[montenegrohugo]

I've always thought of free will as an absurdity.

Here's my thought process:

If I make a decision, there's 2 possibilities:

  1. The decision is based upon prior information and states, therefore there is a deterministic causality

  2. The decision is not based upon prior causality: E.g. I have a "soul" and that's what decides.

However, if we look into 2, we arrive at the same problem:

  1. Either the souls decision is deterministic based upon metaphysical information

  2. Or the soul has a soul (where the same problem appears, turtles all the way down)

3. Or, if the choice is not based on any prior information, then we must conclude that it is therefore completely random (since its not based on anything)

So, either there is no free will because all your actions are determined by past actions, or instead free will just means that part of your actions are just based on, essentially, the throw of a dice. In both of these cases, you yourself have 0 agency.

I think saying that Free Will exists when it equates to a random choice is absurd.

[atq2119]

As usual, these kinds of discussions are really about what we mean by words.

What does "free will" mean? I think technically inclined people like us are easily led down the path you describe, but over the years I've become convinced that the kind of definition that leads you to "free will = random choice" is pretty pointless because it's so vacuous.

I like to take a step back and ask: why are we interested in free will in the first place?

In practice, what tends to be really relevant are questions like: are criminals responsible for their actions?

Free will is better defined as a shorthand for these kinds of questions. And in that context, it seems clear to me that even if our actions are purely deterministic, we can still have free will. What matters isn't whether our will is free of physics or determinism; what matters is whether or to what extent our will is free from the influence of other people and society.

Once you look at it this way it's also clear that there are no absolutes. We all influence each other, which puts limits on our free will, but we aren't just puppets, either.

[stareatgoats]

Agree it's about word meanings, and superimposing different meanings of the same word on each other (often in an attempt to close any cracks in our worldview that might allow religious concepts to take hold). That's probably why "free will" discussions are such a mess.

> In practice, what tends to be really relevant are questions like: are criminals responsible for their actions?

Exactly what I've landed in too, i.e. does free will have any real every-day meaning. The answer must be an unequivocal "yes", otherwise questions like these would be meaningless (which they are not):

- "did they force you to take that apple or did you do it of your own free will?"

- "was the sex voluntary or were you forced?".

- etc

The problematic word/concept here is really "force" and the different meanings of that word. The force of causality is fundamentally different from the force of coercion, and they can not be used interchangeably.

And so the question of "free will" should really be disentangled from physics, once and for all.

[naasking]

> And so the question of "free will" should really be disentangled from physics, once and for all.

Welcome to Compatibilism!

[stareatgoats]

Yeah, maybe. Although (from what I can see) compatibilism is more like carving a niche for free will in an otherwise deterministic universe. I find that the "deterministic universe" is a concept without sufficient empirical support. It is a nebulous abstraction of reality, a faith good as any, but even as such it has a structure (a meaning) that disqualifies it from interfering with any practical notion of "free will" as outlined above.

A more pertinent question is really why the question (of whether "free will" exists) is posed at all. I find that it is often for anti-religious reasons, sometimes for moral responsibility evasion, and sometimes because people want to avoid the all too common cases where a single individual (or group of) is chastised when other factors (like circumstances, other people's actions) are just as important. The former two I don't care for much, that latter is more likable, even if none of them accomplish what they seek using this line of reasoning IMO.

[naasking]

> A more pertinent question is really why the question (of whether "free will" exists) is posed at all.

Good question. See my reply to this post for an answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608440

[gpderetta]

I think this practical definition is quite interesting, useful, and worth discussing about, but I suspect that most people have a more nebulous, metaphisical idea of free will.

[ajuc]

Yup, free will is meaningless, there's no measurable difference between an universe which has a free will and one that doesn't.

> are criminals responsible for their actions?

Doesn't matter, what matters is - is a commitment to punish certain behavior decreasing number of people behaving that way? If so - punishing crimes makes sense, no matter if there's a free will or not.

[coldtea]

>Doesn't matter, what matters is - is a commitment to punish certain behavior decreasing number of people behaving that way?

If there's no free will obviously not -- since any crime decision is predetermined upon the earlier states of the universe (even before we appeared on Earth), and any drop in crime in correlation with a "commitment to punish certain behavior" is just correlation itself, and not causation (both things being caused by those earlier states).

In fact, if there's no free will, then there's also no free decision of a "commitment to punish certain behavior" or not: all those decisions to make laws, punish certain behaviors, etc are already determined.

Without free will nobody can influence whether we create this or that law.

In essence, you started that "free will is meaningless" and then your whole argument was like as if free like totally exists and we can take actual non predetermined decisions.

[ajuc]

> If there's no free will obviously not -- since any crime decision is predetermined upon the earlier states of the universe (even before we appeared on Earth), and any drop in crime in correlation with a "commitment to punish certain behavior" is just correlation itself, and not causation (both things being caused by those earlier states).

An asteroid hitting Earth is predetermined by early stages of universe too. Is the collision just correlated with dinosaurs extinction, or was it the cause?

When a ball hits another ball in snooker - is the movement of the second ball caused by the collision, or just correlated with it? In deterministic universe it was known since the start of time it will happen after all.

Why is it different when people are involved?

If everything is determined by early stages of universe - then you can still discover how exactly that determinism works between 2 particular events (no matter that they share a common causation chain higher up).

In the case of criminals and punishement assuming determinism - our brains deterministically evolved to deterministically respond to punishement by deterministically changing the behaviour when punished. This deterministically caused the brains to come to conclussion, that punishement makes sense. Then they deterministically punish crime, and criminals deterministically respond by avoiding being caught which reduces the crime.

No need for the free will at all.

BTW even if universe is not deterministic it doesn't mean free will exists. After all you wouldn't say dices have a free will.

[naasking]

> No need for the free will at all.

You're mistaken. Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation, ie. who are the morally responsible parties. You can't escape that with the arguments you presented, and you just skipped it to talk about justice, which is a whole separate matter.

[ajuc]

> Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation, ie. who are the morally responsible parties.

Belief in free will is required (in most common ethical systems at least - there were whole religions believing in deterministic salvation, where God made people who will sin and can't do anything about it - and people carried on, punishing crimes as usual :) - instead of striving to be good to deserve the salvation people were supposed to strive to be good to prove they are these that will be saved).

Existence of free will isn't.

In universe without free will there can be people who believe in free will and "decide" who is criminal based on that. It's their brains causing them to do so, but in reality neither they, nor the criminals make any decisions - it's all predetermined. But everything still works the same way, and their consciousnesses feel in control.

BTW even the common moral systems doesn't always care about responsibility - for example if you steal because you're a drug addict - nobody searches for the first guy that gave you the drugs and got you addicted. It's assumed it's impossible to find, and to keep society functioning they put you in jail (even if you had no choice).

[cthalupa]

>Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation,

No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is.

Physical stimuli are basically all we need as intelligent beings to come to a conclusion about things we don't like happening to us, and thus ultimately make into moral laws or codified ones. These are the inputs, these are the causes. Then, once enough human beings have had those inputs result in a large enough collective coming to the conclusion that stuff is Bad, we end up with laws.

Then, whenever someone acts in a way that we have determined is Bad, they are the criminal. They do not need to possess free will for the rational thing to do to be to provide punishment for them, because punishing them ultimately changes the inputs used by others to reach decisions. Nothing about this requires free will - it's all just as applicable if you just believe the laws of physics and causality determine every choice we make.

[coldtea]

>An asteroid hitting Earth is predetermined by early stages of universe too. Is the collision just correlated with dinosaurs extinction, or was it the cause?

It was the cause but it was predetermined itself.

Note that the free will of the dinosaurs or the asteroid doesn't enter the picture at all here. Similarly, and this is the argument, in the drop-in-crime case, our "commitment to punish certain behavior" is not any more of a commitment than the rock was "committed" to extinguish the dinosaurs.

>Why is it different when people are involved?

It's not different physically. The actions can't be said to be decisions is all or to have caused a particular chain of events is all (that chain was the only possible one).

>In the case of criminals and punishement assuming determinism - our brains deterministically evolved to deterministically respond to punishement by deterministically changing the behaviour when punished.

The point is that they couldn't have evolved any other way, and the crime couldn't have been any less or more than what it is. So those measures can't be said to have dropped crime (since it could never be anything else).

[ajuc]

> So those measures can't be said to have dropped crime (since it could never be anything else).

That's redefining words to the extreme.

A rock has dropped because of gravity and lack of support. It doesn't matter that in this universe with the starting conditions as they are - the rock had to drop. It still dropped.

Homo sapiens (or whatever ancestor it was when it happened) - evolved to punish crimes. It lowered the crime, or had other beneficial effects on the population, that's why it was preserved by the evolution. It doesn't matter that it couldn't evolve in any different way given the starting conditions of the universe. It still happened.

[szemet]

If I write a program that scans for counter example of Fermat-theorem it will run until physics is kind to my machine.

The non-halting property of this setup is caused by the physical arrangements/movements of particles and the laws of nature. Fermat-theorem is an abstraction having no real causal power.

I would say, that for us the proof of Fermat-theorem is the right abstraction level to explain the general behavior of the machine: The machine does not halt because Fermat theorem is true

Similarly "punishment causes less crime" may be the right level of abstraction if the correlation is there, even if it can't be reduced to physical terms. And "Responsibility for action due to free will" may be worse abstraction if agent causation[1] is impossible (I am not saying it is)

So even if increasing/decreasing punishments is determined by low level laws of nature, we still can use the higher level explanation if it suits us better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_causation

[coldtea]

>Similarly "punishment causes less crime" may be the right level of abstraction if the correlation is there, even if it can't be reduced to physical terms.

If it can't be reduced to physical terms (and there's no free will) it doesn't matter if its the "right level of abstraction" or not.

We have no other alternative but to think of it at whether level of abstraction we're determined to think of it. We don't have a say in the matter for our thoughts on it to matter at all.

(In fact both our thoughts of it and this comment and your responses will also be pre-determined).

>So the future increasing/decreasing in punishment is depend on elementary particles, also the effect of those, but we still can use the higher level explanation if it suit us better.

This presupposes some "us" that can or cannot use the this or that explanation at will. Which is exactly what we assumed doesn't exist.

If free will doesn't exist, then we don't have any say on whether we "use the higher level explanation if it suit us better". We use it or we don't use it as was predetermined by the causal chain of the universe -- not because it "suits" us.

[szemet]

Ok. I see your point. So I just hope (not actively as a free agent - of course this was determined too) that we are determined to use logically more consistent explanations for our behavior than classical libertarian free will. ;)

[naasking]

> Yup, free will is meaningless, there's no measurable difference between an universe which has a free will and one that doesn't.

Actually there is: in a universe with free will, you must have intelligent agents that can understand their own actions and learn from their choices. A universe lacking free will would lack these qualities, and be observably different as a result.

[ajuc]

> A universe lacking free will would lack these qualities

Why?

[naasking]

Because free will merely requires the ability to understand the choices we're making and learn from them, like I said.

[szemet]

AlphaZero made choices in chess, and learned from them. So did I get you right: it had a free-will because it is a necessity for this behavior according to you? Because mere "machines" can't make decisions, and can't learn from consequences.

[intralizee]

No that is absurd and dehumanizing towards the victims.

[cthalupa]

Plenty of things about reality are unfair. I'm not quite sure how free will being nonexistent is dehumanizing towards victims, but even if you feel it will be, that isn't an argument that free will exists.

[intralizee]

No your last part it was directed towards.

[mirimir]

Why not just consider that there's a mix of determinism and randomness? I mean, if the question is "What's 1+9 in base 10?", the decision/answer is always "10".

But if it's "What do you want for lunch?", the decision depends on how I'm feeling, what I've been eating lately, etc, etc. And there's certainly some randomness there.

And then there are decisions where there's just too little information, or too much confusing information, and I'm left with making a SWAG. Maybe almost random. Even literally, with a coin or whatever.

But about the soul thing, I totally agree. There's the same problem, "turtles all the way down" (or up, as the case may be).

Also, there's the issue that our conscious awareness is clearly not making any decisions. Other stuff is handling that, and we mostly just observe, and tell ourselves that we're in charge. As Old Bill Burroughs put it in Naked Lunch:

> "Possession" they call it.... Sometimes an entity jumps in the body -- outlines waver in yellow orange jelly -- and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the nabor child in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to goof now and again.... Wrong! I am never here.... Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves....

> Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation.... No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere ...

[karmakaze]

I myself have gone through a similar line of reasoning. My conclusion however has always been undecided and that the answer lies in an area where I'm not sufficiently versed.

A good thought experiment is to consider the simulation hypothesis. It doesn't require you to believe it, it's just a thought experiment to show a counter example that lies outside of the deduction.

1. We are living in a simulated universe. 2. But our characters are controlled by beings in an outer universe with everything else that follows the laws of physics being programmed.

So in the context of our universe our actions are based on metaphysical mumbo jumbo, inexplicable in our laws of physics. We the avatars are the beings in the outer universe. So we have 'free will' that is not determined by the state of our universe.

Now of course the simulation hypothesis has a turtles all the way down issue, but that's not the point here. The point is to be clear about our terms. When we say deterministic we mean with respect to the laws of our universe. The thought experiment just makes the terms clear and not conflate what's happening in one with all. If you want to make the definition that free will is something that's not deterministic in all universes, that's something different to discuss.

[gpderetta]

It seems that the avatar theory should be falsifiable: does the mind behaves fully accordingly to the laws of phisics (whether deterministically or probabiliatically via quantum effects) or does some unphisical, unaccoutable effect affects it? It should be possible to design an experiment to magnify this effects and test for them, at least in theory.

[EventH-]

A decision can be based on prior information (in the sense of being informed by it) while not being deterministic.

This is how Aristotle and Aquinas handle the relationship between the Intellect and the Will, where the will chooses between goods which are known by the intellect. It is precisely in this choosing between different goods that we are classically understood to have free will.

So, our decisions are determined in the sense that we are only able to choose things that appear good to us, but free in the sense that we can choose between those goods.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Absolutely no human has ever operated like this.

We experience choice and decision as subjective processes controlled by a subjective experience of self. But all of those experiences are subjective, and delusional to varying degrees.

I recently had a fascinating experience with a lawyer while buying a house. The vendors and the agent did various things annoy my lawyer, and she set up a situation where the agent was - apparently as a free choice - compelled to pay the lawyer a sum of money to close the sale.

I'm sure the agent made what she considers a free choice, albeit not a comfortable one. But in fact the lawyer was always in control of the situation, and knew exactly where to push, and how hard, to get the result she wanted.

If you have good psychological insight, humans can be ridiculously predictable and easy to manipulate. And said humans will still insist their decisions are made with full awareness and agency - even when they aren't.

So in what sense is will free at all? You really don't need to resort to quantum physics to understand there are serious problems with the concept. Marketing, politics, and law provide plenty of evidence that free will is a convenient fiction, not a psychological ground truth.

[waterhouse]

In game theory, you encounter situations where a player's optimal strategy is a "mixed strategy", i.e. "x% chance of choosing strategy A, y% chance of choosing strategy B, ...", with at least two nonzero values in x,y,... . For example, in rock-paper-scissors, if your strategy is anything other than 1/3 rock, 1/3 paper, 1/3 scissors, then an opponent can defeat you (in terms of expected value) by choosing the right pure strategy. People don't normally take out a die to make the choice, but... In a sport like boxing, if in certain situations you always "punch high" or "punch low" or otherwise act predictably, that will probably hurt your chances against an observant opponent. That presumably applies to real fights as well. Outside of direct combat, sometimes someone does you a small favor (or a small offense), and maybe the only favor (or punishment) you can do them in return is significantly larger than that; in that case, the appropriate response might be an x% chance of doing the thing and 1-x% of doing nothing.

So nondeterminism is a useful skill in at least some circumstances, quite likely some circumstances that existed in the environment where we did lots of evolving. Therefore I would expect us to have evolved some capability for (apparent) nondeterminism.

How often does the agent deal with lawyers in an adversarial situation? How often does the lawyer deal with people in adversarial situations like that? If an expert is able to see through and manipulate a beginner, well, I don't consider that good evidence that humans can never effectively deploy nondeterminism.

[EventH-]

On the contrary, this example only /supports/ the classical understanding of free will, in the sense that it shows the will operates only on goods that we perceive, and not on those which the intellect does not know.

We often operate with imperfect knowledge of our situations. That is simply because our intellects are not all-knowing.

[nnq]

Sometimes you pick from a set of actions for each you have equal reasons/information to pick. And you pick technically randomly. But after you made the choice, you stick/commit to it, you identify with it. The other choices are no longer a possibility. You become fixed in this particular causality. And it defines "you" as "the one who [randomly] picked choice X and Y and ... and ended up on this particular causal path".

This is what exercising free will means and how it defines you.

And if you put it in this terms it also becomes obvious that any kind of mechanism can "exercise free will" if you choose to look at it from this perspective.

(The problem with defining "free will" I think is that people get stuck thinking in terms of it as a fixed concept that needs a "what is" type of definition, instead of a procedural/operational "how to" definition. You only care about processes and mutations to the state of reality... not fuzzy wozzy philosopondering. Replace "what is" kind of knowledge with "how to" kind of knowledge and concepts like "free will" become christal clear and obvious. Also it's pointless to bring in another undefined concept, eg. "soul" when defining other.)

[gpderetta]

Any definition that assigns free will to potentially any object, including fundamental particles, doesn't seem a very useful definition to me.

[naasking]

> Sometimes you pick from a set of actions for each you have equal reasons/information to pick. And you pick technically randomly.

If this were true, people wouldn't have any actual preferences and be fairly consistent with their choices. Clearly they are, ergo people do not make choices "technically randomly".

[jf-]

The question doesn’t really have significance in an everyday sense. To have free will means to be able to choose between options. To ask questions about determinism may be intellectually interesting but is of little practical consequence.

[naasking]

> So, either there is no free will because all your actions are determined by past actions, or instead free will just means that part of your actions are just based on, essentially, the throw of a dice. In both of these cases, you yourself have 0 agency.

Your mistake is assuming that determinism precludes agency. You've merely claimed this, you haven't proven it like you did with case #2.

You'll actually find that you can't prove this and so you should give up that assumption, at which point you've reinvented Compatibilism. That's why Compatibilism is the majority view among philosophers.

[millstone]

If the soul has free will, then it cannot have a second-soul to dictate to it. What is the problem with the first-level soul that can freely choose, perhaps incorporating that metaphysical information into its decision?

[praptak]

The problems arise when you start to think what influences the soul's decisions. Does it make decisions solely based on its state? Then you have determinism. Not only state? Than what is this not-state that creates the free will? Adding some dice throwing into this mix does not sound like free will either.

[bambataa]

That applies if you think of a soul as ‘just another mind’, but my understanding is that souls are usually seen as different. What I find problematic with them is that they can be defined to be whatever you need to get out of a logical fix eg “souls use state but are non-deterministic”.

Ultimately you’re asking what defines a soul, which is unknown as far as I can tell.

[praptak]

Ultimately I am asking what defines free will. The attempts at definitions that involve soul seem either circular ("soul is that part of human that has free will") or an unnecessary step, i.e. the considerations about soul might as well apply to original human, without the attempt to define a separate soul.

[gpderetta]

An argument could be that the soul is not constrained by the law of phisics or even logic and ultimately unknowable.

But then the link between the soul and the phisical world should be detectable due to violations of the laws of phisics.

Unless we believe that the whole universe is unlogical and does not follow the law of phisics. We might as well end this, and any other, debate then.

[empath75]

I would say that anything which is both deterministic and fundamentally unpredictable by humans can be said to have something like "Free Will", which I think includes a lot of non-conscious systems as well as human beings. The weather, flocks of birds, river flows, sunspot activity, etc -- really any kind of chaotic system -- which is not the same thing as saying it's random.

But it's also a self centered definition, because I think a being with vast computational power and perfect knowledge of the current state of a chaotic system might not see it as free.

[_Schizotypy]

I would completely agree. Our decisions are made based on previous stimuli. Our networks of neurons are altered by stimuli as we grow, this determines how we process later stimuli and the process repeats.

[y_molodtsov]

The thing is, this process is so complex it’s useless to talk about determinism of human actions.

[_Schizotypy]

I would agree, at this point in time it isn't really possible for us to truly understand the overall system that affects how we make decisions as in. We can at least start with the basics of understanding that it exists rather than stating that we somehow have this sort of magical "free will"

[millstone]

A silver atom's angular momentum is aligned based on the field in a Stern-Gerlach device. This alignment determines how these atoms react to a future magnetic field. Therefore a silver atom's angular momentum is deterministic. But it's not.

A totally deterministic universe would have been a lot simpler. Why go through so much trouble?

[gpderetta]

Why there should be a why?

[whatshisface]

You don't get to know in advance which questions will pan out into answerable ones. You could answer "why should there be a why" to literally and question about why. In fact, you could have said that about the motion of the planets, right up until Newton - which shows that the category of things that can be answered like that contracts over time.

[gpderetta]

That's a how, not a why. Asking why is it worth the trouble ascribes intentionality to the universe where none is expected

[pdonis]

What if the prior states that your decision is based on are states of your brain? For example, states of your brain processing particular information, considering all the factors involved in the decision, and determining what the best decision is, all things considered?

[russdill]

You're making the assumption that thought is a computational process. While there's a ton of evidence to back that up, you can't claim it as an absolute truth, especially when allowing the existence of metaphysics and souls.

[krzat]

Not sure if it makes sense to use concept of soul in logical reasoning, maybe that's where absurdity comes from.

[reitanqild]

Well. People argue against free will.

I've learned to embrace it and it makes my and my kids and my neighbours and my colleagues (and so on) lives a tiny bit better everytime I take advantage of it. (Yes, I've made a decision to use my life for good.)

I've lived like this more and more for 20 years now and my life has become increasingly better.