Asklemmy

You react to choices the specific way you do because of experiences you've had previously.

Reverse time without changing anything, you'll always make the same choices because you're having the same thoughts each time every time, because you've been conditioned the way you are.

The universe doesn't "know" where it's going, but the plan is already in action. You can choose whatever you want to do, but if you were the same person in the same circumstance, you would and will always make the same decision.

I think it's more complicated than free will existing or not.

If you knew every single possible value about the universe at its start and had a perfectly accurate model of physics, you could theoretically predict/simulate everything that would ever happen. For practical reasons, though, that's impossible, even ignoring weird quantum effects, for the simple reason that that is a lot of data points, more than any of us could reasonably keep track of- it's like how, in sufficiently controlled conditions, a fair dice can roll the exact same number 100% of the time, but there are enough variables that are hard enough to control for in a normal situation that it's basically random.

Similarly, if you knew everything about every human on Earth, you could theoretically predict exactly what any of them would do at any given moment. Of course, that's just not practical- the body and brain are a machine that is constantly taking in input and adapting to it, so in order to perfectly predict someone's thoughts and actions, you'd need to know every single detail of every single thing that has ever happened to them, no matter how small. Then, you'd need to account for the fact that they're interacting with hundreds of other people, who are also constantly changing and adapting. It's just not possible to predict or control a person for any reasonable length of time like that, because one tiny interaction could throw off the entire model.

Just look at current work with AI- our modern machine learning algorithms are much more well-understood and are trained in much more contained environments than any human mind, and yet we still need to manually reign them in and sift through the data to prevent them from going off the rails.

So, technically, I suppose free will doesn't exist. For practical purposes, though, what we have is indistinguishable from free will, so there's not much point getting riled up about it.

Quantum mechanics are probabilistic, which serves as a good argument for the universe as a whole being probabilistic. The position of a single particle could change a great many things!

I have the feeling most people cling to free will as a concept because not having free will raises questions if a "self" truly exists. However the existence of free will can be as scary if not more, since how could we define a "self" if it could freely do something not based on what defines it.

I just wanted to say that if you guys truly want to see what serious answers can be given to these type of questions you can always take a look into philosophy and just so happens I'm trying to build a philosophy community on Kbin so feel free to check m/AskPhilosophers, and m/LearnPhilosophy.

The question is underspecified. Why do you want to know if free will exists? What will you do differently if it does exist vs if it does not exist?

This is similar to questions like, "is water wet?" You can generate endless debate on the topic, but it's all intellectual masturbation until you are genuinely looking for the answer to a specific question.

Well, first things first, it is not a "simple" philosophical question. The best minds of humanity have been tackling this problem since forever, and there is still no definitive answer yet.

Ironically, for all the religions since the dawn of time, some kind of evidence for free will has emerged from the frontiers of science. Quantum mechanics, for instance, is based on the fact that at the subatomic level, nothing is known for sure. Therefore, the "initial conditions" issue is no longer true.

Someone with a greater intellect than mine once stated that the quantum nondeterminism underlying the functioning of the human brain could be the key to freeing it from the conundrum of cause and effect. In other words, yes, we have free will. Suggested readings: "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter, "The Book of Job" in the Bible.

Just my 2¢...

The concept of belief is rooted in free will, is it not?

Quantum mechanics shows the universe really does just operate on probabilities. On the smallest scales we can probe we see that the universe is non-deterministic. But average out those probabilities 10^20 times for a coin and everything may look pre-determined to our macroscopic lives.

I think an important question to ask is what "free will" actually is. I find people throw the term around without necessarily having a concrete definition for what they personally mean. When I use the term free will, I am saying that the the choices a sapient being makes would somehow be independent from all of the variables within the natural Universe. If it is dependent on natural variables (whether we know of them or not) this makes it deterministic, simply regular reactions to an unimaginably large domino effect.

The only hypothetical test I could conceive of would be if someone were able to rewind literally all variables of the Universe to a point in time just before decisions were made by another being, and doing this countless times and seeing if the outcome ever changes. I'd consider this to be entirely untestable, and as such I do not entertain the idea. For now I hold to what seems to be demonstrably true, which is that everything seems to operate and behave based on their properties, and react based on other variables which interact with them. With enough variables, we can make models to accurately predict the world around us, I do not expect our will to be any different.

I’m fairly certain free will does not exist. There’s really no solid evidence for it, and no credible scientific mechanic by which it could operate.

Quantum physics provides strong evidence that the future is not deterministic, though it can produce deterministic-like results in larger systems.

That's a wild question.

And I asked myself this earlier in the shower.

I decided I would probably never know, and ended up upset I needed to get out and get ready for work.

Sometimes I wonder if the cosmic joke is we could comprehend a situation like free will, but never actually find out of it exists.

Now see, if you're looking at things from a biological point of view, it's important to recognize the forest from the trees. A few trees are, well, just a few trees. But a great many trees together constitutes a forest, and becomes more than the sum of its parts. I feel the same way about the human brain. Yes, it's a series of electrical and chemical impulses, but there are so many of these working in tandem that it becomes exponentially more complex, akin to ever-advancing computer technology. It's complex enough that we think, we talk, we make decisions. And those decisions aren't based solely on instinctional drive, and can even be made in opposition to them.

It's true that human behavior can be accurately predicted based on an individual's natural tendencies, but there are never any guarantees. There's always a choice, a chance to veer off course. Decisions can be prudently made after careful research, or made on a frivolous impulse. Maybe you even realize that you would ordinarily take one action in a given situation, but do the exact opposite. You consciously chose to ignore your first impulse. If free will is an illusion, it's a damned convincing one.

Hard determinist here. It doesn't make the future predictable by me, but I don't see how randomness could really occur. And then likewise there's no such thing as free will.

Free will is way too vague of a concept, that it's probably not worth pursuing the answer.

Some entities are more deterministic than others. A rock is more deterministic than an animal and a human is less deterministic than an animal because its "causal inertia" (the opposite of free will) is weaker: it can be influenced by more factors than the rock and is more unpredictable. Some people lead more deterministic lives than others.

So that's a topic that fascinated so many people forever.

With all these people fascinated by it, some of them weirdos put their whole life's at it.

And these weirdos came to a few absolutely terrifying conclusions:

1. The ultimate future is predictable: 2nd law of thermal dynamics means the universe will eventually end with energy being equal everywhere, so there is nothing because there is no difference. That's the heat death of the universe.

2. Otherwise nothing is absolutely predictable: the uncertainty principle says you can either know the precise position of a particle, or you know the precise movement of a particle, you can't know both at the same time. So yeh if you know the initial condition you can make a prediction, but you can't know the precise initial condition at particle level, and since the world is made of particles, you can only make imprecise predictions without 100% certainty.

You could argue that the human mind is a quantum machine. You don't know it's initial condition. Nor do you know the precise initial condition of every human mind in the world. The impreciseness of any prediction, even if it could be small individually, adds up in the scale of the world, the universe. So that can be you foundation of free will, up to the heat death.

Indeterministic + free-will doesn't exist and can't exist. You literally end in impossible contradictions if you entail its existence in a consistent universe (as in, one where everything that exists is subjected to the same natural laws).

As a side note for OP, Hisenberg has proven there's no such thing as "knowing the initial condition".

I'd say free will exists. Sure, you are shaped by your environment, your genetics and so on, but in the end you can still decide what you want to do. In theory I could simply quit my job tomorrow, wander off into the sunset and then drown in the next ocean. Or as someone brought up criminals, you could stab someone just trying to disprove the universe is being deterministic.

If you know every single atom in this moment and had unlimited computing power, you'd probably be fantastic at telling the weather. Or if you map every neuron in someone's brain you might know what they are about to do next. But at this point you are just looking at the present data and can maybe calculate the next few seconds (but not even that is 100% sure, just a very good guess).

The question is how far forward would you be able to look just based on current and past data? A minute? A day? A month? At that point the whole thing breaks apart in my opinion. It's like looking at the stock market where you have tons of past data and think you can predict the future simply based on that.

There's so many complex sources of randomness, the most likely solution is that things are just that, random. And you can decide what you want to do with your own life, at least until you die (or don't, who knows what the future brings). Honestly the whole question is dumb, there is no single being that knows everything, so it really doesn't matter. In the grand scheme of things even humanity is just a tiny blip on the timeline and we're with very high probability not unique. Just based on numbers there is a high chance other life forms have existed before us, might exist right now with us (somewhere else in the universe I mean, there's also plenty on Earth) and will exist in the future.