No, it's a silly philosophy. Why would it matter to me whether my decisions are completely deterministic or not? As a materialist, I don't believe in some metaphysical soul - I am the machine, and therefore the decisions that machine makes are my own. That's free will.
If you are the machine, then the decisions are your own, but they're not free. You need the free part and the willed part to have free will (free will being freely willed thoughts).
Our next thought is determined by the conditions in the prior moment and the laws of physics, so our thoughts can never be free (uninfluenced by anything), and there is no free will.
No, this is really just missing the point. Free will is the ability to make decisions. Those decisions will always be in response to certain conditions. That doesn't make them illegitimate. Like, what kind of definition of free will is "uninfluenced by anything"? That's nonsense.
That's actually my point; free will as a term is nonsense, an incoherent concept like a square circle. It's an ability people want to have that isn't actually possible. We want our next thought to be influenced by us, and also uninfluenced by anything; it's a case of wanting to have our cake and eat it too. And decisions being 'legitimate' or not wasn't the question, it was 'free' or not; if your decision this moment is determined by the conditions of the previous moment + the laws of physics, it's not free.
And I'd say the 'ability to make decisions' is the same as the 'ability to have or form freely willed thoughts', without which surely there'd be no free will. Thoughts would just be the fundamental objects capable of being 'freely willed' or not, which is why I bring them up. Which simplifies things; if you can demonstrate that thoughts can be freely willed, then free will exists, if not and thoughts can't be freely willed even theoretically, then there is no free will.
You can have “free will”.
It comes through the ignorance of the grand scope of the environment you’re in.
If I did not know that I would get thrown in jail for smoking a blunt, I’d pop a blunt, that’s my own thought due to the vacuum of information I possess at that moment.
But you need to show it was both your own thought and a 'free' thought: not knowing some information doesn't actually mean the thought arose freely (I can say your thought that moment was still determined by your brain state the moment prior).
In the casual or weak sense, if I say I'm 'free to' or 'can' decide to destroy my laptop in the next minute, I mean given my limited knowledge of my brain and the environment right now, it's still a possibility this thought will pop up so far as I can tell.
But this is different from saying it's actually possible, that I actually can choose to punch a hole through my laptop. If we had full knowledge of my brain and the environment, we would be able to say with certainty whether this mental event would happen or not in the next minute, and there's (basically) no 'can' to speak of. The only actual 'can' or 'freedom' here would be the tiny amount of randomness within the laws of physics that we also have no control over.
I think "determinism" is true if many-worlds is true, in that the branching multiverse is just an expanding collection of quantum states entangling. To us, it basically looks like indeterminism (which Copenhagen implies). Due to chaos theory and a buttload of things being chaotic systems, this microscopic indeterminism influences the scale.
I believe "free will" is more like an emergent phenomenon, useful for assigning blame, agency, etc. I don't think it has much to do with physics at all. Whenever I read any existentialist stuff concerning free will, I mentally assign it to a facet of our perceived, socially constructed reality.
Thoughts?
I see this was from three days ago but the hot algorithm has dug it back up, so I'll give my take on it anyway.
Yeah, under many worlds, the universe is completely deterministic, but the human brain trying to make sense of the experience of living through the branching process views the universe differently. This leads to the invention of classical physics, and also to quantum observations appearing to be non-deterministic. I think you could talk about free will in the context of physics and the fundamental nature of the universe, but most people care about it more in the sense of our daily interactions with other people. I think the biggest factor that separates these is the vast amount of information and information processing that is needed to be able to actually treat something on the scale of a biological organism as deterministic, so even if the universe is deterministic, you can be essentially certain that you will never in your life meet any person or entity that could exploit determinism, so in terms of how you make decisions, you can ignore it. Physics can tell us that no information can be created or destroyed inside a thinking brain, but in the experience of living life as a human, for practical reasons, we have to accept the idea that peoples minds can be completely original sources of new ideas.
Information is essentially entropy, and it can be created, but I pretty much agree.
The nice thing about not having free will is not having a choice about whether or not you believe you have free will.
In this way having free will and not having free will are completely indistinguishable.
Yea, but I don't find the theory practical for me. Even if at some level everything is determined, it requires more information than I have the ability to process so softer forms of determinism form more accurate models in the process of consciousness I can reflexively predict with
tldr: Sure, but I can't use it so what's the point?
We are the universe trying to gain mastery over itself, so we can say two words: “I exist”.
If we are talking about the way that organisms operate on gradient-driven "molecular machinery", chemo-electric impulses, and iteration on state-based transcription of genetic instructions, I would absolutely agree that biological life is mainly "clockwork" in this regard.
The trouble with applying some philosophical attribution of "determinism" (fate) to these systems, however, comes from the issues we have in understanding the fabric of the universe itself, IMO. Strange things happen in these small scales.
Basically it seems like we would need to know the most intimate details of the quantum physics "layers" or "domains" in which these higher abstractions (systems; physics -> chemistry -> biology) operate to be able to say whether any human thought or action (e.g. a particular chemical structure and electrical state in the nervous system of the organism) is preordained by the system in which it exists.
I don’t believe in “free will” nor do I believe in hard determinism as everything is contextual and people possess many capacities to respond to their own environments and vice versa.
