> Free will requires unpredictability, but not all unpredictability is free will.

Then you may want to update the abstract, because there you explicitly claim otherwise:

> If human action is fundamentally unpredictable, then we have free will.

Simulations have a lot to be considered about them, and there's a fair bit of uncertainty there too (the idea of simulated realities simulating realities simulating realities and the probability of us being in one versus the question of whether simulating an entire universe (or even a galaxy) would require an entire universe/galaxy anyway and thus one wonders what difference it would make/could it even continue ad infinitum).

Regarding God, it's more of an idea before even getting to/outside of any big religion in particular. Is the universe/multiverse causeless or is there a being that created it that's causeless? That's where the question lies, and where I don't really know what to believe in either direction.

I think that by tickling yourself, you created a beautiful picture of how an observation could both prove and disprove free will simultaneously, determined by how you measure it.

It's almost like saying a photon can be a particle and a wave at the same time, but completely different 🙃

It seems like you're defining free will as the ability to make decisions that are fundamentally unpredictable. That's not what the vast majority of people seem to mean by free will. What people seem to mean by free will is something like they can make decisions that are not completely caused by things they ultimately never chose and/or not completely random. That's the type of free will that seems to matter to people, and it's the type that has moral implications, and it's the type that's impossible.

Complete Free will sounds too daunting

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While I think it's a slightly more complex issue than just semantics, another undefined term that will likely cause problems for your argument is the assumption of identity you use with "I". One of the more widely discussed issues of late is whether there is a coherent identity you can posit as "I", and if so, what its boundaries and qualities are. Is this something like the Kantian unity of apperception? Does it necessarily include my body and my consciousness? Personally I am sympathetic to the view that "I" is merely a kind of awareness of ourselves after the fact. But my point is, you can see that if I adopt this definition of "I", I am making a subterranean assumption that refutes your criteria, and vice versa. Discussions about free-will are downstream of discussions about consciousness and identity.

I think any theistic model immediately crumbles upon any sort of scrutiny. Sure, a deity itself can not be disproven; but we can explain why religions exists, we can track their origins, their evolutionary value, and on an individual level all major theistic belief systems are full of contradiction. Couple that with a complete lack of evidence that any theistic interpretation of the world could be righr, and that is enough for me to completely disregard any theistic perspective from consideration.

I can't know if there are any reasons quantum mechanics are as they are any more than the reason a photon spins left or right. It just does!

I do not believe we are in a simulation, but I also like the thought experiment of how a simulated universe would need to work, and I like the idea that, in a simulated universe, superposition (light behaving as a wave when the precision of a particle is not needed) is a computational trick to save resources. Like a videogame engine showing you an approximate idea of what a tree looks like from far away, but showing you a fully detailed model of a tree if you get closer and start inspecting it.

This ties everything up in a neat little package that makes sense, that is why it is tempting to believe in it. But making intuitive sense to a human is not required for an aspect of reality to be true, so likely not in a simulation.

Very well said 👏

I like how your argument about the meaninglessness of these discussions seems to fit perfectly in the picture of a recent essay I wrote about how realistic our perception of reality is and how different it could be to every individual. 🙂

What about operant conditioning? Do people have "free will" if their behaviors are unconscious incompetence or unconscious competence? What about trauma responses for folks with PTSD?

If someone is outside their window of tolerance, the prefrontal cortex goes offline and their lower brain regions take over. The person experiencing it feels like their body "took over" until the prefrontal cortex comes back online. Sometimes folks have enough bandwidth to consciously practice a regulation exercise to help their prefrontal cortex come back online faster, but it takes training and practice to accomplish. (See polyvagal theory: Stephen Porges and Deb Dana)

It's all very interesting. I wonder, too if quantum physics is God's way of preventing determinism/predictability and enshrining free will. This is of course under theistic models, though. I'm an agnostic currently.

To explain, quantum mechanics refer to the behaviors of particles, which work differently than large scale physics predicts. The most important aspect to this discussion is particles behaving differently when measured vs not measured. Light for example is a wave when not measured, and a particle when measured. The photons, before being measured, act as a wave becaue their values are not defined before measurement (or observation). This is the source of true randomness in the universe. Theoretically, you could predict the behaviors of anything in large scale physics by having the starting conditions. Quantum mechanics do not allow you to predict the future even with the starting conditions.

Since our brains are essentially quantum computers, it can not be claimed that our choices are pre-determined. This does not prove free will beyond a reasonable doubt, (randomness being involved in our decision does not entirely disprove the notion that our decision is just a mechanical process) but it is a very strong argument for free will because it at least contradicts the notion that everything that we choose is pre-determined by the starting conditions in a system.

I read the summary and the excerpts of the pdf, but didn't notice the answer to how free will works.

If a set of neurons fire because they're in a situation, and I lift my finger, at what point has free will created the energy to make that happen?

Said another way, if Free Will it didn't create energy, the physics of the system would have kept it proceeding in the non-finger-lifting path, but free will changed that.

That sounds like an infinite energy source, which would be admittedly neat.

Thanks for the link to the site and the pdf contained therein.

My brain is way too small to get a firm grasp of quantum physics and its mechanisms to form a meaningful opinion with it.

But based on the principles (I think) I understand from it, I also believe it could give us the ultimate answer to this question.

Let's just hope the answer doesn't turn out to be "42", leaving us with the need to find out what the actual question was 🙃

Quantum mechanics point toward determinism not being possible. Not just that, but local realism is false; which means that either reality can travel faster than light,(locality is false) or that particles definitely do not have set values before observation (realism is false)

I personally suspect both to be false, but I am a geek and not an expert so don't take that as more than a hunch. But even if only realism turns out to be false, that is enough to dismantle determinism and, in my eyes, a strong case in favor of free will.

Humans don’t have the total self reference you talk about on 313. A computer can’t have perfect record of every process since each attempt to record or log a process must be itself recorded and logged by additional processes, ad infinitum. Humans are not aware of all our processes, down to each cell, as such a thing would be computationally impossible. However, our actual level of awareness is no more impossible than a pc showing you a task manager. Our current level of self reference doesn’t meet this requirement for undecidablility.

You already raised the correct objection to infinite state spaces. I think I can illustrate it with an analogy. Saying “Humans have infinite state spaces because we have an impression left by even very large numbers,” is like saying, “This computer has infinitely more storage space than you think. (hits with hammer) Look, it has stored the imprint of this hammer.” You’re confusing a psychological response to incomprehensible numbers with actual storage of said numbers. Also, even if you were right about humans storing a unique impression of everything they’ve ever experienced and that being equivalent to state space. That’s still nowhere close to the infinity you need to make statements about Laplace’s demon.

And you’re probably wrong about different numbers leaving different impressions. I’d bet money that if we gave you a 3000 digit number your “impression” would be the same (no measurable difference) no matter what the 347th digit is.

A trillion molecules with a trillion different possible combinations is a large number. It is not an infinite number. To Laplace’s demon, this might as well be 8 total combinations. We also have reason to believe that the total number of imaginary objects or scenarios might be similarly finite, if incomprehensibly large. I expect we have a finite list of objects and scenarios we’re determined to imagine.

I don’t understand why you think generating an unsolvable problem means that the being who generated it has an unsolvable will. Stating a paradox doesn’t mean you incorporate a paradox in your own thought process nor does it mean you have violated the genetic and environmental causes which determine your choices and thoughts.

There's very interesting work in this regard. Roger Penrose put forward a theory and, after criticism, a defense of his theory that our minds are a sort of quantum computer. I haven't looked too far into it personally, but as much as we can and should always maintain initial skepticism, there may be some validity there since the guy is a complete genius and literally won a Noble Prize as recently as two years ago.

Again, it's kind of an appeal to authority fallacy so it doesn't mean he's immediately right. I just like to think of it in the same sense of when I consider people like Aristotle, etc. of like, "Well, that person's pretty fucking smart, maybe there was something there".

The Cartesian approach is always very interesting in this regard. Consciousness implies at least some kind of self.

Out of curiosity:

1. In this case, do you believe consciousness encompasses the entirety of the person, as in the "I" that we can most certainly believe to exist (the one that sees, experiences, feels, etc.) is the same as the one that moves, acts, speaks, etc. and thus there is only one "self"?

2. As a follow-up, what do you think our existence consists of? Non-reductive physicalism, mind-body dualism, idealism, something else?

It's certainly a very interesting and possibly valid point that a person is not the same as just the collection of his cells... But then my question is what separates that person from said collection rather than being just a huge pile of complex cooperations between those cells in which the predetermined nature of everything just got a bit lost or impossible to perceive?

Imprecision in predictions is basically unavoidable in any domain. Weather prediction is a good example.

Take a much more chaotic system than weather, the human mind, and you have more imprecision. Not to mention the hardness of getting informed about the state of human mind which is required for accurate predictions.

With a good enough prediction model and good enough means to be informed about the state of my mind, you can know whether I will skip dinner.

Everything points to the conclusion that we cannot guess because we don't know enough and it's chaotic.

Quite right that it's mostly refuting arguments from the other side. But I think I do make a positive argument that my two criteria for free will are met; that I am the source of my actions and that I can do otherwise. If I'm right about being non-reductive in scale, then the whole person is the source of action. And if I'm right about temporal asymmetry and undecidability then the whole person can do otherwise.

But yes, this completely depends on picking the parameters for free will. I also sometimes feel that nearly all philosophy is pointless in a way because so many topics depend on prior agreement on concepts that may be inherently squishy, and are endlessly open to be undermined.

Those are also very good answers! Especially the one concerning the AI, which, as I understand it, attributes it more as a case of probability. I think we need quantum physics to further unfold this, which exceeds my knowledge way too far to say anything meaningful about 😊

I also agree with the argument that I'm not a group. But I don't think I entirely agree with the last sentence. I agree that an individual action can make the group less predictable, but not entirely, and also, this doesn't eliminate the possibility that the individual action was made with free will or that it wasn't determined by the workings of the group as a whole.

The way I see it can be compared to the working of the vast quantity of cells that taken as a group make us who we are... these cells individually are encoded with DNA, which determines how they work. Adding them all together creates a huge and complex entangled group of predetermined actions in which the meaning of the predictability mostly gets lost. Also, the other way around, our actions or external factors we experience can have an influence on the behavior of cells, either individual or groups.

So then the question might become if our collection of cells, or part of them, does the same for us as what DNA does for the cells or if we become an entirely new being that's seperated from the elements of which it's made. In the case of the latter, this also raises the question; with what, where, or how can the separation declared?

Okay. Basic idea: free will is the ability to do other than expected, where the expect-or is Laplace’s demon. Some human actions meet this condition, because the human brain is an undecidable computational system.

I had a couple of issues.

First, intuitively free will involves the possibility of any of multiple courses of action (looking in the future direction, to use the language is the article). The objection to this in the article is basically, when you’re making the choice, you’re only doing one thing. So, it doesn’t make sense to say there are multiple possibilities open to you. To the contrary, we can say that at time t1, it is possible that at time t2 I am doing A, or that I am doing B, whereas at time t2 it is only possible that I am doing 1.

But I don’t think that matters much, since the project is still interesting.

Second, key to establishing that the human brain is an undefinable computational system is the claim that the brain has infinite state spaces. This is supported by the fact that we can conceive of the natural numbers, which are infinite.

I’m not convinced that this means the human brain has infinite state spaces. We never conceive of each natural number itself. What is true is that for any of we can conceive of any of an infinite number of sets of numbers, but each of those will be of finite size. It is also true that we can think such terms “as infinite”, and various associated ideas, “1-to-1 mapping onto the natural numbers” for instance, but everything we’re ever actually thinking is finite.

Basically, it’s possible to represent some facts about infinite sets with finite information, which seems to be what we actually do.

As an additional comment, the article also contained a discussion of human decision-making being self-referential. It’s a bit long, but you may want to check out this talk by Jenann Ismael, in which she makes the self-referential aspect of decision-making key to an account of free will.

Molecules are the small parts of a person. Or cells are, or quarks are, etc. I never said that molecules are not the small parts of a person. I just used molecules one example of a type of small part that gives you a terrible sense of the properties of a whole person.

I won't take the time to wade through the rest of the the reading comprehension issues here.

But your last paragraph isn't based on a simple misreading. It's an interesting question whether your own decisions surprise you. In a sense they do. If you know what your decision will be before you make it, then you've actually already made your decision. But you don't make your decision before you make your decision. I don't see that as a problem, but it's interesting.