What does Veeky Forums think about free will?

no if you have no memory of the future that you came from. that is what the poster forgot to say

"Free Will" is an Anglo-Protestant autistic obsession, I don't think of it as a question for any serious mind

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Why are there so many Christmas posters

Welcome to post-irony

waste of time that results in nothing

Every person who believes in free will would say that definition isn't right, then they would proceed to not give their own definition, or say that you can't define it.

The key to solving this problem is to not give it even a shred of validity. If you dare to entertain the idea, you have already lost.

"Free will" doesn't even make sense as a concept unless you're a complete epistemological nihilist; are you claiming your actions have no causes? Oh, no, they DO have causes? But not CAUSES causes rite man lmao dude weed???

Are you retarded?

quantum mechanics is not random, it is probabilistic

I'm right. Actions have causes. Ther only way to reconcile this completely obvious 3rd grade level fact with "free will" is to claim things don't make sense cant no nuffin in which case what makes you think you're right

The idea of free will falls apart under even the most cursory scrutiny- this is why even someone as dim as Sam Harris can write a book arguing against it.

Now see THIS GUY is retarded.

>prefacing with "I'm right."
Stopped reading there.

The notion of free will is a complete joke. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about it can easily conclude that they have none.

Everything you do has a cause. Everything you think and want has a cause. Every "choice" you make is the product of an unconscious process. Nowhere does a free you have any input.

A potentially more interesting question is whether or not it matters.

It's a meme but a good meme. People who think they're so fucking smart for refuting it are actually idiots.

Two words: SAR TRE

Or, BEING and NOTHINGNESS

Issues with libertarian free will are a fact but not every position which rejects that claim are the same.

Harris himself has taken up dismissive attitudes towards the long history of scholarship around philosophical issues and is generally just ignorant of where the current discourse is at. He's stumbled upon something every undergrad physics student realizes at some point or another and is so blown away by his own profundity he's squarely declined to investigate any of the significantly more nuanced thought on the subject.

Libertarian free will is dead but Harris is seemingly blind to positions falling under the heading of compatibilism (yes he's spoken of it before but he's yet to show any real grasp of it nor present a meaningful argument against it beyond "muh semantics")

our free choices retroactively cause the conditions leading up to them

time is itself born of a more fundamental atemporal structure manipulated by the freedom of the will

we're trapped in a material samsara

science will discover all of this in 20 years

screencap this

>The notion of free will is a complete joke. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about it can easily conclude that they have none.
>Everything you do has a cause. Everything you think and want has a cause. Every "choice" you make is the product of an unconscious process. Nowhere does a free you have any input.
If every effect has a cause, what caused the universe? What is the first cause? You either got an infinite chain of causes (perhaps, as some physicists speculate, this universe was created by a black hole, and the universe that had that black hole itself was created by a black hole, ad infinitum), or perhaps there's just an uncaused first cause as Aristotle said. Disclaimer: I've written this same post on Veeky Forums several times before. Going on, it's either that, or an uncaused first cause as Aristotle says. Voila, you've got acausality built into the fabric of the universe itself. Quantum physicists also talk about particles that briefly "pop into existence" out of nowhere then disappear just as quickly, a seeming violation of the law of conservation of mass and energy. Some quantum physicists have posited that the world is a hologram. If you think about the infinite divisibility of time and space, you can pretty easily come into the conclusion that time and space don't exist and that the universe (at least as we perceive it) can't logically exist; which is what Einstein said, that time and space don't exist as we perceive them are actually part of a spacetime continuum.

tl;dr world's weirder than you think and I sound like a pothead, you probably shouldn't listen to me, fuck this

I didn't mean to namefag, sorry, I posted that in another thread as a joke then this automatically filled it in.

>If every effect has a cause
I never said every effect has a cause. I said everything YOU do and think has a cause. There is a strong difference. Quantum mechanics hasn't been enough to completely dismantle all notion of cause and effect in the universe.

And furthermore I reject the notion that a probabilistic model is any “freer” than a purely deterministic one. Where is the ability to choose granted to me?

Prove everything I think and do has a cause.

I tell you to raise either your left hand or your right hand.
Regardless of which hand you ultimately raised, ask yourself why you chose to raise that hand.
If you can answer why, then you have a reason for raising that hand, and therefore a cause.
If you can't answer, then the action must have been the product of an unconscious process, because a conscious process would have left you with a clear path to trace back, with each step having a cause. An unconscious process, by definition, can't be said to be a free choice you make. If a choice you make is not free, that's because it is bound to something. It must have a cause.
You can apply this to every choice you make.

Causality is just a faulty way of perceiving things. The universe is fundamentally acausal.

If we do assert that the the universe is completely devoid of causality, a hard incompatibilist stance still makes more sense than any that assumes free will. Again, you're no freer under such a model than you are under a strictly deterministic one.

But in any case it seems odd to assume complete acausality. Sure if I try to push an object all the particles in my hand tunnel at the same time I won't be able to move that object. But it would be incoherent to go from that to the claim that there is no connection between pushing an object and moving it.

Here's how I see it- either free will exists, determinism exists, or all three.

I don't believe in freewill either, I find it logically incomprehensible, we can't even come up with a definition for it, every definition of it implicitly has the idea in it of "uhhhh... you can choose freely of your own freewill dur?"

I just don't like causality. I think the disproving of it will be as big as the Copernican revolution, the discovery of America, or perhaps Einstein's theory of general relativity (which still hasn't even fully permeated mass consciousness yet IMO). In fact, it will probably (hell, DEFINITELY) be even bigger than these three.

BTW. if you think this is insane, remember that Gurdjieff thought no one had freewill naturally but somehow you could develop it by listening to him. Now THAT'S insanity.

It's both. There's randomness albeit a very bracketted randomness.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

But what if it isn't proven, and causality remains?

I'm a soft determinist. What that means is that I realise that factors outside of my control make the person I am today, and have some bearing on my decisions, however there is nothing stopping me from acting differently in the same situation. So yes I have free will.

God sort of challenges this, because you can't deviate against what God knows you're going to do. But if you're an athiest, or agree with Hume when he says that God is a mystery, then it's not a problem.

I think a lot of determinist arguments are somewhat dishonest. Everything that's part of the decision making process is "not really you" then somehow they are blown away by the idea that you are a passive observer.

If you have intention, and it's carried out freely, then that must be free will. It really depends on what you define the person as. If you define the person as being some infinitesimally small part of the brain, then no. There's no free will. If you take the person as being the sum of all the parts, and the workings of the brain as being part of the decision making process, then free will exists, and you are making decisions, even if you would have made those decisions 100% of the time.

>I think a lot of determinist arguments are somewhat dishonest
>goes with the most dishonest compatibilist argument, which involves redefining the concept so you can say that your definition is true even if the conventional one isn't

>their definition is different from mine therefore they are redefining

which definition fits with the way people actually use the term free will, in common speech and moral and legal discussions? hint: it's the one that exists

it's like you claiming a "chair" does not exist because there are just atoms and no chair essence, and then complaining when people disagree.

The point isn't that humans don't make decisions you moron, the point is that none of those decisions can be said to come out of a vacuum.

>and you are making decisions, even if you would have made those decisions 100% of the time.
How can you say you are truly and freely choosing, if you are bound to make those choices 100% of the time?

>which definition fits with the way people actually use the term free will, in common speech and moral and legal discussions? hint: it's the one that exists
No, it's the one that is questionable. This is evident from the fact that a debate over free will exists in the first place. No one cares if you "technically" have free will. The free will you're arguing for is not the same that most people argue for.

>The free will you're arguing for is not the same that most people argue for.
Who argues for libertarian free will? It's a wildly unpopular position among philosophers, and in fact almost anyone who's familiar with the debat. Debates about free will always turn into compatibilists versus hard determinists, as evidenced by this very thread.

I suspect that there's some kind of more or less random distribution of intuition about what the term "free will" means, some taking the incoherent libertarian concept and some the compatibilist notion and a determinist is just someone with the wrong intuition.

Think about it, ask someone "if you make a decision without coercive exterior forces acting on you based solely on past experience, are you making that decision freely?" and almost everyone will answer yes, even though it's a priori derivable that such a situation does not permit for free will.

Sam Harris is totally confused about free will. It's still an illusion, but not for the reasons he thinks.

>there is nothing stopping me from acting differently in the same situation
How so? If external factors determine your decisions, and you repeat a situation with the same external factors, then presumably your resulting decision-making process will turn out the same?

Can somebody PLEASE describe the essential properties of "free will"? I already know them, but it will mean NOTHING coming from me. So please, give me anything to go off of.

compatabilism was a part of my undergrad course lol. why don't you expound on your premise user and reveal to me how much further the discourse on free will has come

>Who argues for libertarian free will?
People who have never really thought about it. Which is to say, most people.

Not to mention, y'know, libertarians.

In what way does it matter if the compatibilist idea of free will is valid? How does that affect the impact of free will on penology, criminology, ethics, psychology, sociology? What matters is whether it's possible to act differently or not.

On the one hand, when people argue clearly, the question of free will is an essential question, and usually not a merely verbal dispute. On the other hand there are so many definitions of free will that it can be hard to know what we're talking about. Most recent work on the subject is aware of this, and philosophers now actually make normative arguments for the definition of free will that we *should* adopt, as the one most central and important for human beings. (Hume was the first to make this kind of normative argument about our free will vocabulary.)

Anyway, I think that the "could have done otherwise" conception of free will is just as meaningless and pointless as the "split decision between two equal possibilities" conception of free will. These contemporary approaches are sometimes called individualistic conceptions of free will. I am with a rising wave that prefers the classical conception of free will as belonging to rationality, not to arbitrary decisions and meaningless could have done otherwise.

Your action is never what is free. Instead your will is free while you act. For your will to be free it must be guided by your own thought and reason, not arbitrary and contingent desires and circumstances. So what is rational and self-directed and intentional is what is free. In this sense what is free is decidedly *not* something you could have done otherwise.

This is the only way to move forward, I think. I don't understand why our vocabulary got so corrupted in the past couple decades.

Randomness is just indeterminate probability.

I strongly disagree, the correct way to move forward is not to choose a one definition, especially since it's easy to just make specific constructions that allow you to prove or deny "free will" even if that doesn't mean anything anymore.

A more practical suggestion: identify and name the different definitions of free will, which some have already attempted (one of Robert Kane's books on free will identifies "freedom of self-realization", "freedom of self-perfection", and so on). I think compatibilists and incompatibilists could easily see eye to eye on many issues if they just bothered to clean up the mess. The main debate seems to hinge on which of the "freedoms" like the ones Kane identified are sufficient for the idea of "free will". But who really cares? They can be analyzed individually. Then, afterwards, you can identify which ones are relevant to which fields and problems, as another user has shown concern with.

While that it excellent advice and a good methodology to get started, I think we must at least trim off the fat by closing out distracting ways of thinking about freedom. We should cut out talk about what is meaningless and arbitrary (so split decisions and so forth, as well as could-have-done-otherwise), and focus on freedom as rationality and freedom as necessity. Combined with your preparatory methodology, we might finally then get at the heart of the matter.

Because the word "freedom" is not just one word with many senses that we are secretly in perfect agreement about but only with an underdeveloped vocabulary. It is much more than a merely verbal dispute. At some point we must start making normative claims about the best way to think about the way in which we are free.

Let me expand on the main point. For your will to be free, it must first of all be *your* will. And can you say it's really *your* will if when you wound back the clock you "might" have done something differently? If you really might have done something differently then it would not really be you. So the idea that freedom has anything to do with could-have-done-ortherwise is totally mistaken. If you really could have done otherwise, then you can be certain that the action was not free.

If you autonomously give yourself a law, then your keeping with your self-given law makes you free. It ensures all your actions are yours, and it ensures that arbitrary and contingent circumstances don't enslave you in the moment. To be free you must legislate your own behavior in this way. The only way to do this is rationally, with reason, not with impulse. Accordingly we see another reason why could-have-done-otherwise actions, although they may exist, are not our free actions. Free actions are precisely the ones when we feel like there is no question about what must be done, because we owe it to ourselves to be free and to resist slavish dependence on contingent distracting forces.

They will just say that no definition fits and that no definition can be given.

>People who have never really thought about it. Which is to say, most people.
What exactly do you base that on? Yes people may not have a concrete notion of what they mean when they say "free will" but that doesn't mean coherent definitions for the term are invalid.

>Not to mention, y'know, libertarians.

Which are comparatively rare in the academic community. Indeed, if you run across the term "free will" in a modern philosophical paper it is more likely used to refer to compatibilist free will than anything else, and when used to describe libertarian free will it will most often be in the context of its refutation.

>In what way does it matter if the compatibilist idea of free will is valid? How does that affect the impact of free will on penology, criminology, ethics, psychology, sociology? What matters is whether it's possible to act differently or not.
It seems quite informative in all those contexts. Free actions (by the compatibilist notion) line up very nicely with our notion of actions one is morally responsible for, in terms of policy it seems to make a lot of sense to punish acts which are both free and criminal because, by compatibilist definition, free decisions are recurrent given liberty (the criminal that freely chooses to steal will likely continue to steal if left to be free) while non-free actions are contingent on coercive force (e.g. if I am forced to participate in a crime removal of the coercive force is likely to restore my status as a productive free citizen).

>joe rogan