Free Will and Own Choice Making

This is an interesting clash of Neuroscience and Philosophy, but I cannot help but ask:
Is Free Will actually a thing?
I'm not saying that all our choices are predetermined by something,
Does Free Will mean to have an unlimited number of choices, if so then currently this is not appliable to real life (see punishment by law etc.)
>inb4 we live in the Matrix

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Free will is an outdated meme. It literally cannot be defined coherently without losing all meaning.

Meaning is not even the problem...
Nothing matters and I got no problem with that, but even if so, as a human, knowing that literally no of my actions will have an impact in say... 10k years is already disdaining, but knowing that all my "choices" weren't mine to begin with, now that's what'd put most people into a noose

>there is no free will
>there is no god
>there is objective morality
>life has no meaning
>your consciousness is merely a passively suffering observer of a life over which you have no control
Sometimes the red pill is hard to swallow. Enjoy your existential crisis.

File attached: gorilla.jpg

the concept of reward and punishment for behavioral control in social groups is independent of free will.

If you don't want a rampant rape epidemic, you should make sure that raping someone is connected with undesirable consequences for the rapist.
This argument is in fact deterministic. We assume that (potential) rapists are rational actors that will try to maximize their benefits.

Isn't raping literally going after your in-build instincts? If so that'd be the opposite of free will, humans and monkeys are known to exhibits the most sex-urges.
If you can't control yourself, how is that exerting free will?
However, it'd be an interesting take on if you were to put rape out and put something else in

>. It literally cannot be defined coherently without losing all meaning.
Oh, just Google it ffs.
google.com/search?q=free will
>the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
"B-b-but muh determinism!"
Get the fuck out of the Veeky Forumsence and math board with your 19th century witchcraft.

everything is literally going after your in-built instincts

Why do you find food tasty and not shit? (Like certain beetles)
Why do you find girls attractive, instead of spiders?
Why do you seek companionship instead of just being content with being alone? (like most beetles?)
why can't you stop breathing oxygen?

You are literally a slave to your biology. The fact that you can make rational decisions doesn't make you "free" in any sense of the word

>chemical reaction talks about its freedom
kek

>the concept of reward and punishment for behavioral control in social groups is independent of free will.
THIS
While free will is an philosophical issue at best, in the real world, people effectively have free will because they still make choices, regardless of how smug you are about it all being futile masturbation lost in the dark void of existence.

If you claim to have free will, I'll ask you to explain how you make a decision.

If you can answer this question by telling me a decision making procedure/algorithm then your decision was deterministic and hence not free.

If you cannot explain how you made a decision, then you obviously had no control over it.

Does this disprove free will? I'm sure it does.

2/10 bait or 7/10 stupidity

how is that objective morality?

I meant to say "NO objective morality". Guess I was just too nihilistic and apathetic to proofread.

Free will is a theological concept and have no ground except in theology.

>Why do you find girls attractive, instead of spiders?
>tfw bestiality and furries exist
>tfw user is in one of the places where that is most spread

muh quantum microtubules

The human brain is too primitive to understand the physics behind free will.

>I'll ask you to explain how you make a decision.
>implying anyone understands the human brain well enough to answer this question

>If you cannot explain how you made a decision, then you obviously had no control over it.
I can't explain how to walk either.
Does that mean I can't walk?

I think the problem with free will and other similar discussions is that we humans are trying to step outside the set of human experiences and thoughts. But I don't think it's possible. I don't think that we can somehow isolate a thought that is not somehow influenced by our biology and human understanding. It reminds me of the observer effect in quantum physics. So all free will discussion is ultimately pointless.

What would a being with true free will do? How would it choose what to do?

So decisions just come "randomly" to you and you have no idea how or why? Yet you claim to have control of your decisions? Free will is bullshit. Just admit it.

Not Veeky Forums.

If you consider the synapses firing off chemical impulses to respond to a task given by either you or external sources, then you can calculate a delay in response, meaning that you'll get a certain number on
>Outside influence
A question
>Your response
An Answer

That's one of the worst stickmen I've ever seen. How can somebody be so bad at drawing one?

>So decisions just come "randomly" to you and you have no idea how or why?
Ideas obviously aren't random.
But yes, since we don't understand human thought processes, no-one understands the "how".
Evolutionary advantages of intelligence are the obvious answer to "why".

Until you stop pretending to understand the human thought process, you'll never get a realistic grip on the subject.

So you admit that human thought processes are deterministic biological processes in the brain? Then you admit that there is no free will.

>So you admit that human thought processes are deterministic biological processes in the brain?
Have you read anything I've posted, or are you just fighting strawmen?
First: the universe is NOT deterministic (which is a good thing, because the Newtonian-Brownian model is time reversible, and would fuck with causality and the "arrow of time").
Second: What I've been saying all along is we don't understand the underlying mechanics of thought.
Third: Calling it "deterministic biological processes in the brain" can't rule out free will any more than it rules out consciousness itself.

Solve the hard problem of consciousness, then we'll talk.

>First: the universe is NOT deterministic
I never claimed it is. Of course there is quantum randomness, but you don't have control over that either.

>we don't understand the underlying mechanics of thought.
If there are mechanisms, then you have no control. Your brain follows these mechanisms, irregardless of whether you like it.

>can't rule out free will any more than it rules out consciousness itself.
Consciousness does not need free will. You don't have control over your conscious experience either.

>If there are mechanisms, then you have no control.
Obviously, I AM the mechanisms.
You might as well claim I can't eat because it's just my digestive system doing that, not me.

Then the concept of free will is meaningless and incoherent. Thanks for proving my point.

It is a very hard question. The way I look at it boils down to the following and why the notion of free will on a societal level is so absurd
1. You are assigned parents that you have no control over
2. Your consciousness and idea of self arises out of an environment you had no control over
3. Your first 16 years of your life are pretty much determined by this environment
4. You are for a very long time after this= sense of self is developing a babbling kid who is thought to have no real cognitive control and is not held truly responsible for many things (excluding truly sadistic shit). Like a puppy, you are basically stumbling through life, getting hit in the somewhat right direction by external forces.
5. Congratulations, you are now an 18 year old adult. Go conquer the world as your ‘self’ and use your free will and willpower to accomplish ‘your dreams’.
So on a personal level, I think the notion of free will is rather ludicrous, primarily in the sense that even if you had free will, what would you be choosing over and why? Yes, we have the ability to deliberately choose one thing over another, but why do we even make a selection of those 2 things to begin with, and not some other dilemma? So even if we have complete free will, we would still be trapped inside our personal tunnel that is called life, and the freeness idea of the choosing just seems blend.

>cont
Personally, I think free will more has to do with inhibition, than actually taking action. From day one, we are through human culture conditioned to inhibit and fine tune our neural circuitry towards something that we call a well-functioning adult. We are not taught meta cognition or analytic exploratory thinking from day one (because are infant brains are not yet capable of such feats) such as thinking about many possible situations at once. When you think about the brain power that is required for decision making based on full free will, evolutionary psychology tells us it is not very likely that such a mechanism actually evolved or has ever existed. Take for example OP’s pic. If alternitavism would work this way, then where and why would this conscious being draw the line for the amount and also the richness and complexity of the hypothetical outcomes? Since this complexity soon becomes too big for any brain to handle in processing power, we probably unconsciously highlight only a sliver of such a too be solved problem within our conscious mind, and then report to ourselves that we made a cool free will decision, while it is more likely that it is an extremely dumbed down version of an elaborate unconscious thinking process of which the conscious entity only gets to experience to a certain extent why it is doing things, because otherwise a sentient system would literally go crazy.
Not extremely clear, but I personally think there is more reason to assume that we as humans have become extremely good at inhibiting our own behaviour, how good we do this and what types of behaviors/solutions/ideas we inhibit is based on our environment and conditioning, and thus what reaches the senses when we are typing stuff like this as 18 + adults can hardly be as virtuous as many claim the notion of free will to be.

Either the world is deterministic and you no more make a decision than a machine outputting a result or a plant growing towards the sun, or the world is random and the choice is not made by you but by the unpredictable and meaningless motions of particles.

i don't see how the existence of free will is necessary to make fun of lardos. in either event they lack self control, except those rare cases where it's legitimately shit metabolism.

Anyone who says there's no free will has their head firmly up their ass. Is there a significant difference between doing something accidentally and on purpose? Like between hitting someone with your car because you deliberately drove into them and hitting them because you slid on a patch of ice? Then that's free will nigga. That's the kind of distinction that the term exists to describe.

That said, I don't think your image is an accurate representation of how free will works, intelligibility is really the only one of those components necessary.

>but what free will AKSHULLY means is [thing that doesn't make any sense]
You can define words however you want, but doing so in a way that makes an otherwise useful term meaningless is pretty stupid.

An easy way to answer this question is, ask yourself, why are you doing what you are doing, right at this moment? And be completely honest.

Why are you posting this question on Veeky Forums? Why did you choose that image?

Once you have answered those questions for yourself, ask again. Why did you do THOSE things? Why did you feel THOSE specific emotions? And so on and so on.

What I find is that it will all eventually lead back to as far as you can remember and as low level as you can go (childhood experiences, genetics, more recent experiences, the current neurochemical balance within your body)

Personally, I believe determinism is false (even with my incredibly limited knowledge of quantum physics), but what I do believe is that really, the universe is just a probability space with an infinite (or near infinite) set of possible events. If you come to accept this, then there are two further interpretations of free will, ive found:

1. You think of conciousness as something fundamentally separate to the universe. Then in this case, you might believe that free will exists.
2. You think of conciousness as a result of chemicals and electrical signals doing what they do, as a result of a certain number of particles being in that specific configuration at that point in space time.

I prescribe to the latter, which means no, i don't think free will is actually a thing

no, but that doesn't mean you'll stop acting like it is

here. the whole argument for free will not being a real thing is that the 'deliberately' part of "hitting someone with your care because you deliberately drove into them" is not real.

"Is there a significant difference between doing something accidentally and on purpose?"
What IS the significant difference?

>1.5. You think of consciousness as something fundamental to the universe. Of which, existence is arbitrary yet necessary

we're cartoons

Nothing is free
Especially chicks

Get used to it friend.

Fat chicks are free though.

topkek even fat chicks hunger Chad thundercock and you know what Chad doesn't discriminate ;)

>a passively suffering observer
Speak for yourself you pathetic basement dweller

gonna play morrowind now anyone up

I have my own theory.

The brain has preset centers dedicated to certain functions.
The brain organizes information based on a "coordinate reality model" it builds to successfully navigate its environment.

Then the brain sorts information by rank priority and relationship in regards to:
Fight, flight, attraction, attachment, and subjective relations.

So choice is an illusion brought on my cursory genetics and then follows a line of environmental induction with cursory genetics playing a role in tolerance.

Yeay! :D

Unless you're omniscient, with perfect knowledge of all the past and all possible futures, you always have free will within your own frame of reference.

Determinism is only a thing for the gods.

What is it with you and beetles?

>ignorance equates to free will
Sure m8, you certainly have a freer will than most of us.

No it isn't, most humans find forcing sex on an unwilling and fighting partner to be distasteful/unstimulating. Plenty of people have rape fantasies but that doesn't equate to humans having an inbuilt desire to rape/be raped.

>an unwilling and fighting partner
Nice bait. Rape doesn't mean the victim has to fight or to express unwillingness. Even consensual sex can be rape if the victim later feels it was rape.

that guy had bad hair