There is an argument that free will doesn’t exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
It doesn’t matter.
Free will is real and it’s an illusion at the same time.
Our actions are reactions. And we are very limited in our execution of will by the most basic physical boundaries. For example I cannot fly, no matter how much I will it to be so.
We have free will to control the actions of the biological apparatus which is our body, to an extent, though even those are limited by circumstances and consequences.
Overall we have limited free will, or free will “lite”
OK let’s just start with the assertion that there of a casual link back to the beginning of time.
We will begin with the big one first. We don’t even know if time had a beginning.
If we assume that time began at the instant of the big bang. There is no plausible link between my bean induced fart, and some random energy fluctuation, there are just too many chaotic interactions between then and now.
There are so many things we don’t know, making the extremely bold claim that free will doesn’t exist, is dangerously naive.
We can’t even solve Navier-Stokes; neuronal interaction is so far beyond what we are currently capable of, it’s ridiculous.
My recommendation to anyone contemplating this question. Assume free will exists; if you are wrong, it will made no difference; you were destined to believe that anyway.
This seems like a very weird way to look at the issue.
For one, not being able to understand minute, uncountable connections and interactions doesn’t mean we can’t realize a broader relationship of causality between them and our own actions. There are many things we don’t know - that’s right and undeniable - but there are also many things we do know, or at least that we think we know. Sure, you can go around saying “we understand so little about [virtually any scientific discipline], might as well assume that whatever soothes my psyche is true,” but just because the first part of that statement is true doesn’t mean the whole thing is reasonable. In my opinion, by the way, it isn’t reasonable.
Assume free will exists; if you are wrong, it will made no difference;
Here’s a question for you: if you assume free will doesn’t exist, what difference does it make? I mean, you still feel like it exists, you live your life as if experiencing it, and regardless of whether you, as an individual, believe it or not, the world continues on as if it does exist. I really see no difference, in practical terms, between believing free will exists or not.
A little off-topic, but this reminds me of those people that say that morality can’t exist outside of religion. You say you’re an atheist, and then they ask you why you don’t go around killing people. Hopefully you understand what I’m talking about here.
It is not really weird, OP is arguing that the universe itself is deterministic. Taking a mechanistic approach to refuting that claim is perfectly valid.
There are a myriad of examples of physical processes that are chaotic, this invalidates OP’s claim.
To address the morality point, if God is the source of goodness and morality; beyond the question of “which God?” ; it means objective morality doesn’t exist, because God can change it’s mind about what is “good”.
But that is a discussion finds a different threat.
There’s no evidence for free will. Every physical process involved in the function of our bodies and brains has so far proven to be deterministic in every way we can verify. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an original thought though, it just means that any original thought you have was necessarily going to happen and couldn’t possibly have happened any other way. It’s fate.
You’re describing the free will vs predetermination debate we had often in theology discussion. Ours never went anywhere, so I won’t be much help. I just wanted to put a name on it for you. Might help in your search.
I’m not sold on the whole universe being deterministic, but Robert Sapolsky has a book called Determined which has pretty much convinced me that we don’t have any agency. He’s a neuroscientist, and breaks down what goes in to our actions based on the immediate causes, our environment, our upbringing, our culture, and, in my opinion, doesn’t really leave a place for agency to remain. I don’t really understand his arguments well enough to articulate them here, but I think he’s done some interviews on YouTube which I’m sure will cover the gist of it.
In a deterministic reality, where all things are due and subject to causation, there can be no free will. If we did not live in a causal reality, we’d never be able to make accurate predictions or models.
“Randomness” is not free will either. If you’re not in complete control of your influences, then you can not be said to have free will. Randomness does nothing to help the argument for free will.
With that said. Regardless of the existence of free will, what does exists is your awareness of what it’s like to be you. To be in the circumstances that currently govern your life. And in that awareness exists the boundless capacity for compassion. Once you understand that no one is in control of their lives, that all things are causal, it allows you to be less judgmental.
"If a man is crossing a river and an empty boat collides with his own skiff, he will not become angry. He will simply guide his boat around it.
But if he sees a person in the boat, he will shout at the other to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, and the boats collide, he will curse the other person.
Yet, if the boat were empty, he would not be angry."
— Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)
I wrote a simple explanation of determinism in a blog post earlier this year (there’s an audio version available as well.) https://mrfunkedude.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/following-the-strings/
Just pointing this out - we don’t live in a deterministic reality. Quantum interactions are inherently probabilistic and can’t be predetermined. This usually doesn’t matter, but you can chain larger classical systems onto quantum interactions (i.e. Schrödingers cat), which makes them non-deterministic as well.
Thanks for the reply.
“inherently probabilistic and can’t be determined” is just another way of saying “random” or “we don’t know yet”.
If reality was not deterministic, the reliability of models and predictions in physics would be upended.
“inherently probabilistic and can’t be determined” is just another way of saying “random” or “we don’t know yet”.
Well yes, it means “random”. Of course there’s always a chance that we’re just missing something fundamental, but it would mean that literally every model we have is completely wrong. Unless we find indications for that (and there don’t seem to be any so far) I think it’s fair to assume that quantum interactions are actually random.
If reality was not deterministic, the reliability of models and predictions in physics would be upended.
No, because reality is not deterministic, yet the reliability of models and predictions in physics is not upended. There simply are enough of these interactions happening that, in the “macro” world, we can talk about them deterministically, since they are probabilistic. But that doesn’t mean the “micro” interactions are deterministic, and it also doesn’t mean it’s impossible for a “macro” interaction to be non-deterministic - again, the example of Schrödingers cat comes to mind.
You could literally build a non-deterministic experiment right now if you wanted to.
In a sense it is deterministic. It’s just when most people think of determinism, they think of conditioning on the initial state, and that this provides sufficient constraints to predict all future states. In quantum mechanics, conditioning on the initial state does not provide sufficient constraints to predict all future states and leads to ambiguities. However, if you condition on both the initial state and the final state, you appear to get determinstic values for all of the observables. It seems to be deterministic, just not forwards-in-time deterministic, but “all-at-once” deterministic. Laplace’s demon would just need to know the very initial conditions of the universe and the very final conditions.
Hm, I’m not sure if I understand the abstract correctly.
Say I build two Schrödingers cat experiments next to each other, and connect them so that each vial dispersing the poison also makes the other vial disperse poison. I go away, and come back to both vials having triggered and both nuclear decays having occurred. How could I determine the path the whole system took?
I am not that good with abstract language. It helps to put it into more logical terms.
It sounds like what you are saying is that you begin with something a superposition of states like (1/√2)(|0⟩ + |1⟩) which we could achieve with the H operator applied to |0⟩ and then you make that be the cause of something else which we would achieve with the CX operator and would give us (1/√2)(|00⟩ + |11⟩) and then measure it. We can call these t=0 starting in the |00⟩ state, then t=1 we apply H operator to the least significant, and then t=2 is the CX operator with the control on the least significant.
I can’t answer it for the two cats literally because they are made up it a gorillion particles and computing it for all of them would be computationally impossible. But in this simple case you would just compute the weak values which requires you to also condition on the final state which in this case the final states could be |00⟩ or |11⟩. For each observable, let’s say we’re interested in the one at t=x, you construct your final state vector by starting on this final state, specifically its Hermitian transpose, and multiplying it by the reversed unitary evolution from t=2 to t=x and multiply that by the observable then multiply that by the forwards-in-time evolution from t=0 to t=x multiplied by the initial state, and then normalize the whole thing by dividing it by the Hermitian transpose of the final state times the whole reverse time evolution from t=2 to t=0 and then by the final state.
In the case where the measured state at t=3 is |00⟩ we get for the observables (most significant followed by least significant)…
- t=0: (0,0,+1);(+1,+i,+1)
- t=1: (0,0,+1);(+1,-i,+1)
- t=2: (0,0,+1);(0,0,+1)
In the case where the measured state at t=3 is |11⟩ we get for the observables…
- t=0: (0,0,+1);(-1,-i,+1)
- t=1: (0,0,+1);(+1,+i,-1)
- t=2: (0,0,-1);(0,0,-1)
The values |0⟩ and |1⟩ just mean that the Z observable has a value of +1 or -1, so if we just look at the values of the Z observables we can rewrite this in something a bit more readable.
- |00⟩ → |00⟩ → |00⟩
- |00⟩ → |01⟩ → |11⟩
Even though the initial conditions both began at |00⟩ they have different values on their other observables which then plays a role in subsequent interactions. The least significant qubit in the case where the final state is |00⟩ begins with a different signage on its Y observable than in the case when the outcome is |11⟩. That causes the H opreator to have a different impact, in one case it flips the least significant qubit and in another case it does not. If it gets flipped then, since it is the control for the CX operator, it will flip the most significant qubit as well, but if it’s not then it won’t flip it.
Notice how there is also no t=3, because t=3 is when we measure, and the algorithm guarantees that the values are always in the state you will measure before you measure them. So your measurement does reveal what is really there.
If we say |0⟩ = no sleepy gas is released and the cat is awake, and |1⟩ = sleepy gas is released and the cat go sleepy time, then in the case where both cats are observed to be awake when you opened the box, at t=1: |00⟩ meaning the first one’s sleepy gas didn’t get released, and so at t=2: |00⟩ it doesn’t cause the other one’s to get released. In the case where both cats are observed to be asleep when you open the box, then t=1: |01⟩ meaning the first one’s did get released, and at t=2: |11⟩ that causes the second’s to be released.
When you compute this algorithm you find that the values of the observables are always set locally. Whenever two particles interact such that they become entangled, then they will form correlations for their observables in that moment and not later when you measure them, and you can even figure out what those values specifically are.
To borrow an analogy I heard from the physicist Emily Adlam, causality in quantum mechanics is akin to filling out a Sudoku puzzle. The global rules and some “known” values constrains the puzzle so that you are only capable of filling in very specific values, and so the “known” values plus the rules determine the rest of the values. If you are given the initial and final conditions as your “known” values plus the laws of quantum mechanics as the global rules constraining the system, then there is only one way you can fill in these numbers.
Sorry, it’s been a long time since I last looked at the mathematical side of quantum mechanics, so most of your comment flew over my head. Let me put it in as simple terms as I can:
If there are multiple paths a system can take to reach a final state, how can you accurately determine which path was taken if you only know the initial & final state? IMO this shouldn’t be possible.
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Thoughts and muscle movements come about through the opening and closing of ion channels that allow information to travel through neurons and for muscle fibers to contract and relax. ‘Free will’ in the sense that our mind is separate from our body and that it can somehow open those ion channels is a combination of dualism and molecular telekinesis, so I do not believe that, no.
But I do believe that consciousness is an essential emergent property of our brain. What we experience might be the output of a causal prediction engine in our brain that is making a prediction about the immediate sensory experience in a way that we can respond to stimuli before they happen. In that sense, yes, I do believe in free will because that conscious output that I experience is me! This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.
I think that a materialist framing of free will requires accepting some model of consciousness in which consciousness is not just a weird accident but is a physical phenomenon that is part of us. An essential feature of how our brain works. This is not yet demonstrated (very difficult if not impossible to do so), but I think it is. Then ‘free will’ and ‘a material system following the laws of physics’ is no longer a contradiction.
Is the emergent phenomena, consciousness, weak or strong? I think the former, which I think you support, posits a panpsychism and the latter is indistinguishable from magic.
I’m a little confused about the relationship between the causal prediction machine (CPM) and the self. to reiterate, the brain has a causal prediction engine. It’s inputs are immediate sensory experience. I assume the causal prediction engines’ output is predictions. These predictions are limited to the what the next sensory stimuli might be in response to the recent sensory input. These predictions lead to choices. Or maybe the same as choices.
So these outputs are experienced. And that experience of making predictions is me. Am I the one experiencing the predictions as well?
So this sentence confuses me: “This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.” Am I making the predictions or is it the CPM?
I think that its emergence is weak but I see no resolution to the hard problem of consciousness any time soon, so for the time my opinions about it are ideas that I find compelling and intuitive and not grounded in facts and evidence. Weak emergence does posit some form of pansychism in the sense that sentient-like behavior can emerge in other brains and even that characteristics that we might associate with sentience might emerge from other phenomena present through the universe. But, because of the same reasons that the hard problem is hard, it is also hard to study and learn about these phenomena.
I can try to explain a little better what I meant.
I don’t believe we have “free will” in the sense that the mind is separate from the body (dualism) and that it is able to break the laws of physics by altering our physiological processes. I don’t think that the non-determinism of quantum mechanics in itself gives us agency, and our mind does not have a mechanism to select how a particular wavev function collapses (not a fan of the Orch OR model).
So, in this traditional sense my answer is “no, we do not have free will”
But I think that the existential crisis and feeling of a lack of agency stems from the model of sentience that one believes. If one rejects dualism, posits that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but then ascribes only very loosely a mechanism to consciousness such as ‘complex information processing gives rise to consciousness’, then sentience appears to be just some unexplained quirk that is not essential and just happens to be there. Combining a lack of dualism and free will with consciousness being a useless quirk is what (I think) creates the existential crisis associated with a lack of free will. I used to fall into this camp of thought and resolved the crisis through a logic such as: “Yeah, there is no free will, living is nice though so I am happy that I can accidentally experience the world”.
What pushed me to re-assess this way of thinking originally was reading through a paper about teaching a dish of neurons how to play pong](https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6). At first it did not make sense to me how one can possibly provide feedback to a group of isolated neurons such that it could learn to play a game. What ‘reward’ can you give a group of neurons to push them to do what you want?!
I looked into Karl Friston, the last author of that paper, which led me down a path of study. I discovered Judea Pearl, who formalized causal reasoning in a way that lets us build statistical models to move from correlations to counterfactual causes. This makes it possible to teach causal inference even to machines.
Karl Friston’s work and other researchers in the field argue that the brain is a computer built for causal computing. This idea underpins the Bayesian brain, Predictive Coding Theory, Active Inference.
In Karl Friston’s Active Inference book, sentience is proposed to emerge as a result of the prediction engine. What we experience is not actually what our senses already experienced, but instead it is what our brain expects that we will sense in the next instant. This model of reality that is built by our brain in its attempt to perform its basic function (link causes to effects in order to predict the next stimulus).
One idea is that consciousness emerges because the predictive brain is creating a ‘model’ that does not exist in physical space and so it needs imagination to explore it. The imagination of things that do not exist is essential to the process of generating counterfactuals, and counterfactuals are at the core of the causality machine. To show that A causes B, you need to imagine a situation in which A is not present and estimate the likelyhood of B. One idea is that it is precisely in the creation of a world without A that sentience emerges.
A lot of these ideas are not falsifiable, so it is difficult to say that this is indeed the mechanism of consciousness. But some of the ideas are falsifiable, and those ideas have helped these researchers teach neurons how to play pong, so I think they might have a point.
So, then, I find it plausible that consciousness is not a quirk but an essential feature of our brain. To me this resolves the free will crisis because my consciousness is not an accidental outcome of physical processes just chaotically whizzing by but an actual feature of the machinery that is me.
So these outputs are experienced. And that experience of making predictions is me. Am I the one experiencing the predictions as well?
So this sentence confuses me: “This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.” Am I making the predictions or is it the CPM?
I am this machine and I follow the laws of physics. I am part of physical reality, and my sentience is a feature of who I am. If I do something it is because I chose to do so, and the fact that I chose to do so in accordance to the law of physics does not remove my agency.
I have no choice but to believe in it.
You could become convinced your perception of it is an illusion and not reality as it actually is, then you would have no choice not to believe it.
Yes but I need to define free will, I define it as the freedom to make a choice. We don’t control who our parents are, we don’t control what country we live in, we don’t control how others interact with us but we can control what choices we make.
We can chose option A-B-C…
Nope, I don’t.
Doesn’t really matter, though. We certainly have the illusion of free will, we behave as if it exists, so it doesn’t actually matter in a practical sense.
It is fun to think about!
I think there may be a paradox hiding in your question. You cannot believe in free will. You have it or you don’t - I would postulate you need a neutral third-party observer to tell you. For us humans, a Martian might do. Believing is an act of faith. Faith tends to bend will to its dogmas. I would go so far as to say belief is the natural enemy of a free will.
We are distracted animals. All things being equal, the Martian observer will after years of careful study come to the conclusion that humans have free will. But it’s constantly battered by short attention spans, a tendency to go with the herd, presupposituons in our heads that we don’t often or never question, etc. We are a smartphone full of bloatware running on too little RAM. It takes skill to operate. Some are more skillful than others.
You could of course counter that by saying that’s what you believe. It’s paradoxes all the way down.
In my opinion humans are biological machines reacting to stimulus based on previous experience.
If we could theoretically perfectly map the brain and understand it, we could predict what a person would do in response to a specific stimulus.
At least that is how I have come to understand my existence.
Doesn’t mean I am off the hook for my poor decisions either. I still have to make the decision, even if theoretically we already knew what I would do.
This is my favorite take on this topic. I also feel this way and its hard to get people to look at it this way I’ve noticed. People tend to loop back to “If theres no free will why do anything?” Or “If there is no free will why should murderers be punished?” Just because theres possibly no free will doesnt mean we should change the way we live our lives.
It’s a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there’s no free will, then why not instead try to “solve” murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We’d all be better off!
On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don’t know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br’er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that’s hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can’t know their mind.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly how I feel about it. The universe is nothing but dead matter being pushed around by blind force, and any sense of agency is just an emergent phenomenon that exists as an illusion in the brain without having any actual bearing on reality. If you perfectly understood all of the forces and matter involved, you could perfectly predict what any given human (or anything system at all) would do.
That said, I also believe that it’s a completely useless idea when you’re trying to navigate through life, so I mostly just keep it in the back of my head like some half-forgotten piece of trivia and spend most of my time pretending to be in control like everyone else. Cheers!
Me too. The illusion of choice is what makes life interesting I suppose.
Free will is based on the concept of the individual, a concept bounded by a separation already as arbitrary and illusory as a nation’s border. It’s pragmatic to pretend these things exist in your day to day life, but they don’t mean anything to the universe.
Even if the universe is nondeterministic like quantum physics suggests you still don’t have free will because your thoughts and feelings are still ruled by physical processes even when they are random.
But you don’t need physics to dispute free will. Schopenhauer already said that you may do what you want. But you cannot will what you want. Einstein used that realisation to not take everything too seriously even when people act infuriating.
your thoughts and feelings are still ruled by physical processes
citation needed
You exist in the brain, which is ruled by physical processes. Not sure what citations you need for that.
For real though, they have even identified the hormone responsible for the “this was my idea” feeling. But I’m too lazy to google it.
/me gestures in the general direction of the model of particle physics (and neuroscience)
