Why do people care about free will and is there such a thing anyway?

Someone said

It's a bit of a hot topic to tackle, but my overall impression is that there is no such thing as that "base state" the quotee refers to; there is no ability to consciously and deliberately choose with any independence of one's circumstances, and, once the decision has been subconsciously reached, there is nothing to do but to retroactively justify it.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

You don't strictly need to summarise the link in the OP, as you're not using it to replace an actual OP, but having a summary of that source would be good for the discussion so if you have the time, I'd like to ask you to provide a summary of the main points in the OP.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

WRONG THREAD

edited 21st Nov '12 2:58:57 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016

I just exercised Free Will by posting here. I could very well have not posted. Backing up, I could have chosen to not click the thread link, but I did (obviously).

So yeah, I think there's free will. It comes up in some religious discussions from time to time, so that might explain why it's viewed with some matter of importance, as well.

That said, the OP's link makes for a fascinating read, and I will now wiki-walk for quite some time.

edited 21st Nov '12 4:13:31 PM by pvtnum11

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

This strikes me as a meaningless point to make. It's the circumstances that force a choice to begin with; you don't make choices in a vacuum.

The entire justice/legal system depends on free will. If there is no such thing, then it would be impossible (and unethical) to hold people culpable for crimes. There's another system that depends on free will, but it escapes me at the moment.

edited 21st Nov '12 4:18:43 PM by Zephid

I wrote about a fish turning into the moon.

Well, if you didn't have free will, would you know it. If you look at humans from a scientific view, we're just a bunch of chemical and electrical impulses interacting. Now, considering that chemicals interact by "rules" (pretty immutable rules, at that), couldn't you say that you could, if you modeled it perfectly, perfectly predict how anyone reacts to any stimuli? Thus, couldn't you make the case that there's no free will, as the same electro-chemical impulses will, by their nature, react in a predictable way, because they're governed by physical laws, to any stimuli?

This, of course, leads into the question of "is there an randomness in the universe." Currently, I think the only case of "true" randomness we have is the locations of electrons in an atom's orbit.

Anyway...bit complex, but I'm not entirely certain that we have free will. We are a product of our most basic components, which do follow hard and fast rules.

Also, not necessarily so. In my mind, the legal system exists to protect people, and to try to provide greater safety and happiness for everyone. It doesn't matter if a person's in his right mind, if people as a whole are going to be made safer/happier by removing them from society, then we have an obligation to do so.

edited 21st Nov '12 4:31:01 PM by DrTentacles

From a strictly logical and materialistic point of view, the concept of free will makes no sense. There doesn't seem to be any way of defining exactly what it is that is making decisions, if it isnt a deterministic stimili-response mechanism in the brain. You pretty much have to presume some aspect of yourself that exists outside of the paradigm of cause-and-effect in the universe.

The reason that people care about it so much is, of course, that no one wants to think of themselves as an automaton. That would seem to imply that our sense of self is based on an illusion. Also, it's frightening to think that science could one day understand us so well, that anyone could be manipulated into doing anything, that all of our personal freedom would essentially disappear.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Yeah. Honestly, if you think about it, Free Will doesn't matter. The world isn't suddenly going to chance if you realize that people don't have free will. The only thing that's bothersome is people trying to use lack of free will to justify crimes. Free will or not doesn't matter, what matters is the end result.

^^ That sounds like a diabolical scheme of some mad scientist, actually.

Plus, this might be a somewhat appropriate comic for this discussion. Think I'm off to find some squirrels.

edited 21st Nov '12 5:41:18 PM by pvtnum11

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Hah- no mate, it's the very down to earth goal of the world's marketing community. Think about it...

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Oh, of course. But since I view marketing schemes as diabolical control schemes, it all fits.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

That "someone" was me. I just suggested that the discussion be moved to the appropriate thread to avoid drifting away in another.

My main point is that the mere existence of outside influences does not preclude free will. They simply push you emotionally in one direction or another, making you sway in wanting to do something. But one can go with the gut feeling or reconsider and choose otherwise.

By base state, it's application of the concept of free will. You take a being possessing it, and add to that the influences that change the situation from that base state. In a theoretical model, all influences would have equal tug exerted.

I'm gonna say that it doesn't exist, at least in the traditional sense. Every choice you make is made for a reason (a combination of how your particular brain is wired and what your past experiences are). If you run the same scenario over and over again without changing anything, you'll always make the same choices because the reasons for each choice have not been changed.

Even in the closest dilemmas, you end up choosing something for some sort of reason (even if it's just a coin toss, of if the choice you make is "neither").

The mind doesn't exist in some outside, non-physical zone. Brains are physical objects, and the chemicals within them will always behave in how the laws of physics dictate they do. Free will and relativity are mutually exclusive.

edited 21st Nov '12 6:49:25 PM by RTaco

I actually like the fact that we're both a collection of a thin layer of reasoned thinking... and a total black-ops black box underneath it all when it comes to our decision-making processes. Oh, and a part of the brain whose job seems to consist of "OK... let's try explaining what we just did to the rest of the frontal lobes before we have a identity crisis..."

Life would be boring if we could tell exactly what we'd do in any given situation ahead of time with no surprises.

edited 21st Nov '12 6:45:01 PM by Euodiachloris

@Triv: It seems to me that one has to already presume free will for your "base line" idea to make any sense. Which is fair enough, except that wouldn't answer the OP.

The question any materialist is going to ask in re to FW is: What causes you to make the choices that you do? If the answer is some version of "my brain" then how does your brain free itself from the law of cause and effect? If the answer is "it doesn't" then presumably any choice it makes is predictable from prior causes (presuming those can be known). But if your choices are predictable (at least in theory) then in what sense are they free?

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

It also totally ignores the fact that people don't make the same decisions under the same conditions all the time (granted, a hard thing to test for without hitting, "But, they thought it only a test and learned during it, too! And, you can't ensure all factors are accounted for!" accusations).

The cognitive apparatus always seems to be caught between various behaviours and paradigms to utilise for most situations... and, so, often seems to have options when it comes to paths taken. <shrugs> It can be both surprisingly rigid... and plastic in a semi-chaotic, semi-patterned set of interlocking processes (some of which are in conflict).

Um... I guess what I'm saying is... "cognition ain't easy"? And, Cognitive Psychology has had to scrap the "rational, free agent" hypothesis as being totally swamped by actual, empirically sound evidence to the contrary. It's way more complex than that.

We're both free... and not free... all at the same time, with further options upon request.

edited 21st Nov '12 7:15:17 PM by Euodiachloris

Do people really not make the same decisions under the same conditions, or is it that it's impossible to replicate the same condition twice? I tend to think it's the latter.

Then again, I'm somewhat convinced we're slaves to our biology.

But then we kinda are our biology. :o

ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅ

The concept of free will has always struck me as somewhat terrifying. If my thoughts and decisions aren't restricted by the structure of my brain, or if the structure of my brain isn't restricted by my experiences so far, then at any moment I could decide to murder someone, and be totally Ok with that. I like having my personality determine my actions.

Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.

Yes, what else would we be?

Of course we are "slaves" to our biology. It's just... the biology has given rise to a very strange, wonderful and complex system that seems to be capable of more than you'd think possible...

And, a heck of a lot less.

<shrugs>

About the "same conditions twice" problem: yup. That's the bugbear of practically every cognitive study ever written. About half the words written are usually trying to hunt for all loopholes to close in working out what factors you can't possibly account for, just to show that, yes... you have thought of that, thanks. With the additional subtext to your potential detractors of "and, I'd love to rip you apart next time, when you try something like this, matey: just watch me..."

edited 21st Nov '12 7:47:11 PM by Euodiachloris

Removing people from society for our protection is the work of prisons. The legal system sends people to prison, and to do that in most countries it is required to prove that someone willingly committed a crime worth sending them to prison for. "Willingly" is the key word there. Legal codes around the globe have exceptions for people being forced to commit crimes by factors outside their control. If there is no free will, essentially making all factors outside individual control, no one can be held morally responsible or culpable for their actions. They could always point to one stimulus or another (more likely a mosaic of stimuli than a single one) in their lives as proof that they could not have helped committing a certain crime, and therefore can't be held responsible.

Believe me, it's the sort of defense lawyers salivate at the chance to get to use. It can be very convincing.

You're thinking of free will in very absolute terms, something I've found counterproductive. The analogy I've always liked when thinking about free will is considering the range of motion of your left arm. You can choose to move it in many different ways, for a reason or for no reason, at your whim. You are, however, restricted in that motion by the structure of the arm, the need for it to remain attached to your shoulder, and so on. In the same way, your thoughts and personality are restricted by your experiences and past decisions. You could choose to try on a completely different personality, just for kicks, but you'd probably find it very difficult to do just because of how you've developed so far.

edited 21st Nov '12 8:25:11 PM by Zephid

I wrote about a fish turning into the moon.

Unless you, for instance, suddenly receive blunt-force trauma to the head sufficient to reroute temporal lobe pathways thanks to damage.

Then, you can try on a new personality, all right. One others might wish you could take off. <shrugs> (Other people find it very hard to cope when the person they were used to is there-and-not-there any more.)

edited 21st Nov '12 10:24:10 PM by Euodiachloris

Free will seems to be similar to the concept of a soul. Most everyone will say they have one, but they seem to not be able to pinpoint it. So like a soul, I deny free will for the same reason.

What part of a person is freewill?

Stop caring and embrace nullness.

But here you are talking about "freedom to act", not about "freedom to will". Whether or not it could have been predicted that one would choose to shoot a person is not of any relevance for the question whether they should or should not go in jail; what is important is whether them shooting a person happened as a consequence of them wanting to shoot that person, which can certainly be the case even if their decision of shooting is a direct consequence of the boundary conditions of the universe.

However, the fact that it is possible to predict one's decisions from neurological data before they become conscious of having made a decision does not strike me as a strong argument against free will. After all, it is certainly true that we are not particularly aware of what goes on inside of our minds, except for a very imprecise, "surface-level" approximation.

A truly detailed explanation of what goes on inside my brain when I choose which sandwich to get would probably fill several libraries, I think; and the fact that I am not aware of that process until it has reached its conclusion is interesting, yes, but not terribly surprising.

There are some different definitions of "soul". According to Thomas Aquinas, for example, a soul is the substantial form of a living being — basically, a description of the structure of that being, or, to quote Wikipedia, "the structure or configuration that provides the object with the abilities that make the object what it is". Does that pinpoint the concept well enough for you?

edited 22nd Nov '12 12:05:58 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.