Free will has never been demonstrated to exist

[George-ananda]

I gave an example in the OP.

I re-read the OP and I am still not seeing it. What observation could possibly show 'Free Will' to you?

 

[Thief]

I freely refuse to participate in this thread.....
no wait....what if I change my mind?

 

[Falvlun]

Free will, interestingly enough, has never been demonstrated not to exist, either.

 

[Etritonakin]

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 exists. However, the available options are limited -and some options are illogical. The ability to choose that which is known to be illogical for no logical reason -or no reason at all -indicates free will -even though some logic or reasoning is usually involved in decision-making, and many factors usually affect decisions.

Art, architecture, music, etc. are evidence of free will.
Even though the available options are technically limited -and certain factors cannot be changed by the individual due to present ability and other factors -a final outcome is not predetermined except by the will of the individual.

A will with the ability to change all factors possible would have the most freedom to determine a final outcome.
A completely free will can exist and exert complete freedom of will in imagination, but no will can negate the most basic nature of all things -even if able to reconfigure the most basic nature of all things.

 

[sayak83]

That's not free will though. That's like saying that a computer program that has a (true no pseudo) random number generator also has free will. Non determinism does not equal free will. If a random number generator in your head determines your actions, that doesn't mean that you have free will. I'm sure you can agree on that point. You're arguing from a strawman here--i'm not saying that we don't have free will because we're deterministic. Then it seems like the rest of your post is going on to show how the universe does in fact have randomness but you haven't addressed why non determinism implies that free will is real.

I define free will as the ability to will otherwise. Thus under identical conditions, one self-wills a different course of action than what one did before. I am seeing the fly and the rat doing it. I also see that it stems from an internal neural capacity of organized spontaneity that these creatures possess. So why don't they have free will?

Obviously a sophisticated computer designed with such capacities will also have free will.

 

[atanu]

...Thus under identical conditions, one self-wills a different course of action than what one did before. ...

I think the adverse results of the first action impelled one to act differently next time. The conditions might not be same at all.

 

[atanu]

It seems to be beneficial to society that a large number of people hold the illusion that free will exists. Studies have shown that people who believe they have free will tend to be more generous, less likely to cheat, etc than people who understand that free will doesn't exist. Perhaps we are lucky that the illusion is a persistent one.

What a contradiction there in the red part. If free will does not exist then it cannot be said that people understand correctly.

 

[look3467]

You can't know if it was free will or just the illusion of free will.

I can in my own life. As in your case.......an illusion, is the way I understand you.... to opine.

And that..............your "free" to will.


Blessings, AJ

 

[Smart_Guy]

I have a very strong impression that people confuse "free will" with "realizing the outcome". Free will is the mental state of mind to decide to act, it is not the power to realize the outcome. Sorry to say that, but arguing that seems like a weakness and giving up to life. If one believes there is truly no free will, then they should just do nothing at all and let that belief take care of everything. Example: I say free will does exist. Those who believe it does not can just leave me alone and not try to debate it. I mean, it would be useless if there is no free will. I think maybe, just maybe, one can sound reasonable in claiming that there is no free will if they have perfect full power to realize any outcome they want or asked of them to realize.

Dunno, I'm just ranting

 

[Nous]

I don't see any requirement that human beings need true free will.

The ability to act willfully is required in order to choose to believe and to assert true propositions rather than false ones. This is why the denial of having the ability to act willfully is self-stultifying.

Do you claim that any of your beliefs or any of your assertions in your posts are true propositions? Or are they all just beliefs that you can't prevent yourself from having and can't prevent yourself from asserting?

You didn't provide any explanation for what would be--if it were true that the ability to act willfully is a delusion--a tremendous waste of time and energy in the ordinary pondering and planning of goal-directed activities (such as my husband and I engaged in when researching, planning and making reservations for the trip I described). What would be such an explanation? How is all that expenditure of time and energy supposedly consistent with a trait acquired by natural selection?

Furthermore, being able to predict bodily movements means nothing.

Then predict what my next post here will say.

computer programs in robots always predict the moves they will make

Your computer predicts what statements will be typed on its keyboard? Prove it.

Do you have evolutonary logic or evidence which shows that delusions aren't selected for?

Delusions that make an individual less fit are not selected for. If it were a delusion that my husband and I had no control over if, when, or where we went on our trip, then all of our researching, planning, reservation-making, and anticipating the details of our trip were a huge waste of energy and time, which could have been better spent on reproducing our genes.

The lack of any such explanation for that expenditure of time and energy is in addition to fact that you haven't explained how we could possibly have known that we would be boarding a certain plane on a certain date, staying in certain lodgings on certain dates, engaging in particular activities on certain dates, etc., if it were true that we had no control over any of these bodily movements.

Genes, the environment, and culture combine to affect the way your brain is structured--this then affects how you move and when.

Cite all of the evidence from which you have concluded that "genes, the environment and culture" determine the voluntary bodily movements a person makes during his/her life.

 

[Nous]

If one believes there is truly no free will, then they should just do nothing at all and let that belief take care of everything. Example: I say free will does exist. Those who believe it does not can just leave me alone and not try to debate it. I mean, it would be useless if there is no free will. I think maybe, just maybe, one can sound reasonable in claiming that there is no free will if they have perfect full power to realize any outcome they want or asked of them to realize.

Dunno, I'm just ranting

No, you make quite valid points. It is not only inexplicable but also useless for entities that are unable act willfully to ponder issues of free will and to attempt to present arguments to other volitionless entities about free will. (if a volitionless entity believes it can act willfully, it cannot voluntary assimilate the information that it is actually volitionless.)

 

[sayak83]

I think the adverse results of the first action impelled one to act differently next time. The conditions might not be same at all.

No, that would easily show up in the behavior patterns. The examples of flies and rats were chosen in such a way that the effect of decisions were neutral any which way.

 

[Nous]

One thing this board has made clear to me is that beliefs in the thesis of determinism, the denial of the human ability to act willfully, and beliefs that such willfulness cannot possibly be inferred from any evidence are stronger and held more dogmatically than most people hold any religious belief. It seems it doesn’t matter how much evidence contrary to determinism one cites or how many aspects of willful acts one notes that are unaccounted for as anything other than willful acts, people are firm and unquestioning in their beliefs in determinism or the impossibility of logically inferring the existence of free will.

 

[Falvlun]

One thing this board has made clear to me is that beliefs in the thesis of determinism, the denial of the human ability to act willfully, and beliefs that such willfulness cannot possibly be inferred from any evidence are stronger and held more dogmatically than most people hold any religious belief. It seems it doesn’t matter how much evidence contrary to determinism one cites or how many aspects of willful acts one notes that are unaccounted for as anything other than willful acts, people are firm and unquestioning in their beliefs in determinism or the impossibility of logically inferring the existence of free will.

It has always confused me that determinism is considered the "rational" position. Denying free-will not only requires you to ignore every single person's personal experience, but also requires you to accept a completely unproven hypothesis. How is that rational?

 

[viole]

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.

Well, it depends on the abstraction level.

I think it is possible to make sense of free will, even under a regime of strict determinism of the processes that take place in our skulls.

To make an analogy: we have no problem to use probability theory to describe the behavior of systems that are fundamentally deterministic and inherently not subject to pure random mechanisms. A typical example is playing dice or roulette. The lack of detailed information about the mechanical state and initial conditions of dice or roulette, does not stop us to effectively use probability to describe them, even if they are not probabilistic at all, at fundamental level.

So, the total and necessary ignorance about the state of brains and the impossibility to introspect them, might be effectively replaced by a certain definition of freedom, even thought we are not free at all, deep inside.

i think it is self evident that assuming freedom of acts, is not only a useful replacement of our ignorance about our brain states, but provides obvious evolutionary advantages. For instance, without a concept of accountability, that strongly depends on our perceived freedom to do things, the whole social system would probably collapse.

This is also why, probably, this innate intuition of "being free", has been naturally selected., even if it is fundamentally false.

Ciao

- viole

 

[atanu]

No, that would easily show up in the behavior patterns. The examples of flies and rats were chosen in such a way that the effect of decisions were neutral any which way.

Yeah. Here there seems to be an assumption that soft sciences can perfectly model the qualitative hidden aspects. Isn't the very study that you cite is to prove the opposite, that there is a free will?

 

[Nous]

It has always confused me that determinism is considered the "rational" position. Denying free-will not only requires you to ignore every single person's personal experience, but also requires you to accept a completely unproven hypothesis. How is that rational?

You know, I think determinism generally is gotten from the belief that 19th-century Newtonian mechanics is the last word in metaphysics.

Other than that, I think denial that anyone can able to act willfully--the denial of free will--is something that is promoted because it makes people feel better about their bad behavior.

 

[sayak83]

Yeah. Here there seems to be an assumption that soft sciences can perfectly model the qualitative hidden aspects. Isn't the very study that you cite is to prove the opposite, that there is a free will?

How decision making happens in the brain generally. That'S the objective of these studies.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

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).

I disagree that it MUST be the same. If a rock rolls down to the left instead of the right, things will change, but there need not have been any will involved with the rock's change of path.

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.

Depends on the awareness levels of the cows and the people, no? Ever seen studies where they put up a fake "missing child" poster with the actual kid RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT and no one notices?

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).

AI can think, too.

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.

But even if our minds or souls are magic, since magic has rules too, can a magic self be without constraints?

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

What if something or someone else did it and they are just taking the credit?

If we didn't have free will then I wouldn't feel guilty for any mistakes.

You would if that was in your nature.

You know, I think determinism generally is gotten from the belief that 19th-century Newtonian mechanics is the last word in metaphysics.

I believe in chaos. Just because the rules are more complex than we usually can analyze doesn't mean there aren't rules.

 

[George-ananda]

But even if our minds or souls are magic, since magic has rules too, can a magic self be without constraints?

That's a good point but I think when most people thing about Free Will versus Determinism they are considering materialistic determinism and not spiritual determinism. Ultimately I think only Brahman has Free Will but our core is that Brahman,