Free Will - an illusion?
 

Reproducing Libet's original experiment:



More compelling experiment:

Im sorry, I cant seem to get this to load on my phone.

Exactly what am I supposed to be seeing? The title of this thread suggests Im not the only person who thinks this.But I could be way off. What is your point?

BUMP! Answer me dammit.

Well, just coming from a neurophysics background, free will is kind of a supernatural idea if you think about it. It's claiming that some ethereally independent entity makes decisions independent of the laws of the universe.

What makes more sense is that organism behavior is a product of (mostly) deterministic processes playing out: a combination of internal states (genetics, memory, toxicity, trauma, whatever) and external stimulus (current physiological stimuli).

And these experiment demonstrate that when people feel like they've made impulsive, random decisions, they really haven't. A computer algorithm and a little brain monitoring can predict what decision you are going to make with reasonably good accuracy.

We had a discussion similar to this last year. The consensus was that people didn't have freewill and were subject to their environment and the way they were swayed by outside forces.

I have never believed in free will. I think of it from a spiritual stand point, but I am super interested in it from a scientific stand point.

I think that's the most reasonable conclusion... but don't forget internal forces like genetics and psychological states! The stress-diathesis model: two different people will respond to the same environment different ways depending on their past history with the same kind of stimuli, their genetic dispositions, and other confounding biological factors.

I think people tend to forget about developmental factors too.

I just love the way you idiots are hung up on your science. That's some serious faith dudes. Are you all from western Europe, or just the UK. You all are so well schooled, and completely clueless, and this is banter :) But, I'm probably serious.

omniscience will share a secret.

Exactly whom are you calling an idiot?

Don't feed the troll.

:D Feed? Not me my baby, but a rational founded argument from a non scientific stand point. Absolutely. I mean don't say everyone is hung up on science. I have a gut feeling and no proof dammit, but it doesn't make me any less correct.

Wait.. is it a gut feeling or a rational founded argument? :P

Rational founded argument.

And some of it is my gut. But I can argue both points without them intermingling, if need be.

Seems simple to me. Everything, from the rebound of a cue ball, to the movement of galaxies is ruled by unbreakable mathematical rules. Why should our brains be any different?

Free will was invented by religios peeps.

I do.

what.

I.

Wants.

I drinks, I does them drugs, I skate them boards, I tag them c-ments, I do. what. i wants. Free will ain't no illusion. We are who we are. grants, some **** influences who become. But we're free to break from them influences so we choose to do-do's.

:laughing: I love you bro.

I actually did an essay on whether or not free will actually exists a couple of months back and with all the evidence taken in it is very hard to justify its existence without some serious mental gymnastics. So yeah, I think it's an illusion, doesn't make our lives any less meaningful.

Nah. We don't have free will. We're the universe expressing itself. Sounds like flowery hippy crap, yeah, but thems my beliefs. Well not mine, as I don't have free will. ;)

I'm gonna bump this bitch ass **** because it's always kind of interesting.

You know, I don't care if everything that happens is predestined to by God, or whatever we do is the result of chemical processes in the brain, but if I want to do something then I damn well can. Call me psychotic, but that's free will in my book, no lame religious nonsense or whatever. I just took a drink of water, you know why? Because I chose to. It doesn't matter to me in the slightest that someone would want to go out of their way to trace everything back to whatever the ****, because as long as I can do what I choose, then free will exists in my world. I am free to post this statement, read the comments following that will call me an idiot, and laugh at them, what a world.

And even from a mathematical/physical standpoint, that's MY damn brain making that process.

That would be willpower. The question of free will isn't whether you choose to do things you want, it's whether the things you want (and choose to do) are predetermined. So you may feel like you want to drink water and you do so at your own volition because it's what you want, but that doesn't require free will - it only requires that some dopaminergic process in your brain gets triggered by a real physical demand (thirst) that motivates your body to seek water and then suddenly you think "I'm going to have some water" and you do and you feel in control. But the thirst (and the neural mechanisms of thirst and muscle action) were really in control.

I could go kill someone if I wanted to too. Isn't that a commandment? If everything is predetermined then why would God make people sinners he could just make everything wonderful? Is sin beneficial in his masterplan?

And for the record I wasn't thirsty at all.

when you look at your computer screen, your brain is doing some work to interpret the patterns of light and represent it to you as an image that you can comprehend. is that a choice you make just because it is your brain that is doing the work? i would argue that it's not. when we think about choices we think about them in terms of us making some sort of conscious decision. not automatic responses being triggered before we even have time to think about it.

does that mean you have no agency at all? no, it means your agency is constricted by natural factors. you have a will, which is a natural result of the sum total of your evolution. you don't have a free will, imo, because that implies your will is completely under your control as a conscious entity without any sort of natural constraints. it's a metaphysical concept that was proposed back when people thought it was your soul and not your brain which was directing your behavior.

I just think it doesn't really matter if free will (whatever that even is) exists or not. I can still do what I feel

it matters to philosophers and people like that. it doesn't matter if all you are concerned about is that you can do stuff you feel like doing.

To me, for freewill to exist, then randomness also must. If everything is mathematically calculable, then there is no freewill, for everything is predestined according to mathematical laws. Human behavior might be more complex than 1+1=2, but if they are based on the same mathematical principles that govern the entire universe, then they are both just as predictable.

For freewill to exist, then you must be able to reproduce an experiment to gauge a human's behavior in a specific instance where all variables are exactly the same. Same person, same knowledge, same circumstances. All stimuli must be exactly the same in a mathematically predictable way. You'd basically have to be able to effectively time travel to the beginning of each instance of the experiment.

If even 1 time out of 1,000,000,000 a different outcome occurs, then there is freewill. Otherwise, no. And for a different outcome to occur then that would require the math of the situation to add up differently in that one instance. 1+1 would have to equal 3. And for this not to also be a mathematically calculable outcome, and therefore also not freewill, then the aberrant result would have to be completely random. For all intents and purposes, this would be magic.

For freewill to exist, the basic laws of the universe have to be broken.

I pretty much agree with all of these statements.

Well, randomness might exist, some argue, at the quantum level (which may be the case) and proponents of "Quantum Consciousness" (which I personally don't buy, especially with one of the author's peddling it under spirituality language) will argue that QM is free will's last chance or whatever. Most neuroscientists assume the brain is basically a classical object. Most quantum physicists don't buy Penrose's OR-Orch (which is basically highly speculative QM theory based around justifying consciousness as a QM process).

But, I'd think that randomness would be even more useless to free will, anyway. How can an organism ever build memories or use them in a consistent way if they are random? I suppose though, that free will would appear as random to us until we asked the subject why it made that decision.

This is why I consider myself a Secular Calvinist.

Still a person have the choice to read or not to read, just because most of it is done automatically by the physical body (eyes, & brain) doesn't mean one is mindless. Do you believe you are mindless?

i don't think the lack of free will as i described it it equals mindlessless. i just think what the mind does isn't necessarily under our direct conscious control.

Free Will. The power and ability to act out without being held back, or caring about the consequences.

We all have it. We've all used it.

Robots have the same. But, you're working with another definition of free will than I am. Yours is merely the lack of a metaphorical gun to my head, preventing me from doing what I want to do. Mine is the actual mental capacity to be able to make decisions free from ANY constraints, but they physical, mental, or metaphysical.

According to your definition, the lack of a gun to your head constitutes having free will, but in mine, the gun is unnecessary, because I am no more capable of making unconstrained decisions with or without the gun due to absolute mathematical predictability.

I don't know how aware you are of it, but there's a whole philosophical thing about "compatibilism"---which you seem to subscribe to---and "incompatibilism"---which I would agree with, and both of their definitions of free will are dependent on "determinism". Here's some Wikipedia help, that's at least vaguely helpful...

Determinism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A nebulous definition, but it basically means what I was talking about where mathematics determines everything that happens in the universe: from how a pool ball will rebound of the side of the table, to how a person will respond to coming home to find his wife in bed with the neighbor, to how a nation will respond in a crisis such as a natural disaster or war, to how the culture of an entire race will evolve over millions or billions of years, right down to the length of every step each individual member of that race will make for all of eternity.

Incompatibilists believe that the concept of free will and determinism are... well, incompatible.

Free will: Incompatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Incompatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Compatibilism is the philosophy that determinism and free will are... ya know, compatible. But they define free will differently than incompatibilists. There's generally a metaphysical (magical) component to free will for "us", as I've already explained with all my talk of mathematical calculations and randomness being necessary for the existence of free will. Compatibilists basically describe free will as you do, in that it's basically just being able to act without that gun to your head. The legal definition of free will basically, and probably what most people see as free will, even if they're not aware of the philosophical debate. (One of my fav debates as well, mostly because it's actually a rather simple concept which I'm comfortable in my position toward.)

Compatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Free will: Compatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Basically, both sides are correct. It's just seems that they don't accept each other's definitions of free will. Without some kind of magic to give people "true" free will, the incompatibilist sees the concept as useless, whereas compatibilists see the incompatibilist definition to be impossible to define and therefore also useless.

I define myself as an incompatibilist simply because society at large seems to accept compatibilism in ignorance while still subscribing to the metaphysical definition of free will in a way that would make no sense if they really thought about the subject from a secular point of view. And since this popular definition of free will (the incompatibilist definition) is the one that is accepted by the majority of at least the Western world, I will accept that definition and base my arguments around it.

There's other stuff tied into both philosophies, but I'm not all that up on the details, and this post is probably already kind of TL;DR. I tried to make it as coherent as possible, but I'm long-winded and prone to being disorganized. Hopefully I wasn't too confusing. If so, someone smarter than me please explain what I just said in a more clear manner.

Mine is from Merriam Webster

Free will - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

I think you're making a mountain out of a mole hill. It's really very simple.

Today, I have the free will to do whatever the hell I want. Would some options physically hurt me or others, or get me in trouble with the law, or damage relationships? Of course. I still have the free will to do them.

Those are vague enough that they could support either of our definitions, and the second actually sounds like it supports MINE. If you don't want to think much beyond the casual definition of free will that's fine, but if you're going to respond to arguments like mine or JWB or Xurtio, then you should put a little more thought into what you're actually arguing then you seem to be, as your logic comes across as lazy.

Illusion. "Choice" is a funny word, I think the primary force keeping the free will debate alive is foggy semantics.

We makes choices, sure, but we will only make the choices we've been conditioned to make, choices our biology will allow us to make, choices that our environment and experience have encouraged us to make. The brain is a learning and problem solving machine. We're born and we begin testing the world, we touch hot surfaces, stick our tongues on cold poles, touch the stove burner, talk back to our parents, wipe out on our skateboards, play video games, watch movies, lie to people, make poor financial decisions, smoke weird drugs, break speed limits, and gauge everybody's reaction to everything we do. All of that incoming data, filtered through our biology, determines how we act, our temperament, our restraint, our cleverness, our inclination to take risks, our intuition, our taste in music, film, and culture, and whatever else we consider typical human behavior and thoughts.

Any time we are presented with a choice to make (AKA every living second), our brain remembers past results, considers the current situation and the possible outcomes, does some weird math, and makes an informed decision that may or may not be a good one. Every single choice we make can be traced back to a series of events that informed us to act this way, or how to answer a certain question.

It feels like we're making choices, and we are, but the choices aren't decided by "we", our whole biological system makes the choice, we don't control our bodies like a mech pilot. Our mind is shaped by the experience of our body and will only behave in ways that the body has taught it, and the body is taught by the rest of the systems surrounding us. Every body is reacting to everything else, and everything else is reacting to everything else. I had chicken noodle soup for breakfast this morning because the dinosaurs suffered a mass extinction. The dinosaurs suffered a mass extinction because the Earth formed in this particular corner of the galaxy. The galaxy formed over here because some **** happened over there.

I agree with Batlord, you're equivocating. There's nothing to be gained by arguing semantics. Accept the definition we've used and base your discussion on it (particularly since it's the default definition in this well-known, global philosophical discussion).

No, you guys need to put less thought into it.

FREE. WILL.

It's pretty f*cking simple.

Bat, you're not willing to dive deep into Citizen Kane yet you're taking this straight forward concept and heaping layers of psychobabble on top of it?

When talking about the possibility that you're basically a biological machine with no control over your actions, then it's not really all that simple. The difference between the common/compatibilist concept of free will, and the metaphysical/incompatibiliist definition can shape how we view consciousness and the human brain. Why stick to comfortable vagueness, when accepting it closes the door to greater scientific understanding about the most basic and profound aspect of how the human brain functions.

First of all, just because I don't want to rewatch some movie I find to be boring doesn't mean I'm not interested in intellectual discussion. Enjoying Citizen Kane is not some litmus test for intelligence or nuanced thought.

Secondly, it's not psychobabble. It's rather straightforward logic that just has big words attached to it. When talking about things like this it's difficult to be specific and clear without specific and clear language. Calling it psychobabble to use words like "incompatibilism" and "determinism" is reductive and lazy.