Do we have free will?

[Unorthodox]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/

Too long to post the whole thing, generally interesting article declaring free will a lie that we are better off to believe.  More fun as poll than news. 

[ColdWizard]

Oh no! It's philosophy 101 again! Where's the drop course button?!

[Buster's Uncle]

 I mentioned this philosophical quandary in recent months - the answer is simply that it doesn't matter, absent absolute knowledge that we'll never have.  It. Don't. Matter.

[Eadee]

Well. I at least do like philosophy and psychology.

My opinion is that yes, free will is an illusion, but its an almost perfect illusion. And a really good Illusion is as good as the real thing. For example security is an illusion. Security systems do not make your home secure, they make your home to seem secure. However if you make the illusion of security really really good noone's going to break in into your house because it looks impossible to do. Then, while it still would be possible to break in, noone does it, and if noone breaks in into your house you just achieved the same thing as if you had real security.

Another example would be a thing as simple as speed. If you view speed on a level of quantum physics you can see that only certain values of speed are possible. So it is possible to move at speed 1 or to move at speed 2 but the speed of 1.5 cannot be achieved by any measures.
However our world consists of countless particles that all by themselves follow the rules of quantum physics. But their interaction with each other make the whole system to behave like we know it from classic physics. Also the difference between speed 1 and speed 2 is so small that we have no possibility to tell the difference in our world that has HUGE scales.
So, while movement can only happen on certain levels of speed, the illusion of speed being possible at any level and any number between levels is so good that its just as fine as if it was true.

Same thing goes for free will. It may be that all our genes and our experiences DO decide what we do. However there are SO many factors that are taken into account when the "predetermined" decision is made that noone else can replicate them. So, we may not decide freely, but only we ourselves decide everything the way we would decide. Noone else is going to make exactly the same decisions at all times. Therefore it makes our decisive pattern unique. And guess what a free will would do exactly the same thing. It would make a unique pattern of decisions.
Thats why I think our Illusion of free will is as good as real free will.

However while reading that article I found  the standpoint of Sam Harris also very interesting. And yes, if we all accepted that there is no real free will, one might think we'd be able to overcome hate and work on solutions and prevention instead of working on vengeance. But I have to tell you that I absolutely hate asparagus, even though I absolutely believe that it has no free will that decided to taste bad to me, I'd still burn down a field of aspargus if I could .

[Unorthodox]

Well. I at least do like philosophy and psychology.

My opinion is that yes, free will is an illusion, but its an almost perfect illusion. And a really good Illusion is as good as the real thing. For example security is an illusion. Security systems do not make your home secure, they make your home to seem secure. However if you make the illusion of security really really good noone's going to break in into your house because it looks impossible to do. Then, while it still would be possible to break in, noone does it, and if noone breaks in into your house you just achieved the same thing as if you had real security.

I once worked at a place that was for all intents and purposes practically impossible to break into.  However, one of the more interesting things is they specifically cultivated the illusion that is was abandoned and nothing of value could possibly exist in such a place.  All the other buildings around getting new paint, and repairs, etc.  Nope, let that one stay run down, the worse the better.  Once inside, now, and able to see the security, it was impressive.  Motion, heat, vibration sensors, independent airflow, etc. 

I always said the dump illusion did more than all the other security. 

I think the argument against free will holds up very well for impulse decisions.  However, you can train yourself to overcome those impulses.

Those who have decided to quit insert addictive activity here are a great example.  Their impulse, their decision is to continue whatever they are addicted to.  It takes a force of will to cease, stall, alter that activity.  Often several times a day.  This is why addiction is so hard to overcome, your initial decision is already made without much thought, and you have to overcome that. 

[Rusty Edge]

I always thought the stories of identical twins raised separately were too uncannily similar.
I voted maybe.

Since reading the discussion, I'm not so much concerned about the truth as the responses by the authorities. Whether it's to suppress the truth because they know best, or to decide to alter the brains or execute criminals, perhaps before they can do damage. Otherwise, those bad people are going to do what they're going to do. But the authorities aren't responsible either way, they're just going to do what they do.

Like that series of GEICO insurance commercials- "It's what you do."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEICO_advertising_campaigns#.22It.27s_what_you_do.22

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Interesting that a belief in free will is the best predictor of a good employee.

[Lorizael]

Metaphysically: almost certainly not. Most philosophers today think that metaphysical free will essentially means that a random animal on Earth managed to evolve the ability to break the laws of physics. Philosophers generally believe that this kind of free will is either implausible or incoherent. (There are, however, free will "libertarians" who believe it is possible or, in fact, the case.)

Instead, analytic philosophers do what analytic philosophers do (clarify) by taking a compatibilist approach. That is, free will is a concept that exists that we talk about, and saying that we don't have free will is akin to saying that no one ever touches an object because, really, it's just electric fields bumping up against each other. If that's the case, it just means we need to clarify what touching means. So too does it follow with free will. If metaphysical free will is logically impossible, then we must mean something else when we say free will.

The compatibilist stance is generally along the lines of free will means that a person's actions are at least proximately caused by the person's personality and not relevantly constrained by the environment. (This often comes as a way of deciding when a person should count as "responsible" for actions they've carried out.) Ultimately, a person's personality is determined by the hunk of grey matter in their skull, which is still just following the laws of physics, so there's nothing magical going on when free will is exercised. So free will here is essentially definitional, telling us how we classify a particular event in the universe. For example, when a tornado knocks down a house, that's a weather event (an unpredictable one, btw, that no one would classify as being an act of free will on the part of the weather). And when a human acts in a way governed by their personality bla bla... that's a free will event.

As a side note, philosophers (and scientists) not thinking that there is any kind of metaphysical free will does not mean they think people are doomed to do the same thing they always do, or that people put in identical situations will make identical choices. Humans are clearly unpredictable, and they clearly evolve over time, but there are plenty of phenomena in the universe that act the same way. (Go back to the weather metaphor.) This just means that human action may be chaotic: that is, very sensitive to initial parameters in a way that makes them unpredictable. You can put two people in identical situations and get different results while still not having free will because (a) your situations were only identical to X decimal places and/or (b) differently wired brains should react differently to the same stimuli for the same reason that a basketball and a baseball react differently to the same applied force.

[Buster's Uncle]

But how does that matter, if so?

[Lorizael]

For me, it helps me not get angry at people. That is, currently, we have sympathy for people who, say, suffer from schizophrenia and do bad things as a result. They can't help themselves, we think, because their brain is messed up. But other people who do bad things and aren't suffering from a mental illness... well they're just jerks and we shouldn't have any sympathy for them! In reality, though, it's all just the brain doing the only thing the brain can do. Why is one deserving of sympathy and not the other?

The difference between someone who is schizophrenic and someone who's just a jerk is that we've observed that jerk brains can evolve into non-jerk brains, but schizophrenic brains don't seem to be able to make a similar kind of transition. If you go the non-judgmental route, to me this means we should help jerks stop being jerks (and we should learn more about the brain so that we can fix schizophrenics, too).

(If I'm cursing too much in this post, let me know. I think my point is made better with the juxtaposition in how we label people who do bad things.)

[Buster's Uncle]

Well - if you could fix that plural form that got by the filter multiple times, the deterministic universe would have a happier BU in it...  I think the substation make the point well enough, irregardless of if I was fated to think so.

I still say that absent certainty and knowledge of fate, it doesn't matter even so.  It's even better to work out what makes the [jerk] an [jerk] than to tell yourself it's not the [jerk]'s fault.

[Lorizael]

To me, accepting that there is no free will makes it easier to have the attitude that we should try to make the universe (which includes the people and brains in it) more awesome. If you hold on to the illusion of free will, it's too easy to convince yourself that other people deserve whatever they get, or that there's nothing you can do to stop people from making bad choices.

[Buster's Uncle]

No see, people are going to be a problem because I don't know everything, because I don't know what to do.  Whether they have free will frankly is not my problem - whether I have it is.  I need to believe in my own agency to function.  I am not a robot - I chose to play along with the consensus reality, because solipsism -I thought of it as a kid years before I found out it was a thing and had a name or read Twain's The Mysterious Stranger- is similarly useless, madness isn't quite right for it, but useless is close enough - and I'm getting sleepy and going to bed now, but because I choose to, not merely because it was fated and I realize I'm no longer up to finishing this sensibly.  It doesn't matter if I dreamed this because the dream has consistent rules like that I never get an even break, but brain shutting down now.

It just happened; leave me alone.

[Rusty Edge]

Metaphysically: almost certainly not. Most philosophers today think that metaphysical free will essentially means that a random animal on Earth managed to evolve the ability to break the laws of physics.

Yeah, but it's kinda cool to think about that happening. Then the same random animal creates plastic, which would never occur otherwise.

To me having no free will means "Why bother? Que sara sara." Well, maybe that explains why belief in free will is the best indicator of a good employee.

Thanks for elaborating on the subject, Lori.

[Yitzi]

It is very easy to define "free will" in a way that makes "we do not have free will" a true statement.

It is significantly harder (the the point of implausibility IMO) to define it in a way that makes "we do not have free will" a statement that is true but not a priori obvious...and a definition of something that makes "it does not exist" a true statement a priori is usually a fairly poor definition.

If our decisions are due to a process that, from the inside, feels like choosing, and is affected by things that one would intuitively expect to affect moral responsibility, then we have free will, regardless of whether that process can be understood through neuroscience or not.  The experiments quoted in the article, showing that lack of belief in free will affects people's choices, is perhaps the strongest rational argument that free will (as properly understood) does exist that I have seen so far.

[Elok]

To me, accepting that there is no free will makes it easier to have the attitude that we should try to make the universe (which includes the people and brains in it) more awesome. If you hold on to the illusion of free will, it's too easy to convince yourself that other people deserve whatever they get, or that there's nothing you can do to stop people from making bad choices.

I'd say this is only true if you believe in absolute free will--that we can choose anything at all.  I would not say this is rational, nor would it be common if you asked the average believer to think about it.  You cannot, for example, choose to hold your hand on a hot stove; your body will betray you sooner or later.  Almost nobody would deny that we are similarly influenced by hunger, thirst, illness, stress, and any number of other factors.  A Christian would add to that the general fallen-ness of the world (which of course includes hunger, etc. in its repercussions).

Consider a boat on a stormy sea.  The boat's overall direction will be dictated by the wind and the waves, no matter what.  But those on the boat are not utterly helpless.  They can choose to act in a way that will help ensure the boat's survival, like bailing out water or securing loose equipment, even if those are only a small piece of the overall puzzle.  The question is: how much of us is the storm, and how much is the crew?  Your Calvinists say it's basically all storm, and the crew are fooling themselves.  We prefer to think of ourselves as "co-workers in our salvation"; even if God necessarily has to do most of the work, we still have to assent and make an effort at all parts of the process.

I'm more concerned about the opposite--the reduction of the brain to a mechanistic phenomenon like any other--for the practical reason that we humans tend to view phenomena as things to be exploited, once we feel we understand them.  It's only a healthy fear of the inexplicable that keeps us from viewing each other as essentially meat.