Do you believe in free will?
There is an argument that free will doesn't exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
Nope, I don't.
Doesn't really matter, though. We certainly have the illusion of free will, we behave as if it exists, so it doesn't actually matter in a practical sense.
It is fun to think about!
I have no choice but to believe in it.
You could become convinced your perception of it is an illusion and not reality as it actually is, then you would have no choice not to believe it.
In my opinion humans are biological machines reacting to stimulus based on previous experience.
If we could theoretically perfectly map the brain and understand it, we could predict what a person would do in response to a specific stimulus.
At least that is how I have come to understand my existence.
Doesn't mean I am off the hook for my poor decisions either. I still have to make the decision, even if theoretically we already knew what I would do.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly how I feel about it. The universe is nothing but dead matter being pushed around by blind force, and any sense of agency is just an emergent phenomenon that exists as an illusion in the brain without having any actual bearing on reality. If you perfectly understood all of the forces and matter involved, you could perfectly predict what any given human (or anything system at all) would do.
That said, I also believe that it's a completely useless idea when you're trying to navigate through life, so I mostly just keep it in the back of my head like some half-forgotten piece of trivia and spend most of my time pretending to be in control like everyone else. Cheers!
Me too. The illusion of choice is what makes life interesting I suppose.
This is my favorite take on this topic. I also feel this way and its hard to get people to look at it this way I've noticed. People tend to loop back to "If theres no free will why do anything?" Or "If there is no free will why should murderers be punished?" Just because theres possibly no free will doesnt mean we should change the way we live our lives.
It's a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there's no free will, then why not instead try to "solve" murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We'd all be better off!
On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don't know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br'er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that's hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can't know their mind.
The question is meaningless, the answer doesn't affect reality, unless you propose an external mind that is controlling or at least influencing our decisions.
Even with the external mind it'd be irrelevant. As long as we have no way of knowing the future or being able to predict it, having or not having free will is observed in exactly the same way.
If there were some external mind, one might at least speculate about its reasons. Which would probably be futile since it would influence those considerations too. Hm. Yeah.
There's no evidence for free will. Every physical process involved in the function of our bodies and brains has so far proven to be deterministic in every way we can verify. That doesn't mean you can't have an original thought though, it just means that any original thought you have was necessarily going to happen and couldn't possibly have happened any other way. It's fate.
Even if the universe is nondeterministic like quantum physics suggests you still don't have free will because your thoughts and feelings are still ruled by physical processes even when they are random.
But you don't need physics to dispute free will. Schopenhauer already said that you may do what you want. But you cannot will what you want. Einstein used that realisation to not take everything too seriously even when people act infuriating.
citation needed
You exist in the brain, which is ruled by physical processes. Not sure what citations you need for that.
For real though, they have even identified the hormone responsible for the "this was my idea" feeling. But I'm too lazy to google it.
/me gestures in the general direction of the model of particle physics (and neuroscience)
In a deterministic reality, where all things are due and subject to causation, there can be no free will. If we did not live in a causal reality, we'd never be able to make accurate predictions or models.
"Randomness" is not free will either. If you're not in complete control of your influences, then you can not be said to have free will. Randomness does nothing to help the argument for free will.
With that said. Regardless of the existence of free will, what does exists is your awareness of what it's like to be you. To be in the circumstances that currently govern your life. And in that awareness exists the boundless capacity for compassion. Once you understand that no one is in control of their lives, that all things are causal, it allows you to be less judgmental.
"If a man is crossing a river and an empty boat collides with his own skiff, he will not become angry. He will simply guide his boat around it.
But if he sees a person in the boat, he will shout at the other to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, and the boats collide, he will curse the other person.
Yet, if the boat were empty, he would not be angry."
— Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)
I wrote a simple explanation of determinism in a blog post earlier this year (there's an audio version available as well.) https://mrfunkedude.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/following-the-strings/
Just pointing this out - we don't live in a deterministic reality. Quantum interactions are inherently probabilistic and can't be predetermined. This usually doesn't matter, but you can chain larger classical systems onto quantum interactions (i.e. Schrödingers cat), which makes them non-deterministic as well.
Thanks for the reply.
"inherently probabilistic and can't be determined" is just another way of saying "random" or "we don't know yet".
If reality was not deterministic, the reliability of models and predictions in physics would be upended.
Well yes, it means "random". Of course there's always a chance that we're just missing something fundamental, but it would mean that literally every model we have is completely wrong. Unless we find indications for that (and there don't seem to be any so far) I think it's fair to assume that quantum interactions are actually random.
No, because reality is not deterministic, yet the reliability of models and predictions in physics is not upended. There simply are enough of these interactions happening that, in the "macro" world, we can talk about them deterministically, since they are probabilistic. But that doesn't mean the "micro" interactions are deterministic, and it also doesn't mean it's impossible for a "macro" interaction to be non-deterministic - again, the example of Schrödingers cat comes to mind.
You could literally build a non-deterministic experiment right now if you wanted to.
Hm, I'm not sure if I understand the abstract correctly.
Say I build two Schrödingers cat experiments next to each other, and connect them so that each vial dispersing the poison also makes the other vial disperse poison. I go away, and come back to both vials having triggered and both nuclear decays having occurred. How could I determine the path the whole system took?
Sorry, it's been a long time since I last looked at the mathematical side of quantum mechanics, so most of your comment flew over my head. Let me put it in as simple terms as I can:
If there are multiple paths a system can take to reach a final state, how can you accurately determine which path was taken if you only know the initial & final state? IMO this shouldn't be possible.
As I hear it described, it doesn't even make logical sense. A thing is either random, or deterministic. People talk about decisions being motivated by something, but also somehow independent of all exterior things.
People will come back that that lets you off the hook for your misdeeds, but that's only the case if you believe in retribution for it's own sake. A version of incapacitation and rehabilitation could make sense against something as devoid of "free will" as a bridge or building, and deterrence only needs the target to be capable of strategy.
To answer the question a slightly different way, in light of the post text: How random the universe is will come down to fundamental physics. The simplest way of interpreting the current state of the art is that the universe is deterministic but branching.
Doesn't matter either way.
I agree. But then I am a pragmatist, which tends to make people extremely mad
Is there a tl;dr for that?
Sure:
– C. S. Peirce
I don't see why that would make anyone angry, but I also can't understand what the hell it actually means. "The third grade of clearness of apprehension"? "Might conceivably"?
Well, understandable. It's one line out of a book, out of context. What he means is that no metaphysical nonsense actually matters, if it doesn't have real-world consequences. I.e. someone can claim Russell's Teapot actually exists, and rest of us can just ignore them because it's untestable and inconsequential.
This has made very many philosophers very angry, but I don't expect anyone who's not interested in philosophy to care.
Ah I gotcha. That's an actual tl;dr. Makes sense to me and I agree.
Free will is real and it's an illusion at the same time.
Our actions are reactions. And we are very limited in our execution of will by the most basic physical boundaries. For example I cannot fly, no matter how much I will it to be so.
We have free will to control the actions of the biological apparatus which is our body, to an extent, though even those are limited by circumstances and consequences.
Overall we have limited free will, or free will "lite"
i have yet to see any evidence thatethere is anything that overcomes the deterministic nature of the universe. the rare bit of chaos we get from quantum mechanics is washed away by the law of large numbers.
By and large, I agree with you: I cannot see how free will fits into a deterministic universe. I still want to make some points for the case that there is some form of free will.
Think about scratching your nose right now, and decide whether or not to do it. It's banal, but I can't help being convinced by that simple act that I do have some form of choice. I can't fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.
This brings up the second point: We don't need to invoke quantum mechanics to get large-scale uncertainty. It's enough to assume that our mind is a complex, chaotic system. In that case, minute changes in initial conditions or input stimuli can massively change the state of our mind only a short time later. This allows for our mind to be deterministic but functionally impossible to predict (if immeasurably small changes in conditions can cascade to large changes in outcome).
I seem to remember reading that what we interpret as free will is usually our mind justifying our actions after the fact, which would fit well with the "chaotic but deterministic" theory.
so your argument is just personal incredulity?
The issue is not about choice. It is about control. Your next action is purely dependant on the current state of your brain and the stimuli around you. Where is the part that isn't controlled by this system? How did you cause your brain to be exactly how it is right this moment? Was it not a cause of your previous brain state and the stimuli in the previous moment? How can you shown it's not turtles all the way down?
The chaos comment is not really relevant. Chaos isn't choice, I only brought it up to show that at the level of our brains and the interactions we have there isn't anything random. A world rewound would produce the same outcome.
I think you're missing my point: I opened by saying that I definitely believe the world is deterministic. I then went on to problematise the extremely unpredictable nature of the human mind. To the point where an immeasurable amount of historical input goes into determining what number I will say if you ask me to think of one.
Then, I used the argument of a chaotic system to reconcile the determinism of the universe with the apparent impossibility of predicting another persons next thought. A highly chaotic system can be deterministic but still remain functionally unpredictable.
Finally, I floated the idea that what we interpret as free will is in fact our mind justifying the outcome of a highly chaotic process after the fact. I seem to remember there was some research on split-brain patients regarding this.
It doesn't matter.
I'm not sold on the whole universe being deterministic, but Robert Sapolsky has a book called Determined which has pretty much convinced me that we don't have any agency. He's a neuroscientist, and breaks down what goes in to our actions based on the immediate causes, our environment, our upbringing, our culture, and, in my opinion, doesn't really leave a place for agency to remain. I don't really understand his arguments well enough to articulate them here, but I think he's done some interviews on YouTube which I'm sure will cover the gist of it.
I don't think free will can be dismissed just because the framework that it runs on is deterministic.
Let's say you program a text editor. A computer runs the program, but the computer has no influence on what text the user is going to write.
I think that consciousness is a user like that. It runs on deterministic hardware but it's not necessarily deterministic due to that. It might be for other reasons, but the laws of physics isn't it, because physics doesn't prohibit free will from existing.
Consciousness is wildly complex. It's a self illusion and we really have no good idea about where decisions even come from.
If it is deterministic, it would have to involve every single atom in the universe that in one way or another have influenced the person. Wings of a butterfly and light from distant stars etc. Attempting to predict it would require a simulation of everything. That leads to other questions. If a simulation is a 1:1 replica of the real thing, which one is then real and what happens if we run it backwards, can we see what caused the big bang, etc.
So, even if this is about free will, the enquiry falls short on trying to figure out what even causes anything to happen at all.
If we are happy with accepting that the universe was caused by something before or outside the universe, then it's really easy to point in that direction and say that free will also comes from there - somewhere outside the deterministic physics.
Of course the actual universe and the laws of physics are really not separate as data and functions. The data itself contains the instructions. Any system that can contain itself that way is incomplete as proved by Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Truths do exist that can't be proven so perhaps the concept of free will is an example of such a thing, or maybe it's not. The point is that we can't rule it out, just because it exists in a deterministic system.
Personally I don't think it matters all that much. Similarly to how we can only ever experience things that exists inside of the universe,or see the light that hits our eye, we can also only ever hope to experience free will on the level of our own consciousness, even if we acknowledge that it is influenced by all kinds of other things from all levels from atoms to the big bang.
We are particles governed by physical laws, so no
Free will is based on the concept of the individual, a concept bounded by a separation already as arbitrary and illusory as a nation's border. It's pragmatic to pretend these things exist in your day to day life, but they don't mean anything to the universe.
I'm a compatiblist. I don't think a deterministic universe precludes free will. Of course there are reasons for everything we do. If free will was only the freedom to make bad or random decisions, what's the point? That's a lot of free but not a lot will.
No, we don't have free will. HOWEVER, I don't think that arguement will hold up in court.
It can't hold up in court. It ultimately does not matter whether someone is compelled to do evil, or chooses to do evil. Society must be protected in either case
It's dangerous to tell people that they have no free will.
Those who do not want to think critically will just convince themselves that the world is falling apart and that they can't do anything about it because it's all predetermined any way.
Others take advantage of the idea of a predetermined future as a license to do whatever they please. Any terrible thing they do is not a problem to them because their actions were already predetermined, they couldn't help it because they were destined to do these things .... at least that is what they tell everyone.
I believe there is a middle ground ... our biology, our environment, our genetics and the universe as a whole runs like a mechanical clock with predetermined movements .... but we are provided with enough options at every movement or critical point to determine our future.
We will never be able to change how our universe works but we can choose how we can exist in that universe.
Is the opposite of dangerous. Being informed helps people make better decisions, and on a macro scale it helps society progress by not basing the collecting decisions on erroneous or untruths ideologies. The example you gave is theoretically possible and it may have happened once a century but, the reality is that people that does not believe the religious belief of free-will, do not behave like that.
I think we have free agency within various external constraints. Which means we can try to find ways to circumvent external constraints, while also understanding that, as the fictional Ian Malcolm Smith put it, just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should do it.
Just based on my observations of my life, I seem to have the ability to choose to do or not do things, and that's good enough for me. Is my choice just part of the infinite universe's fixed progression through time and I would have done what I did regardless? Are there infinite parallel universes where parallel versions of me exist that have collectively made every choice I can possibly make? Don't care. I feel like I have free will and IMO that's what's most relevant to my life in this universe.
I think the question is ill defined. The answer is entirely dependent on the definitions you use and i don't think answering the question really leads to a meaningfully different view of the world or has any real intellectual consequences.
If there is an unbroken chain of causality, that means that history has been written start to finish already, and my consciousness is just along for the ride. The thing is, my consciousness is locked to right now, which is a single point in this 4-D space, as are all the consciousnesses that I interact with because that’s exactly what right now is.
Until the day I interact with a consciousness that is experiencing a different point in 4-D space other than right now, it does not matter if free will truly exists because from my perspective and from all of my scientific testing so far (like deciding to pick my nose as I just did), evidence suggests that my consciousness is capable of making decisions. Even if those decisions are all a result of a deterministic path, my consciousness felt like it made them so it might as well have.
To add to this, I've noticed not only here but anywhere I ask this question there is a camp of people who immediately become defensive and say the question is pointless. In person it can lead to people getting very angry sometimes at the idea and that is odd to me. I don't really see how the question is pointless, and instead it seems to me like some people feel intimidated by it
Of course given physics and materialism, sans metaphysics, free will is s myth. But the calculations are so difficult you may as well believe.
What explanation do people envision, after which they would both understand the mechanism of free will and are convinced it exists? That understanding just seems contradictory to me, so either it doesn't exist or we can't define it.
It is an impossible concept invented by humans. Free from what? Literally everything you do is because of things beyond your control. It isn't predestined, it just isn't up to you. The question is, at the end of the day, were you kind?
You have free will, but you also have chains that bound you.
Starting from the social order, you need money and other social relations (friends, family, bosses) to literally survive in the modern world - you're not omnipotent.
Then you have the cognitive chains - stuff you know and understand, as well stuff you can invent (or reinvent) from your current knowledge - you are not omnipresent.
Then, as a consequence, without these two, you cannot be (omni)benevolent - you'll always fuck something up (and even if you didn't, most actions positive towards something will have a negative impact towards something else).
All these are pretty much categorically impossible to exist - you're not some god-damn deity.
But does this mean free will doesn't exist?
Hardly. It's just not as ultimate a power or virtue as some may put it. Flies or pigs also have free will - they're free to roll in mud or lick a turd - except for when they're not because they do it to survive (cool themselves or eat respectively).
We humans similarily eat and shit, and we go to work so we have something to eat and someplace to shit. Otherwise you die without the former or get fined without the latter.
So that's what free will is - the ability of an organism to guide what it's doing, how, when (and, to some extent, even why) it's doing it, according to its senses and sensibilities. It's the process with which we put our own, unique spin on the things in our lives.
Being an omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent would in fact remove the essence of what free will (with all its limits) is, because our actions wouldn't have any meaningful consequences. It'd all just be an effective (what I'll call negative) chaos - a mishmush of everything only understandable to the diety.
So in fact, the essence of "free" will is that it's free within some bounds - some we've set ourselves, some we're forced with (disabilities, cognitive abilities, physical limits, etc.). Percisely in the alternative scenario would "free" will cease to be free - because someone already knows it all - past, present future, local and global, from each atom on up. There's perfect causality - as perfect as a movie. You can't change it meaningfully - any changes become a remix or remaster - they lose their originality.
With the limits on our thinking which cause us to be less-than-perfect, they cause a kind of positive chaos, one where one tries to do their best with what they have on their disposal - as they say, you get to know people best at their lowest. Similarily, everyone gets corrupted at a high enough power level - some just do it sooner than others. So surely, at an infinite power level, not even someone omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent all at once would be able to curb this flaw.
no. events and our decisions are abstracted far enough so that the illusion of free will is apparent. I think it's very well impossible to fully distinguish between free will and fate from our limited perspective
Fun thought exercise but functionally irrelevant. It still feels like I'm making decisions, so that's close enough.
Yes I do, because my own experience of existence suggests I have it. Could that all be an illusion? Sure. But believing I don't have free will would pretty much deny the existence of my self, which, being myself, I'm not really capable of, nor would I want to do that.
You could define self differently. Buddhism has some fun takes on it.
it all depends on how you define a person. Most likely, you think that a person's consciousness is something inside the brain, and in this case, the "external" body really influences your decisions. But that's not how it really works. The body is also a part of you, so everything that happens inside it, including "the hormone levels", is a part of you. And your experience is a part of you too. It's just that you can't control it, but that doesn't mean it's not your decisions. Otherwise, we will come to the conclusion that muscle memory is also not a part of you, but some kind of external factor. In general, if you are interested in my answer: yes, we always make decisions on our own.
Muscle memory is stored in the brain, if you didn't know that already.
I believe that we should treat most people as if they have free will but I don't exactly believe in the idealistic notion of free will. I believe we can make choices, but I believe our choices are limited and shaped by our experiences.
I agree that there is no free will, but to act as if that is true is pointless. Nihilism isn’t useful. If it makes you feel better, you are doing what you would have done regardless even if there was free will. I don’t think the fact every action is predetermined matters much. If anything, it makes me have compassion for the worst people, who arguably were fated to be what they are because of the domino effect.
I often wonder if the dominos will ever fall in a way that guarantees us all a positive outcome. Can we heal our monsters? So that every domino thereafter creates no more?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Poetically, you are the universe trying to understand itself.
I tend to believe that there is a sort of "natural distribution" of possible outcomes where there is scope for that, i.e. allowing randomness. Unless we can construct a way to derive this out of some natural laws, positive outcome for everyone sounds like to have very little chance to happen.
It's not even wrong.
No. We make choices, we think, but those choices come frome somewhere. And all of the roots are beyond our control. There is no room for free will, it is a magical reduction of why we do things. We don't say a ball has free will when it is kicked down a hill. I can't separate myself from the ball in any meaningful way.
Tl;Dr, yes*
I find this discussion to be an exercise in frustration. There's a lot of philosophical jargon that gets glazed over and nuances that often get ignored. I also think it's an incredibly complex and complicated topic that we simply do not have enough information available to us to determine in a scientific manner.
For instance: what kind of "free will" are we talking about? Often it's "Libertarian Free Will," that is, absolute agency uninfluenced by any external factors. This much is disproven scientifically, as our brains run countless "subconscious" calculations in response to our environment to hasten decision making and is absolutely influenced by a myriad of factors, regardless of if you're conciously aware of it or not.
However, I think that the above only "disproves" all notions of free will if you divorce your "subconscious" from the rest of your being. Which is where the complication and nuance comes in. What is the "self?" What part of you can you point to as being the "real you?"
From a Christian perspective, you might say the "self" is your soul, which is not yet proven by science, and thus the above has no bearing on, as it cannot take the soul into account. But from the opposite side of the spectrum, from a Buddhist perspective, there is no eternal, unchanging, independently existing "self." And as such, the mind in its entirety, concious awarness or not, is just another part of your aggregates, and from that perspective it can be argued that a decision is no less your own just because it was not made in your conscious awareness.
With my ramblings aside, I am a Buddhist and so my opinion is that we do have free will, we're just not always consciously aware of every decision we make. And while we cannot always directly control every decision we make, we can influence and "train" our autopilot reactions to make better decisions.
There is only one choice: feeling or rationality.
When you feel, you do what feels best.
When you think, you do what is the most valuable.
So no free will but that choice.
The circumstances that led you to any particular decision are pre-determined at the time you're making that decision, simply through the fact that those circumstances have already happened prior to the current decision at hand; but that doesn't mean you don't have the free will to make that decision in the moment.
To extend on that a little: if you were able to make the same person face the same decision multiple times under identical circumstances, I don't believe you'd get identical results every time. It may not be an even distribution between the possible choices; but it wouldn't be a consistent answer either. The Human element introduces too much chaos for that kind of uniformity.
I believe we do not truly have agency but have evolved to think and act as though we do. Since inputs to each choice are likely infinite (probably uncountable as opposed to countable), the lack of agency is difficult to observe.
There’s a documentary about having free will to create your own fate and determine your own future. It’s called Terminator 2 Judgment Day.
Anyway, the whole thing goes: The future's not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.
honestly, i've never seen or heard a single coherent definition of what we even mean by 'free will'. until the question makes sense, i can't really answer it, and don't see any point in discussing it.
anyways, who here believes in blabblesnork? that is a word that refers to something, i promise, but no, i won't tell you what it means.
If it looks like free will and quacks like free will, then it probably is free will.
Yes but I need to define free will, I define it as the freedom to make a choice. We don't control who our parents are, we don't control what country we live in, we don't control how others interact with us but we can control what choices we make.
We can chose option A-B-C.....
Get in the car and go until the scenery looks different. Be somewhere you don't belong and you'll feel more in charge of your choices and decisions. Every single person has the ability to be a wild card and go off script if they choose it. That's free will. Embrace the wild.
Every decision you make and everything that happens is based on conditions, and nothing exists outside of conditions.
In the ultimate sense there's no such thing as free will, because everything has a conditioned existence.
I want to, but Determinism sounds pretty reasonable. Everything is just going with the flow from the big bang, including what happens in our consciousness. Do I think this because of my own will, or because of events set into motion billions of years ago? 🤔
No I don't.
It's free will as long as you don't know and/or control all of that chain of causality.
I don’t believe one can make decisions outside of their web of being.
Thoughts and muscle movements come about through the opening and closing of ion channels that allow information to travel through neurons and for muscle fibers to contract and relax. 'Free will' in the sense that our mind is separate from our body and that it can somehow open those ion channels is a combination of dualism and molecular telekinesis, so I do not believe that, no.
But I do believe that consciousness is an essential emergent property of our brain. What we experience might be the output of a causal prediction engine in our brain that is making a prediction about the immediate sensory experience in a way that we can respond to stimuli before they happen. In that sense, yes, I do believe in free will because that conscious output that I experience is me! This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.
I think that a materialist framing of free will requires accepting some model of consciousness in which consciousness is not just a weird accident but is a physical phenomenon that is part of us. An essential feature of how our brain works. This is not yet demonstrated (very difficult if not impossible to do so), but I think it is. Then 'free will' and 'a material system following the laws of physics' is no longer a contradiction.
Is the emergent phenomena, consciousness, weak or strong? I think the former, which I think you support, posits a panpsychism and the latter is indistinguishable from magic.
I'm a little confused about the relationship between the causal prediction machine (CPM) and the self. to reiterate, the brain has a causal prediction engine. It's inputs are immediate sensory experience. I assume the causal prediction engines' output is predictions. These predictions are limited to the what the next sensory stimuli might be in response to the recent sensory input. These predictions lead to choices. Or maybe the same as choices.
So these outputs are experienced. And that experience of making predictions is me. Am I the one experiencing the predictions as well?
So this sentence confuses me: "This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices." Am I making the predictions or is it the CPM?
I think that its emergence is weak but I see no resolution to the hard problem of consciousness any time soon, so for the time my opinions about it are ideas that I find compelling and intuitive and not grounded in facts and evidence. Weak emergence does posit some form of pansychism in the sense that sentient-like behavior can emerge in other brains and even that characteristics that we might associate with sentience might emerge from other phenomena present through the universe. But, because of the same reasons that the hard problem is hard, it is also hard to study and learn about these phenomena.
I can try to explain a little better what I meant.
I don't believe we have "free will" in the sense that the mind is separate from the body (dualism) and that it is able to break the laws of physics by altering our physiological processes. I don't think that the non-determinism of quantum mechanics in itself gives us agency, and our mind does not have a mechanism to select how a particular wavev function collapses (not a fan of the Orch OR model).
So, in this traditional sense my answer is "no, we do not have free will"
But I think that the existential crisis and feeling of a lack of agency stems from the model of sentience that one believes. If one rejects dualism, posits that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but then ascribes only very loosely a mechanism to consciousness such as 'complex information processing gives rise to consciousness', then sentience appears to be just some unexplained quirk that is not essential and just happens to be there. Combining a lack of dualism and free will with consciousness being a useless quirk is what (I think) creates the existential crisis associated with a lack of free will. I used to fall into this camp of thought and resolved the crisis through a logic such as: "Yeah, there is no free will, living is nice though so I am happy that I can accidentally experience the world".
What pushed me to re-assess this way of thinking originally was reading through a paper about teaching a dish of neurons how to play pong](https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6). At first it did not make sense to me how one can possibly provide feedback to a group of isolated neurons such that it could learn to play a game. What 'reward' can you give a group of neurons to push them to do what you want?!
I looked into Karl Friston, the last author of that paper, which led me down a path of study. I discovered Judea Pearl, who formalized causal reasoning in a way that lets us build statistical models to move from correlations to counterfactual causes. This makes it possible to teach causal inference even to machines.
Karl Friston's work and other researchers in the field argue that the brain is a computer built for causal computing. This idea underpins the Bayesian brain, Predictive Coding Theory, Active Inference.
In Karl Friston's Active Inference book, sentience is proposed to emerge as a result of the prediction engine. What we experience is not actually what our senses already experienced, but instead it is what our brain expects that we will sense in the next instant. This model of reality that is built by our brain in its attempt to perform its basic function (link causes to effects in order to predict the next stimulus).
One idea is that consciousness emerges because the predictive brain is creating a 'model' that does not exist in physical space and so it needs imagination to explore it. The imagination of things that do not exist is essential to the process of generating counterfactuals, and counterfactuals are at the core of the causality machine. To show that A causes B, you need to imagine a situation in which A is not present and estimate the likelyhood of B. One idea is that it is precisely in the creation of a world without A that sentience emerges.
A lot of these ideas are not falsifiable, so it is difficult to say that this is indeed the mechanism of consciousness. But some of the ideas are falsifiable, and those ideas have helped these researchers teach neurons how to play pong, so I think they might have a point.
So, then, I find it plausible that consciousness is not a quirk but an essential feature of our brain. To me this resolves the free will crisis because my consciousness is not an accidental outcome of physical processes just chaotically whizzing by but an actual feature of the machinery that is me.
I am this machine and I follow the laws of physics. I am part of physical reality, and my sentience is a feature of who I am. If I do something it is because I chose to do so, and the fact that I chose to do so in accordance to the law of physics does not remove my agency.
Sorry for the long delay. I think engaging with the material and what you wrote requires some reflection time and, unfortunately, my time for that is limited these days. And so while I was hoping to offer a more robust response after having read the links you provided, I think engagement was more necessary to keep the conversation fresh even if I've only had a glance at the material.
The brain in the dish study seems to be interesting and raised new questions for me. "What is a brain?" comes to mind. For me, I have a novice level understanding of the structures of the brain and the role in neurotransmitters, hormones, neuron structures, etc. But I've never really examined what a brain is and how it is something more than or other than it's component parts and their operations.
Some other questions would be:
So those are some of the initial thoughts I had and would read the paper to see if the authors are even raising that question in their paper.
But more fundamentally, we still have to examine the mind-body problem. Recontextualizing it to a CPM, "what is the relationship between a CPM and either the brain or the mind?" I am unclear if the CPM is a mental or physical phenomena. There seems to be a certainty that the CPM is part of the brain, but the entirety of it's output is non-physical. I imagine that we assume a narrative where the brain in the dish is creating a CPM because it demonstrates learning, adaptive behavior based upon external stimuli.
Ultimately, I bring it back to a framing question. Why choose weak emergence prematurely? It limits our investigation and imagination.
Well... that's my set of issues. I'll try to find time to read those articles in the next few days!
Cheers!
In my view, neuroscience may contribute to clarifying questions like:
Do all brains support a conscious predictive model (CPM)?
Does adaptive behavior in brainless organisms suggest a primitive CPM?
What is the relationship between brain and mind?
But deeper questions, such as “What do we mean by mind?” or “Why assume weak emergence?” remain tied to the hard problem of consciousness, which currently lies beyond the reach of empirical science.
In trying to describe promising cognitive models, I buried my main point. I am not arguing that the brain and mind problem is close to a solution, or that science is close to resolving it.
Here is my actual point:
Certain materialist views unintentionally reproduce dualist thinking. Substance dualism claims that the mind exists outside physical law. Materialism, in contrast, holds that the mind emerges from brain activity. But when this emergence is explained only as complexity or undefined processing, a conceptual gap forms: brain -> black box -> mind. This reproduces dualism in practice, even if not in theory.
This gap renders consciousness a passive byproduct. It becomes a new kind of soul, unable to influence the body. A mind without agency.
Predictive processing and active inference models offer an alternative. They describe the brain as a generative system that continuously updates predictions based on sensory input. As summarized in a recent review:
While these models do not resolve the hard problem, they help remove part of the black box. They suggest that consciousness may play a functional role in these feedback loops. It is not a detached illusion but a process embedded in how the brain operates.
For me, this shift changed how I think about free will. Not because it provides final answers, but because it allows me to see mental acts in a similar way to how I see muscle movement. These acts are constrained by physical laws, but they are still mine.
I'm going to stick with the meat of your point. To summarize,
brain -> black box -> mindbrain -> black box -> CPM-> consciousness -> black box -> mindBut to go further,
stimuli -> brain -> black box -> CPM-> consciousness update CPM -> black box -> mind -> response to stimuliThe CPM as far as I can tell is the following:
representation of stimuli -> model (of the world with a modeled self) -> consciousness making predictions (of how the world changes if the self acts upon it) -> updating model -> updated prediction -> suspected desired resultI feel like I've mis-represented something of your position with the self. I think you're saying that the self is the prediction maker. And that free will exists in the making of predictions. But presentation of the CPM places the self in the model. Furthermore, I think you're saying that consciousness is a process of the brain and I think it's of the mind. Can you remedy my representation of your position?
Quickly reading the review, I went to see if they posited role for the mind. I was disappointed to see that they, not only ignored it (unsurprising), but collapsed functions normally attributed to the mind to the brain. Ascribing predictions, fantasies, and hypotheses to the brain or calling it a statistical organ sidesteps the hard problem and collapses it into a physicalist view. They don't posit a mind-body relationship, they speak about body and never acknowledge the mind. I find this frustrating.
That is not quite how I see it. The linear diagram "brain -> black box -> mind" represents a common mode of thinking about the mind as a by-product of complex brain activity. Modern theories are a lot more integrative. Conscious perception is not just a byproduct of the form brain -> black box -> mind, but instead it is an essential active element in the thought process.
That text was probably written by a materialist / physicalist, and this view is consistent within this framework. It is OK that you find this frustrating, and it is also alright if you don't accept the materialist / physicalist viewpoint. I am not making an argument about materialism being the ultimate truth, or about materialism having all of the answers - especially not answers relating to the hard problem! I am specifically describing how different frameworks held by people who already hold a materialist view can lead to different ways of understanding free will.
Scientists often do sidestep the hard problem in the sense that they acknowledge it to be "hard" and keep moving without dwelling on it. There are many philosophers (David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Stuart R. Hameroff), that do like getting into the nitty-gritty about the hard problem, so there is plenty of material about it, but the general consensus is that the answers to the hard problem cannot be find using the materialist's toolkit.
Materialists have is a mechanism for building consensus via the scientific method. This consensus mechanism has allowed us to understand a lot about the world. I share your frustration in that this class of methods does not seem to be capable of solving the hard problem.
We may never discover a mechanism to build consensus on the hard problem, and unfortunately this means that answers to many very important questions will remain subjective. As an example, if we eventually implement active inference into a computer, and the computer claims to be conscious, we may have no consensus mechanism to determine whether they "really" are conscious or not, just as we cannot ascertain today whether the people around us are conscious. In my opinion, yes, it is physically possible to build conscious systems, and at some point it will get tricky because it will remain a matter of opinion. It will be an extremely polarizing topic.
I should start off and say I'm less interested in the quesiton of free will than the relationship between consciousness and matter. I want to reframe that so you know what I'm focused on.
Here, I'm assuming "it" is a conscious perception. But now I'm confused again because I don't think any theory of mind would deny this.
On the other hand, if "it" is "the brain" then I need to know more about the theory. As I understanding it, the theory says that the brain creates models. Models are mental. I just don't know how that escapes the black box that connects to the mind. But as you assert and I understand, it is:
stimuli -> CPM ⊆ brain -> consciousness update CPM -?> black box -?> mind -?> brain -> nervous system -> response to stimuliIf it isn't obvious, the question marks represent where I don't understand the model.
So if I were to narrow down my concerns, it would be:
You have as much free will as a leaf or a fish.
Maybe not 100% because I am the sum of my experiences but I can choose to act against my impulses if I want to.
If free will was truly non-existent, it would mean that a theoretical entity with access to perfect information would be able to perfectly predict your actions. I don't believe that is possible; I think that human beings are too irrational. Consider a very simple decision: what am I going to have for dinner? You could know the restaurants I have access to, what food is in my home, what I have discussed in a given day, and even what my current mood is, but it can ultimately come down to a whim. I could choose something I've never had before, for no reason, and seek it out.
I believe that we are individual actors in a very complex system that introduces lots of constraints to our decision-making process. We may not even be consciously aware of some of the constraints; however, we are always the ones ultimately making the decisions. You always have the option of a whim.
How would perceived irrationality be counter to a deterministic universe? It just maybe seems irrational without all of the information, but is still perfectly part of the causal chain.
See, now we're getting into parts that we can't prove. My argument is that it is irrational. Your argument is that it merely seems that way. There is no reconciling our positions.
So you're saying it is possible then? That was my only hangup. I don't have a position on whether we have free will (leaning towards not) for the exact reason we can't prove it.
But your whim wouldn't really be random. It may seem random to you but there would be a reason behind it. How did you find out about the random place? You would've had to of come to the decision that you wanted something different somehow
This implies that every action must have a reason behind it, which I frankly find a laughable concept. Human beings are irrational creatures; our actions don't require a reason. We have the ability to choose chaos. Unless your argument is that the cells in my stomach have the ability to know what kind of food they want and can unconsciously pass that information to my brain, there's no reason for me to decide at 8:00 PM tonight "Hey, I want to eat Pakistani food."
In fact, I could choose an invalid choice! Say I chose Pakistani. I would logically need to find a Pakistani restaurant to order from. What if they all closed at 8? What if I didn't have a Pakistani restaurant near me? I may make a decision that ultimately, I cannot act upon, and then I would have to introduce some constraints to my decision making process. The decisions that follow would have a reason, but the initial whim doesn't require one.
How did you hear about pakistani food? Where did you hear about Pakistan recently enough to recall it? Was it food related or not? If you look deep enough, yes sometimes unconsciously, we make these decisions that seem random but they are not. In a real scenario, not one just made up for the sake of debate, theres gonna be underlying reasons for your "random" choice. You could even try your darndest to be random and choose the first thing that comes to mind but you are still digging for things that it ties to "that would be unlikely therefore random" when in reality its just a word or concept you've unconsciously defined as unusual or different. I don't think there is a human element or ability to choose chaos like you think there is. It just appears that way because thats the only way we are capable of perceiving it
Then we must agree to disagree, because there really isn't any further to debate. My argument is that human beings are irrational and capable of making irrational decisions. Your argument is that irrationality is merely a pretense, and that there must be a confluence of factors that caused these things to happen. I think trying to constantly find a reason when one doesn't need to exist is a path to madness, and that is why I believe in free will.
I can respect that. Good closure to a discussion!
What about randomness? Most people would say to be random is not to have free will.
This depends, because there are two different kinds of randomness. A lot of the "randomness" that people encounter is actually based upon something, and our theoretical entity with access to perfect information could predict the outcome of that randomness perfectly. I'm thinking of stuff like computer randomness, number generation, games of chance, that sort of thing.
However, true random absolutely exists; in the words of Terry Pratchett "Things just happen, what the hell." You see it with mutations in nature; ordinarily healthy cells can spontaneously change without directed input. It is unpredictable, even for our theoretical entity.
Or like quantum systems, in the interpretations that prevent alternate universes. The first kind is called "pseudorandomness" in mathematics.
Usually, when people say free will they don't just mean that their decisions are random, though.
Does that even mater? Either stance can't be proved.
We have free will, but the majority are not free to exercise it because of material conditions and/or circumstance.
I think there may be a paradox hiding in your question. You cannot believe in free will. You have it or you don't - I would postulate you need a neutral third-party observer to tell you. For us humans, a Martian might do. Believing is an act of faith. Faith tends to bend will to its dogmas. I would go so far as to say belief is the natural enemy of a free will.
We are distracted animals. All things being equal, the Martian observer will after years of careful study come to the conclusion that humans have free will. But it's constantly battered by short attention spans, a tendency to go with the herd, presupposituons in our heads that we don't often or never question, etc. We are a smartphone full of bloatware running on too little RAM. It takes skill to operate. Some are more skillful than others.
You could of course counter that by saying that's what you believe. It's paradoxes all the way down.
ya'll some neo and oracle bustas up in here.
yes, as entities that are conscious of consciousness, we can steer ideas and actions with our will and intent.
This may or may not have universal implications, so stop trying to be all grandiose. we're barely existing conscious ants that have imaginations. does that mean the universe won't experience entropy? one of these things is not like the other.
You gave an argument against free will based on Determinism, but there are other good and even better arguments IMO. Like the science-centrist arguments of Neuroscience , Psychological and the Evolutionary Arguments. Then there are the philosophical Arguments from Divine Predestination or Fate. There are still more but the fun is on the discovery.
I believe free will exists but the world is deterministic. In your life you can make any choice you want & it was decided by you. However the effect of your actions on the world is so small that it will continue on a predetermined path. Events in the future are “predetermined” & all I have power over is how I react to it.
well atoms themselves are inherently random you can't even perceive them without them blowing the fuck away
I absolutely believe in free will.
Yes. Every person has to believe in it to accept the notion of good and evil.
Local causality doesn't imply unbroken universal causality. In fact, the idea everything is a purely deterministic projection of some initial state is far weirder than the idea that stochastic actions can influence a partially deterministic state.
Yes. I could talk about quantum indeterminacy as a scientific argument for it, but fundamentally, I believe in it because I want to[1]. I don't like the idea of being a deterministic machine with a fate I can't influence with active choices. It's not provable either way with the current state of science, so I choose to believe my preferred option is the correct one.
[1] Of course such a statement presumes free will. I think I want to, anyway.
Okay, you can believe what you want, but I should clear something up: Quantum indeterminacy is not free will. It just means that there's always residual randomness (measured by classical standards) at the smallest scales. Just going by the laws of physics there's no obvious way for the brain to be more than a meat-based computer.
Yes.
I observe free will directly. Watch: I will choose of my own free will to type a tilde at the end of this sentence instead of a period~ Behold free will.
Everything that says we don't have free will depends on indirect observations that blatantly make faulty assumptions. Do our senses accurately tell us about the state of the universe, and ourselves within it? Are our interpretations of this infallible?
Most egregious is the assumption that classical mechanics governs the mind, when we know that at a deep level, classical mechanics governs nothing. Quantum mechanics is the best guess we have at the moment about how objects work at a fundamental level. Many will say neurons are too big for the quantum level. But everything is at the quantum level. We just don't typically observe the effects because most things are too big to see quantum effects from the outside. But we don't only look at the brain from the outside.
Nor can we say that the brain is the seat of consciousness. Who can say what the nature of reality is? Does space even exist at a fundamental level? What does it mean for consciousness to be in a particular place? What's to say it can only affect and be affected by certain things in certain locations? Especially when we can't pinpoint what those things are?
So yeah I believe in free will. It's direct observation vs. blatantly faulty reasoning.
Quantum mechanics only says that you can't predict the spin of certain particles. Those particles are at a vastly different scale of the things we see in everyday life. Yes, a photon might suddenly change direction and I won't see it because it's a wave function, right? But only at a really small odd. I bet it has never happened to me or anyone in my continent, if not the entire human race in all time. Let alone neurones in my brains experiencing quantum effects.
Quantum mechanics dismisses no argument of determinism because how low the possibilities are.
Even if macroscopic particles do behave randomly, it is still a random behaviour, not your decision.
But that's zeroing in on the idea that quantum mechanics directly affects neurons, which affect free will. Which is only one way one could conceivably argue free will exists. But I'm saying I don't need to come up with a specific way, because I observe free will more directly than anything else. So there's basically infinite ways it could happen, including for example:
OK let's just start with the assertion that there of a casual link back to the beginning of time.
We will begin with the big one first. We don't even know if time had a beginning.
If we assume that time began at the instant of the big bang. There is no plausible link between my bean induced fart, and some random energy fluctuation, there are just too many chaotic interactions between then and now.
There are so many things we don't know, making the extremely bold claim that free will doesn't exist, is dangerously naive.
We can't even solve Navier-Stokes; neuronal interaction is so far beyond what we are currently capable of, it's ridiculous.
My recommendation to anyone contemplating this question. Assume free will exists; if you are wrong, it will made no difference; you were destined to believe that anyway.
This seems like a very weird way to look at the issue.
For one, not being able to understand minute, uncountable connections and interactions doesn't mean we can't realize a broader relationship of causality between them and our own actions. There are many things we don't know - that's right and undeniable - but there are also many things we do know, or at least that we think we know. Sure, you can go around saying "we understand so little about [virtually any scientific discipline], might as well assume that whatever soothes my psyche is true," but just because the first part of that statement is true doesn't mean the whole thing is reasonable. In my opinion, by the way, it isn't reasonable.
Here's a question for you: if you assume free will doesn't exist, what difference does it make? I mean, you still feel like it exists, you live your life as if experiencing it, and regardless of whether you, as an individual, believe it or not, the world continues on as if it does exist. I really see no difference, in practical terms, between believing free will exists or not.
A little off-topic, but this reminds me of those people that say that morality can't exist outside of religion. You say you're an atheist, and then they ask you why you don't go around killing people. Hopefully you understand what I'm talking about here.
It is not really weird, OP is arguing that the universe itself is deterministic. Taking a mechanistic approach to refuting that claim is perfectly valid.
There are a myriad of examples of physical processes that are chaotic, this invalidates OP's claim.
To address the morality point, if God is the source of goodness and morality; beyond the question of "which God?" ; it means objective morality doesn't exist, because God can change it's mind about what is "good".
But that is a discussion finds a different threat.