Ask Lemmy

You're conscious of the decisions you make. Sure they're the result of a million different variables, chemicles, memories, and predetermined traits, but some of that is active. You are making the choice. Whether you could have made a different one or not doesn't affect what the choice feels like

Simple: We cannot predict the future. If you don't know what's going to happen nor whether it is being controlled, you do not know whether your actions are predetermined. Every movement you make might be the result of universal programming. What I'm typing, have sent, and you are reading might be the sequence of events that was always supposed to happen.

Free will is, IMO, as unknowable as whether an almighty being exists. That "almighty being" might have created this existence, but might also exist in its own realm that was created by another "almighty being". The chain might be infinite and it might not be. Asking these questions is like asking "can we reach infinity".

I forget which philosopher said this but he said something along the lines of if you have the desire and the capacity for an action you do, then deterministic or not, you chose that action. If the tide pulls me where I was already swimming, I still chose to swim there, even if some other force took me half of the way.

Confabulation.

Look at split-brain patients: divide the corpus callosum down the middle, and you effectively have two separate brains that don't communicate. Tell the half without the speech centre to perform some random task, then ask the other one why they did that - and they will flat-out make up some plausible sounding reason.

And the thing is, they haven't the slightest idea that it isn't true. To them, it feels exactly like freely choosing to do it, for those made up reasons.

Bits of our brains make us do stuff for their own reasons, and we just make shit up to explain it after the fact. We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we've primed our muscles to carry out the choice.

I think a chunk of this comes down to our need to model the thoughts of others (incredibly useful for social animals) - we make everyone out to be these monolithic executive units so that we can predict their actions, and we make ourselves out to be the same so we can slot ourselves into that same reasoning.

Also it would be a bit fucking terrifying to just constantly get surprised by your own actions, blown around like a leaf on the wind without a clue what's going on, so I think another chunk of it is just larping this "I" person who has a coherent narrative behind it all, to protect your own sanity.

Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist

He thinks consciousness has to do with "quantum bubble collapse" happening inside our brains at a very very tiny level.

That's the only way free will could exist.

If consciousness is anything else, then everything is predetermined.

Like, imagine dropping a million bouncy balls off the hoover dam. You'll never get the same results twice.

However, that's because you'll never get the same conditions twice.

If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level... You'll get the same results every time

What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole "quantum bubble collapse" was a fundamental part of consciousness.

That still wouldn't guarantee free will, but it would make it possible.

There's also the whole thing where what we think of as our consciousness isn't actually running the show. It's just a narrator that's summarizing everything up immediately after it happened. What's actually calling the shot is other parts of our brains, neurons in our gut, and what controls our hormones.

We don't know if that's not true either. But if it was, each person as a thing would have free will, it's just what we think of as that person does not have free will.

Sounds batshit crazy and impossible, until you read up on the studies on people who had their brains split in half at different stages of mental development.

There's a scary amount of shit we don't know about "us". And an even scarier amount we don't know about how much variation there is with all that

The most accurate answer is: We don't know.

But there are pieces of scientific evidence that suggest our sense of free will is just another perception process that happens in our brains. Specifically I'm thinking about people who have problems in their brain that make them feel like they AREN'T the one controlling what they do. For example people suffering from derealization - https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonalization-derealization-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352911

EDIT

As to why our brains have a process that gives us a perception of free will, that's a much harder question that i think science currently only has conjecture on. If i had to guess I'd guess that either there's an evolutionary advantage to it, or it's an emergent property that arises from all the parts of the brain being connected in the way they are

Because determinism is too depressing for small minds.

Because it's not an illusion.

Determinism seems reasonable only because people have an inaccurately simplistic conception of causation, such that they believe that consciousness and choice violate it, rather than being a part of it.

Causation isn't a simple linear thing - it's an enormously complex web in which any number of things can be causes and/or effects of any number of things.

Free will (properly understood) is just one part of that enormously complex web.

That's a very large assumption. The simplest explanation is that we feel like we have free will because we do. Quantum mechanics suggests some major challenges to determinism, and the best arguments to restore it require a very unsatisfying amount of magical thinking.

For the same reason that I feel like I'm still right now, while I'm actually spinning and hurtling through space at incredible speed.

If I found out that I don't have free will, I would start trying to gain it back immediately.

Assuming we don't have free will, why do we have the illusion that we do?

You experience the world through your senses.

What sense that your body has would you expect to give your brain a different set of inputs if your brain's actions were not deterministic, not set by the laws of physics? How would you expect it to feel different?

You wouldn't expect to feel like some invisible force is in control of your limbs, which I think is perhaps what some people intuitively expect if someone says that their actions are pre-determined.

It's not talking about anything that your brain can sense; it's talking about how your brain works.

There was a relevant post on Lemmy the other day:

The origin and nature of existence is an epistemological black hole that some people like to plug with "a ~~wizard~~ god did it".

The sensation of free will is an emergent property of a lack of awareness of the big stuff, the small stuff, the long stuff, and the short stuff.

If you throw a pair of dice, do they still have to roll if their final positions are predetermined from the point that you let go?

One view is that even a deterministic mind still must execute. An illusion of the capacity to choose between multiple options might be necessary to considering those options which leads to the unavoidable conclusion.