Do We Have Free Will?

[Amadeus]

Are we truly free or are we some sort characters, in a game, that are controlled by God.

Every decision we've taken, has it really been our choice or was it just fate.

Edited February 20, 2022 by Amadeus

[Genady]

Yes, we do.

[Alex_Krycek]

5 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Are we truly free or are we some sort characters, in a game, that are controlled by God.

Every decision we've taken, has it really been our choice or was it just fate.

For me, how one answers this question depends on one's individual worldview.  One can construct marvelously elaborate arguments as to why free will does not exist, and marvelously elaborate arguments as to why it does.  In the end both views are subjective projections.

I consider free will as probabilistic based on the relationship between environmental conditioning/external forces and the strength of the individual actor and their manifested capacity for independent action. 

In other words, both the environment and the individual have a role in determining an outcome that is not always definitive.

 

Edited February 20, 2022 by Alex_Krycek

[joigus]

Knock yourself out:

https://www.scienceforums.net/search/?&q="free will"&search_and_or=or&search_in=titles&sortby=relevancy

[dimreepr]

6 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Are we truly free or are we some sort characters, in a game, that are controlled by God.

Every decision we've taken, has it really been our choice or was it just fate.

Did you choose to post this? 😉

[Peterkin]

8 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Are we truly free or are we some sort characters, in a game, that are controlled by God.

Those can't be the only possible alternatives.

8 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Every decision we've taken, has it really been our choice or was it just fate.

Again, not the only available alternatives.

When you set up false dichotomies, you get nonsensical results.

[OldChemE]

Yes we have freewill.  Our internal brain structure and brain chemistry drive what we do, as well as our environment.  But-- ultimately, the things happening inside our brains leads to the decisions we make.  We could argue about how inevitable our decisions are, and how much they are influenced by things we are not consciously aware of. and how much we are manipulated by outside forces, but in my opinion anything that ultimately arises from the functions within our brains constitutes free will.

Edited February 21, 2022 by OldChemE
clarification

[Bufofrog]

Yes.

[geordief]

Does it have to be either or?

And what if we create our own reality?

[Peterkin]

1 hour ago, geordief said:

And what if we create our own reality?

Then mine would be very different.

[geordief]

43 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

Then mine would be very different.

I believe you.I have just been listening to some John Fahey guitar  performances on German TV back in the day.He certainly created his own version.

 

 

[SuperSlim]

Even if it isn't true, our sense of being free to choose is fundamental to survival, evolution and no free will doesn't seem to add together.

[Peterkin]

It probably isn't true: everything that went before determines everything that comes after. But we don't know more than 0.00001% of all that; it doesn't figure in our decision-making process.

We experience life as if we had free will. We make our assessments and judgments, pick our fights, partners and lottery numbers as if we had free will. We walk around thinking and acting as if we had free will. So, for all practical purposes, we do have free will. (Pay no attention to the predetermined physics behind the curtain!)

[Genady]

6 hours ago, Peterkin said:

(Pay no attention to the predetermined physics behind the curtain!)

In the words of Gerard ’t Hooft, it is determined but not pre-determined. There is no way to know what will happen before it in fact happens.

Quote

Neither determinism nor ‘superdeterminism’ imply ‘pre-determinism', since no human and no machine can ever calculate faster than Nature itself.

 

[dimreepr]

9 hours ago, SuperSlim said:

Even if it isn't true, our sense of being free to choose is fundamental to survival, evolution and no free will doesn't seem to add together.

That only work's for the survivors...

Free will is limited:

Our enviroment, our diet, our teacher's etc...

But we have to believe our choices matter, otherwise what's the point...

[Vashta Nerada]

On 2/20/2022 at 3:46 AM, Amadeus said:

Are we truly free or are we some sort characters, in a game, that are controlled by God.

Every decision we've taken, has it really been our choice or was it just fate.

I think we don't.

Thinking in a biological perspective, I think (and that's only my opinion) that we are just a very complex biological machine that can process information and responds to it. Information that was captured by our biological sensors that are all around our body. What can explain why different people receive and interprete the signals in different ways, because each one is unique, and have a unique set of biological sensors. And also no one has gone through the same experiences as the other.

Our brain is a very incredible machine that can store incalculable Terabytes of memories and experiences. So I like to think that we as humans are only a result of all the experiences that we had in our lives added to the characteristics of our tools that externalize that processed information.

So, no... I don't think we have free will at all, I think that all decisions that you take is just a result of your past and the way you process the information.

It's like the idea that if you know the status of all particles in the universe (such as position, energy, momentum, velocity, etc.), you would be able to "predict the future", because you would "just" have to calculate all the interactions between all those particles to know their future interactions and so on...
So, why couldn't this idea be applied to our brains too?

Now, just one thing that makes me consider this idea is the fact that we can't predict at all the interactions of particles in a quantum level. For us (at least so far) these interactions are literally random and unpredictable. Maybe that's where our Free Will is 😋.

[Peterkin]

3 hours ago, Genady said:

There is no way to know what will happen before it in fact happens.

As a wise man recently said: Like mathematics, it exists and is absolute, whether we know about it or not.

In this case, the outcome of the decision is pre-determined in the sense of having been determined by all the events pre-ceding the decision, before the decision is known by the decider. 

[Genady]

14 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

As a wise man recently said: Like mathematics, it exists and is absolute, whether we know about it or not.

In this case, the outcome of the decision is pre-determined in the sense of having been determined by all the events pre-ceding the decision, before the decision is known by the decider. 

This is a good clarification, which may solve the apparent contradiction:

We don't have a free will in a mathematical sense because the outcome of the decision is determined by the preceding state of the universe, but -

We do have a free will in a physical sense because the outcome of my decision appears in my mind before it appears anywhere else. 

1 hour ago, Vashta Nerada said:

.. all decisions that you take is just a result of your past and the way you process the information.

All decisions I take are a result of my past and the way I process the information ... This IS a free will!

[Peterkin]

Yeah. I can live with that.

[Vashta Nerada]

40 minutes ago, Genady said:

This IS a free will!

No, Perhaps I did not make myself clear. What I tried to say is that always when you have to make a decision, since you had a specific and unique set of inputs for your whole life until now, then there's only one possible way that you could response to that, you don't have a "choice", your response is just a resultant of the chaos of the universe. You think that your response was created and elaborated by you as if you were a conscious entity, but the fact is that you were always doomed to response exactly like you did.

Simplifying, think in an isolated box full of particles with random positions and directions speeds. Then at a given time one particle hits another particle and changes it's direction and speed. Did that particle changed it's direction speed because it wanted to? No, it was just a causality given by the previous state of the system, and it could be easily predicted once knowing that state.
Same idea for our brains, but in a much greater and complex scale.

[Peterkin]

6 minutes ago, Vashta Nerada said:

then there's only one possible way that you could response to that, you don't have a "choice"

Obviously. But you don't have access to all that preceding information, so you can't know what-all is going into the current decision. You experience it as a process over which you have a degree of control (depending on external circumstances and available options), so it feels more free than it really is. You're still going through the process, just as if the outcome were not pre-determined. I could, for example, have sworn I cited this link before, but it was not reproduced in the external world the way I pictured it in my prefrontal cortex. https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofmanagementopenstax/chapter/how-the-brain-processes-information-to-make-decisions-reflective-and-reactive-systems/

[Genady]

8 minutes ago, Vashta Nerada said:

No, Perhaps I did not make myself clear. What I tried to say is that always when you have to make a decision, since you had a specific and unique set of inputs for your whole life until now, then there's only one possible way that you could response to that, you don't have a "choice", your response is just a resultant of the chaos of the universe. You think that your response was created and elaborated by you as if you were a conscious entity, but the fact is that you were always doomed to response exactly like you did.

Simplifying, think in an isolated box full of particles with random positions and directions speeds. Then at a given time one particle hits another particle and changes it's direction and speed. Did that particle changed it's direction speed because it wanted to? No, it was just a causality given by the previous state of the system, and it could be easily predicted once knowing that state.
Same idea for our brains, but in a much greater and complex scale.

So, my neurons, my action potentials, my transmitter concentrations, my blood pressure, etc. made me to decide what I've decided. This is correct. On the other hand, my neurons, my action potentials, my transmitter concentrations, my blood pressure, etc. taken all together IS me. Thus, it is me that made me to decide what I've decided. Isn't this a free will?

[Peterkin]

25 minutes ago, Vashta Nerada said:

Did that particle changed it's direction speed because it wanted to? No, it was just a causality given by the previous state of the system, and it could be easily predicted once knowing that state.

How do you know? https://blog.oup.com/2017/08/electrons-consciousness-philosophy/

Just now, Peterkin said:

once knowing that state

There is the operative phrase. You don't know. The particle doesn't know.

[Vashta Nerada]

3 minutes ago, Genady said:

taken all together IS me

Agreed, all of that IS YOU. But what is exactly "you"? And also, the hole point here is to understand if you are a conscious entity or just an unconscious reproducer "machine" of information. And that second one for me don't feel like a free will.

 

15 minutes ago, Genady said:

Thus, it is me that made me to decide what I've decided. Isn't this a free will?

I mean... If free will is just the fact that your brain is capable of process data that was conceived by organic sensors and then generate a response to that, then sure, we all have free will, there's no doubt that the brain do that.
Now, for me, free will were something more like the ability of having a master conscious that allow you decide whatever you want, independent of the chaos surrounding you. And that for me is not true. In that case we would be creatures without free will.

8 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

How do you know? https://blog.oup.com/2017/08/electrons-consciousness-philosophy/

Yeah, that enters in what I said of "Maybe that's where our Free Will is 😋."

[Peterkin]

15 minutes ago, Vashta Nerada said:

And also, the hole point here is to understand if you are a conscious entity or just an unconscious reproducer "machine" of information.

Why?

If the first, you already experience yourself that way, so the only thing left to learn is the mechanism of you function.

If the second, you can never understand anything anyway, so it doesn't matter.