If "free will" is nonsense, then what are people describing when they speak of "effort"?

If "free will" is nonsense, then what are people describing when they speak of "effort"?

Free will isn't nonsense. Free will isn't incompatible with determinism. If you think free will is incompatible with determinism, consider this:

Would you have MORE or LESS free will in a non-deterministic universe, where gorilla butts can speak English & bananas can peel themselves when you softly finger them?

If you think about it, a sense-making (i.e. deterministic) universe is the ONLY type of universe where any semblance of free will could possibly exist.

Our languages (at least, western languages?) have this assumption of free will in the way they build subjects in sentences. Well.. if you say someone (3rd person) made a lot of effort, that just means he made effort for whatever reason, as a response to whatever impulse his environment sent his body.

the mental/physical time, thought and energy they've invested into something. Got nothin to do with free will?!

it means they experienced some discomfort in their subjective reality when they were compelled to complete a task.

Free will is bullshit not only on grounds of principle (neither deterministic nor indeterministic universes leave room for "an ability to choose otherwise"), but also because your "choices" are made by unconscious processes and only interpreted as choices by the conscious mind after they've been made and enacted. You also have no control over what thoughts you have, because every thought you even consider comes out of nowhere as far as you're concerned. And even if you somehow manage to weasel through a definition of free will that avoids contradictions and these issues, you'll still have to deal with unfalsifiability. No matter your "choice", you'll never have the chance to verify if indeed you ever would have chosen differently.

Free will is unable to be meaningfully defined. It's an old concept built in a framework that is no longer necessary, just like the concept of "life".

Either way, when people talk about effort they're describing their experience, which is a result of mechanical processes. Effort means it felt difficult, or they felt compelled to stop but didn't. This ties into if consciousness is simply a watcher (one way), or if it's also a director (two way I/O). I would guess it's the latter.

Also, to make my point very clear, the experience of making a choice isn't necessarily actually having one. You're just experiencing a series of accumulating processes that culminate into an ultimate action, no different than a computer program allows a computer to make a choice.

good explanation

I have a definition of free will however: It's a feeling. The feeling of independence of other people or constraints. A feeling of satisfaction that shows you / your brain / your conscious processing that it's in control. With Alien Hand Syndrome you won't have the sensation of free will for example.

I responded below the poster you quoted, and I'd kind of go with this. Though I'd just frame it as control.

If you have nerve damage, or get shocked, your muscles will spasm randomly. -Uncontrollably-. Likewise, the muscles surrounding the respond to motion and your posture via mechanoreceptors, they are not consciously controlled. You do not readily or directly -control- them.

It's about capacity for control, and degree of control. Free will is still superfluous and clutters up the dialogue as far as what's actually happening.

>Likewise, the muscles surrounding the
spine*

Yes, the universe evolves, what happens happens, and I'm a small part of it.

I think free will is still too abstract a concept to define or even begin to understand with science.

Yea science is not even needed. Philosophers have been talking about free will since the greeks. All you need is common sense and introspection. Although only recent physics convincingly demonstrated that living beings also "function" by the same laws as the rest of the universe.

Can you elaborate on that last sentence?

Chemists routinely produce organic chemicals, once thought only producible by living cells. Urea was the first example of this, but there's millions more.

Also, not as groundbreaking, but we've carefully weighed bodies before and after death, and proved pretty conclusively there's nothing measurable leaving at death, so no soul shedding it's mortal coil or what have you.

I think the mystery of free will is tied to the mystery of life (that is, what exactly is life in a scientific sense) in that only in understanding what exactly life is can we begin to understand what it means for life to act on its environment.

Science can't detect a change in body composition after death. All that means is we can't detect life yet. Obviously SOMETHING is leaving (or dissipating) in the body.

>Obviously SOMETHING is leaving (or dissipating) in the body.
Why "obviously".

Because there was life and now there isn't. I'm just saying life, as in what makes something alive, has to have an answer.

Life is mechanical. Life becomes not life when a cascade of failures in a system occur, and the whole ceases to produce meaningful outputs, consciousness, whatever.

Matters like this are easily addressed by bearing in mind scale and subdivision. ie, what is "you" that is "alive" to begin with? Your cells can be removed and go on without you, the whole is not compromised. Like that Modest Mouse lyric "My heart stopped pumping but my blood is still alive. My eyes wake up, but my brain is sleeping fine." It's about a system as a whole.

Well, for example:

Physics uncovers mathematical relations / "laws" with which to describe the behavior of objects around us. Using these laws it is often possible to predict the future (or past) motion of these objects, e.g. astronomical bodies. Our ability to predict the position of the moon 10 years into the future means the moon doesn't have much to say about it (no free will^^).

A noticeable or probably the distinctive feature of living things, especially animals is there capability for self-directed, active motion.
A stone always lies passively on the ground until it is kicked, picked up etc., i.e. moved by an external force. If thrown, it follows a parabolic trajectory, which can easily be calculated. Animals however seem to be different, they can move without an external force acting upon them (a property shared with other machines, like cars, or steam engines, which do, admittedly need to be started). Do animals therefore defy physics? tbc

Define "free will".

No, because living things use energy to spontaneously move.

I know we know why things die, and I know we know life acts mechanically, but life itself is still a mystery to science and we can't understand free will until life is understood.

Life is not a mystery and I just told you why.

Elaborating more on this, science doesn't know how to create life because we don't understand it in its most raw form. We know what living things do and how they do them, and we know why living things die, but we don't know how to give life. For example, even if we made a fully functioning body (Frankenstein shit), we wouldn't be able to "turn it on."

Didn't the "science" of psychology have a theory about this recently, called ego depletion, and then it turned out they couldn't reproduce any of the experiments that had supposedly supported the theory? LOL.

Define "free will".

lol
and checked

No you didn't. Not fully. If you did then what makes something alive?

>we wouldn't be able to "turn it on."
Life being "on" is an inherent result of its properties as a system. It does not need an on switch, it's on simply by being what it is.

Refer to my answer(s) above:

Okay then what about the smallest form of life?

Life is a concept, not a hard, absolute, objective thing.

Some people would argue viruses are a form of life, others wouldn't. Some people would say tiny nanomachines smaller than the smallest bacteria, are life. Some would not. Some say there is no meaningful difference between a living organism and a computer, others would not.

Life is a concept and it is arbitrary. It's a thing if you think it is, it's not if you don't. Just like good and evil.

This is getting really intense, haha. I just think we don't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet. Not until we can actually "create" something that acts on its own as opposed to acts on its programming. I think the problem with our debate lies in the fact that we define life differently based on our different stances on free will (whether its an illusion or not).

Indeed no one has been able to come up with a formula with which to predict the behavior of humans or animals. Does that mean that active motion is fundamentally different than passive motion? (passive motion meaning one object exchanging forces with another object according to physical laws, which sets the other object in motion). Which one is the more general one?

By looking closely into the animal and how it moves the seemingly non-predictable active motion can be shown to consist of many small parts being moved by other small parts according to basic physical laws, so their motion is in fact passive. E.g. electrical impulse coming from the motor neuron release calcium ions, that cause, actin an myosin in the muscle to move along each other. That happening millions of times per second cause the muscle to contract, which moves the skeleton of the animal, which produces the observed behavior.

Everything acts on its programming relative to its inputs. Whether that program is genes or your composition relative to the laws of physics.

There has never been found anything that does anything else. I wrote a story in middle school about a hypothetical exception, and there's been a lot of sci-fi written about such things, but it's nothing that has ever been found to exist. And life certainly is not that thing either.

Elaborating on the aforementioned difference between our stances on free will, I think the reason we can't create life yet is that living things are more than just physics and organic matter. We're more at a philosophical/idealogical stalemate than a scientific one.

Define "free will".

Thus, the active/volitional motion of the animal has been shown to be describable by a complex chain of passive motions that follow basic, unchanging physical laws.

I know what our divide is, user. I've been telling you why there isn't anything to substantiate it on your side.

I'm fine with you trolling me though. I don't really mind.

Either an illusion because life is manipulated by physics, genes/biology in general, and environment, or real and there's more to life than that.

That's not a definition.

There was no life before the big bang, what started it? I'm not trolling, user.

Free will is will unimpeded by all environmental factors.

And do you understand the implications of humans being able to perceive that? Do you understand what the nature of something with those properties must be?

The capacity for a given machine's functionality is afforded by the laws of the universe. If it's not, it will not exist.

Nature only cares that it works.

No one was there to witness it, therefore we don't know for sure. 4 billion years ago, some molecules swimming in the ocean assembled themselves into rna, membranes or something similar and started to make copies of themselves...

I swam some of my molecules into your mother's ocean, or something.

There may have been no "before" the big bang. The forces that created life are the same forces that create non-life.

We don't know whether the Uncertainty Principle works on the Neurological level or whether it works in conjunction with Self-determinacy via the Pygmalion Effect.

We do know, for sure, that we are effected by our environment, and our environment is effected by our reactions to it.

I like to thing that while individuals may not have free will, the evolutionary process is guided partly by mutagenic evolutionary desires, thereby creating a long term species driven free will, primarily controlled by random deciding factors mitigated by curiosity.

In short, if generations change what they like over time, due to curiosity, is that not free will?
The question is how do define how curiosity comes to fruition? Is it purely deterministic? How much does chance play a part? What about other driving forces and agencies?
I think the desire to achieve better or new is our free will.

Whelp, it's getting late, so I'll just spoil the answer:

It's the "driving force" behind the universe. Where the mind's perception is strongest, the world becomes transparent and what is beyond it can be measured. Humans perceive their own bodies as person-shaped windows, but what's behind that window is in fact behind everything. It's the ability for the mind to measure things that the other senses can't reach.

But I can't convince anybody if I just state my premises. I need to first make somebody else state my premises for me, so I can show them that they already believe.

Effort is just one way of describing how closely your genetic predispositions match your environment and conditioning.

or it's quantum

...

>Humans perceive their own bodies as person-shaped windows
I have never heard of anyone who thought they were anything resembling a window, most people are smart enough to know our bodies are person-shaped hunks of meat, you probably do need sleep because you aren't really making any sense.

...

They're just talking in very loose an abstract terms without realizing the elements in their logical framework they're using to contextualize their meaning are not universal, and other people can't so readily decipher and map it 1:1 within themselves.

I have a small spectrum of possible underlying things they could be trying to relay, but no means to know if any are correct. Not very effective communication.

...

Okay, that's not how they parse their perception of themselves, but that's what they see. The common view has the will end at the borders of the body, but it continues and is just not measured beyond that. It's the mistake of "I don't see it there, so it's not there."

It should be apparent when you examine what "will" means. It's the becoming of something into something else. It necessarily must be everywhere. The fact that we perceive will as a constant also means that it's the same for everything. We know that we cannot know any other will, and the conclusion that can be drawn from that is that there is no other will.

The universal will model is the model that is the most compatible with science because it doesn't presume the existence of unknowables, forces spontaneously emerging from nothing, or strong behaviors that have no conceivable role.

..... effort can be exactly what it is in deterministic world. it would just imply that when you put forth effort is determined by something other that your free will. Anything else
>Would you have MORE or LESS free will in a non-deterministic universe, where gorilla butts can speak English & bananas can peel themselves when you softly finger them?

... crap argument. .. maybe an insane 100 percent indeterminable universe would make free will impossible, but who cares? anything other that such a place would provide enough room for what we call free will to exert itself, whether its in fact "free" or not

Very good. Will repost on face book.

Are you having a legitimate stroke and mistaking it for some kind of stroke of genius, didn't you need some sleep so you can think right?

Why did you quote me?

Its really obvious you need to sleep and I was just reinforcing the sentiment that you expressed.

I'm saying that the free will that people perceive is the universal will, and that the capacity of humans to perceive it is part of extra-sensory perception. Is that coherent enough yet?

You're not talking to who you think you are.
Perhaps you need some sleep.

Maybe according to the loosest possible interpretation of the word coherent if you don't take into account the literal definition of perception and don't try to actually define universal will because vagueness is your friend in this case.

That was very helpful.
You are obviously very alert and intelligent.

Thanks.

>muh randomness at the sub-atomic level.

Push on a table but don't move the table.

Congrats, you had an effect on the table without changing anything about it. That's what would happen if this "randomness" existed. These supposed "random" events are so small and insignificant that they have zero actual effect on the chemicals they're a part of that actually follow the laws of the universe to a T.

"Will" as in "the force that acts upon something to transform it into something else". "Universal" as in applying to all things, as opposed to applying to a limited number of things.

Our perception is that there cannot be more than one will, so the will we perceive must be universal.

...

Nonono, it's too frank, it doesn't work.

>the force that acts upon something to transform it into something else
That is almost the definition for work, but definitely not will. Will is not a force, its an ability in action and not everything in the universe expresses active abilities because most masses are inanimate and incapable to act on their own. You have one will because you are one object and you can only act in one way in any given moment.

That's a consequence of transformation, not a cause. I'm talking about something that is more like the conventional view of time.

"Effort" is the suffering you go through in order to achieve a goal. If the suffering outweighs your desire to achieve that goal you will give up, if it doesnt, you wont

>That's
What is That?
So... you are saying the universe has a will and that will is a time cube?

If we have no free will how are we able to realize we have no free will? How are we able to do all this complex meta philosophizing under the effects of determinism?

Why shouldnt we be able to? Complexity =/= freedome

We're machines. How does any machine do anything.

It just seems strange to me. I mean doesn't it create an endless loop? You think about free will. Then you think about how your thoughts about free will are influenced by determinism. Then you think about how these thoughts are influenced by determinism as well. And so on and so on...

Then you decide to leave that loop and go back to being a human.

I don't see how it creates an infinite loop, no. Nor is it possibly infinitely recursive in a mechanical sense. The mind is finite.

Then free will is a long-term thing and not short-term. You can mold your subconscious on the long-term. Short-term decision making is more limiting.

You have no control over any part of that process

Can we even think about free will? I mean isn't it like the observer effect in quantum physics? It's not like we can step back and look at ourselves completely objectivly. We believe we can but we can't.

Contemplating free will is within our faculty for thought, yes. Which is why we can resolve conceptual universes where such a thing is possible, and one's where it is not.

There are likely many things that are beyond our logic and therefore outside the total spectrum of thoughts we may come to think, but I don't think free will is one of them. We don't need to be able to veritably view anything in an absolute and objective sense.

Does a piece of paper with the word "one" observe/recognize single objects? That is to say, is awareness more than a record? We have volatile electronic storage methods in devices, are they aware?

It might be useful to consider whether awareness exists as well as whether it is meaningful.

When I started this thread I didn't expect people to make so many assumptions and then just run with them. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were just using fictional versions of myself as a tool to debate with themselves.

Finite in what sense? With unlimited time/processing power we should be able to determine the position of every star in the known universe by observing any lump of matter, whether it's a rock or brain. So I would assume you mean finite in predetermined allocation of resources, or stability.

Just finite, generally. Even given infinite time, it cannot do infinite things.

>The feeling of independence of other people or constraints

Yes, it's called an illusion.

By that definition we haven't observed anything which doesn't fit that description.

There isn't an infinite loop in reality, only in theory, for the brain to approach (even if it can never get there).

I think they were trying to say that considering free will being influenced by determinism is futile, like how it would be futile to try to escape an infinite loop.

Dammit captcha, crepes are drinks if I say they are.

>By that definition we haven't observed anything which doesn't fit that description.
Yep, that's the intent.

For example, people often say "Well you can think of infinitely many unique numbers!", but in doing so ignore the underlying mechanics the brain is using to conceptualize, recognize, and generate those numbers. There will come a point when the number is either too large, or too complex to store in working memory. At such a point the brain is doing roughly the same ting over and over while incrementing a counter so they can track their position in the number. When they finish, they will not necessarily remember the beginning. The brain has cycled through the same states in slightly different context. Or they'll resort to methods that allow storing the digits more efficiently, like repeating digits, patterns in digits, etc, so they can just store the pattern and that it goes on however long. Or use linguistic aids.

Point is, the brain is a machine capable if finite states. Even relying on temporal "windows" does no alleviate this hardware limitation. With an infinite life you probably would feel like you were seeing the same thing over and over at some point as your brain consolidates unique memories to relatively general concepts.

I wish there wasn't such a pushback against this, or people weren't so afraid of it. It doesn't have to be so bad to be limited.

>they speak of "effort"
They have no clear concept,
and neither do you.

>Free will is unable to be meaningfully defined.

False, look up linear logic. It incorporates an a priori notion of choice and possibility (game semantics). It is also probably necessary for truly understanding quantum theory.

Just because your actions are predetermined given complete information doesn't mean that they can't be meaningfully described using free will.

If you have the freedom to do something different then how is it predetermined?

>Just because your actions are predetermined given complete information doesn't mean that they can't be meaningfully described using free will.
That's actually exactly what it means. In such a case you're better off abandoning the notion of free will in favor of better and more accurate ways of framing what you're capable of.

Well, think about it: you know what you did in the past. Does that mean you didn't have the free will to choose? If you don't have access to the information about the future outcome then your actions may as well be undetermined.

Also note that quantum mechanics explicitly models systems using choice (choice of experiment / basis for a Hilbert space).

Such as?

>Such as?
Read:
Control, affordance, capacity, and arbitrary scale, are far more useful.

>where gorilla butts can speak English
Now I finally understand Veeky Forums, thank you.

ok sure, control is also a valid concept. "Free will" can be interpreted in different ways.

If everything is predetermined then how do you make decisions or choices?

Is there a meaningful difference in terms of free will between the following scenarios?
A man is thinking about driving to meet someone at a restaurant in his car.
1) The man is paralyzed from the neck down
2) The man is on house arrest
3) The man suffers from OCD symptoms and his routine is in the way of the meeting time (substitute aroraphobia if it makes more sense to you)
4) The man falls asleep and misses the date
5) The man realizes that he no longer wants to associate with this person

Regardless of how viable or appealing the plans are, if the processes in our brain are predetermined, how is a choice to be made?
Does an orange choose to roll down a hill?

Please do name the models/laws you use to justify your answer.

>If everything is predetermined then how do you make decisions or choices?
Short answer: You don't.
Longer answer, you use deterministic machinery to calculate a course of action. As I said here: