Is Free Will An Illusion?

Is X An Illusion?<p>Is "the word Illusion" an Illusion? Does it convey a sense of mystery and secret knowledge where there is none?<p>When people actually claim something is an illusion, do they actually have a clear idea in their head about what they mean, or are they playing semantic games with flipping back and forth between mistaking the word map for the reality territory and not?<p>Yes to that second one.<p>All "X is an Illusion" means is "that definition for X you thought you had? It's not right." Which is a much less, well, <i>stupid</i> way to put it. Of course, it doesn't have the same ability to confer Special Knowledge that the Plebes don't have.<p>Free will isn't an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. Time is not an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. Our sense of self is not an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. And so on.<p>Stop it with this damn worthless "illusion" word. Maybe go study General Semantics instead, since all the word does is reify map/territory confusion and basically doom what could otherwise be an interesting debate from the very beginning, and General Semantics has some choice words on that topic.

I've always been on the fence on this issue due to two concerns I always saw as conflicting until recently: * Causality * Perception of free will<p>In my mind, it always made sense that I couldn't have free will with causality as then my brain is really just an insanely complex chaotic system that only appears to be random. Allowing for freewill in something like that would appear to warrant the idea of magic.<p>But then my friend remarked that instead of the universe being driven based on causation why not imagine it all being correlation based? Any scientific experiment really only proves correlation to a mathematical model. Unlike pure math you can't <i>prove</i> a hypothesis using anything nearly as rigorous as induction (since the infinite is out of our reach).<p>By not taking that extra step of saying science proves causation of certain phenomena and just leaving it at correlation I think ideas such as freewill and the odd uncertainty of quantum mechanics can mesh with our macro level view of the universe.<p><i></i>shrugs<i></i> I thought it was interesting at least. :)

<i>Or is every choice -- even the choice to prepare for future choices -- an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid?</i><p>Is water really wet, or is water really made of non-wet atoms of hydrogen and oxygen over which an illusory wetness is laid?<p>It's self-defeating to define free will in a way that inherently violates physics, but it's easy to define it in a way that doesn't, but still preserves what we mean intuitively by "free will": If it's possible to perfectly predict (absent actual errors in either mechanism) what a system will do without simulating it, the system doesn't have free will. If it's not possible without simulating the system (and the actions of the system aren't actually random), then it could be said to have free will.<p>This still leaves the possibility that it will turn out that humans don't have free will, of course, or only have it in certain conditions.

&#62; Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it.<p>&#62; All of the data of cognitive neuroscience are pushing us to replace the idea of mind-body duality…<p>This is ultimately an issue of definitions, but for me, those two quotes are the main takeaways. You have to decide whether there is such a thing as a self that exists apart from the couple pounds of organic material inside your skull. Science hasn't found hard evidence of such a thing.<p>If you give that credence (albeit while remembering that absence of evidence != evidence of absence), forget about whether you have free will — the bigger question becomes to what extent "you" exist in the first place. If you're comfortable reducing yourself to your brain (and science would probably suggest that you should be), then it's not a problem; you do have free will, as long as you're willing to define that as having a set of chemical reactions sitting inside your skull, doing their thing.<p>If you aren't comfortable reducing yourself to your brain, the search for free will and a self gets a lot more stressful.

I think part of the problem is to use "free will" as a name for thing (like an organ, next to, say, the liver), rather than as a name for a process. If we ask "how do we DO free will", we might start to get somewhere, I think.<p>I think we "do" free will rarely, with most of our lives running automatically. When we hit trouble -- a turning point, a fork in the road so to speak, where it is no longer obvious what to do -- THAT is when we have to "do" some free will. But most of our lives aren't driven by free will or conscious choosing, but rather by skills we develop when we are enculturated into our society, skills that get trained into us so deeply we don't ever think about them (automatically getting saying thank you, etc). (When we have to consciously choose too much of daily life, we call that autism...)<p>At those turning points, I think we need language. First, language (words either in our head or in conversation) clarifies the options by giving them names. Second, language enable us to arbitrarily choose one of the options and stick to it. Finally, language enables us to imagine the negation of a situation once we have named it, and thus open us to creativity. Without language, we can only do what we feel like instaneously.<p>So, while that was an interesting article, the debate is framed subconsciously makes in a way that makes it impossible to get a good answer. Also, none of these ideas are mine -- I am regurgitating the original thoughts of Heidegger, Peirce, and Bourdieu.

"I don’t think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will!"<p>--<p>That's a rather large philosophical debate to be skimming over so glibly... and the world is not completely mechanistic (quantum mechanics).

Be careful that your philosophy does not get caught in the definition of words. I would think an illusion is something that occurs once you are aware, because your awareness is fooled. If the awareness is the illusion, then who's fooled? I wouldn't think you could fool an illusion, but the meaning of words is quite subjective.<p>If you want to make a point, say something like: "free will is your mind regurgitating sensory information and decisions you took moments before by relating them to current senses and memory creating a feeling of awareness", that takes away some of the thunder, but also part of the ambiguity.

This is very in line with the discussion of Free Will in Waking Life: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VxQuPBX1_U" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VxQuPBX1_U</a><p>They mention quantum mechanics and the randomness there may have some impact on free will.<p>Also, I think the double slit experiment is interesting. If we observe some things with our mind, then the outcome can change. We can ignore things as well. Introspection may enable free will.

"Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions."<p>Who takes seven seconds to decide which hand to press with? And was it seven seconds from the time they were given the instruction, or seven seconds before they pressed the button (independent of when they were given the instruction)?

I read about this several times and I think this whole button experiment is somehow screwed. The measure some brainwaves and draw such a fundamental conclusion without really understanding what they measure. Maybe we are just making our decisions in our mind before they get transformed into language or actions. But that wouldn't imply that these are not our own decisions.

All I'm seeing is that we tend to follow our instinctual reactions. Which isn't really surprising, considering how close we are to when our survival depended almost entirely on making a snap judgment and executing.

If effect necessarily follows cause then yes.<p>If that is true, then "repeating" the universe would lead to exactly the same outcome. Hence we have no free will.

Is free will an illusion?<p>Yes! \<p><pre><code> Let these two asses be set to grind corn! </code></pre> No! /

If there is no free will then our will is determined by our DNA. Since our DNA is subject to continuous change via random events, then do we have 'random will' and does that make it 'free will?'