Maybe this has come up before, but I still wanted to ask. Lately, I’ve been a bit confused about whether we really have free will or not. I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in metaphysics. I’d probably call myself agnostic. I’ve just been questioning life more than I used to, and this thought keeps popping into my head.
Do we actually have free will? Like, can we really choose things the way religious texts say we can? What made me think about this is how predictable the micro world seems to be—but when you go deeper into the quantum level, things get really chaotic and complex.
On top of that, as people, we’re constantly shaped by what we go through, and it feels like our reactions and choices get more limited over time.
What do you think about all this?
There are a few possibilities for how the universe ultimately functions:
- Determinism - under determinism, every event is the direct-and-only-possible outcome of the causes that preceded it. Everything that is or occurs is ultimately due to the unfolding conditions initially set by the big bang. What set those conditions though?
- Stochasticism - everything is, at root, random. If QM effects don’t directly impact the macro world (is an electrons “choice” of up or down spin a butterfly’s wings upon the larger system it entangles into?), then at the very least the initial conditions of the Big Bang were randomly set.
- Super-determinism - not only is everything deterministic, but so are seemingly stochastic processes. Maybe there are infinite universes with every possible starting condition? Maybe every quantum event splits the multiverse onto various paths were each possible outcome is taken? (This is basically what I believe.)
- Will - there exists an object which can “choose” things without any calculation process. It simply “decides” something, but this isn’t a random process. It will usually choose the same outcome giving the same coniditons, but not always so it isn’t a purely deterministic object either. We have to treat this like an Oracle, that is mathematically, it’s a thing that spits out answers but has no internal process we can understand. This object could be God (divine will) or something inside some or all acting beings in the universe (free will).
This problem with Will is that it’s undefinable. Look at the axioms most mathematicians use: ZFC, the (Z)ermello-(F)ranco axioms plus ©hoice. We can do math with or without Choice, both make sense, but we can’t prove that you need it or not. And the axiom of choice is purist expression of Free Will that I know of: either you are allowed to have some undefined means of selecting one item from (possibly infinite) sets, or you must have a definite (calculable) means of choosing. Free will, or determinism? Even math can’t decide!
I tend towards Daniel Dennett’s views on this. The universe is fundamentally deterministic, but we can act as though we have free will.
Because whether that will is possible or not kinda doesn’t matter. Did you make any choices today? Yes, of course you did. But who are you? You’re a product of the universe, a complex system of neurons and physics that generate a consciousness that we don’t really understand.
I’ve never really understood any argument for free will, because I’ve never really understood exactly what they mean by ‘free will’. Take me through it, exactly what does it mean if you ‘make a choice’?
As free will, we can handle any choice you make. At least that’s what I mean. Everything you choose in life, whether you brush your teeth this morning, whether you drink tea or coffee. More broadly, your ideologies, your reactions in life, whether you choose to be a “bad person” as a result of bad experiences. The holy books say we can choose these things. That we can determine our destiny by these decisions and that it is up to us to choose between heaven or hell. I think this is wrong and I wanted to ask you all my opinion. There will always be certain criteria and certain limits when we make choices. But what I am curious about is the predictability of our choices.
Ok, let’s take one example. You said you can choose whether you brush your teeth this morning or not.
If you do choose to brush your teeth, what caused you to do so?
That’s exactly what I’m trying to ask, what caused this? Was it already prepared and foreseeable? Or did I just want to brush my teeth. I think we humans don’t live in a cause-and-effect relationship and so I think it’s difficult to give a clear answer to that question. Maybe if I could come up with a rationalization, it would be: I need to be clean, for the health of my teeth, to keep up the routine, etc.
Why can’t it be that it happened because you wanted to brush your teeth, and the reason you wanted to was deterministic?
I’m asking how we want it. I’m asking what kind of causality the brain uses to want it. It’s very difficult to explain what’s in my mind. Let’s take earthquakes for example, earthquakes don’t just shake the earth as they please, right? There are certain continental movements, land plates form, these plates move with certain underground movements and we shake because of the friction, movement, cracks and pressure. Take the winds on Earth, the wind doesn’t just blow wherever it wants to, certain pressures, landforms, antecedent and successor winds, things like that allow winds to happen where and when they want to happen. Before we humans knew about these mechanics of earthquakes and winds we thought they were random, but thanks to science we have mapped them and now with our current knowledge we can at least make high-powered predictions. And if you are not a religious person, you are more likely to think that the “life” of us humans and other living beings is not something that was created in such a monumental way. It is, in essence, a complex structure of energy cycles in which inanimate beings live with each other in a given ecosystem. And human beings have a lot of mechanics. There are many details that affect our will. It’s not random and we can’t decide anything. Can we be predictable beings with a lot of mechanics like emotions, thoughts, certain movements of atoms and molecules inside us, the society and the world we live in?
Detaching it from science and what’s actually going on inside our brains, I see two logical possibilities for why something happens. Either it was the result of a deterministic prior cause, or it was random. Neither of those are ‘you choosing’ for it to happen.
Yes. I was just looking for that kind of answer. My poor English might made it become waste of time but thanks for sharing opinion.
All those things are cultural. Humans are social creatures that mimic other humans to form a kinship. Whether you drink tea because that is what British people do, that is cultural. You put a human baby with a chimpanzee, they will mimic the chimpanzee. Feral children raised by dogs mimic the dogs they grew up with. Christianity does not indefinitely say we have free will. It is a debate, not a consensus. Calvinism sides with predestination as an example. The Qur’an is very heavy on predestination - a holy book to Muslims which is steeped in Judeo-Christian tradition.
Good and evil, or good versus evil is dualism that Judeo-Christian tradition inherited from the Persians when Jews were ruled by the Persians. Again, it is a cultural concept that is not universal, but contingent on what is taught generationally, and taken for granted as being a truth. The fact you take dualism seriously, shows that you are influenced by cultural assumptions made up, and passed up to the present day by distinct cultures. In reality, there is no good versus evil, or good or evil in a universal, absolute sense.
I understand what you mean, but rather than culture and phenomenon, I’m curious about the limits of our will. For example, except in the case of dogs or chimpanzees, would two identical children, living exactly the same life (same life, same food, same family, same traumas, same friends, same events, and even all the little reactions and actions that we don’t define as events) make the same decisions? Would they do the same things every day, at the same time, at the same second? Or would we still see a difference? Could one be good and one bad? Would one listen to a different band?
I suspect we don’t know enough about the mechanics of consciousness yet to determine what free will really means. We certainly know enough about psychology to understand predispositions to make certain choices and humans as a group are fairly predictable.
If you can’t define the thing you’re arguing for, then I don’t think you can really reasonably claim that it exists.
I think every system is deterministic as much as it can be defined and reasoned. Macro world is working with deterministic principles in my opinion. A robber steals something due to maybe greediness or starvation etc. reason and they’re being judged with reason to protect the safety of people and order.
But I cannot say the same thing about the micro world. Because even science can’t reason and explain it too much when things goes quantum mechanics. We just make it “serving” for our goals. Like using a useful stuff which we don’t even know how it works.
Free will does not exist in a biological sense. If you get hit in the head in a car accident, and you get brain damage, you can be a changed person. That is not free will. Sexual activity is an example of the lack of free will. That is why we have teen pregnancies when such pregnancies, according to a certain consensus, doom the people who are pregnant. That is why we have abortion.
Christian theologians for centuries debated whether we have free will, or predestination. They asked profound questions which are answered by science. Asceticism or discipline helps us try to deviate from our animalistic tendencies, but, so far, death is the ultimate predestination.
Free will does not exist in a biological sense.
True but…
If you get hit in the head in a car accident, and you get brain damage, you can be a changed person. That is not free will.
That’s not a rebuttal to free will. It does indicate that our mind generates our person. But just because your choices can be influenced doesn’t mean you don’t make choices. The question is whether you could choose otherwise.
I may not fully understand what you are saying, but what I am focusing on is whether we are free in the choice we make when we do something. Whether we have a choice in what we do or who we are, rather than what happens to us. If we don’t give a right to free will, wouldn’t the evils that we as humans condemn cease to be evils? When I describe the evils that are done, I’m not talking about categorizing them as bad or good, I’m talking about the people who do them choosing whether or not to do them. For example, murder, rape, jealousy. Do we kill someone or is it a reflection of what we have been exposed to throughout our lives?
There’s a lot of schools of thought on this.
One to consider is that every time we make a decision, the universe basically does an instant mitosis. You find yourself in one of them. This would be a sort of non determinism, and if this school of thought intrigues you, that’s a good keyword. This is the Many Worlds interpretation.
Conversely, there’s the Block Time model, which kind of asserts through relativistic fuckery that all time exists. There is no now (only a relative now), and yeah, you have no free will whatsoever.
I tend to favor a blend of Block Time and non deterministic ideas. I think we have free will that operates on a sort of plane of possible actions which limits our will, and that we (consciousness) are just a really, really, really small facet of some larger dimension that is being crushed through a higher dimensional black hole, and some really hard-for-us-to-wrap-our-heads-around shit is getting full-on Allegory of the Cave’d into what we experience as consciousness.
So I think we’re sort of conscious, I think we’re sort of having free will, but I think we operate within confines that we can’t see which limits our free will. We’re kind of just along for the ride.
Wow, you’ve given me a lot of research topics. I can’t say that I am as well versed in the culture of philosophy as you are, so I will research the topics you mentioned one by one and get back to you.
