Ask Lemmy

Here's my take: the answer is emergent phenomena. We live in a very complex system and in complex systems there are interactions that can only be predicted using systems of equal or higher complexity. So even in case everything is predetermined, it would still be unpredictable and therefore your decisions are basically still up to you and the complex interactions in your brain.

Anyone who says we don’t have free will can come up with a thousand reasons we don’t.

Anyone who says we do have free will can come up with a thousand reasons we do.

It really doesn’t matter. All I know is that if I wanted to go on a murderous rampage, I could. I choose not to. For me, that means that I currently have control over myself and my actions. And on the same token, there is so much outside of my control that affects my trajectory in this life.

So there are illusions if you allow there to be. To me, we both have and don’t have free will depending on context.

I call this phenomenon, Schrödinger’s Destiny.

The Matrix deals with the exact question.

I enjoy either the free will or the illusion thereof not to torment myself with such unanswerable questions!

Just going to throw out a really good read: Determined by Robert Sapolky. (Behave is also really good.)

He doesn't really convince me of the core thesis that free will doesn't exist, or that some of his proposed changes to the legal system to "recognize the absence of free will" in the second half are good courses of action, but he does do a great job of demonstrating what makes us tick from a variety of lenses, how much environmental factors play a role in behavior, and generally arguing to approach people with more empathy and recognition that we might be more like them in a similar situation than we think.

(It is heavy. It's long and goes into some depth on different fields. But he lays out the main ideas you need to know and doesn't assume that much knowledge, just a will to learn.)

I can’t think of any good reason why we would have such an illusion.

Perhaps it is the illusion of choice and the choice you make was always going to be that one due to all of the events that shaped you and the events that shaped the people that shaped you etc all the way back to the big bang.

I contemplate this from time to time.

Maybe look up "compatibilism". It's a philosophy proposing that both exist.

Honorary mention, Kurtzgesagt/In a Nutshell https://youtu.be/UebSfjmQNvs?feature=shared

I personally think the debate over the existence of Free Will is simply an extraordinary debate over semantics.

If you look at a human being from its basic biological and cellular makeup, a human being is a walking bundle of competing desires that appears to present itself as a single cohesive corporate entity.

The people who are against the concept of free will say that because you have innate desires for food sex and entertainment, that you have no choice to not act upon those in a desires and therefore any delusion that you carry about the choices that you make being done of an entirely unencumbered and Free Will are false.

Then there are people who say that Free Will doesn't exist for religious purposes, that God is an all-knowing creature who knows the beginning and the end and everything in between and so you cannot make a choice that he or she or it does not already know that you will make and therefore your choices are not free.

The people who say Free Will does exist on a biological level will point to people who choose to self-immolate or to starve themselves to death in protest of a spiritual or psychological issue, valuing the ideals that life has imprinted upon them over the biological necessities of continuing to live.

The people who say Free Will does exist on a spiritual level say many things, such as we carry a spark of the Divine in us and therefore we are as little gods ourselves, capable of creating and destroying in roughly the same proportional magnitude as the greater gods above are, or they say that since we have the ability to make choices and we are judged by those choices than our choices must be free otherwise judgment is meaningless.

I personally tend to lean into the Free Will side, while understanding simultaneously that sometimes there are exigencies that induce us to choose one option over another on a more likely than not basis, or to phrase it another way, our will is as free as we choose it to be.

I don't believe there is an "illusions that we have free will," either. Honestly, "illusions" don't really even exist as they're traditionally talked about. People say if you place a stick in a cup of water, there is an "illusion" created that the stick is bent. But is there? What you see is just what a non-bent stick looks like in a cup of water. Its appearance is different from one out of water due to light refraction. It's not as if reality is tricking you by showing you a bent stick when there isn't one, that's just what a non-bent stick in water really looks like.

The only "illusion" is your own faulty interpretation of what you are seeing, which upon further inspection you may later find it is wrong and change your mind. There was simply no illusion there to begin with. Reality just presents itself as it actually exists, and it is us who interpret it, and sometimes we make mistakes and interpret it wrong. But it's not reality's fault we interpret it wrong sometimes. Reality is not wrong, nor is it right. It just is what it is.

In a similar sense, there is just no "illusion of free will." Neural networks are pattern recognition machines. We form models of the external world which can approximate different counterfactual realities, and we consider those realities to decide which one will optimize whatever goal we're trying to achieve. The fact we can consider counterfactual worlds doesn't mean that those counterfactual worlds really exist, and indeed our very consideration of them is part of the process of determining which decision we make.

Reality never tricks us into the counterfactual worlds really do in some way exist and we are selecting from these possible worlds. That's just an interpretation we sometimes impose artificially, but honestly I think it's exaggerated how much of an "illusion" this really is. A lot of regular people if you talk to them will probably admit quite easily that those counterfactual worlds don't exist anywhere but in their imagination, and that of course the only thing real is the decision that they made and the world they exist within where they made that decision.

Hence, reality is not in any way tricking us into thinking our decisions somehow have more power than they really do. It is some of us (not all of us, I'm not even convinced it's most of us) who impose greater powers to decision making than it actually has. There just is no "illusion of free will," at best there is your personal misinterpretation of what decision making actually entails.

Because maintaining the illusion keeps us going as normal and won't break the simulation. /s

Why are we assuming we don't have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.

The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, "assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?"

We don’t have a free will.

We do have a free won’t.

Our brains cannot store all the experiences we ever make. It rather only stores 'hunches' (via many weightings of neurons). In particular, it also mixes multiple experiences together to reinforce such hunches.

This means that despite there being causal reasons why you might e.g. feel uneasy around big dogs, your brain will likely only reproduce a hunch, a gut feeling of fear.

And then because you don't remember the concrete causal reasons, it feels like a decision to follow your hunch to get the hell out of there.
This feeling of making a decision is made even stronger, because there isn't just the big-dog-bad-hunch, but also the don't-show-fear-to-big-dog-hunch and the I'm-in-a-social-situation-and-it-would-be-rude-to-leave-hunch and many others.

There is just an insane amount of past experiences and present sensory input, which makes it impossible to trace back why you would decide a certain way. This gives the illusion of there being no reasons, of free will.