[coldtea]

There's an endless loop in this argument.

Per definition, if free will doesn't exist, then you can't say that "the illusion of the free will influences our lives more and in multiple ways."

If free will doesn't exist, then our lives, thoughts and choices are predetermined, and thus they can't be "influenced" by our belief in free will (or lack thereof).

In fact if we are in such a world, the we can't even opt to believe in free will or not -- since in such a world, our beliefs are also predetermined themselves.

The society wont be any more "compassionate, healthier and happy" in such a world based on any of its beliefs. It would only be compassionated, healthier and happy if its predetermined to be so.

The only option for your argument to work, would be for free will to exist while the society doesn't believe it does. Such a society, indeed, could be more compassionated, healthier and happy (it remains to be proven, but it's a possibility that non-belief in free will could change things positively, as long as free will exists for this non-belief to make a difference).

[ajuc]

> If free will doesn't exist, then our lives, thoughts and choices are predetermined, and thus they can't be "influenced" by our belief in free will (or lack thereof).

Something that is predetermined can be influenced. See a collision of 2 balls in Newtonian universe - it's predetermined, yet you're justified in saying "collision influenced paths of these balls".

The only thing determinism takes from you is choice. There is still causality (stuff influencing other stuff), there can still be thoughts and beliefs influencing behavior of people and (indirectly) the state of the universe. The only difference is - these people had no choice how to react to these ideas.

[coldtea]

>Something that is predetermined can be influenced. See a collision of 2 balls in Newtonian universe - it's predetermined, yet you're justified in saying "collision influenced paths of these balls".

Not beyond its initial cause. If free will doesn't exist (in the universe), then nothing that happens after our birth can influence it.

(A fundamental existence of free will is not the same scenario with e.g. taking a person and specifically (e.g. surgically) alter them to not have free will).

[ajuc]

> Not beyond its initial cause.

Who cares about the initial cause? Initial cause of everything in deterministic universe is the initial conditions + the set of rules that govern it.

And it's also the main influence on anything that happens in our universe, no matter if it's deterministic. If Earth wasn't there you wouldn't write this comment. Who caused your comment, then - you or Big Bang?

It's our arbitrary convention to stop looking for a root cause when we hit a person. It's useful for social organization, but it's not objectively more true than looking up the chain of "why" till you hit the Big Bang, or stopping on the first step.

> If free will doesn't exist (in the universe), then nothing that happens after our birth can influence it.

Influence = cause change. When you're born you interact (and influence) very many things. That's true no matter if the universe is deterministic or not.

You might be confused about change in predetermined universe. There's in-universe change (particle moves as laws of physics dictate), and external change (universe was going to develop one way, but then something changed the future and it will develop differently). I don't think only the second kind of change deserves to be called "influence". I don't think the second kind of change ever happens.

> If free will doesn't exist (in the universe), then nothing that happens after our birth can influence it.

Even assuming your weird definition of "influence" this is still not true, you can have nondeterministic universe without free will.

[coldtea]

>And it's also the main influence on anything that happens in our universe, no matter if it's deterministic. If Earth wasn't there you wouldn't write this comment. Who caused your comment, then - you or Big Bang?

The key difference determined by the existence or not of free will is whether the comment is solely or partly caused by the Big Bang (or the first cause).

What we're discussing is not whether the writing of a comment is possible in a non-free will universe. Of course it is.

But we're discussing whether free will exists (the very subject is "Discovering free will"), and then, what does that entail if it does or if it doesn't. It surely doesn't entail that comments can't be written.

>It's our arbitrary convention to stop looking for a root cause when we hit a person. It's useful for social organization, but it's not objectively more true than looking up the chain of "why" till you hit the Big Bang, or stopping on the first step.

Well, it's not just a convention. You seem to take for granted what one should prove: whether free will exists or not.

Society stops looking for a root cause when it hits a person not as an "arbitrary convention", but because it does believe in free will.

(And it also believes that it's limited by external events. So that it doesn't stop looking for a root cause always on a person, but can go beyond that. E.g. "yeah, the driver caused an accident, but they were forced to swerve because a rock fell on the road, so they're not to blame").

>Influence = cause change. When you're born you interact (and influence) very many things. That's true no matter if the universe is deterministic or not.

If the universe is deterministic you don't cause or influence anything. Those things would have happened anyway. At best you're a medium through an already determined casual chain moves.

But you can not be said to influence something to happen, because that requires that not influencing it was also a possibility.

>Even assuming your weird definition of "influence" this is still not true, you can have nondeterministic universe without free will.

Not really "weird". It's the very dictionary definition.

"influence: the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself: the influence of television violence | I was still under the influence of my parents | [count noun] : their friends are having a bad influence on them. • the power to shape policy or ensure favourable treatment from someone, especially through status, contacts, or wealth: the institute has considerable influence with teachers. • [count noun] a person or thing with the capacity to have an influence on someone or something: Fiona was a good influence on her"

You can't have an influence on something happening (or someone's thoughts etc) if that is beyond your control.

[ajuc]

> But we're discussing whether free will exists

No, we were discussing whether the argument in the article was circular. It's not circular, because your assertion that influence requires free will is wrong.

> If the universe is deterministic you don't cause or influence anything. Those things would have happened anyway.

No, they wouldn't. Deterministic universe is like a compiler. You give it source code and it produces output. Given different source code (such that you aren't born) the output is different.

> But you can not be said to influence something to happen, because that requires that not influencing it was also a possibility.

No it doesn't. It's not in the definition you provided.

> Society stops looking for a root cause when it hits a person not as an "arbitrary convention", but because it does believe in free will.

Yes, and it's arbitrary, because we don't know if that assumption is true (and I might add it's very unlikely to be true - even if universe is nondeterministic. The rules of physics still work in our heads just as well as elsewhere).

[coldtea]

>No, we were discussing whether the argument in the article was circular.

Actually, on this subthread we were discussing whether the argument of the grandparent ( dziungles) was circular. That's what I called circular and started the circularity discussion -- not something in the article.

>No, they wouldn't. Deterministic universe is like a compiler. You give it source code and it produces output. Given different source code (such that you aren't born) the output is different.

That's not an option in a deterministic universe. Everything you've described, like the ability to give a compiler different source code, depends on non determinism.

In a non-deterministic universe there's only one source code that is given to the compiler, and it's predetermined at the first of the universe's deterministic causal chain. That's the whole point, or the very definition of the universe being deterministic: that it cannot change course.

>Yes, and it's arbitrary, because we don't know if that assumption is true

We haven't proved it, but we do believe it to be true. And that's not arbitrary (it's based on people's inherent experience of free will). It might be illusory, but not arbitrary.

[BoiledCabbage]

> Not beyond its initial cause. If free will doesn't exist (in the universe), then nothing that happens after our birth can influence it.

This is false. If the sun were to explode right now it would influence the earth. Neither of them have free will.

Even in a completely deterministic universe, where we could predict to the second when the sun would explode from initial conditions, its explosion still influences the earth.

You're mixing influence with choice.

[coldtea]

>>If free will doesn't exist (in the universe), then nothing that happens after our birth can influence it.

>This is false. If the sun were to explode right now it would influence the earth. Neither of them have free will.

I didn't mean "nothing can influence the universe".

I meant nothing can influence someone's will (if free will doesn't exist).

Hence the "after our birth" qualifier.

[dragonwriter]

> I meant nothing can influence someone's will (if free will doesn't exist).

But it's still wrong. Just because will isn't free doesn't mean it isn't influenced by events in the physical universe (in fact, the alternative to free will is will completely determined by events in the physical universe.)

[n4r9]

I don't follow your reasoning at all. You seem to be quite confused over how beliefs could possibly work in a predetermined world.

Firstly, a lack of free will does not imply predetermination, since it's possible that some things are fundamentally random.

Secondly, even if everything is predetermined, it can still be the case that our choices can be influenced by our belief in free will. You could imagine two instances of a fairly simple bot which has a "isFreeWillBelieved" property. One of them has it set to true and the other to false, and they make different choices accordingly.

Thirdly, whilst we can't "opt" to believe in free will or not, whether or not we believe in it can certainly change over time due to building evidence and argumentation.

[coldtea]

>I don't follow your reasoning at all. You seem to be quite confused over how beliefs could possibly work in a predetermined world. Firstly, a lack of free will does not imply predetermination, since it's possible that some things are fundamentally random.

Predetermined or random is all the same for the sake of the argument I've made. Both are beyond the control of the subjects.

>Secondly, even if everything is predetermined, it can still be the case that our choices can be influenced by our belief in free will.

Not really. If "everything is predetermined" then we don't have choices, and what we do (the singular thing that we cannot but do) is only influenced by the start event in the casual chain (that predetermined everything).

>Thirdly, whilst we can't "opt" to believe in free will or not, whether or not we believe in it can certainly change over time due to building evidence and argumentation.

That only applies to a universe with free will. If free will doesn't exist, then evidence and argumentation doesn't matter -- as those are not the causes that shape our beliefs. Instead both our beliefs and any evidence that appears are determined from the entire predetermined casual chain (or are random, as you said, and as such, are still not based on the presence of evidence or not).

[nxc18]

Where is this ridiculous idea that you need to have free will to make choices coming from?

Free will is incompatible with the concept of choice, because all choices are bound by physical constraints. How do you make a choice without any constraints? The best you can do is random.

Think about any of the choices you made today and think about why you made them. When you take all the inputs into account, most of your outcomes are predictable or random. There's no room for free will when you start looking closely.

[n4r9]

> Predetermined or random is all the same for the sake of the argument I've made.

Fair point, I was just pointing out the first gap in the logic.

> If "everything is predetermined" then we don't have choices

Pure semantics. You can replace "choice" with "the action that occurs" in the context of my point.

> If free will doesn't exist, then evidence and argumentation doesn't matter -- as those are not the causes that shape our beliefs.

I genuinely don't see why not. Going back to the simple bot analogy, it's conceivable that a bot's "isFreeWillBelieved" field is updated based on the results returned from an "ObserveNature()" procedure. That's all I'm saying.

I think I'm starting to understand your perspective. It's like you're so entrenched in a belief that free will exists that you're clinging very tightly to definitions of words/concepts that somehow presuppose the existence of free will. For example you seem determined that the external state of the world cannot alter our internal narratives unless we have the "free will" to make that alteration ourselves. But to me, this seems to be countered quite straightforwardly by thinking about the bots with their internal belief settings.

[coldtea]

>Pure semantics. You can replace "choice" with "the action that occurs" in the context of my point.

When we talk about "free will" it's all in the semantics. The term must have a specific meaning -- else we're discussing in vain.

The action that occurs is either a:

1) a conscious choice (i.e. free will)

or:

2) a predetermined / random action (i.e. no free will)

In either case, (2) is beyond the subject's control, and that's not a merely nominal or semantic difference, it's a very real difference. In fact, it's exactly what we're debating.

>> If free will doesn't exist, then evidence and argumentation doesn't matter -- as those are not the causes that shape our beliefs.

> I genuinely don't see why not.

Probably because I didn't clarified that. I use "shape our beliefs" in the meaning that we would use the term everyday: that they enter our minds, we judge them and consider them, and through this we are influenced by them in our beliefs.

They could still "shape our beliefs" in the sense that kicking a ball will make it move.

But not in any way in which our conscious self participates in that shaping. More like a trauma would "shape" our beliefs.

>I think I'm starting to understand your perspective. It's like you're so entrenched in a belief that free will exists that you're clinging very tightly to definitions of words/concepts that somehow presuppose the existence of free will.

Not really. I'm actually pointing the consequences of free will not existing. I don't believe it exists except in a very specific way myself, which is in accordance with a deterministic universe (to sum, that our free will is exactly the inevitable choice we make because we are who we are -- i.e. directly the sum product of our prior space-time history -- and that it's both free -- as in uniquely expressing our self -- and inevitable).

>For example you seem determined that the external state of the world cannot alter our internal narratives unless we have the "free will" to make that alteration ourselves.

I gave the example in another comment on this post about a person being surgically altered to not have free will, which is the different side of the same coin.

The actions of that person would indeed be controlled by the outside world (e.g. the surgeon). But without free will, in other words, without an agent, there are no "internal narratives".

What remains would be an internal "program" -- like the bots in your example.

But a program is not a narrative in the sense of an agent consciously talking to itself.

[n4r9]

I'll explain what I mean about the semantics. Your original argument went thus:

> Per definition, if free will doesn't exist, then you can't say that "the illusion of the free will influences our lives more and in multiple ways."

By teasing apart your arguments, I now realise that you have bundled up the word "influence" into a package of meaning. You're presupposing "influence" to mean an agent consciously - and with free will - modifying their belief based on the environment. Same as what you mean by "shape our beliefs" just now. But I doubt OP was using the word "influence" that strongly; I think they were allowing for us to be machines without the free will necessary to "shape" their own beliefs. Therefore their point stands without the "endless loop".

[nailuj]

The experience of free will can be real, without free will being real. An individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an individual that believes all actions are predetermined. I think what your parent commenter meant was that society might be better off if the notion of free will was not taken for granted by its individuals, hoping this would inspire compassion and tolerance. Of course, if free will isn't real, this isn't something anyone would be able to influence. It would still be possible to come to that conclusion deterministically.

Looking at this from the angle of social organisation, I think without the notion of personal responsibility, we lose more good things than we would gain by assuming life is deterministic, and I don't see how we can keep personal responsibility when giving up on free will. There is a consideration of trusting other people to be cooperative if they stand nothing to lose by being selfish to the detriment of others hidden somewhere in there too.

[tjoff]

I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive reinforcement). Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences of ones action (if it is able to realize those consequences).

The desire to live in a society where people don't solely act in their own interests is by itself a driving force (not necessarily fueled by free will). There are other species that more or less do only act in their own interest but humans would not have survived if we did, our strength comes from collaboration.

Even our own, well behaved, developed software "understand" the concept of consequences and personal responsibility - because we program in that behavior. Just as evolution has programmed us not to be destructive (with varying success).

[coldtea]

>I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

Responsibility is not about punishment or lack thereof. That is just a mechanism to encourage responsibility, not its manifestation.

Responsibility is about being able to do X or Y and choosing right.

A rock is not considered responsible because we don't think it has free will. If a rock falls on one's head and kills them, that's it. We don't jail it.

In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go to jail etc.

>Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive reinforcement). Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences of ones action (if it is able to realize those consequences).

Without free will there is no "decides".

Everything is pre-decided.

It doesn't even matter if one is guilty or not -- the decision to jail them or not is already made before they committed anything and is independent of their actions.

[tjoff]

> In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go to jail etc.

It depends on your viewpoint, but the reason for why they don't go to jail etc. is because it doesn't match the intent with jail. Jail is meant as a deterrence as well as shielding the society. If it doesn't work as a deterrence and we have better ways to shield the society from it happening again (which is "easy" to argue in regards to a mad person) then it doesn't make sense to force it upon people where it will do more harm than good (we still do it do a large extent, but society also benefits from its inhabitants believing that the system is fair and that is a difficult balance).

> Without free will there is no "decides".

This also depends on your viewpoint. A computer takes tons of decisions but they are all based on a given set of inputs, as will society (regardless of whether free will exist or not).

[coldtea]

A computer doesn't take any "free will" decision of its own -- everything is determined at the time the program is written/loaded.

"Doing X if Y" is not a free will decision if it's already encoded. In a sense it's not a decision at all. When X, the computer will do Y, period.

(And this also applies if we add some stohastic elements in the mix).

[ajuc]

> everything is determined at the time the program is written/loaded

Computer can measure random event and do something basing on that.

> is not a free will decision if it's already encoded

Most probably so is our "free will".

[tjoff]

A computer doesn't take any "free will" decisions. But it does make decisions, based on rules that the programmer gave it. Everything about the program is determined, but the inputs to the program is not necessarily deterministic and is also completely orthogonal to free will. We can still have true random events, that doesn't imply that free will exist.

The actions of a computer making decisions based on a noisy, nondeterministic source, can not be predicted.

From your previous post: It doesn't even matter if one is guilty or not -- the decision to jail them or not is already made before they committed anything and is independent of their actions.

The decision to jail them depends on whether they are found guilty. Whether they are found guilty depends on the information available at that time. What information is available is not deterministic even in a world lacking free will.

[foldr]

>I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

It's still possible to reward and punish people for their actions. The point is that the absence of free will seems to give everyone a rock solid excuse for anything bad that they do: "I could not have done otherwise". Thus, while you can still punish people, you can't actually hold them responsible.

[tjoff]

The free will equivalent of that rock solid excuse also exist: "Because I wanted to".

The the incentives are identical and the consequences are identical, why can't we hold one of the scenarios responsible?

Now if you subscribe to the lack of free will idea, you might come to the conclusion that. Okay, it isn't this individual that performed this action, it is the history led up to this point. But in the end nothing has changed. Given that belief you might adjust and realize that hey, maybe we could have prevented this. And we probably could.

But nothing in this reasoning is any different with or without free will. Our societies would most likely be much better if we had good techniques for detecting signs for bad behavior early and encouraging change (no force required), and I'm positive that would be the case both in a free will and in a lack of free will scenario.

[foldr]

I don't see how "because I wanted to" is an excuse at all. If you shouldn't have, and you needn't have, then it doesn't matter if you wanted to.

I mean, I am just talking about excuses as we ordinarily understand them here. Try using "because I wanted to" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

[tjoff]

> Try using "because I wanted to" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

Try using "I could not have done otherwise" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

The consequences will be equally bad, thus with or without free will you will be equally motivated to avoid it. And even if it doesn't hold up to some definition of being "held responsible" the outcomes are identical.

EDIT: Nothing stops you from, even in a free-will world, believing that free will doesn't exist (as many do). But I bet you don't see them using that excuse.

[nailuj]

This is a great point. Maybe there is a moral argument to be made here that we shouldn't punish people for actions they could not have prevented (since they don't have free will), but I see, my implicit assumption that transgression of social rules must be responded to by punishment that causes suffering for the offender is probably harmful as well.

[simias]

>An individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an individual that believes all actions are predetermined

Sure, but then you still have this loop the parent talks about: if there's no free will then the insight that you have it or not is also completely predetermined. This discussion is predetermined. The reply that you may or may not write to this comment is predetermined. We're just in a movie and one of the character says "What if we don't have free will? Maybe that'll change the end of the movie." No it won't, it's already set in stone, just fast-forward a bit.

[ajuc]

> We're just in a movie and one of the character says "What if we don't have free will? Maybe that'll change the end of the movie." No it won't, it's already set in stone, just fast-forward a bit.

That's mixing in-universe time (and change), and out-of-universe time (and change).

For characters in the movie stuff changes. One of them was alive and then died. It's objectively a change in state of that universe.

For us looking from outside the story is constant, so nothing really changes.

So, returning to the subject - beliefs of people in predetermined universe can have measurable effects in that universe, so they influence stuff. The way they influence stuff is predetermined, but so what?

If the beliefs were different (for example because of different inital conditions), then the universe would be and develop differently. That's enough IMHO to say that beliefs influence stuff in that universe.

[simias]

I see what you mean but in the absence of free will "beliefs" changing are just yet an other event steering your course. It's like a rock tumbling down a mountain and changing path as it hits a tree, sure the tree changed the course of the rock and therefore influenced the state of the universe by existing at this location at this given moment but that doesn't really get us anywhere. If you can't choose to believe in something then the whole concept of belief is just yet an other consequence of external stimuli and the chemical and physical reactions in your brain. You deciding to believe something is no different than you getting a flat tire and getting late to work. It's happening to you, not by you.

As far as I can tell the only way for free will to exist is if consciousness somehow transcends the physical existence and is more than a series of physical reactions. An other poster mentioned randomness but that doesn't really help, if there are absolutely random events occurring in the universe (for instance at the quantum scale) that means that the universe is effectively unpredictable but that doesn't grant us free will. Free will requires unpredictability but it must be the consequence of the conscious choice, not God rolling the dice while playing DnD.

[ajuc]

> As far as I can tell the only way for free will to exist is if consciousness somehow transcends the physical existence and is more than a series of physical reactions

Yep, that's why I don't think there is a free will. Removing it from the model simplifies everything and doesn't change any predictions.

[nailuj]

Not necessarily, there could still be effects of true randomness that are not influenced by previous causes.

[simias]

That doesn't really give us free will, otherwise the NPCs in videogames would have free will (since they experience and react to events in-universe which are effectively absolutely unpredictable since they come from outside the universe).

Maybe the universe is a simulation and the randomness we observe when we look at quantum fluctuations comes from /dev/urandom in God's computer. That doesn't really get us anywhere when it comes to the nature of consciousness and free will.

[coldtea]

True randomness is also beyond the control of the individual so it's not a "will".

[dziungles]

Our all current social structures, norms and concepts evolved on the basis of the illusion of the free will.

When we look from this perspective, we put so much emphasis on the concept of personal responsibility. We assign points of success or failure to people based on their personal responsibility and our lives depend on it, in many cases it's even a matter of life and death. That's why we are so heavility invested in the concept of personal responsibility and think that it's so important.

But in the culture without the belief in free will, the concept of personal responsibility wouldn't even exist. It would be meaningless. The society without the free will would look at life from completely different perspectives, have different values and would organize itself in different ways.

I think that the illusion of free will is just a one step in our consciouscness. Sooner or later we will move forward and leave it behind.

[darekkay]

> An individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an individual that believes all actions are predetermined.

Just because all actions are predetermined does not mean I don't (or can't) make any choices. It may be not "my" choice, but I for sure experience it as one (thus the "illusion of free will"). I like to believe that everything is predetermined and yet this has no effect on my behavior (except me writing this post right now ;) )

As Sam Harris told in his talk (linked in my other post here): Not making a choice is also a choice.

[coldtea]

>The experience of free will can be real, without free will being real. An individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an individual that believes all actions are predetermined.

Without free will that's not up to the individual.

So it's not "certain" at all.

[ajuc]

Individuals programmed to behave differently depending on X will act differently depending on X. It's irrelevant whether they have a choice, or are programmed.

[dziungles]

You are right that my all expressions are predetermined. The concepts of free will and of it being an illusion are also predetermined.

With my completely predetermined wholeness, I see the possibility for a better life in which the concept of the free will doesn't exist.

As a being, I'm designed to evolve. My prior message about the illusion of the free will is an act of evolution. By publicly stating that free will is an illusion, I try to change minds and move to a better future.

[colomon]

For your last case, isn't it just as likely the opposite would happen? If Fred don't deserve any blame for being a mass murderer, why should Sally get any credit for not giving in to her instinct to see him hang for it? And what would the point of trying to be compassionate be?

[simias]

That's insightful, but I also thing the parent argument still works if you use a weaker hypothesis. The way I see it if free will somehow exists it's still relatively limited in scope, at least from what I observe for most human beings (including myself). Our upbringing has a massive influence on who we are and how we think. I'd very much like to believe that I'm a product of my own free will, that I ended up where I am through my own intelligence and the decisions I made but let's face it, had I been born in a poor Ethiopian family I probably wouldn't be talking philosophy on HN because I'm procrastinating on that Perl project.

In particular in right-wing politics I really think that the importance of free-will and self-determination is massively overinflated. We have a ton of evidence that shows that people who are born poor (both economically and culturally) tend to stay that way. Even the most advanced first world societies fail to level the playing field through education and redistribution. Free will is an interesting concept at the individual level but clearly when we consider large societies it's relatively easy to model how humans are likely to behave.

I don't want to derail this discussion to the topic of politics but I want to point out that this conception of the world is why I think socialism makes sense, because I believe that freedom is meaningless if where you're born so heavily influences who you're going to become. Ideally if we were all born perfectly equal in all aspects then your own decisions would be the only things that matter, but we're very, very far from that, therefore I think that we have the moral duty as a society to attempt to correct these inequalities as much as possible. Because all of us right here, had we been born in a Pakistani slum we'd probably be pretty fucking screwed right now, regardless of the existence of free will.