Is free will a myth?

Scanlas The 2nd

We are essentially a collection of atoms interacting, although I don't like the conclusion I've reached I can only conclude that every single thing I've done could have been predicted thousands of years ago with enough computing power and understanding of physics/chemistry at the atomic level. I'm hoping someone will prove me wrong.

Scanlas The 2nd

Scanlas The 2nd wrote: »

We are essentially a collection of atoms interacting, although I don't like the conclusion I've reached I can only conclude that every single thing I've done could have been predicted thousands of years ago with enough computing power and understanding of physics/chemistry at the atomic level. I'm hoping someone will prove me wrong.

I'm guess you're talking about probabilities and the ability of software/computers to predict what someone is going to do? And yet, such predictions don't change or control a persons choices. We have free will. We have the choice to make bad decisions if we want. Its just that between conditioning and well, common sense, we tend to pick the safest route. Or we weigh up the consequences and our own probability of success. But free will remains.

As for proving you wrong, you haven't actually proven anything. Its just a limiting belief. The only one that can change that is, well, you.

seamus

Do some research into quantum physics and uncertainty, you'll find it an interesting topic/debate.

Things go a bit weird when you go below the atomic level and we lose the determinism that you expect of physics at the macro level.

The possibility is that if the microforces which make up our macro world are unpredictable and non-deterministic, then it's fair to say that to a certain extent our universe in non-deterministic. Or perhaps it's better thought of that it's less deterministic as time moves on. That is, if I could model the universe today, I might be able to accurately predict when will happen to each atom over the next 24 hours. But as the range of the prediction moves on, the uncertainty will increase.

It's an interesting topic, but I don't think anyone has come to the conclusion that the universe is or isn't deterministic.

We have free will. We have the choice to make bad decisions if we want. Its just that between conditioning and well, common sense, we tend to pick the safest route. Or we weigh up the consequences and our own probability of success. But free will remains.

If you consider the possibility that consciousness is nothing more than the manisfestation of biochemical/bioelectrical reactions in our brains, then that leads to a conclusion that we make a decision based on the atomic composition of our brains at that point in time. And if the universe is deterministic, then our brains will always have had the same composition at that point in time and therefore we would never have been capable of making any other decision. Therefore we don't have free will, only the illusion of it.

Dades

I also think free will is pretty much an illusion.

However given the unimaginable complexity and sheer bizarreness of our constituent pieces (as elaborated on by seamus) on any practical level there is little point in taking this too seriously. There's also little point in speculating about a machine that could take these pieces into account with a view to predicting the future. This ain't ever gonna happen, meaning that our future remains undetermined as far as we are concerned.

On a oddly related note, I find that this idea fits the old idea of "fate".
i.e. Was it fate I met my wife? I guess it was on a sub-atomic level. How romantic.

00sully

agree with OP - its all predetermined. ever since the big bang. but as mentioned here no point even thinking about it - although you are destined to do so

irishh_bob

i believe some people are born lucky and other are born unlucky , whether that means i dont believe in free will or not , im not sure

Dades

That depends, situations in life can be described as lucky or unlucky. The question is whether you can make you own luck...

riffmongous

seamus wrote: »

It's an interesting topic, but I don't think anyone has come to the conclusion that the universe is or isn't deterministic.

If you consider the possibility that consciousness is nothing more than the manisfestation of biochemical/bioelectrical reactions in our brains, then that leads to a conclusion that we make a decision based on the atomic composition of our brains at that point in time. And if the universe is deterministic, then our brains will always have had the same composition at that point in time and therefore we would never have been capable of making any other decision. Therefore we don't have free will, only the illusion of it.

So do you mean that if Quantum Mechanics is an accurate description of the nanoscale world that we do have free will?

OP, I think Chaos Theory and stochastic processes will stop you from predicting the future perfectly

seamus

riffmongous wrote: »

So do you mean that if Quantum Mechanics is an accurate description of the nanoscale world that we do have free will?

Not necessarily and that's where it gets muddy. Even if the universe is nondeterministic, that doesn't mean that we have free will, simly that we're not slaves to determinism. We are likely still slaves to the biochemical/eletrical forces which drive our existence, random or not. That is, although we may not be able to predict what choices I make tomorrow, that doesn't mean that I am the one being unpredictable.

irishh_bob wrote: »

i believe some people are born lucky and other are born unlucky , whether that means i dont believe in free will or not , im not sure

That does depend I guess. If you believe in the common notion of fate, you don't believe in free will, about as simple as that.
However, people have developed their own grey areas of fate and chance and some people believe that you have a "destiny", but you have to seize it or it will pass you by otherwise. Personally I think the two concepts are mutually exclusive and if we all have a destiny, then we have no choice but to seize it.

Random chance dictates that some people will consistently have good fortune in their lives and others will have consistent misfortune. The bulk of us will land somewhere in the middle with fairly even amounts of fortune and misfortune. Which correlates with the nature of the world as I see it. So no, I don't believe in being lucky or unlucky insofar as it being a predetermined outcome.

Butterbox

Yes I imagine it could all have been predicted. What is important,though, is that you don't know.

irishh_bob

Dades wrote: »

That depends, situations in life can be described as lucky or unlucky. The question is whether you can make you own luck...

IMO , the term you make your own luck is an oxymoron of sorts in that , if you made your own luck , it wouldnt really be luck , just good descision making , luck is when someone is the recipient of good fortune without having done anything to deserve it , i.e , being rescued by someone while stranded on a desert highway or falling through a roof and landing on a bed or even finding yourself working for a nigella lawson as opposed to a gordon ramsey

an example of bad luck would be accidently crossing the path of a psychopath while walking home one night , ending up on flight 93 on the day of sept 11 2001 etc

Dades

Perhaps the idea of "making your own luck" is similar to karma.

Do enough good deeds and one day you might get repaid by a seemingly (but not actually) unrelated piece of 'luck'.

Scanlas The 2nd

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm guess you're talking about probabilities and the ability of software/computers to predict what someone is going to do? And yet, such predictions don't change or control a persons choices. We have free will. We have the choice to make bad decisions if we want. Its just that between conditioning and well, common sense, we tend to pick the safest route. Or we weigh up the consequences and our own probability of success. But free will remains.

As for proving you wrong, you haven't actually proven anything. Its just a limiting belief. The only one that can change that is, well, you.

We can't change physics though, it will act how it's going to act regardless. The choice I do make which I think was my choice was the result of physics/chemistry making me make that choice.

I'd like to make the point that regardless of this being true or not we should assume we do have free will in our daily lives.

riffmongous

seamus wrote: »

Not necessarily and that's where it gets muddy. Even if the universe is nondeterministic, that doesn't mean that we have free will, simly that we're not slaves to determinism. We are likely still slaves to the biochemical/eletrical forces which drive our existence, random or not. That is, although we may not be able to predict what choices I make tomorrow, that doesn't mean that I am the one being unpredictable.

That sounds about right. So it all comes down to Dualism really (separation of mind and matter). So if the mind really is just a bunch of electrical signals I don't see how we could even claim to have a 'mind', let alone free will.

irishh_bob

Dades wrote: »

Perhaps the idea of "making your own luck" is similar to karma.

Do enough good deeds and one day you might get repaid by a seemingly (but not actually) unrelated piece of 'luck'.

the concept of karma was invented to make opressed people feel better :rolleyes:

riffmongous

irishh_bob wrote: »

the concept of karma was invented to make opressed people feel better :rolleyes:

I don't know, karma has always appealed to me in a physics-y way, 'conservation of goodness'

seamus

I think karma to a certain extent is rooted in the same kind of thing that some old wives' tales are.

It's a reasonable suggestion that if you act in a nice way, good things will happen to you in return as an indirect result of your actions. Evidence also suggests that a positive outlook on life and a general positive attitude is linked with improved health and lifespan.

It would be easy to see how primitive cultures may interpret this as some form of ethereal brownie points system rather than simple cause-and-effect.

Earthhorse

Though I cannot prove it, and indeed from what I've seen the evidence is in the opposite camp, I believe we do have free will. Most of the arguments agains this are nothing more than reductionism e.g. we are "just" a bunch of electrical impulses, atoms etc. This ignores the complexity of what those electrical impulses and atoms create when there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of them interacting with each other.

It's unlikely we will ever be able to prove conclusively either way; no one's going to build a machine powerful enough to predict the future. If free will is an illusion it's a pretty convincing one.

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Dades wrote: »

Perhaps the idea of "making your own luck" is similar to karma.

Do enough good deeds and one day you might get repaid by a seemingly (but not actually) unrelated piece of 'luck'.

Actually, if you're talking about free will a look at Karma is quite interesting. In the religions where it plays a role the "will of God" aspect of action and reaction is absent or much reduced compared to Christianity, Islam and Judaism; where the "will of God" in governing all things is a key aspect of the theology. There's a lot more to Karma than the "My Name Is Earl" model which people seem so keen to adopt, but I won't pretend to understand it even nearly well enough to be able to talk about it

Black Swan

It's not an either/or question, which would fall error to being a dichotomy; ergo, determining to what extent free will exists is problematic, given the associated complexities and influences of human nature and nurture in an open systems environmental model.

cleremy jarkson

If we have free will, other creatures must have it too. Unless something magic happened at one of the branch-off points on the tree of evolution which allowed only us to have it....
I don't believe in free-will and I'll admit, it is the one philosophical topic that depresses me, because I can't believe in it. One simple point that contributes to this... the existence of mental illnesses..

Dades

Earthhorse wrote: »

Though I cannot prove it, and indeed from what I've seen the evidence is in the opposite camp, I believe we do have free will. Most of the arguments agains this are nothing more than reductionism e.g. we are "just" a bunch of electrical impulses, atoms etc. This ignores the complexity of what those electrical impulses and atoms create when there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of them interacting with each other.

I don't think anything ignores the complexity of what happens in our universe. Just because it's unimaginably complex doesn't mean we aren't still the sum of our constituent parts.

Earthhorse wrote: »

It's unlikely we will ever be able to prove conclusively either way; no one's going to build a machine powerful enough to predict the future. If free will is an illusion it's a pretty convincing one.

This I agree with. It is such a convincing illusion as to not matter except in discussions such as this.
We continue to make "decisions" in everyday life as it seems to us we have choices - and life goes on.

raah!

Black Swan wrote: »

It's not an either/or question, which would fall error to being a dichotomy; ergo, determining to what extent free will exists is problematic, given the associated complexities and influences of human nature and nurture in an open systems environmental model.

What do you mean it's not an either/or question? As far as I can see the word "will" rules out any description of it in terms of "this electron could do a number of things". A mechanical system with varying degrees of freedom is very different to a person with free will. As far as the meanings of the words "free" and "will" go anyway.

Some mistakes are often made in this area and indeed in this thread :
-Quantum mechanics has little to no bearing on the question of whether or not there is free will. There is one ridiculous theory about quantum effects in some tubules in cells or something, but it's ridiculous.
-Not being able to predict something does not mean it is not determined. (an easy example is somebody dropping a glass behind your back)

cleremy jarkson

I find that most people who insist that free-will isn't an illusion either:
- haven't thought about it for very long or
- don't want to accept the possibility of free will not existing, because they find it robs them of something..

Scanlas The 2nd

Earthhorse wrote: »

Though I cannot prove it, and indeed from what I've seen the evidence is in the opposite camp, I believe we do have free will. Most of the arguments agains this are nothing more than reductionism e.g. we are "just" a bunch of electrical impulses, atoms etc. This ignores the complexity of what those electrical impulses and atoms create when there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of them interacting with each other.

It's unlikely we will ever be able to prove conclusively either way; no one's going to build a machine powerful enough to predict the future. If free will is an illusion it's a pretty convincing one.

The conclusion I've come to is that believing in free will is like believing in magic. The laws of the universe don't stop working inside our skulls.

Earthhorse

Dades wrote: »

I don't think anything ignores the complexity of what happens in our universe. Just because it's unimaginably complex doesn't mean we aren't still the sum of our constituent parts.

I disagree, we are greater, or rather, different, to the sum of our parts. Consciousness is a good example of something that fits this criteria.

Scanlas The 2nd wrote: »

The conclusion I've come to is that believing in free will is like believing in magic. The laws of the universe don't stop working inside our skulls.

I don't think they do either but I also don't think we fully understand how our universe works. Not by a long shot.

Dades

Earthhorse wrote: »

I disagree, we are greater, or rather, different, to the sum of our parts. Consciousness is a good example of something that fits this criteria.

Consciousness can be very easily demonstrated to be a product of our brain matter. A smack on the head with a baseball bat will cause you to lose your consciousness. What's more, damage to different areas of your brain may alter your personality - which is a feature of your consciousness.

There is nothing to indicate we are any more than the sum of our parts, any more than the chicken you might eat for lunch was more than the sum of it's parts.

Earthhorse

Dades wrote: »

Consciousness can be very easily demonstrated to be a product of our brain matter. A smack on the head with a baseball bat will cause you to lose your consciousness. What's more, damage to different areas of your brain may alter your personality - which is a feature of your consciousness.

So consciousness arises in the brain but the parts that make up our brain don't possess consciousness. It's a real thing that was not present in the individual parts.

Dades

Earthhorse wrote: »

It's a real thing that was not present in the individual parts.

What's a "thing"?

If it isn't the sum of it's parts what is the missing ingredient?

Earthhorse

Dades wrote: »

What's a "thing"?

I have no wish to engage in semantics but in this case it is the quality or phenomenon of conciousness.

If it isn't the sum of it's parts what is the missing ingredient?

There is no "missing ingredient" as you put it. The point is that the finished product, the brain, possesses the quality of conciousness whereas none of its constiuent parts do.

Dades

Consciousness is a subjective human term though. How would we go about defining at what point in our evolution our ancestors stopped being unconscious and became conscious?

I would be more open to the idea that consciousness is something special if it didn't appear to have just evolved. The alternative is it just 'appeared' and there's nothing to suggest that is the case.

Earthhorse

I don't see how those questions are relevant to the fact that a new quality arose from parts that do not possess that quality. The assumption of reductionism is that this doesn't happen.

seamus

Earthhorse wrote: »

There is no "missing ingredient" as you put it. The point is that the finished product, the brain, possesses the quality of conciousness whereas none of its constiuent parts do.

I'm not really sure why this is any kind of amazing thing tbh.

I'm using a computer here. It's built of a number of parts which individually, cannot be used as a computer. But when they are put together they possess the quality of being a computer. If we remove any of these parts, it is no longer capable of being a computer.

The same can be said of anything which is constructed of a number of distinct parts - cars, buildings, etc. Constructed they are all capable of things which they are individually incapable of. But they are still just the sum of their parts.

Earthhorse

If you don't know why it's an amazing thing then why bring amazement into the debate? Who ever said it was amazing?

I don't really know how simpler I can make the point. Perhaps an example will suffice.

A table is "just a bunch of atoms". A human is "just a bunch of atoms". What does that tell you about a table? About a human? About the differences between them? Almost nothing. Of course, it will always be correct of almost anything in this universe to say it is "just" a bunch of atoms, or quarks, or electric impulses or whatever else. But that doesn't preclude the possibility of it from possessing other qualities such as colour, taste, texture, conciousness or free-will.

Scanlas The 2nd

Earthhorse wrote: »

If you don't know why it's an amazing thing then why bring amazement into the debate? Who ever said it was amazing?

I don't really know how simpler I can make the point. Perhaps an example will suffice.

A table is "just a bunch of atoms". A human is "just a bunch of atoms". What does that tell you about a table? About a human? About the differences between them? Almost nothing. Of course, it will always be correct of almost anything in this universe to say it is "just" a bunch of atoms, or quarks, or electric impulses or whatever else. But that doesn't preclude the possibility of it from possessing other qualities such as colour, taste, texture, conciousness or free-will.

You are not explaining how we have free will. For free will to exist the laws of our universe woould have to stop working in our body and that clearly isn't the case. IMO we are no more special than a stone. We are more complex, but everything you do and think is the result of physics, chemistry etc... Free will is an illusion.

The qualities of colour, taste and texture are determined by the laws of the the universe too. I don't see your point here.

Dades

Earthhorse wrote: »

A table is "just a bunch of atoms". A human is "just a bunch of atoms". What does that tell you about a table? About a human? About the differences between them? Almost nothing. Of course, it will always be correct of almost anything in this universe to say it is "just" a bunch of atoms, or quarks, or electric impulses or whatever else. But that doesn't preclude the possibility of it from possessing other qualities such as colour, taste, texture, conciousness or free-will.

Hmmm...

Take a lunatic who believes he can fly. If you release him from a height he believes he has the free will to go which ever direction he pleases. Obviously he doesn't, because the laws of the universe which dicate that the sum of the lunatic's parts, and those of the ground will act in a certain way and determines that they are going to meet at a predetermined point in space and time.

Just because the lunatic is "conscious" and believes he has free will does not change the reality that he doesn't, and is just as subject to the laws of the universe as a stone or a whale or a prawn cocktail.

Earthhorse

Scanlas The 2nd wrote: »

You are not explaining how we have free will.

Correct. Nor have I attempted to. I have been pointing out the problem with the reductionist approach.

For free will to exist the laws of our universe woould have to stop working in our body and that clearly isn't the case.

Assuming all laws of the universe are known to us and correctly understood by us can you explain to me, specifically, which ones free will breaks and how it breaks them?

Dades wrote: »

Take a lunatic who believes he can fly. If you release him from a height he believes he has the free will to go which ever direction he pleases. Obviously he doesn't, because the laws of the universe which dicate that the sum of the lunatic's parts, and those of the ground will act in a certain way and determines that they are going to meet at a predetermined point in space and time.

Let's say that instead the lunatic confounds all our expectations and takes flight into the night. What does this say about free will? Nothing. All it would prove is that the lunatic could fly, not whether he chose to fly and whether that choice was predetermined or not.

Scanlas The 2nd

Earthhorse wrote: »

Assuming all laws of the universe are known to us and correctly understood by us can you explain to me, specifically, which ones free will breaks and how it breaks them?

Free will contradicts basic logic because just like rolling a dice, there is only one thing that is going to happen. (lets not get into quantum mechanics as it's not relevant.) The dice will land which ever way it's going to land and that's it. Similarly, a humans movements, thoughts etc are going take place the way they are and that's it, we can't change what we are going to do, I was always going to be writing this sentence right here and now, I feel like I made the choices and I did, but physics made me make these choices. I think you are getting confused because you feel like you can choose to do what you want so you consider that free will, but what you were going to do and think was already predetermined.

Earthhorse

No, I'm not confused. I said in my opening post that the balance of evidence was not in favour of free will.

It'll be interesting to see what we discover when we begin to understand how the brain makes decisions and choices. I think there's a good chance we'll find something new; it might not be free will or anything even as radical as that but I think it'll be something no one ever thought of before.

take everything

I'd imagine free will is an illusion.
Having said that, chaos theory (unpredictability in certain complex systems) was touched on here and i'd think that this might be a "block" on proving that a leads to b leads to c etc. At least i don't see anyone getting past this any time soon. That's possibly moot but still it is one block on "seeing" free will at work at least. So this seems to be a "block on measuring reality"

The other thing mentioned, possibly more relevant and fundamental (Quantum mechanics and how it applies to biological systems- specifically the brain). I'm not sure exactly how this applies to the free will question- but again it seems to be a "block on predicting reality fully" thing to me rather than anything else.
(But even if it is indeterrministic, i don't see how that confers free will/agency on a person. It's not like the person controls the QM inside them- it's the other way round, they're still a slave to the indeterminacy, aren't they).

So (given the limitations above) the first question might be:
Can we ever test if we have free will or not.

In other words are we hopelessly unamenable to true self-examination (including whether we do or do not have free will) because of our complexity and our limitations in measuring that complexity.