I have a friend who’s convinced that there’s no such thing as free-will. We go back and forth on this frequently. Thinking about LLMs and how companies are investing billions in predicting what we want before we buy it or using LLMs to remove choice from us suggests to me that not only is free-will real, but is such a threat to things like capitalism that it is being actively fought against.
People spend a lot of money trying to predict weather but that doesn’t mean it has free will.
Does the river spare a thought for the dam?
I generally approach the concept of free will like this: think back to a decision you mulled over for a while before finally making a choice. If you went back in time to that exact scenario again, being in the same state of mind, thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, experiencing the same experiences… if every single atom in the entire universe were in the exact same state as it was in that moment, would you ever really make a different choice?
Something made you choose one thing over another the first time around, and I believe that whatever factor that was would have always been there, causing you to make that decision again even if the scenario played out over and over on repeat. If that’s true, then free will, the concept that humans have the ability to make a decision completely freely from any physical factors, would be false.
For free will to be true, such a scenario played out multiple times in exactly the same way, down to the exact placement of the atoms in the entire universe, would be able to have different conclusions due to the decisions of creatures with free will. You would have the ability to make a different choice even when literally everything else is exactly the same as when you made the initial choice.
Essentially, I believe that if someone knew the exact state of every single atom in the universe at a given moment, they could figure out the next moment, and the next, and so on, thus predicting the entirety of existence throughout all of time. That’s obviously impossible due to the immense complexity of the task, but it would still mean that whatever happens was always going to happen, and thus free will doesn’t exist. Even the atoms in your brain would be predicted, including the decisions that arise from them.
Lack of free will shouldn’t be confused with the inability for your decisions to be swayed by various factors, it just means that those factors were always going to be there at that moment to sway you. That’s just my understanding of things, and I could obviously be wrong, but it makes sense to me.
Yeah, perhaps the real question is: What’s the definition of free will?
If you make your decision purely based on outside influences, then that’s not free will, that’s determinism.
So, you’d have to integrate something into your decision process that’s independent from outside influence. But something which is independent from the outside, that is either some constant (e.g. you always tend to say yes) or it’s effectively random.
Neither of those sound like free will to me…
The question of free will doesn’t even need to exist. What’s the point? We already know different people act differently. Whether they’re just post-hoc justifying things, or deciding things differently, doesn’t really matter when the behavior will be different either way.
Especially at a further removed point like what corporations want. They want people to hand them money, regardless of the reason. They’re already dealing with more people than individuality will ever matter, so the question is completely moot.
Yes, they want people to be easily controlled and mentally corralled into specific behaviors … so they can exploit people more efficiently. That’s it. They’ll try to do it regardless of free will. In any case, humans are quite a complex system, so it takes a great deal of time and subliminal training to get people to behave the same.
That’s basically culture. Hence why the US has such a fucked, dumb culture; capitalists have been driving it for generations. That’d happen with or without free will when they’re allowed to run rampant as they have.
I don’t believe in free will either but that doesn’t imply that I think decisions aren’t being made. You’re simply just not authoring those decisions - at least not the way you think.
We do things for two reasons: either you have to or you want to. There’s no freedom in neither one.
We have a pretty good simulation of free will, but we don’t actually have free will.
What we have is Chaos. It looks like free will.
Close enough for government work as they say. It’s not like it makes a difference.
A marionette has no freewill and puppeteers are making decisions for them.
Also, because a marionette has a range of possible actions doesn’t mean it has freewill.
People who think about free will vs determinism are thinking in the wrong terms. Our brains evolved, they weren’t created by mixing abstract concepts.
We evolved to have some ability to observe and predict problems and find ways to solve or avoid predicted problems.
The prediction part is actually the lesser part. It’s the solving that’s doing most of the heavy lifting. That’s the larger part of what we consider intelligent choice.
“Free will doesn’t exist” is, quoting The Thick of It, a position of one “disconnected to the point of autism”. It’s what happens when you get lost in words trying to understand the universe. It’s also a position very convenient for anyone trying to avoid accountability. Unsurprisingly, it is very popular in the West. 🙃🤣
I’m deterministic. So I believe that everything that is going to happen was always going to happen due to the laws of physics/math. Time is only linear from a 4th dimension perspective. Above that the past/present/future all appear as one ‘object’.
From my perspective our decisions are inseparable from our identify. It’s not that I am a being making decisions, it’s that my decisions are a part of my being.
Therefor in my mind there is literally no conflict between my ability to make choices and the fact that the outcomes are already determined.
Cuz they don’t have a choice. duh. /s
