[asifjamil]

I wonder how this study can be used as evidence against determinism, ie., that humans really do possess free will. If the coin toss relevantly affects the person's decision, then it seems like random chance plays a key role in affecting our experience, right?

[CamperBob2]

My reasoning: to the extent I have free will, I can consciously choose to delegate it to an unrelated source of entropy, such as a coin toss. That happens all the time, in fact, without any conscious input from me at all. We're immersed in randomness. ("Wow, if I'd left 3 seconds earlier or driven 1 MPH faster or slower, I wouldn't have been T-boned at that intersection." How can free will coexist with a statement like that?)

This sort of thing happens frequently enough to dispel both (soft) determinism and free will as viable concepts, IMHO. We all live in a Gaussian game, where everything that occurs is the sum of an unknowable and indeed unimaginable number of factors. The sum of a vast number of of random numbers may still be deterministic, in the sense that it could be rederived from a perfect copy of the system's original state, but I'd argue that this insight cannot possibly be useful since there's no way to store or represent such a copy in any environment where the original "me" is able to manipulate it.

[pliny]

To the extent that a human is otherwise deterministic, a coin toss is too.

You have plenty of noise in the inputs that determine your actions by way of brain, even without coins, but it's still the state of your brain + those inputs that determine the next state of your brain and therefore your actions.

[laughingman2]

I have strong view that there is no such thing as free will.In close scrutiny any definition of free will falls apart.

Wittgenstien's view that most philosophical problems of dissolve by understanding that the question involved is nonsensical or not defined properly.

I think events

1. follow Cause -> Effect (Casual)

2. Or they Random (If we don't find evidence for a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics)

There is no 3rd option. Some people try to derive free will from randomness, which means they are essentially saying that their "free will" is equivalent to blind selection without any regard for causes, which contradicts the normal common sense(nonsense?) use of the word.

[BadCookie]

I've made this argument to myself and I can't find fault with it, but it does really bother me. Can it be true that I have no control over my life? I find that hard to swallow at a gut level but can't explain how it might be otherwise.

[laughingman2]

I would like to point to this enlightening post on Zen and Free will - https://aeon.co/essays/do-i-have-free-will-in-zen-the-questi...

Also the insights of Alan Watts in the book 'The Way of Zen' and others on Free will and Determinism is eye opening.

I think one has to examine whether the feeling of a separate "I" who has to surf through tides of fate is real.

I think in meditation, or in moments of spontainety brought about anything that gets one in the "Flow" helps to fade the distinction of a observer and the observed ?

[hodwikSE]

It's not that you have no "control", it's that there is no "you".

You are the set of reactions to external stimuli that a certain system goes through.

[laughingman2]

One can also say that "you" cannot be separated from the "external" system?

Alan Watts -

“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ”

[hodwikSE]

"Random" chance is still probably deterministic.