You must log in or register to comment.
If you can predict, but not controll what I’ll do, I still consider that free will.
Research and brain scans indicate that your choices are already made and decided in the decision making portion of your brain before you’re even consciously aware that you have a decision to make in the first place. The sum total of individual experienced reality is just your brain post-hoc rationalizing your sensory input and reactions.
Nah that’s horseshit, and lowkey is predicated on maintaining the hypercapitalist notion of individualism. If I have a decision premade off of my own sensory input, that’s one thing. But to call that a negation of free will is to discount the addition of input outside of my sensory input vis-a-vis other community members. If I packed my lunch, then David comes up to me and says “hey, I got a bogo coupon for wings, wanna come?” I didn’t pre-decide to join him. He literally added this information to my life, and I immediately decided to join. Now I have friends, and wings, and the free will to enjoy them both.
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Bro, I’m not high enough for that shit.
Sir, this is Wendy’s
Even if that’s true, there’s a bootstrap paradox with that though because the decision was still made in the decision making part of your brain. So what made that part of your brain make that decision?
What it implies is that decision making is entirely subconscious and the whole conscious experience of making a decision is just our brains way of providing a sense of agency where none seems to actually exist. You really wanna bake your noodle look into split brain experiments. There might be more than one person in our heads.
Think of it like this: once Goku and Vegeta did the fusion dance, there was only Gogeta.
Yeah but when they cut the corpus callosum it’s like they’re unfused but still one body. We’re all Pacific Rim gundams.
There might be more than one person in our heads.
But of course. Not more than one person, but certainly more than one part, right?
If you ever have meditated or attempted to meditate, you see this immediately. There is the portion of you that is trying to get you to concentrate on your breath or mantra, and there are the meandering parts of your mind that are more susceptible to moods and drawing your thoughts to other things.
The same thing goes for reading. Sometimes you’ll be passing your eyes over the words on the page but most of your mind has vacated the premises.
There’s also things like instances where you drive to a place where you used to live or used to work.
There are different processes running for certain, and the mind isn’t a singular thing, but ultimately I’m not sure that anything is. I don’t think that any of this says much definitive about free will though.
wait till you get one of those neuralink chips and you’re forced to like all of elon’s tweets
Free always needs a qualifier… Free from what? Free from other people, for now… Free from physics? No.
I consider free will to be the concept that whenever you make a choice A/B you as in a subjective consciousness have the power to decide any way and are not bound by a deterministic system to always give one output for the same input.
For example if we were to decide the universe is deterministic except for the conscious beings that are humans it would mean the universe looks exactly like it does in all timelines after it’s start but those timelines diverge once free will enters, since the deterministic system gets random input from free will.
So free from physics
basically. well you see like you said you can define some higher order that could exert some control over your will and that could be physics or something metaphysical. in case of some religions that is a devine force, while others say devine forces relegate the power of free will to humans and in most cases they don’t interfere with the decision making processes of people. i would say if any sort of higher order retains perpetual control over your decision making process that calls the concept of free will into question. if you believe your brain is the sole source of your decisions and is bound by deterministic physical processes then that’s not free will in it’s purest form. you could say it’s free will in the sense that no other being of the same level can accurately predict or manipulate your choices but i would say that only grants the illusion of free will.
i personally believe that the source of consciousness and as such free will is metaphysical in nature and is not generally manipulated by any process, so it’s free will as per my definition.
edited in everything after ‘basically’ because i decided i had more to say
So now I’m at the mercy of quantum physics. I would honestly just get rid of my free will, and always do the right thing (within my pussy-self’s limits).
It’s interesting, because some people are doomed to say, be evil. But that still counts as free will, even though they literally can’t just choose their way out of it.
So now, that means the punishments, and torments we put on those people for being evil, they can do nothing to actually prevent.
So now we have another interesting idea: what’s the difference between putting down a bad person for doing something bad, and a “bad” person, for “being” bad. Like say, disabled people, people of a skin color you don’t like, country origin…
Neither of them really get to choose, you can argue now that skin color is free will.
Of course, I don’t really want this to happen.
"Now, your honor, as the jury will have read in this clinical, peer-acknowledged study, our superintelligent quantum AI regional supercluster determimes guilt accurately in over 98.9% of cases, in various scenarios, in thousands of simulations.
“With no margin of error, this system has determined the defendant would have acted within the next few days, perhaps even hours!”
But what about the 1.1% that determines innocence? You know, the minority in the report.
If you don’t go full Minority Report on it, having something that could predict crimes with 98% certainty could be amazing.
Imagine if instead sending everyone to jail, you could use the predictions to just prevent the crime. For example, if someone was likely to commit murder as passion crime, maybe society could have a team of trained councillors to mediate the conflict before it happens.
Imagine finding out your wife is cheating on you, because a supercomputer sent a shrink over to your house, to help you come to terms with it.
If you are already going to get bad news anyway, might as well get them from a professional.
Your brain IS you. It’s the one choosing
Not technically…
Cutting edge (and relatively proven) theory is:
“You” is the quantum superposition that exists inside connected microtubules.
That’s why for anesthesia or just getting knocked unconscious, you don’t need to remove the brain, you just do something to break up the connection of microtubules and boom: the person is unconscious but their brain is still functioning which keeps the body alive. Eventually the microtubules reassemble and you’re able to be conscious again.
The brain is just another organ the “you” manipulates to interact with your surroundings.
It’s also the only way we could actually have free will.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12060853/
For bonus 80s coolness tho, it would mean that what is “us”, is a laser zooming around an incredibly tiny race track in our brains.
Quick edit:
Microtubules are basically biological nanites too, they’re in every cell of the body and to give you an ideal of their size, they’re what pulls DNA apart during cell replication. So these incredibly tiny little buggers link up to basically form a fiber optic cable which is how we can have quantum superposition in warm/wet environment like the brain.
Which if you know anything about how hard it is to sustain quantum superposition, well, anywhere, it explains why it considered a crazy theory for decades till we actually observed it just a couple years ago.
Holy shit that’s nanners. And this has been observed? I gotta read that paper.
Microtubules are structural and exist throughout the whole body, not just in the brain. They are part of the scaffolding of cells. If you broke them up, you’d die, because your cells would fall apart. They also have not much to do with the actual information processing in the brain, as again their role is strictly structural.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free willNot the old man with the white beard, noooo
… and usage of candles in fictional video, one of my pet peeves!
People who try to apply game theory to fictional super AIs and David Chalmers can both fuck off.
I like to replace the concept of “free will” with that of “agency”.
The Britannica definition of free will is “the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe”. But it seems to me that any state where you temporarily cannot act or communicate would automatically rule out free will, at least while that condition persists. Do you lose free will every time you fall asleep? Are people who are aware but whose bodies are nonresponsive - people who are “locked in” - lacking free will? Certainly both conditions lack agency, but these are still inarguably people - yet free will is so tightly bound with the concept of personhood, that it’s supposed lack is often used to imply one is “less human”!
Frankly, free will seems like too broad and binary a concept to match what people actually do and deal with day to day. Agency comes in degrees, and can be gained and lost - which seems to me a much closer match to what people were trying to describe with the phrase “free will”.
I am reading “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahniman.
This seems to be way more true than I am comfortable admitting to myself.
deleted by creator
I wish I still believed in free will. It would make getting stuff done a lot easier. Feeling like you are fighting the universe to accomplish something you don’t want to do is much harder than feeling like you just don’t want to do something today. It’s the exact same situation either way, but the illusion of free will is, imho, valuable psychologically.
I just dont understand this admittantly common argument.
Free will seems like such a psychologically damaging lie. As if blaming yourself for the outcome of every sad movie you’ve watched is somehow motivational.
Since coming to accept that free will is farcically impossible, I feel free to just go about my actions with a sense of curious enthusiasm as to what will happen next, safe in the knowledge that que sera sera - whatever will be, will be.
I think if somebody truly understood this, they would just quit fighting. What would be the point?
Exactly the problem. It’s very easy to fall into doing nothing, and the question of whether that would be a problem if I actually still believed in free will, or at least didn’t actively disbelieve it, is a big one… that knowledge or belief is now part of my operating system, a core feature of who I am that impacts the choices I don’t think I actually get to make. One of the known variables that influences behavior.
I don’t think that “not fighting” is the same as doing nothing. Like I said, if somebody could truly understand this, there would be no reason to fight, not no reason to act. They would simply think and then act.
I’ve heard a kind of enlightenment described this way. Some people have claimed to attain it. It may not be possible in a pure state, but perhaps you can get close to it by degrees.
Life, joy, friends, love, art, pleasure, dopamine, oxytocin, etc.
Anything we’re doing now can still be done without the concept of free will, because we’re already doing it without free will.
Life, joy, friends, love, art, pleasure, dopamine, oxytocin, etc.
I don’t get any of those things out of fighting the universe.
We all get those things regardless. The stories we tell ourselves about how the world works don’t affect how the world works.
Early into college I convinced a few people there isn’t free will because it contradicts everything we know about psychology. That said, I also explained it didn’t matter since there’s so much going on that it’s difficult to predict a person’s behavior with absolute certainty, even with a multitude of information about them.
To simplify, a coin flip is considered random even if all the forces are physical and deterministic. The angle and strength of the flip, the air resistance, gentle breezes, the precise gravity where it takes place given the pull from the earth and hell, even the moon… you can factor in so much and be right maybe 99.9% of the time with proper controls and yet there’s always something.
Human brains have magnitudes more going on, so even if some factors are strong predictors, there’s always an illusion of free will since there are so many other factors we haven’t even imagined.
I don’t think it needs to convince you about anything. brains run on less energy than a friggin lightbulb seems like it would be pretty open to suggestions
Did anyone here, including myself, post a comment because we had no choice?
Meh I wouldn’t call it that super
Its a choice to you because you don’t have that power
