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I find arguing over free will to be a little pointless, because determinists tend to be people who simply don't understand the concept of emergent properties. It's why things like "the ability to do otherwise" that you mention don't really matter to them - if the universe is at base random and chaotic rather than deterministic, it's still not something that you have control over. Basically, free will is not a property of the universe at a basic level - it just emerges in certain complex systems. It's like "life" or "consciousness" in that respect. But emergent properties are difficult to explain, and a lot of people would rather disbelieve in them rather than admitbto the reality of something they don't understand. Hell, I've seen people argue that consciousness and even life are illusions rather than face having to admit that the world contains things science can't easily explain.

I would accept being me and living my life over and over again though I’m not sure I’m utilizing my life to the best of my ability but does that matter? Does this mean I still accept the eternal return? What is living life the best one can mean? That idea seems relative to the individuals perspective and desires, the only absolute clear answer is that we all die. I’m not sure I’m using my life the best way, but I only know my life and my perspectives so I can only live this life and I’m gonna die just like everyone before and after me.

Sorry don’t mean to ramble.

There's several things I disagree with here, but I'll only mention one because I have to go to work.

You're equivocating between all of my potential deaths as if they're all the same event. I can choose a lot of actions that lead to different deaths. So what if I can't choose to never die? I can't choose to fly like Superman either. No one thinking about free will ever thought I could.

> It's not that deep.

Did we even read the same article?

I do know it's not deep at all. Yet there really is this aura of not just "philosophical curiosity" but even "academical relevance".

> Like most shows do.

Most shows have lots of inspirations and references, yes. But that's it then. Fans may then write whatever they want, and perhaps a few of them reach really thoughtful levels.

Yet it's always only NGE that you hear. Like, I get it's also the most popular (for as much as this is kinda a circular explanation) but this is totally despite its shallowness. And wrongness (because jesus H. christ anything that mentions freud should have a disclaimer)

It's almost as if people were working backwards from some kind of need to validate/romanticize/elevate the characters (as opposed to them only being the eventual object of the analysis) if everything and the kitchen sink is good enough to throw at the wall just because they have been named once.

> The Christianity stuff was done for stylistic reasons

I mean, that's seemed to be the topic you were focusing this comments tree on.

So you’re making a faith based argument. You don’t know that you didn’t have free will before you were born - and now you don’t, anymore than, you don’t know that you didn’t have free will before you were born - and now you do.

What IS known is one day you were here - however the means. That’s all you can say definitively - that is true. With that foundation, it’s more of a foundation of something based in determination than one’s choice to be here.

The experiential aspect of thinking you’re choosing to be here rather than offing yourself might be free will, but it’s also equally likely to be deterministic.
Did you get to choose to be in a body that gets chronically depressed?

Two things are true, you’re born and you die, and these are determined experiences that you can’t run away from or use free will to avoid. If this beginning and end of one’s life is determined and destined to happen, however and whenever, than it’s seems unreasonable to believe (because it’s a belief) that you’re in control of the experience of life.

If something is not provable or disprovable by evidence then the entire concept may as well be discarded out of hand as it has no relevance to our experience of reality. What is real can be demonstrated by evidence, what cannot be demonstrated at all is as good as fiction.

I liked the paper. It's a fascinating subject for me, and the one thing my wife and I really disagree upon (and she's a Jungian). I always say "You have all the free will in the world to do the one, exact thing you'll actually do". In my belief, "that one thing" is already written in stone, it just hasn't happened yet but it's the only thing you will do.

I didn't have sight before I was born, but now I do.

I didn't have free will before I was born, but now I do.

I choose to be here every day.

Damn. I didn't consider that.

Right? Shit's crazy.

Well okay, now that I've been forced to think about this more deeply I'll agree with OP that maps are about prediction. Why do you use a map? Because you don't know where you are with any great familiarity and need it to make predictions about what will happen if you walk in one direction or another. Prediction is primarily what the validity of a map relies on.

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But did you choose to be born? Did you say somewhere in the ether “hey I’d like to be born” and then you were born? If not, than either by fate or design it was determined you’d be here. The foundation of your existence on earth was determined, not chosen.

Free will is the argument people make hoping that it’s the individual that makes evil decisions toward others, not the design of fate itself.

Determinism, as meaning every choice is hard-coded, sounds very silly to me, and I don't see many people arguing for it.

I think my interpretation is still in line with the thinking behind determinism. That, the agency people feel in their choices is a farce, and really they are selecting from a limited set of options defined by the way their mind works. And that, in most cases, they will make predictable choices, whilst feeling they are choosing freely.

This is for sure probabilistic but I feel it keeps in line with the deterministic thinking that free choice is a farce

So.. the results of experiments depend on how you define the terms used in the experiment? I’m other news…

>Prediction of the unknown is the only worthwhile property of a map.

Not according to the original commenter. If it’s any purpose of a map, predicting the unknown might literally be the last objective of a map. Maps are straightforwardly and primarily about recording what has already been discovered.

The analogy basically works, until you use it to say the opposite of what the objects in the analogy are really for.

well i think the core of the analogy is just representation vs real thing being represented, rather than a literal map.

Yeah, ole Chrissy Columbus, and countless others, tried that.

1. I don't think unpredictability is a great definition of free will. Its incomplete imo.

2. The compatiblist definition seems what ur closest too, and this seems like a reasonable free will. Most philosophers believe in compatibalist free will.

3. Libertarian free will is absolute nonsense on par with believing in fairies and only a thought in peoples heads because of religious indoctrination. This requires being able to do different if you hit replay... as you correctly state is nonsense.

Redefinitions of free will are kind of useless imo... as ur simply not talking about what others are. Theres way too much baggage on the term free will causing equivocation on redefinition. Whats the point of redefining free will to some infinite state space predictability stuff that has nothing to do with what others mean... why not use a different term to define a different concept? I think the reason is because we piggyback off the baggage of the term "free will".

Theres issues with scale of predictability as well. Example quantum systems and reality may be fundamentally probabilistic, but for any actual mental decisions and things at human scale they fundamentally aren't probabilistic and are predictable. Similarly unpredictable numerous potential neuron states does not mean unpredictable decisions or actions. Also human action is fundamentally highly highly predictable in many ways, our inability to predict things does not mean they are unpredictable. I guarantee when ai can better measure brain states it can certainly predict our outcomes almost perfectly. As neural nets will make this trivial.

If ur definition relies so heavily on predictability, what happens to your "free will" when ai or a psychologist predict your behavior. Do mentally ill people or people with bipolar have more free will because their actions are fundamentally more unpredictable?

I think there is also massive problems with ur infinite state space claims. Taking the amount of neurons then just adding them as a binary is insanely wrong... thats not how neurons work even remotely, or math, or brains, or physical space. Its akin to saying theres 2^^999999999999999 atom combinations in my body... therefore i have infinite potential of body forms i can take. Its preposterous imo. Theres also assumptions like every neuron can interact, despite that obviously not being even close to true as neurons can only interact with the few in their proximity. Also theres the issue of equating mental representations of physical numbers to a binary brain state, as if our understanding of the number 1 = brain state neural binary 01.. this is not what numbers or how our brain represents them. Then there is the issue of even if i grant all this... that immeasurably large number of neuron combinations is still not infinite... its unreachable... BUT its fundamentally NOT infinite.

Maybe i just don't understand what you mean... but then again thats another problem with redefining words with a lot of baggage.

No, he means that in order for you to know that you are doing the best you can with your life, you can pretend that you will live the same life over and over again for eternity. If you would accept the eternal return, you know your are doing the best with your life; living it as well as you can

If not, you should question how you live, and try harder to live a life worth living

This is a thought-experiment

I think that it's correct to use a "backward-looking" point of view: after all, we have to draw conclusions about the future on what has already happened.

However, not in the conditional sense of "what could have happened", or "could I have made any other choice?". To me, not only is that inherently unknownable, but it just confuses what is a very simple matter, that things happen for previous reasons (causes), and nothing happens without either a known reason (not free will) or unknown randomness (which is not free will either).

So, take any decision process that is claimed to be a "free will" process, and just work backwards. Ask why that decision was made. Either the acting party knows or doesn't. i they know, voila, there we have out determinant reason (cause). A different reason (cause) would have led to a different result.

On the other hand, the acting party might have no idea why the decision was made, so that can hardly be called free will. It just happened as if the decision had fallen out of the sky (randomness).

I really think it's that simple an issue. For any decision process there will be a series of "why" questions to determine how one chose this or that decision. Determinism or randomness (where randomness simply means we don't yet know the deterministic cause due to lack of knowledge).

>What makes you think people can't, in at least some cases, control their emotional responses?

So, is your assertion then that sometimes Free Will exists and sometimes it doesn't? Seems to me it's a rather binary proposition, I mean if you can exert free will in some cases, why not others? Does the severity of the stimulus affect whether or not you have free will, and therefore the ability to choose your emotional response?

As to what makes me believe that people cannot, in any circumstance, control their emotional response.

Well that's based on 40 years of observation. And a recognition that almost everyone else's emotional responses work relatively similar to my own. That, coupled with being able to formulate hypothetical scenarios which explicitly lay bare the notion that you cannot, in fact, choose your emotional response to any stimuli.

Consider this...

You are at the park rolling around a ball with your most favorite precious little puppy whom you love dearly. You adopted this puppy from a shelter and you and this puppy share a deep emotional bond.

Now,

 Scenario 1 - a man walks by, looks at the puppy, looks at you, then leans down scoops up the puppy carefully holds it against his chest, scratches behind it's ear, then gently sets the puppy back down and continues on his way.

Ultimately, this is a fairly innocuous event. However, you most definitely experienced some emotional response to this event. Perhaps, beer, because you did not know this man's intentions and whether or not he was just going harm your puppy or just walk away with it. Perhaps you experienced happiness, because you assumed that he was doing the very thing he ended up doing and you find it pleaseing that someone else finds your puppy adorable, so you experience some amount of Joy or happiness.

 Scenario 2 - a man walks by, looks at you, looks at the puppy, then proceeds to kick the puppy like a football, looks you straight in the eye, truffles and walks away.

.. An absolutely horrific event. To which you most definitely have an emotional response. Great, anger, abject horror...

Now, in either of these scenarios, did you choose your emotional response? Could you choose to respond to scenario two with joy and happiness? Could you choose to respond to scenario one with absolute furious anger? To be sure, depending on your ability you could outwardly act in a seemingly incongruent manner. But that still would not change the fact that inwardly you had an emotional experience beyond your control. And even in scenario one, we could add additional background information which would alter the most likely expected emotional responses. And these would be the things that influence any given emotional response to any given event you witness no matter how innocuous or impactful it is.

And in the same way in which those previous experiences and your current state of mind dictate the emotional response you will experience, so too does previous experience and current state of mind dictate any action you will or will not take when experiencing any given emotional response.

The emotional response, the action you do or don't take based on that emotional response, very act of having an inner dialogue weighing out potential benefits and outcomes of various courses of action, all these things are beyond your active control. They're all the results of your brains current condition. We can even see this cases of people who experience head trauma. When the rain experiences literal physical alteration it can completely alter someone's personality. And they cannot simply choose to behave in the way they did prior. Their behavior, and thus there responses and actions to the world around them are entirely dictated by the physical composition of their brain which is intern manufactured by all previous experiences.

All these things occur beyond your control and interact in such a way so as to make you feel as though you are actively making these decisions. To be sure, it is a very strong illusion, but it is an illusion nonetheless. Elsewise you may as well be a radio that believes itself to be the world's greatest musician simply because it receives a stimulus processes said stimulus through available circuitry and then generate output based on that processed stimuli.

(Please be assured that no cute little fluffer puppers we're actually harmed in the formulation of these hypothetical scenarios, though unfortunately, neither did any cute little puppers receive ear skritches)

As for the second part of your comment, I'm not so sure anything I've said should have implied that I believe that any of this is removing the "I" from the system. Merely pointing out that human experience is comprised of interconnected identities, however pointing out that neither of which is an "I" that can choose, through free will, to act with disregard the physical composition and current state of mind which it emanates from.

>I see determinism as defining the likelihood of certain decisions being made, not necessarily what choice WILL be made.

It's that literally the difference between a probabilistic system vice a deterministic system? Why call the probabilistic one deterministic?

Yes, but we need to believe that "selves" can be controlled otherwise how could we enact laws and operate as a society?