I’m so glad you said this. I have been wondering if anyone else has been going through this. I catch myself after I speak certain sentences thinking, “wow that was a good thought you just said. That was well-articulated…. Where did that even come from?” But I also have those “what the actual fuck did you even just say” moments. Like I am a live studio audience to this animated meat machine that seems to run itself and make decisions seemingly outside of my own control sometimes.

Today driving to work I called 911 after witnessing a woman swerving all across the highway for a few miles. I actually drove past the car and looked inside to see if the person was distracted or what the deal was. Thinking back, it was really stupid of me to drive up next to this person who I just watched drive off onto the shoulder of the road multiple times. But as soon as I saw that it was a zoinked out woman with what looked like a child seat in the back seat, my chest sunk through the fucking floor.

Literally seeming entirely outside of my control, I whipped out my phone and dialed 911. The call took 4 minutes but it felt like 4 hours.

Or there are those times where you just get mad to the point where you say or do something you instantly regret. Some people mention that it’s like they weren’t even in control when they did some horrendous act. Like, where do thoughts come from anyway?

I don’t know, I’m just some nobody on a random rock in a random galaxy in some random universe for no reason and none of it makes sense lol.

I agree with you when you say

> One of the central criteria for free will is “Could I have done otherwise?” But because of a temporal asymmetry in human choice, the question makes no sense.

I think that free will is a useful concept that feels true and useful, more true and useful than the alternative of “already written”.

I’ll give the example of watching a recording of a basketball game where I already know the final score. I am watching the deterministic process of things unfold, shots being missed, fouls being called, players getting tired. But at the end of the day, I know that the score will be met, even if that means one team hits 15 three pointers in a row and the other team misses layup after layup. It will happen.

And yet, a coach can say useful things about the deterministic side of things, things like “you’re not turning your hips enough” and “see how the defender turns his head here and there is the possibility for an entry pass?”

But nobody really has anything useful to say about the extra knowledge version where the interplay of actions and decisions is taken off the table. You’re left with inanities like “I guess the home team is going to get hot in the second half” and things like that.

Choosing between which version is more interesting and useful, it’s the deterministic, free will one. (I know that determinism and free will are often put on opposite sides of the debate, so I think it’s interesting that in this thought experiment they are on the same side, against a sort of omniscient pre determination.) Believing in free will let’s us talk about habit formation and deciding who you want to be as a person and all that stuff. It’s William James’s Right to Believe. In a debatable situation, we’re allowed to throw our beliefs behind the worldview that gives us more of a chance of success.

Very much agree. Each of us is an observer to our thoughts and actions while our brains actually determine how we react to stimuli.

> quantum mechanics can mean no free will while also

OH...... I thought it just mean free will , where can I read this basing?

Superficial attempt to shoehorn a bad position into logical language. You don't need to be out here pushing the idea of free will, we've had millennia of religious zealots and other "intellectuals" trying to figure out how to make this illogical and unworkable position work, and we've already figured out a bunch of ways to dress it up in ways that hide the issues. We don't need you regurgitating arguments that are as old as time and easily debunked. Think harder, go deeper. There is no binary between free will and no free will. Having no free will is functionally and experientially identical to having free will.

The map analogy really doesn’t hold up when you bring up “prediction of the unknown.” A map only gets its lines and colors from what’s observed in the territory.

Lmao I wasn't going to comment anything even though I was tempted to make the general comment of "it's hard to make a compelling argument on something you are wrong about" in response to your article. But here I find you in the comments telling people that the problems in your reasoning and argument are actually comprehension issues on the side of the reader. That's the single biggest hallmark of a bad author - blaming the reader for just "not getting it". Don't do that.

Read about the Young/Double Slit experiment. The whole reason why the Schrodingers Cat thought experiment and quantum mechanics came up in the first place was because they were able to cheat the observing condition, in other words they managed to "observe" something without that something knowing it was observed. It also demonstrates the concept of superposition, or having all the possibilities exist at the same time and even interfering and interacting with each other.

Really makes you think about what it exactly means for something to be observed and for all those possibilities to resolve themselves to one outcome. Or if we're the ones that simply branch off to another timeline that represents one of the outcomes.

I just don't really see why unpredictability should be identified with free will. Seems like a very superficial way of thinking about it. I don't really think there is a possible definition of free will that is both coherent and non-trivial.

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Thanks for the tip. It's not always easy to translate these kinds of ideas and questions into words without having an academic background. Did a quick search on Kant, and it seems like his first critical work could cover some inspiring points. Might well be worth a closer look, indeed.

Second this. OPs reply sounds exactly like a crude intro to Kant's metaphysics.

And on the point of program data duality. I’d be willing to delve into this idea more but it doesn’t actually seem necessary at this time for you to prove this or for me to refute it either way.

So in summation I’d say politely that these are good and interesting points but I believe you’ve smuggled free will into negation.

A DUMB AI could arguably fit these three definitions depending on how you worded them but I think the fact that a “dumb” aI could probably work with an infinite computational medium shows us that this specific point isn’t where the argument comes from because I personally really enjoyed this point.

Plz feel free to push back if you’d like to go over it with me

Negation-

Moving on to negation, this actually doesn’t seem to me to be what humans do. A human brain is a large number of systems “battling” for power. It seems to me that trying to say that a human being provides an answer that is exactly contrary to the processing is either saying too much or too little depending on what you believe you’re actually claiming. I actually think you’ve smuggled the whole free will claim into this point here.

Take for example chatGPT I think one could argue that ChatGPT could fit this if you’re defining it in the way I would agree actually exists. But I think for this term to do the work you want it to you might need to smuggle magic in.

If you're referring to the apples redness analogy, here's my thoughts on it. There's indeed no redness to be found in constituent parts of the apple, but there's still a relevant causal connection between those parts properties and the emergent quality of the whole, the redness. So you can't just disregard that connection because you found no redness at that level, something other than the macro property on the micro level caused the macro property. The parts are demonstrably relevant here. The same is true for the main problem.

I don't think philosophy can just ignore science anymore.

I feel like some aspect of agency is lost here. When do you know you've made it? Our conscious thought is what gives us the sense of free will, but neuroscientists have proven with a few studies that our brain decides before we do. What is free about that?

As any other animal, we came from survivalist routes. I believe our "consciousness" and social abilities have allowed us to reach how far we've come as a species. But I think we can be studied in predictable ways like any other living thing that exists.

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Hey bro this is a great paper and I’m gonna spend some time to try an see if I can find where it’s wrong but in order to do it right I’m gonna have to go point by point and really think about your argument.

I started with “Infinite computational medium” It seems that being able to think of any number is something that a human might be able to do. When I think more about it though it seems like our “dumb” AI can do a similar thing. ChatGPT can handle really any string of words and provide answers for them. You could give it potentially any number or string of letters to work with. So this isn’t unique to us. This doesn’t refute what you say but I imagine this could be relevant later.

That last part helped me get an idea about the connection between these 2 concepts. And to bring this back to the original topic of free will brings a lot of extra questions to think about. Like if we are our own observers constantly deciding freely in which timeline we continue to exist, and if this would count for both the sum of our parts and consciousness, or only for te latter. And so on... 🤕

This gave me a lot to think about for a while 😅

This, times a million. I'm convinced that human experience/existence is comprised of two separate but connected identities. I've come to think of them as the "perceiver" and the "decider". The decider is the subconscious beyond "my (perceiver)" control, making decisions based on physical composition of my thinking meat at any given time and it's relationship to all available stimulus. So, determinism can still exist or not, and have no bearing. "I" could still have "done otherwise" based on any number of factors, even down to pure random chance at a quantum level as far as when neurological potentials "trip" and I make a discission to say, press either a red button or blue button at a pre determined time. "I" made that choice, but it was the "I" that I don't control. And then I'm left to witness reality play out from a separate "I", namely the "perceiver."

I dunno. I'm not formally educated in philosophy. so I don't know how to present this concept better. But it seems to me I don't often run across this idea often in free will discussion. Determinism seems to be a very enticing red herring. But I do believe the core of why I don't believe in free will is the recognition that there are two separate "me's." And neither one of them can be consciously controlled.

Simply put, you can not choose to not get mad.

If you had free will, you could.

I say "hey, exercise your free will, and don't get mad." Then tell you about some horrendous thing I did that harms you emotionally. You absolutely can not choose your emotional response. Now, you may think you are choosing how you act on that emotional response, but even that "choice" in how you react to the emotional stimulus is dictated by, it or pr dictated on all previous experience which have formed all your responses. And that decision is no more "yours" than is the emotional response itself. Brains are physical electro/chemical systems.

Weather the univers is deterministic or not does not have primary bearing on free will. If you want to prove free will by pointing out "I could have done otherwise" then your missing the point. All that does is discount determinism. But determinism is not required for "no free will" to be true.

How can seperate the 'whole person' from its environment? And if we don't have 'free willpower our environment, how can we have it over ourselves? Does a dog, or am ant have this same seperated freedom from its environment? Or are we simply a process with the ability to reflect, but not change, that purpose.

Okay. You might want to think about the presentation to make your purpose more clear.

You might also want to look at Kant.

That's all fair. I just think of metaphysics as physics potentially not yet realized, and quantum physics has at least put forward the idea of the possibility of extra possibilities beyond things we can currently conceive.

Regarding things that may not be currently falsifiable, I think it depends on the idea. Sometimes the ideas are useless to consider, sometimes we may in time know the truth of them, and some of them are just left in a state of "remains to be seen". In that sense, a lot of that kind of stuff is in the grouping of things I don't necessarily believe in, but are interesting to consider, may be verified in the future, and aren't necessarily worth tossing out straight from the get-go.

I'm mostly asking questions about how realistic our perception and descriptions of that reality are. Assuming we already experience things we already consider as reality such as colors differently, In other words: does physics accurately describe how reality is or only the ways in which we all perceive the same relative differences between stuff compared to each other.

Another question could be if there is really something like empty space in which we and everything we see exists? Or is it rather a characteristic of al the matter and / or energy or whatever reality is made of, which we all just perceive in relatively the same way?

I don't really find much value in anything metaphysical or spiritual. Growing up surrounded by it as well as religion it has become incredibly apparent that it is all made up. I understand the desire to imagine there is something more to us than matter being funny, but everything we know suggests we are only matter.

I think we have free will and intelligence as an emergent quality of the biochemical processes that we are formed by, conciousness may indeed be more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps conciousness is the result of the quantum superposition of what happens in our brain, but I do not think it is reasonable to entertain the concept of some unmaterial soul, some entity that exists beyond the body and brain. All of our best evidence tells us the only logical conclusion is that there is no afterlife, or karma, or reincarnation. It really is not logical to believe in anything else when we can be pretty certain we already know nothing happens.

People still believe in other things, of course, or they at least entertain some ideas related to spiritualism. That is ok, belief is natural. I personally feel like truth is more important, and I am simply not convinced by "no one can truly know". Just because something can not be proven false does not mean it is possible. I know there is no afterlife and consider that a fact, because that is the only possible option.