It's not even wrong.

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.

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.

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.

Fun thought exercise but functionally irrelevant. It still feels like I'm making decisions, so that's close enough.

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.

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.

If it looks like free will and quacks like free will, then it probably is free will.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.....

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

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.

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.

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.

"Free will" usually refers to the belief that your decisions cannot be reduced to the laws of physics (e.g. people who say "do you really think your thoughts are just a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain???"), either because they can't be reduced at all or that they operate according to their own independent logic. I see no reason to believe that and no evidence for it.

Some people try to bring up randomness but even if the universe is random that doesn't get you to free will. Imagine if the state forced you to accept a job for life they choose when you turn 18, and they pick it with a random number generator. Is that free will? Of course not. Randomness is not relevant to free will. I think the confusion comes from the fact that we have two parallel debates of "free will vs determinism" and "randomness vs determinism" and people think they're related, but in reality the term "determinism" means something different in both contexts.

In the "free will vs determinism" debate we are talking about nomological determinism, which is the idea that reality is reducible to the laws of physics and nothing more. Even if those laws may be random, it would still be incompatible with the philosophical notion of "free will" because it would still be ultimately the probabilistic mathematical laws that govern the chemical reactions in your brain that cause you to make decisions.

In the "randomness vs determinism" debate we are instead talking about absolute determinism, sometimes also called Laplacian determinism, which is the idea that if you fully know the initial state of the universe you could predict the future with absolute certainty.

These are two separate discussions and shouldn't be confused with one another.

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.

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".

It's free will as long as you don't know and/or control all of that chain of causality.

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.

Does that even mater? Either stance can't be proved.

I absolutely believe in free will.

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.

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.

We have free will, but the majority are not free to exercise it because of material conditions and/or circumstance.

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

well atoms themselves are inherently random you can't even perceive them without them blowing the fuck away