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.

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's an element of free will and an element of instinct and mechanism.

Conceptually I see the mind as a system which takes its own outputs as inputs and also reacts to externalities. I also believe in a stochastic universe so there's plenty of opportunities for these partially self-decided decisions to be unique, unpredictable and incorporating the sense of self and an introspected mental model. This is a "good enough for me" version of free will in a physical system.

I have some intuition that the brain probably undergoes some level of "cognitive bootstrapping" where at some point it goes beyond just being a mechanism and starts reacting to stimuli as according to its own learned mental model. But this is necessarily limited and the degree to which an individual gets to do this, as opposed to reacting instinctively or reflexively, varies based on their physical and mental state.

There are also instances where an individual loses their personal sense of freed will and submits it to a crowd, such as in the concept of "de-individuation"

Maybe not 100% because I am the sum of my experiences but I can choose to act against my impulses if I want to.

We have will, it just isn't perfectly free. Our consciousness emerges out of a confluence of intersecting forces, and itself has the ability to influence the flows around it. But to pretend it's removed from those flows and forces, or exists in some vacuum, is nonsensical, as is pretending that there isn't some essence behind the signifier "self".

Doesn't matter either way.

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.

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.

No, we don't have free will. HOWEVER, I don't think that arguement will hold up in court.

I absolutely believe in free will.

Yes. Every person has to believe in it to accept the notion of good and evil.

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.

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

It doesn't matter.

No I don't.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

You’re describing the free will vs predestination debate we had often in theology discussion. Ours never went anywhere, so I won’t be much help. I just wanted to put a name on it for you. Might help in your search.

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 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.

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.

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.

Of course given physics and materialism, sans metaphysics, free will is s myth. But the calculations are so difficult you may as well believe.

We are particles governed by physical laws, so no