Do Humans really have free will?

[Platinum117]

An interesting little point I mused on while bored out of my skull.

Disregarding religion entirely or any sense of a higher being guiding us do we really have free will? We can of course choose our path whether cirumstances allow that path to fail or succeed. The very basis of free will in my opinion, we can make up our minds or choose not to. We can care or not care.

But there is a lot that we cannot control. For instance we are born with instincts hard-wired into our minds. The instinct to pro-create for example, we may not have any desire to have children in our conscious minds but burning at the back of every single one of us is the sheer unbridled impulsion to make sure there is something to carry us on. This is not something we can choose to ignore in a right minds, sure you can ignore if you want to. It's not going to go away though.

Another example is emotion as a whole, who would choose to be unhappy given the choice? Surely our own emotional responses are our own doing? Then why can we not just choose to be happy? Why can we not just choose to be indifferent when somethign angers us? These emotions will cause us to take actions we dont't neccessarily want to take.

If this is all true then our free will is limited to a very small scope of possibility. At the end of the day we have been programmed through thousands of years of evolution and we are not going to shake off that programming for a long time yet, if ever.

So my question is this, is free will merely an illusion? A very narrow window of choice that we believe to be larger than it really is simply because we cannot see outside this narrow view?

Damn i feel pretentious right now xD

 

[TaboriHK]

Your choices are influenced but not controlled. Every decision is the responsibility of the person who made it. Nothing is stopping me from doing anything that I could conceivably do except me.

 

[the_pleasure_is_mine]

Throwing away any sense of a higher guidance throws away any chance I have of explaining. I'm not a religious man but I have interesting views on free will.

But I'll try and tackle it anyway. I think generally yes, we have all these instincts hardwired into us but we also have the power to ignore them, otherwise we'd all be sex crazed and food obsessed, but we can overcome then.

So I say free will is a definite. It just whether we choose to exercise it.

 

[onewheeled]

Eh, I guess I accidentally posted in the now-locked duplicate thread, I'mma just copy and paste my response into this one...

This is something I've thought about for a long while. Being a Christian, I'm taught to believe that God has a plan for everyone, that He is in control of what's going on in our lives. But what about the choice to follow or betray Him? Is that up to us, or is He in control of all that?

If it's true that we aren't in control of our lives, then oh well, I guess I've been living a life of simulated choice without complaint, why start now?

 

[Choppaduel]

I guess that depends on how the brain works exactly.

 

[Platinum117]

Your choices are influenced but not controlled. Every decision is the responsibility of the person who made it. Nothing is stopping me from doing anything that I could conceivably do except me.

If you understand that your choices are influenced then surely you can see that free will is an illusion? All our choices are influenced by our own sub-conscious, experiences you may not even remember may affect your ability to make free choice. There is a distinct difference between what you want to do and what you choose to do.

 

[Agayek]

From a purely scientific point of view, humans do not have free will. The human mind is a state machine, roughly equivalent to a Turing Machine with a frankly ridiculous number of states. Given the exact same stimuli, an individual human mind will react in exactly the same way every time.

That said, with the sheer number of variables involved in such a task, creating such a scenario is the next best thing to impossible. That's why we have the illusion of choice. The stimuli are always at least subtly different, and that creates enough leeway for "choice" to come into the picture.

 

[Simnic]

even if you have two choices wouldn't it still be free will if you could choose between them?

And you can choose to be indifferent when something angers you. It's just easier to let anger flow. The same with unhappiness. The amount of willpower required to completely shrug off an insult, attack etc. is enormous, but one can still choose to attain it.

Ps. if you find anything that is poor English, then I don't really care.

 

[Darth IB]

Errrr. It seems to me you're not asking whether we have free will, but to what extent we do have free will.
And yes, I believe we have free will. There are of course things we cannot control - like emotions, as you mentioned, but I would argue emotions are as much part of the human "machine" as, say, his blood circulation. You cannot choose to not bleed from a cut, and likewise you cannot choose not to be affected by an emotion. You can, however, take steps to lessen the pain in both situations, which we tend to do in various more or less predictable ways.

Finally, if we had no free will then our consciousness is entirely pointless, and probably wouldn't have existed in the first place.

 

[TaboriHK]

Your choices are influenced but not controlled. Every decision is the responsibility of the person who made it. Nothing is stopping me from doing anything that I could conceivably do except me.

If you understand that your choices are influenced then surely you can see that free will is an illusion? All our choices are influenced by our own sub-conscious, experiences you may not even remember may affect your ability to make free choice. There is a distinct difference between what you want to do and what you choose to do.

That makes me biased, not trapped.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Eh... You should see scientists get in on this subject.

The growing opinion scientifically is that free will doesn't exist at all.

But if you actually look at some of the finer points of the scientific discussion on the matter, you find an immediate, and glaring problem.

Nobody can agree on what 'free will' actually means.

And if you can't define what it means, how can you say if anyone has it or not?


Still, the most severe line of reasoning rejecting free will outright, is based on the presumption that free will implies being able to make a choice without outside influence.


But, unless you bring in religion, or at least metaphysical concepts such as the soul, can this really be said to be possible?

After all, cause and effect can be said to govern everything about a person, even if they aren't consciously aware of it.
You might choose to eat an apple right now, which, if you followed the trail of causality back could have been from something totally unrelated, such as seeing a stone fall off a cliff 3 years previous.

Granted, the examples get really contrived, but it comes down to there being no part of you that is seperate from the environment around you. As such, anything in the environment can influence you, and you wouldn't even know about it.
A 'Free' choice, may well be constrained by the sum of all prior experience in your life; The only way it could have happened any differently, is if your life up to that point had been different.

But, since you can say the same thing about all prior moments, there isn't actually any point in time at which you were ever capable of making a 'free' choice.

There's also other theories, based on somewhat less restrictive notions of what a 'free' choice actually is.

But meanwhile, there's also experimental evidence to show how messed up our reasoning actually is.
An experiment apparently showed that as much as 85% of the choices we make aren't even choices at all. We just rationalised our actions after the fact to make it seem like there was a decision involved.
Unfortunately, whatever 'decision' we made, happened after the event.
And if you are making a 'choice' after the action you're deciding about, it's not really a choice so much as a justification.

Anyway... Look up some papers. Or articles in New Scientist or something. I guarantee you'll drive yourself nuts with this.

So... Have fun. XD

 

[YouCallMeNighthawk]

Free will is an illusion. It's a bit like free speech, they say we have it but in reality it is controlled.

 

[TomLikesGuitar]

ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW FOR SURE THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE OR OF ANYTHING METAPHYSICAL.

Now that that's out of the way...

I like to think every single thing in the entire universe is mathematically calculable, down to every decision we make... we just don't understand the human brain enough.

For example, pretend you are going to do something... action A. Say you are also having a conundrum of free will and you ponder doing the opposite... action B. But then you consider that by doing action B, you are actually succumbing to a notion of fate.

So, you alternate back and forth and finally make a decision.

I think there are factors within the brain and within the specific persons genetics and within their own personal experiences that would allow us to calculate flawlessly whether the person will choose action A or B.

So, as far as I like to believe, there is only the illusion of free will, and there is only scientific fate.

 

[Chamale]

Humans do whatever they want to do. What they want to do is regulated by their brains and circumstances. Because the brain must obey the laws of physics, one could, with perfect information, predict a human's actions exactly. A person doesn't have free will in that sense, since their brain must obey the laws of physics. But one couldn't do this anyway, because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

 

[Spacewolf]

no any branches on the path of your life are the domain of hindsight and what ifs.
Since all your actions are decided by the results of a previous actions then since your first actions/experinces where dictated by your parents they made your first choices thus you never had any degree of choice, what choice you would make in a given situation was already decided before the situation appeared

 

[viranimus]

Ehh.. In my estimation free will exists. What we lack is the willpower or clarity of mind to manifest it.

I think the biggest thing that limits free will is the supposed nature of humans being a social animal.

We allow our will to be dictated by others. Be it friends, family, carnal intrests, corporations, marketers, vices, basically any human action and interaction gets colored by our associations.

We also live in a civilized society, which hinders the notion of free will. In order for will to be free it requires complete and utter freedom, which we basically can never have or else society would be torn asunder.

So to that end, We do not have free will because we are always governed by external influences, But we have the capacity for free will.

 

[tehweave]

Free will and the pre-set path that has been laid out before us by all the other people in the universe go hand-in-hand. Granted, I have the free will to go purchase a gun and run down the street shooting everything, but I won't. I also have the free will to grab my girlfriend inappropriately in public which will render one of two reactions: A swift punch to the shoulder or her lightly pushing my hand away, then winking.

On a whole, we do have free will, but there is a LOT that we can't control, namely, the other people in the universe. There's some days when you're lucky (and I do believe in luck) when the people at the DMV are having a better day than usual. They had great sex last night, got a huge tax break, and when you go in to renew your license, they brush off the fact that you don't have your social security card, and simply go off your license, making your day a little bit easier. Of course, they might have recently been dumped, gotten a ticket themselves, and need to vent their aggression somehow so they act like a total ponce when you come to them and don't have that one little slip of paper you had no idea you needed to have.

That's what luck is, I believe. Just how everything around you folds together, and whether or not its in your favor or not is... Well... Entirely luck. We don't have total free will, but we do have the option to slap that person at the DMV across the face. Then we have the free will to run away from the police who are now chasing us.

 

[Blemontea]

I believe in "free" will... if we can ignore all the "programming" in our right mind and do stupid things then i would say we have free will because we can say NO to things our mind says YES to and we can say YES to things our mind says NO that is free will against the "programming" all the pessimist shout about and just because we can be influenced from outside decisions doesn't mean were aren't still making a choice by our own hands.