Free will is not real

It's a truth, and before you go
>LOL QM DISPROVES DETERMINISM U FUCKING MONGOLOID
I'm not arguing for determinism, i'm simply arguing that the will of a human is out of their control and is only made by the environment surrounding the person, not the person themselves.

Here's a thought experiment.

We have 2 identical persons, person A and person B.

Both of them are perfectly identical, so flawlessly mirroring eachother that you could not tell the difference.

Now, if we keep person A in the normal world and we transport person B to a world ruled by aliens and then fast forward 10 years, you can clearly see that the idea of free will crumbles.

Person A and person B will end up completely different people, while person A is a pacifist and owns a flowershop, person B despises his alien overlords and just started a resistance.

Of course this is a very extreme example, but this type of logic has nothing preventing it from applying to smaller things.

If it were really hot right now you would probably be more cranky, and if it were colder, you would probably feel more timid. Both of these can affect decisions you make and can possibly lead to a sort of butterfly effect, which could probably change events in your life drastically.

The last bullet that people try to fire into this argument is that it's morally wrong in that it is basically an excuse for criminals to be criminals because they "couldn't be anything else"

This argument is weak, as it's only arguing from a human moral standpoint, which the laws of physics give less than 1 fuck about.

I'm not arguing that criminals shouldn't be locked up, i'm just saying free will is nonsense through our current understanding of the world.

Your thought experiment does not disprove free will at all. Most people who believe in free will would agree that the environment plays a part in how people behave. Plenty of psychologists who study behavior explicitly state that they believe in free will, look at humanistic psychology for example.

also, btw op, this thread belongs on

>Free will is not real

is that way.

>confusing free will choices for environmental factors
ahahahahahaha even deterministic algorithms behave differently on different data sets ahaahahahahahaha brainlets when will they ever learn? aahahahaa

>people being influenced debunks free will
Only a sith deals in absolutes, user.

My entire point is that all of our decisions are based on events in the past, thus not making them "real decisions" it's a bit baffling to me how we can somehow have control over our destiny, if the person we are right now is only that person because of events out of our control.

That being said, i d know little about huamn psychology, so maybe you can give me a brief rundown on why it disproves my points.

Human*

terrible "thought experiment"
free will means you have the freedom to make a decision using the set of choices available to you
in your experiment, the two individuals are given two completely different sets of choices each day due to their radically different predicaments
no conclusions can be drawn from comparing them

you can improve it somewhat like this

after the 10 years is up, transport them both to separate (but identical) lab rooms and have them complete identical tests where they are asked to make choices
and then compare the choices they make and see how they differ

even then this will not tell us anything about free will, just that our decision making process is altered by our experiences

Yes, your decision making process is altered in a way you had no control over.
Making you make different decisions and different life choices.

That is the basis of my argumentC

Identical people doing different things in different environments doesn't disprove free will. To disprove free will you have to prove that there is no choice in their actions.

If you are trying to say that the alien rebellion guy didn't have the choice of becoming the owner of a flower shop (which I will assume as true for now for the sake of argument), that only proves that free will is limited or restricted.

For example, I can't choose to create a slice of pizza out of thin air even if I would like one because my existence is bounded by physical laws. Even more abstractly we are bounded by our own imagination, maybe it is physically possible for me to create the slice of pizza but I just don't understand by whats means. Or in your example, maybe the alien rebellion guy could create a universe in which he does indeed own a shop filled with flowers but doesn't know how or doesn't even know what a flower is or would want to do so if he could? There are an infinite number of choices he can't make or is even aware of, but that doesn't mean he has no choice at all. It just means his choices are incredibly restricted.

I suppose is should have done what advised, even if they don't neccesarily agree with it.

but he did have some control over it
maybe on day 100 he chose to fight some alien, or maybe on that day he decided to hide behind a rock

furthermore, if you had sent a different person to the alien world, the experiences may alter his decision making in a different way than it did for person B

Wait, wouldn't 2 identical people in 2 identical, seperate locations be better?

If they make different decisions, then genetics and the environment cant be a factor, therefore free will?

theoretically
but in practicality, it is impossible
they would have to be born identically and raised identically in identical places with precisely identical features for their entire upbringing
up until the point that they are capable of taking a test

This is a good thought experiment. I would argue that such a construction would be impossible to create due to the probabilistic nature of measurements on systems. If you were to attempt to construct two identical entities you couldn't guarantee the exact position and momentum of the particles they're made of (and therefor their identity). It is possible, however, that they would still make identical choices. I'm not sure, but I think they would differ slightly.

I would assume we're talking theoretically.

Nigga, we're discussing free will vs determinism. "Practicality" is out the fucking window, it's a fucking metaphysical question.

If you had two completely separate, but perfectly identical, people, in perfectly identical Earths, the question of whether they would differ in their actions at any point, by any degree, is the crux of whether you believe in free will or not.

The decisions he makes on what he does on day 100 is explained in the OP, even simple changes in temperature can affect and has been proven to affect peoples moods (which in turn, affects decisions) so we can also assign his seemingly minor decisions to other factors.

well, to do it they'd have to be raised by machines since there'd be no way to get two mothers that are identical in every way (as obtaining two identical mothers brings us back to the original problem at hand)

and the environments would have to be perfectly sterile, otherwise one of them might get virus or infection when the other one doesn't

and we'd have to deal with very difficult problems
let's say on day 13 after they're born, both babies are in their cribs
one baby rolls left, and one baby rolls right
was it free will? or did the machine place one baby down a fraction of a millimeter differently that the other machine?

Lets say you raise a mouse in an empty box with only a little container for food and water.

Then you clone the mouse and raise it the same way. So generically they would be the same, and environmentally the same.

Then test each one in a maze to see if they make the same decisions at intersections. Would this work?

It would have to be so finely tuned and perfect that it seems too out of hand for us right now (or maybe ever)

Do you mean down to the atomic scale? Or things like temperature of the box, quantities of food/water etc?

I said creating two identical entities is not impractical, but impossible due to the uncertainty principle. From this point on I'll be using two entities as similar as physically possible (atomically).

Depending on how insignificant the differences would be, I don't think they would have free will in any meaningful sense of the word. It would also depend on what kinds of choices they are given. A rat going left or right in a maze isn't incredibly significant and could be chosen on instinct or by whim and rats are probably incapable of enough cognition to convince me of their free will, unless maybe one runs left and the other rips out his heart and stares at me with contempt for his creation or something. Any "impossible" choices would certainly convince me, i.e. the rat starts speaking English or reality warping.

What would disprove free will would be, if you put two exactly the same people in exactly the same situation, copy for copy and they wound up exactly the same.

The reason this is still argued about, is because there is no why to set up above experiment.

Anyone who tells you they know the answer is a hack or godlike.

Whether a choice is "significant" or not is completely irrelevant. It all comes down whether or not anyone, rat or otherwise, can indeed act on "instinct" or "a whim" or anything that isn't PURELY 100% based on its current situation/past experiences. People can say that they made a choice on a whim, but we obviously have no reason to trust a person's own description of why they did something, and even if we did, we also have no reason to believe they can perfectly understand their own decision-making procedure.

This is where I have to disagree. If in the experiment two guys live the exact same life but one gets extra sprinkles on one of his ice creams and the other doesn't and you try to tell me that proves his ability to choose I'm just not buying it.

If you're going to freak out over something that isn't purely 100% based on it's current situation and past, recall the photon. There are millions of trillions of them coming out of your monitor per second and each and every one of them break hard determinism and they don't even have consciousness. Not going to rehash that argument.

Here is what I've never understood about the determinism/free will argument.

Even if it is the case that the universe is deterministic, you still have to live AS IF you have free-will. So, does saying "the world is deterministic, free will doesn't exist," amount to anything more than a philosophical "gotcha!"? Because it seems to me like the end result is the same. (That is, saying "the world is deterministic!" won't decide what you make for dinner.)

Yes, the question is inherently meta-physical, meaning we can never truly verify one or the other, and makes it all pretty much just a bunch of philosophical wankery.
You don't have to buy it, but at what point does it go from affecting a person to not? How many more sprinkles does it take before dude A says "holy shit chill with the fucking sprinkles" and now there is obviously a divergence? 10? 40? 100? 1000? Sometimes tiny things affect people massively, sometimes huge things do nothing at all. It's only when there are literally no differences whatsoever can we be certain that they are not being affected by their environment, if they STILL make different choices, only then can we "verify" free-will. Since its impossible to make perfectly identical scenarios on perfectly identical people, it's impossible to make a judgement on free-will with certainty, since neither of us can be truly sure that he didn't notice the sprinkles, and won't choose to lick his ice cream differently now. And as long as there is some degree of uncertainty, you've done absolutely nothing in actually "settling" the problem.

Free will doesn't exist in the absolute sense, just like there isn't infinity or god.
However, using chaotic (non-linear) chemical reactions with loads of feedback mechanisms, the sequences are so insanely long before they begin to repeat that in any practical sense it is indistinguishable from free will.

We are all robots, but the capabilities of robots are extremely underestimated.

(fuck this "I'm not a robot" check)

what about awareness, feeling alive, what about subjective experience?

Are you fucking stupid?

they may not be 'strictly" deterministic, but they still obey physical laws like everything else, as do we, including our brain matter.

Please, tell me how probabilistic relationships on the atomic scale allow for free will. Do we each have some sort of magic fairy in the back of our heads, gently controlling each and every quantum mechanical process to try to make an extra potassium ion go someplace?


This. This guy gets it.

Subjective experience, we experience. I know some people on Veeky Forums go as far as to completely deny it, and arguing with that particular user is like a brick wall. I'm pretty sure he's convinced himself that he's a philosophical zombie.

But yeah, no idea why we experience anything. But just because we don't know, we shouldn't speculate something mystical and intangible. Though I would almost prefer the idea of panpsychism - the idea that everything has subjective experience, i.e, there is something like "being an electron" - if only because it resolves consciousness by just making it a fundemental quality of matter or existence.

Then again, it also sounds insane, and it could just be part of having a ridiculously complicated brain.

Actually, I'd go further, arguing that even in the exact same environment, there is no free will even with the muh QM argument. It's that simple:
Einstein said "God does not play dice". So we don't have free will. He's wrong ? Ok
God plays dice then. But god isn't me. I can't choose God's roll, so even if life isn't deterministic, I don't get to choose anything, regardless of whether determinism exists or not, and the argument holds regardless of the environment.

This does not disprove free will.
You cannot disprove free will, You would need to put the same person in the same situation infinitely many times and if he always did the same you could argue that it is his free will to always do the same OR you could argue that he he always does the same because the same situation and environment requires his non-free will to do so.

If you want to prove free will you would do the same. You put the same person infinitely many times in the same situation. If he always does the same you could argue that it is because of his free will to do so or because of his non-free environment driven will and actions.

If however he does not always do the same you have a probability of doing different actions. This does not neceessarily mean you have a free will but you WILL make a choice. Which gives you your understanding of free will. However the odds may be. You can always beat the odds.

Arguing for things that are 50/50 just ends in people misunderstanding each other because of scale. Please stop needlessly arguing over the (almost) literal same thing.

I've thought about the electron part too, it would make sense for one to have a tiny amount, if you can call it that, of consciousness, and that in a larger, more complex brain like the human brain those units of consciousness add up and start to form a bigger consciousness.

But I don't really know much about neurology. I know that the brain also has chemical signals so I have no idea what the basic unit of consciousness would be like and why they even add up and form a single, bigger consciousness. I mean, why doesn't each component of the brain have a consciousness of its own, or maybe they have but since they're not the part that's in control of speech and rational thoughts that perspective cannot make its thoughts known to other humans so it remains hidden.

And yet you still chose to be a deterministic faggot.

Poo the cum out