[ezion]

I disagree with your claim there's no free will and one's thoughts are out of one's control. I do not believe all of our actions and behaviors are determined. That's, like, just your opinion man ;)

Where determinism truly fails is at the transcendental argument level. The act of affirming determinism is self-defeating like affirming materialism: to rationally accept something as true you must have the freedom to weigh the evidence, but if determinism is true there's no true deliberation as everything is the result of prior causes, including its acceptance.

So you cannot trust your own belief system and thus your worldview is inconsistent at its core.

It also fails to account for our mental lives, given the experience we all have.

[rssoconnor]

While it is true that one cannot trust one's belief system, I don't think that makes it inconsistent. I cannot know with complete certainty that the world is without free will, but that doesn't prevent me from concluding and thus believing the in the lack of free will, in as much as I believe anything else. It is, like, my opinion man, although I claim it is a reasonably informed opinion.

Like, maybe the world is inhabited by leprechaun's holding up cardboard facades of the city when I'm walking through it always hiding themselves. Or maybe my brain is in vat, hooked up to a computer that is making me believe that I'm experiencing typing out this comment. Or maybe I have no brain at all and I'm just an improbably quantum fluctuation in unfathomably large dead universe that just for a fraction of a second creates an experience of typing on a keyboard and the sensation of having a history that never was, a Boltzmann brain.

I accept that all the above are possible, but I don't "believe in them". I do believe in determinism (plus randomness) with about the same conviction that I believe the keyboard that I am tapping on exists.

> It also fails to account for our mental lives, given the experience we all have.

So this is what got me quite recently.

I remember a while back Henk Barendregt remarked something to the effect that everything that happens either follows deterministically from past event or happens randomly, and in neither case is there any free will.

I remember accepting that from what I know of physics this does seem to be the case. I'm not aware of any violations of the Borne rule that would allow for any event to be neither random nor deterministic. But, that the time, I remember thinking that it did seem strange that I feel like I have free will.

But recently, I've been listening to Sam Harris's Waking Up app, and, in addition to meditation practices, he has a section where he argues, convincingly in my opinion, that if you pay attention, there isn't actually any feeling of free will either.

For instance, if I am sitting and meditating and I am trying to pay attention to my breathing, or trying to pay attention the the bird chirping outside my window, then often, usually only after a few seconds, I suddenly find myself thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner, or remembering that time I was talking with my aunt about her birdwatching hobby, or any number of a million possible intrusive thoughts.

I certainly do not freely will these thoughts into existence. My will is supposedly to be paying attention to what I am hearing, or the experience of breathing. Yet inevitability I eventually end up distracted by whatever pops into my head at any given moment.

And after spending some time paying attention to my experience, I cannot help but see that Harris is right. He suggests taking the example of picking a movie, any movie. Just pick one and pay attention to the experience of freely choosing a movie title. For me, just now, I picked "Ghostbusters". But it was simply the first title that popped into my head.

Is this free will? The title popped into my head the same way that thoughts intrude into my meditation, just appearing in consciousness with no source in sight. No particular explanation as to why one title appears and not another.

Try again and think up three songs and choose one of them. Take as much time as you want. Make this choice as freely as you like. But also watch as the titles just appear in your consciousness from nowhere to be seen. Watch as you /deliberate/ about which one to pick. Reasons, like all thoughts, just start popping into one's head from nowhere to be seen. "I really enjoy X song" or "X song is quite popular" or "I haven't listened to X in a while, maybe I'll pick it then go listen to it". All these reasons for freely picking a title are just popping into consciousness in just the same way that the titles appeared in the first place. Maybe the thought pops into your head that you should just roll a die to choose one of the three.

Upon examination, my experience of deliberation is just the same as my experiences of other kinds of thoughts. I simply experience reasons popping into my head relating to the choice at hand, but I have no real control over which reasons will appear. They all just start to show up. Maybe eventually a thought appears, "Ah, that is a good reason to do X". Did I just freely come to a choice? Am I in control of that thought? That last thought just popped into my head in the same way that every other thought did, and I don't recall choosing to come to a final conclusion.

Anyhow upon this recent introspection on my own mental life, it now feels completely compatible with the lack of free will. While it doesn't conclude that I for sure have no free will, it doesn't actually look like I have it. The thoughts that enter my consciousness don't directly appear to have any origin. They just appear in consciousness in a way not so different from the appearance of the sound of a bird chirping outside my window does. I don't have any direct control over what thoughts will appear in my consciousness. And what type of thoughts that do appear in my head seem to be at least somewhat influenced from past experiences. i.e. they do kinda look like something that is offered up based on some combination of determinism and randomness.

[ezion]

If you cannot trust your belief system then maybe you should change it, instead of calling yourself an NPC.

It's clear circumstance and your memory will impact your present - that doesn't mean you did not choose to reply to my comment with your thoughts.

The whole point of a belief system is for it to correlate with reality and truth, and if there's an obvious contradiction in it, it clearly doesn't.

[rssoconnor]

I'd certainly prefer it to be the case that I have free will. However me having free will is neither not compatible with my current understanding of physics, nor is free will something that I've noticed having when I carefully consider my experiences.

Free will or not, I don't see how I can change my belief system in such a way to exclude the possibility that I'm a brain in a vat, so in that sense I don't see how I can ever 100% believe my experiences match reality short of attempting to tautologically define my experiences as what reality is.

Since you claim have free will, I'd be interested in how you experience the sensation of freely choosing a movie or song title and where exactly your free will comes into play within those sensations, and of how your sensations of the task differ from mine.

[plorkyeran]

Declaring something to be a contradiction because you don't like the conclusion they came to is not the most compelling argument.

[ezion]

If your set of beliefs implies that your set of beliefs are not true, that's a contradiction.

In this case, thinking all of reality is material implies that you cannot believe your thoughts, including the thought that all of reality is material. But that was your original belief, meaning through your own worldview you've reached a contradiction.