Do you believe in a concept of free will?

I believe in the concept.

I do not believe humans possess it.

The illusion of such seems to be enough for most people. Though most probably never consider that the illusion might be scientifically explicable.

Yes. It means you have choice and influence over your life. The opposite of free will is to be predestined or fated on a path in life. I don’t believe in that.

However, there are things out of our control that hampers the ability to express our will.

I’m inclined to agree with Schopenhauer: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills”.

I have mixed feelings since we don’t really know the answer to this. There is hope for it even if we are just systematic meat computers.

Yes, I am free to choose my actions and reactions.

I am fated to believe in free will.

I like the concept, and hope it’s true but I fear for most people it is not.

I had no intention of answering this question. My hand was guided by an invisible force.

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that It means we are all free to make stupid mistakes, poor choices and to forgive ourselves too. haha
No, in the sense that unless one is fully awake and conscious and not running off their rote unconscious programming there can be no true exercise of free will, only unconscious conditioning.

“Free will” is an ambiguous term, and there are at least two different things that people are often trying to refer to when they talk about free will. The first is traditionally known as “liberty of indifference,” which can be glossed as the ability to have done otherwise in the same circumstances. If we have liberty of indifference, then our actions are not determined by the laws of physics. Liberty of indifference is not compatible with causal determinism (the view that every event is causally necessitated by prior events in accordance with the laws of nature).

The second is traditionally know as “liberty of spontaneity,” which can be glossed as the ability to act in accordance with our will without coercion or impairment. If we have liberty of spontaneity, then we aren’t being unduly influenced by external threats (e.g., a gun to our head) or internal constraints (e.g., mental illnesses that undermine our self-control). Liberty of spontaneity is compatible with causal determinism (so those who believe it counts as free will are often called “compatibilists”).

I believe that we have liberty of spontaneity, and I also believe that liberty of spontaneity counts as free will. I am agnostic with regard to liberty of indifference, though I lean towards disbelief.

Yes. I chose to answer this question.

It looks like a few people on here are determined to believe that they have free will.

Yesirrrrreeeee.

Free will is constrained by what we want which limits its freedom drastically even to the point where it doesn’t really exist.

Absolutely I believe in free will…I spent two decades in my teens and twenties acting at my own discretion and had a freaking great time. As my responsibilities grew and conversely my full throttle free will was dialed down a notch or three. Now that the kids are essentially grown, I can now do anything I damn well please! No need to make America Greater…just let me bang on a drum all day.

^ Indeed you can do whatever you damn well please.

But can you be absolutely certain that was not predestined?

@SecondHandStoke I am damned certain that my God and my ancestors had no role in making sure that some day I got to bang on my drum all day….it was all my doing…fact! ;)

Free will is a concept, You hate your job your free to leave, Sure you are, who cares if you lose your home , car, live on the street type thing, we might have the concept of free will but 99.9% of us also have responsibilities that prevent us from using our free will.

I define free will as the ability to choose between the available options, and yes, I believe in it.

The best argument I can give is that free will just makes more sense. That’s the short answer. Below is my attempt at explaining my intuition that it “makes more sense.”

If we take determinism seriously, that everything happening in the universe is a result of a rigid, cascading sequence of events, I don’t think we can afford any “slop.” Everything must be according to what has already been determined. The break I took from typing to lean back and crack my knuckles. The pause just before I typed the word “knuckles.” The way my feet are crossed, right on top of left, as I sit on the ground and lean towards my laptop. The way I just doubled-blinked my eyes. The breaths I’m taking. The way I’m wiggling my toes. Determinism suggests that everything in the universe is falling into the only possible way events could unfold. So all of those tiny, mundane movements of mine must be already determined by the cascading events, like a tumbling dominoes.

I don’t think most people are comfortable holding that position. I’ve heard various ways to back off it… One example is the claim that only the “big” stuff is determined, but all the “little” stuff is our choice. This cannot be right when we know about things like the butterfly effect, where miniscule events can have enormous effects. Anyway, this claim would have to give a satisfactory account of “big”—as in, given the immense size of the universe, it would have to explain why on earth “big” should be on a human scale. And if “big” is beyond a human scale, then we (humans) have free will.

Now, imagine we let in random events. This will require some deviation on our part from strict determinism, but since our best science indicates that certain events (radioactive decay, and certain quantum activity) seem to be random, this deviation seems warranted. True, random events don’t give us free will. But they do put determinism in a peculiar situation. The rules acting on the dominoes are the same—the collision of one domino into the next will tip the next domino forward—but we lose the certainty that our initial set-up predicts the ending; it’s no longer determined. Also true, at the macroscale these random events form general patterns of probability. But probability strikes me as fundamentally different than determinism. Probability admits of possible exceptions and of fuzzy lines instead of strict adherence. So if we let science bring in randomness, we no longer have the traditional determinism. We have a series of laws the universe abides by, and the possibility that something could disrupt the current sequence of events in favor of another.

That’s the universe I think we live in. Predictable outcomes, general laws, and the possibility of change.

Nothing about a probabilistic universe gives us free will—but it no longer precludes it, either.

And then I think about my being conscious.

I may not be able to adequately explain what consciousness is, or where it comes from, or any other existential question along that line of thought. But we live in a universe where things do things, and things affect each other, even if the reason for their doing those things is ultimately meaningless, even if the function is absolutely miniscule.

A deterministic world suggests that everything has happened according to an initial set up, even everything I ever do. Effectively then, it suggests my consciousness is useless: I may as well be a spectator. Everything would happen exactly the same whether or not I was conscious of its happening… which seems logically problematic for a deterministic world: how can something that ultimately has no consequence be determined?

This is not a problem for a probabilistic, sans-free-will universe.

But let’s imagine two versions of the world, and see which seems more probable:

The same basic setup: the universe is probabilistic—predictable rules and some random events. In the process of cause and effect, a world called “earth” was created and on it life began to evolve. It began as single-celled organisms producing their own energy, dividing, and growing. Sometimes the organisms would copy themselves incorrectly in their dividing, and mutations began accumulating, changing the way the organisms functioned and splitting groups off from each other. At some point, life made the jump to multicellular, but the mutations continued, increasing the diversity of life. Those species that survived passed on their genes. Etc. We all know the story of evolution.

At some point early on in this story, life develops sense organs, and this ability to respond to the environment is evolutionarily advantageous. (Side note: how does a deterministic world view explain sense organs? It seems to me that the whole function of sense organs is to respond to the environment in a way that disrupts the otherwise ordinary sequence of cause and effect.)

Version 1: Sense organs provide input for complex difference engines computing responses to the environment. Those responses which improve an organism’s chances of survival are passed on. Additionally, seemingly randomly, a “consciousness” arises in at least some of the living organisms. This consciousness experiences the sense inputs but has no control over the organism’s responses to the environment.

Version 2: Sense organs provide input to complex difference engines computing responses to the environment. Those difference engines are (in some capacity or another) consciousnesses. A consciousness experiences sensory input, considers the given information, and chooses how to respond. Those consciousnesses whose responses improve their chances of survival are more likely to pass on their genes.

To sum it all up: Version 2 just makes more sense to me. I don’t see why something so apparently tied into the stimulus-response function of an organism as consciousness seems to be would be merely a peripheral detail—and isn’t our conscious experience one of general free will?

PS, sorry the above post is so long!

If there is no free will, then there is no point to law, rules, justice, or life itself. We may as well adopt the apathetic attitude that the British witnessed and documented throughout the Middle East for most of a century of various endeavors (and occupations) there. No matter what question was asked of a native seemed to be answered with “Inshallah” – “as Allah wills” – with zero attempt to make a thing “be” or “not be”.

Inshallah. We eat tonight or we don’t eat. I have nothing to do with that? Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

How could I not?

If we didn’t have free will, then we’d all make the same choices.

We’d be no more than chemicals that always react to stimulus in the same way every time.

@Kropotkin @SecondHandStoke Humorous as they may be, your recent answers overlook the fact that free will and determinism are not necessarily incompatible. So it is not necessarily a problem if we were determined to believe in free will. It’s like the quote that @thorninmud posted: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” Again, it’s called compatibilism.

@Soubresaut The problem is is that “consciousness” is a small part of what the brain does, and information processing and the processing of stimuli into responses and decision making are done without any conscious awareness, and seem to largely come before one is consciously aware of the decision making.

@SavoirFaire It’s the only way I could make the joke work.

I actually think the universe is fundamentally indeterminate, in that it would turn out differently if it were to be replayed from the exact same starting conditions. I realise that there’s the view that free will and determinism are compatible—I am completely unpersuaded by it, and I think it relies on a rather wishy washy definition of free will. And I think determinism is wrong anyway.

I’m somewhat agnostic on this topic, but I lean toward hard incompatibilism.

@CWOTUS Though that’s a pessimistic view of the implications of not having free will—appealing to consequences doesn’t make a lack of free will false.

@Kropotkin What do you think the nature of the fundamental indeterminism is? I ask because there has been a lot of talk about so-called “quantum indeterminism” in the free will literature, but it doesn’t actually change the issue nearly as much as people think. The real issue at the end of the day concerns the level of control we have over our actions. Indeterminism isn’t enough to get us liberty of indifference, and quantum indeterminism isn’t enough to rule out causal determinism if there is a smoothing effect between the quantum and macro levels.

As for liberty of spontaneity, I am curious why you consider it a “wishy washy” definition of free will. As it turns out, it’s actually the original definition of free will in both Eastern and Western philosophy. It is also the notion on which many of our free will talk rests. For example, one might legitimately insist that they weren’t really free to decide if someone had a gun to their head or if they were in chains (these being the classic examples in the literature). Or to use a more modern example, we don’t think that people are truly responsible for their actions during certain episodes associated with mental illness. But this is true even if we were to grant that they had liberty of indifference.

So it seems that liberty of spontaneity is a deeply ingrained notion of free will, even if it is not the only one. Nor does it seem “wishy washy” to take into account factors like internal and external circumstances. If you think that someone counts as free even when they are in chains, then you are the one with an inadequate notion of freedom.

@Kropotkin—I grant that self-consciousness—the state of thinking about what we’re thinking about—is only a small part of what the brain does. But self-consciousness isn’t necessary for consciousness. I also grant that there are many functions that occur without consciousness and are regulated by the brain. But I would still argue that (for example) a visual system which casts a 4D representation of the world around an organism is pretty useless unless the consciousness experiencing the representation can act on it. So is a physical experience of pain, or pleasure. Etc.

Our brains have an awful lot of wiring designed to process sensation as physical experience. This would not be evolutionarily advantageous unless the consciousness experiencing the physical sensations were able to use that information to do something. (We engineer machines to perform remarkably complex functions without such physical experience, which seems to support the point.) Why would evolution seem to bring forward creatures which can—beyond processing reality—experience it, if consciousness were not playing some role in decisions and survival?

From what I understand about those studies that claim to show decisions being made without conscious awareness… they make certain assumptions from the outset that seem to weaken their findings.

Some of them ask the participant to note a certain time (by various visual means) that they decided to do an action like move an arm… so they aren’t asking someone simply to “move an arm.” They are asking someone to plan to move their arm, meta-cognitively recognize they plan to move their arm, then look for additional visual stimula and process it. It doesn’t surprise me they claim to have found a delay between brain activity and the visual stimula seen by the person at the apparent “moment” of their decision. I would be surprised if they didn’t find a delay.

Other studies just watch brain activity. They claim to have found brain activity in what “is not” consciousness before brain activity that “is” consciousness. The problem: they’ve already assumed a definition of consciousness as being in a specific brain region. They then interpret the study results to suit their definition—that if we find brain activity outside the region we’ve labelled as “conscious,” then it must be unconscious. Conveniently, we tend to label locations of the brain that are exclusive to us, or else exclusive to “higher processing” animals, as where consciousness arises—but the more similarities we realize we share with other animals, the more this definition seems to cause problems.

My intuition tells me that I have free will, that, as the existentialists say, my need to choose is inescapable. Looking at it from the perspective of science, what I do must be predetermined. I am inclined to go along with the compatibilist position that @SavoirFaire mentions, but I do not find it totally satisfying.

Suppose that everything that a person does is predetermined and that someone writes a program telling everything that you are going to do. You look at a printout from the program and see that it says that the next thing you will say is “dog”. You then willfully defy the program and say “cat”. There is a fundamental paradox here, a feedback problem in being able to predict the behavior of conscious beings. If we cannot predict what a person is going to do, is it meaningful to say that what a person does is predetermined?

A more sophisticated version of this is known as Newcomb’s Paradox, which I have previously posted here.

There is a paradox to free will which I will try to show using two extremes. On the one hand if you have total freedom of choice you will have an infinite number of possibilities with no external or internal bias between them that is there is an equal possibility of choosing any one of them. This situation leads to total paralysis of the will. There is no basis for choosing any one rather than any other one. On the other hand if just one of these possible choices is extremely desirable and all the others are undesirable then we can choose this option and it seems we have exercised free will though the choice has effectively been made for us.

Having free will means we don’t have it and not having it means we do.

@LostInParadise Your scenario is not a paradox. If the program predicts you will say “dog” and you say “cat” instead, then it is—by definition—not a program that predicts everything you will do. A genuine predictive program would be able to account for your reaction to the printout, and any program that cannot do so is not genuinely predictive. No paradox.

Newcomb’s problem, of course, is also not a paradox. Nor does it have much at all to do with free will (determinism opens up the possibility of a perfect predictor, but does not guarantee that this is the method he is using). So while it is certainly a more sophisticated thought experiment than the one you have presented, it doesn’t really implicate any of the issues under discussion.

As for the question of how someone’s actions could be said to be predetermined if we cannot predict them, this seems to place too much emphasis on the limited epistemic powers of fallible creatures like us. Just because we can’t figure out what someone’s next move will be does not mean that their next move is not predetermined. To show this, let us look at another computer-based case.

Suppose we have programmed a computer to play chess. But rather than using any sort of flexible response system, we have programmed every possible chess game into its memory banks. These are mapped out in a branching structure, and the computer is programmed to go down only those branches that will lead it to victory. So if you open by moving your king’s pawn forward two steps, the computer eliminates all branches that do not start that way and all branches that do start that way but that do not lead to its victory.

The moves made by a program like this are fully determined by previous events, yet it is beyond the epistemic capacities of anyone playing it to map out the every possible chess game that it might be running. So we know it is determined, and it is meaningful to say that it is predetermined, yet we cannot predict its moves (at least not in the moment).

The universe, however, is a lot more complicated than chess. So while it may be possible for us to map out every possible path of a chess game, it is likely not possible for us to do so when it comes to the universe. Even if we had a complete description of both a single state of the universe and the set of causal laws, we would constantly be playing catch-up. We are simply incapable of running through all of the calculations fast enough to keep up with each subsequent state of the universe (let alone get ahead if the state of the universe we have a complete description of is in the distant past). So once again it would be know that the universe is determined, and it would be meaningful to say so, yet we would not be able to predict anyone’s actions. It’s an epistemic problem, not a metaphysical one.

@flutherother That’s the problem known as Buridan’s ass. I think the most obvious objection to it is that freedom does not require a lack of preference. Even if I have an infinite number of possible choices, the requirement that I have no external or internal biases is illegitimate. Preferences don’t make me less free. Indeed, freedom is often considered meaningful precisely because (and insofar as) it allows me to act on my preferences. So really, the supposed problem just gets the whole issue wrong. Freedom of the will does not require an absence of preferences. It simply requires an absence of certain kinds of constraints (nomological constraints in the case of liberty of indifference, physical/physiological constraints in the case of liberty of spontaneity).

@SavoirFaire , Don’t you see that whatever the program predicts can be overridden by the person whose acts are being predicted? Unless the person has a gun pointed to their head, there is no way to force the person to do what the program predicts. There is a definite feedback problem. The problem is not similar to the computer chess program. It is not about the complexity of what is being predicted, but the interaction between the prediction and the person’s acts that are being predicted. It is roughly analogous to the interference caused by the observer related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. See, for example, this. It does relate to Newcomb’s Paradox, though in a subtle way. Once again we have a case where a person’s acts have been predicted, but the person has the freedom to act taking knowledge of the act of prediction into account, though in this case the actual prediction is not known and may or may not be relevant.

@SavoirFaire I accept that freedom of will requires preferences. If we had no preferences we would have no free will, as we would have nothing to desire. But what are these preferences and where do they come from? They don’t originate from the will they come from somewhere deep and inaccessible. The will doesn’t control them, rather they control the will. This is what feels like a paradox to me. We know intuitively that we have free will but the more you try to define it the less it seems to exist.

The issue of whether events can be predicted relates to the meaningfulness of determinism. If you can’t make predictions, then what difference does it make whether events are predetermined? There would be no way to act upon the belief in determinism or to distinguish determinism from non-determinism. You might as well be arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

No. Not anymore.

@longgone Could you elaborate?

@LostInParadise Yes, I understand the point of the example. But my response does not rest in any way upon denying the “feedback problem.” It rests on pointing out that said problem does not entail any paradox. What it entails is that the program is not what the example purports it to be. That is to say, it is not a successfully designed prediction program. It is a failed attempt at a prediction program. Since the example only works if the program is a successful attempt at a prediction problem, no such program could exist in a world where the feedback problem exists. Therefore, there can be no paradox (since there is no world in which both a successful prediction program and the feedback problem exist simultaneously).

And if you go back and look, you’ll see that my chess machine example had absolutely nothing to do with your predictive program example. The chess machine was used in reference to a completely separate point, so it makes no sense for you to compare them (let alone to to decry their dissimilarity, as no similarity was even suggested). Indeed, the chess machine example was about the meaningfulness of calling something predetermined even when you cannot predict it. To say that it is meaningless to describe the computer as determined is absurd (it is quite clear what is meant by such a statement). Yet we cannot predict it with absolute precision. Therefore, the claim that it is meaningless to describe something as predetermined if we cannot predict it with absolute precision is also absurd. QED.

In your most recent post, however, you have raised a different point (perhaps the one that you meant to raise previously). Rather than asking how it could be meaningful to call something predetermined in a world where prediction was impossible, you have asked what difference it would make. As it turns out, there are many potential differences. Some of these are ontological. Others are practical. The ontological ones are obvious: deterministic worlds contain rules that indeterministic worlds lack (the causal laws); non-stochastic indeterministic worlds in which free agency exists include beings with a power that beings in deterministic worlds lack (liberty of indifference). But it seems you are more concerned with the practical differences.

Here there are various things to be said. First, determinism rules out certain moral theories (e.g., Kantianism). So if we were to become convinced that determinism is the case, then one practical difference that would make is that we could discard that moral theory—and all others that take non-determinism as a necessary condition for morality—from consideration (the discarding being an act, and one based—at least in this instance—upon the belief in determinism). So that’s one way of answering the challenge that you have put forward, even if it is a rather technical way.

Furthermore, the inability to make perfect predictions in no way entails that trying to understand the causal laws would be entirely useless. Again, the chess machine is relevant here. Without complete knowledge of its program, I cannot be certain what its next move will be. But given a reasonable amount of knowledge concerning chess rules and chess strategies, I can still make the game a sporting one by making rational—even if fallible—predictions about what the program will do. The same goes for the natural sciences, the social sciences, and even just navigating our way through life. But maybe you don’t think any of those things matter?

@flutherother I still don’t see a problem here. A will requires something to act on and in reaction to. In all cases, what it acts on and in reaction to is the circumstances of the world. Some of these are external (“Hmmm, there seems to be a tree in the road”). Others are internal (“Mmmm, I definitely would rather have the chocolate bar than the grape candy”). It has never been a problem for any theory of free will that some things are beyond our control. The issue has only been about the nature and extent of the will’s influence over our reactions. It’s not that our preferences control the will, it is that they inform our will. They are the data upon and in reaction to which it—and thus we—act.

@NerdyKeith I’m way out of my depth on this topic, so – not really. I’ll try.

We think we make choices. We feel that we have the option to resist temptation, or give in.

Where does this ability come from? What makes one person drink two bottles of wine and steal a car, while others study dilligently for exams, or return money to its rightful owner?

Apart from genetics and environment, we are all the same. Therefore, the ability to “be good” must come from a combination of these two factors. This leads me to believe that anyone with my genetics and experience, in the same situation, would have acted just like me. What’s “free” about decisions, if all decisions are based on who I am?

@longgone I would say having a strong sense of will power or a weak sense is relievent to these issues. I think we all have the ability to decide to to drink alcohol,or eat certain foods or perform certain acts. There is temptation, but there is also the will power to defy it.

I’m going to choose to change my response on this:

We have no free will. (So apparently, I didn’t choose that belief at all. I’m going to pretend as if I did.)

@NerdyKeith Yeah, but where does that willpower come from?

“I can resist everything except temptation” Oscar Wilde.