There is free will: we make choices even if our atoms don’t

So typical - there is no clear definition, lots of ambiguous terms...People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms.<p>It&#x27;s not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle.<p>1. Determinism or not, free will doesn&#x27;t exist in either case. 2. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random. 3. Me deciding something doesn&#x27;t happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say &quot;fuck it, it&#x27;s chocolate&quot; that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4. The whole idea of &quot;me&quot; being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.<p>If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.

The strongest argument against free will doesn&#x27;t have to do with determinism (and I agree with Christian List that looking at lower levels is a category error). Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can&#x27;t say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it.

&gt; If you try to make sense of human behavior, not just in ordinary life but also in the sciences, then the ascription of intentionality is indispensable. It’s infeasible and not illuminating to explain human behavior at the level of astronomically complex neural firing patterns that take place in the brain.<p>“It’s difficult to describe macro behavior as a direct function of micro behavior, therefore, intentionality doesn’t belong on, nor should be falsified at, the micro level.”<p>All of the lines of argument in this article seem pretty weak. My time of disrespecting modern philosophy has sure come to an abrupt middle.

&gt; Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level.<p>Not sure I understand&#x2F;agree with that. Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?

Are you going to read this comment or not? this is a choice. If you read it, will you respond to it? yet another choice.<p>I can stay the fact that you&#x27;re reading this far is a free choice you made out of possible alternative forks of reality. Yet, if I attempt to dig deep on why you have decided to read thus far, I&#x27;ve to factor in your genetic makeup and the summation of all the experiences from the moment you were conceived until this very moment, which is impossible to do, I also have no way to infer the current state of your mind, your brain state is unaccessible information to me. So, I just abstract it all by giving YOU agency, a free will. You choose to read this far by your own freewill as far as I can tell.<p>Therefore, freewill is a concept that exist at certain plan of abstraction (along with the concept of I and YOU) but they all dissolve once you try to peek inside inner-working of the brain&#x27;s decision making machinery. But since we human don&#x27;t have a way to peek inside each other brain in real-time with ease, we operate at the higher level concepts of YOU, and I assign the agency and &quot;freewill&quot; to YOU since I&#x27;ve no better explanation of why you have read up until this point.

All arguments I have ever seen involving free will, from both sides, are very weak. It is a branch of philosophy that is particularly self-obsessed, and particularly unlikely to make any decent forward progress. The people who write books about free will are self-selected for a tendency to pontificate on a topic that has no foreseeable resolution.

&gt;<i>The jury is out on whether the world is fundamentally deterministic...but suppose it is. This does not necessitate that the world is also deterministic at some higher level of description.</i><p>Ah, so there can exist counterfactual levels of description which are inconsistent with what may be the fundamental nature of reality. This seems accurate. (C.f. religion)<p>&gt;<i>We can attach probabilities to different scenarios, but it’s not the case that the weather state at the present time fully determines the weather state in a few days’ time. Multiple different trajectories are entirely possible.</i><p>In superdeterminism, the state of the universe at the present time <i>does</i> fully determine the weather state in a few days time. Multiple trajectories are <i>not</i> physically possible, though we are able to probabilistically model such trajectories based on the incomplete information that we do have access to.

HN should institute a rule than anyone replying to a free will thread should get 2ⁿ negative points for each post, where n is the depth position in the thread.<p>Present company included, naturally.

Step 1: Define &quot;Free Will&quot;.

I&#x27;m not convinced. At least not by the summary this article puts forward. Perhaps the world isn&#x27;t deterministic (although how could we possibly know?). Even if it isn&#x27;t, that non-determinism is only visible at the smallest of scales. Whether an electron is here or there is hardly likely to be caused by my mental states. So, if we don&#x27;t have free will, at best we have random will. That is not free will as most people conceive of it.<p>To the whole section about human behavior being too complex to explain in terms of fundamental physics, my answer is: it can&#x27;t be explained in terms of fundamental physics <i>yet</i>. But, again, given sufficient time, research, and computational power, it seems highly likely that eventually human behavior will be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Or at least, we will be able to simulate a human (or higher animal) brain with sufficient resolution so as to demonstrate that there are no other inputs to cognition than current state + laws of physics. I really don&#x27;t see how our current inability to explain human behavior physically has any bearing on the question of cognitive determinism.

I think the root of the problem is in trying to use logical proof to reason about things that are beyond the limits of logical reasoning and our relatively small human minds. We know from results like the Godel Incompleteness theorem that even mathematics has very real limits on what is provable through human reasoning. The logical paradox of free will and determinism is like the paradoxes used within mathematics to prove its own limits. It is unfortunate but predictable that we cling to the delusion that we can resolve the paradox of free will through logical reasoning. There are some aspects of reality, particularly those dealing with one’s own mind or self, that cannot be reasoned about. It is also a well known open secret that those aspects of reality, while beyond the reaches of thinking and logical explanation, can be directly experienced. The practitioners of various forms of meditation experience have a great deal to report about such experiential knowledge.

&gt; <i>You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level of description, your decisions can be truly open.</i><p>They essentially redefine &quot;free will&quot; as &quot;difficult to predict&quot;, instead of &quot;truly random&quot; or &quot;magical&quot; or something like that.<p>With this definition of &quot;free will&quot;:<p>Does a cow have free will?<p>Does a tree have free will?<p>Does a rolling dice have free will?

I can flip a coin every time I have an opportunity to make certain minor choices. Some of those choices will turn out to have major effects (my whole life changed once because the batteries were low on my Walkman and I tuned into the radio instead of playing a cassette tape like I otherwise would have). Most will not.<p>The point is, I can do this, and I have. Other times I have chosen not to leave as much to chance. For all practical purposes, to me this indicates sufficient free will for me to comfortable believing I have it.

Since we are discussing if there is free will or not can I get an answer to who first proposed the solution I describe here [0]. I know I am not the first person to have raised this argument, but I can&#x27;t find who did.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tillett.info&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;the-last-word-on-free-will&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tillett.info&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;the-last-word-on-free-wi...</a>

If some process M behaves according to fixed rules yet no other process can exist that can determine, with certainty, M&#x27;s behavior ahead of M, then M is still &quot;deterministic&quot; in the physics sense of the word, but is it deterministic enough to claim no free will?<p>I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is, could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely well-defined.

I don&#x27;t see how conflating inscrutible with non-deterministic is useful. But this is the argument the author is making. They seem to argue that it is a useful thing to do scientifically. Perhaps philosophers would do well to focus on whether a different person in the same circumstances would be forced to make the same decision. The answer is clearly no. But not because of a lack of determinism.

This is just another false dichotomy theists like to use to argue their case. It&#x27;s like arguing whether humans are inherently good or evil - no, humans create both of those things. Or whether the universe was created or not. Why make up stories for something we can never know?

I wrote a koan about free will not too long ago...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchgordon.me&#x2F;zen&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;02&#x2F;koan-of-will.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchgordon.me&#x2F;zen&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;02&#x2F;koan-of-will.html</a>

As long as the concept of infinity exist it&#x27;s impossible to say that existence is deterministic or not. It&#x27;s rather determinism wrapped in indeterminism and that wrapped in determinism so on and so forth.

Does anyone know of a good text that will better help explain the concept of &#x27;free will&#x27; and the agruments around it? Kant et al are completely opaque and nearly unreadable.

Before you go on disparaging the author and philosophy in general like the proverbial xkcd physicist, take a look at this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compatibilism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compatibilism</a>