> there is no homunculus (or soul, or separate entity) calling the shots for you, but even if there were a mini-me inside of you making choices, that mini-me would need a mini-mini-me inside of it, ad infinitum.
I find it kind of amusing that people think free will is an illusion. It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.
This "Science disproves free will" thing has the epistemological hierarchy reversed: one of the surest things I know is my own will. Before Descartes could proclaim "I think, therefore I am" he had to choose to make that proclamation.
The argument that free will can't exist because it involves infinite regress is not particularly convincing: if anything, we should expect that our agency springs from something as bizarre as a causal singularity. Consciousness is weird as hell, and I expect the true nature of consciousness will turn out to be weirder than we can imagine.
So your belief in free will comes from "It's going to turn out to come from something really weird"? That's not convincing either.
I don't believe in free will, but I believe that there will always be the illusion because the computing needed to know anything before it happens is far too much, and if you knew, it would add another layer of things you'd need to compute, meaning you still wouldn't know your choice ahead of time.
I agree that the infinite regress argument is not convincing - it proves nothing. I would point to science, physics, etc, which is much more factually supportive of it. Of course you can point out quarks, quantum computing, etc, but my argument is that the "randomness" is simply a system we have yet to understand.
More importantly, you highlight something else - choice is not the same as free will. Yes, we all have choices we make every day. They seem to be our will because we don't understand how they were made down to the particles. Whether or not there is free will, there is always choice. So the question is, when is the lack of free will actually relevant? I find that a lot of people apply it in ways that don't make sense when it actually does offer insight in certain interesting areas such as ethics.
> I don't believe in free will, but I believe that there will always be the illusion because the computing needed to know anything before it happens is far too much, and if you knew, it would add another layer of things you'd need to compute, meaning you still wouldn't know your choice ahead of time.
I think the illusion comes from the desire of a person to have power over their situation, which allows their instincts, especially those hidden from the person themselves, to have an effect which gives them an advantage evolutionally.
With all other things equal, without ascribing free will, having one's mind have control over their life vs being controlled by external factors is one in the same. So there must be a natural built in preference for autonomy or there isn't enough space for hidden instincts to manifest themselves.
One of the biggest examples of what I would call "hidden instincts" would be the fact that children grow up to be like their parents, including developing the very same vices that they hated when they were kids, such as domestic violence, drug abuse, abandonment of a child by a parent, etc. In order for these instincts to manifest, one must have control over oneself. (These instincts are possibly genetic, but a great survival tactic is to imitate your parents, since no matter how miserable their lives turned out, they were genetic winners in the fact they had you)
> More importantly, you highlight something else - choice is not the same as free will. Yes, we all have choices we make every day. They seem to be our will because we don't understand how they were made down to the particles. Whether or not there is free will, there is always choice. So the question is, when is the lack of free will actually relevant?
Great point. This should be brought up more often. Many discussions of free will completely skip over this angle.
I haven't studied the subject but on the odd day, it'd pique my curiosity. I've thought on these lines earlier but eventually I'd end it with "but the very act of choosing to make a choice" is in itself governed by the presence/absence of free-will. I have to admit I've not made progress from that point (neither have I made efforts to break through that barrier).
How is free will not the same as choice? A lack of free will is an inability to exert agency through choosing. Determinism removes the possibility of choosing.
If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires. Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?
You're being quite naive, not understanding what the issue is.
Of course everything you do will be a product of what "you" "decide" to do. In that, completely naive & day-to-day, sense of the phrase, "you" do have "free will".
But how did that "decision" come to be? Was there a cause for it to happen? If so, what caused it? If it was caused by deterministic laws of physics, then that doesn't sound much like "free will". If it was random, it doesn't sound like "free will" either. What is "free will" and how does it start electrochemical reactions in your brain which will result in a movement of your hand? What is "you", which posseses "free will"?
It's all about definition here I guess. I would say choice is the illusion itself.
I chose the words I did, but the "how" is all an answer of essentially very complicated physics, chemistry, biology, and everything I've experienced in my life.
>"If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires."
This is absolutely false. My desires are still a part of what drives me. I express myself every day in countless ways. The distinction is that I didn't have free will - it was always going to happen, in the way it happened. My consciousness does not understand how it came to that though, so it sees it as choices I made. It's just a bunch of molecules reacting to each other. That doesn't say anything of what the reactions mean or make what I do or feel any less important.
> If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires. Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?
My words are "my" choice and indeed the product of my desires, but that me and those desires are nothing more or less than the product of various mundane processes. I could never have been anything other than myself, and as such I could never have chosen any words other than these. (And if my choice of words was not determined then that just means they were random, which doesn't seem to make them any more an exercise of agency or free will - fundamental particles are able to behave just as randomly as we are).
I am a coherent existence because the causal relations from one thing to another really do go through a nexus that can be identified as me, but there's no free will there - what would it even mean to have free will?
> A lack of free will is an inability to exert agency through choosing.
Not at all. A computer program can easily do such things as choose items from a list, and thus create the appearance of agency to an outside observer. But that doesn't mean that it exhibits free will.
> Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?
I was thinking the same. If we have no free will, what made us think that we don't have free will? Because we don't have free will, the thought on "not having free will" should probably the outcome of the past actions, which we didn't have choice on that either. Is it inevitable for many people to think so? Why not the rest?
> I don't believe in free will, but I believe that there will always be the illusion because the computing needed to know anything before it happens is far too much, and if you knew, it would add another layer of things you'd need to compute, meaning you still wouldn't know your choice ahead of time.
Interesting. I arrived at the same conclusion for myself, but used it as justification that I, basically, "might as well believe in free will". Sort of like a duck typing approach: If it walks like free will and talks like free will, I can just act as if it's free will.
> I find it kind of amusing that people think free will is an illusion. It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.
And yet, my own fundamental perceptions say otherwise. If I sit here and try to decide to do something, how do I do it? I kind of... wait. Wait for some idea to pop into my head. Wait for something to appear before me. Wait for some feeling to push me one way or another. Try as I might, I can't find anything inside me that could constitute free will. Just a jumble of perceptions and inklings that change with the wind.
And yet you still choose. You're trying to dissect your agency, but it's too fundamental to be analyzed like that. It isn't a decision-making process: it is the decision itself.
Writing that reply to me required a series of decisions on your part. Do you feel like your words are under your control? Communication requires choice... if we have no free will, then we're mute prisoners. I'm pretty sure I'm not a mute prisoner, and if I am, then whoever is controlling my typing is making a cruel mockery of my plight. :(
That's a different axis than the free will vs determinism debate though. What you are describing is your (and my) inability to convincingly prescribe meaning to our actions. Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it is determined.
Try give up all your bad habits, today. You (or at least most) will find that our "free" will is barely free on the margin. We're able to change, but not in an instant decision, more like a chemical process - slowly, methodically, by working at our inner animal. Many can't change, just stay stuck in their habits for life, despite how free we believe we are.
> Before Descartes could proclaim "I think, therefore I am" he had to choose to make that proclamation.
Not at all. I could program a PC to say that. We believe he chose that. A determinist might say he had as much choice as a plant. A person with his characteristics, given his context, would say something like that. Now if he chose to take up gymnastics and run away with the circus, that would be more like free will. Try acting out of character. Quite hard.
Hardly. It just seems a bit presumptuous to claim firm knowledge of the fundamental, low level workings of one's brain.
In general, I find these discussions often go on far too long without even bothering to define the terms. "Free will" itself seems to be an incredibly nebulous concept.
> It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.
Or maybe it's just that all of my experience, memories, thoughts, and sensory input leading up to this exact moment in time leave me involuntarily with the belief I don't have free will.
"Free will" is not a terribly well defined notion, but it's usually considered distinct from the concept of consciousness. Moreover, most people tend to define it in a way that is incompatible with a deterministic universe (indeed, in some cases that is the definition). One can of course be fairly certain that "I think", but that doesn't necessarily mean they can be sure "I decide". Once could instead imagine that our conscious experience is merely a strange phenomena caused by the entirely deterministic actions of our brain, and is merely along for the ride.
Now personally, I believe there is no coherent definition of "free will" which is meaningfully distinct from "will", and as such, in as far as it can be said to exist, we must have it. I'd love to be challenged on this, so I'm a little disappointed to see how many people in this thread seem to be making assertions without defining anything. These are incredibly subtle concepts that require precision if we are to have any kind of meaningful discussion.
I think this is the most insightful comment on HN I have read in a long while.
We are limited by the concepts our minds can form. As I commented before, free will could arise from an infinity of antecedents; the fact that we find it difficult to wrap our minds around such a concept does not in any way imply anything about its veracity.
I could not agree more; things like consciousness and free will are very likely to require concepts of almost infinite complexity to model. It is the height of hubris to say something as inane as "science disproves free will", to think we can settle these questions with with glibly, with concepts that are the product of a mere 70-or-so years of mental development
You don't need to grasp any of the complexity to believe that free will does't exist. In fact the argument is almost a truism: as long as the mind is something created by the brain, and the brain is governed by the laws of nature (both known and unknown), then there's no free will.
It's a somewhat tired argument, because it's mostly semantics. But it really doesn't matter how complex the brain is.
> as long as the mind is something created by the brain, and the brain is governed by the laws of nature (both known and unknown), then there's no free will
There are three assumptions here that need a citation.
The idea that we can predict human behavior and thus invalidate the concept of free will is that there exists an algorithm that takes less time to run than the future human behavior it predicts will happen in. However, certain biological processes, like protein folding, take exponential time to compute, so we're going to have to make due with approximations for now. Thus, there will always be some aspect of the unknown with regards to human behavior until we get those algorithms to run faster.
I find it kind of amusing that people think free will is an illusion. It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.
This "Science disproves free will" thing has the epistemological hierarchy reversed: one of the surest things I know is my own will. Before Descartes could proclaim "I think, therefore I am" he had to choose to make that proclamation.
The argument that free will can't exist because it involves infinite regress is not particularly convincing: if anything, we should expect that our agency springs from something as bizarre as a causal singularity. Consciousness is weird as hell, and I expect the true nature of consciousness will turn out to be weirder than we can imagine.