If the universe can be expressed as numbers plugged into an equation, doesn't that alone answer the question of free will?
It is becoming increasingly clear in quantum mechanics that the universe cannot be expressed as number plugged into an equation.
If the universe can be expressed as numbers plugged into an equation
That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there
There are several fields of study dedicated to that if. And a galactic supercomputer dedicated to finding the question.
Exactly. If the laws of physics are absolute, then the brain—which is made of atoms—must follow those laws. Every choice is just a chemical reaction following a set path. The fact that we don't have a computer 'big' enough to calculate it doesn't mean the equation doesn't exist.
this to me is the problem with her argument. In order to process the data to get find out the answer if you had all the data you would need something larger than existence to take it in and do it. We effectively have free will which is fine to me.
The question is not whether that expression can actually be processed within our existence, but whether everything is expressible in such a way that it's theoretically deterministic.
To me, having"free will" is independent of our capacity of knowledge. For example: if you tell me that, for whatever reason, it's impossible to really know how does a computer work, that would not mean that computers have "free will". It just means that there would be limits to our capacity for knowledge.
To be honest when we can't really predict an algorithm we do start talking about free will. Thats whats happening with the llm's. Now we get into the conversation of sentience and if that is different than free will. Most conversations around llms comes down to understanding. That being said nothing that exists can be impossible to predict with enough knowledge and data. That is basically my argument that it seems that the argument against free will is that if a mechanism for free will exists then its predicatable so then it can't exist. I don't think the how we get to decisions makes them any less relevant in making them.
To be honest when we can’t really predict an algorithm we do start talking about free will. Thats whats happening with the llm’s.
But then this makes free will something relative to own limit of knowledge.. meaning that if we were sufficiently stupid to be unable to predict the behavior of the much more simplistic Eliza bot we might think that this bot has free will too.
It would also imply that a sufficiently random algorithm (ie. one that cannot be predicted) also has free will. If there was a random number generator (ie. a set of dice) that was fully random and unpredictable, would you say it has free will?
it seems that the argument against free will is that if a mechanism for free will exists then its predicatable so then it can’t exist. I don’t think the how we get to decisions makes them any less relevant in making them.
I think this is the same topic we were discussing in this other comment branch, so I'm gonna refer to that as to not repeat ourselves :)
Thanks for the interesting conversation.
honestly merging the two may be a bit much but whay you said there sorta hits the nail on the head. I feel going way back to the argument in the video that free will would just be a function of randomness. I actually do think the stupider we are the more we would think things have free will. I mean many ancient religions viewed everything as being alive often with what would seem like free will. Then again we have often had beliefs with animals that they lack cognition or feeling when I think they have free will as well down to some point of lack of complexity. Its hard to say at one point it is emergent and there are cetainly levels.
Yes, there's been societies in the past that would attribute "free will" to fill the gaps in their knowledge, but that's an approach that consistently has been shown to be wrong as our knowledge of the world has expanded. So for that reason I don't think it's not a good approach to try and define things in relation to the limits of our knowledge.
Yeah I agree the issue isn't whether we can actually process the data within our existence but whether everything is theoretically expressible in a deterministic equation. Our limited knowledge capacity doesn't disprove determinism it just shows our epistemic boundaries. Not fully understanding how a computer works doesn't mean the computer has free will, it only means we have limits to our knowledge.
That is what I said.
The person I was responding to was saying that " We effectively have free will " just because "you would need something larger than existence " to process the data that predicts the Universe.
I was giving the example of the computer as a way to show that this is not typically the way we udnerstand "free will", it's not about actually being able to predict what will happen.
Yeah and I agree.
Yeah and I agree
Very correct, and that's not even taking into consideration that we're nowhere near such an equation, or even any idea if it can even exist in principle.
even on small scale. I feel its like. if we offer food to someone who is hungry they have no free will because we knew all that or like change it to the food you offered is something they like and you know they can't resist and are not on a diet or you know they are on a diet and have an iron will so they will refuse it or you know they are stuffed to the gills and will refuse it. none of that removes the agency of deciding to me.
If an action is 100% predictable based on inputs (hunger, preference, brain state), then it’s not a choice it’s a reaction. Just because we feel like we are choosing doesn't mean we are. We are just witnessing the result of a complex biological equation that has already been solved by our neurons. What do you think?
If i am presented with a choice, say beer or wine, I feel like I'm making an educated choice based on the circumstances and my current personal state.
If we were to rewind time to that exact choice with the exact same parameters I'd choose the same beverage over and over again. It's my free will, but I'm completely conditioned to choose it based of the environment, my DNA and my experiences.
If there were to be some quantumancy happening that made me choose differently in one of those scenarios, that doesn't make the argument for free (controlled) will any stronger. Just that there's some uncertainty at play.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter, we still need to good people accountable for their actions.
I'd pick the same drink every single time, and that makes sense to me as my choice under those conditions. It feels like compatibilism: free will as acting according to my own motivations, even if those are fully determined. But honestly, I'm still leaning toward determinism being mostly true our actions seem rooted in genetics, environment, childhood coding, and brain states that we don't ultimately control. We can overcome patterns through therapy, awareness, etc., which gives a sense of freedom, but even that overcoming desire/ability is probably caused by prior factors too. So I'm not 100% hard determinist (because practical change feels real and meaningful), but I'm not fully compatibilist either— it sometimes feels like redefining 'free will' to fit determinism. Quantum uncertainty adds some unpredictability, but as you said, it's just randomness, not 'willed' control, so it doesn't rescue libertarian free will. At the end of the day, I agree accountability is crucial we still need to hold people responsible for actions to keep society functioning. How do you personally draw the line where 'conditioned choice' becomes 'free enough' for moral responsibility?
Yeah I agree that free will and determinism aren't mutually exclusive. Just because free will doesn't exist, that doesn't mean that everything is preordained.
It's a hard question. For example with children I try to assume that they're doing the best(only thing) they can and judge their actions from that perspective. With people who are mentally ill or addicts I lean that direction as well but honestly it's hard with adults.
I truly believe that Putin and Trump are doing the only things they are capable of but I cannot forgive their actions despite them being victims of determinism, just like everybody else.
Society needs to hold people accountable, not because it's fair, but because it could possibly prevent others from acting similarly.
I cannot forgive their actions despite them being victims of determinism, just like everybody else.
Personally, I feel that's a different topic. Being determined does not mean your actions can't be morally judged.
Just because a dangerous animal like a bull might have it in their nature to trample people in the streets does not mean we should just tolerate it and let it go rampant. This behavior should be prevented. And if the cause of the behavior is a human mental/behavioral pattern, then we, as a society, should seek to correct those patterns in whichever way possible. Sometimes this means jail.
However, the punishment is only a means to an end.. the goal is to prevent future damage, it's not a vengeful vendetta out of spite/hate.. it would make no sense to punish the same way a child who you know will learn / has learnt their lesson than an animal that you know cannot change their ways and the only solution would be keeping it away from society.
Yeah, I really can't forgive them either. It's not only about deterring others from doing the same it's also because we have empathy. In normal brains, the empathy circuits (like mirror neurons and prefrontal areas) work as they should, so we feel the pain others cause but for some people that system is broken or wired differently from the start. Still society has to hold them accountable.
I disagree. basically its impossible to have free will if it has a structure and process. Its like because your actions are driven by your senses, logic, and feelings its not free will. But that is the nature of being. There could be no free will with that because its defining anything that comes from anything as not being free will. If a god exists he would not have free will because he exists and therefore has being and therefore has mechanisms of action. Its not an argument against free will its an argument about free will being the result of some spiritual mumbo jumbo like a soul.
I feel you are defining "free will" as any form of "will".
What would be the difference between having a deterministic will and having free will in your view?
If you think that every decision that involves our own willpower is "free", even when that decision is 100% predictable/determined and one cannot really arbitrarily choose to "will" it differently, then calling it "free" is redundant, since it does not really require the freedom to choose differently.
Maybe. Again I don't think that having a mechanism for our being. Our will. Does not make in nonfree will. This argument of if enough is known, even if its impossible to have all that knowledge, means no free will is flawed because the premise is based on an impossibility. Again to me its an argument against a mystical spirit or soul type free will but I think we can have free will that emerges from complex systems. To me its like. You eat because your hungry therefore you did not make free will choice to eat. Its like the logic is that there can be no free will unless we are random and crazy and don't use our reason and situation into account with our decisions. We make different decisions because we are different entities and that to me is free will. I mean I also feel we define ourselves by our actions so in effect by the decisions we make.
I agree that "having a mechanism for our being, our will, does not make in nonfree will."
The one thing that makes it non-free is the lack of any freedom (given the exact same circumstances) of choosing differently.
So if you think our actions are 100% determined by external factors, and that we don't have the freedom to choose differently, then I would say that's not what normally is considered "free".
I honestly don't see this being for/against "a mystical spirit or soul" one way or the other.. one can believe in a deterministic God/soul (like for example, Spinoza's God), or one can believe in free will without it being spiritual at all.. whether there's "spiritality" is not really directly related, imho.
We make different decisions because we are different entities and that to me is free will. I mean I also feel we define ourselves by our actions so in effect by the decisions we make.
To me, we being different entities is differentiation, not free will. Two pieces of rock can also behave differently when thrown because they might have different distribution of their mass.. does this make the rocks free?
Also, I think we are way more than just our actions.. but if we were to really define everything based on the actions that it takes as a consequence of their circunstances, then you might as well define a rock by the way it bounces as a consequence of its velocity. Does that make it free?
well its an argument against in that she discounts it in her view. everything if if could be known then you could compute the outcome. I have been thinking about this and im not sure I accept her premise. I think she is saying if you knew the exact starting conditions and all the laws the universe perfectly you could know that we would come into being and what we would do. At first I was thinking she was more saying if you knew everything up to us now which is kinda different. I don't think knowing the exact initial state and all the laws would allow for knowing anything but the next step. I do think we see randomness or what we can only describe as randomness in in the way our universe works such that you cannot really predict more than the next step. If you see the particle go through the slit then you know where it will land. Going from the start and looking into the far future or even having all the information to now won't necessarily allow for exact knowldge of what will happen 100 years from now. Even with perfect everything. I do actually think what we see in quantum physics may be a part of our decision making and our effectively free will. We call it random but if that is what it is then maybe randomness is needed for free will.
Note that "knowing the next step" implies knowing "everything" about that next step.
So if you accept that, given knowledge of "everything" about a given state, it's possible to know "everything" about the next state, it follows by pure logic that this can be iterated. Otherwise, you would have to say that it's not true that the knowledge of "everything" about a state makes it possible to know "everything" about the next state.
So either you agree that one can go forwards beyond the second state or you don't think we can know "everything" about that second state, or you don't really think that knowing "everything" about a state really guarantees that you will be able to predict the next one.
But saying that you can perfectly know one step and not the next one seems logically incoherent to me. Not when you are talking about a theoretical perfect system that follows that initial premise. If there are factors that affect going from state+1 to state+2 then why would those factors not play a role when going from state+0 to state+1?
You would need to introduce variables that are not known, which would already mean that you do not really agree with the initial premise (since the initial premise implies that there are no unknown variables). And if there are variables that are unknown.. why would you assume that state+1 (the first step) is predictable to begin with?
Thats I good point. I was thinking since its the next step of a confined area that you could not get the rest but what it really does it make it just ludicrously impossible its like okay if you have some something larger than the universe that can take in the universe you can get the next step in once place but now you need an infinte of them or infinte time to get all of the specific things. Or virtually infinite. Its like stacking infinities on infinities to make it not free will. It just does not work for me.
Yes, it's just a way to try and explain the idea of determinism, it's not about actually being able to build a machine that predicts the entire Universe. I think Sabine knows that's impossible, but that wasn't the point. The point was to explain determinism.
Like I said before, there’s a difference between something being “predictable” and something being “deterministic”. For something to be predictable it needs to be deterministic, but something being deterministic does not necessarily make it predictable.
well so this gets back to what I call effective free will. We have free will in the sense that we feel it because why you can theoretically build an impossible construct that would not make it so effectively it works that way. I may decide to grab another donut because its tasty or I may decide I need to watch my weight. If I grabbed one I may eat it or as about to my health concerns win out or I drop it and decide I just don't want it now and im not going to bother with another. Its effectively infinite possibilities and choices from our perspective and we make the choices through them.
Superdeterminism is a bit odd in that it rejects even effective free will, at least in very specific circumstances. Let's say you set up an experiment where the observer is given the free choice to measure a particle in a particular way. If you were Laplace's demon and could see the precise state of the initial particle, that information alone would be sufficient to predict the choice the observer will make because they would be guaranteed to be pre-correlated with that value.
It would be like Final Destination where, just by looking at a single variable in a single particle, you would know with absolute certainty what conscious decision the observer would make ahead of time, and all their complex brain chemistry and stuff becomes unnecessary to predict what decision they will make, because you will know with certainty what the orientation of the measurement must be. You could try everything to stop them and change their mind and even fight them, but you'd find yourself entirely unable to change it, because the laws of physics would guarantee the particle would be measured on that particular choice of orientation.
You might be able to get around this by arguing that the these variables are fundamentally unobservable and hidden from us so that you still have effective free will, but then the model becomes pointless. Hossenfelder has suggested she thinks a hidden variable model should be testable and she thinks it may be possible to find patterns in the quantum noise and violations of the Born rule under specific circumstances. If these variables become even partially knowable then even effective free will, at least in certain very contrived circumstances, becomes doomed.
That is kind of the weirdest thing about it.
What's put into question is not our perception of getting to decide between different choices, what we are challenging is whether or not those choices are taken freely or determined by external factors.
Again, just because you are making a choice, amongst many possibilities, does not mean that this choice is "free".
And one cannot judge this based on what one knows about the factors affecting oneself, since you necessarily cannot have full knowledge of them.
This is another recursive problem, one that happens in our own perception of those factors, if we knew about everything that affects our decisions, then this knowledge would affect our decisions, and so there would be a new external factor which would be the repercussions this knowledge itself would have...and if you knew this new factor this knowledge would again be new information that would be added to your knowledge, altering the data pool you use to base your decisions... and so on infinitely
This makes it impossible for us to ever be aware of that which determines us. So the "feeling" of having no external factors that determines you is actually not really proof of us having any kind of freedom, since even in a deterministic world, with no freedom, it would be expected for people to be unaware of their own determining factors. It's in fact expected for people to not be aware of the determination.
So. Here is the thing and where it gets silly to me. I don't view choices being made taking external factors into consideration as not making them freely. It makes free will this thing that can only be achieved by randomness or at least it feels that way to me. I consider free will and effective free will as essentially the same thing. I mean thing about the idea of optimization and choices. People write books about it and we have business practices around it. Yet people being cognizant of the optimized choice will still make a different one. Because of different priorities. Somone might be known for choosing the optimized choice and its part of who they are. But others will not. This is free will to me. Two people in the same situations making different choices because of who they are. Thats the thing the stuff that might in theory tell exactly the decision the person will make is knowledge about who they are. Innately. As an entity. It is the impossibility of truly knowing someone. So it is the fact we make different choices to me that is free will. That we make these choices and define ourselves in the process.
This leads us again to "freedom" losing meaning. How do you differentiate a free choice from a choice that is not free? "free will" vs "non-free will".
Optimizing choices is a mathematical operation.. a rock, when thrown, moves in such a way that it optimizes the potential energy and does not stop moving until it reaches the minimum energy state, optimizing for minimal entropy. A slime mold optimizes the nutrient intake by having its cells expand and reproduce where they connect with food and progressively die where they don't.
All the things you mentioned are not incompatible with free will not existing. Two non-free people in the same non-free situations make different non-free choices because of who they are. The impossibility of truly knowing someone is something that's consistent with a non-free world were nobody has full knowledge of all factors that determine them. If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand we would be too stupid to understand it. It's a recursive problem. We can analyze simpler mechanisms, but the simpler they get, the clearer we understand them, and the more clear the lack of "agency" in them becomes.
Yeah and to me its basically getting down to a definition of free will. If free will is no factors internal or external can effect the choice it must be free of any influence. Well its just silly. To me its demanding that no mechanism of free choice (will) be present. To me you can't really include the individual and their molecules and such as they are the individual that has the agency. They make the choices based on who they are and in that sense they are free and why one individual makes different choices than another in the exact same circumstances. To me its a bit of going to down in a definition and losing the forest for the trees kinda of thing (or maybe vice versa). Alls I meant with the optimizing was actually that people choose not to. Even though theoretically its considered the best way to go and even if the individual knows the optimized choice they may choose to not go that way. So I was more saying us not making the optimized choice because of what I would see as free will.
Well its just silly. To me its demanding that no mechanism of free choice (will) be present.
Well.. yes, if that is the implication, then well.. that's the implication. But changing the definition of freedom just because one does not like the implications would not make much sense to me.
To me you can’t really include the individual and their molecules and such as they are the individual that has the agency.
The whole point is to find out if the individual has freedom or not.. and for that you need to find out if each and every of the molecules that make up that individual has been influenced by external factors past and present. Emphasis in past, given that there are way more external factors in our past than there are in our present. The external factors go even beyond our own lifetimes.. you are influenced by factors that happened before you were born.. and before your parents were born.. we have external factors even encoded in our DNA. The reason why you even feel the impulse to eat that donut is an external factor... the reason why you feel the impulse to NOT eat that donut is another external factor. Our individual wishes and wants are just the expression of external factors... our molecules are built through external factors, external factors make us grow.. external factors are what we are made out from. And since we all are modeled in different circumstances, we are different, every last one of us, with different combinations of different external factors, each influencing each other, in a harmonious soup of relationships with one another and with our environment. Even 2 identical twins become more and more different the more they experience the world, since they will inevitably have different experiences in life (even from the womb, before they are even born!)... even the smallest of things can snowball into experiences we will unconsciously internalize and alter our personality and the way we see ourselves and others.
Even though theoretically its considered the best way to go and even if the individual knows the optimized choice they may choose to not go that way.
I disagree. People always take the optimal choice for them. It's just that what's "optimal" depends on the dataset one uses. Eating that donut has a lot of pros, and not eating it has a lot of pros too.. it's all about what action is optimal given the influence of the external factors that model one's behavior. In some models, eating the donut and getting the gratification is the optimal path, so they do that (whether it's good for the individual or not), other neural models might see more value in not eating it so they don't do that.
So yeah I think we are getting into fundamental disagreement territory. Which in all honestly I have with sabine as well on this. Even though I generally like her stuff. Its not the only one. Even when I otherwise agree with her I definately often have a different perspective on the particulars.
Our genetics and environment (especially childhood experiences) basically program us and shape our brains. A lot of what we do stems from those early codes we were given. But we can overcome them through therapy, awareness, new experiences, etc. That said, if the very desire and ability to overcome those patterns weren’t wired into us from the start (genetics, upbringing, etc.). That’s a different story.
Thats what I kinda mean. Its like we have a mechanism of being and yeah you go back to if you know the path of every particle in the universe right up to you you could maybe 100% say what will be but its something that can't happen. Because we and nothing we know of can 100% say what decisions we will make. Because we can be shocked, awed, or laugh at what we would see as crazy decisions. Effectively everyone has free will in my book.
What if the equation is a wave function? And the free will is collapsed quantum state?
When a quantum event collapses in the brain, the result is unpredictable yet this randomness is still not something you control. True free will would require a selection process that is neither purely random nor strictly deterministic, but genuinely willed. Randomness just introduces chaos; it doesn’t produce the sense of "I chose this".
Well, the wave function collapsing to that universal reality 🙃
The numbers don't lie.
That’s a very valid point ☺️
Subscribe to see new publications and popular science coverage of current research on your homepage