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Are there any decent arguments for free will? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Regardless of if it's practical to live that way in daily life, the world seems pretty determined. Everything happens because a vast amount of interactions between infinite factors causes it to. You can't really say you choose between things as many influences have been taken in by you and many things have affected your psychological state. Has everything been practically decided by the big bang? Now, this is not to say we can know everything or predict the future, but we know what's likely. Socialism or extinction may be inevitable, but we don't know yet. Socialism can only happen if people keep fighting, regardless. People will be convinced or principled or not. Science seems to agree with this, and only few, like the wrong Sartre would propose we have ultimate free will. So are there any arguments against determinism? I know there is a saying that you're freer when you recognize how your freedom is restricted, and that recognition may make your actions better, but isn't there ultimately no freedom?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

From David Bohm in Chance and Causality

Now, as we shall see in this chapter and in other parts of the book, the mechanistic philosophy has taken many specific forms throughout the development of science. The most essential aspects of this philosophy seem to the author, however, to be its assumption that the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience, every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the behaviour of a few kinds of basic entities or variables. (p. 37)

But we do not assume, as is generally done in a mechanistic philosophy, that the whole of nature can eventually be treated completely perfectly and unconditionally in terms of just one of these sides, so that the other will be seen to be inessential, a mere shadow, that makes no fundamental contribution to our representation of nature as a whole. (p. 143)

There's plenty of space to reinterpret free-will (or concretized moments of free-will recognized or experienced by humans, if you'd like) into this representation of nature as wholly infinite and constantly developing.

If you scrap the indeterminism = free-will assumption, you can interpret this way:

determinism and no free-will.
indeterminism but genes + environment/structure govern everything, so free-will illusion.
indeterminism and genes + environment/structure impact culture and cultural learning, but meaning and content delivered through understanding and cognition is still an experience and hence uniquely free to interpret and reinterpret itself, leaving room for some freedom of the will.