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The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?
- bryanrasmussen 5y agois the clockwork universe provable?
- kanzenryu2 5y agoQuantum theory disproves it
- kuroguro 5y agoWould it really matter if parts of your "will" are running on deterministically moving particles or random ones?
- loopz 5y agoBelieving in free will or not are different configurations in your mind, leading to different future outcomes. Who are you to disbelieve in anything?
- kuroguro 5y agoOnly pointing out that there's no meaningful convo to be had at hardware/micro level. IMO there is no free will there. Free will only becomes important on a personal (I do x because it's meaningful to me) or social contexts (I'm responsible for consequences of x action). I doubt the philosophers are trying to say anything about our day to day lives and that's where most of the opposition is coming from (ie no free will, therefore no meaning in life or responsibilities for anyone).
- loopz 5y agoThis is why the body-mind is said to be the vehicle of the soul. These are all very ancient ideas, determinism especially. As you suspect, people discussing this misses out on how it's all relative, not so absolute.
- kuroguro 5y agoWell, I still don't think there's any souls/free will etc in the academic or "objective world" that is provably out there. However I don't think we're living there. We live in our own minds with a limited view and understanding, mostly dealing with social problems day to day, and emotions coloring that view however they see fit. So IMO the "soul" and "free will" (or whatever other beliefs one may have) are ultimately metaphors for navigating the complex inner world. They can be very important/useful for the individual and society yet non-existent in the "objective world".
- loopz 5y agoFair enough. It is just a word preventing people from turning us into soylent green willy-nilly. To me there's no contradiction. There are knows: We have shared lucid experiences and we can share contemplations of such. There are unknowns: What is consciousness, what happens exactly in brain in relation to outside (body, family, room, house, area, town). It all seems interconnected to the point of break-down when not, for minds especially.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI’m glad your will has an opinion. This all seems miraculous.
- kefabean 5y ago> It’s true that since Laplace’s day, findings in quantum physics have indicated that some events, at the level of atoms and electrons, are genuinely random, which means they would be impossible to predict in advance, even by some hypothetical megabrain. > But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings. Free will or no free will, is not the assumption in point 2 fundamentally flawed? Quantum mechanics is surely at the heart of all interactions and so at some level is responsible for the ‘illusion’ making any difference between free will and predetermination unknowable.
- z5h 5y agoRandomness is not the same as free-from-physics. The former is required for quantum physics, the latter is required for free will.
- loopz 5y agoFree will is inevitable.
- dvh 5y agoI knew you would write that.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoFree from what? If one has will to choose based on a preference is the will free from having that preference? Was the preference chosen?
- loopz 5y agoFree from stepping into an obvious hole in front of you. Free to smash particles at high speed. It's all relative.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoI don’t remember choosing to acquire the preference to avoid stepping into a hole or falling down the stairs. I was born preferring to avoid danger and pain. It was never a free choice. I have not yet observed a choice that is independent or free.
- dlkf 5y ago> A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we are talking about something else.
- senectus1 5y ago> The standard argument against free will is sound. I must have missed that memo :-P
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThe universe has planted a few sceptics to liven things up.
- danbruc 5y agoJust try to define what free will actually means and see things fall apart. The entire idea of free will makes no sense to begin with if one thinks clearly about it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoI suspect you're wrong. But you made the claim, could you supply some of this "clear thinking"?
- nefitty 5y agoIf all events have causes, then nothing can happen spontaneously. A “will” in that world can’t be “free” or disconnected from the causal chain. If there are events that don’t have causes, either they are random, or we need to introduce an unfalsifiable explanation. In a random world, a “will” is still constrained by rolls of the dice. It does not express itself. It is not “free”. If we introduce a metaphysical explanation, then it is no longer science, and can properly be discarded as “nonsense” in the context of the project of inquiry into the physical world. In its company we find concepts like souls, ghosts, deities, magic, etc.
- AndrewDucker 5y agoA lot of these discussions start off badly by not agreeing a definition of Free Will. It's a really really nebulous phrase, and that frequently leads to people talking past each other. This comic illustrates things quite nicely: https://scienceandtheology.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/dilbert-on-free-will-and-determinism/ https://scienceandtheology.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/dilbert-...
- zwkrt 5y ago“That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.” Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either. Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”. Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.
- Shaddox 5y agoI guess this explains why I feel so trapped. Like a pawn to my own circumstances. To live life is to live in servitude. I'm a slave to my own needs of bread, water and circus. To supply this never-ending need I must serve someone else too. I must serve the needs of my family as well : they want and expect things out of me too. So where does that leave me? A never-ending cycle of busy-bodying. I can't even get mad or push back anymore. To what end? I'm simply a spectator to my own fate which unravels before me. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else. Since it wasn't someone else, therefore, it has to be me. I am just a replaceable cog, but this cog still needs to be put to use in a machine. This made me realize death is the true gift of God to mankind. An end to our seemingly never-ending drudgery.
- zwkrt 5y agoBased on your posting here I’m guessing you actually have enough freedom to be doing almost anything you want but you’ve “trapped” yourself in some awful situation that allows you to abdicate responsibility based on how terrible it is for you.
- lambda_obrien 5y agoYou're probably right, whether we have free will or not, we still cannot tell the future, so we should act as if we have it. This poster is clearly conflating their own life situation, which might limit them somehow, with the universe at large. I could get divorced and disown my son and run off to another place to start another life, but I "can't" do that because of my own morals and limitations for what I'm willing to do. The OP could do a similar thing, but chooses not to because of whatever thing is limiting then from that decision.
- nvader 5y agoI've been playing a bit of chess lately. The rules of the game are deterministic, and the best engines have solved many positions completely. Nevertheless, it's still fun to play, for me. I'm trying to play the most optimal move, and yet, nevertheless, what comes out, is the most nvader move. I don't have the free will not to choose as myself. But I still get to be a part of some really fun games. I still feel shame if I blunder a piece, or the thrill of hunting down a vulnerable king. And every so often, a pawn makes it to the back rank and promotes to win the game.
- dusted 5y agoI've always done what I did because, while other options existed for my agency to persue, I didn't chose them, I chose what I did, and so at that time, was the only possible choice I could make, obviously, since it was what I made, it was what my entire life here on earth had set me up to chose continues arguing around the same cirle forever Quantum theory is probably not going to save us from this, even if it at some point is fully and entirely proven and understood in a grand unified field theory. Even if something is not deterministic, does not mean that the thing is "will" or even a part of it. Even on a macroscopic scale we can have unpredictable events, at least practically unpredictable ones, which can change our behavior, but that's just it, external events chainging our internal state. For all I know, a high energy particle may once every so often hit one of my synapses, changing its chargs just-so, making me decide to opt for the smaller menu at Mc.Donalds.
- taffronaut 5y agoI found that playing Rock, Paper, Scissors against an AI opponent demonstrated at least to me that I was not even able to make what I thought were random choices. The only way I could hold the AI to a draw was by using an external source of random numbers.
- akvadrako 5y agoBeing able to make random choices is of course not free will. Also the only way to really make random choices is quantum mechanics. Everything else can only look random.
- novaRom 5y agoQM can also only "look" random. If human- or machine- intelligence cannot recognize a pattern and cannot predict an outcome doesn't mean another being should be the same.
- usgroup 5y agoI think self consciousness is the sticking point for a mechanical or probabilistic universe. It exists. It eludes quantifiable definition. It makes no sense in a mechanism. It is central to free will.
- tremon 5y agoWhat if self-consciousness is merely awareness of the choices your clockwork body makes?
- usgroup 5y agoAs long as self awareness is an input at least in part independent of the rest of the world, if makes your outputs non deterministic if it’s not taken into account. Yet self awareness defies explanation at the moment. Ie there is no known way to account for it.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis is true. It’s obvious we have free will, it’s obvious that an atomistic body can’t support that alone, but no one wants to talk about it ;)
- nefitty 5y agoIf I hallucinate prismatic shapes overlaying everything, it does not follow that there is some non-physical phenomenon which is responsible. “It is obvious that the world is covered in prisms. It’s obvious that those prisms don’t fit in my eyeballs, therefore the entire scientific edifice is mistaken and we need a metaphysical explanation for my experience.”
- mensetmanusman 5y agoComparing free will to a hallucination isn’t helpful because everyone knows the difference and has experienced them.
- monkeycantype 5y agoYou want to make me cringe? remind me that I got into an email conversation on my theory on this topic with an internet stranger and it turned out that person's name was daniel dennett, who I would assume assumed that I knew who he was and that I was an internet fan boy. I'm not a philosopher, I didn't even know who daniel dennet was, so while certain that my view was covered somewhere long before I was born, I wouldn't know which century, but would guess all of them. I am the deterministic set of operations and coefficients that calculates my choice. My will is not caged by a deterministic universe, the deterministic universe is the the constraint ensures my choice is the true reflection of who I am, the true has of the private key of my character. A quantum magic spinny wheel doesn't liberate me, it would undermine the integrity of my choice.
- loopz 5y agoSo you are able to determine the infinite universe, or is this a belief-model?
- monkeycantype 5y agoYes, but I’ll need more compute
- monkeycantype 5y agoOr an infinite paper tape
- nonameiguess 5y agoThis is hilarious. I had a nice email back and forth with Daniel Dennett about 15 years ago, but I knew who he was and initiated contact on purpose to talk about something he was an expert on. Good to see he is still approachable.
- unknown_apostle 5y agoI personally find it highly likely that the decision mechanism emerges from physical computation in the brain. However, when we talk about decision mechanisms, we inevitably introduce the question of whether this decision mechanism can work better or worse. “Free will” may be seen as a computational notion of “health” for this decision mechanism, similar to how we use the term health for our physical bodies. A free will is a healthy will, in the sense that our decision mechanism is not broken by e.g. drugs, electrodes or mental illness. Second, many people, myself included, hold the assumption that the ordering between options A and B is not purely subjective. If there exists an ordering of options which is objective and external to the agent of choice, then the choices that are actually made can be compared to that external ordering. Free will in this sense denotes the observation that our choices may reflect an ordering which is significantly different from the ordering imposed by reality. This is not a scientific claim and cannot be disproven scientifically. Holding this assumption is in fact a choice.
- tremon 5y agoI personally find it highly likely that the decision mechanism emerges from physical computation in the brain. I think it's more likely that the decision mechanism emerges from a race condition between multiple competing signals. We choose the one that arrives first, even if it takes time to be consciously aware of the choice.
- AlexandrB 5y ago> A free will is a healthy will, in the sense that our decision mechanism is not broken by e.g. drugs, electrodes or mental illness. Isn't the drug example a contradiction? If my brain was healthy ("free") when I decided to take drugs, why would the resulting drugged state be less "free"? After all, it was my "free" choice to take the drugs and alter my mental state. Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness.
- unknown_apostle 5y agoConsider hypnotics used during light medical procedures to keep you awake but compliant. From a state of more freedom you can freely choose to enter a state of arguably less freedom. Why would this be a contradiction? > Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness. Yep, insights and definitions of illness will keep changing. But while insights in the details of e.g. psychosis may vary, few would deny a correlation with chemical issues.
- uniqueid 5y agoFrom what I understand of the Many-Worlds Theory, if it's correct, we can have both 'free will' and 'determinism': a man orders pizza, in 90% of possible futures he chooses a Margherita which is his favorite, but in 10% he orders something else.
- loopz 5y agoThose are just statistics or hypotheticals. It's only facts after the action is made.
- uniqueid 5y agoIt's only facts after the action is made. My understanding of Many Worlds is probably wrong then. I assumed that every outcome exists (every possible world in the — relative to you right now — past, present, and future), and that any particular outcome is only 'special' to the copy of you in that universe.
- loopz 5y agoSounds hypothetical ;)
- akvadrako 5y agoBut the choice in MWI is random, which isn't any more "free" than determinism.
- apienx 5y ago> _A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?_ Most likely not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- anvandare 5y agoThings either have a cause, and then they are causal. Or they have no cause, and then they are random. But in the opinions of some, the laws of physics stop at the neck, beyond which things are neither causal nor non-causal nor random nor non-random but 'free'. Whatever that might mean. (Apparently it's some sort of unmoving mover which moves itself and interacts with the universe without being interacted upon by the universe.)
- AlexandrB 5y ago> Things either have a cause, and then they are causal. Or they have no cause, and then they are random. This is probably the most succinct statement that sums up the problem with "free will". As soon as you start to try to define "free will" in terms of the natural sciences you run into insurmountable contradictions that suggest that it must be an illusion. Edit: I wonder what proportion of posters here believe both that "free will" is not an illusion and that "strong AI" is possible.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoWe have no ethical framework to turn the scientific method towards what is going on at the deepest levels of the brain without some crazy cloning stuff or a horrible dystopian future.
- AlexandrB 5y agoI don't think that's entirely accurate. We've done plenty of tests on animals and found nothing that would contradict either known physics or chemistry. Moreover, even if human brains were somehow special relative to animal brains, there's no reason to think they operate in a way that that's separate from all the other matter in the universe. And as the GP said - interactions between matter are either causal or random. There's no "free will" interaction. Such a thing would be - almost by definition - supernatural.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
- amriksohata 5y agoMaterial nature, although allowing us only a limited choice, deludes us into thinking we are completely free. But our freedom is like that of a prisoner who has the privilege to choose between a first-, second-, or third-class prison cell. He has three choices, but in all cases he is still in prison. Like a prison, the three modes of nature restrict our original free will. The instinctive sense of free will that we now feel is factual, but it is only partially realized. Our destiny in this material world is determined by a combination of our partial free will and the three modes of material nature. According to our previous karma, we are destined to face certain situations in this life. In those situations we have a certain amount of freedom to choose how we want to react. Once we choose, we come under the control of the mode associated with our choice, and we are obliged to accept the consequences, be they happy or miserable. Fate and free will, as described in the Bhagavad-gita, are analogous to the relationship between the state, the law-abiding citizen, and the criminals in prison. A citizen is considered free only if he obeys the laws of the state. If he breaks the law, he goes to jail. A prisoner may enjoy limited freedom to choose between reading a book or writing a letter: between Jell-0 or ice-cream for dessert; between work in the barber shop or in the kitchen. But he is not free to abandon the prison altogether. By comparison, the free citizen is in a better position, but both are controlled by the law. Practically, the only unconditioned exercise of their free will is in their decision to choose between being a good citizen or a criminal. http://www.krishna.com/fate-free-will-and-you http://www.krishna.com/fate-free-will-and-you
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoBS! Free will emerges from the accumulation of checksum errors in the file system of the quantum foam storage of the Akashic Records. Because bit rot is universal, regardless of the substrate information is stored, computed, running on, and in. (Eat this!)
- dotsam 5y agoAs we can't train ourselves *not* to see an optical illusion (even if we know it is an illusion), I think we're also stuck with the experience of free will, even if we conclude it is an illusion. But like illusions, we can use our knowledge, rather than our experience, to guide our response to the illusion. Revising the criminal justice system would be a good outcome, and I am glad to see this mentioned!
- coldtea 5y ago>“That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.” Huh? Why? Shouldn't it be the opposite? As much as I have a personal will, I will continue to will the same thing if we replay the situation -- all other things being exactly the same. I don't chose something at random. I express who I am, based on my life story in space time. To make a light example, if I'm a person who prefers Big Macs over Chinese, I will pick a Bic Mac if I'm asked to make such a decision, no matter how many times we rewind and replay the universe state. Free will is not about me suddenly picking some random alternative. How would that ever express who I am (and thus, my, _my_ personal will?). What's "free" about this free will since its inexorably tied to my space-time history? Well, it's exactly the fact that it's my space-time history, and can't be altered based on some external factor. It's not "free" as in arbitrarily changeable, but free as in "expressing me and only me" (that is: my space-time history who made me what I am).
- jokoon 5y agoSome people will argue that you are not so exceptional, which is the whole thing about the snowflake argument. You share most of your specificities with other homo sapiens. Individualism is a thought system that is centered on liberalism. Watch "the century of the self".
- coldtea 5y ago>You share most of your specificities with other homo sapiens. Sure, but that's neither here, nor there - and totally orthogonal to the discussion. Free will is about expressing the self, not about the self being unique.
- nickcotter 5y agoThis has always seemed to me to be the inherent contradiction in free will but I struggle to elaborate it. If it’s my choice then doesn’t that mean it’s determined in some way? In which case it’s not free. But if it’s random then that’s not “will” either. What then is the thing that could be both free and willed?
- ThalesX 5y agoThis article brings about the perfect oportunity to share with the HNews community what I share with my friends when I feel edgy. Consider a human as a function of a ton of variables... infinitely many. Our whole life defined as a function of a lot of variables. Now... when you think about what makes you, you, this includes the moment of your birth, and the configuration of your genes. So when your parents decided to have sex. Furthermore, the sperm that turned into you, came from a reservoir that replenishes itself from time to time, so even that is a function of how many times that reservoir has been replenished. So basically, you are a function of how many times your dad masturbated in his life up until your conception, amongst others. Nobel here I come.
- PeterWhittaker 5y agoI'm surprised at an article on free will that mentions neither Skinner nor Kahnemann. Skinner's studies on behaviourism and operational conditioning led him to question free will in quite a dramatic fashion - in some ways I think akin to how Darwin was able to reason from "reproduction with modification" to evolution, without ever having a mechanism for modification in mind (gene theory came along much later). More recent studies of cognition and reaction have provided some of the counter-mechanisms, the things we do without deciding to do them, such as reflex arcs (the mechanism in action that causes us to withdraw our hands from something hot before our brains have realized it was hot, e.g.,), and, more importantly for the free-will discussion, Kahnemann's (and Tversky)'s two-systems model. The basic idea of that model is that our body and brain do a lot of prefiltering, dealing with much of what we encounter and manage without ever involving the conscious mind. Think of driving on a familiar, quiet road. You never think about it, you might not even be aware of much of the drive, but you drove safely. That "fast", low-energy-requirement system only flags things to the conscious mind - the slow, high-energy-system that we identify as ourselves - when it cannot make sense of what it encounters or when there are surprising happenings. The workings of the fast (aconscious) system are inaccessible to the slow (conscious) system. So we have within us a system that decides a great deal without our being involved, at least not consciously, and that only presents for our conscious consideration things it needs help with. We make conscious, free-will-like decisions, based on filtered and reduced information. How free is that, really? Of course, the definition of consciousness is a question all its own.
- dwd 5y agoSam Harris very recently published a podcast where he updated his stance on free will - worth a listen as he explored in depth the direct quote towards the end of the article: "If one pays sufficient attention, one can notice that there's no subject in the middle of experience – there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own." In saying that he says that most of our actions simply come out of the fast thinking system, and when we think something through slower we have an "illusion of free will" but still act in a way that to an external observer would say was "in character".
- fallingfrog 5y ago“Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.“ I guarantee you that nobody outside of a tiny group of academics would care at all. The only reason that people care about evolution is that they feel insulted at being called monkeys. Call them mammals instead and you’ll get no response, because it doesn’t trigger the same emotional reaction. Call them animals, they’ll protest. Call them vertebrates, shrug. There’s no logic involved. People just react to the connotation of what an “animal” or an “ape” is and then rationalize that reaction after the fact. If you just the word “hominids” instead of apes they wouldn’t care. People are idiots, it takes years of training to be able to think the way a scientist does. Free will is an airy abstraction. Nobody cares about that. Only someone like Harris could possibly think they would.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoFree will is not an airy abstraction. Why does my cloud of atoms disagree with yours? ;)
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago>“This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. This sort of hubris is astounding. It boggles the mind that a "scientist" could make such a definitive statement when there is so much we don't understand about physics, and the universe(s?) in general.
- rewgs 5y agoI think it's pretty obvious that free will is an illusion. No matter what, every action -- even if that action is somehow clearly defined as an act of free will (I guess the "classic" example being one of rebellion or a wholly unexpected action) -- springs from a cause. That cause has its own cause. And so and on and so forth, until you pass the barrier between what we call consciousness and what we call organic hardware and pass into the realm of the (currently) measurable and predictable. Just as a technology, sufficiently advanced, appears to be magic, so then does a complexity, sufficiently complex, appear to be something other than what it is. I bet everyone on HN a Coke that Consciousness will one day be understood than to be nothing more than a whole lot of complexity masquerading as something more. Ditto for any concept of free will within the universe, though I suppose that'd be a whole hell of a lot more harder to prove ;) Free will simply does not exit, no matter how complex reality is or brains are. Side-note: while they're pretty bad movies over all, the Matrix sequels summed this concept up pretty will with the whole idea of the One being essentially the free will machine of the Matrix, the "Integral Anomaly" -- essentially baked-in variety/novelty/choice/etc, which is still no less part of the machine itself. Just as a random number generator function returns a random number, it's still programmed to do it.
- rewgs 5y agoChrist I was clearly tired when I wrote this. Apologies for the horrible grammar.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoWILL, a kind of abstract but measurable power. We don't know exactly what it is, where it is contained, or how it works, but we can intuitively point to somewhere in our world and say, "that person has lots of willpower" or, "that action required lots of willpower to pull off". So it's defined about as well as consciousness is at the moment. FREE is a loaded word; It can mean free as in no cost, or free as in without restriction. These are interrelated; Restrictions increase cost. Resources diminish restrictions. But no action in the universe is completely without cost nor restriction. Even when you generate power you're not creating it from nothing, you're extracting it from one form into another, more usable to you. After use it transforms into yet another, waste form, economically unviably unusable to you personally, but not any kind of "absolute waste". One being's waste is another's food. Even the most powerful systems in the known universe are subject to restrictions of the physical laws. Humans have long theorized the existence of god(s), systems that transcend all limitations. But they have never been observed scientifically. Every system previously thought "ultimate" in any way has been discovered to be a measurable part of our universe. Currently the most "ultimate" thing challenging our comprehension are black holes. Compare them to god(s): They cannot be seen directly. They are the most powerful things we think might exist. They affect everything around them. We know almost nothing about them, besides how they affect the universe. So then what is FREE WILL? We can intuitively point to instances of it, and it seemes to be some kind of power that facilitates change in the universe. Humans seem to have more of it than other animals, on the basis that we've changed our world in more numerous and complex ways than any other animal. It might be an energy source we can draw from, like the Sun or black holes. Something we're not sure where it's coming from, yet. Once we discover the exact nature of it, what revelations about our universe might we achieve? Consider that at one point in the evolutionary history of life on this planet, the Sun was this magical, invisible, distant, ambient energy that some organisms learned to harness with a process later named photosynthesis. Plants probably still don't understand the nature of the Sun, but their proliferation of the surface has allowed us to thrive and understand it. And for most of our civilized history we only knew it's a cyclic point energy source that makes everything go more alive when there's enough of it, and increasingly dead when there's too much of it. Is the Sun an illusion? Of course not. Is free will an illusion? Of course not. We just don't know what it is, yet.
- RGamma 5y agoWell true (small scale) randomness, combinatorial explosion and intractable complexity/chaos do exist, which should be plenty to keep things interesting even in the face of considerable behavioral determinism. Better to replace free will with sense of agency.
- RHSman2 5y ago“Nevertheless, the free will problem is really depressing if you take it seriously. It hasn’t made me happy, and in retrospect, if I were at graduate school again, maybe a different topic would have been preferable.” Well, he couldn’t....