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.

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.

The way I see it, the brain is essentially a neural network that builds a model of the world through experience. It then uses this model to make predictions. Its primary function is to maintain homeostasis within the body, reacting to chemical signals like hunger, emotions, or pain. Our volition stems from the brain's effort to achieve this balance, using its world model as the foundation for action.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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? 🤔

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You have as much free will as a leaf or a fish.

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

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.

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