Can someone explain "free will" to me?

I think free will is too broad a term. There are many limiting factors in the world regarding the decisions we make. Everything affects everything else.

As someone who has had a major brain injury, I can tell you that we can’t know what it due to the injury and if it’s our original character (pre-injury) unless you were injured after your personality was already formed and defined.

Free Willie.

The best treatment of this question that I’ve come across was in this recent Slate article. The gist of it is that “free will” doesn’t imply that choices arise independent of causation. Rather, at increasingly higher levels of organization, new causes are introduced. While each new level can’t be entirely explained in terms of the lower levels, neither can it violate the rules that govern the lower levels.

Anyway, that’s just a taste of the argument. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you’re intrigued enough to read the article.

Sam Harris on Free Will.

@thorninmud – Thanks. I just read that article, but can’t seem to comprehend what he’s saying here. Is it simply that we abandon the question altogether, or that the variables involved are too complex to be evaluated. I’m not following this at all.

@Smitha – Thanks. I am familiar with Sam Harris on the subject. I have read brief refutations of Harris’ work by philosophers and scientists who disagree with him, but have been unable to comprehend them. I need a simple explanation from someone who might be able to give another perspective.

@thorninmud – from the article…

“Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it.”

I’m confused. Does added complexity add to the concept?

I was talking with a coworker last week about classical music. He’s a huge fan. When he hears some pieces, he will break into tears. It does nothing for me. This is just a very simple view into a reaction to external stimuli that we do not choose. But nearly all of our interactions involve a complex web of external stimuli and reactions in our brain that we don’t have any control over – and do not have a window into what is firing and why.

As per traditional descriptions: Freewill is the ability to freely choose one of several possible alternatives, to make decisions the outcome of which is and cannot be known in advance”,
“Freewill is the doctrine that human choices are not predetermined”.
“Freewill means that we are self-determined, not (ultimately) subject to forces outside of our control – it means, we could have done otherwise”.
“Freewill is the ability to choose and act according to the dictates of our own will”.
“Freewill comprises choices not caused by, and independent of antecedent factors”

So, what he’s arguing is not that there are mental processes that aren’t based on neuronal firings, nor that those neuronal firings don’t conform to basic laws of causation—all of that is pretty clearly the case. He’s saying that what we understand by “free will” is not a violation of these facts, but rather a faculty that emerges from the complex psychology necessary for human-level social organization.

Neuronal firings, even given an understanding of all of their preceding causes, aren’t a sufficient explanation for the subjective experience of agency. Social organization, as an evolutionary pressure, became a cause along the course of human development, forming our psychology and the higher cortical processes that enable it. Our experience of free will is a feature of psychology at this level of organization.

In other words, if you consider that free will must exist outside of the realm of cause and effect to qualify as “free”, well, you won’t find anything like that. But just as we know that our material world consists mostly of empty space, yet we take for granted its solidity, so at the level of psychological complexity at which our human lives unfold we accept freedom of choice to be a real organizing principle.

@thorninmud – Thanks. Sorry if I’m slow on this. I keep typing a rewording of this to make sure I understand, but then delete it because I realize that I don’t understand it. Maybe I just need to process this some more.

Note: I can’t help but get the feeling that if we were simply able to understand all of the variables at play (an impossible task), we’d be able to predict with 100% certainty what someone will do or choose.

Part of my handicap here could be what I do for a living. If I were working in a different field or at least working on AI algorithms, there might be more insight. I mean, even generating random numbers while programming can be challenging.

Ok, let me ask it this way – you (or the article) aren’t merely arguing for the use of “free will” in the pragmatic sense, right? It’s something deeper? Something that means that a decision is not merely the result of genetics and prior events/causes?

I’m not sure why the pragmatic sense need be “mere”. It’s on the pragmatic level that our lives unfold. To go back to my analogy, the understanding that there is little actual substance to the material world, while quite true, won’t enter into how you understand your dining table. The evident presence of your dining table there doesn’t negate the fact of emptiness, but at the level on which we interact with the world, the table is a table is a table. That too is a pragmatic level of understanding, since the table-ness disappears at any level that isn’t pragmatic.

The same can be said of the idea of self. This belongs to the this same cluster of psychological phenomena that emerge from the complexity of social interaction. There’s nothing at the lower levels of organization that sufficiently explains our conviction of self (and clearly, the sense of agency is an aspect of this), but we live on this pragmatic level populated by selves. Are they “real”? Not at all levels, no, but they’re real enough to matter at this level.

The subjective experience of choosing is what we call free will even if the choice we make is already preordained. This is the definition of free will as there isn’t any other free will in the universe.

Thanks for your patience, @thorninmud. This helps.

The reason I used “mere”, I suppose, was to point out that in a sense it violates what many of us have grown up understanding about “free will”. And you like you said, isn’t the self illusory – at least at certain levels?

I think this helps. This is one of those things that my brain can’t seem to truly understand.

One last thing…

@thorninmud: “Are they “real”? Not at all levels, no, but they’re real enough to matter at this level.”

So, does that mean that if we were to really look at free will, it would appear as though the result of complex processes, but simply a caused event? But that if we were to look at it from “this” level – as in what we need to be able to proceed as a society made up of agents who are “free” to act as they choose, it makes sense to simply call it “free will”?

No offense taken if you use your “free will” to decide to ignore for now in hopes that I’ll “get it” soon. :)

I haven’t read the other responses yet. I’m just thinking out loud, and, though I’m definitely following, I feel this question may be too much for me. So, no deep thoughts, just my take on this:

Free will seems evident. If Bob believes he should exercise, but doesn’t want to, he may debate before getting off the couch. Depending on the outcome, he either goes for a jog or stays in watching TV. He has exercised free will.

The question is, however: How does Bob get there? In my opinion, our decisions are influenced by past experiences, current circumstances and even genetics. Let’s say Bob’s parents never exercised. His favourite TV show is on, and, in addition, he is one of those people who don’t seem to be comfortable in their body – at all. I’d say he will probably stay in. Childhood, genetics and to some extent circumstances, we can’t alter. So…how free is this “free will”?

Did any of that make sense?

As a sidenote, I wish I had one more question left for today so I could ask why it’s fashionable~ to attack a position as “it has become fashionable to say”*. Man, it drives me insane. Hipster meter goes bezerk, and I hear my Critical Reasoning 101 professor going apeshit in my mind.

Dude, don’t be hard on yourself. This is tough stuff. I wrestled soooo much with this at the beginning of my Zen practice. I remember going in to a teacher at one point and blurting out in frustration that I couldn’t see how to reconcile no-self with my conviction that I can exercise will. It was the same circular reasoning that was behind Descart’s cogito. You can’t solve the problem on the level at which it is created, as they say.

You can say that free will is illusory. You can say that free will is real. And these are not contradictions; they’re true at different levels. On the level at which there is a “you” to consider them, then that “you” has free will. There is a level at which there is no free will, but at that level there’s no “you ” to ponder the matter.

Ok, I watched the first 23 minutes of that Sam Harris video that @Smitha linked to (he starts at around 1:30). He does a perfect job of articulating my thoughts/concerns about free will. I mean, exactly some of the concerns I have had for years. @thorninmud (or anyone), if you have a chance to check this out, I suspect that what you might object to (and it could be valid) would be the talk about “not knowing” why we choose what we choose, etc. Could this really be hinging on the concept of “self” in such a way that speaking of free will in this way is simply addressing the concept of the self and not free will at all?

@tom_g I’ve watched up to the same point, so let me stop and comment.

I disagree with nothing at all that he has said. This kind of systematic questioning of the roots of our experience is the basis for the Buddhist teaching of no-self. We assume conscious agency—a self—and free will comes as part of that package. “Self” has no meaning at all in the absence of free will; they go together.

A common method in Zen for getting at the same insight is to relentlessly question this business of agency. You take up the question “Who am I”, not on the level of biography or psychology or even physiology, but on the level of “Who is thinking this thought, eating this cereal, typing this text…?” In other words, right at the cutting edge of where an agent is assumed to be. If done honestly, closely and openly, no agent is found. There’s thinking, but no thinker; eating, but no eater; typing, but no typist. No-self. Along with no-self goes no-thing, because subject and object are co-dependent. This also leads to the realization of connectedness: everything participates in everything. This typing isn’t something I do; it arises from everything…the One. If you feel the need to attribute actions to an agent, than it’s the One.

As astonishing as that realization can be, it’s really of no practical use. We still lead the lives of selves, since that’s the operative assumption of our social structure. So within the framework of society, self is real and free will is real. I really can’t imagine a social structure that doesn’t take that for granted. Even in a Zen community, self and free will are seen as necessary features of community. As I type these words, knowing full well that there is no typist behind them, I put them out as my words, not yours.

The import of no-self is not a practical one, but it acts as a buffer against the extremes that come from taking the assumption of agency and free will as an absolute truth.

Maybe I should give this a try. What is free will? As I understand it:

Free will is the ability to alter the course or function of particles from without the physical constraints of the universe.

@ninjacolin So free will, if it exists, would be a supernatural phenomenon that doesn’t follow from the laws of physics? That is an interesting thought.