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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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From all the discussions I've read about Free Will, I'm convinced the term actually doesn't mean anything at all. What would a world with free will look like? What would a world without free will look like? How would a person with/without it behave? Would there be any tangible difference between them?
As far as I can tell, free will is supposed to be a property of a person, which may or may not have something to do with physics, either everybody has it or nobody has it, and nobody has a definition that would let them measure it (without reducing the question to a disagreement over semantics). I think that whether someone believes in free will is a trick question; you can't believe or disbelieve in a something that isn't even a real concept to begin with.
It's like the "are we living in a simulation" question. It's impossible to prove or disprove and ultimately does not affect our lives in any way that we can control. Just a thought experiment.
It may be possible to prove if one day we can prove whether universe is or isn't deterministic.
It can in theory be disproved - if we ever manage to prove that universe is deterministic, free will by definition cannot exist.
Not necessarily, even if everything is determined randomly we still end up without free will, because then it's not us that somehow introduce the randomness from both outside and within the system, it is randomness itself that makes us
Nah, that's just your thought process. As far as I know, if universe is proven to be undeterministic, free will remains unproven and undisproven.
Eh, maybe, maybe not.
What is the definition of free will that is only possible in a non-deterministic universe? Is non-determinism the only requirement for a universe to qualify as having free will?
If the universe is deterministic, every particle has a mathematically determinable path, meaning you can fully predict where each particle will be in a billion years. Our thoughts and everything are carried by neurons in our brain, as is our will. So if the universe is deterministic, every neuron had to fire at exactly the same moment it did and it could've never happened otherwise, meaning every thought and action is predetermined.
No idea.
He's not making any claims about that argument. He is saying that determinism implies no free will.
Edit: meant to reply to Chicken.
Sure, but that isn't a definition of free will, and it is unclear why this should have something to do with free will. Whatever it is, why can't you still have it even as a part of a deterministic system? A definition that allowed this wouldn't be surprising to me, and some people do seem to support such definitions.
This reinforces my point; I don't think people talking about free will have a very specific idea of how what they are talking about relates to anything else.
I find it very clear. If you can't really decide because everything was already decided, you don't have free will. A definition that grass is meat wouldn't be surprising to me either. It wouldn't be correct, but it wouldn't be surprising. I wasn't talking about what free will is, I was talking about one specific case of what it isn't.
You can demarcate the boundary of decisions however you like. My decisions can still be called decisions while being part of a larger system that those are inherited from, or not, depending on how you arbitrarily choose to use the word. Either way it doesn't change what is actually happening.
The problem with "free will" is that it isn't used to make claims about what is actually happening. It is undefined, just a vehicle for semantic assertions.
I don't think you can, because it isn't anything.
Are you trying to sound really deep? "I don't think you can, because it isn't anything." - what kind of pseudo-intellectual stuff is that?
No, I'm trying to express a specific idea. I don't think Free Will, as normally considered, is a real concept. I think that is why you don't say what it is; because you only have an idea of what it isn't, not an idea of what it is, and there is no idea of what it is behind the words.
If this could be put in a way that doesn't come off as pretentious, sorry if I haven't figured out how to do that.
Disagree. Look up compatibilism
There are so many cases like that. For example, define intelligence. If you try to, you'll run in loops of equally undefined abstract concepts.
And that's basically what philosophy is about.
Even though intelligence isn't precisely defined, people still have enough of an idea about it to have some consensus about how it should be measured. An animal that keeps running into a wire fence trying to get through is showing less intelligence than an animal that notices an opening a few feet away and walks through that instead. Free will is much less defined than even that.
Well, intelligence is defined as what the intelligence test measures.
But lets try a different one: sentience. Or consciousness.
Right, so where's the Free Will test?
IMO these are a bit worse defined than intelligence, but still more so than free will. I don't think it would mean anything to say I don't believe in free will, but when I say I don't believe in consciousness, the delusion I deny is one people actually have. The state of your brain is only that, a state, but people are possessed by an overpowering intuition of having experience that is independent from the physical reality and data structure.
Free will on the other hand isn't even a delusion, it isn't anything more than rhetoric.
Same as conciousnes. That concept only consists to differentiate between groups of living beings to justify eating some of them. (Disclaimer, I too eat meat, but using conciousnes/sentience as a justification is just a rethoric, or more plainly a lie).
I think the the divide in this is Thought vs Action. You can choose to think of whatever. Imagine things whether possible or not.
To be able to act on those thoughts could be an entirely different thing.
But even with thoughts, we're still limited by our humanity. For you and I, we could likely find common ground on many things. Come to similar conclusions. But trying this with any other animal and it all falls apart.
Absolutely right. There are of course definitions of free will that would grant us free will, like one could argue that a traffic light has free will, but there is no reason to believe that humans are not just reducible to a set of (complicated) biological processes. People of all religions and even plenty of atheists believe that somehow human consciousness is something special that transcends the material laws of the universe. That is what most people still seem to think, so it seems. Even I would dare to say that most people, including you, who know that this is likely false still have some deep rooted belief in the illusion. You may not believe in truly free will, but that is only the top of the iceberg part of your mind. The rest is deeply invested in the notion.
Interestingly Buddhists have as one of their central tenets that there is not only no free will, but not even a self. The idea of a self is nothing more than an idea. It has a function, but is inherently an empty construct. What it means to be a human can only be experienced in the moment. If one looks closely enough at that experience, the illusion of free will can be relented even at its deepest root. Paradoxically, I can report, this is incredibly freeing.