Free will doesn't exist...?

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- Heyjustlooking
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Free will doesn't exist...?
OP - January 13, 2011, 11:30 PM

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=scientists-say-free-will-probably-d-2010-04-06

Thought this article made for an interesting read.

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #1 - January 13, 2011, 11:49 PM

Quote
Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is compatible with highly ethical behavior, but the present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that possibility.

This is what I've often suspected but it's nice to see it written down in such a scientific way.
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #2 - January 13, 2011, 11:55 PM

^^^ So you would have killed the very young Hitler or...?

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #3 - January 13, 2011, 11:59 PM

Well (just finished the article) I don't think it's so much about if you would have killed Hitler but what the reason would be, because either option allows room for both free will and determinism.

I would have not killed him but given his parents the holocaust literature as I believe largely in determinism and that his parents might have raised him differently if they had that foreknowledge (though I don't know enough about his childhood).

Also, I don't like the idea of killing people (not because I believe am a "good" person, but because deterministic factors have led me to be this way!)
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #4 - January 14, 2011, 12:03 AM

Lol, yeh i'm just curious. So, that would fall more along the lines of causal determinism (according ot the article).

Fatalism would have predicted he would have killed those people no matter what, right?

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #5 - January 14, 2011, 12:05 AM

Quote
At the core of the question of free will is a debate about the psychological causes of action. That is, is the person an autonomous entity who genuinely chooses how to act from among multiple possible options? Or is the person essentially just one link in a causal chain, so that the person’s actions are merely the inevitable product of lawful causes stemming from prior events, and no one ever could have acted differently than he or she actually did?...

The whole conclusion in that paragraph simply demonstrates how pointless the argument is, like saying 'everyone has an invisible countdown timer to die, when you die, that means it's finished and if you didn't, it means the timer wasn't finished just yet'..It's idiotic when you take notice of whats actually being said.

People change their mind and people go against their 'gut instincts' all the time, the argument simply creates a 'possible' conclusion that no matter what you did, it was always the only option and it was equally predetermined that you chose it, regardless of how things play out.

Example:
4 colored cups, you choose the red one....'you did it because of your genes, no way to avoid choosing it'
you choose the green one....'you did it because of your genes, no way to avoid choosing it'

Not quite a logical fallacy, but almost there..
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #6 - January 14, 2011, 12:19 AM

^^^Yeh, I'm not too big on fatalism. It's a cop-out.

The root of the argument of free-will deals with the psychology of humans and if we consciously make decisions which I think we do.

Yeh, you could say well that person has a certain personality type and mental disposition but that wouldn't necessary imply we could 100% determine what a person would do in any given situation. There are a whole variety of factors we could measure and use to predict what that said person would do or would be more likely to do but we could still be wrong.

Happens with subatomic particles which randomly pop into existence and then out in quantum mechanics.

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #7 - January 14, 2011, 01:01 AM

I think as we become more and more aware of the factors involved in our "decision-making" we will realise that they aren't really decisions at all.

I mean there are countless factors which determine why I am sitting here typing this right now and why I am typing these particular words. Just because you can't measure those factors scientifically does not mean that they don't exist nor does it mean that I could have chosen not to type this.

Fatalism is different to determinism though, isn't fatalism like - it's going to happen no matter what, whilst determinism is like it was always going to happen that way given those factors. So if you changed Hitler's past (changing the factors), fatalism says he still kills 6 million Jews, whilst determinism says that because you have changed those factors, Hitler no longer kills 6 million Jews. But either way, he had no free will.
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #8 - January 14, 2011, 01:02 AM

I'm not a die-hard determinalist though, I believe we probably do have a very, very small amount of free-will, but it's usually over decisions which are so trivial it doesn't matter anyway!
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Reply #9 - January 14, 2011, 01:29 AM

Free will is contingent on the mind being independent from the body, and I don't believe there's such a possibility as "a very, very small amount of free will." We either have free will or we don't, and I believe we don't. I do believe, however, we have choices, some freer than others (which many people confuse for free will when they argue for it), but is it really us, as self-conscious beings, who make those choices? We're nothing more than the aggregate of cells and firings that make up our bodies. Studies have shown that through brain scans people can know what decision you're going to make given certain choices about six seconds before you make it consciously.
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #10 - January 14, 2011, 05:52 PM

Quote from: Eliphaz on January 14, 2011, 01:01 AM
I think as we become more and more aware of the factors involved in our "decision-making" we will realise that they aren't really decisions at all.

I mean there are countless factors which determine why I am sitting here typing this right now and why I am typing these particular words. Just because you can't measure those factors scientifically does not mean that they don't exist nor does it mean that I could have chosen not to type this.

Fatalism is different to determinism though, isn't fatalism like - it's going to happen no matter what, whilst determinism is like it was always going to happen that way given those factors. So if you changed Hitler's past (changing the factors), fatalism says he still kills 6 million Jews, whilst determinism says that because you have changed those factors, Hitler no longer kills 6 million Jews. But either way, he had no free will.

Ye, according to fatalism, Hitler would have killed those 6 million jews irrespective of what happened in his childhood or interference there was.

Abood - very interesting insight. I will need to read more into the neuroscience behind our decision making process.

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #11 - January 16, 2011, 04:07 AM

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   Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.
   While conceding that human behavior is indeed determined by the laws of nature, it also seems reasonable to conclude that the outcome is determined in such a complicated way and with so many variables as to make it impossible in practice to predict. For that one would need knowledge of the initial state of each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body and to solve something like that number of equations. That would take a few billion years, which would be a bit late to duck when the person opposite aimed a blow.
   Because it is so impractical to use the underlying physical laws to predict human behavior, we adopt what is called an effective theory. In physics, an effective theory is a framework created to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of the underlying processes. For example, we cannot solve exactly the equations governing the gravitational interactions of every atom in a person's body with every atom in the earth. But for all practical purposes the gravitational force between a person and the earth can be described in terms of just a few numbers, such as the person's total mass. Similarly, we cannot solve the equations governing the behavior of complex atoms and molecules, but we have developed an effective theory called chemistry that provides an adequate explanation of how atoms and molecules behave in chemical reactions without accounting for every detail of the interactions. In the case of people, since we cannot solve the equations that determine our behavior, we use the effective theory that people have free will. The study of our free will, and of the behavior that arises from it, is the science of psychology.

The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, pp. 31-33.
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Re: Free will doesn't exist...?
Reply #12 - January 16, 2011, 04:35 AM

Nice.

So once again I'm left with the classic Irish man's dilemma, do I eat the potato or do I let it ferment so I can drink it later?
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