r/freewill

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>Decisionism: "A decision must be made before any outcome of the decision-making process can emerge. No observable / measurable outcome can happen prior to a decision being made. Outcomes are only observable / measurable after a decision has been made."

... "Decisionism" trumps "Determinism" because determinism is subservient to whatever decision is about to be made. Determinism is rendered powerless. Everything leading up to a decision being made (no matter what) must yield and wait for a decision to be made before any result(s) can happen.

No decision = No outcome

Despite the many determinists' arguments that whatever is chosen was predetermined by prior events (cause and effect), the outcome of those prior events and any other mechanics that the determinists argue are in play must yield and wait for a decision to be made.

That places the power, authority and control of the entire decision-making process solely in the hands of the "decision maker."

NOTE: The only reason a determinist would reject this ideology is because it has zero effect on eliminating free will.

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EDIT 7:20 PM EST: Those of you who are downvoting my OP and my replies must first 'decide" to issue them before they can ever show up on Reddit. Yes, even with your shameless downvoting you are unwittingly demonstrating the supremacy of "Decisionism" over "Determinism."

Is free will ultimately a philosophy question? Surely even the relevant science has to be interpreted by philosophers?

Is there any good data on scientists and belief in free will?

Do we have any good reason to believe scientists will lean towards free will skepticism?

"I want the ability to do otherwise"

The ability to do otherwise, from what? From the future thing you havent done yet?!?

Okay, granted. *waves magic wand*

"Hey... i dont feel any different."

Right, because the ability to do otherwise from the thing you havent done yet is a null statement. So what do you really want?

"To not be determined by things".

Okay, granted. *waves magic wand again*.

"I still dont feel any different..."

Right, because "not being determined" is a low bar to pass. All i had to do was make one of your neurons fire randomly at a time, and, that doesnt change much of anything.

"No no no, i want MAGIC. I want magic to give the ability to do otherwise."

Okay... Granted. *waves magic wand*

"I STILL dont feel any different? What is going on?!?"

I turned your brain into a stone, which means it no longer functions. Now you think *magically* as if you had a brain, but you dont. Thats what you wanted, right?

"Noooo i want, Choices. I want to be able to make REAL choices."

Explain that to me.

"I cant".

(And theres many such cases)

I started participating on this sub and others like it a few days ago. What I've found is that each person defines their position differently & all those definitions don't make any sense when you really think about them. I think it's because they use outdated premises from centuries ago that just don't fit into modern science. Which makes them incoherent.

If life is determined, and free will does not exist, then a person has no real control over what happens to them or how they respond. In that case, consciousness can feel tragic: you are aware of your suffering, but you cannot ultimately do anything to escape it.

For someone whose life is mostly good, the absence of free will might feel comforting or even freeing. They can simply experience life as a pleasant ride. But for someone whose life is full of pain, the same idea becomes horrifying. They are not freely choosing their path; they are simply forced to experience a nightmare they did not choose and cannot control.

So if determinism is true, consciousness seems deeply unfair. Some people are determined to enjoy life, while others are determined to suffer through it. The unlucky person is not just suffering; they are conscious of their suffering while being powerless to change the fact that they must experience it.

Edit: My point was more that consciousness itself can be seen as tragic from the perspective of an unlucky person. I don’t really care that much about fairness.

The Laws of Nature are a description of how the many objects and forces that make up the physical universe work. One type of such objects is the intelligent living organism.

Intelligent living organisms include all the autonomic and instinctual behaviors of their biology plus the added flexibility of having an intelligent brain capable of imagining alternate possibilities, evaluating their options in terms of their own goals and reasons, and choosing which option they will physically implement by their own actions.

This the ability to do otherwise provides a survival advantage to all intelligent species, allowing them to come up with new ways to adapt to a wide variety of environments in which they find themselves. It gives them a survival advantage over species that are limited to hardwired instinctive responses.

Under Smolin’s temporal naturalism, he identifies an unprecedented (or underdetermined) event as one in which the underlying governing laws cannot determine a unique outcome. The physical example that Smolin gives is spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB), the fundamental process by which the unique outcome of a dynamical evolution does not exhibit the same symmetry as its governing laws. The direct mirror of this in the free will debate is Buridan’s ass; where the final outcome (choosing food or water) does not exhibit the same symmetry as the logical evaluation that deemed both as equivalently necessary. To Smolin, once a given set of dynamical laws can no longer determine a unique final state, “new facts” must emerge to allow a unique evolution to continue propagating.

Smolin’s critical argument is that the laws governing a system are not some external property that impose themselves on the system; they are just as dynamically emergent of evolution as the system structure itself. What this framing explicitly does is reject the hidden dualism that pervades pretty much all of atemporal materialism; the idea that things (physical objects) are somehow fundamentally distinct from the laws that describe them. As such, dynamical laws are not some divine metaphysical authority imposing themselves on the physical, but are themselves molded by the physical just as the physical is molded by them. It is a rejection that “laws” should be taken as some self-evident aspect of reality, requiring no investigation or justification for having the given structure that they do. To the traditional materialist, “physical law” has simply replaced God as the unquestionable, uncaused, primary mover. Even conceding infinite regress, they must still acknowledge the metaphysical primacy of the laws guiding such a regress. I can theoretically write a program that executes infinitely, but the structure of that program is still not self-evident; it only arises because I made it so.

Penrose attempted a similar argument computationally, arguing that consciousness “bridges the gap” of undecidability, allowing a logically undecidable problem to be internally decided (though he still points to a “metaphysically imposing” mechanism like Orch-OR). Like a physical infinite regress, undecidability is the result of an infinite chain of logical regress. A simple example is the Liar’s paradox; “This statement is false.” If it is false, then the statement is true, making the statement false etc etc. Like all undecidable problems, its infinite regress is self-referential in nature, as described in Prokopenko’s The self-referential basis of undecidable dynamics: from the Liar Paradox and the Halting Problem to The Edge of Chaos. As such, the only way to “resolve” such a paradox is via the emergence of a new fact from inside of the system itself. If the logic is unchanging, uniqueness will never emerge. Self-definition is what created the undecidability, so self-definition is simultaneously the only way to remove it.

In the brain, spontaneous symmetry breaking is already intricately linked with the emergence of new facts; knowledge itself. As described by Fumarola Et. Al;

For the brain to recognize local orientations within images, neurons must spontaneously break the translation and rotation symmetry of their response functions—an archetypal example of unsupervised learning…These results
reconcile experimental observations to the Hebbian paradigm, shed light on a new mechanism for visual cortex development, and contribute to our growing understanding of the relationship between learning and symmetry breaking.

This makes a direct and fundamental distinction between “random” (IE unintentional) and “underdetermined” behavior. Indeterminism is often directly conflated with acausality, or something that is external to the laws of physics. This framing still assumes such laws as metaphysically primary, meaning that anything outside of their influence must be some form of unlawful, unintentional chaos. Externally, both situations would appear identical (unpredictable and acausal, assuming shared known laws between of observer and observed), yet internally they are polar opposites. An underdetermined event is still entirely causal, that causal structure is simply unique to the system exhibiting such behavior; IE a form of “new” knowledge.

In Landsman’s Indeterminism and Undecidability, he attempts to make a direct equivalency between these concepts. By exploiting mathematical incompleteness (primarily Chaitin’s follow-ups), he argues that situations of observed indeterminism such as QM are better understood as expressions of lawful yet fundamentally unpredictable undecidability. Such a conclusion is somewhat obvious, as QM’s “randomness” obviously still exhibits structure; entanglement requires a shared framework that is both lawful yet non-local to the preceding governing rules. The same is true of spontaneous symmetry breaking, as described in Hill et. al’s Exceptional points preceding and enabling spontaneous symmetry breaking;

“Here we investigate the intricate relationship between SSB and a specific class of EPs across three distinct, real-world scenarios in nonlinear optics. In these systems, the two phenomena do not coincide; they occur at dislocated points in parameter space, but are interdependent. This recurring behavior across disparate platforms implies that such decoupling is not unique to these optical systems, but likely reflects a more general principle.”

If we accept the fundamental connection between knowledge and SSB as described by Fumarola, such disparate interconnection seems somewhat obvious. While they are causally disconnected from the perspective of the “old laws,” their evolution is intricately linked via the shared “new facts” that emerged between and within them. Returning to Smolin’s temporal naturalism, such “new facts,” he claims, directly account for the emergence and experience of qualia within conscious beings.

This ability to account for qualia is one of Smolin’s critical points for why temporal naturalism should be favored over what he calls atemporal naturalism, or the traditional materialist perspective. If given two (objectively) equivalently explanatory theories, the one that is consistent with subjective experience should be preferred to the one that claims the subjective is a complex, unnecessary, acausal delusion.

The compulsions with the tethered necessity of blind assumption and defense thereof grow stronger

The possibilities are (1) It follows logically from the definitions of free will and determinism that they are compatible. (2) It follows logically from the definitions of free will and determinism that they are incompatible. (3) It doesn't follow logically from the definitions of free will and determinism either that they are compatible or incompatible.

The claim that both use the same definitions but come to different conclusions is incoherent.

I have the impression that the debate about free will often fails because the two sides are answering different questions. Neuroscientists explain how decisions are produced by the brain, while many philosophers—and most people in everyday life—mean something different by “free will”: the ability of a person to act as an autonomous agent according to their own motives, values, and beliefs. As a result, it often feels like both sides are talking past each other.

A good example of this is *A Clockwork Orange*. The film is often described as being about free will, but interestingly, it is not concerned with whether Alex could somehow violate the laws of physics or have acted differently under identical conditions. The central question is whether Alex can still be considered an autonomous individual after his personality has been deliberately manipulated from the outside. His freedom is not taken away because his brain suddenly begins obeying the laws of physics—it always did—but because an external force interferes with his personality and removes his ability to act according to his own motives. This seems much closer to what most people intuitively mean when they talk about free will.

This becomes especially clear in discussions surrounding the famous Libet experiments, which are often interpreted as showing that the brain initiates decisions before they become consciously accessible. From this, many conclude that “you” are not really making the decision. But that conclusion seems to assume, from the outset, that the brain and the self are two different things. Why should that be the case? If I reject dualism and don’t believe in a soul separate from the brain, then I *am* my entire mental process—including my unconscious processes. The fact that a decision begins unconsciously before entering awareness does not mean that someone else made the decision; it simply means that consciousness does not have immediate access to every part of its own operation.

If, on the other hand, one insists that the true self is something separate from the brain, then one has implicitly reintroduced a kind of dualism or soul. In that case, it would also seem reasonable to argue that this conscious self can reflect on its internal states and influence how it responds to them. Either way, I don’t find the simple claim, “Your brain decided, therefore you didn’t,” particularly convincing.

I also suspect that freedom is not an all-or-nothing property but something that exists on a spectrum. People differ in their capacity to recognize impulses, regulate emotions, reflect on their motivations, and exercise self-control. Someone who is better able to understand and regulate their emotions arguably has greater self-governance than someone who is largely driven by impulses or unconscious patterns. If that’s true, then freedom may be better understood as a matter of degree rather than a binary property.

Another issue, in my view, is the confusion of different levels of explanation. Science describes the physical conditions under which thought is possible. But it does not automatically follow that science can therefore fully explain—or eliminate—concepts such as meaning, responsibility, or free will. That strikes me as a category mistake.
An analogy might help. Structural engineers can explain every detail about the concrete, steel, and architecture of a football stadium. Their knowledge is essential for the game to exist. But it doesn’t answer questions like whether a referee made the correct call, whether a tactic was effective, or whether a player acted fairly. The engineers describe the conditions that make the game possible, not the game itself. Likewise, neuroscience explains the conditions that make thought possible, but that doesn’t necessarily settle philosophical questions about autonomy, responsibility, or meaning.

For this reason, I also don’t find it convincing when critics of compatibilism argue that it merely redefines free will. It seems to me that many incompatibilists instead begin with an extremely demanding definition of freedom: a person is only free if they could have acted differently under exactly the same conditions and are ultimately the origin of their own character and desires. I don’t see why that particular definition should be considered the only legitimate one.

I also struggle with the practical implications of hard determinism. If every belief is fully determined, then that applies just as much to the determinist’s beliefs as it does to those of everyone else. Of course, one can reply that discussion itself is determined and that arguments are simply part of the causal chain. But this seems to strip the debate of its distinctive normative force. Trying to persuade someone with reasons already assumes that concepts such as truth, rationality, and responsibility have a meaningful role. It seems to me that many hard determinists continue to rely on these concepts in practice while simultaneously arguing that they are ultimately reducible to impersonal causal processes.
Overall, I suspect that the debate over free will is less about empirical evidence than about fundamentally different assumptions regarding what “freedom” actually means. Neuroscience can provide invaluable insights into how decisions arise. But it does not automatically follow that philosophical concepts such as freedom, responsibility, or meaning have therefore been refuted.

For that reason, I often get the impression that some critics of free will enter the discussion by quietly changing the subject. Many people understand free will as the capacity to act according to one’s own motives, values, and beliefs. Yet the discussion is then shifted to whether a person can be the ultimate origin of themselves or somehow transcend the laws of nature. Once that stricter definition is adopted, free will is almost guaranteed to fail by definition. To me, this seems less like a refutation of the ordinary concept of free will and more like a change in what is actually being debated. Unless that shift in definitions is acknowledged, I suspect both sides will continue talking past one another.

I must say, I do not understand people who simultaneously believe in Sapolsky-style determinism and remain practicing Christians or Muslims. Isn't such a worldview inherently unjust? Even if we adopt a definition of free will that is not libertarian, but rather "if a person desired to do it and did it, then it was their free choice," the problem of rigid mechanical predetermination remains—things could not have happened any other way. This makes God a villain if He punishes a person in hell for what was, in essence, the unconscious execution of a program embedded in their body and brain.

I've been reading about this for a while and I do find hard determinism the most compelling position but I'm having a hard time accepting the implications.

Do you think of yourself as just a series of processes of cause and effect, a "cog in the universe"? If so, do you feel anxious about it or do you consider it a satisfying way of interpreting the world?

Personally, I really want to adopt the interpretation of reality I consider to be true but I'm not sure if a life without agency is compatible with a meaningful existence

each neuron is connected to other neurons ( possibly thousands) via dendrites. it is constantly recieving inputs from these other neurons. if a given set of these inputs arrives at its dendrites within a narrow time frame ( under a second), it sums these inputs together. if this sum crosses the firing threshhold, it fires an action potential. it fires at a specific firing rate. the higher the sum of its inputs, the higher the firing rate it fires at. it is fully deterministic with the exception of possibly some small quantum fluctuations.

To give a much simplified model, imagine neuron A is connected to neurons B and C. Neurons B and C both fire onto neuron A within a few miliseconds. Neuron B fires an input of 5 and Neuron C fires an input of 4 ( im using these numbers to represent firing rates which are actually measured in hertz). Neuron A sums these inputs getting 9. the firing threshhold is 4, so because the sum crosses this it fires at 9 firing rate. Neuron A has no magical ability to choose to fire at 7 firing rate instead or to refuse to fire. likewise, Neurons B and C fired at 5 and 4 firing rate because of the inputs they recieved as well. this goes on and on down the line until you reach a sensory neuron which recieved a stimulus from the environment or a pacemaker neuron.

how could libertarian freewill be possible from a neurological viewpoint? where is the libertarian freewill neuron?

I generally like debating ideas, but debating compatibilism verses incompatibilism, I find tedious. It might appear that this debate should be decided by looking at the empirical evidence and seeing which theory better comports with the evidence. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Compatibilism is a debate about the nature of determinism, and this is necessarily an ontological debate. I find all ontological debates tedious.

For example, the compatibilist argument that if you rewind time after you made a difficult decision, you would always make the identical choice. To them this proves there is never any leeway in our choosing. However, there is no, and can be no, experimental evidence for this. It is just a baseless claim that boils down to an ontological "yes it is," "no it's not" stalemate.

There appears to be no difference of the either view in explaining the objective observations of free will behavior. Anytime apparent indeterminism is observed, the compatibilist rightly claims that they do not need to subscribe to determinism.

Let's look at an example. Suppose we observe how rats navigate a maze that requires each rat to choose the correct way to turn at 4 "T" junctions in order to escape. We follow the statistics of which way the rat turns at each junction over the course of 10 trials. We do this for all 10 of the rats and compile the results. These types of experiments have been done many times over the years. The pattern invariably found is that initially the choice for each junction was a random 50%. The rats proved to the investigators (and probably to themselves) that either choice was possible at each of the 4 junctions. As the rats repeated the maze, the statistics changed. The choice that led out of the maze instead of a blind alley increased in frequency. By the 10th iteration, most subjects ran the maze making the correct choice at each of the 4 junctions. Random choices became purposeful choices as the maze was explored and knowledge of the subject increased. How should we think about this result?

The libertarian explanation is that rats have a genetic influence to escape a maze and will choose randomly if no information is available as a basis for choice. Choosing randomly we can all agree is not indicative of free will. However, their experience in running the maze gives them the information to make a rational, free will choice in later trials. Libertarians believe that at each junction the subject chooses according to its purpose, based upon the information it has. How do compatibilists view these results?

Some compatibilists might agree with the libertarian account. Some might say that the initial choices, though they appeared random, were actually manifestations of complex deterministic factors that just happen to appear as a 0.50 frequency. Some might think that choosing which way to go in a maze is totally unrelated to the type of free will needed for human moral responsibility. How do you explain these results?

Either we are "able to do otherwise" even if we strongly dont want to, or not. Pick one.

Many libertarians say "Fine, if you dont want to at all, then you cant" and they say that to explain why they dont have to worry about, for example, spontaneously leaping from a cliff or stabbing someone for no reason.

And by this logic, the most bloodthirsty murderers "cant" not murder, because they dont want to not murder! Their hearts are set on murder. Therefore... They couldnt do otherwise? Jeffrey Dahmer gets a pass, but a remorseful one-time killer doesnt?

Inb4: And i know what youre thinking... "Theres got to be a third option...", Sure, there is. It could be asymmetric. You could always "do otherwise" if thats not doing something, then doing something requires desire. Yep, thats coherent. Now have fun walking across a busy street, hope you dont suddenly freeze. lol...

help me digest this, a proposed version of indeterminism, said to be different from traditional indeteminism

"""

Even if determinism is false, causal completeness requires that there be some quantitatively precise law governing the development of every situation. If we maintain the doctrine of causal completeness, then the only retreat from physical determination of our actions is in the direction of more or less unreliability, hardly a desirable philosophical goal.

However, the indeterminism that I wish to advocate is something quite different, the denial of causal completeness.5 I shall maintain that few, if any, situations have a complete causal truth to be told about them. Causal regularity is a much rarer feature of the world than is generally supposed. And the real solution to the problem of freedom of the will, I shall argue, is to recognize that humans, far from being putative exceptions to an otherwise seamless web of causal connection, are in fact dense concentrations of causal power in a world where this is in short supply. The solution to the problem of human autonomy that I propose, then, is a complete reversal of traditional non-compatibilist end p.157 approaches. Such solutions have assumed that the non-human world consists of a network of causal connections, the links in which instantiate lawlike, exceptionless generalizations, but have tried to show that humans, somehow, lie outside or partially outside this web.6 By contrast, I am suggesting that causal order is everywhere partial and incomplete. There is no such causal web. But humans, by virtue of their enormously complex but highly ordered internal structure, provide oases of order and predictability; they are potent sources of causality. Thus the significance of recognizing indeterminism is not at all to show that human actions are unreliable or random. It is rather to show that the causal structure that impinges on human beings, whether externally from macroscopic causal interaction, or internally from constitutive microstructural processes, is not such as to threaten the natural intuition that humans are, sometimes, causally efficacious in the world around them.

"""

AI explanation

""'This author's view is the opposite. They're not claiming humans are exceptions to an otherwise complete causal web — they're denying there's a complete causal web anywhere, human or non-human. Causal completeness (every event having a full, lawlike causal story) is rare in general, not just suspended for agents. So instead of humans being a hole in the causal fabric, humans are actually the opposite: unusually dense, ordered pockets of causal power in a universe that's mostly causally loose and patchy.

The upshot for free will: you don't need to find a special gap at the moment of decision to protect agency, because the deterministic web that would threaten agency was never there in the first place. Human causal efficacy isn't secured by exempting ourselves from causation — it's secured because we're comparatively more causally structured than most of reality, not less."""

Think about the scenario where you're trying to predict the exact ending of a wildly complex computer simulation.

If the simulation is complex enough, there are no mathematical shortcuts to jump to the end. The only way to know what happens at step one-trillion is to physically run the program for one-trillion steps.

In computer science and physics, this is called Computational Irreducibility

The human brain is a tiny, localised subsystem embedded inside the continuous network of the universe.

In other words, you're not a separate entity or visitor but the very specific structural pattern of the continuous fundamental fields.

Now because a small part of a system cannot out-compute the whole system, your brain mathematically cannot fast-forward the universe's sequence to see the outcome. You are forced to experience the future as an unknown, "open" variable simply because your biological hardware is experiencing processing lag.

But what if you just tried to predict your own next choice?

Even if you had a supercomputer brain, you would hit a terminal physical paradox.

To actually know that prediction, your brain has to physically store the memory of it. But the moment you store that prediction, you physically change the neural configuration of your brain. You have just introduced a brand new physical variable (the knowledge of the prediction) which instantly invalidates the prediction you just made. If you try to calculate how this new knowledge changes your choice, you change your brain state again, trapping yourself in an infinite feedback loop.

Thus it is mechanically impossible for a system to perfectly predict its own future state.

Because you cannot access the end of the equation, you are forced to physically run the algorithm.

Now let's apply the above to this scenario. You stand in the kitchen deliberating between coffee and tea.

That is the literal, thermodynamic process of your brain physically crunching the unresolved variables of your environment to arrive at a necessary outcome.

The physical execution of that calculation is then your agency.

Descartes "I think, therefore I am" commits a mistake by assuming that if there is thinking, there must also be a thinker - something distinct from the thought itself that does the thinking. A more economical description is simply: there is thinking. A thought arises. In the same way, the statement "No one prevents me from thinking, therefore I have free will" is more accurately expressed as: thinking occurs unhindered.

Descartes claim and the compatibilist conclusion share the same fallacy. In both cases, the absence of one thing is treated as evidence for the presence of something entirely different. For Descartes, the absence of doubt is taken as proof that a thinking subject exists. For compatibilism, the absence of external constraint is taken as proof that free will exists. But the fact that we do not find an obstacle does not mean that we have found an author. Absence does not, by itself, create presence. It merely reveals a process unfolding according to its own lawful regularities. There is thinking. There is choosing. There is living. And within these impersonal verbs, no place remains for an independent agent.

Can anyone explain to me the philosophical theories around free will and if it exists? I have heard many notable people online claim that it does not.

I grant that free will is incredibly constrained by genetics, socioeconomic status, biochemistry, political tides of your current time, etc.

But I have trouble believing that I am not completely free to choose vainilla or chocolate at the ice cream shop, for example.