
Ask HN: If all events are random or deterministic is there free will - jwally
I’m going back and forth with my father in law about whether or not free will exists (beats talking about politics) and I stumbled into an idea and was curious if it made sense.<p>I’m supposing that all events are the result of a train of consequences (determinism) or are completely random (quantum stuff). Is this correct?<p>If so wouldn’t this rule out the possibility of “free-will” since your choice will either be completely random and without cause or it’s the result of the history of the universe that put you here now?
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gtirloni
It's an interesting discussion and one that has bothered philosophers for
millennia. I'm afraid you won't have a true answer to your doubts and it's a
matter of what makes sense to each of you.

As usual, Wikipedia does a decent job of surveying the landscape so you can
deep dive into any of the philosophies as you wish:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will)

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danieltillett
There is actually a solution to this problem similar to Pascal's Wager [0].
This is the argument.

1\. If there is no free will and you believe you have free will then it
doesn't matter.

2\. If there is free will and you believe it doesn't exist then you have
wasted your life.

3\. Our knowledge of the existence of free will or not is incomplete.

The end result of these three statements is no matter how unlikely free will
is (all evidence suggests it doesn't exist) you must act as though free will
exists since there is some finite probability that it does and you will waste
your life by believing free will doesn't exist.

Does anyone know who first proposed this solution in the literature?

0\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager)

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sethammons
You are going to have to define free-will.

I think that the same person put into the same situation makes the same
choices. So it is the result of history. There is the chance that neurons fire
semi-randomly, potentially meaning someone might connect a different thought
given the same scenario.

Either way, does it matter? Are those things free will? I believe people can
chose thier actions. They can choose to be better or worse or any of a million
other things. This ability to choose is free will, and is independent of
determinism. Even if it is an illusion (and you are just successive,
deterministic events), it is important that people chose to be who they are.
That is how society can exist.

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glun
Determinism is compatible with a free will. Determinism simply mean that the
future can be accurately predicted from the present. Its only implication on
the subject of free will is that the same person in the same situation always
will make the same choice, i.e. theres nothing inherently random about our
decision making processes.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That kind of depends on your definition of "free will". If the same person in
the same situation will always make the same choice, then they cannot choose
differently. Then they aren't free to choose differently, for at least some
definitions of "free".

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zzo38computer
All of these comments are good points. I have thought of free will too. My
idea was mainly nondeterministic free will, but also a kind of two kind of
free will: "classical" free will which is less free but has more effect, and
"quantum" free will which is more free but less effective. I also thought of a
kind of deterministic free will where free will is somehow encoded in the
initial state; possibly transcendental numbers might be required in order for
this to work. And yet there are still more questions. I have read Wikipedia
and other stuff too.

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andrei_says_
One of the pointers Advaita offers is to start observing your “choices” — what
and when are you “authoring”?

I’ve been doing this for a while and am yet to observe any choice which is not
determined by circumstances, conditioning, beliefs, thoughts, emotions,
desires, bodily needs, or genetic make up. None of these are under my control,
so where’s this “free” will?

I recommend I am That, a book collecting talks with Nisargadatta Maharaj. If
you’re lucky, it’ll blow your mind.

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thedevindevops
This is a deep rabbit hole, for further confusion I proffer:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice)

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lucozade
There is no contradiction between being causal and non-deterministic. QM is
both, for example.

So your argument fails at that point. Not that that helps much in determining
whether or not we have free will, just that this isn't a good argument against
it.

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howscrewedami
Why do you care about free will? If you are a healthy human being, you are
capable of making decisions based on the knowledge you have and your ability
to think. Why does free will matter in this case? Or am I missing something?

~~~
jwally
It’s a fun topic of conversation that opens up other cans of worms involving
religion, justice, heroism, etc.

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patmcc
What do you mean by free will?

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AnimalMuppet
TL;DR: Check your presuppositions.

> I’m supposing that all events are the result of a train of consequences
> (determinism) or are completely random (quantum stuff). Is this correct?

In "He Is There And He Is Not Silent", Francis Schaeffer points out that, if
everything had an impersonal beginning, then free will is impossible. A bunch
of other stuff is impossible, too: love, morals, meaning, real beauty.
Everything we think of as making us human is dead. All we are is deterministic
machines made out of atoms, with quantum uncertainty injecting some noise at
the lower layers. We're peers to robots. This is the consequence of your
supposition in your second paragraph.

But, Schaeffer points out, there is another possible starting point - that
everything we see had a _personal_ beginning, that is, God. In that case, our
aspiriations to being real persons rather than just machines are in line with
what has always been - true personality. And if that is so, then your second
paragraph is an incorrect supposition.

Most everyone has a materialistic starting point as such a deeply-buried
presupposition that they never question it. But the logical consequences
destroy our humanity.

It's kind of like this: Have you ever put a T-shirt on backward? It looks like
it should work, and it covers everything that it should cover, but it just
doesn't fit. And you try to wiggle it around so that it fits better, but no
matter how you wiggle, it never fits right. In the same way, the materialist
presupposition looks like it explains everything. But who it says we humans
are doesn't fit us. It's untrue to our experience of living as human beings.

I assert that this isn't just a cruel joke played on us by an unfeeling
universe. I assert that this is evidence that the materialist presupposition
is in fact incorrect. It doesn't explain who we are as human beings. It
doesn't explain how we can have real personality.

