[strogonoff]

That your thoughts are not fully under what you believe would be your direct control, and supposed absence of free will, do not strike me as particularly following from one another (at least as long as you allow that as a conscious agent you are more than just what you identify as your thoughts).

[rssoconnor]

For me, the lack of free will follows from my study of physics, which seems to allow no room for free will.

That my thoughts are not under my control is the counter argument to the claim "But then how is it that you feel like you do have free will?" The answer to this is that, upon more careful introspection, it seems I don't even really feel like I have free will either.

[vacuity]

> For me, the lack of free will follows from my study of physics, which seems to allow no room for free will.

We don't understand enough about thinking/consciousness to reduce them entirely to physics (the literal brain).

> The answer to this is that, upon more careful introspection, it seems I don't even really feel like I have free will either.

Why did you write the above reply then? I posit that I have free will because I perceive my typing this as occurring due to my free will. Maybe everything is (effectively) deterministic, but at the very least I exist in a reality where I can think and act in ways that demonstrate free will. That's more fundamental than any scientific finding, which is necessarily an approximate view of reality. Think of a computer that can somehow emulate computers such that apps in the emulated computers have no way to discover a distinction (timing and side effects are emulated too, I guess). What difference does it make to those apps that they're running in an emulated computer or the base?

[AnimalMuppet]

> We don't understand enough about thinking/consciousness to reduce them entirely to physics (the literal brain).

We don't understand enough to know whether (or how) they reduce entirely to physics. But if the materialist position is correct, then matter (including energy particles) and the laws of physics all there is. So thinking and consciousness have to reduce entirely to physics, because there's nothing else for them to reduce to. We may not know how, but we know they do - if the materialist position is correct.

> > The answer to this is that, upon more careful introspection, it seems I don't even really feel like I have free will either.

> Why did you write the above reply then?

Because he had to, of course! (/s, or not, depending on your philosophical position...)

[strogonoff]

Looks like a good summary and a balanced take (except without additional context it could’ve been a she).

I find materialism weird because it seems like a given that all we do is motivated by our minds, including physical models—but then we are tempted to make a leap and claim that metaphors from those models (particles flying, strings vibrating, fields permeating, wave functions collapsing) are objective facts about environment rather than metaphors that try to predict how our environment would behave (in order to satisfy our minds’ curiosity and increasingly achieve some goal relevant to our minds), and that our environment and our mind itself completely reduces to those metaphors. I blame it on lack of philosophical sophistication.

That is not to claim it’s one way or another—just that we should at least be aware that it is a leap without positive proof.

[AnimalMuppet]

> except without additional context it could’ve been a she.

True. And sometimes I even say "he/she" or "they". But 1) the vast majority of people on HN are male (I'd guess 90%, but I have no hard data), 2) the default "she" for doesn't fit on a male-dominated site, especially when referring to a real individual, 3) "he/she" sounds more inclusive, but it still misses nonbinary people, and 4) "they" just sounds off to me when referring to an individual.

I could have, instead of saying "he", gone up-thread and used the name of the poster, but... sometimes I'm lazy.

[vacuity]

I try to use people's names directly but sometimes I forget and sometimes it just reads weirdly. On HN I'd use "parent", "grandparent", etc. anyways because it's a fun little quirk here. I don't like using "they" to refer to an individual either.

[rssoconnor]

> Why did you write the above reply then?

After reading his comment, I had the thought and an urge to type up a response to attempt to clarify that I indeed understand the idea that thoughts not under my control and my lack of free will are somewhat independent aspects (it is certainly possible to imagine both having free will at some subconscious level and also seeming to have no direct control over one's thoughts that appear in consciousness), and add that my primary reason for doubting free will is physics based.

No serious counter-thoughts or other considerations appeared, i.e. it didn't seem dangerous or harmful to reply. So I ended up succumbing to my urge type up a reply and in fact did so.

TL;DR: I couldn't help myself.

[strogonoff]

It can’t follow from physics, because it is not in scope of physics in the first place. Physics, as all natural sciences, does not make statements about existential status of entities described by its models.

You can make a hypothesis that perhaps you have no free will, but you should acknowledge that it is a philosophical thesis unfalsifiable within the scope of physics.

[rssoconnor]

If I have free will, then, when calling a flipped coin in the air, I am completely free to choose whether to uttering either the word "heads" or "tails". And, if somehow identical circumstances were to arise again, I would again have a free choice and could possibly choose to call out a different word, "this time around".

But my act of calling out a word isn't just mental, it is physical. It causes physical vibrations in the air, and choosing different words causes different physical vibrations. And according to physics we can trace back the events leading up to the vibration in the air, which are caused by vibrations in my larynx and the shape of my mouth, each pulled in turn by contractions of muscle fibres that are happen when they are bathed in acetylcholine released by neurons attached to those fibers. The neurons are in turn linked together by electrical and chemical connections, all in turn following the laws of electrical and chemical potentials though their interactions with each other, each in turn following the laws of physics.

If I had a free choice, then somewhere that free choice interacts with the physical environment. If the same situation were somehow to truly arise again, as in the state of my brain is the same, the wind touching my skin is identical, the radiation falling from the sun on my face is identical, and I have a free choice, then the evolution of the state of me and the entire worlds diverges at some point, the point at which I make a free choice.

Quantum mechanics does allow divergence similar to this. In the observation of measurements in quantum mechanics, quantum theory says that identically prepared experiments can yield different results in which the probability of each result following the Born rule. However these results are random, and not based on a free choice. If we try to use measurement as a way to cause the state of the world to diverge based on my free choice, then I could be using my free choice to violate the Born rule, which could then in turn let me freely violate the conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, etc.

I acknowledge that our understanding of quantum physics isn't complete. The so-called vacuum catastrophe remains unexplained as just one example. And what the heck is qualia anyways? So it may be possible that a later theory does, somehow, give an opening for free will.

But just as the theory of the earth being flat was refined to be a sphere and then later refined into an oblate spheroid, each refinement of physics theories cannot stray too far from the previous one, as all the previous experimental results have to be maintained. Thus any updated version of quantum physics will need to maintain something close to unitary evolution of quantum states and it will need something close to the Born rule to make quantum events that appear to follow a random distribution, and will want to at least nearly respect conservation of energy and momentum.

Thus I remain skeptical of any refinement of physics ever enabling free will. But yeah, maybe it isn't entirely impossible.