How are you experiencing free will? You have no idea what your next thought will be, nor can you control it.
You have the opinion that you have free will, but that doesn't mean it's true.
You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? I routinely chose things to think about or things to concentrate on.
It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.
You choose based on your past experience. If you know doing A is better than B, you didn’t choose A, it’s just that your brain already knows that A is the best option based on past experience or knowledge or beliefs.
Even if you choose the seemingly "worst" option B, it’s just that you know that new experiences can be rewarding so your brain is ok to try it.
And there is the extreme example : given you are in good mental health, you are totally, physically, unable to chose to kill someone (or even yourself) without a very important reason (to you).
Also, if the absence of free will at biological levels don’t make the concept useless at the society level. Accepting that environment, culture, knowledge and society have such an influence on us just shows the importance of shaping a good society.
Accepting absence of free will at a biological level can just makes us more empathetic towards others.
It doesn’t means society have to accept any wrong behavior from humans but rather something way more positive : society is ultimately responsible for individuals behaviors and have the power to change them for the benefit of everyone.
> Typing out such a long rambling reply was itself a choice.
First sentence GP wrote is: "Choosing is not free will.". Did you choose to ignore what GP wrote when writing your reply?
Free will isn't about making choices, at least not according to any definition I've heard. After all, it is obvious that in some way we do make choices. As far as my understanding goes free will is, depending on the definition, either about choosing differently when all else is equal or not having a gun pointed at your head when making a choice.
Free will is absolutely largely about making choices. That’s not all of it, but denying that is silly, it’s goal post shifting from the ones who don’t believe in it.
> Free will is absolutely largely about making choices.
Free will largely isn't about making choices or having choices. It is largely about how/why we make choices.
Bacteria can move, thus bacteria have a choice of direction in which to move. Bacteria move, so it is making a choice.
If GP has free will just because they made a choice to write a reply to you, as you claim, then it must follow that bacteria also have free will. Am I wrong or do you think that bacteria have free will?
Some animals certainly do. They’re not necessarily bound by our morality by any stretch of the imagination, but absolute some animals likely have free will.
As for reflex versus choice, if someone hits my knee just right my legs going to kick out. If someone pushes in the same spot and says “kick your leg out” and I don’t want to, I don’t have to.
There may be constraints on that, obviously at gun point I’m going to, but yah, if you’re able to think about then choose to do something or not do something that seems qualitatively different than a reflex.
Simply think about what you want to concentrate on, then concentrate on that until you get tired or physically can’t concentrate on it any more?
I would be shocked if I was the only one on HN who ever thought, “I don’t want to think about this right now, I want to think about <whatever>” and then stopped thinking about the first thing. In aviation there’s even actually training on division of attention and learning to prioritize and concentrate selectively. You evaluate the situation and classify things as “important” or “not important” then focus in the important stuff. Literally choosing what to think about in the moment.
You’ve never said “gotta concentrate on this now,” and then concentrated on it very hard? Everyone on here is going overly reductive and going into infinite regress as though that proves their point, but it’s Sorites Paradox. “Oh where did the decision about its importance come from? Well that’s entirely the product of your environment! Checkmate free will!” But it’s a lot simpler than that, in the heat of the moment if you don’t have time you tend to fall back to your training, but in other decisions - even when making a choice about what to think about - you can even hold a bit of a discussion with yourself, or lay out the pros and cons to decide what to do, evaluate them all and then choose.
You can absolutely choose to think about one thing or think about another. That’s its own sort of free will. As I read a lot of these comments I really pity the people who don’t believe they’re imbued with free will. It really makes me wonder about their lives and upbringing.
You are glossing over very fundamental issues here. If you want to be pragmatic about it, sure. Don’t worry about it. At the macroscopic scale this discussion does not matter and of course I can choose what to focus on, I hope we all can.
But then again, the addict also says he willingly chooses to drink another beer.. I’m sorry, I can’t let go. But I get your point and TBH I don’t really care either way. I just like to introspect and get at the bottom of things and then let go.
> You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours?
My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.
Choose to stop then? I mean social media that is - but seriously. Choose to say, “I’m not driven by my pleasure sensors” and do something hard for the sake of doing it - not for glory, not for nothing. Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places.
Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core) have never had to make any real “no-shit” choices in their life with serious consequences. I don’t mean to sound like an ass, but I both pity and envy these folks. Obviously you don’t have control over a lot of things, but the idea that this is all on rails screams “I’ve never had to do anything that had any real risk to it.”
"""Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences. Repetitive drug use often alters brain function in ways that perpetuate craving, and weakens (but does not completely negate) self-control.[1] This phenomenon – drugs reshaping brain function – has led to an understanding of addiction as a brain disorder with a complex variety of psychosocial as well as neurobiological (and thus involuntary)[a] factors that are implicated in addiction's development.[2][3][4] Classic signs of addiction include compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, preoccupation with substances or behavior, and continued use despite negative consequences. Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward),[5][6] coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).[3][7]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
I block some social media entirely, and I have to block rather than simply "choose to stop", due to the "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli" and habituation to patterns "characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward)".
I can easily recognise the long term deleterious effects social media, especially when it comes to just being horizontal in bed, either needing to go to sleep or to get up in the morning, and wanting to open up a browser on my phone to check for replies rather than either of those.
> which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core
The me of the id is not the same as the me of the ego, or the superego.
The me of tomorrow can curse the expanding waistline caused by the cake eaten by the me of today.
There is only one thing any of us can choose to do in any given moment while remaining true to ourselves; but which of the selves is truly "our"?
I know what addiction is, of course I’m aware that there’s a biological component. I quit smoking, I have many friends who quit drinking or doing drugs. It was incredibly hard, but I did it. Some of them did it.
I met a young guy while I was backpacking last year who was quitting heroin cold turkey. He was back packing to quit - he’d simply chosen to walk out of his home and go without heroin for thousands of km from the trail system by his home in France.
He was a nice guy - I wonder what became of him, but still, he chose to simply stop. I think you have a lot more agency than you think. Yeah, things cannot be undone, but you can definitely will yourself to change a great many things. It’s just hard and our body resists doing hard things.
I think another part is that materialism, determinism and science have (seemingly) given us great understanding and control of our environment and overturned lots of superstitious and erroneous ideas that society has. So if you accept materialism and determinism as the base of the universe and nature of things you naturally arrive at the conclusion that there is no free will.
I have a hunch that the universe is more complicated than that and might likely be beyond human understanding, but maybe that's just another superstitious belief. Regardless, we should keep using Science to explore because it is the best model we have so far and continue to use Philosophy to question things.
Personally I feel that I have free will and understanding of my emotions gives me more free will. Even if I am wrong, I prefer living in a non-free will universe and believing in free will than living in a free will universe and not believing in free will. In the former case that would just be my destiny, haha.
> Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places.
I think it's the other way around. Because as a society we believe in free will, we easily ignore the effect of environment on our choices. We let social media companies make their products addictive, because we believe that it's a choice to use them. If we ackwnoledged the fact that our choices are the result of our genetics and experiences, we could start creating a society that avoids such practices and would be a better place to live in.
Let's say you were addicted to social media and you never in your life have heard or read anything bad about it. No one has ever mentioned quitting social media to you. Do you think the thought to do so would come to your mind? Or is the "choice" to quit social media just a path carved into your brain by all the negative experiences you have had or heard about?
This is all just word salad though - you don’t have to ignore the effect of environmental conditions to believe in free will. Just because I was born to who I was or grew up where I did doesn’t mean that I cannot change things in my life. Seriously - it’ll be hard, but just try to change. I bet you’ll be surprised.
> Just because I was born to who I was or grew up where I did doesn’t mean that I cannot change things in my life.
False dichotomy.
What you can change, you can change. What you can't, you can't. Both exist, but not only those.
People can also want and seek help to change parts of yourself beyond your own control — to put the cookies beyond reach; to ensconce yourself in a monastery or nunnery to avoid being around those you're ashamed to fancy; to block the websites you can't resist typing in the URL for when half asleep.
And beyond that even; "thinking outside the box" isn't just a business cliché, there can be ways to change that were already possible, yet the mere thought had not formed and could not spontaneously emerge within a mind, yet when heard it is easy.
> Seriously - it’ll be hard, but just try to change. I bet you’ll be surprised.
If you made the bet to me, you would lose.
My main surprise in this life has been expecting to be able to change more, to resist more temptations, to have more self control.
At university, first year, we had a challenge. With appropriate safety gear, climb a telegraph pole, jump from the top to a trapeze. The teacher framed it in advance: "You'll think you can't, but you can. Remember that going forward, remember the voice saying you can't is wrong."
I climbed without fear. They had to tell me to slow down to keep the safety role taught. I expected it to be fine. I got my torso above the top… and my limbs froze. I still felt no fear, but my limbs were no more responsive to my desire to climb further and stand on the top, than when I have sleep paralysis. This was annoying, frustrating, but not scary. I came down by jumping sideways off the tower, and amused those on the ground by flapping my arms as if they were wings.
The lesson for me was the exact opposite of what had been intended by the teacher: I thought I could, but even without fear I could not.
Why are my expectations wrong in the opposite direction than you expect? Unclear even to me; perhaps because, by the standards I was raised in, so little even tempted me in the first place.
Let me introduce you to a little dopamine imbalance I like to call "focus control disorder", better known as Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder.
Think of it like having a preemptive multitasking scheduler that is unable to keep track of the state of the previous task.
