r/freewill

We are ultimately “sock puppets of physics” - my view on that has not changed. But

here’s my new position as clearly as I can state it:

I do not think humans possess magical, acausal, libertarian free will. Every thought, preference, instinct, and decision arises from prior causes.

But the traditional framing of the debate is confused.

A sufficiently recursive system that makes decisions, understands what decisions are, and models itself as an agent, but cannot fully calculate or inventory all the variables causing its own decisions, will necessarily experience its decisions as internally unresolved until the moment of choice.

That experience is what I now think “free will” actually is.

Not freedom from causality.
Freedom from complete self-transparency.

Humans cannot fully derive their next thought before thinking it. If they could, the thought would already exist. A mind is part of the causal system it is trying to model, and complete self-modeling is computationally impossible.

From the inside, our decisions appear open or 'free', but that is because the system cannot fully access the causality generating itself.

In other words, determinism is true at the physical level and free will emerges phenomenologically due to the epistemic limitations on self-awareness.

"Free will" is simulated by humans - the experience is real and part of the conscious process.

And if this is correct, sufficiently advanced AI systems may eventually experience the same thing.

At this point I’m not even sure “free will vs determinism” is the right debate anymore.

I think there are systems capable of recursive self-modeling under uncertainty, and systems that are not.

A hurricane follows physics.
A human follows physics while also experiencing itself as choosing.

That is the difference.

People have blamed each other for many reasons throughout history. The idea that we should only blame them if they made a free will choice is a recent development that was a result of a lot of discussion until we finally settled on this current criteria. Saying we should only hold people morally responsible if they have made a free will choice is not the same thing as saying they really are morally responsible.

Free will has two definitions. The first is simply a voluntary, unforced choice. The second definition is freedom from physical causation, the causal chains that make every event, including every choice, causally necessary.

Definition 2 is paradoxical. Therefore it must be rejected as a serious definition of anything.

Here's the paradox. Every freedom we have, to do anything at all, involves us reliably causing some effect. And we cannot be free from that which freedom itself requires. Thus the paradox.

For example, we can set a bird free from its cage, and now it is free to fly away. But if we were to set it free from causality, then flapping its wings would cause no effect, and its freedom to fly would be gone.

So, "freedom from causal necessity" can be dismissed as an absurdity. And it cannot be used as the definition of anything.

Fortunately, free will is not limited to that absurd definition, but has another simpler definition, as a voluntary, unforced choice, which is not an absurdity, but a meaningful and relevant notion. The notion that nearly everyone understands and correctly applies when assessing a person's responsibility for their actions. This is the operational definition of free will.

Unfortunately, when philosophers try to redefine free will as freedom from causal necessity, they destroy the meaningful and relevant notion of free will. And they introduce a paradox, which results in an interminable debate, and a waste of everyone's time.

I have a thought experiment to propose:

We place a space ship, 3 light-minutes from Earth. It is also a time machine.

On Earth is a little coffee shop in which two elderly women have a conversation. This conversation is recorded for exactly 1 minute, and radioed immediately to space. 3 minutes later, the space ship watches the conversation and at minute 4, the space ship activates its time machine and jumps 4 minutes back in the past.

The two women are conversing again, the same minute. They cannot be influenced by the space ship, since it is 3 light minutes away. The space ship receives their conversation again, and then after a minute of listening, it jumps back 4 minutes in time.

My simple proposition:
- If determinism is true, the space ship will do this forever, without those two women ever changing a single thing in their conversation.
- However, if free will exists, then an outside change is not required. With enough repetition one of the old ladies will change up what they are saying eventually, if she possesses free will. This must be the definition of free will, because even an automaton can change their behavior on new input from the outer world.

(Side note: This idea mirrors the halting problem.)

Now that we have clarified what free will is and what determinism is, and since we acknowledge entropy makes it impossible to recreate the same state twice, as long as we do not have time travel, we could never test for free will. Because short of time travel, we could never recreate the exact same state a near infinite amount of times.

Which leads to a simple thought: Free will and determinism are indistinguishable from each other. And that makes them identical. They are the same.

Therefore, I conclude, free will is determinism and that is why the debate about free will versus determinism makes no sense.

At least in this universe, under the assumption that time travel in the past is impossible and entropy is irreversible.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

I recently thought about this for a while and I think it really a two part question of "Can we make decisions?" I think so. And also "Are we really making decisions on our own accord?" And I think yes as well.

Yes there are a million things that influence decisions which, causes a confliction with "on our own accord". But I think humans are not some third party entity where we are separate from our past experiences and genetics. I think those past experiences and genetics are part of what make us who we are Of course some influences are bigger than other and some smaller. If we are separate from those things then choices become soulless and random rather than chosen.

So yes basically all of our choices are driven by influences, but those influences are what makes the choices we make "on our own accord" to me. We are what happens to us and what happens to us shapes who we are. If a choice were free from all influences, would it really be our choice?

The allegory of the cave explicitly says that from the beginning we are brainwashed to believe to see the shadows on the wall as reality.; this can be directly connected to epistemology as the fundamental mechanism of perceiving informations. Thus this means we are hypnotized to acquire knowledges in a specific way that decides how we view, use those aquired knowledeges; this leads to the concept of episteme by which Foucault explained how our mind unconsciously uses frameworks that was ready-made by historical conditions, surreptitiously assimilated by our mind, and which decides how the discourses would gonna be shaped.

If we consider about our reality of the allegory, and even philosophy itself, which was meant to liberate a human being from those yokes, deceptions, being assimilated to ourselves, thus without contemplating its essence, the problem becomes apparent.

Apparently modern people from modernized world know exactly what the allegory means, but if we took the allegory as an actual truth, this means we are inherently blocked from contemplating about this truth of being hypnotized and what does it mean to realize it.

For these reasons, there should be a fundamental difference between a person thinking outside of the cave and a person thinking inside of the cave, because the distinguishment can only be made clear when it is fundamentally, or transcendentally different as we can see from the difference between a philosophical zombie (whether it has qualia or not) and a human being.

I believe the same process was presented in Kant's distinguishment of the private use of reason, which he articulated as 'as this part of machine' and the public use of reason, which 'must be free.' I don't think this merely recite Frederick the Great's policy of "Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!" nor Kant only meant it as a scholarly attitude in public sphere; for Scholars themselves can be bounded by their own cave.

How the mere apperception, without being transcendental, without this distinguishment, works, which has happened throughout modernity, was presented blantantly in the Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality and the Culture Industry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

"The intelligibility which subjective judgment discovers in any matter is imprinted on that matter by the intellect as an objective quality before it enters the ego. Without such a schematism-in short, without rhe intellectual element in perception-no impression would conform to the corresponding concept, no category to the particular example; thought, not to speak of the system toward which everything is directed, would be devoid of unity. ...

The true nature of the schematism which externally coordinates the universal and the particular, the concept and the individual case, finally turns out, in current science, to be the interest of industrial society. Being is apprehended in terms of manipulation and administration. Every thing-including the individual human being, not to mention the animal-becomes a repeatable, replaceable process, a mere example of the conceptual models of the system. Conflict between administrative, reifying science, between the public mind and the experience of the individual, is precluded by the prevailing circumstances. The senses are determined by the conceptual apparatus in advance of perception; the citizen sees the world as made a priori of the stuff from which he himself constructs it. Kant intuitively anticipated what Hollywood has consciously put into practice: images are precensored during production by the same standard of understanding which will later determine their reception by viewers. The perception by which public judgment feels itself confirmed has been shaped by that judgment even before the perception takes place. Although the secret utopia harbored within the concept of reason may have glimpsed the repressed identical interest which lies beyond the diverse accidental interests of subjects, reason, operating under the pressure of purposes merely as systematic science, not only levels out the differences but standardizes the identical interest."

"The active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of subjects-that they should, from the first, relate sensuous multiplicity to fundamental concepts-is denied to the subject by industry. It purveys schematism as its first service to the cus tomer. According to Kantian schematism, a secret mechanism within the psyche preformed immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason. That secret has now been unraveled. Although the operations of the mechanism appear to be planned by those who supply the data, the culture industry, the planning is in fact imposed on the industry by the inertia of a society irrational despite all its rationalization, and this calamitous tendency, in passing through the agencies of business, takes on the shrewd intentionality peculiar to them. For the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production."

It seems like in our present modern society of universality, we are being deceived by the facade of the private use of reason disguised as the public use of reason and are being precluded from the latter while being hypnotized to believe one is, indeed, free. Universality itself becomes episteme because of the rise of media and the internet, which assimilates into us an episteme of how to think, perceive a certain subject that communities are discussing about.

The allegory points to this as well, since if we are born inside the cave and can learn only from within the cave, this would definitely results into the problem of parroting. The Frost King incident of Helen Keller and the public's reaction against it is the direct evidence of this taking place.

Rousseau noticed this problem when he thought he would write "Emile," and what he was suggesting through that book is an acknowledgement of nature as uncorrupted teaching, as we can see later from Helen Keller, and save children being embedded in a prejudice. Because we didn't learn anything from this point and put our children to public school which makes them universalized, they were stripped of the individuality—for how many students we have in our world who thinks independently and not being embedded and corrupted by the structure? How many students can think outside of how students should think?

In reality, philosophy actually have gone through the discourse of modernity through this path since Kant—through Hegel, Schelling, Schiller to Nieztsche to post modernism, structuralism, Husseurl, Heidgger, Frankurt school, etc.

Schiller was the first one who opened the door on the possibility of harmony between the state of being determined and the state of determining—of not being merely determined by the private use of reason. Even though Nietzsche butchered him constantly through his philosophy, I believe he was not aiming for Moral Romantismcism like Schelling, Schlegel, young Hegel, but epistemological liberation for he proceeded the essay with clear epistemlogocial concepts from Kant and thinking.

Where are all this philosophy based on epistemology in the present discourse of free will?

Why have we fallen into the same historicism, positivism, against which these philosiphers noticed the problem, challenged and resisted?

Instead, It seems like philosophers have forgotten about thay they hadn't solved the problem within the epistemology, and moved on to the current discourse.

Philosophers made mistakes when they were dealing with epistemology, for they did not guage the public's capability of understanding or even noticing them, while their works have means only through such action.

Alongside with Kant, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Schiller's "Letters upon the Aestehtic educations of man" could have saved some men from dogmatic, dialectic Nihilism, but because of the distortion made by Hegel and his deciples, Nietzsche, etc. it was completely blurred from the public in terms of epistemological value.

Instead with the current discourse of free will, the newcomers who can only view it from the certain angles in which he grasped the problem, because of which he is stuck in it. It becomes the problem of sciences and logics whoose tools cannot even acknowledges the real problem that is urgently needed to be solved.

Maybe I'm naive to think like this for I am aiming for Idealism. I don't know any about the academic philosophy used in this subreddit or what achievements that can be made with those method; I just read some books.

But I definitely know this excerpt from Kant's essay on Enlightenment can be applied for many people in this subreddit:

"Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity."

Shouldn't we at least acknowledge the problem and open the possibility of free will even if we cannot solve the problem itself? The transcendental one like Husserul attempted to figure out? Or Foucault's permanent critique of ourselves and of our age?

By noticing the difference between historical episteme, we can understand others, who are dominated by different episteme than ourselves, better as well.

Just out of curiosity and viewing it from the perspective of a politician trying to create a working system.

Modern science loves to tell us that Aristotle’s four causes were good but naive, and that we’ve finally “upgraded” to a clean mechanistic Darwinian worldview.

Except...

Whenever biologists describe the heart, they still explain it by what it does and what it’s for: pumping blood, sustaining the organism, allowing survival. Same with eyes: they’re for seeing, not just for “being there.”

Aristotle already had those four kinds of explanation. The material cause is what something is made of. The formal cause is its structure and organization. The efficient cause is the mechanical processes that make it work. The final cause is what it’s for, its telos, its function in the whole organism.

Darwinian biology borrows almost the entire package: material structure, functional form, efficient mechanisms, and historical selection. Then it suddenly gets squeamish at the word “purpose.” So instead of saying “eyes exist in order to see,” they rephrase it as “eyes exist because they enhanced fitness.”

Whoa. Very rigorous.

But now watch the sleight of hand: once selection is in place, they declare teleology “obsolete” and “unscientific,” as if talking about a trait being for something were suddenly a crime against physics.

Spoiler: it isn’t.

What actually happened is that the metaphysical version of final cause, Aristotle’s cosmic built‑in essences, got weakened into a historical one: traits are “for” whatever effects they were selected for. Call it teleonomy, call it function, call it “shorthand.” But it’s still teleology dressed in a lab coat.

And here’s where it gets fun:

The same reductionists who say “free will is an illusion because the brain is just machinery” will happily say that the brain is for goal‑directed behavior, decision‑making, and keeping the organism alive.

You can’t have it both ways: either talk about “what organisms are for” is legitimate, and teleology is alive and well in biology, or you admit that your rejection of final cause is really a linguistic purge, not a discovery about the world.

So it’s time to bring back your favorite scientist’s boogeyman into the conversation. The man that bridged philosophy with science. The father of biology. The one that makes materialists and reductionists cope. The one called Aristotle.

I’m tired of seeing that nincompoop Darwin get all the credit for the work he basically plagiarized by looking over Aristotle’s shoulder. Evolution this, evolution that, survival, fitness, randomness, boooriing. It’s just Aristotle with a lab coat and a PR team.

Any mention of purpose, design, or goal‑directedness gets thrown out the lab window out of fear that maybe, just maybe, things aren’t as lifeless and mechanistic as you want them to be. At that point, you might as well join the nihilists and existentialist pity party. Don’t forget your eyeliner and black clothing.

Next time someone here says “biology is purely mechanistic and therefore free will is impossible,” ask them:

“If the brain is just a machine, why does it do anything at all? And why does biology keep talking about functions, purposes, and ends?”

Maybe the real problem isn’t teleology. Maybe it’s the refusal to admit that purpose‑talk is baked into the way we even describe life.

Teleology: banned in philosophy, smuggled in through the back door of biology.

But I know most of you aren’t ready for that type of discussion 😎

"I'm 17. I've been seeking recognition my whole life. I wrote about why I stopped trying, about rejection and bullies, about the child inside who still wants to shine. If you've been made small — this is for you."

As I sit and ponder about these existential questions, I’ve come to realize that the line between cause and effect is not so clear. Say you’re ordering an ice cream cone, for simplicity reasons we’ll say there’s only two options, chocolate and vanilla. You choose chocolate. Now what seems like a simple choice becomes a lot more complicated when dissected. We need to take into account action potentials, neural summation, conditioning genetics, environmental factors, past and present contexts, and probably millions of other factors that would be impossible to list.

So that choice, that critical moment when it’s decided chocolate and therefore can never be vanilla since choosing otherwise via identical circumstances is effectively a violation of physics, was that a cause or an effect?

Think about it. The answer is not so simple.

In a nondual framework, wherein all of reality emanates from a primordial nonlocal field of consciousness, there is a distinction between will and agency which corresponds to the distinction between "consciousness" and “mind”, the former coming from the nonlocal field while the latter is a product of the physical brain.

Within this framing consciousness is the observing awareness, the perceiver of the qualia produced by the mind imbued with the powers of attention and intention (will, essentially), while the mind is the agent enacting this will. But the mind is not a perfect agent, being the output of the brain it is bound by physical causality/effects so the influence of the will is imperfect. 

There exists a feedback loop between these two systems, conscious intention/attention influences the physical actions of the agent, the results of these actions then influence the subjective experience produced by the mind, the conscious observer perceives this experience, and then the observer can alter its attention/intention. This change is only influenced by the physical world and not bound by it, because "consciousness” is part of the nonlocal field it has a degree of freedom from the chain of physical causality.

Hence we have free will but not free agency.

Consider addiction, a chemical influence that may work against the conscious intention. One still has free will here, their intention/attention is not ruled by this chemical influence, but the mind’s ability to make decisions and choices can become overwhelmed by this influence, essentially removing our agency. 

Personally I find this framing to be a bit optimistic and empowering; our intentions matter in a causal sense, we’re not just automatons with the illusion of free will (sorry compatibilists, but you’re deluding yourselves if you think actual free will is possible under strict physicalism). But at the same time the exercise of this free will is limited, so we have some culpability for our actions, but not total culpability. (And yes, my desire for this optimistic framing to be true is steering is partially why I believe it, but experiential knowledge is playing a role too).

While I intended this post to be about the free will implications within this framework and not about the veracity or metaphysics of the framework itself, I’ll add a bit more detail to head off some reasonable qualms. A plausible mechanism for this influence of the nonlocal conscious observer on the physical brain is via coordinated collapse of quantum states in the nervous system. The brain is a chaotic system, the smallest perturbations can have macro effects, that's how this small conscious influence on "randomness" can have a causal impact. So nonduality is not actually in conflict with any laws of physics, it’s only in conflict with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Also I want to acknowledge that all conceptual frameworks are inherently dualistic, so trying to conceptualize a nondual framework is bound to have seeming inconsistencies. One worth highlighting is how the nonlocal consciousness can be influenced by the physical world if it’s outside of time, space, and causality. This is actually the point of departure between different forms of nonduality, in Advaita Vedanta the innermost self (Atman) cannot be influenced by the physical world, whereas in nondual Tantra (the framework I am using here) it can be. I’m afraid the “how” of this is beyond my metaphysical understanding.

I understand that nondual frameworks are not super popular here, so I get why some people will nope out on this from the jump (this is why I didn’t include nonduality in the title), but I hope even those that reject this framing found it to be at least mildly interesting.

The truth of hard determinism dissolves a certain sense of moral responsibility that a lot of folks don’t want to let go of.

This sense of moral responsibility is central to their world view and sense of self, but its obliterated by strong determinism.

The moral responsibility that determinism vaporizes is the judgy, self-righteous, vindictive kind. Its the kind the Old Testament Judeo-Christian god was all about. It often gets utilized as a tool of structural racism and and discriminatory dickery in general.

You know that right wing “tough-on-crime” mentality that sent masked goon squads into American cities to arrest a 45 year old guy who had been working at Home Depot for ten years? That’s what it destroys.

Of course a lot of folks have a vested interest in keeping that kind of “moral responsibility” alive. These people either live their lives in a fearful reactionary mode or exploit that mentality in others.

The sense of moral responsibility that does survives determinism is thoughtful, humble, compassionate, and practical. Its more concerned with the way things work than with emotions like anger and hatred.

Which of these takes on moral responsibility is smarter and better for human beings and communities?

*this argument uses free will as being “ the ability to truly and freely choose between several options independently*

Ai uses algorithmic thinking.

An algorithm can be defined as a finite set of step-by-step instructions or rules designed to perform a specific task, solve a problem.

So how does this prevent free will?

Algorithms follow a set sequence, which always acts the same. Meaning if we give an algorithm an input, its output to that input will always be the same, despite the seemingly unlimited number of possibilities.

This means that for any particular situation, there is only one given “choice”/output that an algorithm can produce. This defies the “several options” part of the free will definition used.

There was never a choice, as there was only one option.

I am aware that some algorithms use the computer version of “random” meaning they will actuallt generate different outcomes to the same prompt. However if the variable that is being randomly assigned is allowed to change, that means the algorithm is not the same.

Similarly, some may argue that many algorithms do allow for several outcomes/answers. To which I reason this.

Should a given algorithm seem to output several answers, that is effectively one answer in itself. Rather than the answer being a string, it becomes a list, which are both just 1 thing.

Also, some algorithms will generate a pool of acceptable outcomes, and only choose one.

This seems to suggest options or “choices”. However this is not the case, as the sequence of steps used to determine which possible output to use will always return the same thing.

Meaning the only real possible output was the one given, and removing the “choices”. The only way to change this is to use “random” but that means the algorithm is not the same- as I previously mentioned.

Worth a read, could also apply to us as humans too

The Basic Argument (Strawson), to be specific.