• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Free will has never been demonstrated to exist

serp777

Well-Known Member
People casually talk about free will as if we have it, but in reality it has never been proven to exist. To me it seems like all of our decisions are mostly a result of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors over time. If you change the environmental and genetic factors, then you can produce an entirely different person. That doesn't mean its deterministic though, it just means you have an illusion of free will, or at best a very limited free will that only works in select cases.

Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists? And what is the criteria of free will/ how can you distinguish if someone has freewill and someone doesn't.
 
Last edited:

निताइ dasa

Nitai's servant's servant
reality it has never been proven to exist

What does it mean "to prove to exist"? empirically? How do we measure 'will' empirically (let alone qualify it as "free").Whose definition of "free will" do we use in this dilemma? Consider the thought experiment, if we were to make 1000 thousand "copies" of our universe and observe the events in each of those universes, the determinism supporter will say that the universes will be exactly the same (all future events included). This problem is quite complex, and that is why I don't feel like your statement is correct. For the traditional objections to determinism please see this link. Philosophers have been arguing this for ages, I personally think it comes down to your worldview (if you are a materialistic, you will hold that everything is a presupposed sequence of chemical interactions, including will/choice. If you are dualist, like me, you will think differently).

Since you posted this in a religious debate dir, I will try and answer this question from a Hindu perceptive. Note, my other Hindu brothers and sisters may differ, here (because Hinduism is an umbrella of philosophies). Now, I believe in dualism, which in essentially means that consciousness and its byproducts (i.e the intellect, ability to will,desire,act. I will call this the "mind") are not products of material elements (chemicals), but rather a non-physical entity. While both interact in many ways, they are non-identical and have separate functions. Therefore while genetics and even environmental factors may influence the mind, the mind is still independent in its desire to will. While I believe that the Will is not "free" in the sense that there are no tendencies to will/desire/choose in certain ways, the mind still has a ability to exercise some degree of choice that is not dependent on genetics and/or the environment.

Dualism asserts that the very desire to will arises not from chemical interactions within the brain, but another entity (which we call the atma or soul). Since, this entity is not dependent on genetics and the environment and separate from them, it holds that will is not deterministic. However, neither is this will free, because our body (which is composed of genetics and environment) may influence the mind to act in certain ways. This is essentially a form of compatibilism. Quoting from an article about this topic (Vedic view on free-will):

"The Vedic view about free will is that there is a soul which makes choices. The soul is transcendent and cannot be measured by material measurements; however, its presence can be detected by the consequences it creates on its own experiences. To validate these consequences, we need a law that makes accurate predictions, and this law is called the law of karma. It is as much a natural law as other laws in science, although it deals in truth conditions, and not meanings (or physical states).

For instance, if you are driving from home to work, and there are many possible routes that you could take, the selection of these routes appears to be a choice. However, the critic of choice argues that this selection is subject to constraints such as the time you start, the time you want to arrive, the amount of speed you would like to drive at, the errands you would want to perform on the way, other co-passengers you might be picking on the way, the level of road rage you are prepared to deal with, etc. Once you take these factors into account, the choice is no longer free. The problem of choice essentially reduces to a mathematical optimization problem, such as the Traveling Salesman Problem.

This criticism is not flawed, but it misses a key point, namely that which factors need to be optimized is not given by the reasoning itself. Furthermore, within optimization which things have to be maximized or minimized isn’t given. In short, once you define the problem to be solved, the solution is mathematical and rational. But how do you know which problem you are going to solve? The car by itself doesn’t have the problem of choosing a route. Then why do we have that problem?" "

I also wrote a bit about this in the topic on free will on the Hinduism directory (check that out too for some arguements):

This I think is the biggest problem in the debate. Both sides define free will so differently that its impossible to come to a common ground. If we define "free will" as the ability to choose without a predisposition, then that is clearly wrong, because we do tend towards certain choices due to our context. If we define "free will" is possible with some predisposition, then where do we draw the line from Will being free (under its dispositions) to being completely restricted by them?

For example, according to my body, I may be predisposed to make particular choices, but that mean that there exists no choice in the first place? Is it possible that I may make a decision that goes against my predisposition? I mean, materialists will say that everything is simply a series of collisions of atoms and chemical reactions and thus will itself is an illusion.

I personally believe, that science as it is today (a naturalistic and empirical methodology) can never solve or even begin to investigate the solutions to this issue. I mean heck, we don't even have a consistent definition of what consciousness (and hence will) is. Consciousness cannot be measured empirically, and therefore is irreducible by the scientific method (presently). Since we cannot approach this problem in an inductive way (i.e break it down to its constituent parts and analyse), we are forced to look at it from a deductive position (i.e look at the bigger picture and analyse general trends etc.), which is what psychologists do. However even this method of investigation cannot be thoroughly controlled as we are dealing with human beings, and having control variables will often lead to ethical issues. This is often by such studies shown I think lead to so many varied results.

There is also interesting moral implications to this issue. If we conclude that "free will" is totally an illusion, then don't we lose moral responsibility for our actions? A killer may argue that they were predisposed to "murder" in the first place, therefore why should he/she be punished for something he/she could not control?

I personally think the answer lies somewhere in between the two positions (i.e we have will, but it is heavily influences by external factors. Still we can resist these factors).
 
Last edited:

serp777

Well-Known Member
What does it mean "to prove to exist"? empirically? How do we measure 'will' empirically (let alone qualify it as "free").Whose definition of "free will" do we use in this dilemma? Consider the thought experiment, if we were to make 1000 thousand "copies" of our universe and observe the events in each of those universes, the determinism supporter will say that the universes will be exactly the same (all future events included). This problem is quite complex, and that is why I don't feel like your statement is correct. For the traditional objections to determinism please see this link. Philosophers have been arguing this for ages, I personally think it comes down to your worldview (if you are a materialistic, you will hold that everything is a presupposed sequence of chemical interactions, including will/choice. If you are dualist, like me, you will think differently).

Since you posted this in a religious debate dir, I will try and answer this question from a Hindu perceptive. Note, my other Hindu brothers and sisters may differ, here (because Hinduism is an umbrella of philosophies). Now, I believe in dualism, which in essentially means that consciousness and its byproducts (i.e the intellect, ability to will,desire,act. I will call this the "mind") are not products of material elements (chemicals), but rather a non-physical entity. While both interact in many ways, they are non-identical and have separate functions. Therefore while genetics and even environmental factors may influence the mind, the mind is still independent in its desire to will. While I believe that the Will is not "free" in the sense that there are no tendencies to will/desire/choose in certain ways, the mind still has a ability to exercise some degree of choice that is not dependent on genetics and/or the environment.

Dualism asserts that the very desire to will arises not from chemical interactions within the brain, but another entity (which we call the atma or soul). Since, this entity is not dependent on genetics and the environment and separate from them, it holds that will is not deterministic. However, neither is this will free, because our body (which is composed of genetics and environment) may influence the mind to act in certain ways. This is essentially a form of compatibilism. Quoting from an article about this topic (Vedic view on free-will):

"The Vedic view about free will is that there is a soul which makes choices. The soul is transcendent and cannot be measured by material measurements; however, its presence can be detected by the consequences it creates on its own experiences. To validate these consequences, we need a law that makes accurate predictions, and this law is called the law of karma. It is as much a natural law as other laws in science, although it deals in truth conditions, and not meanings (or physical states).

For instance, if you are driving from home to work, and there are many possible routes that you could take, the selection of these routes appears to be a choice. However, the critic of choice argues that this selection is subject to constraints such as the time you start, the time you want to arrive, the amount of speed you would like to drive at, the errands you would want to perform on the way, other co-passengers you might be picking on the way, the level of road rage you are prepared to deal with, etc. Once you take these factors into account, the choice is no longer free. The problem of choice essentially reduces to a mathematical optimization problem, such as the Traveling Salesman Problem.

This criticism is not flawed, but it misses a key point, namely that which factors need to be optimized is not given by the reasoning itself. Furthermore, within optimization which things have to be maximized or minimized isn’t given. In short, once you define the problem to be solved, the solution is mathematical and rational. But how do you know which problem you are going to solve? The car by itself doesn’t have the problem of choosing a route. Then why do we have that problem?" "

I also wrote a bit about this in the topic on free will on the Hinduism directory (check that out too for some arguements):

What does it mean "to prove to exist"? empirically? How do we measure 'will' empirically (let alone qualify it as "free").Whose definition of "free will" do we use in this dilemma? Consider the thought experiment, if we were to make 1000 thousand "copies" of our universe and observe the events in each of those universes, the determinism supporter will say that the universes will be exactly the same (all future events included). This problem is quite complex, and that is why I don't feel like your statement is correct. For the traditional objections to determinism please see this link. Philosophers have been arguing this for ages, I personally think it comes down to your worldview (if you are a materialistic, you will hold that everything is a presupposed sequence of chemical interactions, including will/choice. If you are dualist, like me, you will think differently).

Either we make our own decision are we don't or we make our own decisions to some degree. That's a simple definition but is mostly, what I believe, people intend free will to mean. How would you prove it experimentally? Well the fact that its unfalsifiable is a testament to its weakness. Therefore the original statement is true. It hasn't been demonstrated to exist. Nevertheless religious people talk about free will all over this forum without even demonstrating that it exists. If it hasn't been shown to exist, then how can people use it in their arguments? That's one of the goals of this post: to show the fallacy of using free will as a point in your argument. Also if you're a materialist its a reasonable position to hold that you shouldn't free will exists period. Religions like calvinism would also tend to agree that free will and choice is just an illusion.

However, I think it might be possible to show that free doesn't exist, which would means its unfalsifiable. If you were able to simulate the human brain perfectly on a computer, then we wouldn't have free will because the states of transistors in computer are deterministic. However, there is no reason or evidence to conclude that it is possible to perfectly simualte the human brain.

Since you posted this in a religious debate dir, I will try and answer this question from a Hindu perceptive. Note, my other Hindu brothers and sisters may differ, here (because Hinduism is an umbrella of philosophies). Now, I believe in dualism, which in essentially means that consciousness and its byproducts (i.e the intellect, ability to will,desire,act. I will call this the "mind") are not products of material elements (chemicals), but rather a non-physical entity. While both interact in many ways, they are non-identical and have separate functions. Therefore while genetics and even environmental factors may influence the mind, the mind is still independent in its desire to will. While I believe that the Will is not "free" in the sense that there are no tendencies to will/desire/choose in certain ways, the mind still has a ability to exercise some degree of choice that is not dependent on genetics and/or the environment.

But how could you even begin to make these conclusions without any evidence or reason that free will exists? You can't prove or measure it. You can't really show in any meaningful way that any of us make an independent choices, so how can you believe dualism is true?

Dualism asserts that the very desire to will arises not from chemical interactions within the brain, but another entity (which we call the atma or soul). Since, this entity is not dependent on genetics and the environment and separate from them, it holds that will is not deterministic. However, neither is this will free, because our body (which is composed of genetics and environment) may influence the mind to act in certain ways. This is essentially a form of compatibilism. Quoting from an article about this topic (Vedic view on free-will):

I don't agree. The entity is dependent on environment, genetics, and culture. If you change a persons genetics and environments, then its likely they'll become an entirely new person. Would you say that the soul also changes if this occurs? You have to admit that chemical reactions are an important part of how the brain works and how we make decisions. If you lose a significant amount of seratonin in your brain, then you will probably become depressed--this is purely the result of a chemical reaction and will change how you act and feel. Without seratonin people sometimes feel "dead inside" as is often described by people with depression. if one chemical can do this to you then I think you shouldn't dismiss chemicals so easily.

For instance, if you are driving from home to work, and there are many possible routes that you could take, the selection of these routes appears to be a choice. However, the critic of choice argues that this selection is subject to constraints such as the time you start, the time you want to arrive, the amount of speed you would like to drive at, the errands you would want to perform on the way, other co-passengers you might be picking on the way, the level of road rage you are prepared to deal with, etc. Once you take these factors into account, the choice is no longer free. The problem of choice essentially reduces to a mathematical optimization problem, such as the Traveling Salesman Problem.

This criticism is not flawed, but it misses a key point, namely that which factors need to be optimized is not given by the reasoning itself. Furthermore, within optimization which things have to be maximized or minimized isn’t given. In short, once you define the problem to be solved, the solution is mathematical and rational. But how do you know which problem you are going to solve? The car by itself doesn’t have the problem of choosing a route. Then why do we have that problem?" "

The factors that need to be optimized is not given by reasoning necesserily, but rather they emerge in your mind as a result of the sub conscious and how the environment and your genetics have changed your neural configuration to affect the way you think. Thus these factors pop in your head--you don't choose the thoughts that come into your head since the thought that you should make a decision something wasn't chosen by you either. You know which problem you are going to solve based on your experience which is a result of your genetics and the environment. These produce the material pathways in your head that define what you think.
 

serp777

Well-Known Member
Big deal. The color green has never been shown to exist, either. That doesn’t mean it's not a viable aspect of my experience.
This is a silly point. The color green doesn't exist period; its an interpretation from your mind based on either the RGB values of the pixels in your computer screen, or an extrapolation of the frequency from the electromagnetic radiation hitting your eye. Basically the color is an illusion. You might think free will might be a viable part of your experience, but just like the color green, that is an illusion.
 

Gharib

I want Khilafah back
People casually talk about free will as if we have it, but in reality it has never been proven to exist. To me it seems like all of our decisions are mostly a result of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors over time. If you change the environmental and genetic factors, then you can produce an entirely different person. That doesn't mean its deterministic though, it just means you have an illusion of free will, or at best a very limited free will that only works in select cases.

Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists? And what is the criteria of free will/ how can you distinguish if someone has freewill and someone doesn't.

I have made this example before (years ago).

Our free will is a choice between a set outcome. We do not have as much free will as we think, but we do have more than we think too.

If at a farm of 1000 cows one of them drops dead other cows won't take much notice of it and continue grazing/eating as though nothing happened. They do not have free will, they are designed to simply be cows and serve humans as food/source of food.

Now in the same scenario we have about 1000 humans at a shopping centre, if a person dies we will all go out of our way and inquire as to what happened, how it happened and to whom it happened.

A simple answer but I hope the message gets across the ocean.
 

निताइ dasa

Nitai's servant's servant
Either we make our own decision are we don't or we make our own decisions to some degree. That's a simple definition but is mostly, what I believe, people intend free will to mean. How would you prove it experimentally? Well the fact that its unfalsifiable is a testament to its weakness. Therefore the original statement is true. It hasn't been demonstrated to exist. Nevertheless religious people talk about free will all over this forum without even demonstrating that it exists. If it hasn't been shown to exist, then how can people use it in their arguments? That's one of the goals of this post: to show the fallacy of using free will as a point in your argument. Also if you're a materialist its a reasonable position to hold that you shouldn't free will exists period. Religions like calvinism would also tend to agree that free will and choice is just an illusion.

However, I think it might be possible to show that free doesn't exist, which would means its unfalsifiable. If you were able to simulate the human brain perfectly on a computer, then we wouldn't have free will because the states of transistors in computer are deterministic. However, there is no reason or evidence to conclude that it is possible to perfectly simualte the human brain.

Okay. I feel like the controversy in this issue comes the difference in our worldviews. I actually believe that the claim can be falsified, not empirically but by other means. If we can prove that our ability to desire/will/choose arises from a basis other than genetic and environmental determinism, then it holds sufficient proof that will is not deterministic. Descartes's famous proof, "I think therefore I am" is used many times to argue that the mind is in fact distinct, and verily the only thing that can be known to exist (which is an extreme position).

As for using it in arguments and falsifiability. Nothing can be shown completely to exist lol. Even our ability to define "evidence" is dependent on assumptions we make. Think about it. The senses (i.e our empirical data) have not been proven to perceive "reality". How do we know that the senses aren't being deluded? (think brain in the vat). The answer is we can't, because that requires an external source of knowledge, yet we only get information from our senses. By that logic, empirical data itself cannot be falsified.

As for computer simulation. Dualists will argue that the brain is not the seat of consciousness, but rather a monitor which displays those conscious process. The desire to will itself comes from the mind (which is a separate entity from the body remember). The assumption you are making, is that the brain (and its chemical reactions) give rise to consciousness, which is something I would reject. It is a assumption that a materialist will make.

All arguments make assumptions which require leaps of faith (some bigger than others). That is how arguments generally work, you accept certain premises and then lead them to a logical conclusion. Some theist accept teleogical assumptions (i.e that supported by scripture about God) and use them in their arguments and there is nothing wrong with that.

But how could you even begin to make these conclusions without any evidence or reason that free will exists? You can't prove or measure it. You can't really show in any meaningful way that any of us make an independent choices, so how can you believe dualism is true?

Again evidence cannot be restricted to simply empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is an important tool, but it cannot touch certain areas of knowledge. That is where we Hindus turn to the Vedas. The Vedas are assumed to be of divine origin (i.e you can see here that assumptions underlie evidence) and thus we use scriptural

I would highly recommend reading up on Vedic/Hindu epistemology. All forms of knowledge have generally three sources. pratyuksha (meaning sensory inference), anumana (meaning evidence from logic or rationality), and sabda (testimony). Where infomation cannot be given by the former two ( as is the case for free will, or immeasurable things like the soul etc), we turn to the third form of evidence. For Hindus the Vedas constitute the highest form of Sabda evidence, because they are assumed so. Every piece of evidence underlies an assumption.

The arguments for dualism are generally are not empirical, but rather rational argument. I would advise reading the philosopher Rene Descarte and his works, because he was prominent dualist in the west. His arguments are far too long to write up, so you can read them here.

I don't agree. The entity is dependent on environment, genetics, and culture. If you change a persons genetics and environments, then its likely they'll become an entirely new person. Would you say that the soul also changes if this occurs? You have to admit that chemical reactions are an important part of how the brain works and how we make decisions. If you lose a significant amount of seratonin in your brain, then you will probably become depressed--this is purely the result of a chemical reaction and will change how you act and feel. Without seratonin people sometimes feel "dead inside" as is often described by people with depression. if one chemical can do this to you then I think you shouldn't dismiss chemicals so easily.

That is fine. Your view is the traditional materialist view. Now the question arises what defines a person, or rather a human being.I would say it is the ability to perceive/will/act. By this definition I would argue that while genetic/environmental factors may influence out our perception/will/acts they are not the root cause of them. I am not dismissing the role of chemicals in shaping them, but I am claiming that very the origin of those desires are not the body (hence I am a dualist).

In Vedanta philosophy there is a distinct difference between inert matter and consciousness. Consciousness is far more superior than matter because it can manipulate it. Therefore, it is logical to say that something as complex as consciousness cannot arise from something as dull as matter. So what I am saying is that the difference in conclusions come from the difference in our worldviews.
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
People casually talk about free will as if we have it, but in reality it has never been proven to exist. To me it seems like all of our decisions are mostly a result of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors over time. If you change the environmental and genetic factors, then you can produce an entirely different person. That doesn't mean its deterministic though, it just means you have an illusion of free will, or at best a very limited free will that only works in select cases.

Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists? And what is the criteria of free will/ how can you distinguish if someone has freewill and someone doesn't.

You are talking of free will in reference to whom?
 

George-ananda

Advaita Vedanta, Theosophy, Spiritualism
Premium Member
Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists?
Think about it a minute. What possible evidence or argumentation could exist to show free will exists. If you try to come up with even a theoretical example, you may find that none is possible.
 

George-ananda

Advaita Vedanta, Theosophy, Spiritualism
Premium Member
Either we make our own decision are we don't
Who is the 'we' in the above statement. The question for me is do you believe we are just a physical body or do you believe we have real astral, mental and spiritual aspects also beyond the reach of mainstream western science. I think that issue is what it comes down to; I believe we are more than physical matter and I suspect you view us as just matter. I think that difference gets at the real question.
 

ThirtyThree

Well-Known Member
People casually talk about free will as if we have it, but in reality it has never been proven to exist. To me it seems like all of our decisions are mostly a result of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors over time. If you change the environmental and genetic factors, then you can produce an entirely different person. That doesn't mean its deterministic though, it just means you have an illusion of free will, or at best a very limited free will that only works in select cases.

Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists? And what is the criteria of free will/ how can you distinguish if someone has freewill and someone doesn't.
Free will is not even written about in the Bible, anywhere. It is, to be frank and in my opinion, an invisible million dollars. People desire the money to exist but that does not mean it does. The closest thing to "free will" I can come up with is a decision between two parties with two outcomes. in other words, the choice between Coke or Pepsi, Democrat or Republican.
 

ThirtyThree

Well-Known Member
I have made this example before (years ago).

Our free will is a choice between a set outcome. We do not have as much free will as we think, but we do have more than we think too.

If at a farm of 1000 cows one of them drops dead other cows won't take much notice of it and continue grazing/eating as though nothing happened. They do not have free will, they are designed to simply be cows and serve humans as food/source of food.

Now in the same scenario we have about 1000 humans at a shopping centre, if a person dies we will all go out of our way and inquire as to what happened, how it happened and to whom it happened.

A simple answer but I hope the message gets across the ocean.
Humans are more complex than bovine. However, that complexity does not necessitate humans have any more core decision making ability than cattle. It simply means humans engage in more aspects of the world, hence having a wider range of options.

Free will is a fairytale, in my opinion. Similar to what most Christians believe Heaven to be like, rather than what is taught about it.
 

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
Free will is demonstrated to exist every time someone interprets an action as something that "they did," as "theirs." (As opposed to...)
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
I can't think of anything that isn't privy to limitation in one manner or another.

Free will seems to be just a religious themed term that really in essence, means nothing.
 

sayak83

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
People casually talk about free will as if we have it, but in reality it has never been proven to exist. To me it seems like all of our decisions are mostly a result of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors over time. If you change the environmental and genetic factors, then you can produce an entirely different person. That doesn't mean its deterministic though, it just means you have an illusion of free will, or at best a very limited free will that only works in select cases.

Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists? And what is the criteria of free will/ how can you distinguish if someone has freewill and someone doesn't.
Even fruit flies and rats have free will
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is good evidence that there exists modules in animal brains (even fruit flies) that use the randomness and channel it to generate spontaneous internal variability in response.

http://brembs.net/spontaneous/mayeetal_2007.html

We tethered fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in completely uniform white surroundings and recorded their turning behavior. In this setup, the flies do not receive any visual cues from the environment and since they are fixed in space, their turning attempts have no effect.

Thus lacking any input, if the flies were input-output devices, their behavior should resemble random noise, similar to a radio tuned between stations. However, the analysis showed that the temporal structure of fly behavior is very different from random noise.

Note that the behavior is not just unchanneled random noise. Neither is it deterministic.

Using the so-called "S-Map Procedure" we detected a non-linear signature in the fly behavior. Such a signature can only be found in systems whose indeterminate behavior is not due to noise but originates in their design. This signature indicates that there is a function in the fly brain which evolved to generate spontaneous variations in the behavior. This function appears to be common to many other animals and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will.

The temporal signature in the fly behavior points to a so-called 'unstable nonlinearity' in the fly brain. This in turn means that the brain areas controlling turning behavior must be tuned very precisely to generate unpredictable output and are unlikely to be a by-product of the general complexity of the brain. Unstable nonlinear systems are known from many other natural systems and display a high sensitivity to small perturbations. These sensitive systems provide an evolutionary advantage to animals that possess them not only because they help animals forage, but also for a number of other reasons. For instance, they can lead to unpredictable escape maneuvers when avoiding a predator or to unpredictable moves which confer advantages in almost any competitive social setting (think politics or chess). The biological implementation of this mechanism is currently unknown, but there is evidence from a previous study that a brain area called the ellipsoid body (sometimes called the "fly motor cortex") might be involved.

Thus the fly can does choose otherwise under identical conditions! :)

Next similar things have been observed in rats as well,

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2014/11/12/rats-free-will/#.V0HPhfkrKM8

Murakami et al. trained rats to perform a task requiring patience. In each trial, the rat heard a sound and had to wait in place until a second sound occured. If they waited, they got a large amount of water as a reward. If they moved to get some water too soon, however, they only got a small amount.

Poor thirsty rats. :(

These “integrator” neurons didn’t always count at the same speed, however. On some trials, they ‘ramped up’ more quickly – and when this happened, the rat was more impatient.
Why did the integrators sometimes count faster than other times? Murakami et al. found a second class of neurons, whose rate of firing (which varied seemingly at random) predicted the rate at which the integrators “counted up”. The authors suggest, therefore, that these latter neurons provide inputs to the neural integrators. When the total amount of input reaches a threshold, a ‘spontaneous’ action is triggered.

activity preceding bound crossing, either input or accumulated activity, could be said to participate causally in the timing of an action, but does not uniquely specify it. The integration-to-bound theory implies that no decision has been made until the bound has been reached… as at any moment up to bound crossing, the arrival of opposing inputs may avert an action.

Physical phenomena that are highly sensitive to initial conditions is not new in physics. The field of chaos theory . Now chaos theory (the classical version) assumes that the system being studied is inherently deterministic (i.e. classical) but highly sensitive to initial conditions, so that small inaccuracy in knowing what the initial condition is leads to charge changes in the evolution of the system. It is a very useful model, particularly for simulations of complex chaotic systems like weather, turbulent flows and things like protein folding in cells.

But let us think of the real world.
1)We know that quantum mechanical indeterminacy exists creating "true" indeterminism at a very small scale.

2) We know that these quantum mechanical variations leads both to deterministic behavior on the mid-level scale (all classical physics and chemistry) and indeterministic behavior on mid-level scale (thermal fluctuations, momentum fluctuations and fluctuations in electromagnetic fields ). Here is a detailed article that looks specifically at thermal fluctuations and their immense effect at all scales of physics. http://www.iki.rssi.ru/asp/pub_sha1/Sharch04.pdf

3) What is ultimate source of all this mid-level semi-classical randomness. It is, ultimately, the phenomena (still being investigated) of quantum decoherence that was crudely called the "collapse of wavefunctions" in early stages of quantum theory development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence. It caused both the determinism and the chaotic noise fluctuations we see at the classical level. Both are created, and their interaction through chaos theory, becomes the hallmark of complex dynamical systems at higher scales.

4) For even further details on how this occurs in biology. Consider this book Life's Ratchet. An excellent chapter by chapter overview of the chaotic molecular storm from which all of life's processes get their oomph is here.

5) The last book that is yet to be written is how life's processes extract "designed spontaneity" from this molecular chaotic storm as well. This will take more research of the kind I alluded to and more research like this.

Almost 20 years ago, Professor William Newsome, director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, stumbled on a surprising finding: Neurons in the brain have fluctuating, “noisy” signals, sometimes firing one way when faced with a certain stimuli and sometimes firing another. What’s more, how that single, somewhat variable neuron fires is then reflected in an animal’s decisions.

Now Stanford scientists have employed computer models to reveal the reason behind these “noisy neurons”: neurons that are entirely consistent can’t learn.

Or this article http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2683

Pouget's work for the first time connects two of the brain's biggest mysteries; why it's so noisy, and how it can perform such complex calculations. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, the noise seems integral to making those calculations possible.

6) The mathematics behind this integration of determinism with indeterminism in complex processing systems is described by what is called Stochastic Dynamics. Here is book, technical, bit the intro is enough to understand what the thing is talking about.
https://books.google.com/books?id=P...g=PR2#v=onepage&q=stochastic dynamics&f=false

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

Subhankar Zac

Hare Krishna,Hare Krishna,
I take a position somewhere in the middle.
The past, present and future already exists and were just moving through the road of time while our gestures, voluntary and involuntary are puppeted by time.
It's like the charecters in a movie or a sketch.
But at the same time, since all matter and energy is God, both God and the living consciousness does it together n even these two are the same.
 

idav

Being
Premium Member
People casually talk about free will as if we have it, but in reality it has never been proven to exist. To me it seems like all of our decisions are mostly a result of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors over time. If you change the environmental and genetic factors, then you can produce an entirely different person. That doesn't mean its deterministic though, it just means you have an illusion of free will, or at best a very limited free will that only works in select cases.

Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists? And what is the criteria of free will/ how can you distinguish if someone has freewill and someone doesn't.
There is no free will. The forum gods are in charge of the destiny of all internet posts and future data maintenance. Ask any of the gods how much free will you have and they will laugh.
 

Nous

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
People casually talk about free will as if we have it, but in reality it has never been proven to exist. To me it seems like all of our decisions are mostly a result of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors over time. If you change the environmental and genetic factors, then you can produce an entirely different person. That doesn't mean its deterministic though, it just means you have an illusion of free will, or at best a very limited free will that only works in select cases.

Does anyone have any arguments or evidence showing that free will actually exists?
It seems you are asserting (a) the inarguable proposition that people are able to act willfully but their willful acts are influenced by a variety of factors outside of themselves, rather than (b) that people are unable to act willfully. It seems that many people, in trying to point out facts relating to (a), sweep up the facts relating to (b) in the process and wrongly deny the ability of humans to act willfully. In the following I am articulating the arguments contrary to (b).

The conclusion that human individuals are able to determine the voluntary bodily movements that one will or will not perform (i.e., are able to act willfully) is the only coherent explanation for these trivial bodily movements. Thus the existence of free will (or the ability to act willfully) is deducible by a process of elimination--in exactly the same way that if there three upside-down cups in front of you and you know a bean is under one of them, after turning over two of the cups and finding no bean, you can deduce that the bean is under the remaining cup.

In the first place, the denial of being able to determine one’s own voluntary bodily movements is, like asserting belief in the thesis of epiphenomenalism, self-stultifying: http://www.religiousforums.com/thre...nial-of-free-will-is-self-stultifying.185568/

If, for instance, the statements in the OP that you typed and posted are the product of an entity that lacks the ability to choose between available options, then they are just noise such as an engine makes, because the entity that produced them (Serp777) was unable to choose to assert true statements rather than false ones. An entity that cannot choose to assert a true statement rather than a false one is an entity that cannot determine whether its own statements are true or false.

In the second place, human individuals are able to predict or foresee far in advance and with perfect accuracy the voluntary bodily movements that one will make--though no one can accurately predict or foresee the voluntary bodily movements that someone else will perform, and no one can with similar accuracy predict or foresee anomalous events of one’s own autonomic nervous system (such as a heart attack). There is no other coherent explanation for this ability than the fact that these voluntary bodily movements are willful acts, determined by the individual who performs them. Everyone engages in such predictions of their voluntary bodily movements. For instance, modern people commonly contract to pay a particular amount by a particular day each month to the utility, phone and/or internet company that provides them electricity, water, phone and/or internet service, or to make monthly payments to the bank in repaying (plus interest) a loan on a house or car purchase. The vast majority of people fulfill their obligations on these contracts, and when they don’t it is almost invariably due to loss of income or otherwise simply not having the money to make good on their contracts. There is no other coherent explanation for individuals’ commonplace ability to accurately predict or foresee their voluntary bodily movements by which they fulfill their contractual obligations than the fact that these are the willful acts of the individuals.

Additionally there is the problem of accounting for the energy expenditures involved in our goal-directed activities. If it were true that humans are automatons lacking the ability to initiate goal-directed activity, then it is certainly a huge and inexplicable waste of energy and time to type and post messages on a discussion board such as RF, and to read and type and post messages ostensibly in response.

Last year my husband and I took a trip to Australia, New Zealand and Melanesia; months in advance we researched and planned exactly where we would go, which hotels and other lodging where we would stay, and the activities that we would participate in; we contacted a number of places and made reservations for certain dates. All this researching, planning and making of reservations was certainly a huge waste of time and energy if it were true that we had no control over our goings and doings of this trip. If it were true that we did not and could not determine our own acts, then all of the time and energy expended on researching, planning and making of reservations would have been a massive, inefficient delusion. Yet there is nothing more commonplace among humans than the belief that we can and do determine such voluntary bodily acts (our laws assume that individuals have this ability to act intentionally, purposely and knowingly in our voluntary bodily movements). In its inefficiency and wastefulness of time and energy, such a supposed “delusion” of being able to act willfully is directly contrary to the principles of natural selection (exactly as epiphenomenalism is, as William James and Karl Popper argued). Maintaining such delusion would be trait that would have been quickly selected out due to its inefficiency and wastefulness, and would have never been selected for.

Obviously genes do not determine which voluntary bodily movements a person will make during his/her lifetime. There is no evidence that genes determine which voluntary bodily movements a person will make. Identical twins have identical genes, but identical twins do not perform identical bodily movements during their lifetimes.

To claim that a person’s environment or culture is what causes a person which bodily movements the person makes is just nonsense--besides it being obviously untrue (many millions of people live in the same culture but do not perform the same bodily movements), it’s to claim something magical. Machine-structure programming is detectable. There is no detectable programming running from a person’s environment or culture to his/her brain.

And what is the criteria of free will/ how can you distinguish if someone has freewill and someone doesn't.
Here’s the test: A person or other entity that ponders whether or not free will exists is a person or entity that can act willfully.
 
Top