This topic has been buzzing around my mind for a while, so I figure it's time to externalize it. "Free will is an illusion" is a meme that I've seen quite a lot on this site especially. I don't think most people who repeat it have thought much about it.

Yeah, materialism (which I hear is popular around here) suggests a mechanistic universe, one without true randomness, defined solely by predictable input and output. That contradicts our intuition about independent free will, which seems unpredictable (or at least not fully predictable) when we experience it. I don't think a fully mechanistic universe is incompatible with free will, though - in fact, I think that any coherent definition of free will must necessarily exist even under a materialist lens. Those of you who are (like me) pop-philosophy dilettantes probably know that this position is called "compatibilism".

Obviously, though, people disagree. I want to know why. If you don't believe that free will exists, under what circumstances do you think it would exist? What do you think would change if it did exist according to your definition?

  • Zoift [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    This is conjecture more than anything and I could be proven wrong, but I don’t this is another ‘science will figure it out when it gets advanced enough’ issue.

    Agreed. I always felt like assuming science is capable of infinite progression to be pure hubris. There's no guarantee we don't hit an intractable problem in every single field, and I'd be willing to wager real cash money we eventually do.

    You can theorize of a hypothetical being that knows the exact atomic make-up of a red object down to the smallest molecule and exactly how it triggers the color-cones in our eyes but that being would not phenomenally know the experience of redness unless they had observed it for themselves subjectively.

    I disagree with this though, or rather the more general variant that gets passed around. I see absolutely no reason qualia couldn't be, or arise from, purely physical interactions. In the more general example I've seen it's usually phrased as something like "A being that possesses omniscience of the concept of Red, but has not experienced vision of it." Which seems like a either a non-sequetor or misses the point entirely.

    In the first interpretation I cant see how you could have a being that has "Knowledge of all possible notions of a concept" without experiencing qualia, because if it had it wouldn't have had "Knowledge of all possible notions." Congrats, you made a god that cant lift stones and gave it a rock.

    In the second interpretation im just like "Ok? What now though?" Visual qualia and cognitive qualia aren't the same thing, cool, agreed. Somebody that can see but has no idea of how vision works is also lacking the qualia of seeing within that context, or having thoughts related to it. Locked out of entire possible mind-space. Simply seeing Red is a different qualia than understanding Red, which is yet still a different qualia than doing both or neither. A blind person and an infant are both qualically(?how tf do you adverb qualia?) starved.

    Edit: I should probably say I think materialist panpsychism is dope and good. Probably should have lead with that. Sorry.