Does free will exist?

I'll never understand the "but what about free will" argument against determinism. This was never a philosophical question to begin with. The universe chugs along and we're a part of it, made of the same stuff, following the same rules. Even if you want to go the
>but muh quantum mechanics
route, you're still not saving free will; just replacing the deterministic process with a random one.

All that matters to us is that no matter how the underlying mechanics of the universe work, everything on our scale is so fucking huge and complex that none of it matters whatsoever. It's nearly impossible to predict what you yourself will think of next, let alone what anyone else will think or do.

The only argument that allows for "we possess the ability to make any decision whatsoever" flavor of free will is one that invokes a magical soul that follows no mechanics whatsoever and has infinite and timeless processing power from which to generate choices at any instant, along with some method to write those decisions back into reality, presumably onto our brains, in some mysterious way that fails to defy the second law of thermodynamics - without that last point our soul would necessarily turn our brain into a black hole, of course.

I think all of this talk about free will is complete bogus because you haven't even defined what free will means

You have the most down to Earth and practical viewpoint. is esoteric and has yet to even define free will which, if you're going to have any amount of logical rigorour, is completely necessary and WILL change the conclusion

I was bout to write hat free will does not exist, but I changed my mind.

is a different guy entirely so I won't speak for him. Personally I'm barely discussing free will itself in my post precisely for the reason you stated, as OP did not define free will in any terms except to suggest that the concept of determinism is somehow incompatible with it. To that end, I'm just talking about determinism itself, and how "it breaks free will" is the stupidest fucking reason in the world to doubt (or alternatively believe in) its reality.

If your conception of free will is one that is broken by the fact that all the decisions you ever made and will make were predetermined, then no, free will obviously does not and physically can not exist regardless of whether determinism is real or whether the universe is fundamentally random at some level. This type of "future-altering" free will is incompatible with any form of physical reality unless aided by the existence of the type of soul described in If your conception of free will only necessitates that you can in fact make decisions based on your own thought processes and past experience, then yes, it exists regardless of what the laws of the universe are with the one possible exception of a "Boltzmann brain" type scenario which seems pointless to even discuss since a hypothetical Boltzmann brain would not survive long enough to complete a thought on the topic in the first place.

I'd never heard of Boltzmann brains. From wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
"Boltzmann brains gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many existing theories about the Universe, human brains in the current Universe appear to be vastly outnumbered by Boltzmann brains in the future Universe who, by chance, have the exact same perceptions that we do; this leads to the absurd conclusion that statistically we ourselves are likely to be Boltzmann brains." That's a mind fuck if there really are more Boltzmann brains in the universe resembling human brains at any given time than actual human brains

In your second paragraph you said "physically can not exist regardless of whether determinism is real or whether..." If the universe is not deterministic, then decisions are not predetermined. Therefore what error would this have against freewill?

You leave free will open to be defined with the only assumption being it will be proved invalid if decisions are premade. My biggest complaint is that I don't believe you can even find a single sensible way to define free will which satisfies this relationship.

What I'm saying with "my biggest complaint," is not necessarily towards your argument, but is "my biggest complaint" against OP's question

>determinism goes infinitely into the past
>if it doesn't then it must have been a random start

Do you believe in causation or not? You can't say causation implies there is no free will only to say the first moment of the Universe along with its laws have no cause.

Attached: wow so hard.png (972x284, 9K)

>define free will
Having actions that aren't ultimately determined by physical causes, be they absolutely deterministic physical causes or probabilistically deterministic physical causes.
Other definitions I've seen mostly just seem like obfuscated determinism where you try to claim free will still counts even though the brain isn't exempt from physical causality.

>You leave free will open to be defined with the only assumption being it will be proved invalid if decisions are premade.
That's what the OP did by suggesting they are incompatible in the first place. I'm saying that if you believe in a class of free will that is incompatible with determinism, then the flaw actually has nothing to do with the relationship between free will and determinism; the flaw would be in said conception of free will in the first place. This is significant because the "magic" required to make that kind of free will work would still be necessary even if the universe was governed by entirely random or probabilistic mechanics. Surely we can agree that a completely random decision is not any more meaningful when it comes to free will than a predetermined one.

In other words, you either believe that you are made of physical stuff (in which case you cannot change the future any more than a planet can change its own orbit) or you're not (in which case no rules need apply and you can believe whatever you want). Personally, I'm all for definitions of free will that accept this in the first place. I believe that every decision I WILL make has, in a sense, already been made, but that doesn't make them any less my decisions or mitigate responsibility for them in any way. It's just a funny quirk of what happens when you assume the universe follows ANY rules at all. The only wrench you can throw in there is fundamental randomness, which can potentially defeat determinism but critically does not impact free will itself.

i believe nietzsche made the analysis that the concept of free will was created by christianity because you can use it to blame people for being evil, instead of evil being in their nature

Consider youtube.com/watch?time_continue=108&v=Jint5kjoy6I

Quantum mechanics, and specifically the uncertainty principle, directly contradict determinism. However, this does not necessarily imply free will (the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded). There will always be subjective biases, and involuntary subconscious responses to some stimuli.

In regard to OP's question, whatever ones views on free will and determinism, suicide is not the inevitable choice, but rather the weak and lazy option for people unwilling to give their lives meaning.

>does free will exist?
no
>If free will doesn't exist, everything is predetermined, does that mean suicide is inevitable one way or another for a person?
no

>That's a mind fuck if there really are more Boltzmann brains in the universe resembling human brains at any given time than actual human brains
Yeah, I just brought it up as one possible counterexample in which a brain could possibly exist without even the mechanical physically real type of free will. I don't think it's actually worth entertaining as a real possibility. Not just because of its seeming absurdity, but because if I were to accept that they do exist in such numbers then I'd also have to accept that I am one and even my current thought about the nature of such brains is itself a completely random delusion I was made with.

In other words, to accept Boltzmann brains is to simultaneously accept that your own logic in accepting it does not actually exist. It's probably better to be seen as a sign that any theory of the universe that relies on its creation being a totally random fluctuation in quantum fields will have to find some way to explain why Boltzmann brains DON'T exist (or at least are vastly outnumbered by brains in bodies in complete universes) before it can work as a theory in the first place.

We are made of particles which follow predetermined rules so free will is impossible as you can predict every particle's movement through time if you can work out the rules. Question is why does god make a universe which has no freedom?

>you can predict every particle's movement through time
Quantum mechanics is a thing.
see

As someone who's committed suicide twice and's survived (a la quantum immortality) both times, I can say that
> but rather the weak and lazy option for people unwilling to give their lives meaning.
is not always applicable. I tried killing myself because I had no hope left, my ability to ascribe meaning to things was overridden by subconscious aspects of my brain. where subconscious obsession of qualia overrode my ability to think consciously in a continuous manner. The meaning of what it meant to be alive boiled down to two things at two ifferent periods of time. One was that my life was too heavily entangled with another human being to allow me any sort of 'free' will, subsequently, after having committed my first suicide to escape previous said entabglement, my mind was filled with fire and the idea that I was going to hell, to which I acted with the premise that "Well, if hell is my fate, and I can't think properly with this image of fire so heavily imparted upon my mind, then why delay the inevitable if I can't contribute anything?" HOWEVER, I didn't die either time.

I wasn't unwilling to give my life meaning, I tried to. However, subconscious, frequent fabrications (fabrications which I did not decide to be there), made me lose hope and my belief in free thought.

Thankfully, after killing myself the fabrications subsided, though I'm more believing in the lack of free will from experience since then. I've felt the universe 'pulling' and 'pushing upon' me, at times being unable to counter the forces. Anyway, if you can prevent committing suicide, I'd suggest doing so. It can fuck you up spiritually in an extreme way. (halp

>We are made of particles which follow predetermined rules
no lol
they follow post-determined rules, unless you think newton came before the apple

Even if you have random effects there will still be some kind of logic controlling them which is deterministic. Everything even random effects must have some logic controlling them which is following a path set from the big bang. It's still all preordained.

>instead of evil being in their nature
Wouldn't that make them evil anyway? Why wouldn't >we blame them? Nietzsdsasd expected us to pity evil people?

How the neurons in your brain are formed/connected determine how you make the "choices" in your life. Free will does not exist on an individual level.

it's more like
>oh this guy acts like this and I don't like it
>i want to tell him to stop so I call it a sin
>but if god made him, and it's in his nature to do that thing, isn't that gods fault?
>ok god gave you free will so it's your fault for acting like that anyway
but I'm probably getting this very very wrong, I haven't read genealogy of morality yet

Why do you ask non-scientific questions on a science board?

This is pretty much exactly how I think about free will but in more down to earth language, thanks for that.

Laplace' demon, there is no way to determine the movement of every particle in a system from within the system so for there not to be free will in this sense there would have to be a being outside the system who knows all the movements of every particle in our universe.

So basically, an unknown phenomenon in physics which isn't yet accounted for
However this "unknown phenomenon" should be expected to reside at the quantum level in a hidden variable theory (there is no other room for it to reside. Everything else is well determined).

But then this makes no sense either for giving us freewill, because decision making of the brain happens at the macroscopic level. Not the quantum level.

By this definition, to have free will, you have to have magic. Anything that doesn't literally violate the laws of physics and causality, isn't free will.

It's a shit definition.

Better and simpler definition is the ability to make decisions with consequences, and that we have in spades.

The only way a being with conscious perspective could not have free will would be if they were completely omniscient - at which point it wouldn't really be making decisions. It would already know what it was going to do, and simply do it. Suffice to say, the limits of the physical universe prevent any such being from existing within it - lest maybe you count the universe itself, as a whole, but even then...

In the end, we're limited beings working with limited information, that don't even have a full grasp of our own decision making processes. We may know, intellectually, that all things are ultimately inevitable, but that doesn't relieve us of making decisions and experiencing that process as free will.

Attached: philosoraptor free will.jpg (500x500, 75K)

>Everything even random effects must have some logic controlling them

Why do you think that? Do you really think "logic" is anything but a concept invented by humans to better understand something?

But if you worked out the rules, and you desired something, you would utilize the rules to get what you desired by manipulating or distorting or outright breaking them, meaning that physical laws might impede free will, but in no way necessarily preclude it.

that implies that a part of you is outside of the rules and can be used to manipulate the rules

>If free will doesn't exist, everything is predetermined

Not necessarily. quantum mechanics could potentially disprove determinism. But it just means that the future would be randomly selected.

I'm this person. I left for a while. So yea, I'll just say the goal is not to investigate endless possibilities. It is to produce the truth regarding the problem as directly as possible.

There's a lot of truth to what you say. However I'm still in favor of "you want to talk about free will? Define it, because you're wanting to talk about a vague word which you don't even know what you mean by."

We are machines which make decisions, calculations, and think for ourselves
I really don't know what else people want. Does "unpredictability" really have that big of a significance?

What I'm saying is, the goal is to solve the problem. See the truth. Not just muck around.

>I'm just going to redefine free will until I hit something that exists because I'm too attached to the concept
IQ 12?

We are creatures of habit. And what we do will end up killing us one way or another.

Your mistake is thinking that if free will doesn't exist, then everything is predetermined. Mainly the predetermined part.

It's predetermined in the same way that the algorithm you run to solve a computational query is predetermined. Yeah, it is in some sense, but the measurement of that value is equivalent to the action of running it.

The measurement of your actions aren't known in advance. They're deterministic, but not "predetermined".

I completely agree with you in that regard. My only point is about the categories of free will themselves rather than the concrete definition of it.

People always make a big deal about determinism and free will as if it has big implications for it, but as far as I'm concerned there's NO philosophical implications of determinism whatsoever. It's a purely physical and mathematical thing, and if someone is of the opinion that free will is incompatible with it, then the type of "free will" they're thinking of is probably just incompatible with EVERY idea of a universe that does not invoke spirituality or magic to explain human decision-making; not just ones in which the universe happens to be deterministic rather than probabilistic.

My best definition for my own interpretation of what free will means is just the capability to act according to your own will. I believe that this is a plainly evident property of many animals including humans, and I believe there is nothing that makes programming an AI that possesses this free will impossible either. The only important part is the relationship between what you want to do and the decisions you take. It does NOT necessitate that you can arbitrarily decide what you want to do in the first place, nor that your very thoughts themselves aren't already determined in advance by cause and effect.

I don't like to say "free will doesn't exist" because that's not even close to my belief. But I think most people think that something more along the lines of:
>being able to think and act outside of any physical or mechanical processes
is the correct definition of free will, so if that is in fact the definition we're working with then I have no choice but to categorically deny its existence and implore those who believe in it to think more carefully about how exactly their brains (or whatever other part of them they think is involved in making decisions) is supposed to transcend reality to accomplish this feat.

>I'm just going to redefine free will to force it to not exist because I'm too against the concept

Yeah everything is predetermined but people can stop other predetermined events from happening.