Any good arguments in favor of free will?

[The Magic Pudding]

So you are what you are because of past events, this doesn't bother me.
What you do is a result of what you are responding to the environment.
I don't think this means you don't own your actions, it doesn't matter how you got here, you are here.
So just use your free will, it doesn't belong to anyone else.

[hackenslash]

Err, no. It's precisely at the quantum level that determinism is ruled out. Perhaps you didn't read the post above, or the posts that I linked to in that post.

Perhaps you didn't read the rest of that paragraph.  Some definitions of determinism don't imply predictability, just that each action is caused by preceding actions.  Besides, who knows whether there may be some underlying reality to quantum uncertainty that IS predictable, were it understood.  But it's not an important point; everything that an animal decides is the result of subatomic forces he has no control over, ultimately.  That's the important point.

Perhaps you didn't read my post in its entirety, because I pointed out that, as far as we can tell, the issue is not one of us not being able to predict these values, it's actually that those values don't exist until they are observed. In any event, determinism is falsified, as explained above, so it's a moot point.

[Wilson]

I've never understood the "of course we have freewill" assertion. Freewill is not simply whether or not you can choose to turn left or right or anything it's the question of how much control you have over your decision making; your will.

Philosophically, scientifically, at the cellular level in our brains we don't have free will.  But tell an unenlightened slob, the common man, that he doesn't have free will and he'll laugh at you - and he'd be justified in doing so.  It's fine to have an intellectual discussion about free will, but a person can make decisions all day long that nobody can predict.  There's no question that past experience can nudge people in one direction or the other, but the individal's DNA and the configuration of neurons in his brain determine how he reacts to external stimuli.  How the brain reached that state is also beyond the control of that individual's "self", but in every meaningful way he has free will.

The practical implications of the question of free will are along this line: Is anyone responsible, ultimately, for what he does?  If not, are we justified in punishing him?  Are we justified in getting angry at someone?  If a ghetto kid robs a store and shoots the owner, should we forgive him his transgressions?  If a rich kid rapes a woman, should we forgive him his transgressions?  In my opinion, no; in order to have a civilized, safe, fair society, we need to punish.  We were given by evolution the gifts of anger and verngeance along with the gifts of compassion and a sense of fairness.  Those emotions are also beyond our control.

[LegendarySandwich]

I've never understood the "of course we have freewill" assertion. Freewill is not simply whether or not you can choose to turn left or right or anything it's the question of how much control you have over your decision making; your will.

Philosophically, scientifically, at the cellular level in our brains we don't have free will.  But tell an unenlightened slob, the common man, that he doesn't have free will and he'll laugh at you - and he'd be justified in doing so.  It's fine to have an intellectual discussion about free will, but a person can make decisions all day long that nobody can predict.  There's no question that past experience can nudge people in one direction or the other, but the individal's DNA and the configuration of neurons in his brain determine how he reacts to external stimuli.  How the brain reached that state is also beyond the control of that individual's "self", but in every meaningful way he has free will.

The practical implications of the question of free will are along this line: Is anyone responsible, ultimately, for what he does?  If not, are we justified in punishing him?  Are we justified in getting angry at someone?  If a ghetto kid robs a store and shoots the owner, should we forgive him his transgressions?  If a rich kid rapes a woman, should we forgive him his transgressions?  In my opinion, no; in order to have a civilized, safe, fair society, we need to punish.  We were given by evolution the gifts of anger and verngeance along with the gifts of compassion and a sense of fairness.  Those emotions are also beyond our control.

Why do we need to punish?

[Wilson]

Why do we need to punish?

If we don't, the sociopaths will have free rein to rape and pillage.  There are some really nasty customers out there.  Laws do deter a lot of bad behavior.

Also because it feels good to hurt evildoers.

[JohnCR]

This disturbs me more than there being no afterlife, no purpose, and no God(s).

Are you sure you are an Atheist?
How can you find it disturbing that there are no gods?
Why do you desire a purpose? How come you find it disturbing that there isn't a predefined purpose for you?
Why do you desire a mythical afterlife? How does it disturb you that there isn't one?

BTW I believe there is no such thing as complete free will. You base your decisions on your experiences and your knowledge and your emotions and physical state. Your decisions aren't simply random. You don't have a soul that is independant of everything, which carries around a moral (values) structure to which your decisions are based.

I guess I phrased that poorly. To put it simply, I am NOT disturbed by those things. I was merely commenting that it seems like those would be the things to be bothered by, but I am not. I don't yearn for purpose or gods or an afterlife. Also, yes, I am sure that I am an atheist, because I do not believe in any sort of deities or any "supernatural" phenomenon to speak of.

Not having free will drives me crazy because it flies in the face of our society. We are judged based on our decisions, but our decisions are never ours to make. For example, my friends say I should choose a major in college, and I am reminded that I am not making a choice freely. Even if I am supposed to pretend free will exists, how am I supposed to make the choice to do so? It doesn't mean that I won't eventually pretend it, but it does make me pause when a fellow, er... nonbeliever in free will, suggests that I choose to not worry about it.

Hi, John. You have touched upon one of the great quandaries in thought, and one that has had many great thinkers wrestling with themselves. Perhaps I can allay some of your fears, but it may be apposite to give some thought to just what is meant by free will.

'Will' is the ability to choose between alternatives. Free will is, therefore, the ability to choose unconstrained between alternatives. This is an important distinction to be made, for reasons that should become clear in what follows.

Now, a deterministic universe would indeed cause problems for free will, but worse than that, it causes problems for will, free or otherwise. Thankfully, determinism, at least in the Laplacian sense (it was Pierre-Simon Laplce who is credited with the assertion that, given sufficient knowledge of the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at any one time, we could predict with certainty the positions and velocities of those particles at any future time), is ruled out. Firstly, quantum mechanics, and specifically Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, demonstrate that such knowledge cannot be attained. Indeed, the best models we have for quantum phenomena at the moment suggest that these parameters do not actually have values until observed, which is to say that any particle has no position or velocity until such time as its wavefunction is collapsed, the wavefunction essentially being a probabilistic treatment of given values for those parameters. Worse still, the more accurately we know one, the less accurately we can know the other.

There are other interesting phenomena that arise from QM concerning determinism, and one of them should be treated here, because it addresses why the universe seems deterministic. That phenomenon is, of course, radionuclide decay. Given an individual atom of a radioactive nuclide, it cannot be predicted when it will decay. This event is totally random which, in this context, simply means that its decay is statistically independent. Statistical independence is a very important principle to understand, as it is the most common treatment of 'random' in a scientific context. What it actually means is that an event A occuring at time t is equiprobable with occuring at any other time. There are other, related, definitions of random that are important to note here. The most important alternative treatment is 'containing variables too numerous for us to be able to make categorical predictions. It's important to note in what context the word is being used in any given instance, because it goes to the heart of what we actually understand.

Getting back to the radionuclide decay, we cannot say when a particular atom will decay, but when dealing with macroscopic agglomerations of said atoms, we can predict probabilistically how they will decay. We can say, for example, that a given sample will have decayed by 50% in a given span of time. We term this the half-life, and it follows a pattern that can be predicted with absolute accuracy, which is why we can use it for dating things, by measuring the ratio of parent to daughter isotopes. If you're interested, there's a really excellent article by the world-famous Calilasseia HERE, in which he delivers an exposé of radiometric dating and how we know what we know.

The important thing to note here is that this gives us a kind of semi-determinism, but the question is, is our will affected by this level of determinism?

There's another point to be made about the relationship between QM and determinism, in the form of a test of determinism. I'll allow the excellent and knowledgable susu.exp to explain:

Now, quantum physics has provided us with a means of testing determinism. To give an explanation let´s look at the Pauli principle first: two electrons in an orbital can not have the same spin number. One must have 1/2 and one -1/2. If we measure the spin in one direction they always come out different. So if we measure s1 in the x direction we know that s2 in the x direction is -1/2.
Now, let´s assume that at a time t these numbers would be fixed, so our electrons have spin numbers for 3 directions. Then we know that they must differ in each of them, so we either have (+,+,+) and (-,-,-) or (+,+,-) and (-,-,+) (for any sequence of y,x, and z direction). Now, we can think about the results we should obtain if we measure the spin number in any two directions. If the first "programming" is correct we will always find them differing. If the second one is correct, they will differ in 5/9 of the cases. Assuming that there is some program at work, but allowing for both types to be around, we will have them differing in at least 5/9 of the cases. So the proportion of differing measurements >=5/9: This is the Bell inequality and there are variations on this (you don´t have to use the spin of electrons, there are other similar options). Since the late 1970s experiments of this type have been carried out and they all show violations of the inequality. This means that there is no such "program" at work and this implies that whether the electrons comes out as +,- or -,+ when we measure them in the same direction is not only unknown to us before we measure them, but also to the electrons itself. The inderterminism is as real as it gets, because a prediction of determinism is the inequality given above and the violations falsify it.

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/gener ... ml#p682847

Moving on, it is at least reasonably clear that our neural processes, through which we make our decisions, are at least somewhat governed by quantum processes, not least because our neural processes are electrochemical in nature, and electrons are similarly subject to quantum indeterminacy. So, do we have will? I would say almost certainly. Do we have free will? That's a different question, and one that has a conclusion that may surprise you.

Cali again

In short, I think that free will is an illusion, at least to the degree that our choices are entirely unconstrained, but I do think that we have will, with at least some freedom to choose, even if that freedom is somewhat curtailed by things we aren't even aware of, such as the above study illustrates.

I think I would be happier if I believed in free will again, but I have yet to hear any good arguments in favor of it.

I hope I've provided a good argument for at least some degree of free will, or at least against a deterministic universe. It should be noted that free will, while ruled out by determinism, is not actually ruled in by non-determinism

However, I don't want to delude myself into believing something that is false either.

TBH, I think you're overworrying at it. In reality, the question of whether or not we possess and freedom of will at all is quite probably unfalsifiable and unanswerable. All we can say for certain is that the universe is definitely not deterministic, so it looks as if we have some freedom of will.

I don't know if you read my second post on this thread, but I elaborated on my position to say that I am not a complete determinist. I have been convinced that quantum uncertainty disproves determinism absolutely running the universe. However, what I fail to see is how randomness translates into will. I understand this isn't really what you argued, having admitted yourself that it doesn't necessarily validate free will. We really have no disagreement about free will or even determinism. I just think it is disturbing to realize that we cannot even shape our own futures.

Someone tried to argue emergentism to me once, but I didn't see any evidence of free will in that argument either. Granted, I don't feel like I completely understood the argument he was making.

[dloubet]

but in every meaningful way he has free will.

No, he has will, but it's not in any way free. We are each born with a nature that we did not choose, and can only act according to that nature. We are trapped by the imposed  natures that define us. There's no way around it, and you can't second-guess it. You can't decide to change your nature without that being a consequence of...your nature.

in order to have a civilized, safe, fair society, we need to punish.

We are robots. We take in data, and output actions. If one of the robots outputs actions that negatively impact the other robots, those robots may seek to adjust the output of the offending robot. Punishment is one way of reprogramming offending robots so that their output is more positive.

That's what we're doing, and it works to some degree. This is how punishment works without the invocation of responsibility. We like to justify our punishments with all sorts of fancy rationalizations about holding people responsible for their actions, but in the end it's simply a practical means of behavior modification.

We re-program the offending robots for the benefit of all.

[Asmodean]

If we don't, the sociopaths will have free rein to rape and pillage.

They do it anyways. A law would not stop a sociopath, nor would fear of punishment.

There are some really nasty customers out there.  Laws do deter a lot of bad behavior.

Laws prevent otherwise good guys from doing bad things. They do not prevent bad guys from doing them. At most, one can hope that the laws make it more difficult to commit crime, but one must not forget the ingenuity of a determined (would-be) criminal.

Also because it feels good to hurt evildoers.

Making you no better than they. The lawful moral high ground based on crime and punishment is not really a high ground... You are sitting in a pile of dung. Just... Above theose who do not.

Disclaimer: do not read into my words that, which is not there, please. My view of usefulness of laws and punishment is far more complex than what you would be able to derive from these few lines.

[hackenslash]

We really have no disagreement about free will or even determinism. I just think it is disturbing to realize that we cannot even shape our own futures.

Then we fundamentally disagree. I thought I'd made myself clear on this point, but apparently not. I think we certainly can shape our own futures, but not completely unconstrained.

Someone tried to argue emergentism to me once, but I didn't see any evidence of free will in that argument either. Granted, I don't feel like I completely understood the argument he was making.

Emergentism is fairly straightforward, although I'm not sure what he meant when applying it to will. Emergence, put simply, is when a behaviour is displayed that is more than the sum of its parts. This is actually the rigorous definition of complexity, incidentally, contrary to popular usage. The universe is emergent, for example, as is life, evolution, etc. I don't see what he meant in terms of will, unless he was saying that our decisions are a product of our experiences, and are therefore emergent. That makes some sense, but doesn't really address will.

[The Magic Pudding]

but in every meaningful way he has free will.

No, he has will, but it's not in any way free. We are each born with a nature that we did not choose, and can only act according to that nature. We are trapped by the imposed  natures that define us. There's no way around it, and you can't second-guess it. You can't decide to change your nature without that being a consequence of...your nature.

We are conceived with a nature, develop it in utero, as children and so on, well what is the alternative, some angel touches you on the lip at birth and imbues with some godly purpose?  When determinism is used to make life seem constricted I have to reject it as dysfunctional.  I could toss a coin to decide between doing some volunteer work and joining a golf club, the different experiences would make a different me.  But of course the fall of that coin was predetermined.  Well fuck that, it sounds like some fantasy theist crap, I am here an I can make choices.

We are robots. We take in data, and output actions. If one of the robots outputs actions that negatively impact the other robots, those robots may seek to adjust the output of the offending robot. Punishment is one way of reprogramming offending robots so that their output is more positive.

That's what we're doing, and it works to some degree. This is how punishment works without the invocation of responsibility. We like to justify our punishments with all sorts of fancy rationalizations about holding people responsible for their actions, but in the end it's simply a practical means of behavior modification.

We re-program the offending robots for the benefit of all.

I think there is a sense of fair play, if it is offended it demands satisfaction.  I have heard of other primates sharing the feeling.  I don't have a link, but observe supporters of any team watching a game.  Robots don't raise children for decades, keep photo's of them at age three on their desks for ever, and when they hear of a mother who has lost her child under the wheels of a car, I doubt they shed a tear.

[JohnCR]

I think there is a sense of fair play, if it is offended it demands satisfaction.  I have heard of other primates sharing the feeling.  I don't have a link, but observe supporters of any team watching a game.  Robots don't raise children for decades, keep photo's of them at age three on their desks for ever, and when they hear of a mother who has lost her child under the wheels of a car, I doubt they shed a tear.

That assumes a very narrow definition of robot. The analogy here is that we are completely mechanistic and our actions are dictated by a combination of our programming and input.

Then we fundamentally disagree. I thought I'd made myself clear on this point, but apparently not. I think we certainly can shape our own futures, but not completely unconstrained.

I'm sorry, I went back and reread your post. I remembered seeing "free will is an illusion" but then I realize that you added to that by saying that we still maintain the ability to choose. I don't agree that quantum uncertainty would give us free will (my definition of free will corresponding to your definition of "will"). I don't see how something in our brains being random can translate into choices. Maybe you can elaborate?

[RyB17]

I feel free will isn't actually "free". Our actions will result in consequences we must "pay" for. I believe free will is an illusion as mentioned previously. Free will is a great idea but MOST people's morals and conscience will filter out any actions that will affect them negatively.

[Wilson]

but in every meaningful way he has free will.

No, he has will, but it's not in any way free. We are each born with a nature that we did not choose, and can only act according to that nature. We are trapped by the imposed  natures that define us. There's no way around it, and you can't second-guess it. You can't decide to change your nature without that being a consequence of...your nature.

in order to have a civilized, safe, fair society, we need to punish.

We are robots. We take in data, and output actions. If one of the robots outputs actions that negatively impact the other robots, those robots may seek to adjust the output of the offending robot. Punishment is one way of reprogramming offending robots so that their output is more positive.

That's what we're doing, and it works to some degree. This is how punishment works without the invocation of responsibility. We like to justify our punishments with all sorts of fancy rationalizations about holding people responsible for their actions, but in the end it's simply a practical means of behavior modification.

We re-program the offending robots for the benefit of all.

Will, free will - let's argue ideas, not semantics.  I agree with most of what you wrote.  The point is that we can and do make decisions, and that ability is so far removed from quantum uncertainty that it's almost silly to say that we aren't making those choices - freely, but not completely freely.

I do think we are a lot like robots, as you suggest.  But since robots imply an intelligent builder, I prefer to think of us as colonies of cells.  Don't forget that evolution gave most of us a desire for fair play and pleasure in exacting revenge, along with a certain degree of compassion, even for those who offend society.

[Wilson]

A law would not stop a sociopath, nor would fear of punishment.  Laws prevent otherwise good guys from doing bad things. They do not prevent bad guys from doing them. At most, one can hope that the laws make it more difficult to commit crime, but one must not forget the ingenuity of a determined (would-be) criminal.

Nonsense.  Do you really think that serial rapists are not deterred at all from raping women, or thieves are not deterred at all from stealing, or embezzlers are not deterred at all from embezzling, by the fear of punishment?  That's crazy thinking.  If there was no punishment, those criminals would be brazenly committing atrocities all day long.  Take a nasty guy who enjoys beating up people.  He doesn't do it often because he doesn't want to go to jail, so he picks his spots.  If there were no consequences, he could walk down the street, pick someone at random, and assault him or her.  And he'd do it.  Give me a break!  Obviously the fear of punishment doesn't prevent all crime, but a society without laws would be brutish and horrible.  And laws have no power unless they involve punishment.

Also because it feels good to hurt evildoers.

Making you no better than they. The lawful moral high ground based on crime and punishment is not really a high ground... You are sitting in a pile of dung. Just... Above theose who do not.

Speaking of dung, that's the quality of that logic.  Over here you have a group of good, decent people who treat each other with respect and follow the rules of society, but they do want to punish those who commit crimes.  On the other side, you have sociopaths - career criminals, mass murderers, child and spousal abusers - people with no conscience and no concern for others.  And you think those two groups are equally bad?  You have a screw loose.  No offense.

Incidentally, "making you no better than they" implies a moral judgment, making you no better than a rapist.

[Stevil]

Preventative Detention is a great thing. Hard for people to commit crimes on society when they are locked up.

I get pissed off when people get let off crimes because the lawyers can point to a reason e.g. temporary insanity etc.
There is always a reason, it is not that the person's soul is inherently evil. But I say lock'em up anyway. Do the crime, pay the time!