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?
I've thought quite a bit about this and see no way to preserve free will outside of immaterial or religious thinking.
Essentially it boils down to, is the existing state of affairs determined by the preceding state of affairs? The domicile you're in right now is there because somebody gathered the materials, put it together, and now it's a place to live, you're in it. Seems obvious and straightforward enough. But if the existing nature of things is a direct result of what came before, that's going to apply to everything, not just bits and pieces. Every element of your brain in the position it is in right now was determined by a preceding state of affairs. Every neuron firing, every neurotransmitter present or absent, the motivation you have, the memory you have, the personality you have, the options you have, all are directly determined by, and the result of, what happened previously. And you do not get decide this, you don't have any say in this.
If we want to posit that there's something in the human brain that is outside of causality -- how? Why? This requires what seems to be incredible assumptions which don't stand up to scrutiny. Where is the "will" that's independent of its conditions? How does it operate outside of cause and effect, but still somehow influence cause and effect?
"Choice" as in the competition of alternatives is insufficient for a free will as well. Imagine a fox running through the woods comes up against a fork in the road; on the left hand side is a small rabbit, on the right a small squirrel, whichever animal the Fox hunts, the other escapes. It's confronted with two options and goes after either left or right (or hell maybe it ends up paralyzed by indecision). Is the fox asserting its free will, because the choice was not made externally? I wouldn't say that's what I understand to be free will, but that is the extent of the "choice" we humans have as well: competing alternatives which are then collapsed into one outcome based entirely on intrinsic, non-chosen motivations.
Look at any action you've done or choice you've made. It's been done because of causes outside your influence. Imagine you have a friend Bob and a friend Jane and are confronted with the more complex choice of going to the gym or eating a large meal of McDonald's. Bob says "hey, come work out" while Jane says "I'm so high, I'm going to eat 2 Big Mac's and 20 nuggs, wanna come?" You're confronted with a choice and now have the opportunity to employ your faculty of free will. Say you end up deciding to go to the gym -- but why? Maybe it's because you want to be healthy and are afraid of dying, maybe it's because you want to impress members of your preferred sex, maybe you enjoy the release of endorphins, whatever motivates you in particular. But you didn't choose to want to impress members of your preferred sex or choose to desire intimacy. You didn't choose to want to prolong your life and fear death. You didn't choose that the release of norepinephrine is pleasurable to you. The same applies if you end up deciding to go for fast food -- if you go because you're starved, you didn't choose to crave food and consume it for sustenance, you didn't choose the fact that the oils and salt release dopamine in your brain, you didn't choose that you enjoy the comfort of sitting and the lack of strain.
This applies to every choice we've ever made, motivations and desires underlying them we cannot choose and do not. Spinoza says the issue is because we simply aren't aware of the complexity of our motivations and reasons for doing things and it's the gap in between that produces the error of thinking we have free will. Or put another way by Schopenhauer, "man is free to do as he desires, but he is not free to desire as he desires" (paraphrasing from memory).
It's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, which has not and probably cannot be forthcoming.
Free will doesn't require any part of a person to exist outside of causality. Really, the idea of anything existing outside of causality is sort of incoherent.
To exposit a bit on compatibilism, the idea is that a self-consistent idea of free will must be compatible with a mechanistic world. The only requirement for free will, in this view, is that a free-willed actor must control their actions - that is, what you are decides what you do. A rock isn't free-willed because it can't take make decisions or take actions. A person is free-willed because they make decisions that lead to actions; a person would not be free-willed if their decisions had no effect on their actions (e.g. they were mind-controlled by a compliance chip). Yes, in a mechanistic world, those actions might be pre-determined, but they are pre-determined in part by the actor. A person is part of the universe; a free-willed actor is a cause in itself. Having unchosen desires doesn't negate this. (Side note - the idea of "chosen desires" is shaky too; in the absence of pre-existing, unchosen desires, why would anyone choose to desire anything? Inherent value doesn't exist, so without at least one unchosen first-principle desire, there would be no reason to choose to desire one thing over the other. And without desire, why exercise free will?)
The problem with most people's concept of free will is that it assumes its own negation. If free will means being outside causality, unaffected by the universe, then it can't meaningfully affect anything in the universe. Free will can't mean making decisions regardless of causal input, because those decisions would be baseless. Really, fully baseless, to the point of incoherence - how could anyone make a decision without knowing what they're deciding between? If part of the human mind was "outside causality," what would that even look like? Either the acausal mind is internally consistent, and would make the same decisions as an identically conditioned causal mind (in which case there would be no real difference), or the acausal mind would make decisions randomly. I don't think randomness is a requirement for free will - the exact opposite, actually. If actions are essentially random, then the actor has no agency.
This is why I'm asking people to define free will in their terms. Almost no one here has.
So a fox has as much free will as a person. Sure, if your definition of "free will" is what you are (the current state of your configuration) determines what you will do (the actions or inactions that then follow), free will absolutely exists and is possessed by mice and flies as well.
If those actions are pre-determined by the actor, but the state of the actor is *itself * is also fully pre-determined, it's... Determinism, the outcome is determined, the actor is determined, it's a chain of causality. In a mechanistic world, it's not "those actions might be pre-determined" they are.
A human being as an actor in the world causes things to happen, and that human is also entirely an effect of previous causes. If you're claiming they are a cause but that cause is itself undetermined, that's the crux of the debate, and leads to all that I've said above. There is no acausal mind -- if there is, how did it come to be, what part of it is outside of causality, how is this possible, and what evidence do we have to make that claim?
What else could they be? You've missed the more important part of my argument. How can you define free will in a way that is independent of previous causes?
Forgive me if I misunderstood but you asserted choice and will were determined in part but not fully.
Your brain and will are entirely, fully the result of things outside of your control, the previous state . If you're claiming there is some element of the will, or mind, or brain, outside of causality whatsoever that's the extraordinary and immaterialist claim. If you're claiming the will and mind are entirely determined and the outcomes that occur because of that determination are "free will", that's just rephrasing determinism as free will.
The human mind can be entirely deterministic and still possess free will, for any coherent definition of free will. That is literally my entire point. What definition of free will are you using?
The one you gestured towards when you mentioned an "acausal mind", something which causes but in itself is not caused. So my definition of free will is a mind that is in part somewhere not subjected to causality. What exactly is your definition?
You keep sidestepping the basic question of do mosquitoes possess free will? By what you've offered as a definition, they absolutely do. And if so, I hope you might see why the implications of that present a problem for how most people view the freedom of the will. I'm completely cool with it though, flies and toads have as much free will as humans. If that's how we're defining it, absolutely, free will exists.
In what sense is an entirely determined mind "free"? What is it "free" from?
Here's the SEP on the basic critiques of compatibilism, or what compatibilism is in attempt a response to, the approach you have here:
Did you read the third paragraph of my first reply? I already addressed the acausal mind idea. It's untenable - either it would be indistinguishable from a purely causal mind, or it would make decisions randomly (which sort of defeats the point of free will).
And sure, mosquitoes have free will. So do trees, mushrooms, and bacteria. To a much lesser extent than humans (their decision space is way more constrained), but it's there.
I think then our only disagreement is actually nomenclature honestly