Assuming we don't have free will, why do we have the illusion that we do?
Three possibilities come to mind:
Is there an evolutionary purpose?
Does it arise as a consequence of our mental activities, a sort of side effect of our thinking?
Is it given a priori (something we have to think in order to think at all)?
EDIT: Thanks for all the responses! Just one thing I saw come up a few times I'd like to address: a lot of people are asking 'Why assume this?' The answer is: it's purely rhetorical! That said, I'm happy with a well thought-out 'I dispute the premiss' answer.
Confabulation.
Look at split-brain patients: divide the corpus callosum down the middle, and you effectively have two separate brains that don't communicate. Tell the half without the speech centre to perform some random task, then ask the other one why they did that - and they will flat-out make up some plausible sounding reason.
And the thing is, they haven't the slightest idea that it isn't true. To them, it feels exactly like freely choosing to do it, for those made up reasons.
Bits of our brains make us do stuff for their own reasons, and we just make shit up to explain it after the fact. We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we've primed our muscles to carry out the choice.
I think a chunk of this comes down to our need to model the thoughts of others (incredibly useful for social animals) - we make everyone out to be these monolithic executive units so that we can predict their actions, and we make ourselves out to be the same so we can slot ourselves into that same reasoning.
Also it would be a bit fucking terrifying to just constantly get surprised by your own actions, blown around like a leaf on the wind without a clue what's going on, so I think another chunk of it is just larping this "I" person who has a coherent narrative behind it all, to protect your own sanity.
Where can I read more about this?
There was a relevant post on Lemmy the other day:
The origin and nature of existence is an epistemological black hole that some people like to plug with "a
wizardgod did it".The sensation of free will is an emergent property of a lack of awareness of the big stuff, the small stuff, the long stuff, and the short stuff.
I like to look at the illusion of free will as if you're falling down a pit. You can try to flap your arms or swim, and maybe move yourself a little bit, but at the end, you're still falling down.
Warning, I came up with this while very high one time, lol, but it's kind of stuck with me:
Consciousness is a 4-dimensional construct living in a 3-dimensional world. What we experience as the passage of time is just our consciousness traveling/falling along the surface of the 4-dimensional plane/shape that defines our existence.
Feel free to poke all the holes you want in that. lol
There is an old Taoist story about two people floating down a river. One has already decided where he wants the river to take him and is constantly swimming against the current to try to get there, the other just floats along taking in the sights.
They both end up wherever the river takes them, and they both went through the same obstacles and rapids, but when asked how the trip was, one of them is complaining about the whole trip being frustrating and exhausting, while the other had a pleasant time and tells you all about the amazing things they saw on the way.
I love that!
Really illustrates the saying, "go with the flow," too.
This is basically a spacetime worldline, which is one of those terms that sounds like scifi technobabble even though it's an actual concept
Couldn't it also be argued that our lack of awareness of the big stuff also leaves open the possibility of free will?
On a sufficiently large billiards table, it does become hard to prove that some balls don't spontaneously sink themselves.
That is a clever point but I think it also overly simplifies the nature of reality to such a point that it's not likely to change any minds.
Here's my take: the answer is emergent phenomena. We live in a very complex system and in complex systems there are interactions that can only be predicted using systems of equal or higher complexity. So even in case everything is predetermined, it would still be unpredictable and therefore your decisions are basically still up to you and the complex interactions in your brain.
I think this is probably it. I think this argument is strongly related to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of sensory experience. I find it simple to imagine the idea of a body with no will or no consciousness (i.e., a philosophical zombie). But I find it very difficult, almost impossible, in fact, to imagine a consciousness with no will, even if it's only the will to think a given thought.
Do we have free will to think a given thought? All of my thoughts just suddenly appear in my mind or are connected to previous thoughts that suddenly appeared in my mind.
I mean, if I said to you, 'Calculate 13x16' (or some other sum you don't know off the top of your head) you could either do it or not do it. That would be a willed choice, whether or not you knew the answer.
My thoughts would be presented based the fact that you've asked me to calculate something. At that point, past experiences would guide my path forward. If I felt like doing math, I may do it, if I had poor childhood experiences in math class, I probably wouldn't. At the end of the day, it's all based on history or current questions/feelings. In every scenario my thoughts are presented to me. To prove it, ask yourself what your next thought will be. If you're honest with yourself, you'll see you can't answer that question and when you try and force a thought direction, that direction itself is based on your knowledge from the past and that thought was also presented to you.
It's wild because it absolutely feels like we have free will, but it sure doesn't look like it. đ¤ˇââď¸
This is the problem of original intentionality. There are studies on it, for instance they found that with an mri they can detect when you have come to a decision before your conscious mind realizes you have. Some processes in our brain are outside of our control, because the brain is not just the neocortex but also includes tens of other structures that evolved separately with specific hard-coded purposes, but that doesn't mean they are not working as a team. I think in any case you are still reaponsible for the decisions you take.
exactly. that for me is in fact the definition of free will
actually this is the definition that first came up on a search
"the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion"
so yeah we do have free will. the rest is philosophical masturbation
You can also find the definition of magic or telekinesis, but that doesnât mean we have them, and not all philosophical question are just âmasturbationâ. It is an interesting question. It is worth taking free will at least axiomatically as our perception of that freedom even if it is truly deterministic.
If you throw a pair of dice, do they still have to roll if their final positions are predetermined from the point that you let go?
One view is that even a deterministic mind still must execute. An illusion of the capacity to choose between multiple options might be necessary to considering those options which leads to the unavoidable conclusion.
Dice do not choose where they roll.
They also do not pretend choosing, or tell themselves any bullshit...
A better question is, is there any difference between the illusion of free will and actual free will. Is there some experiment you could conduct to tell the difference?
Depends, who's choosing the experiment?
If it's the illusion of free will then whoever constructed it most likely made sure we wouldn't have access to those kinds of experiments, or we wouldn't think of or choose to do them.
Why assume that an illusion must have a constructor?
Our brains cannot store all the experiences we ever make. It rather only stores 'hunches' (via many weightings of neurons). In particular, it also mixes multiple experiences together to reinforce such hunches.
This means that despite there being causal reasons why you might e.g. feel uneasy around big dogs, your brain will likely only reproduce a hunch, a gut feeling of fear.
And then because you don't remember the concrete causal reasons, it feels like a decision to follow your hunch to get the hell out of there.
This feeling of making a decision is made even stronger, because there isn't just the big-dog-bad-hunch, but also the don't-show-fear-to-big-dog-hunch and the I'm-in-a-social-situation-and-it-would-be-rude-to-leave-hunch and many others.
There is just an insane amount of past experiences and present sensory input, which makes it impossible to trace back why you would decide a certain way. This gives the illusion of there being no reasons, of free will.
You're conscious of the decisions you make. Sure they're the result of a million different variables, chemicles, memories, and predetermined traits, but some of that is active. You are making the choice. Whether you could have made a different one or not doesn't affect what the choice feels like
Maybe look up "compatibilism". It's a philosophy proposing that both exist.
TIL!
I just made up my own term for it in another post :)
Honorary mention, Kurtzgesagt/In a Nutshell https://youtu.be/UebSfjmQNvs?feature=shared
The most accurate answer is: We don't know.
But there are pieces of scientific evidence that suggest our sense of free will is just another perception process that happens in our brains. Specifically I'm thinking about people who have problems in their brain that make them feel like they AREN'T the one controlling what they do. For example people suffering from derealization - https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonalization-derealization-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352911
EDIT
As to why our brains have a process that gives us a perception of free will, that's a much harder question that i think science currently only has conjecture on. If i had to guess I'd guess that either there's an evolutionary advantage to it, or it's an emergent property that arises from all the parts of the brain being connected in the way they are
Just going to throw out a really good read: Determined by Robert Sapolky. (Behave is also really good.)
He doesn't really convince me of the core thesis that free will doesn't exist, or that some of his proposed changes to the legal system to "recognize the absence of free will" in the second half are good courses of action, but he does do a great job of demonstrating what makes us tick from a variety of lenses, how much environmental factors play a role in behavior, and generally arguing to approach people with more empathy and recognition that we might be more like them in a similar situation than we think.
(It is heavy. It's long and goes into some depth on different fields. But he lays out the main ideas you need to know and doesn't assume that much knowledge, just a will to learn.)
Behave is incredible.
I read a fucking lot of books about what makes us tick. Behave is (tied for) my favorite. He does actually hint down the determinism path a little in behave, but he goes all in on Determined.
I would still probably generally recommend Behave over Determined, but Determined is directly relevant to the OP.
For the same reason that I feel like I'm still right now, while I'm actually spinning and hurtling through space at incredible speed.
ludicrous speed
I have heard somewhere that some people seemed to believe that behind each human's actions, there is some kind of "daemon" that is invisible, but moving the humans like puppets.
This is conceptualized in the theater mask, through which one can speak.
The daemon speaks through the human as a theater actor would speak through a mask. (The latin word for that mask is "persona" (literally "sound-through") and that's why we call a person a person today (because they are controlled by a daemon who speaks through them)).
My deamon is now telling you this theory is convoluted and stupid.
I forget which philosopher said this but he said something along the lines of if you have the desire and the capacity for an action you do, then deterministic or not, you chose that action. If the tide pulls me where I was already swimming, I still chose to swim there, even if some other force took me half of the way.
But where does your desire and capacity to do that thing come from? It arises from the physical arrangement of neurons/hormones/etc. in your brain and body
Why are you separating "you" from the choices your physical self is making?
I'm not. Did you reply to the correct comment?
Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist
He thinks consciousness has to do with "quantum bubble collapse" happening inside our brains at a very very tiny level.
That's the only way free will could exist.
If consciousness is anything else, then everything is predetermined.
Like, imagine dropping a million bouncy balls off the hoover dam. You'll never get the same results twice.
However, that's because you'll never get the same conditions twice.
If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level... You'll get the same results every time
What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole "quantum bubble collapse" was a fundamental part of consciousness.
That still wouldn't guarantee free will, but it would make it possible.
There's also the whole thing where what we think of as our consciousness isn't actually running the show. It's just a narrator that's summarizing everything up immediately after it happened. What's actually calling the shot is other parts of our brains, neurons in our gut, and what controls our hormones.
We don't know if that's not true either. But if it was, each person as a thing would have free will, it's just what we think of as that person does not have free will.
Sounds batshit crazy and impossible, until you read up on the studies on people who had their brains split in half at different stages of mental development.
There's a scary amount of shit we don't know about "us". And an even scarier amount we don't know about how much variation there is with all that
I would recommend reading the philosophers Jocelyn Benoist and Francois-Igor Pris who argue very convincingly that both the "hard problem of consciousness" and the "measurement problem" stem from the same logical fallacies of conflating subjectivity (or sometimes called phenomenality) with contextuality, and that both disappear when you make this distinction, and so neither are actually problems for physics to solve but are caused by fallacious reasoning in some of our a priori assumptions about the properties of reality.
Benoist's book Toward a Contextual Realism and Pris' book Contextual Realism and Quantum Mechanics both cover this really well. They are based in late Wittgensteinian philosophy, so maybe reading Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good primer.
Even if they discover quantum phenomena in the brain, all that would show is our brain is like a quantum computer. But nobody would argue quantum computers have free will, do they? People often like to conflate the determinism/free will debate with the debate over Laplacian determinism specifically, which should not be conflated, as randomness clearly has nothing to do with the question of free will.
If the state forced everyone into a job for life the moment they turned 18, but they chose that job using a quantum random number generator, would it be "free"? Obviously not. But we can also look at it in the reverse sense. If there was a God that knew every decision you were going to make, would that negate free will? Not necessarily. Just because something knows your decision ahead of time doesn't necessarily mean you did not make that decision yourself.
The determinism/free will debate is ultimately about whether or not human decisions are reducible to the laws of physics or not. Even if there is quantum phenomena in the brain that plays a real role in decision making, our decisions would still be reducible to the laws of physics and thus determined by them. Quantum mechanics is still deterministic in the nomological sense of the word, meaning, determinism according to the laws of physics. It is just not deterministic in the absolute Laplacian sense of the word that says you can predict the future with certainty if you knew all properties of all systems in the present.
I think a distinction should be made between Laplacian determinism and fatalism (not sure if there's a better word for the latter category). The difference here is that both claim there is only one future, but only the former claims the future is perfectly predictable from the states of things at present. So fatalism is less strict: even in quantum mechanics that is random, there is a single outcome that is "fated to be," but you could never predict it ahead of time.
Unless you ascribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation, I think you kind of have to accept a fatalistic position in regards to quantum mechanics, mainly due not to quantum mechanics itself but special relativity. In special relativity, different observers see time passing at different rates. You can thus build a time machine that can take you into the future just by traveling really fast, near the speed of light, then turning around and coming back home.
The only way for this to even be possible for there to be different reference frames that see time pass differently is if the future already, in some sense, pre-exists. This is sometimes known as the "block universe" which suggests that the future, present, and past are all equally "real" in some sense. For the future to be real, then, there has to be an outcome of each of the quantum random events already "decided" so to speak. Quantum mechanics is nomologically deterministic in the sense that it does describe nature as reducible to the laws of physics, but not deterministic in the Laplacian sense that you can predict the future with certainty knowing even in principle. It is more comparable to fatalism, that there is a single outcome fated to be (that is, again, unless you ascribe to MWI), but it's impossible to know ahead of time.
There 100% are...
Penrose thinks they're responsible for consciousness.
Because we also don't know what makes anesthesia stop consciousness. And anesthesia stops consciousness and stops the quantum process.
Now, the math isn't clean. I forget which way it leans, but I think it's that consciousness kicks out a little before the quantum action is fully inhibited?
It's been a minute, and this shit isn't simple.
This is incompatible with that.
It's the quantum wave function collapse that's important. There's no spinning out where multiple things happen, there is only one thing. After wave collapse, is when you look in the box and see if the cats dead.
In a sense it's the literal "observer effect" happening our head.
And that is probably what consciousness is.
It'll just take a while till we can prove it. And Penrose will probably be dead by then. But so was Einstein before Penrose proved most of his shit was true
That's how science works. Most won't know who Penrose is till he's dead.
I donât think itâs incompatible with many worlds, unless Iâm misunderstanding something. The many worlds interpretation means that the observer doesnât collapse the wave function, but rather becomes entangled with it. It only apparently collapses because we only perceive a âsliceâ of the wave function. (For whatever reason).
I think this is still compatible with Penroseâs ideas, just not in the way he presents it. Anyway, I think heâs not really explaining consciousness, but rather a piece of how it could be facilitated in the brain.
There are quantum phenomenon in a piece of bread. That doesn't mean bread is conscious.
Penrose has never proved that the quantum effects affect neurons macroscopically.
Quantum computers run at near absolute zero temperature and isolated from all vibrations in order to maintain superposition. The brain is a horrible environment for a quantum computer.
Anesthesia is a chemical signal blocker. If consciousness was quantum, it couldn't affect it.
Penrose's work is "God in the gaps" or in his case "quantum in the gaps" explanation of consciousness. His claims were made before we had functional quantum computers and precise categorization of neurotransmitters that anesthesia chemicals bind to to block your natural neurotransmitters.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-anesthesia-work/
Inception helped to bring the Penrose Stairs back into popularity and Penrose tiles are still a popular example of aperiodic tiling, so I suspect enough of the public has a connection to who he is.
If you choose to believe so, like I said I don't really care. Is a quantum computer conscious? I think it's a bit irrelevant whether or not they exist. I will concede they do for the sake of discussion.
Yeah, and as I said, Penrose was wrong, not because the measurement problem isn't the cause for consciousness, but that there is no measurement problem nor a "hard problem." Penrose plays on the same logical fallacies I pointed out to come to believe there are two problems where none actually exist and then, because both problems originate from the same logical fallacies. He then notices they are similar and thinks "solving" one is necessary for "solving" the other, when neither problems actually existed in the first place.
You'd need to define what you mean more specifically about "consciousness" and "quantum process." We don't remember things that occur when we're under anesthesia, so are we saying memory is consciousness?
Sure, it's not simple, because the notion of "consciousness" as used in philosophy is a very vague and slippery word with hundreds of different meanings depending on the context, and this makes it seem "mysterious" as its meaning is slippery and can change from context to context, making it difficult to pin down what is even being talked about.
Yet, if you pin it down, if you are actually specific about what you mean, then you don't run into any confusion. The "hard problem of consciousness" is not even a "problem" as a "problem" implies you want to solve it, and most philosophers who advocate for it like David Chalmers, well, advocate for it. They spend their whole career arguing in favor of its existence and then using it as a basis for their own dualistic philosophy. It is thus a hard axiom of consciousness and not a hard problem. I simply disagree with the axioms.
Penrose is an odd case because he accepts the axioms and then carries that same thinking into QM where the same contradiction re-emerges but actually thinks it is somehow solvable. What is a "measurement" if not an "observation," and what is an "observation" if not an "experience"? The same "measurement problem" is just a reflection of the very same "hard problem" about the supposed "phenomenality" of experience and the explanatory gap between what we actually experience and what supposedly exists beyond it.
Why should I believe there is a physical collapse? This requires you to, again, posit that there physically exists something that lies beyond all possibilities of us ever observing it (paralleling Kant's "noumenon") which suddenly transforms itself into something we can actually observe the moment we try to look at it (paralleling Kant's "phenomenon"). This clearly introduces an explanatory gap as to how this process occurs, which is the basis of the measurement problem in the first place.
There is no reason to posit a physical "collapse" or even that there exists at all a realm of waves floating about in Hilbert space. These are unnecessary metaphysical assumptions that are purely philosophical and contribute nothing but confusion to an understanding of the mathematics of the theory. Again, just like Chalmers' so-called "hard problem," Penrose is inventing a problem to solve which we have no reason to believe is even a problem in the first place: nothing about quantum theory demands that you believe particles really turn into invisible waves in Hilbert space when you aren't looking at them and suddenly turn back into visible particles in spacetime when you do look at them.
That's entirely metaphysical and arbitrary to believe in.
There is only an "observer effect" if you believe the cat literally did turn into a wave and you perturbed that wave by looking at it and caused it to "collapse" like a house of cards. What did the cat see in its perspective? How did it feel for the cat to turn into a wave? The whole point of Schrodinger's cat thought experiment was that Schrodinger was trying to argue against believing particles really turn into waves because then you'd have to believe unreasonable things like cats turning into waves.
All of this is entirely metaphysical, there is no observations that can confirm this interpretation. You can only justify the claim that cats literally turn into waves when you don't look at them and there is a physical collapse of that wave when you do look at them on purely philosophical grounds. It is not demanded by the theory at all. You choose to believe it purely on philosophical grounds which then leads you to think there is some "problem" with the theory that needs to be "solved," but it is purely metaphysical.
There is no actual contradiction between theory and evidence/observation, only contradiction between people's metaphysical assumptions that they refuse to question for some reason and what they a priori think the theory should be, rather than just rethinking their assumptions.
I'd hardly consider what Penrose is doing to be "science" at all. All these physical "theories of consciousness" that purport not to just be explaining intelligence or self-awareness or things like that, but more specifically claim to be solving Chalmers' hard axiom of consciousness (that humans possess some immaterial invisible substance that is somehow attached to the brain but is not the brain itself), are all pseudoscience, because they are beginning with an unreasonable axiom which we have no scientific reason at all to take seriously and then trying to use science to "solve" it.
It is no different then claiming to use science to try and answer the question as to why humans have souls. Any "scientific" approach you use to try and answer that question is inherently pseudoscience because the axiomatic premise itself is flawed: it would be trying to solve a problem it never established is even a problem to be solved in the first place.
I agree with some of what youâre saying, but can you explain (in simple terms please) how the hard problem doesnât exist? Iâm not quite following. The subjective experience of consciousness is directly observable, and definitely real, no?
(I donât think adding some metaphysical element does much of anything, and Penrose still doesnât really explain it, just provides a potential mechanism for it in the brain. Itâs still a real âthingâ, unexplained by current physics though.)
Also, to your other point, my I believe everything is just an evolving wave function. All waves all the time, and we only perceive a slice of it. (Which has something to do with consciousness, but nobody really knows exactly how). The Copenhagen interpretation is just how the many worlds universe appears to behave to a conscious observer.
Experience is definitely real, but there is no such thing as "subjective experience." It is not logically possible to say there is "subjective experience" without inherently entailing that there is some sort of "objective experience," in the same way that saying something is "inside of" something makes no sense unless there is an "outside of" it. Without implicitly entailing some sort of "objective experience" then the qualifier "subjective" would become meaningless.
If you associate "experience" with "minds," then you'd be implying there is some sort of objective mind, i.e. a cosmic consciousness of some sorts. Which, you can believe that, but at that point you've just embraced objective idealism. The very usage of the term "subjective experience" that is supposedly inherently irreducible to non-minds inherently entails objective idealism, there is no way out of it once you've accepted that premise.
The conflation between experience with "subjectivity" is largely done because we all experience the world in a way unique to us, so we conclude experience is "subjective." But a lot of things can be experienced differently between different observers. Two observers, for example, can measure the same object to be different velocities, not because velocity is subjective, but because they occupy different frames of reference. In other words, the notion that something being unique to us proves it is "subjective" is a non sequitur, there can be other reasons for it to be unique to us, which is just that nature is context-dependent.
Reality itself depends upon where you are standing in it, how you are looking at it, everything in your surroundings, etc, how everything relates to everything else from a particular reference frame. So, naturally, two observers occupying different contexts will perceive the world differently, not because their perception is "subjective," but in spite of it. We experience the world as it exists independent of our observation of it, but not independent of the context of our observation. Experience itself is not subjective, although what we take experience to be might be subjective.
We can misinterpret things for example, we can come to falsely believe we experienced some particular thing and later it turns out we actually perceived something else, and thus were mistaken in our initial interpretation which we later replaced with a new interpretation. However, at no point did it become false that there was experience. Reality can never be true or false, it always just is what it is. The notion that there is some sort of "explanatory gap" between what humans experience and some sort of cosmic experience is just an invented problem. There is no gap because what we experience is indeed reality independent of conscious observers being there to interpret it, but absolutely dependent upon the context under which it is observed.
Again, I'd recommend reading Jocelyn Benoist's Toward a Contextual Realism. All this is explained in detail and any possible rebuttal you're thinking of has already been addressed. People are often afraid of treating experience as real because they operate on this Kantian "phenomenal-noumenal" paradigm (inherently implied by the usage of "subjective experience") and then think if they admit that this unobservable "noumenon" is a meaningless construct then they have to default to only accepting the "phenomenon," i.e. that there's only "subjective experience" and we're all "trapped in our minds" so to speak. But the whole point of contextual realism is to point out this fear is unfounded because both the phenomenal and noumenal categories are problematic and both have to be discarded: experience is not "phenomenal" as a "phenomenal" means "appearance of reality" but it is not the appearance of reality but is reality.
You only enter into subjectivity, again, when you take reality to be something, when you begin assigning labels to it, when you begin to invent abstract categories and names to try and categorize what you are experiencing. (Although the overwhelming majority of abstract categories you use were not created by you but are social constructs, part of what Wittgenstein called the "language game.")
We don't need more metaphysical elements, we need less. We need to stop presuming things that have no reason to be presumed, then presuming other things to fix contradictions created by those false presumptions. We need to discard those bad assumptions that led to the contradiction in the first place (discard then phenomenal-noumenal distinction entirely, not just one or the other).
This is basically the Many Worlds Interpretation. I don't really buy it because we can't observe wave functions, so if the entire universe is made of wave functions... how does that explain what we observe? You end up with an explanatory gap between what we observe and the mathematical description.
The whole point of science is to explain the reality which we observe, which is synonymous with experience, which again experience just is reality. That's what science is supposed to do: explain experiential reality, so we have to tie it back to experience, what Bell called "local beables," things we can actually point to identify in our observations.
The biggest issue with MWI is that there is simply no way to tie it back to what we actually observe because it contains nothing observable. There is an explanatory gap between the world of waves in Hilbert space and what we actually observe in reality.
What you've basically done is just wrapped up the difficult question of how the invisible world of waves in Hilbert space converts itself to the visible world of particles in spacetime by just saying "oh it has something to do with our consciousness." I mean, sure, if you find that to be satisfactory, I personally don't.
What?
We literally and scientifically know that it does...
I just want to thank you for typing that ahead of all that other shit you pulled out of your ass.
No one's reading it anyways, but at least they won't feel bad for skipping it
No, we don't know the brain is making use of any quantum phenomena. At best if there is any quantum phenomena in the brain it would just contribute noise. The idea that interference phenomena is actually made use of in the brain for computation is just not backed by anything.
Even if the brain is a quantum computer, it's quantum dice rolls controlling your neurons. So quantum consciousness doesn't enable the possibility free will.
You experience the world through your senses.
What sense that your body has would you expect to give your brain a different set of inputs if your brain's actions were not deterministic, not set by the laws of physics? How would you expect it to feel different?
You wouldn't expect to feel like some invisible force is in control of your limbs, which I think is perhaps what some people intuitively expect if someone says that their actions are pre-determined.
It's not talking about anything that your brain can sense; it's talking about how your brain works.
Yeah, this is it.
And to take a slightly different tack, if the biochemical and electrical activity in your brain were not deterministic, how would you ever know? It's one thing to believe that you made a decision on your own "Free Will", but how could you possibly rewind the entire universe (or at least some sufficiently small portion of it), including your brain's exact atomic state, and re-run the experiment to know for sure? At that point, what would "Free Will" even mean?
There are many thing my body does which I'm aware of, but that I don't will, and others that I have some control over, i.e., my will appears to play a role, but not the only role.
I don't think it creates any kind of contradiction to suggest that, hypothetically, there could be more (or less) of either of those types of things, without my perceiving an invisible (external) force of some kind to be involved. After all, I don't ascribe my heartbeat to an external force, but I am aware that I don't will it.
No, but you have the ability to sense your heartbeat, so you can tell that it's there.
You don't have the ability to sense electromagnetic emissions in the X-ray frequency range, so you can't tell that they're there. You wouldn't know if X-rays of a given intensity were present at a given moment. It's like asking "why is there the illusion that there are no X-rays" when you wouldn't expect to feel differently regardless of their presence or non-presence.
But my body also takes actions which I don't control and of which I'm not conscious. E.g., normal cell death and replacement (granted, I would eventually notice if this stopped, but not in the short term). I don't have the illusion of control over those actions, but I do have a sense (real or not) of control over others. My question is, why do I have that sense if it's not real?
The premiss involves the idea that it would feel different, that my deliberate acts would feel (like cell replacement) like a thing that happens, rather than a thing I'm doing. Granted, if I were unconscious of all my acts, it wouldn't feel like anything (like my experience of x-rays, which is a non-experience), but then I would be unconscious. So, if I'm interpreting you correctly, are you suggesting that the sense of will is a property of consciousness, and that consciousness is itself an emergent property of sensory experience?
I think its because we're only just now coming to terms with the fact that we're simply a collection of desires, the culture we were born to and stories we tell ourselves. In keeping, we had to have a story to tell ourselves and free will existing is the more compelling of the two.
I don't think there's an evolutionary purpose. To me, we just became far more self aware than our limited knowledge of the world we find ourself in could cope with and its more of a coping mechanism than anything else.
If I found out that I don't have free will, I would start trying to gain it back immediately.
What if you found out that free will is an inherently flawed concept and therefore impossible to conclusively obtain
I also cannot imagine finding out that the hole in my ass is bigger than I am.
Then I have some bad news for you, about calculating the interior volume of a cylinder. You've got a lot of hole coiled up inside you
What if you never had it and never can have it because its not a havable thing
https://lemmy.world/comment/11059629
Pot kettle black
The destiny making you pretend that you are trying to gain free will must be on a list of the evilest things.
We know.
I enjoy either the free will or the illusion thereof not to torment myself with such unanswerable questions!
Gooooood choice
The Matrix deals with the exact question.
Because it's not an illusion.
Determinism seems reasonable only because people have an inaccurately simplistic conception of causation, such that they believe that consciousness and choice violate it, rather than being a part of it.
Causation isn't a simple linear thing - it's an enormously complex web in which any number of things can be causes and/or effects of any number of things.
Free will (properly understood) is just one part of that enormously complex web.
How is our experience of decision making different to one where we reach an inevitable outcome based on a complex set of parameters?
Because there are points at which, exactly as seems to be the case, we consciouly choose to follow one particular path in spite of the fact that we could just as easily have chosen another.
Even in that scenario, the "conscious choice" happened via some particular arrangement of neurons/chemical messengers/etc. Your argument is a "god of the gaps" argument- science doesn't know everything about how the brain works, therefore some supernatural process called "free will" is the cause of the stuff science can't explain yet.
(No knock on you, you're having a good faith debate :)
Without those obvious pejoratives, that would've been a pretty good summation of at least that aspect of my position.
With those obvious pejoratives, it was reduced to an unfortunate expression of bias.
I believe that it's not simply that science doesn't yet fully understand how the brain works, but that it's not even really equipped to deal with consciousness, which while clearly a manifestation of physical processes, is not itself physical.
That and we're in an era in which "science" (scare quotes because part of the problem IMO is a misunderstanding of what science can do and does) has largely moved to the forefront of the pursuit of understanding, but humanity is still to some significant degree stuck in a quasi-religious mindset, so all too many have merely shifted from a devout faith that their religion provides every answer to everything ever to a devout faith that "science" provides every answer to everything ever.
The problem then comes when they run up against something for which science can't provide an answer. And the common response then is to blithely insist that that thing must not and cannot exist at all, since the alternative is to face the fact that science potentially cannot provide every answer to everything ever. And that's generally accompanied by an immediate assignment of whatever it is that's in question to the other half of their wholly binaristic worldview - if it's not amenable to science, it must and can only be religion/magic.
Reality, IMO, is vaster than that.
Neither of those are pejoratives, they're just the words for your positions
https://www.askdifference.com/natural-vs-supernatural/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
Everything you just wrote in your followup reply here continues to fit into those categories as far as i can tell.
That's unfortunate - you credited me with debating in good faith, yet won't do the same.
You rather obviously knew that the way you attempted to frame my position was disparaging - if you hadn't, you wouldn't have felt the need to add that proviso to the end of your post. What you clearly attempted to do with that was to disparage the position, while asserting that you didn't mean it personally.
Ah well.
I didn't do what you said. Did you read the links?
I agree that it "seems to be the case" that we consciously choose, but I don't understand where you found justification to state that there really are such points. How do you dismiss the idea that our conscious choice is not simply an application of the myriad parameters?
Because I experience them, and not just at times, but moment-to-moment, every waking day. And so do you. And so does essentially every single human in existence.
That indicates two possibilities - either it's a universal illusion, and in both senses of the term - one experienced by everyone and one experienced without exception by each individual, or it's a real experience.
And I just find the former to be so ridiculously unlikely that the latter can be safely said to be near certainly true.
I don't. I simply include consciousness, and all it entails - reason, value, self-interest, preference, mood, etc. - among those parameters.
Or, as you acknowledged before, it seems like you experience them. That experience of weighing up all the inputs, applying your mood and whatever else you bring, feels like making a decision freely.
These parameters are all examples of the complex inputs that precede a decision. And each of these inputs could be understood as the inevitable result of a causal chain.
It's super complex and likely involves technology that we don't yet possess, but if I could perfectly simulate a brain identical to yours, with the same neural states, and the same concentrations of relevant chemicals in its simulated blood at the moment of the decision, that simulated brain would have to produce the same output as as your meaty one.
Yes.
If I'm to be precise, it seems that I exist on what seems to be a planet in what seems to be a universe. On that seeming planet it seems as if I am surrounded by what seem to be things - some of which seem to be alive and others of which seem not to be. And among the ones that seem to be alive, there are some that seem to share the classification I seem to possess, as a human being.
In my seeming experience as what seems to be accurately desgnated a human being, I seem to experience some things, among them the process of seeming to make choices. And that process of seeming to make choices is a thing that I seemingly perceive the other seeming humans who seem to exist seemingly relate to be a part of their seeming lives as well.
And so on. Since I, as seems to be the case with all other beings that seem to exist, live behind the veil of perception, I cannot know for certain that any part of what I experience represents an objective reality. So every single aspect of my experience of life, most accurately, can only be said to seem to be as I perceive it to be.
I simply don't believe that to be the case, if for no other reason than that that would appear to make creative reasoning impossible. If reason was merely the manifestation of a rigid causal chain, then all reason would follow the same paths to the same destinations. The fact that human history is, viewed one way, a record of new chains being followed to new destinations, means that there must be some mechanism by which consciousness can and does effectively "switch tracks." Or even introduce entirely new ones.
Nor do I believe that to be true, since while consciousness appears to be a manifestation of the mechanical workings of the brain, it is not itself merely those mechanical workings - it is a "thing" unto itself. And I believe, quite simply, that the relationship between consciousness and the brain is not unidirectional, but bidirectional - that just as the physical state of a brain can be a proximate cause of a chain of thought, a chain of thought can be a proximate cause of a physical state of a brain.
And in fact, I would say that that's easily demonstrated by the fact that one can trigger a response - fight or flight for instance - merely by imagining a threat. There's no need for any physical manifestation of the threat - a wholly conscious, wholly non-physical imagining of it is sufficient. That says to me, rather clearly, that consciousness can serve as a cause - not merely as an effect.
And on a side note, thanks for the responses - this subject particularly fascinates me, but I find intellectually honest debate on it to be vanishingly rare.
You're welcome. I too find it very interesting, though my expertise in it is below amater level.
I am a little confused about your model of continuous and the brain: you speak of consciousness appearing to be a manifestation of the brain's processing, but talk about what seems to be a communicative relationship between the two. My understanding is that consciousness is entirely an emergent property of the brain, impossible to distinguish from the squishy mechanics. If yours is significantly different to this, then it is no wonder that our beliefs diverge.
That consciousness is (theoretically) an emergent property of the brain doesn't make it indistinguishable from the brain. I would say that it's self-evidently a thing unto itself - while consciousness appears to be (and logically is) a manifestation of brain activity, it is not that brain activity in and of itself. My experience of consciousness undoubtedly manifests via the firing of neurons and release of chemicals, but it is not merely the firing of neurons and release of chemicals - it's an experience unto itself.
To use a potentially poor analogy, consciousness might be viewed as the fruit of the plant of the brain. While the fruit comes to be solely through the workings of the plant, it still, fully formed, has an existence outside of, and even to some degree independent of, the plant.
Or something like that...
I guess, if we're looking at trees, I see it more like the shelter provided by the tree. The shelter cannot exist without the tree, it consists entirely of the tree, and when a tree attains certain properties it creates/becomes a shelter almost definitionally.
Note that here I'm making a distinction between a shelter and a sheltered area. The sheltered area is not the shelter; it is an effect of the shelter. I don't think there's room for the sheltered area in my consciousness analogy. So don't think about it too hard?
Anyway, do you believe there is any ingredient to consciousness other than the physically of the brain? For example a "spark", or a soul, or a connection to something external to the brain?
I get where you're going with that analogy. It's a bit awkward, just because, as you did, you have to stipulate shelter as opposed to the sheltered area, but with that stipulation it does work, and quite well really.
And as analogies should be, it's intriguing.
But...
My first reaction is that it's sort of similar to the "consciousness is an illusion" concept in that it appears to just move the problem back one step rather than solve it.
It seems to me that what you're describing is the "space" (or maybe "framework would be better) in which consciousness takes place, but not consciousness itself.
The problem then (as is the problem with the consciousness is an illusion idea) is that that space/framework/whatever is only of note if a consciousness is introduced.
At the risk of bringing in too many metaphors, it's akin to the "tree falling in a forest" thought experiment. The tree falling in the forest certainly generates disturbances in the air that, were there ears to hear them, would register as sound. But without ears to hear them, they're just disturbances in the air. Similarly, it seems to me that the "shelter" that's apparently intrinsic to the brain is only rightly considered "shelter" if there's a consciousness to experience it. Without a consciousness to experience it, it's just a space/framework/whatever.
I believe that consciousness in and of itself is obviously that.
I probably should've clarified - when I say "consciouness," I'm referring to the state/process that's at least one step removed from immediate perception.
I see a round red thing and recognize it to be food. That's just perception.
I also recognize it to be the thing called an "apple" (in English - other languages have other words). I know that they grow on trees and come in many varieties, and I remember the tree in the side yard of the house I grew up in and how the apples were small and yellow and very good, but I had to generally get a ladder to get any apples, since the deer ate the ones close to the ground (and the ones on the ground, which at least meant I didn't have to worry about cleaning them up), oh yeah and mom had a recipe for raw apple cake and it was delicious, but she bought the apples for that because the ones from the tree were too firm and tangy to bake with... and so on.
That's the part that, to me, corresponds with the "shelter" in your analogy.
But that's still not consciousness.
Consciousness is the apparently entirely non-physical "audience" to all of that - the "I" that's aware of the process as it's happening.
For example, it's not the part that recognizes an apple, or the part that categorizes it as food, or even the part that remembers the apple tree and the cake and feels nostalgia - it's the part that's one step removed from all of that - the internal "audience" (of one) that observes that "I" am experiencing all of that.
And it seems to me that your view accounts for all of those subsidiary things, but doesn't account for the "audience" - consciousness. Consciousness is distinct from, and at least one step removed from, all of those things.
And finally (though this has already gone on quite long) -
I don't believe that consciouness is a manifestation of some "spark" or "soul" or anything else external. I think it's really a relatively mundane function of the brain that we simply haven't come to understand yet (and for as long as "science" remains blinkered by reductive physicalism, likely won't be able to come to understand). The key, and the thing (to go all the way back) that ties it in with free will, is that I believe that (as I mentioned before) the communication between brain and consciousness is bidirectional - that there's some mechanism by which conscious thought alone can at least affect if not wholly direct the path along which neurons fire, and likely not only pioneer new paths, but in some way "flag" them, such that the new path is (nominally) properly fitted into the whole.
And again - thanks. This is some of the most rewarding mental exercise I've had in a long time.
Haha "Don't think about it too hard," I suggested! But there's some real value in what you've said: I do find your idea of an "audience" very helpful and will have to cogitate on it.
The first thing it makes me think of is a story about Doctor Who that I once made up while trying to sleep: are you familiar with Doctor Who? It's a sci-fi show like a home-made British Star Trek with more tinfoil and more time travel.
In my story, if you'll indulge me, one of the characters briefly enters a super-perceptual state where she sees some kind of invisible entity steal the consciousness out of her friend's head, squirts someone else's consciousness in there, and then makes off with the one originally belonging to her friend.
It's like the audience from your analogy walked out of one brain and became the audience for another brain. Her friend wakes up, and doesn't seem to be any different: the brain his conscientiousness inhabits still has all his memories and nobody else's, so why would she expect him to be any different? But the "audience" observing their friendship hitherto has been spirited away to who-knows-where and this grieves her.
The middle of the story consists of her trying to track down the entity, and also her trying, with only ambiguous success, to determine any difference in his behaviours or thoughts. She becomes increasingly desperate as she imagines the invisible entity getting further and further away.
In the end, she tracks down a way to re-enter the state in which she perceived the entity originally. This time, she is able to look over a large group of people, and the punch line, of course, is that there are countless such entities swapping our "audiences" from head to head constantly. How many times in the last minute has she herself had her conscientiousness swapped for somebody else's?
It makes me wonder if the ownership between brain and audience is a thing. Is that connection a necessary thing that is missing from our materialistic definition of a consciousness? Maybe that's the nagging thing that you call a communication channel.
I've got another thought experiment to share which challenges this idea, but I've given you far too much to wade through already so I'll save it.
I personally think the debate over the existence of Free Will is simply an extraordinary debate over semantics.
If you look at a human being from its basic biological and cellular makeup, a human being is a walking bundle of competing desires that appears to present itself as a single cohesive corporate entity.
The people who are against the concept of free will say that because you have innate desires for food sex and entertainment, that you have no choice to not act upon those in a desires and therefore any delusion that you carry about the choices that you make being done of an entirely unencumbered and Free Will are false.
Then there are people who say that Free Will doesn't exist for religious purposes, that God is an all-knowing creature who knows the beginning and the end and everything in between and so you cannot make a choice that he or she or it does not already know that you will make and therefore your choices are not free.
The people who say Free Will does exist on a biological level will point to people who choose to self-immolate or to starve themselves to death in protest of a spiritual or psychological issue, valuing the ideals that life has imprinted upon them over the biological necessities of continuing to live.
The people who say Free Will does exist on a spiritual level say many things, such as we carry a spark of the Divine in us and therefore we are as little gods ourselves, capable of creating and destroying in roughly the same proportional magnitude as the greater gods above are, or they say that since we have the ability to make choices and we are judged by those choices than our choices must be free otherwise judgment is meaningless.
I personally tend to lean into the Free Will side, while understanding simultaneously that sometimes there are exigencies that induce us to choose one option over another on a more likely than not basis, or to phrase it another way, our will is as free as we choose it to be.
That's not the argument against free will. The argument is just that there's a physical process to every thought in your head. When you think of a tree, inside your brain a specific pattern of neurons and chemical messengers activate which is what creates the thought of a tree.
When you're consciously deciding whether to eat a donut or a salad, a specific pattern of neurons and chemical messengers are the mechanism by which that decision process is occurring. The pattern of neurons and chemical messengers happening in your brain is the physical mechanism that is performing the decision making process.
There are no thoughts outside of the ones generated by your neurons and chemical messengers. The pattern of neurons and chemical messengers IS the thought that you're thinking. Your brain (and the thoughts that occur within it) is a physical object that obeys the laws of nature, the same as all physical objects do.
I think you've mischaracterized the arguments of the "no free will" camp, or at least omitted a major argument. You may find this interesting https://youtu.be/eELfSwqJNKU
Anyone who says we donât have free will can come up with a thousand reasons we donât.
Anyone who says we do have free will can come up with a thousand reasons we do.
It really doesnât matter. All I know is that if I wanted to go on a murderous rampage, I could. I choose not to. For me, that means that I currently have control over myself and my actions. And on the same token, there is so much outside of my control that affects my trajectory in this life.
So there are illusions if you allow there to be. To me, we both have and donât have free will depending on context.
I call this phenomenon, SchrĂśdingerâs Destiny.
It seems to me that the question of free will is only truly meaningful (aside from being an interesting thought experiment) if we could then perfectly or near-perfectly predict what a person will do. But the system in which we exist is so complex that we will never be able to model that or come close.
So we might as well consider humans to have free will, just as we consider a roll of the dice to be random.
Good points!
This is the kind of pointless shit that I think of when I smoke too much. If you have a pipe in your hand, SIT IT DOWN đ
No, now I'm old and don't smoke anymore, but my mind still does this stuff to me anyway.
Look into Kurt GĂśdel's incompleteness theorem, and the philosophical implications of that.
A lot of times, when we're dealing with the assertion that we don't have free will, we're analyzing that according to rule-based systems. The system that we use to evaluate truth isn't entirely rule-based, and is necessarily a superset of what we can consciously evaluate.
In effect, some less-complex system that is a subset of your larger mind is saying 'you have limits, and they are this.' But your larger mind disagrees, because that more rule-based subset of rights is incapable of knowing the limits of its superset. Though, we just feel like it's 'off'.
If it feels like it's off, there's a good chance that the overall way you're thinking of it isn't right, even if the literal thing you're focused on has some degree of truth.
In short, it's possible to know something that is technically true, but that isn't interpreted correctly internally.
If you accept the model that you have no free will without processing the larger feelings it evokes, then whether or not your internal sense of free will is rule-based, you'll artificially limit the way you think to filter out the internal process you think of as free will. ..and that can have massive consequences for your happiness and viability as an organism, because you've swapped away that which you actually are for labels and concepts of what you are - but your concept is fundamentally less complex and led capable than you are as a whole.
Fortunately, rule-based systems break when faced with reality. It's just that it can be very painful to go through that process with what you identify with.
Help me understand if I am interpreting you correctly:
We have free will in a deterministic universe because feelings?
I'll help:
You are not interpreting me correctly.
Edit: give a snarky response, get a snarky response.
If you can reword you initial post, that would be great. I was also having trouble following what you were saying.
If the concept of the universe being deterministic interferes with one's concept of free will, then one of these must be true:
But of course, that begs:
But that cannot be, because your notion of free will is for you to decide, even if the universe is somehow determinate.
But that doesn't mean the universe is or is not deterministic, it just means one or more of the above three things.
Ultimately, though, I was not making an argument concerning the fundamental nature of free will and determinism, or whether or not the universe is deterministic. I was arguing for completely processing fundamental concepts before you accept them to be true, because often times we accept a lot of false implications alongside the true things we accept.
One's world view holds immense power in one's own life. People do not intentionally act in accordance with things they do not believe to be the case. To accept determinism without fully processing the implications thereof, particularly if it "feels wrong but seems true" is to enter into and sign up for those internal conflicts writ large in one's own life.
I also don't believe that the universe is absolutely deterministic, but that's a different argument that others have made better than I likely would.
Okay, in other words we need to consider our assumptions and definitions of "Free will" and "Determinism" when answering this question?
I really enjoyed this video on Compatibilism, and the view of Patricia Churchland (around 5:50) where she says we should reframe the question away from "what choices we have" to "how much control do we have".
Close enough. This topic deserves significant care - of course, in the end, though, people buy into whatever they buy into.
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out when YouTube is working for me again
Things can be true on different levels and false on others. The earth is locally flat, it is as a whole a near sphere.
I don't know if we have free will or not, I strongly suspect that physics can explain our minds fully, but I don't know. At the same time even if physics could fully explain our minds in practice we are so complicated we give the impression that we have a limited amount of free will. So yeah the earth is round but it is easier for us to assume flat most of the time.
That's a very large assumption. The simplest explanation is that we feel like we have free will because we do. Quantum mechanics suggests some major challenges to determinism, and the best arguments to restore it require a very unsatisfying amount of magical thinking.
I canât think of any good reason why we would have such an illusion.
Perhaps I'm looking for less of a reason, more of an explanation?
We donât have a free will.
We do have a free wonât.
I don't believe there is an "illusions that we have free will," either. Honestly, "illusions" don't really even exist as they're traditionally talked about. People say if you place a stick in a cup of water, there is an "illusion" created that the stick is bent. But is there? What you see is just what a non-bent stick looks like in a cup of water. Its appearance is different from one out of water due to light refraction. It's not as if reality is tricking you by showing you a bent stick when there isn't one, that's just what a non-bent stick in water really looks like.
The only "illusion" is your own faulty interpretation of what you are seeing, which upon further inspection you may later find it is wrong and change your mind. There was simply no illusion there to begin with. Reality just presents itself as it actually exists, and it is us who interpret it, and sometimes we make mistakes and interpret it wrong. But it's not reality's fault we interpret it wrong sometimes. Reality is not wrong, nor is it right. It just is what it is.
In a similar sense, there is just no "illusion of free will." Neural networks are pattern recognition machines. We form models of the external world which can approximate different counterfactual realities, and we consider those realities to decide which one will optimize whatever goal we're trying to achieve. The fact we can consider counterfactual worlds doesn't mean that those counterfactual worlds really exist, and indeed our very consideration of them is part of the process of determining which decision we make.
Reality never tricks us into the counterfactual worlds really do in some way exist and we are selecting from these possible worlds. That's just an interpretation we sometimes impose artificially, but honestly I think it's exaggerated how much of an "illusion" this really is. A lot of regular people if you talk to them will probably admit quite easily that those counterfactual worlds don't exist anywhere but in their imagination, and that of course the only thing real is the decision that they made and the world they exist within where they made that decision.
Hence, reality is not in any way tricking us into thinking our decisions somehow have more power than they really do. It is some of us (not all of us, I'm not even convinced it's most of us) who impose greater powers to decision making than it actually has. There just is no "illusion of free will," at best there is your personal misinterpretation of what decision making actually entails.
Thanks for the response! Would it change your answer at all if I had instead asked, 'Why do we have the idea that we have free will?'
That would seem like more of a question of sociology and history, studying why certain cultures develop the ideas they do, and it probably would not be the same for every culture. Not really a question that I have the proper expertise on to answer.
Because maintaining the illusion keeps us going as normal and won't break the simulation. /s
see for explanation: The Matrix (1999)
Weird, now I know kung fu.
woah
dude
Perhaps it is the illusion of choice and the choice you make was always going to be that one due to all of the events that shaped you and the events that shaped the people that shaped you etc all the way back to the big bang.
I contemplate this from time to time.
Yes, that's the question: if our acts are predetermined all the way back to the big bang, as you suggest, why do we feel that we determine them?
Why are we assuming we don't have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.
The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, "assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?"
This is a nice and brief video that I've found persuasive. https://youtu.be/eELfSwqJNKU
Noone believes that people have full freedom with no context, no extenuating circumstances. What makes arguments like this seem convincing is how uncommon it is for people to think dialectically.
Here's a very good essay that steps through all of the different parts of the problem, and looks at different views historically. https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
To the hard deterministic explanation that "something always came before," it asks "what is the role of the individual in history?"
This excerpt isn't a substitute for reading the whole essay but it makes a point pretty concisely:
Simple: We cannot predict the future. If you don't know what's going to happen nor whether it is being controlled, you do not know whether your actions are predetermined. Every movement you make might be the result of universal programming. What I'm typing, have sent, and you are reading might be the sequence of events that was always supposed to happen.
Free will is, IMO, as unknowable as whether an almighty being exists. That "almighty being" might have created this existence, but might also exist in its own realm that was created by another "almighty being". The chain might be infinite and it might not be. Asking these questions is like asking "can we reach infinity".
Because determinism is too depressing for small minds.
Really making a strong argument by calling people dumb. If you were as smart as you think you are, you would realize the value of empathy.
Your response was an emotional one, which does not mean my argument is incorrect. However, it does reveal your insecurities.
If you think you can accurately diagnose my insecurities from one comment, I don't know what to tell you. My response evoking an emotional response in you does not make it in itself emotional. I wrote it sitting on the toilet because I was bored at work, not because I felt that it was especially important.
"No u" lol ok
Careful, your response quality is slipping. You don't want to put even a little effort in?