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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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I mean, it's pretty obvious free will is an illusion if you stop and think about how the universe functions. If everything is governed by physics, then why would we be special? In order for "true" free will to exist, it is necessary to exist outside the realm of physics in order to make decisions without said decisions being affected by the chemical and electrical signals in your brain. You have to be able to make choices that won't be influenced by the physical world, which, afaik, there is no evidence for.
However, even from a philosophical standpoint: if we rewound time to the last major choice you made, so that you could make it all over again, would you do anything different?
Keep in mind that we rewound time and you don't have any new knowledge that you acquired after originally making the choice.
Personally, I can't see a reason why I'd make any other choice. As such, that seems like a much larger existential crisis in the same vein that you should be concerned with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
I don't agree with this version of the free will argument. I prefer to ask the question, is anything outside the local system affecting my decisions. Think of a toaster. It has buttons and levers, but once you press them, it can do whatever it wants. It's a contained system. It was preprogrammed or designed to respond a certain way, but if it short-circuits or something inside changes, it does that independent of your will or input.
In your case, you are made of chemical and electrical signals, so your argument is like saying, do I have free will if my brain is making the decisions? The real question is, is there anything outside your brain that is affecting your decisions. Otherwise, congratulations! You have free will!
Well, yes. We are a collection of inputs and outputs. We cease to be in a vacuum. I can't find the study, but I'm almost certain I remember reading about an experiment where scientists removed a rat brain and studied what happened when they gave it everything it needed except external stimuli. They found the brain atrophied and eventually just stopped. That doesn't mean the same would happen to humans, but it suggests that external stimuli are necessary for consciousness.
Our lives appear to be a chain of cause and effect impacted by our surroundings. Any prediction or anticipation we do is in response to external stimuli priming us to expect some form of action or inaction to occur.
To try and put it another way, your response was predetermined, as is mine. The text on the screen released photons in a pattern my brain could recognize, which were then focused by my cornea and projected onto my retina. Those photons were translated into a mix of chemical and electrical impulses that traveled up my optic nerves and into my brain. From there, they were filtered through a highly complex series of algorithms that used things like prior experience and personality to decide whether or not I should respond, and if so, how I should do it. At no point in this did I actually get to choose, everything was cause and effect with my choice being an illusion.
This isn't some grand conspiracy theory about lizard men hijacking your brainwaves; it's just simple cause and effect. You responded the way you did because deep inside your brain, you decided that what you wrote was the best way to respond based on prior experience, and so you did. The same is true for me.
Two things: 1. Considering we can't even predict which slit a photon will go through in a double-slit experiment or a stochastic system like the precession of a top spinning, it's difficult to say that our actions, each of which the results of many millions of synapsis firing in concert, are predetermined.
Even if we were able to create a complete replica of our brains to the synapse level, that model would not be able to predict our future responses 100% because synapses are always changing. So who you are 2 minutes from now is not the same as who you are now.
All this to say that the belief that we have no control over the cause and effect in our lives is facetious at best and cowardly at worst.
Almost everything your brain decides is affected by things outside of it.
We are a mixture of chemical desires and social + cultural outputs. Free will is an illusion. Its been done. Philosophers did to to free will what they did to God and capitalism.
I suppose the real question is, is my brain part of me or am I inside of it somewhere/how? If it's part of me I'd argue it's the part I use for free willin', just like my butt is the part of me I use for poopin'. If I'm inside of it...well... I don't know? I think it's more the first, anyway, so I guess I don't have to know lol.
Ok but that's different than free will as in, the premise of a society in which a person is able to choose their path in life
Which we also don't have, since our choices are greatly restricted by the economic class that we're born into!