Ask Lemmygrad

Don't think the free will v no free will dualism is the best way to look at the beast/phrase it, its something else entirely that uses these two aspects that seem like polar poles but are heavily overlapping, what some may easily call free will in some scenarios to being heavily shaded by conditions/environmental factors in others. I think of it as Marx's "man makes history, not under conditions of his choosing" meets modern psychneurosci.

Anyway, the real question here feels like 'what is freedom', which would be another good topic.

Every argument for free will comes down to insisting it must exist because the alternative makes people feel bad.

Other commenters here have given some great answers. The answer is a pretty resounding: No. There is nothing to indicate that "free will" exists, and in fact it is not clear how such a thing even could exist in a universe which operates according to a set of physical laws.

That being said, this is really a moot academic point. For all practical intents and purposes we have no choice but to live our lives and organize our societies as though we had free will. Socially speaking this is a necessary pretense, otherwise nothing would get done.

My take is simple.

We do not live in a vacuum, our actions will always be conditioned by our current and past material conditions. However, contradictions are inherent in nature and there lies our free will, in our constant struggle for development.

There's one practical scientific argument against free will. And that is that: that:

1. Given the base of all decision-making, and even thoughts, in humans is on chemical reactions in the brain.

2. The chemical reactions we are referring to affect neurons firing. Neurons firing is actually how the brain works.

3. The action potential is what determines whether or not a neuron will fire. The action potential is based on a ton of teeny tiny interactions at the chemical level.

4. Those teeny tiny chemical reactions are quantum.

5. Quantum things are inherently unpredictable. No, I do not mean they are difficult to predict. I mean, even with perfect knowledge, they are literally unpredictable.

6. Even with perfect knowledge, you will not understand entirely if someone is going to have particular neurons firing, and they can have many downstream effects because there are billions of neurons, and sometimes entire thoughts are caused by only only thousands of them, and literally that would be unpredictable.

Okay, but here's some caveats.

A. Just because something is unpredictable does that mean you have free will. In fact, in theory, if it's completely unpredictable, even if you have perfect knowledge, then that actually means you don't have free will and that your actions are just random. So I wouldn't call that better.

B. Anybody who claims they understand quantum mechanics is lying. Even here I'm kind of just using it as a philosophical tool because I have no idea if you can actually predict anything in quantum mechanics. I just know that the quantum mechanics scientists basically say that you can't.

Back in my liberal, scientific, neurological, philosophical days. This is basically the end of the conversation I made it to in terms of free will. I haven't really thought about it much since then. Food for thought if you are interested in thinking about it further.

To preface, I have no logical or syllogistic arguments against determinism. Many arguments are sophistic or simply ahistorical and undialectical.

Also, I take it that you're assuming "free-will = indeterminism" and "no free-will = determinism"? I'll roll with this for now.

Hard (Laplacian) determinism presupposes that you can fully predict the future once you know all the initial conditions. This means all events must necessarily have one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, granted we know the initial conditions and the functions to evolve it. Thus, "knowing what's likely" is, in my opinion, not convincing enough to believe in metaphysical determinism.

Notice the connection between knowledge and reality here:

The universe could be deterministic for all we know, but we cannot know all the initial conditions to evolve it deterministically for ourselves. Here, if we subscribe to some kind of technical limits to our knowledge acquisition, then we have "seemingly" random or stochastic processes, but governed by completely deterministic processes. Our physical theories have mathematical equations we can solve to connect cause and effects. Sounds too good and simple to be real? From the text I linked above:

Nature, however, is much more clever than this. Towards the end of the 1800's, mathematicians and scientists began encountering some very difficult equations to solve — some in fact were completely unsolvable. A particularly troublesome set of mathematical equations were non-linear differential equations. Much in the same vein, there existed the horribly difficult and outstanding problem of three mutually gravitationally attracted bodies — the so called "three-body problem" (or its generalization to "n-bodies").

At first, problems such as these were cast-off as special cases and largely ignored. It would turn out that these so-called "special cases" would bring the birth of a new way of thinking. When these equations were finally studied in detail a fundamental change, which would ultimately overthrow the ideas of determinism, began to occur in mathematics and science. Inklings of the science that would be come to be known as "chaos" began to appear.

So are our theories just incomplete? That there is a deterministic fabric but we are not clever enough to figure it out? If we can't figure that out then for all we know we do recognize a psychological free-will. One might retort that this free-will is an "illusion" (i.e. not real; doesn't exist in a metaphysical sense). I don't like this because I take phenomenology/experience to be first class, not mathematical equations, the latter is chauvinistic and reductive. The content of people's thoughts and decisions are meaningful to them. One's action could be interpreted by outsiders as both determined and completely unpredictable, depending on who you ask. If you psychoanalyze someone to "get down to the bottom" of their desires to explain how they are currently, then it functions as therapy, not necessarily something logically right or wrong.

If you say to your coworkers and fellow working class people that their lives are ultimately governed by mathematics and physics, then you either depress a potential comrade from future actions or set the ball rolling for their revolutionary escape (through negating what you've just said).

Either way, free-will in the sense of phenomenology versus free-will in the sense of indeterminism are really separate concepts in my eyes.

But then, by accepting the former free-will and being on the fence about the latter free-will, am I conceding that nature-in-itself is truly deterministic and that we're too dumb to figure it out?

To have a nature-in-itself being deterministic while everyone believes they have free-will, you might subscribe to the existence of a Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. This, I presume, refers to the ultimate in what you mean by "ultimately no freedom". In other words, if this nature-in-itself is actually governed by deterministic principles, then we ultimately have no free-will.

But why do we have this assumption of determinism (and scientific reductionism; if we believe from the Big Bang, everything was determined)? Just because our 19th century mathematics and mechanistic physics worked out well then? Why is this determinism a fallback epistemological assumption? Are we just influenced by the way mathematical and physical sciences are taught in schools? That we can know these bits of proofs and derivations once we grasp these abstractions of nature taught by our teachers?

On the other hand, the universe might be infinitely complex and constantly changing. Let's take this assumption à la Engels: The ebbs and flows of our scientific development is a dialectical grapple with this dialectical nature. The dialetheistic structure of {abstraction}, {negation}, {concrete; production of new knowledge} is not a static method, but manifests itself in how we might choose to best move forward and develop new ways to understand the world.

This means not projecting our assumptions and dogma. Events that have no one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, but rather one-to-many, or many-to-many, are still caused, but they are indeterministic. Quantum physics can be interpreted to be completely indeterministic, but still caused. This is acceptable if one accepts the infinite nature of the universe that allows itself to be captured and abstracted by humans (inb4 occam's razor). We are to understand it at some certain levels and parts, but not the whole all at once. If we understand this, the "necessity" of one-to-one cause and effect seems like a dogmatic belief that only function to hinder further development. It can be a limiting case of certain physical theories (classical physics), but that is where it ends.

This isn’t necessarily free-will, but it’s an interesting factor. It’s been observed that in some tissue development, genes essentially are shuffled like a deck of cards. At first, this seemed to happen in crops like corn. But now, we know that this also happens as brain tissues are forming. So as your brain formed, your body shuffled the deck of your genes to acieve a unique structure. Perhaps not free will, but this is strong evidence of highly nondeterministic processes influencing behavior.