What is free will when you are suffering from pathological procrastination, depression or addiction ?
If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?
Why does anxiety makes me stay in my couch and antidepressants makes me want to go outside ?
I understand free will as a moral concept but at a biological level, i feel like it adds a lot of shaming and suffering to people who struggle to modify their behavior because science now knows that changing behavior is hard and impossible without physical modification of the brain structure.
You just moved the shaming from "look they are lazy and don't move from the couch" to "they are lazy because they made bad decisions"
You can fail to take action, you can take drugs to manage the negative situation more comfortably, but, if abuse is the underlying issue, a genuine change of circumstances is required.
However it can take a while to realize the problems and manage to get out. This may have effects that last for a good while. People do not deserve abuse or the negative effects of such abuse, just because they technically could have made a change, or made it earlier.
Sometimes, the outcome of one's decisions (bad is an unnecessary value statement here. Was it a "bad" idea to start a restaurant that failed and made you sad? Cmon).
However, a huge swath of mental illness, including depression, is the result of environmental and genetic factors utterly outside your control. Your mom smoked crack when you were in her womb and somehow that's "the outcome of your bad decision?"
Your brain chemistry is part of this will, though.
> science now knows that changing behavior is hard
I don't think science knows things. And while changing behaviour is hard, and much harder for some than others, it still doesn't mean that the total system that makes up your mind, including biological predispositions, is not your will.
But here's the thing, given enough knowledge that chemistry is deterministic.
Will seems to be one of those words we've created from deep ignorance, much like consciousness, and the more we learn about the world and ourselves the less our old views make sense.
What causes someone to suppress doing something they want to do, but have decided is wrong, even if they will never be caught? Or to do something they don't want to do, but have decided is right, even if no-one will ever know?
I would call that "will".
When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but that intention too is also just a thought that appears in consciousness. To decide what to think in a manner compatible with what most people think free will is would require you to decide what to think or feel before actually thinking or feeling it, which is not possible.
And when you think about the causality of feelings or thoughts, which are just neuronal signaling patterns/chains in the brain, it begins to appear much more mechanical than free will intention.
I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.
> we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served it.
No definition of free will that I have encountered considers it an absolute freedom from any form of determinism. We’re obviously influenced by our nature and external influences. For instance my emotional predispositions are largely determined and my thoughts are not entirely under my control but I do have scope to shape both my emotions and my thoughts over time by what I choose to focus on. I can choose to do what is necessary to change my behavior and to treat people differently than what comes naturally. I know all of this because I have done it, I have experienced it. No materialist philosophy of mind has produced any compelling evidence to contradict my experience of free will in this capacity.
This seems to be an idiosyncratic definition of free will.
This seems like a separate question. Having the power to choose doesn't mean you have every conceivable option in mind, nor that you have the power to exercise every choice, nor even that you like any of the choices.
Did the first particles that ejected from the big bang have free will?
This sounds much too broad - I can't tell what it means. The things I listed are the normal constraints around how we define free will:
> > doesn't mean you have every conceivable option in mind
I think this is what you were exploring in your reply.
> > nor that you have the power to exercise every choice
I might choose to fly, but that doesn't mean that that is what will happen
> > nor even that you like any of the choices
I might be choosing between allowing myself to be robbed and risking being shot, but I am choosing within my horrible options.
> Did the first particles that ejected from the big bang have free will?
I don't think anyone's claiming they did, no.
Whatever happens you'll end up crossing the road right now.
In one example, you absent-mindedly cross the road.
In another example a thought comes to you to get coffee, and you cross the road to get it.
In another example you consider not getting coffee, and going to the park instead, but end up choosing coffee because you feel sluggish.
If there's no free will, any amount of thinking before the decision doesn't prove there's free will. It's just more stuff that was also predetermined. You having an illusion of choice doesn't prove anything.
It's not reasonable to assume one's experience is an illusion without sufficient evidence which is a bar you haven't crossed. Therefore your argument begs the question.
That's why people thought the Sun moved around the Earth. I mean, it's just "common sense" -- you see the Sun in the East in the morning, and then it's in the West in the evening. It turns out "common sense" is not useful for understanding how things work.
Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.
The chain of causality that leads to thoughts and emotions in consciousness is completely determined by the structure and action potentials that propagate through our brain and nothing else, and this doesn’t leave room for some conscious agent in our brain also pulling levers and further modifying causality.
The differences between the lives of even identical twins in the same environment are a lot more than a flap of a butterfly's wings. They don't spend every second of their lives together, so their experiences will differ quite a bit.
A lot of our reasoning are applications of observations and best practices rules that we are sometimes not really aware of unless challenged by circumstances or outsiders.
This is to some degree necessary - the outside world is too complex to fully model inside our minds. The most important things that we can only build approximate models about are other people.
And based on what do you decide ? Probably your past experience, your knowledge, your education and your moral values. Which are all somehow environmental factors.
I'm largely swayed by the 'conscious experience.' Presumably neither of us believe that if you make a program to add 2+2, that some entity suddenly pops into existence and imagines itself to be adding 2+2 only to then zip out out of existence. Where we may differ is that I don't think that changes if we go from adding 2+2, to instead sequentially carrying out arbitrarily more simple instruction.
Yet here we are - 'passenger' or 'driver' in a body feeling as though we have complete control over our own actions. I tend to believe what lay before my eyes. And so in this case, I am obligated to reject this as being an emergent property of complexity, or as a facade. Which, in turn, obligates me to reject physicalism.
It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.
You choose based on your past experience. If you know doing A is better than B, you didn’t choose A, it’s just that your brain already knows that A is the best option based on past experience or knowledge or beliefs.
Even if you choose the seemingly "worst" option B, it’s just that you know that new experiences can be rewarding so your brain is ok to try it.
And there is the extreme example : given you are in good mental health, you are totally, physically, unable to chose to kill someone (or even yourself) without a very important reason (to you).
Also, if the absence of free will at biological levels don’t make the concept useless at the society level. Accepting that environment, culture, knowledge and society have such an influence on us just shows the importance of shaping a good society.
Accepting absence of free will at a biological level can just makes us more empathetic towards others.
It doesn’t means society have to accept any wrong behavior from humans but rather something way more positive : society is ultimately responsible for individuals behaviors and have the power to change them for the benefit of everyone.
Typing out such a long rambling reply was itself a choice.
First sentence GP wrote is: "Choosing is not free will.". Did you choose to ignore what GP wrote when writing your reply?
Free will isn't about making choices, at least not according to any definition I've heard. After all, it is obvious that in some way we do make choices. As far as my understanding goes free will is, depending on the definition, either about choosing differently when all else is equal or not having a gun pointed at your head when making a choice.
Free will largely isn't about making choices or having choices. It is largely about how/why we make choices.
Bacteria can move, thus bacteria have a choice of direction in which to move. Bacteria move, so it is making a choice.
If GP has free will just because they made a choice to write a reply to you, as you claim, then it must follow that bacteria also have free will. Am I wrong or do you think that bacteria have free will?
As for reflex versus choice, if someone hits my knee just right my legs going to kick out. If someone pushes in the same spot and says “kick your leg out” and I don’t want to, I don’t have to.
There may be constraints on that, obviously at gun point I’m going to, but yah, if you’re able to think about then choose to do something or not do something that seems qualitatively different than a reflex.
My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.
Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core) have never had to make any real “no-shit” choices in their life with serious consequences. I don’t mean to sound like an ass, but I both pity and envy these folks. Obviously you don’t have control over a lot of things, but the idea that this is all on rails screams “I’ve never had to do anything that had any real risk to it.”
I think it's the other way around. Because as a society we believe in free will, we easily ignore the effect of environment on our choices. We let social media companies make their products addictive, because we believe that it's a choice to use them. If we ackwnoledged the fact that our choices are the result of our genetics and experiences, we could start creating a society that avoids such practices and would be a better place to live in.
Let's say you were addicted to social media and you never in your life have heard or read anything bad about it. No one has ever mentioned quitting social media to you. Do you think the thought to do so would come to your mind? Or is the "choice" to quit social media just a path carved into your brain by all the negative experiences you have had or heard about?
False dichotomy.
What you can change, you can change. What you can't, you can't. Both exist, but not only those.
People can also want and seek help to change parts of yourself beyond your own control — to put the cookies beyond reach; to ensconce yourself in a monastery or nunnery to avoid being around those you're ashamed to fancy; to block the websites you can't resist typing in the URL for when half asleep.
And beyond that even; "thinking outside the box" isn't just a business cliché, there can be ways to change that were already possible, yet the mere thought had not formed and could not spontaneously emerge within a mind, yet when heard it is easy.
> Seriously - it’ll be hard, but just try to change. I bet you’ll be surprised.
If you made the bet to me, you would lose.
My main surprise in this life has been expecting to be able to change more, to resist more temptations, to have more self control.
At university, first year, we had a challenge. With appropriate safety gear, climb a telegraph pole, jump from the top to a trapeze. The teacher framed it in advance: "You'll think you can't, but you can. Remember that going forward, remember the voice saying you can't is wrong."
I climbed without fear. They had to tell me to slow down to keep the safety role taught. I expected it to be fine. I got my torso above the top… and my limbs froze. I still felt no fear, but my limbs were no more responsive to my desire to climb further and stand on the top, than when I have sleep paralysis. This was annoying, frustrating, but not scary. I came down by jumping sideways off the tower, and amused those on the ground by flapping my arms as if they were wings.
The lesson for me was the exact opposite of what had been intended by the teacher: I thought I could, but even without fear I could not.
Why are my expectations wrong in the opposite direction than you expect? Unclear even to me; perhaps because, by the standards I was raised in, so little even tempted me in the first place.
I have a hunch that the universe is more complicated than that and might likely be beyond human understanding, but maybe that's just another superstitious belief. Regardless, we should keep using Science to explore because it is the best model we have so far and continue to use Philosophy to question things.
Personally I feel that I have free will and understanding of my emotions gives me more free will. Even if I am wrong, I prefer living in a non-free will universe and believing in free will than living in a free will universe and not believing in free will. In the former case that would just be my destiny, haha.
"""Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences. Repetitive drug use often alters brain function in ways that perpetuate craving, and weakens (but does not completely negate) self-control.[1] This phenomenon – drugs reshaping brain function – has led to an understanding of addiction as a brain disorder with a complex variety of psychosocial as well as neurobiological (and thus involuntary)[a] factors that are implicated in addiction's development.[2][3][4] Classic signs of addiction include compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, preoccupation with substances or behavior, and continued use despite negative consequences. Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward),[5][6] coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).[3][7]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
I block some social media entirely, and I have to block rather than simply "choose to stop", due to the "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli" and habituation to patterns "characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward)".
I can easily recognise the long term deleterious effects social media, especially when it comes to just being horizontal in bed, either needing to go to sleep or to get up in the morning, and wanting to open up a browser on my phone to check for replies rather than either of those.
> which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core
The me of the id is not the same as the me of the ego, or the superego.
The me of tomorrow can curse the expanding waistline caused by the cake eaten by the me of today.
There is only one thing any of us can choose to do in any given moment while remaining true to ourselves; but which of the selves is truly "our"?
I met a young guy while I was backpacking last year who was quitting heroin cold turkey. He was back packing to quit - he’d simply chosen to walk out of his home and go without heroin for thousands of km from the trail system by his home in France.
He was a nice guy - I wonder what became of him, but still, he chose to simply stop. I think you have a lot more agency than you think. Yeah, things cannot be undone, but you can definitely will yourself to change a great many things. It’s just hard and our body resists doing hard things.
Surely you must see this is problems all the way down.
I would be shocked if I was the only one on HN who ever thought, “I don’t want to think about this right now, I want to think about <whatever>” and then stopped thinking about the first thing. In aviation there’s even actually training on division of attention and learning to prioritize and concentrate selectively. You evaluate the situation and classify things as “important” or “not important” then focus in the important stuff. Literally choosing what to think about in the moment.
You’ve never said “gotta concentrate on this now,” and then concentrated on it very hard? Everyone on here is going overly reductive and going into infinite regress as though that proves their point, but it’s Sorites Paradox. “Oh where did the decision about its importance come from? Well that’s entirely the product of your environment! Checkmate free will!” But it’s a lot simpler than that, in the heat of the moment if you don’t have time you tend to fall back to your training, but in other decisions - even when making a choice about what to think about - you can even hold a bit of a discussion with yourself, or lay out the pros and cons to decide what to do, evaluate them all and then choose.
You can absolutely choose to think about one thing or think about another. That’s its own sort of free will. As I read a lot of these comments I really pity the people who don’t believe they’re imbued with free will. It really makes me wonder about their lives and upbringing.
But then again, the addict also says he willingly chooses to drink another beer.. I’m sorry, I can’t let go. But I get your point and TBH I don’t really care either way. I just like to introspect and get at the bottom of things and then let go.
Think of it like having a preemptive multitasking scheduler that is unable to keep track of the state of the previous task.
I also wonder if this sort of “free will is not real” sort of mindset comes from a world that’s removed all agency from them?
Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.