Poll: Does free-will exist?

[mrwoo6]

Yes, it does, because despite what our brains tell us (logic, emotion, pain), we can and often do make the decision to go against that.

Can you really? Can you give just one example of this having happened in the whole of human history? I don't think you can.

Simple one: say someone's tired. If there was no free will, the person would meet that need and immediately go to sleep, but who goes to sleep every time they start to feel tired?

There's a difference between giving in to physical stimuli and "going against what our brain tells us" which you originally claimed. In the above case you would only not go to sleep if you brain told you it would be a better idea not to - whether it is 'correct' is irrelevant as we are irrational creatures - for example to stay up and play computer games or do whatever. Your brain has taken all the available stimuli and made a choice, you are slave to that.

But you did say that was a simple one, maybe you want to fire another?

What you are describing is what I described above (on this page) as freedom, which is a quite different concept to freewill. You are free to go to bed or stay up, but the choice you end up making is certainly not a free one, it is dictated by chemical processes etc as I described. Now if you were being tortured and not allowed to sleep, then in this case you wouldn't even have the original choice, so you're restricted to what you can do. This is a lack of freedom.

Not quite. Sometimes it's a better idea to go to sleep (i.e. work the next day) but people still don't. Also, hunger: food's sitting right there, no negative consequences, but some people still choose not to eat.

Freedom is whether circumstance allow for a choice to be made, free will is whether you make that choice anyways. I'm certainly not "free" to yell that there's a fire in a movie theater, but I can make the choice to if I want due to free will. Resisting any temptation is free will, because there is the impulse from your brain to take a certain course of action, but you resist because you can.

What about actions with no stimulus? There, I just snapped my fingers for no reason.

And would you have done this if this argument had never had happened? it was not your freedom of choice to snap your fingers, you did it because this argument caused you to. If you grow up in bad area filled with drugs and strife it is not your freedom of choice to not get shaped by that. various aspects of life and people help create an illusion of freedom. Perhaps a social worker asks you not to take drugs. and taking these two variations. if you say yes then you have been shaped and effected by the social worker not yourself. if you say no then you have been shaped and effected by your drug taking friends again, not purely yourself. you may say its your freedom of choice to choise these two paths, but thats not true either. perhaps your parents died and your were looked after by your friends more. it is much more likely you will do what your friends tell you.

everything you do is shaped by the people around you.

 

[Jedoro]

Yes, it does, because despite what our brains tell us (logic, emotion, pain), we can and often do make the decision to go against that.

Can you really? Can you give just one example of this having happened in the whole of human history? I don't think you can.

Simple one: say someone's tired. If there was no free will, the person would meet that need and immediately go to sleep, but who goes to sleep every time they start to feel tired?

There's a difference between giving in to physical stimuli and "going against what our brain tells us" which you originally claimed. In the above case you would only not go to sleep if you brain told you it would be a better idea not to - whether it is 'correct' is irrelevant as we are irrational creatures - for example to stay up and play computer games or do whatever. Your brain has taken all the available stimuli and made a choice, you are slave to that.

But you did say that was a simple one, maybe you want to fire another?

What you are describing is what I described above (on this page) as freedom, which is a quite different concept to freewill. You are free to go to bed or stay up, but the choice you end up making is certainly not a free one, it is dictated by chemical processes etc as I described. Now if you were being tortured and not allowed to sleep, then in this case you wouldn't even have the original choice, so you're restricted to what you can do. This is a lack of freedom.

Not quite. Sometimes it's a better idea to go to sleep (i.e. work the next day) but people still don't. Also, hunger: food's sitting right there, no negative consequences, but some people still choose not to eat.

Freedom is whether circumstance allow for a choice to be made, free will is whether you make that choice anyways. I'm certainly not "free" to yell that there's a fire in a movie theater, but I can make the choice to if I want due to free will. Resisting any temptation is free will, because there is the impulse from your brain to take a certain course of action, but you resist because you can.

What about actions with no stimulus? There, I just snapped my fingers for no reason. Who says we don't control some of those chemical processes, or decide when they start? Actions and reactions are two different things, and it doesn't take a complete comprehension of the human body to do something with it.

I do appreciate what you're saying but like I said we don't always make the best choice (ie going to bed might be better for us, just 'cos we make a bad choice doesn't give free will, the point is we would always have made that bad choice).

You understand my point about freedom, so I won't go further there.

"Resisting temptation" is a perfect example of your mind weighing up the options and deciding what you will benefit most from. The spontaneity of you clicking your fingers was a way of your mind taking in the stimulus that is our dialogue, and coming to a conclusion to snap your fingers. I'm afraid that you as a biological information processing machine were going to come to that conclusion and slave to the future of you snapping your fingers.

I don't think we actually disagree on anything.

We make all our decisions. Whether they were the only ones we could make if we went back in time is debatable because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. However we both agree (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) that we are a system which processes information and decides to take actions as the result. Or we might even ignore information and act against it if our brains process and come to that conclusion.

What I am trying to say is that there is no 'pure' abstract idea of free will. Something like that can only come if we were somehow above the universe we live in, if we had a spirit or something like that. As it is we're a complicated bag of atoms that is meaningless in the scale of the universe, and as much slaves to it as that poor rock sitting outside in the cold.

[...]

Messaged you my email, lets talk more :]

So that's the one place we seem to differ; I believe in the "soul" and its superiority over the workings of the brain. I don't really think we'd make "bad" decisions without a soul, because any other time our brain would decide the decision was overall "good" because the benefits outweigh the costs.

 

[iRiis]

Mrwoo6, a very social look at it - but completely correct (loosely) in what you say. :]

 

[Jedoro]

Yes, it does, because despite what our brains tell us (logic, emotion, pain), we can and often do make the decision to go against that.

Can you really? Can you give just one example of this having happened in the whole of human history? I don't think you can.

Simple one: say someone's tired. If there was no free will, the person would meet that need and immediately go to sleep, but who goes to sleep every time they start to feel tired?

There's a difference between giving in to physical stimuli and "going against what our brain tells us" which you originally claimed. In the above case you would only not go to sleep if you brain told you it would be a better idea not to - whether it is 'correct' is irrelevant as we are irrational creatures - for example to stay up and play computer games or do whatever. Your brain has taken all the available stimuli and made a choice, you are slave to that.

But you did say that was a simple one, maybe you want to fire another?

What you are describing is what I described above (on this page) as freedom, which is a quite different concept to freewill. You are free to go to bed or stay up, but the choice you end up making is certainly not a free one, it is dictated by chemical processes etc as I described. Now if you were being tortured and not allowed to sleep, then in this case you wouldn't even have the original choice, so you're restricted to what you can do. This is a lack of freedom.

Not quite. Sometimes it's a better idea to go to sleep (i.e. work the next day) but people still don't. Also, hunger: food's sitting right there, no negative consequences, but some people still choose not to eat.

Freedom is whether circumstance allow for a choice to be made, free will is whether you make that choice anyways. I'm certainly not "free" to yell that there's a fire in a movie theater, but I can make the choice to if I want due to free will. Resisting any temptation is free will, because there is the impulse from your brain to take a certain course of action, but you resist because you can.

What about actions with no stimulus? There, I just snapped my fingers for no reason.

And would you have done this if this argument had never had happened? it was not your freedom of choice to snap your fingers, you did it because this argument caused you to. If you grow up in bad area filled with drugs and strife it is not your freedom of choice to not get shaped by that. various aspects of life and people help create an illusion of freedom. Perhaps a social worker asks you not to take drugs. and taking these two variations. if you say yes then you have been shaped and effected by the social worker not yourself. if you say no then you have been shaped and effected by your drug taking friends again, not purely yourself. you may say its your freedom of choice to choise these two paths, but thats not true either. perhaps your parents died and your were looked after by your friends more. it is much more likely you will do what your friends tell you.

everything you do is shaped by the people around you.

Shaped, but not decided. Andrew Jackson was some backwoods hick who was orphaned at a young age, but he became a lawyer and eventually the President. I highly doubt anyone chose that path for him. Everything's independent and connected at the same time. People can influence decisions, but there's still a choice involved.

 

[iRiis]

Yes, it does, because despite what our brains tell us (logic, emotion, pain), we can and often do make the decision to go against that.

Can you really? Can you give just one example of this having happened in the whole of human history? I don't think you can.

Simple one: say someone's tired. If there was no free will, the person would meet that need and immediately go to sleep, but who goes to sleep every time they start to feel tired?

There's a difference between giving in to physical stimuli and "going against what our brain tells us" which you originally claimed. In the above case you would only not go to sleep if you brain told you it would be a better idea not to - whether it is 'correct' is irrelevant as we are irrational creatures - for example to stay up and play computer games or do whatever. Your brain has taken all the available stimuli and made a choice, you are slave to that.

But you did say that was a simple one, maybe you want to fire another?

What you are describing is what I described above (on this page) as freedom, which is a quite different concept to freewill. You are free to go to bed or stay up, but the choice you end up making is certainly not a free one, it is dictated by chemical processes etc as I described. Now if you were being tortured and not allowed to sleep, then in this case you wouldn't even have the original choice, so you're restricted to what you can do. This is a lack of freedom.

Not quite. Sometimes it's a better idea to go to sleep (i.e. work the next day) but people still don't. Also, hunger: food's sitting right there, no negative consequences, but some people still choose not to eat.

Freedom is whether circumstance allow for a choice to be made, free will is whether you make that choice anyways. I'm certainly not "free" to yell that there's a fire in a movie theater, but I can make the choice to if I want due to free will. Resisting any temptation is free will, because there is the impulse from your brain to take a certain course of action, but you resist because you can.

What about actions with no stimulus? There, I just snapped my fingers for no reason. Who says we don't control some of those chemical processes, or decide when they start? Actions and reactions are two different things, and it doesn't take a complete comprehension of the human body to do something with it.

I do appreciate what you're saying but like I said we don't always make the best choice (ie going to bed might be better for us, just 'cos we make a bad choice doesn't give free will, the point is we would always have made that bad choice).

You understand my point about freedom, so I won't go further there.

"Resisting temptation" is a perfect example of your mind weighing up the options and deciding what you will benefit most from. The spontaneity of you clicking your fingers was a way of your mind taking in the stimulus that is our dialogue, and coming to a conclusion to snap your fingers. I'm afraid that you as a biological information processing machine were going to come to that conclusion and slave to the future of you snapping your fingers.

I don't think we actually disagree on anything.

We make all our decisions. Whether they were the only ones we could make if we went back in time is debatable because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. However we both agree (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) that we are a system which processes information and decides to take actions as the result. Or we might even ignore information and act against it if our brains process and come to that conclusion.

What I am trying to say is that there is no 'pure' abstract idea of free will. Something like that can only come if we were somehow above the universe we live in, if we had a spirit or something like that. As it is we're a complicated bag of atoms that is meaningless in the scale of the universe, and as much slaves to it as that poor rock sitting outside in the cold.

[...]

Messaged you my email, lets talk more :]

So that's the one place we seem to differ; I believe in the "soul" and its superiority over the workings of the brain. I don't really think we'd make "bad" decisions without a soul, because any other time our brain would decide the decision was overall "good" because the benefits outweigh the costs.

That's fair enough then, I'm not going to argue against that, we've reasoned it out as much as we can and I respect your beliefs as I hope you respect mine. I just want to defend mine a little to what you have just said though.

I do believe (and this is where we differ) that we always take THE MOST SELFISH decision we can. We might be deluded by it, or it might be a selfless decision in that you are helping someone. But in that case I say you do that because you feel good about helping them. Selfishness is not a bad thing. So I say, no bad decision, so like you say (although I wouldn't use your reasoning) no soul as a result. But yeah, it was good to run my thoughts by you, helped me understand what I don't understand much better.

 

[Jedoro]

Yes, it does, because despite what our brains tell us (logic, emotion, pain), we can and often do make the decision to go against that.

Can you really? Can you give just one example of this having happened in the whole of human history? I don't think you can.

Simple one: say someone's tired. If there was no free will, the person would meet that need and immediately go to sleep, but who goes to sleep every time they start to feel tired?

There's a difference between giving in to physical stimuli and "going against what our brain tells us" which you originally claimed. In the above case you would only not go to sleep if you brain told you it would be a better idea not to - whether it is 'correct' is irrelevant as we are irrational creatures - for example to stay up and play computer games or do whatever. Your brain has taken all the available stimuli and made a choice, you are slave to that.

But you did say that was a simple one, maybe you want to fire another?

What you are describing is what I described above (on this page) as freedom, which is a quite different concept to freewill. You are free to go to bed or stay up, but the choice you end up making is certainly not a free one, it is dictated by chemical processes etc as I described. Now if you were being tortured and not allowed to sleep, then in this case you wouldn't even have the original choice, so you're restricted to what you can do. This is a lack of freedom.

Not quite. Sometimes it's a better idea to go to sleep (i.e. work the next day) but people still don't. Also, hunger: food's sitting right there, no negative consequences, but some people still choose not to eat.

Freedom is whether circumstance allow for a choice to be made, free will is whether you make that choice anyways. I'm certainly not "free" to yell that there's a fire in a movie theater, but I can make the choice to if I want due to free will. Resisting any temptation is free will, because there is the impulse from your brain to take a certain course of action, but you resist because you can.

What about actions with no stimulus? There, I just snapped my fingers for no reason. Who says we don't control some of those chemical processes, or decide when they start? Actions and reactions are two different things, and it doesn't take a complete comprehension of the human body to do something with it.

I do appreciate what you're saying but like I said we don't always make the best choice (ie going to bed might be better for us, just 'cos we make a bad choice doesn't give free will, the point is we would always have made that bad choice).

You understand my point about freedom, so I won't go further there.

"Resisting temptation" is a perfect example of your mind weighing up the options and deciding what you will benefit most from. The spontaneity of you clicking your fingers was a way of your mind taking in the stimulus that is our dialogue, and coming to a conclusion to snap your fingers. I'm afraid that you as a biological information processing machine were going to come to that conclusion and slave to the future of you snapping your fingers.

I don't think we actually disagree on anything.

We make all our decisions. Whether they were the only ones we could make if we went back in time is debatable because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. However we both agree (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) that we are a system which processes information and decides to take actions as the result. Or we might even ignore information and act against it if our brains process and come to that conclusion.

What I am trying to say is that there is no 'pure' abstract idea of free will. Something like that can only come if we were somehow above the universe we live in, if we had a spirit or something like that. As it is we're a complicated bag of atoms that is meaningless in the scale of the universe, and as much slaves to it as that poor rock sitting outside in the cold.

[...]

Messaged you my email, lets talk more :]

So that's the one place we seem to differ; I believe in the "soul" and its superiority over the workings of the brain. I don't really think we'd make "bad" decisions without a soul, because any other time our brain would decide the decision was overall "good" because the benefits outweigh the costs.

That's fair enough then, I'm not going to argue against that, we've reasoned it out as much as we can and I respect your beliefs as I hope you respect mine. I just want to defend mine a little to what you have just said though.

I do believe (and this is where we differ) that we always take THE MOST SELFISH decision we can. We might be deluded by it, or it might be a selfless decision in that you are helping someone. But in that case I say you do that because you feel good about helping them. Selfishness is not a bad thing. So I say, no bad decision, so like you say (although I wouldn't use your reasoning) no soul as a result. But yeah, it was good to run my thoughts by you, helped me understand what I don't understand much better.

Best arguments are where we agree to disagree, and understand why we do.

 

[Verlander]

No, because you are predetermined not to do things by your parental and social conditioning. There's a massive difference between could and would, and therein lacks the lack of freedom. That, and as the neuroscientists say, the brain is a physical object, which is open to physical influence.

 

[manic_depressive13]

Yes, there is free will because I am choosing to write this reply. No one is forcing me or controlling me.

Sure, you can argue that it was already pre-determined that I would write this reply, but who cares? The only way that could possibly be relevant is if there was a way of knowing beforehand what our actions would be. However, if we did, we could then choose to change them, thereby creating a paradox. Since there is no way of knowing, it is really quite irrelevant, and pointless speculation.

What bothers me about the idea of pre-determinism is that, if the future is already written, it implies that there is someone or something outside the timeline who would be able to see or read the future. Like characters in a book don't know how their story ends, but the person reading it does. If our story is already written, who could possibly be reading it? I don't believe in supernatural entities, so I believe it is being written as we go along.

I don't see why believing in free will is "optimistic", or that the idea of there being no free will is "depressing". All it means is that we have no one to blame for our mistakes but ourselves. The determinist argument seems like a cop-out if anything. "Sure, I cocked up, but it was always going to happen. I couldn't help it."

 

[iRiis]

Best arguments are where we agree to disagree, and understand why we do.

Agree, I'm normally met by shouts and insults, I'll more than happily settle for this. But I'd say to you to have a think about what this "soul" is. Do animals have it? If some, why not all. If all, do bacteria, single cell. Ok they don't, so what does. I think it's very interesting to think about. I won't further that discussion here as it's off topic, but feel free to email me thoughts at josephheldenhammer at gmail dot com.

 

[iRiis]

Yes, there is free will because I am choosing to write this reply. No one is forcing me or controlling me.

Sure, you can argue that it was already pre-determined that I would write this reply, but who cares? The only way that could possibly be relevant is if there was a way of knowing beforehand what our actions would be. However, if we did, we could then choose to change them, thereby creating a paradox. Since there is no way of knowing, it is really quite irrelevant, and pointless speculation.

What bothers me about the idea of pre-determinism is that, if the future is already written, it implies that there is someone or something outside the timeline who would be able to see or read the future. Like characters in a book don't know how their story ends, but the person reading it does. If our story is already written, who could possibly be reading it? I don't believe in supernatural entities, so I believe it is being written as we go along.

I don't see why believing in free will is "optimistic", or that the idea of there being no free will is "depressing". All it means is that we have no one to blame for our mistakes but ourselves. The determinist argument seems like a cop-out if anything. "Sure, I cocked up, but it was always going to happen. I couldn't help it."

Perfect and well structured!

First point you are making is about the difference between freedom and freewill; here you are talking about freedom under the guise of 'free will'. However, everything else I completely agree with.

Especially the character in a book analogy, I made the same one a few years ago but I used it to say something along the lines of:

Ok, say everything is determined, we're like characters in a book. That doesn't stop what we do and the decisions we make from being important. Like the characters in a book, they don't know they are characters in a book and they make real decisions, even though the outcome is on the next page. We should live our lives optimistically and enjoy our story as it unfolds!

So I agree with what you have to say, and I think the way I used the analogy is similar to what you are saying in the rest of your post. In answer to the 'higher being', I would say that in the case of our story, there is no higher being to see it as it is. So even though it may be written, there is nothing that can see the page ahead, and therefore in terms of reality the story is being written exactly as it unfolds. I don't know if that makes sense, but I hope you take the meaning I intended from it!

 

[Redingold]

I wanted to make a post on free will, but I decided not to, so here it is.

No, free will doesn't exist, the physical laws that govern your brain are completely deterministic (ruling out weird quantum things, but they don't provide an explanation for free will anyway). You can't change what the electrons in your brain do any more than you can decide which way gravity makes things move.

 

[iRiis]

how am I being close minded I just summed it up and to be fair I'm from the psychology branch so yeah forgive me if I'm not easing in on elaborating immediately

the discussion between two previous posters actually summed up my opinion quite well

On onee hand one can say that we can choose to do things like hungerstrikes which on the other hand can be said to be predetermined just as easily as the temptation to actually eat

outwheighing pro's and con's goes for both sides only the 1 says that you do it cause you want to and the other says your body/brain does it cause it deems it benefactory to itself

Refusing to watch a video based on the grounds that you know what neuroscience is about. I apologise if you work in the field and do actually know what it's about. But you're next slapdash paragraph about "the thing about neuroscience" strongly suggests that you don't. I bothered to post because there have been some quite elegant experiments that are far removed from your electric shock - > raise arm summation. Maybe you were just generalising in an offhand manner, but yeah it just grated against me when you seemed so quick to remove yourself from something as if it is below you - especially when this is a field that very little is understood (compare our understanding of human body with that of human brain) and in which many people spend a lot of their time furthering our understanding!

 

[Rubashov]

No, we don't, but then it doesn't really matter that we don't.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it! But not by choice. Well, kind of by choice, if the illusion of choice counts. So yeah.

 

[GrinningManiac]

Yes

Yes it does. Easy enough

 

[Tallim]

Indeterministic philosophy usually admits that much of what happens in the universe is due to either the laws of nature or chance, but supposes that human beings still have free will.

Predeterminism says that the future was set in stone by causality at the beginning of the universe. Some other forms of determinism deny Predeterminism because of quantum indeterminacy but still argue that free-will doesn't exist because everything we do is determined by random collisions of particles and chemical reactions in our brains.

Compatibalism attempts to redefine either "determinism" "causality" "free-will" or some combination of these terms to reconcile determinism with free-will. The only form of this that I am that familiar with is Many-worlds Compatibalism, which says that every time you make a choice you create two alternate time-lines, one where you made the choice and another where you didn't make the choice. So you can choose which time-line to inhabit but you can't actually change any particular timeline. Sorry about the lack of poll, my computer has been having a hard time interacting with The Escapist lately.

My choosing to post this, rather then doing one of a million other things with my time, I believe that I am setting an example that free will does exist. <3

However, that theory does make a bit of sense to me. If I did not choose to reply to this thread, then something different would have occupied my time, another activity or situation, another path, it could be many different things. But to me, you can shape the timeline you do choose to a degree, if it's relation to you is something tangible and you are able to influence or change it. For instance, a choice about yourself could be defined to me as one timeline you could dictate almost if not 100% if you really wanted to.

Did you really choose to reply? Or did you read something that compelled you to reply.
What made you read the thread in the first place? If it was an interest in the subject matter then where did that interest come from? Why were you even online in the first place?

If anyone truly had free will then they wouldn't do anything ever. They would be in a perpetual state of indecisiveness. Something has to influence the decision and then it isn't a free choice but a decision based on information and experience.

 

[blaberer6]

Pffft of course there is- I AM ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.

 

[starwarsgeek]

But let's think this out a bit:do we do anything out of free will?Take for example all the little things you do in your daily life like eating and sleeping and...going to the bathroom.Do we consider those to be out of free will?If free will does exist,then we should be able to have it in every moment of our life.

That is all.

I've fasted and pulled all nighters. And we've all been in a situation where we've post-poned going to the bathroom...For example, someone goes to the theater and orders a large coke. He finds he showed up way early--the previews haven't even started. Absent-mindedly, he continues to drink it. The movies about to start, and the cup is already empty. He quickly grabs a refill and enjoys his second large coke during the movie. Near the end, he needs to go to the bathroom...but the movie is so good! Despite how uncomfortable it is, he waits through the movie and goes afterwards.

Given the right inspiration, even basic needs can be postponed, despite discomfort or pain.

Aha!But touche!You can post-pone these needs,but eventually they force you to go.If I were to give a straight answer(which in my earlier post I couldn't because of my lack of sleep):No-we don't have free will.Yes-we have the impression that we have free will.

That is all.

"You have to pee eventually! Therefore, freedom is a lie."

That's...some...umm, interesting logic there

 

[Samcanuck]

Far too complex and difficult a question to answer. It all depends on scale, time and reality as far as I am concerned. On the surface free will exists...but in the larger picture I am not sure it exists at all.