Is free will binary or a spectrum?

the want to deny a piece of cake could just be another urge that you do not have control over

Was gonna say this Furthermore, the fact that you didn't consider the infinite "possible" paths of action is another proof of the limit of our freedom. Why is it more likely for you to follow a basic schedule, performing normal activities everyday, rather than randomly screaming, catching fire to yourself, walking 2 steps to the left, running 20 steps to the right, kissing the closest object, blinking repeatedly, etc?
Everything you do is just a result of the most powerful desire at the moment. Not eating the cake is a rational desire; you know that not eating it produces a physical benefit. So, the desire not to eat the cake was simply stronger than the desire to eat it.

>Not eating the cake is a rational desire; you know that not eating it produces a physical benefit.
You think people always make decisions based on what rationality determines is beneficial to them? Also you're being pedantic with regard to the infinite number of choices. I was making the point that free will is the ability to choose any action you want regardless of stimuli. You could choose to walk away, there are many choices while a person without free will is railroaded along a path where they have no choice but to follow base urges.

I can choose to perform any action I want at any time. I don't need any rational explanation, in fact I could do something incredibly detrimental to my wellbeing like smashing my hand with a hammer. That's how I know I have free will. The ability to choose any action available to me at any time, not just being corralled into specific choices based on programming.

I don't understand why you seem to believe being insane implies freedom?

>if I do have free will then I can simply choose not to eat it
Refraining from eating a cake isn't a magical behavior exempt from causality. You can neither eat a cake nor refrain from eating a cake without there being physical causes for your behavior. The fact there are multiple competing processes in your brain isn't an indication of "free will," it's an indication that the brain is more complicated than a single yes/no circuit, which shouldn't be surprising because plenty of other phenomena in the world are more complicated than a single yes/no circuit. Does the weather have "free will" because more than one competing process determines its behavior?

So? Free will isn't incompatible with the physical processes of the brain. You're spouting middle school brainlet tier misunderstandings.

It seems you think stimuli can only be external. Why can two people react differently in the same environment? Internal stimuli. Is it possible that external stimuli produce internal stimula, which you realize consciously, but didn't produce, leading you to think you did produce your thoughts? What makes you think walking away isn't the result of a biological desire? I want to know why you think it's impossible that you don't have free will. Consider these questions:
Do animals have free will? Does A.I, such as a chess engine, have free will?
Can you control, plan, and pause your thoughts? Can you change something you love into something you hate, and vice versa? If your brain is made of chemicals, and chemicals follow the laws of physics, is your brain not determined? If you have a soul, and it has substance, is it not also determined? Could you have more free will than you do now? Does God have more than you? If your will is free, what is it free from?

I don't understand why you think sane implies freedom?

>Is it possible that external stimuli produce internal stimula, which you realize consciously, but didn't produce, leading you to think you did produce your thoughts
No. Back to smoking weed and thinking "deep thoughts" with you.

our brain reacts to external stimuli and produces a result.

Now you're just being stubborn. Thoughts come out of nowhere and you know it. Do you actively search your brain for memories before they pop up? Do you search the English language before you string together a sentence? Do you think before you react to anything? And how can you say that to think is not a reaction itself? Is it not possible that everything you do is determined?

How can you have free will if you can't even influence what you think? Is there ever a concious step before your thoughts? Nope. They just pop up in your head.

I think "free will" is just a synonym for "willpower".

>Is it not possible that everything you do is determined
Nope. Is it possible there is a pink elephant orbiting Jupiter?

>Free will isn't incompatible with the physical processes of the brain.
Your brain produces behavior based on cause and effect relationships describable with ordinary classical physics. There is no reason to call that "free will" any more than there would be reason to call the weather a product of "free will."

What about
>it's either determined, then it can't be free, or random, then it has no value?

>Do you actively search your brain for memories before they pop up?
Uh, I do this all the time. Don't you? Isn't it the first step when you want to find something you think back and remember where you put it? It sounds like you just don't use your brain, but people do in fact think back and organize their thoughts and memories consciously.

Where did you get that from?
Nice dodge btw, I think i got my answer tho, you believe that's so because it suits your argument

>is it possible there is a pink elephant orbiting Jupiter?
Yes, it's very possible, what's your point?
>nope
Why not? This is where you demonstrate your free will reasoning abilities and not just knee jerk responses.

No-one is even close to solving the hard problem of consciousness so it's disingenuous to claim we know how the brain produces behavior in any way.

>Why not?
There's no evidence for it. But then I'm talking to someone who thinks it's "very possible" that a pink elephant orbits Jupiter so perhaps you haven't properly developed a healthy incredulity for anything that isn't supported by evidence yet.

Consciousness does not require free will. Bigger brains follow the same physical laws as smaller brains. Or do you think that at some point free will just comes out of nowhere due to an increase in brain complexity? How does physical matter exempt itself from physical laws?

>There's no evidence for it.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There isn't anywhere near universal agreement that there is a "hard problem of consciousness" in the first place.
What there is near universal agreement for is the premise neuronal firing underlies what gets labeled as conscious behavior, and what you can establish is that neuronal firing is a process describable by classical physics.
arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9907009v2.pdf
>We find that the decoherence timescale s ( ∼ 10 −13 − 10 −20 seconds) are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical timescales ( ∼ 10 − 3 − 10 − 1 seconds), both for regular neuron firing and for kink-like polarization excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way.

There's no evidence to claim that free will is impossible?
>matter obeys physical laws
>physical laws can be used to predict the future (they determine the future)
>the brain is physical
>therefore, the brain is determined
There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that we DO have free will, however. The best argument for free will is that you FEEL like you have it. If you can't provide any reasoning for free will I'm done wasting time with you

It's called emergentism and it's very possible. Haven't you ever heard the expression "whe whole is greater than the sum of the parts"? The idea that when a brain reaches a critical mass of complexity it creates new emergent properties that cannot be expressed in simpler structures isn't absurd at all, in fact it's the best explanation for what we experience on a day to day basis.

>Yes, it's very possible
It isn't, don't act retarded just to win an argument

The stuff we're made of isn't conscious either

I find it cute that you're trying so hard to show that the brain is purely physical in operation like you really, truly believe that if you can show that it proves free will can't exist. It's adorably naive. Unfortunately I never said anything about the brain using any non-physical processes and free will is entirely compatible with the physical operation of the brain. The idea that "Purely physical brain = no free will!!" is like philosophy 1 stuff that is pure navel gazing.

I shouldn't have said very. It sounds like I'm saying it's more likely than not likely.
But you can't say that it's IMPOSSIBLE. If you can't consider how it could be possible, then you have no place debating something as complex as free will.

Not an argument, try again.

I don't need to make any argument. You're the one trying to claim something that is grossly incongruent with human experience it's up to you to support your claim with sufficient evidence and you've fallen flat on your face with an embarrassing freshman level "Uhhh physical brain means no free will" argument.

Not an argument, try again.

We don't have to be omniscient, we can use logic instead. It makes no sense for an agent to be free from factors when making decisions, because even its own substance contributes to its desires. How can you be free from everything and exist at the same time?

Elephants can't withstand the vacuum of space

>It makes no sense for an agent to be free from factors when making decisions
You don't need to be. Who said free will means you're free from anything that might influence you. It's simple, you have your own will and you can choose any course of action available to you freely. If you feel hungry you don't lose your free will by acting on that.

Your will is an emergent property of the brain once it reaches a certain point of complexity.

yes but consciousness doesn't relate to free will

It doesn't have to be alive. It doesn't have to be naked. It could be in a ship. Aliens could be assisting it. "Space is a vacuum" could just be a lie.
"The only thing I know is that I know nothing"

>will = free will
Most people who believe in free will do so because they believe they control their actions in such a way that their lives aren't determined, while it seems your definition of free will is compatible with determinism. No one cares about having a will; all animals have that!

How can you chose the way that you chose

>all animals have that
No they don't. Almost all animals act on base instinct. The more developed the brain the stronger the will of the creature and the more ability it has to override natural urges and follow it's own individual will. Free will requires self awareness for one, which most creatures lack right off the bat. The ability to self identify as "you", to be able to recognize that you have choices and the ability to choose from the options available based on your will, that is free will.

There is nothing special about humans. We have the most developed brain and so we have the most ability to set long reaching goals, to acknowledge our desires and act on those if we choose, or override them as we will.

It's impossible for humans to do do anything we don't have the urge for. I figured this out when I was literally 8.

>It's impossible for humans to do do anything we don't have the urge for.
I do it all the time. Maybe you're just a low functioning brainlet who is ruled by impulse instead of higher brain function?

Determinism is false so there isn't any need to prove that free will can exist within that framework anyway

If we override our instincts then what is making us function afterwards and what makes us sure that our choices are not pre determined

This thread proves that either the concept of free will is illogical or we don't even have the language to discuss it. No one can even define it or a lack of it.

You are the one who is wrong
because you fail to realize that you have an urge to chose between your urges.

that's the google definition
>the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
I would say that we don't because stuff functions in either, pre determined or truly random ways. Since we are made of stuff it should be assumed that we also function in pre-determined or random ways

Your brain does not behave, you behave. People have behavior, the brain is a small part of yourself.

>the brain is a small part of yourself
????????

the brain the part that determines a person's behavior. if we didn't have a brain then we wouldn't be moving and couldn't exhibit any behavior

Bruh you kidding me, every ancient civilization had already solved consciousness. The ideas have been carried on in religious texts all the way till now.

>Since we are made of stuff it should be assumed that we also function in pre-determined or random ways
This is so dumb. The properties of objects change wildly at different scales. The properties of an atom are not the same as the properties of the cell it is part of and the properties of the cell are not the same as the organ it is part of. Asserting that "Well if a single atom can't be conscious and we're made of atoms clearly we can't be conscious!" is retarded.

The properties of an atom, cell, and organ are all deterministic. It should also be noted that each of these things share base properties. The cell and the organ both have all of the properties as an atom. No properties are being taken away. so it seems as though emergence can add properties but can't take them away. if we assume this then consciousness could exist but free will could not because free will is based on things being non-deterministic.

We're lucky determinism was debunked in the 60s then

>This thread proves that either the concept of free will is illogical or we don't even have the language to discuss it. No one can even define it or a lack of it.
It's well-defined in the book pictured in

It was debunked by random probability which also has no free will

>Is free will binary or a spectrum?
analog freewill
vs
digital freewill

Obviously robots have digital free will and humans have analog free will. But what kind of free will do cyborgs have?

Free-will discussions always makes me drop Veeky Forums for weeks. Shit is just too depressing.

I loled

The study you are using to support your argument is almost two decades old because the new research being done is saying that quantum physics does have an impact on the study of the brain. the fact that Quantum cognition is even a thing proves that there is not "near universal agreement."
If you want to read more about it you can go to wikipedia or read the abstract of the recent paper on this topic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003491615003243

Determinism does not make free will impossible.

Asking for a supernatural explanation that shits on the laws of physics is retarded.

Free will can be understood as the set of processes involved in decision making and how it is being that set of processes (although that does not mean you are only those). It is your will as it is a part of you and it is free in the sense that it is a system with degrees of freedom, even if the initial values are set and we are within a deterministic universe.

If it makes you feel any better the anti-free will proponents are almost entirely pseuds who don't actually know what they're talking about

The problem with this definition is that its arbitrary. Many systems are as you described with df in a complex world. Your definition doesnt stand to scrutiny. Could describe anything as having free will by your way.

This study has nothing to do with consciousness or free will. Youve just searched brain and quantum together. The quantum tuff doesnt posit anyhing about the brain that is particulalry special due to quantum mechanics rhat isnt also reflected in any other natural phenkmena at a specific scale

Youre mistaken if u think this has anything to do with the hard problem of consciousness.
We can talk about it in the easy sense where we do know a fair ammiunt.

>Could describe anything as having free will by your way.
Only if those things have consciousness. Do they?

can a chemical reaction have a free will? free will to do what? to brake the bonds of physics laws? i don't think so.
we by definition just reacting to our surroundings. even with feedback loops we just react to our reactions.

Well, not anything. Just anything making decisions.

According to the integrated information theory of consciousness, every system has a consciousness. Although I would say only some systems make decisions.

Both.
In the end, all decisions can be boiled down to a finite series of yes or no's. Sometimes this series is a very, very long, but it is still finite.
The capacity to consciously make those decisions defines free will. If I can stop and think "yes" to eggs and "no" to all other choices of things I could eat for breakfast, edible or otherwise, I have free will.
In this way, free will is binary. You are either able to make a conscious decision to do or not do something, or you do not.

But at the same time, your free will is influenced by your unconscious mind. People with vitamin deficiencies will find themselves having odd cravings as their body urges them to consume the nutrients it requires. You get aroused when a mate touches your privates not because you made a conscious effort to, but because that's just the way your brain works.
Something like a rock obviously has no free will. It cannot make any decisions. There is no spectrum in these cases.
The capacity for different organisms to respond to these urges in different ways is what makes free will a spectrum. Humans have grown to be capable of incredible self-control compared to most animals, but even animals seen as "dumb" have some form of free will. A dog can still decide whether or not it's going to bite something that's bothering it. But it will also instinctively eat anything that smells good with no thought as to whether or not it might be safe.
Basically, you have free will or you don't. If you do have free will, you are on a spectrum from "total control over all my urges and ability to logically think over every decision" to "technically can make decisions but almost always just goes with instinct".

I really don't get the point of this discussion. Or rather, I really don't understand how it's possible that so few people understand that there is no such thing as free will.

Sam Harris among many others have made a good case as to why it's simply not possible. Because we experience time as a one-way street, everything that we think, know, feel and are today is the consequence of who we were yesterday. Once you track down the lines of yesterdays, we'll eventually get the point where we weren't even conscious and intelligent enough to make any decisions yet. So our nature and nurture, all the experiences we get as we grow up literally build our entire personalities, and all the data those personalities have to play with.

Free will simply isn't possible. Just because we can't intuitively understand that, and just because we have the same primal, digusted reaction to it the religious folk had to Darwin's idea that we're all closely related to chimps, doesn't make the logic behind it any less valid.

We've seen religions go down this road for a while now. A few thousand years back religions explained everything. Then the more we learned through science, the less room there was for religion. Turns out everything that even could be explained, could be explained through science and reason. Free will is exactly like that. We used to have a lot of it, then as our knowledge increased we learned that more and more good and bad choices were nothing but differences caused by how people were raised, potential abuse, education, their inborn intellect, neurological damage, and other hard and soft factors that basically removed all the proposed decision-making power from free will. Clearly we can see that the space remaining for where free will should be, is diminishing the more we understand about human biology and psychology. Clearly, we can see where it's going.

See

>Why does a criminal murder, but not you?
Assuming I don't murder.

What good is a few already initially biased degrees of freedom, especially since even those degrees are clearly much fewer than we know now. Considering practically every year more and more of our decision making is being explained by biology and psychology, as explained above.

Those comments are promoting the idea that we settle for the degrees of freedom we know now, and accept that as our free will. Rather than looking forward to what the information we have is clearly predicting: That there ARE no degrees of freedom. None. If our free will was a curve on a chart, we could easily draw a line that would predict where it was going. And that predictive line would eventually be going to 0.

>Free will simply isn't possible
It is. Even under determinism it's possible. But we know determinism is false so really at this point there is no reason to reject the existence of free will

>Considering practically every year more and more of our decision making is being explained by biology and psychology
Not really. It's mostly post hoc reasoning and poor science that can't be independently verified. There hasn't really been any evidence that the primary factor in how people act is not their own free will. Nature and nurture have some amount of influence but it's actually wildly overstated by people who are desperate to absolve criminals of their culpability. Sociological studies should be regarded with extreme skepticism considering the results they produce can rarely be replicated

We do not know that. See bohmian mechanics.

Good is not a word that makes sense to use now. And there are degrees of freedom, which is not the same as saying these ignore the laws of physics. You did not understand the idea at all.

You are confusing free will with willpower.

Free will is described as the ability to deliberate an affect on our surrounding environment. in this regard the binary aspect is the case that we can do such a thing, but it's spectral in the parameters we are influencing, but of course those parameters can be deterministic or non-deterministic, and that's literally the entirety of our nervous system, whose macroscopic properties we barely understand let alone the microscopic ones.

Man has free-will: otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain. In order to make this evident, we must observe that some things act without judgment; as a stone moves downwards; and in like manner all things which lack knowledge. And some act from judgment, but not a free judgment; as brute animals. For the sheep, seeing the wolf, judges it a thing to be shunned, from a natural and not a free judgment, because it judges, not from reason, but from natural instinct. And the same thing is to be said of any judgment of brute animals. But man acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. For reason in contingent matters may follow opposite courses, as we see in dialectic syllogisms and rhetorical arguments. Now particular operations are contingent, and therefore in such matters the judgment of reason may follow opposite courses, and is not determinate to one. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will.

I think whatever free will is, or rather what people reason free will aught to be is lost in translation. It's more a linguistic problem rather than a philosophical or neurological one.

The main offender being "free". It's a pretty shoddy definition of all the extremely complex motions our brains go through to compose something like a will. Which is more likely than not heavily influenced by either genetics or at least all of our past experiences, in most cases neither of which we where "free" to choose from.

In the end the terminology doesn't really matter though. That which we feel "free will" to be is certainly there. It probably isn't completely free and might even be entirely deterministic. Yet such an understanding doesn't take away from that which we experience. Eyesight is pretty decent analogy, all that we see is actually upside down. It's our brains that flip it horizontally for us so everything is right side up. Knowing this as fact doesn't suddenly change my perspective of it. Everything is still right side up.

it's an illusion

>punishment is pointless if we don't have free will
I get tired of hearing this. When someone murders, would you rather have them locked up or roaming the streets? Also, the justice system acts as a deterrent, preventing some crimes before they take place, because people are worried that they might get in trouble later. According to this whole post, dogs don't have free will, so why do we punish dogs, then?
>we take time deciding our actions, comparing alternatives
So do chess engines. That doesn't imply freedom at all.

You just managed to completely miss a point that should be easy enough for an average IQ guy to realize, if he but put in the effort. So whether you're too stupid to understand, or too emotionally loaded to even try, I don't think anyone here needs that kind of deliberately misunderstanding leftist straw man ideology that you just spilled. Please, just move on and leave this thread alone.

Human behave perfectly *economically* rational. Rational in economics doesn't mean wise or smart or advisable according to some objective standard. It means that humans always do what they want to do or what they value. If a human wants to smoke a cigarette it is because they enjoy the benefit more than they regard the cost of money, time, and health. If a human decides willing to be a martyr like in your picture, it is because they think martyrdom will have more benefit than death to somebody else and they value the benefit of others more than personal cost. Human do not always make these decisions with perfect information or with much consideration, but all actions are value decisions. You could smash your hand with a hammer because you value proving your point more than the health of your hand

I think even in this model, free will can arise from our value determination methods. If we freely choose what we value, then we can have some amount of control over how we act.

Not an argument.

Well a feeding in poiny is that consciousness also has no discrete lines. Many systems have similar properties to conscious ones.

I don't think that resistance necessarily comes from free will. Being opposite is not strictly free.

It's unable to know whole observable everything by yourself, you react on what you have learned, and yes, it is deterministic a bit.

Cannot predict outcome of one neuron, can predict sum, cannot predict if something is stacking suprise.

Being forcefully resistive can be just natural reaction, not free will. i.e. problems with oxytocin formation according to stimuli of it's group statistics pathways are not necessarily free will...

But if we say oxytocin is love, and love is free will it's kinda where the 'thing' lies, because if you call free will PROBLEM in your work, you can kinda be HUGE fuckup for humanity if machines ever read your work.

Never solve it, with problem solving.

Solve it with love.

Free will relates to light in culture. That's it. In quantum physics, also.

Define decision. Youre presupposing things so dont use that terminology.

Even photons pretend they don't have it if you are watching.