considering those options which leads to the unavoidable conclusion.
Dice do not choose where they roll.
They also do not pretend choosing, or tell themselves any bullshit…
If I found out that I don’t have free will, I would start trying to gain it back immediately.
What if you never had it and never can have it because its not a havable thing
Pot kettle black
What if you found out that free will is an inherently flawed concept and therefore impossible to conclusively obtain
if you found out that free will is an inherently flawed concept
I also cannot imagine finding out that the hole in my ass is bigger than I am.
Then I have some bad news for you, about calculating the interior volume of a cylinder. You’ve got a lot of hole coiled up inside you
For the same reason that I feel like I’m still right now, while I’m actually spinning and hurtling through space at incredible speed.
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Assuming we don’t have free will, why do we have the illusion that we do?
You experience the world through your senses.
What sense that your body has would you expect to give your brain a different set of inputs if your brain’s actions were not deterministic, not set by the laws of physics? How would you expect it to feel different?
You wouldn’t expect to feel like some invisible force is in control of your limbs, which I think is perhaps what some people intuitively expect if someone says that their actions are pre-determined.
It’s not talking about anything that your brain can sense; it’s talking about how your brain works.
Yeah, this is it.
And to take a slightly different tack, if the biochemical and electrical activity in your brain were not deterministic, how would you ever know? It’s one thing to believe that you made a decision on your own “Free Will”, but how could you possibly rewind the entire universe (or at least some sufficiently small portion of it), including your brain’s exact atomic state, and re-run the experiment to know for sure? At that point, what would “Free Will” even mean?
There are many thing my body does which I’m aware of, but that I don’t will, and others that I have some control over, i.e., my will appears to play a role, but not the only role.
I don’t think it creates any kind of contradiction to suggest that, hypothetically, there could be more (or less) of either of those types of things, without my perceiving an invisible (external) force of some kind to be involved. After all, I don’t ascribe my heartbeat to an external force, but I am aware that I don’t will it.
After all, I don’t ascribe my heartbeat to an external force, but I am aware that I don’t will it.
No, but you have the ability to sense your heartbeat, so you can tell that it’s there.
You don’t have the ability to sense electromagnetic emissions in the X-ray frequency range, so you can’t tell that they’re there. You wouldn’t know if X-rays of a given intensity were present at a given moment. It’s like asking “why is there the illusion that there are no X-rays” when you wouldn’t expect to feel differently regardless of their presence or non-presence.
Just going to throw out a really good read: Determined by Robert Sapolky. (Behave is also really good.)
He doesn’t really convince me of the core thesis that free will doesn’t exist, or that some of his proposed changes to the legal system to “recognize the absence of free will” in the second half are good courses of action, but he does do a great job of demonstrating what makes us tick from a variety of lenses, how much environmental factors play a role in behavior, and generally arguing to approach people with more empathy and recognition that we might be more like them in a similar situation than we think.
(It is heavy. It’s long and goes into some depth on different fields. But he lays out the main ideas you need to know and doesn’t assume that much knowledge, just a will to learn.)
Behave is incredible.
I read a fucking lot of books about what makes us tick. Behave is (tied for) my favorite. He does actually hint down the determinism path a little in behave, but he goes all in on Determined.
I would still probably generally recommend Behave over Determined, but Determined is directly relevant to the OP.
Because it’s not an illusion.
Determinism seems reasonable only because people have an inaccurately simplistic conception of causation, such that they believe that consciousness and choice violate it, rather than being a part of it.
Causation isn’t a simple linear thing - it’s an enormously complex web in which any number of things can be causes and/or effects of any number of things.
Free will (properly understood) is just one part of that enormously complex web.
How is our experience of decision making different to one where we reach an inevitable outcome based on a complex set of parameters?
Because there are points at which, exactly as seems to be the case, we consciouly choose to follow one particular path in spite of the fact that we could just as easily have chosen another.
Even in that scenario, the “conscious choice” happened via some particular arrangement of neurons/chemical messengers/etc. Your argument is a “god of the gaps” argument- science doesn’t know everything about how the brain works, therefore some supernatural process called “free will” is the cause of the stuff science can’t explain yet.
(No knock on you, you’re having a good faith debate :)
god of the gaps
supernatural
Without those obvious pejoratives, that would’ve been a pretty good summation of at least that aspect of my position.
With those obvious pejoratives, it was reduced to an unfortunate expression of bias.
I believe that it’s not simply that science doesn’t yet fully understand how the brain works, but that it’s not even really equipped to deal with consciousness, which while clearly a manifestation of physical processes, is not itself physical.
That and we’re in an era in which “science” (scare quotes because part of the problem IMO is a misunderstanding of what science can do and does) has largely moved to the forefront of the pursuit of understanding, but humanity is still to some significant degree stuck in a quasi-religious mindset, so all too many have merely shifted from a devout faith that their religion provides every answer to everything ever to a devout faith that “science” provides every answer to everything ever.
The problem then comes when they run up against something for which science can’t provide an answer. And the common response then is to blithely insist that that thing must not and cannot exist at all, since the alternative is to face the fact that science potentially cannot provide every answer to everything ever. And that’s generally accompanied by an immediate assignment of whatever it is that’s in question to the other half of their wholly binaristic worldview - if it’s not amenable to science, it must and can only be religion/magic.
Reality, IMO, is vaster than that.
Neither of those are pejoratives, they’re just the words for your positions
https://www.askdifference.com/natural-vs-supernatural/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
Everything you just wrote in your followup reply here continues to fit into those categories as far as i can tell.
That’s unfortunate - you credited me with debating in good faith, yet won’t do the same.
You rather obviously knew that the way you attempted to frame my position was disparaging - if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have felt the need to add that proviso to the end of your post. What you clearly attempted to do with that was to disparage the position, while asserting that you didn’t mean it personally.
Ah well.
I didn’t do what you said. Did you read the links?
I agree that it “seems to be the case” that we consciously choose, but I don’t understand where you found justification to state that there really are such points. How do you dismiss the idea that our conscious choice is not simply an application of the myriad parameters?
I don’t understand where you found justification to state that there really are such points.
Because I experience them, and not just at times, but moment-to-moment, every waking day. And so do you. And so does essentially every single human in existence.
That indicates two possibilities - either it’s a universal illusion, and in both senses of the term - one experienced by everyone and one experienced without exception by each individual, or it’s a real experience.
And I just find the former to be so ridiculously unlikely that the latter can be safely said to be near certainly true.
How do you dismiss the idea that our conscious choice is not simply an application of the myriad parameters?
I don’t. I simply include consciousness, and all it entails - reason, value, self-interest, preference, mood, etc. - among those parameters.
Because I experience them, and not just at times, but moment-to-moment, every waking day. And so do you. And so does essentially every single human in existence.
Or, as you acknowledged before, it seems like you experience them. That experience of weighing up all the inputs, applying your mood and whatever else you bring, feels like making a decision freely.
I simply include consciousness, and all it entails - reason, value, self-interest, preference, mood, etc. - among those parameters.
These parameters are all examples of the complex inputs that precede a decision. And each of these inputs could be understood as the inevitable result of a causal chain.
It’s super complex and likely involves technology that we don’t yet possess, but if I could perfectly simulate a brain identical to yours, with the same neural states, and the same concentrations of relevant chemicals in its simulated blood at the moment of the decision, that simulated brain would have to produce the same output as as your meaty one.
Or, as you acknowledged before, it seems like you experience them.
Yes.
If I’m to be precise, it seems that I exist on what seems to be a planet in what seems to be a universe. On that seeming planet it seems as if I am surrounded by what seem to be things - some of which seem to be alive and others of which seem not to be. And among the ones that seem to be alive, there are some that seem to share the classification I seem to possess, as a human being.
In my seeming experience as what seems to be accurately desgnated a human being, I seem to experience some things, among them the process of seeming to make choices. And that process of seeming to make choices is a thing that I seemingly perceive the other seeming humans who seem to exist seemingly relate to be a part of their seeming lives as well.
And so on. Since I, as seems to be the case with all other beings that seem to exist, live behind the veil of perception, I cannot know for certain that any part of what I experience represents an objective reality. So every single aspect of my experience of life, most accurately, can only be said to seem to be as I perceive it to be.
And each of these inputs could be understood as the inevitable result of a causal chain.
I simply don’t believe that to be the case, if for no other reason than that that would appear to make creative reasoning impossible. If reason was merely the manifestation of a rigid causal chain, then all reason would follow the same paths to the same destinations. The fact that human history is, viewed one way, a record of new chains being followed to new destinations, means that there must be some mechanism by which consciousness can and does effectively “switch tracks.” Or even introduce entirely new ones.
It’s super complex and likely involves technology that we don’t yet possess, but if I could perfectly simulate a brain identical to yours, with the same neural states, and the same concentrations of relevant chemicals in its simulated blood at the moment of the decision, that simulated brain would have to produce the same output as as your meaty one.
Nor do I believe that to be true, since while consciousness appears to be a manifestation of the mechanical workings of the brain, it is not itself merely those mechanical workings - it is a “thing” unto itself. And I believe, quite simply, that the relationship between consciousness and the brain is not unidirectional, but bidirectional - that just as the physical state of a brain can be a proximate cause of a chain of thought, a chain of thought can be a proximate cause of a physical state of a brain.
And in fact, I would say that that’s easily demonstrated by the fact that one can trigger a response - fight or flight for instance - merely by imagining a threat. There’s no need for any physical manifestation of the threat - a wholly conscious, wholly non-physical imagining of it is sufficient. That says to me, rather clearly, that consciousness can serve as a cause - not merely as an effect.
And on a side note, thanks for the responses - this subject particularly fascinates me, but I find intellectually honest debate on it to be vanishingly rare.
You’re welcome. I too find it very interesting, though my expertise in it is below amater level.
I am a little confused about your model of continuous and the brain: you speak of consciousness appearing to be a manifestation of the brain’s processing, but talk about what seems to be a communicative relationship between the two. My understanding is that consciousness is entirely an emergent property of the brain, impossible to distinguish from the squishy mechanics. If yours is significantly different to this, then it is no wonder that our beliefs diverge.
Simple: We cannot predict the future. If you don’t know what’s going to happen nor whether it is being controlled, you do not know whether your actions are predetermined. Every movement you make might be the result of universal programming. What I’m typing, have sent, and you are reading might be the sequence of events that was always supposed to happen.
Free will is, IMO, as unknowable as whether an almighty being exists. That “almighty being” might have created this existence, but might also exist in its own realm that was created by another “almighty being”. The chain might be infinite and it might not be. Asking these questions is like asking “can we reach infinity”.
There was a relevant post on Lemmy the other day:
The origin and nature of existence is an epistemological black hole that some people like to plug with “a
wizardgod did it”.The sensation of free will is an emergent property of a lack of awareness of the big stuff, the small stuff, the long stuff, and the short stuff.
Couldn’t it also be argued that our lack of awareness of the big stuff also leaves open the possibility of free will?
On a sufficiently large billiards table, it does become hard to prove that some balls don’t spontaneously sink themselves.
That is a clever point but I think it also overly simplifies the nature of reality to such a point that it’s not likely to change any minds.
I like to look at the illusion of free will as if you’re falling down a pit. You can try to flap your arms or swim, and maybe move yourself a little bit, but at the end, you’re still falling down.
Warning, I came up with this while very high one time, lol, but it’s kind of stuck with me:
Consciousness is a 4-dimensional construct living in a 3-dimensional world. What we experience as the passage of time is just our consciousness traveling/falling along the surface of the 4-dimensional plane/shape that defines our existence.
Feel free to poke all the holes you want in that. lol
There is an old Taoist story about two people floating down a river. One has already decided where he wants the river to take him and is constantly swimming against the current to try to get there, the other just floats along taking in the sights.
They both end up wherever the river takes them, and they both went through the same obstacles and rapids, but when asked how the trip was, one of them is complaining about the whole trip being frustrating and exhausting, while the other had a pleasant time and tells you all about the amazing things they saw on the way.
I love that!
Really illustrates the saying, “go with the flow,” too.
This is basically a spacetime worldline, which is one of those terms that sounds like scifi technobabble even though it’s an actual concept
