Maybe this has come up before, but I still wanted to ask. Lately, I’ve been a bit confused about whether we really have free will or not. I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in metaphysics. I’d probably call myself agnostic. I’ve just been questioning life more than I used to, and this thought keeps popping into my head.
Do we actually have free will? Like, can we really choose things the way religious texts say we can? What made me think about this is how predictable the micro world seems to be—but when you go deeper into the quantum level, things get really chaotic and complex.
On top of that, as people, we’re constantly shaped by what we go through, and it feels like our reactions and choices get more limited over time.
What do you think about all this?
I’ve never really understood any argument for free will, because I’ve never really understood exactly what they mean by ‘free will’. Take me through it, exactly what does it mean if you ‘make a choice’?
I suspect we don’t know enough about the mechanics of consciousness yet to determine what free will really means. We certainly know enough about psychology to understand predispositions to make certain choices and humans as a group are fairly predictable.
As free will, we can handle any choice you make. At least that’s what I mean. Everything you choose in life, whether you brush your teeth this morning, whether you drink tea or coffee. More broadly, your ideologies, your reactions in life, whether you choose to be a “bad person” as a result of bad experiences. The holy books say we can choose these things. That we can determine our destiny by these decisions and that it is up to us to choose between heaven or hell. I think this is wrong and I wanted to ask you all my opinion. There will always be certain criteria and certain limits when we make choices. But what I am curious about is the predictability of our choices.
All those things are cultural. Humans are social creatures that mimic other humans to form a kinship. Whether you drink tea because that is what British people do, that is cultural. You put a human baby with a chimpanzee, they will mimic the chimpanzee. Feral children raised by dogs mimic the dogs they grew up with. Christianity does not indefinitely say we have free will. It is a debate, not a consensus. Calvinism sides with predestination as an example. The Qur’an is very heavy on predestination - a holy book to Muslims which is steeped in Judeo-Christian tradition.
Good and evil, or good versus evil is dualism that Judeo-Christian tradition inherited from the Persians when Jews were ruled by the Persians. Again, it is a cultural concept that is not universal, but contingent on what is taught generationally, and taken for granted as being a truth.
Ok, let’s take one example. You said you can choose whether you brush your teeth this morning or not.
If you do choose to brush your teeth, what caused you to do so?
That’s exactly what I’m trying to ask, what caused this? Was it already prepared and foreseeable? Or did I just want to brush my teeth. I think we humans don’t live in a cause-and-effect relationship and so I think it’s difficult to give a clear answer to that question. Maybe if I could come up with a rationalization, it would be: I need to be clean, for the health of my teeth, to keep up the routine, etc.
Why can’t it be that it happened because you wanted to brush your teeth, and the reason you wanted to was deterministic?
I’m asking how we want it. I’m asking what kind of causality the brain uses to want it. It’s very difficult to explain what’s in my mind. Let’s take earthquakes for example, earthquakes don’t just shake the earth as they please, right? There are certain continental movements, land plates form, these plates move with certain underground movements and we shake because of the friction, movement, cracks and pressure. Take the winds on Earth, the wind doesn’t just blow wherever it wants to, certain pressures, landforms, antecedent and successor winds, things like that allow winds to happen where and when they want to happen. Before we humans knew about these mechanics of earthquakes and winds we thought they were random, but thanks to science we have mapped them and now with our current knowledge we can at least make high-powered predictions. And if you are not a religious person, you are more likely to think that the “life” of us humans and other living beings is not something that was created in such a monumental way. It is, in essence, a complex structure of energy cycles in which inanimate beings live with each other in a given ecosystem. And human beings have a lot of mechanics. There are many details that affect our will. It’s not random and we can’t decide anything. Can we be predictable beings with a lot of mechanics like emotions, thoughts, certain movements of atoms and molecules inside us, the society and the world we live in?
Detaching it from science and what’s actually going on inside our brains, I see two possibilities for why something happens. Either it was the result of a deterministic prior cause, or it was random. Neither of those are ‘you choosing’ for it to happen.
Yes. I was just looking for that kind of answer. My poor English might made it become waste of time but thanks for sharing opinion.
Free will does not exist in a biological sense. If you get hit in the head in a car accident, and you get brain damage, you can be a changed person. That is not free will. Sexual activity is an example of the lack of free will. That is why we have teen pregnancies when such pregnancies, according to a certain consensus, doom the people who are pregnant. That is why we have abortion.
Christian theologians for centuries debated whether we have free will, or predestination. They asked profound questions which are answered by science.
Oh, and ignore all religious ideas about free will
You’re not going to get anywhere listening to fairytales
Even though I have no religion, I cannot ignore them, even if they are religious thoughts. I understand your point, but my real fear is that I cannot see what they see. So I give them all at least a chance.
Then you’re wasting your time, and ours
Trust nothing an enthusiast has to say about ANYTHING
You can trust me about booze, and fisting
I know a lot about booze, and fisting
A couple of other things too, but those two are where I really shine
There’s a lot of schools of thought on this.
One to consider is that every time we make a decision, the universe basically does an instant mitosis. You find yourself in one of them. This would be a sort of non determinism, and if this school of thought intrigues you, that’s a good keyword. This is the Many Worlds interpretation.
Conversely, there’s the Block Time model, which kind of asserts through relativistic fuckery that all time exists. There is no now (only a relative now), and yeah, you have no free will whatsoever.
I tend to favor a blend of Block Time and non deterministic ideas. I think we have free will that operates on a sort of plane of possible actions which limits our will, and that we (consciousness) are just a really, really, really small facet of some larger dimension that is being crushed through a higher dimensional black hole, and some really hard-for-us-to-wrap-our-heads-around shit is getting full-on Allegory of the Cave’d into what we experience as consciousness.
So I think we’re sort of conscious, I think we’re sort of having free will, but I think we operate within confines that we can’t see which limits our free will. We’re kind of just along for the ride.
Look at the works of B. F. Skinner
Free will is an illusion, but it doesn’t need to invoke a deterministic universe or anything so esoteric
The reality is that we’re born into societies that shape us. We can do great things with the personal agency that we have, but we will always be constrained by the things we’re taught, the things we’re not taught, and the world around us
It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just a part of life. It’s all about what we choose to do that matters
All we can do is our best
Thanks for you fast comment. I’ll look at B.F. Skinner.
You’re welcome
There are many others with good ideas about free will, but the reality is that it doesn’t matter in the slightest. If we do have it, then we will act as we choose, if we don’t, then what we think we think we’re acting from choice
The outcome is absolutely the same, it’s just whether or not we’re prepared to take responsibility for our choices
It’s all unfalsafiable, so it’s in the realm of philosophy. There’s no evidence either way, so we may as well just be true to ourselves and enjoy the ride
