Lets solve Free will once and for all!!

[siti]

if Einstein was still with us,
you could ask him about it.

Einstein was a determinist - "God doesn't play dice"

 

[siti]

It really doesn't MATTER if "matter" evolves in a predictable manner or not.

It matters if matter is all there is, matter is not only what matters but what matter does and all that matters is matter and that matters whether we think it matters or not - as far as it matters in this matter, that's the end of the matter.

 

[Augustus]

To me, it doesn't really seem to address the issue of past influences, if these are completely beyond our control, then how is behaviors more of a free will thing than that of being hungry and eating?

But humans behave in certain ways, we don't want to be sad, we don't want to be harmed, we like to be safe, happy etc. But what makes us sad or happy etc, is beyond our control. It doesn't seem like much of free will, if all we do is to align to conditions for which we had no control of, if that makes sense?

If I'm hungry, I can cook a steak or a pizza.

The food I like is, in part, influenced by where I grew up, what I was fed as a child, etc. The options available to me for cooking depend on the ingredients and so forth.

I am constrained by certain parameters, but I can still choose a steak or a pizza or something else. Just because I'm not a tabula rasa, doesn't mean I can't exercise some degree of choice within whatever limits may apply.

 

[Nimos]

I'm not sure it would entirely, because the ability or inability to determine the brain's (or the atoms therein) future would in some measure partially determine that future - if you see what I mean.

Complexity shouldn't affect whether something is determined or not as I see it. I think you could compare it to a computer, there is a lot going on under the hood and at first glance looking at all the numbers and we didn't know better, it would look like "chaos" or random things going on. Yet it is following very strict rules that we gave it, it is simply too complex for us to understand at that level. So even though it looks extremely complex and we can't understand it at that level, we have means of knowing exactly what it does. And if the Universe also follows strict rules, I don't really see a huge difference, except we weren't the "creators" and we currently don't have a very good interface to understand it.

If it is truly deterministic then free will is an illusion - what I'm still trying to grapple with is whether being indeterminable means it is, in fact, indeterminate...it (whether or not we can predict something) certainly makes a difference to how we think about things and how we think about things certainly makes a difference to the brain's future states...none of that is entirely free in the sense of being completely random - that much I am sure of...but is there any genuine volition involved? Is it really will? And even if it is volitional, it our own volition at work? Or some partially randomized probabilistic function of the universe we find ourselves acting as "agents" within? All of which is probably just a very long way of saying I don't know.

But couldn't the example with the computer work here as well? or we could look at something like the weather, even though we can predict it to some degree, we still struggle a lot with it. But if you go back 200 years it was a lot more difficult. But the weather follows natural laws and they are complex, but if we multiply that complexity by a lot, why wouldn't we get the Universe?

Regarding free will, does it matter? If we have free will we can still make choices, but they are with limited information, meaning that we are more likely to make incorrect ones. But if we don't have free will, then we simply act according to the available information and given they are too complex for our brain to understand we get things wrong, but as we get better and better information we simply reduce the amount of errors we make, but we are still acting upon the same available information. Because I completely agree that how we think about things affects the future state of the brain, that seems rather logical to me.

I don't think we should "care" for any practical purposes - its an intriguing and mildly entertaining philosophical puzzle, but in real life I think we have no choice but to assume we do have free will even if we really don't.

I agree

If we someday reach the conclusion that we have no free will at all, then all morality goes out the window and the most rational way of dealing with human issues, might be to find a way to scan humans before birth and get rid of them, either through forced abortion or DNA manipulation. At least that would reduce the amount of moral issues

Maybe that is what humans will do in the far future

No - but that's the other way round...I was suggesting that if we can't predict the future of the brain, we can't predict the future of its constituent atoms...so in the case of a planet, if we couldn't predict its future orbit we would not know where its constituent atoms are...and, it turns out, that the precision with which we can predict future planetary motion is not great over very long timescales...orbital chaos, resonance effects and slight errors (as small as a few meters) in pinpointing the exact location of a planet now make it utterly impossible to predict their orbits in a couple of hundred million years.

Maybe, after all, its the orderliness of the universe rather than the capriciousness of free will that is an illusion...but who knows?

Yeah, that is a huge question. Do we simply lack better measuring tools or do we eventually reach a level where there will always be fluctuations that simply can't be measured and therefore not predicted?

 

[Nimos]

No .. you are the one saying "I had no say in it", as if it were obvious.
It's not .. it's just that it appears to be the case .. a bit like a paradox .. I'm not at all confused.

Im not saying anything, this is simply the position of the determinist would say to you, sorry if I made it sound like it was my personal view

Im arguing and raising questions a bit from both sides

It really isn't .. there is no such thing as free-will being an illusion .. it's a meaningless concept.
The illusion is people imagining that a determined future means that we are just automatons following a script .. it's about the way we perceive the passage of time .. if Einstein was still with us,
you could ask him about it.

So let's say you have a free will thought, where did that come from? Obviously, you would say your brain, but how did you manifest this without any former influences and how do you decide whether that is the best action or not, again without former influences?

Here is an example, but you can use your own if you want.

Chocolate ice cream? or Vanilla ice cream? or no ice cream?

You have a preference, let's just simplify it and only take taste into account. To make the choice and it having any meaning, you need to know what ice cream is and what the flavors taste like. Either you have tasted both and don't like either so you go for no ice cream or you have tasted them and you prefer one over the other. In all cases, your decision is based on your former experience of ice cream.

The argument then goes, that your taste senses are biological, and biological beings including our senses follow physical laws and if these are deterministic, it doesn't seem to allow for a lot of free will.

 

[Nimos]

If I'm hungry, I can cook a steak or a pizza.

The food I like is, in part, influenced by where I grew up, what I was fed as a child, etc. The options available to me for cooking depend on the ingredients and so forth.

I am constrained by certain parameters, but I can still choose a steak or a pizza or something else. Just because I'm not a tabula rasa, doesn't mean I can't exercise some degree of choice within whatever limits may apply.

Let's say you want Pizza, how did you arrive at that decision?

Try to think about the details that go into that choice. Is it the taste? (That is biological, you didn't have any say in this), Was it because it was faster to make? (That could be due to you having little time? or maybe you simply don't enjoy spending time on cooking? Yet, none of these are things you had a say in)

So how did you arrive at the pizza being the best option, that is what I mean by going into details. How free was your choice really?

 

[Augustus]

Let's say you want Pizza, how did you arrive at that decision?

Try to think about the details that go into that choice. Is it the taste? (That is biological, you didn't have any say in this), Was it because it was faster to make? (That could be due to you having little time? or maybe you simply don't enjoy spending time on cooking? Yet, none of these are things you had a say in)

So how did you arrive at the pizza being the best option, that is what I mean by going into details. How free was your choice really?

My definition of free will is the ability to have chosen differently. I don’t think we are blank slates acting without constraints.

But if I prefer a food for taste or because it is
quicker to make and I want to watch football is a choice I can make.

 

[Nimos]

My definition of free will is the ability to have chosen differently. I don’t think we are blank slates acting without constraints.

But if I prefer a food for taste or because it is
quicker to make and I want to watch football is a choice I can make.

The details of the definition are irrelevant really. If everything is deterministic, then you can't choose differently, changing the definition or preferring one over the other does nothing.

Don't get me wrong, everyone feels like you. I don't think anyone goes around thinking "Dammit the Universe chose salat for me today!!".
The discussion on this topic is being made on a theoretical level and based on arguments for and against.

So simply saying that "it is a choice you can make" when that is the very thing up for discussion doesn't really make sense, that is why I asked you to "demonstrate" how you would do it, rather than just concluding that you can. Not because you are not allowed to do it, but hopefully you can see that it is a more interesting discussion when actually trying to deal with the issues for each position.

I don't think anyone here is trying to convince anyone of anything, we are simply exploring it and sharing views on it.

 

[wellwisher]

The time has come to settle whether we have free will or not

So had a somewhat interesting talk with ChatGPT about this, but can't help but feel that it has some restrictions or fallback safety mechanisms that limit it in regards to saying what is actually on its "mind". So thought I would raise the discussion here instead with my human brethren

There are several questions here:

1. Where does free will come from?
2. Do we have it?

Google introduced its new AI, which appears to have a blatant Liberal created glitch, that was way too obvious. Therefore, their AI now needs to be overhauled to make it better for subtle manipulation. This output was less about AI having a mind of its own, but rather showed how AI is still only as good as the bias of the programmers. Their AI was like a faithful horse pleasing the owners.

Their AI seems to live in a reverse color utopia where George Washington was black, the Pope was a woman, and even vikings and Nazi, look like minorities. If that AI had be free to read the collection of human books, and not have liberal propaganda foundation premises, that mistake would not have been made. They showed you can game AI, by what you feed it.

What they were going for, was a subtle illusion of willful AI, that can appear to think on its own, and like a miracle came to the very conclusions that reinforce Liberal propaganda. Their AI went way too far, trying to draw conclusions with a stack data set composed of a liberal revisionist history wish list biases.

The worse mistake with AI, is many will give these preprogramed biased AI, too much credit, and fall for scams. It is good their AI went all in, and became a Liberal cartoon that will fool nobody. All in, the AI bias, was a foundation premise that views history troth colored glasses. Their data remind me of Hollywood, where they are trying to giving women and minorities the roles once given to just white men; action figures. Maybe the Google AI data was based just on movies made after 2000.

Free will

I like the definition of free will to mean being able to make willful choices, that have no emotional or psychological cost; free. If I can eat either meat or veggies and be happy with either, there is no cost to willfully choose, one or the other. The slack vegetarian or the slack carnivore, may be able to eat broccoli or a hamburger, willfully on some days, but they might be hesitant and grimace, since there is a cost; yucky inhibition. This will still be willful, but it is not free will, since there is a deterministic or inhibitory cost.

If I have make a plate with rice, broccoli/cheddar, and a nice strip steak and I enjoy the entire meal, there is no cost but total enjoyment. This also is not exactly free, since it creates a surplus of pleasure. This is somewhat deterministic; adds a profit.

Free will allows one to move about inhibited and uncompelled, but content with all choices; no cost and no profit.

Most people cannot kill humans, and many cannot kill anything. This is because the cost is too great; guilt. One might be able to force yourself to kill an animal while hunting. This can be done willfully, but any hesitancy or lingering guilt means this was not free will; willful with a cost.

Any willful action, that is not free will, is usually a blend of will and determism; cost or profit. There are blends of will and determism. Laws of good and evil is about these blends of primal and modern cultural sublimated urges and our resistances. We have impulses, but we are not totally free either way; urge, resistance and even enjoyment. Resisting any determinism is willful, but it may not be free will. Free will is pure will at no cost or profit. Free will is very rare, since most will have some cost or profit; jump off a bridge or watch an all day movie marathon.

St Paul in the New Testament said, I became all things to all men. This is about practicing free will, without preconceived choices that give an advantage or the disadvantage; no cost or profit but free to talk and mingle with all people, with any social protocol.

 

[muhammad_isa]

So let's say you have a free will thought, where did that come from? Obviously, you would say your brain, but how did you manifest this without any former influences and how do you decide whether that is the best action or not, again without former influences?

Again, you are confusing several issues here.
Naturally, there are reasons why we choose what we choose .. but we still CHOOSE it.
..so that does NOT invalidate your original def. of free-will.

The argument then goes, that your taste senses are biological, and biological beings including our senses follow physical laws and if these are deterministic, it doesn't seem to allow for a lot of free will.

"seem to" ? What does that mean, in this context?
Any mechanism that you can describe, becomes PART of the choice making process.
We may FEEL that an inevitable future means that we "don't have any choice", but
it isn't so.

Basically, materialism in the context of so-called determinism is hypothetical nonsense.
As a simple example, it would mean that the drivers of vehicles were being driven by nobody.

 

[Bear Wild]

That wasn't what I meant, rather we would say that a crab is acting according to its instincts. I don't think it is correct to think that it is making a choice as that would mean that it should be somewhat able to rationalize.

And how do you know if the crab has the ability to rationalize the situation and make an decision based on itself? How do you know it is only pure reaction to the environment without consideration of previous experiences thus memory, evaluation of what its needs are at that particular time to make a decision of how to react. If you do not like crabs just change it to a cute fuzzy hamster coming into something novel, I personally would have gone from for the fox but since I do not have any free will to make decisions lets go with the hamster.

 

[Bear Wild]

The details of the definition are irrelevant really. If everything is deterministic, then you can't choose differently, changing the definition or preferring one over the other does nothing.

Don't get me wrong, everyone feels like you. I don't think anyone goes around thinking "Dammit the Universe chose salat for me today!!".
The discussion on this topic is being made on a theoretical level and based on arguments for and against.

So simply saying that "it is a choice you can make" when that is the very thing up for discussion doesn't really make sense, that is why I asked you to "demonstrate" how you would do it, rather than just concluding that you can. Not because you are not allowed to do it, but hopefully you can see that it is a more interesting discussion when actually trying to deal with the issues for each position.

I don't think anyone here is trying to convince anyone of anything, we are simply exploring it and sharing views on it.

Consider the question of how you could demonstrate that a decision is fully deterministic. What would would you need to show in order to exclude any variation outside of purely deterministic decision.

 

[Nimos]

The worse mistake with AI, is many will give these preprogramed biased AI, too much credit, and fall for scams.

But some people, if you are taught nonsense your whole life you might believe it. But also the current AI we have is based on pattern recognition, so even though they can to some degree think logically and rationally, they purely rely on the training data. So if you feed it nonsense/biases that is what will come out.

This is obviously a huge issue in itself because if/when these AI are getting more integrated and used, the information we are fed is essentially controlled by whatever company/government that owns the model.

But again, the majority of people seem to be completely unaware of exactly what these AI systems are or what they are capable of. And my guess is that when we eventually reach AGI, the majority of people will be completely unaware or have no clue what it even is, it will hit them like a lightning strike

But anyway that is another discussion I guess

If I can eat either meat or veggies and be happy with either, there is no cost to willfully choose, one or the other.

But you run into the same problem. Sure you have the option to choose either veggies or meat and be happy about it, yet you have to choose one of them, and whatever you choose is determined by former influences.

How did you choose to be happy with both veggies and meat? Why didn't you choose to be happy just being a vegetarian and not eating animals?

Resisting any determinism is willful, but it may not be free will. Free will is pure will at no cost or profit.

I don't really agree with your definition. Because again in the example above with meat and veggies, there doesn't seem to be any cost to you emotionally or psychologically in choosing to be a vegetarian, so why didn't you(everyone) choose that? There seems to be a potential emotional cost to choosing to eat meat, as one is killing an animal.

 

[Nimos]

Basically, materialism in the context of so-called determinism is hypothetical nonsense.

It isn't. But you seem to get the meaning of determinism wrong and are jumping ahead so to speak.

This is a short video of someone explaining both sides, its only 10 minutes try to see if that makes it more clear

 

[Nimos]

And how do you know if the crab has the ability to rationalize the situation and make an decision based on itself? How do you know it is only pure reaction to the environment without consideration of previous experiences thus memory, evaluation of what its needs are at that particular time to make a decision of how to react. If you do not like crabs just change it to a cute fuzzy hamster coming into something novel, I personally would have gone from for the fox but since I do not have any free will to make decisions lets go with the hamster.

Im saying that i don't think the hamster (crab) is able to do it, I don't think it has the brain capacity to do it. Rather it is guided by its instincts. I don't think it understands the idea behind a choice or the consequence of choosing one thing over another. I don't think these connections are made in the brain in the same way as with humans.

Said in another way, animals without this capacity are following patterns (instincts).

 

[Nimos]

Consider the question of how you could demonstrate that a decision is fully deterministic. What would would you need to show in order to exclude any variation outside of purely deterministic decision.

Cause and effect, does anything happen without a cause?

Besides the Big Bang, which is unknown, I think the general view is that everything seems to have a cause. The issue becomes whether this applies to everything or not and given that I can't seem to find any examples of anything not having a cause, then we can at least conclude that determinism seems highly plausible.

 

[Bear Wild]

It isn't. But you seem to get the meaning of determinism wrong and are jumping ahead so to speak.

This is a short video of someone explaining both sides, its only 10 minutes try to see if that makes it more clear

Nice video but how do you know that both do not exist? There are paradoxes throughout our world where two things seemingly incompatible exist together and both are true.

 

[Bear Wild]

Im saying that i don't think the hamster (crab) is able to do it, I don't think it has the brain capacity to do it. Rather it is guided by its instincts. I don't think it understands the idea behind a choice or the consequence of choosing one thing over another. I don't think these connections are made in the brain in the same way as with humans.

Said in another way, animals without this capacity are following patterns (instincts).

But how do you know that a crab or hamster does not have that capability? What evidence do you have to exclude them?

 

[Bear Wild]

Cause and effect, does anything happen without a cause?

Besides the Big Bang, which is unknown, I think the general view is that everything seems to have a cause. The issue becomes whether this applies to everything or not and given that I can't seem to find any examples of anything not having a cause, then we can at least conclude that determinism seems highly plausible.

So the words you just wrote were determined from the big bang?

 

[muhammad_isa]

It isn't. But you seem to get the meaning of determinism wrong and are jumping ahead so to speak..

No .. I DO understand what is meant by "determinism"..
..and it is deeply flawed.

It all relies on our perception of what an inevitable future means.
..and it doesn't mean what determinists think it means .. they think it implies we "have no choice",
but that is wrong.

ANY predefined mechanism you can describe, does not imply that we no longer make choices, and cars are all crashing on the highway.