
There is free will: we make choices even if our atoms don’t - r0n0j0y
http://m.nautil.us/issue/72/quandary/yes-determinists-there-is-free-will
======
tpetrina
So typical - there is no clear definition, lots of ambiguous terms...People
just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally
conflate the terms.

It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle.

1\. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case. 2\. Lack of
knowledge is not the same as random. 3\. Me deciding something doesn't happen
because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space
time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that
is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4\. The whole
idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of
human language. We are a process, not a thing.

If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of
course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable
process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.

~~~
jfk13
Your claims are no more convincing than the article.

You're entirely free to hold your beliefs about this, of course (or are you?
perhaps they're predetermined), but don't imagine they're somehow more valid
than the alternatives.

~~~
0_gravitas
They're convincing to me. I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free
will' to a physical process that was always going to happen in that particular
way. A ball doesn't choose to bounce when it is dropped on the ground.

~~~
gerbilly
> I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical
> process

Who says it's a physical process to begin with? That's an assertion, not a
proof.

More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)

~~~
0_gravitas
> More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)

Very cute if unoriginal, someone says that anytime I bring up this argument,
and the answer is very simple, of course I didnt!

A 'decision' is a physical process, as in 'physics' physical, if something is
not physical, then it is magic, and I dont believe (believe being used in the
abstract sense of course) in magic.

~~~
gerbilly
> if something is not physical, then it is magic

Again you are simply asserting it is so. I'll grant you it's a very popular
assertion, but you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.

1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical
matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free
will.

The concept has utility.

2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.

edited: To add point #2

~~~
0_gravitas
> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical
> matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free
> will.

The concept has utility.

You must understand, this is the most horrifying part! People are sentenced to
prisons, torture, and death for "making bad/evil decisions". I'm not saying we
should let murderers be murderers, but what I am saying is we should start
looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if
prison. If we are operating on this whole free-will notion, then that will
never happen.

> 2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.

Define emergent in this case, I dont know of any truly emergent behavior that
violates the rules of what caused it, you could say 'organic life' was an
emergent behavior, but it still obeys physics.

>you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.

I think if we can't get passed an agreement that magic isnt real, that may be
a reasonable time to end the discussion.

~~~
gerbilly
In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had
everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world
completely.

I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than
any other.

(Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word: as
if people disagreeing with you are just children who believe in silly things.)

~~~
0_gravitas
> In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they
> had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world
> completely.

I don't think anyone here believes they have everything figured out.

> I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than
> any other.

I think we're slowly getting better over time, as our collective knowledge
compounds as time goes.

> Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word

You made a claim that a 'choice/decision' is not necessarily a physical
process, I don't know how else I should interpret that.

------
thejohnconway
The strongest argument against free will doesn't have to do with determinism
(and I agree with Christian List that looking at lower levels is a category
error). Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will
is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no
matter what sort of framework you put up around it.

~~~
athroway
That's the case for many abstract notions no one seems to agree on. Art,
culture, nation, justice... No one really agrees on what they're supposed to
be, only on single instances. Doesn't make the more encompassing abstraction
any less real or useful.

~~~
thejohnconway
No, I don't think that's it. Art, justice, etc, have constituent parts. People
disagree, but there's lots of stuff in those boxes. When I turn my minds eye
to free will, there's nothing there.

------
arkades
> If you try to make sense of human behavior, not just in ordinary life but
> also in the sciences, then the ascription of intentionality is
> indispensable. It’s infeasible and not illuminating to explain human
> behavior at the level of astronomically complex neural firing patterns that
> take place in the brain.

“It’s difficult to describe macro behavior as a direct function of micro
behavior, therefore, intentionality doesn’t belong on, nor should be falsified
at, the micro level.”

All of the lines of argument in this article seem pretty weak. My time of
disrespecting modern philosophy has sure come to an abrupt middle.

------
mrkeen
> Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and
> alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at
> the fundamental physical level.

Not sure I understand/agree with that. Can you build non-determinism out of
deterministic pieces?

~~~
js8
> Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?

Yes. Pseudo-random generators are deterministic on lower level, yet they
effectively non-deterministic in the sense that you cannot easily predict next
value.

Or you can just take a system with large number of interacting particles -
even if behavior of each of them is determined, the system as a whole is hard
to predict.

Converse is also possible, you can build effectively deterministic system on
top of a non-deterministic one. We do that with computers, we have digital
computers (deterministic) on top of solid-state physics, which is non-
deterministic due to interactions of electrons and the material.

This is not really a paradox, since at the higher level you only consider
macrostates, so the fact that the microstates, which you consider at the lower
level, are (non-)deterministic doesn't really matter.

~~~
trevyn
Determinism and predictability are distinct concepts, it is epistemically
dangerous to conflate them.

~~~
dlkf
Well put. Compatibilist arguments typically hinge on some bait and switch and
this is a popular one. The author does this exact thing in his weather
example:

> At the level of individual air molecules, there is no such thing as weather.
> Perhaps the system at that very fine-grained level of description would
> indeed behave deterministically according to classical physical laws, but as
> you move to a more macroscopic description, you abstract away from this
> microphysical detail. _That is not driven by ignorance on our part_ , but by
> the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities.

> When you consider the macroscopic weather states, the system is not
> deterministic, but stochastic, or random.

The high level weather pattern is just like the output of the pseudorandom
number generator. It _appears_ stochastic to someone who is only given the
high level description, but it is still deterministic in the actual world.
Given the Laplace's demon description of the system, there is no room for
alternative possibilities.

I think the author is only added the part I have bolded to try and deflect
this. He is saying "we don't _want_ the Laplace's demon description of the
system, we just want the high level precis." Weirder still, he seems to
suggest that getting the Laplace's demon is a realistic possibility, which
obviously it's not.

But the fact is it doesn't matter whether it's possible for a human to get the
Laplace's demon description, or whether you actively pursue it or whatever -
if your accept that it's there, as List seems to, then it fully determines the
higher level phenomena and this idea about higher level indeterminacy is moot.

------
aogaili
Are you going to read this comment or not? this is a choice. If you read it,
will you respond to it? yet another choice.

I can stay the fact that you're reading this far is a free choice you made out
of possible alternative forks of reality. Yet, if I attempt to dig deep on why
you have decided to read thus far, I've to factor in your genetic makeup and
the summation of all the experiences from the moment you were conceived until
this very moment, which is impossible to do, I also have no way to infer the
current state of your mind, your brain state is unaccessible information to
me. So, I just abstract it all by giving YOU agency, a free will. You choose
to read this far by your own freewill as far as I can tell.

Therefore, freewill is a concept that exist at certain plan of abstraction
(along with the concept of I and YOU) but they all dissolve once you try to
peek inside inner-working of the brain's decision making machinery. But since
we human don't have a way to peek inside each other brain in real-time with
ease, we operate at the higher level concepts of YOU, and I assign the agency
and "freewill" to YOU since I've no better explanation of why you have read up
until this point.

------
challenger22
All arguments I have ever seen involving free will, from both sides, are very
weak. It is a branch of philosophy that is particularly self-obsessed, and
particularly unlikely to make any decent forward progress. The people who
write books about free will are self-selected for a tendency to pontificate on
a topic that has no foreseeable resolution.

------
trevyn
> _The jury is out on whether the world is fundamentally deterministic...but
> suppose it is. This does not necessitate that the world is also
> deterministic at some higher level of description._

Ah, so there can exist counterfactual levels of description which are
inconsistent with what may be the fundamental nature of reality. This seems
accurate. (C.f. religion)

> _We can attach probabilities to different scenarios, but it’s not the case
> that the weather state at the present time fully determines the weather
> state in a few days’ time. Multiple different trajectories are entirely
> possible._

In superdeterminism, the state of the universe at the present time _does_
fully determine the weather state in a few days time. Multiple trajectories
are _not_ physically possible, though we are able to probabilistically model
such trajectories based on the incomplete information that we do have access
to.

~~~
nathanlied
This article seems (to me) to be advocating some sort of scientific cognitive
dissonance. Where you can 'believe' different (and contradictory) things about
the nature of systems surrounding you.

I'm not sure I buy it.

~~~
unparagoned
It's not saying the same thing is different, but the fact free will is an
emergent concept that only works on the level of a person. There is no
reasonable definition of free will at the atomic level, it just doesn't exist.
Let's say a picture is beautiful. Well atoms can't be beautiful so hence the
picture can't be beautiful. Beauty is a very high level emergent concept that
only exist at that level. It's completely compatible with determinism but the
fact its ultimately deterministic atoms at play is irrelevant. It's similar
for free will, the cocomcept doesn't reply on determinism and that it's
completely independent from it. It's about a person's actions not the
underlying mechanism of how a person acts.

------
gerbilly
HN should institute a rule than anyone replying to a free will thread should
get 2ⁿ negative points for each post, where n is the depth position in the
thread.

Present company included, naturally.

~~~
0_gravitas
I feel honored

------
soberhoff
Step 1: Define "Free Will".

~~~
turk73
I am at work right now but I can walk the fuck out anytime I feel like it.

~~~
tpetrina
Does determinism prevent you? Why _would_ you want or feel like it? And when
that happens, how do you control the deliberation process itself?

Can you freely choose your deliberations? Why would you choose them exactly
like that?

------
asdfasgasdgasdg
I'm not convinced. At least not by the summary this article puts forward.
Perhaps the world isn't deterministic (although how could we possibly know?).
Even if it isn't, that non-determinism is only visible at the smallest of
scales. Whether an electron is here or there is hardly likely to be caused by
my mental states. So, if we don't have free will, at best we have random will.
That is not free will as most people conceive of it.

To the whole section about human behavior being too complex to explain in
terms of fundamental physics, my answer is: it can't be explained in terms of
fundamental physics _yet_. But, again, given sufficient time, research, and
computational power, it seems highly likely that eventually human behavior
will be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Or at least, we will be
able to simulate a human (or higher animal) brain with sufficient resolution
so as to demonstrate that there are no other inputs to cognition than current
state + laws of physics. I really don't see how our current inability to
explain human behavior physically has any bearing on the question of cognitive
determinism.

------
riskneutral
I think the root of the problem is in trying to use logical proof to reason
about things that are beyond the limits of logical reasoning and our
relatively small human minds. We know from results like the Godel
Incompleteness theorem that even mathematics has very real limits on what is
provable through human reasoning. The logical paradox of free will and
determinism is like the paradoxes used within mathematics to prove its own
limits. It is unfortunate but predictable that we cling to the delusion that
we can resolve the paradox of free will through logical reasoning. There are
some aspects of reality, particularly those dealing with one’s own mind or
self, that cannot be reasoned about. It is also a well known open secret that
those aspects of reality, while beyond the reaches of thinking and logical
explanation, can be directly experienced. The practitioners of various forms
of meditation experience have a great deal to report about such experiential
knowledge.

------
gus_massa
> _You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you
> are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of
> atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the
> individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level
> of description, your decisions can be truly open._

They essentially redefine "free will" as "difficult to predict", instead of
"truly random" or "magical" or something like that.

With this definition of "free will":

Does a cow have free will?

Does a tree have free will?

Does a rolling dice have free will?

------
slfnflctd
I can flip a coin every time I have an opportunity to make certain minor
choices. Some of those choices will turn out to have major effects (my whole
life changed once because the batteries were low on my Walkman and I tuned
into the radio instead of playing a cassette tape like I otherwise would
have). Most will not.

The point is, I can do this, and I have. Other times I have chosen not to
leave as much to chance. For all practical purposes, to me this indicates
sufficient free will for me to comfortable believing I have it.

~~~
doboyy
I agree that believing free-will exists can be advantageous when being
confronted with choices and alternative timelines. Believing that you have no
autonomy can lead to situations where you don't weigh different possibilties
at a given moment in time. In general, it's... deflating?

The problem for me is that there are an innumerable amount of solutions to any
given choice. You have to narrow these down subconsciously. Tracing back all
of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices that were implicitly
ruled out, for me, ends up at birth, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a
choice in being born.

~~~
slfnflctd
> Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices

It likely varies a lot across individuals.

For me personally, when I do this I see a whole lot of small choices made
almost whimsically that led up to very large results. It came down to
aesthetics a lot of the time. My values, relationships and knowledge were all
inconsistent and in constant flux for many years, and when faced with analysis
paralysis, how I forced a decision was often not discernably different from
chance.

As I get older, it appears my choices have more weight, but they paradoxically
also seem more predetermined. Perhaps it's as simple as that we're more
unpredictable in our youth.

------
danieltillett
Since we are discussing if there is free will or not can I get an answer to
who first proposed the solution I describe here [0]. I know I am not the first
person to have raised this argument, but I can't find who did.

0\. [https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-
wi...](https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-will/)

~~~
trevyn
Not believing in free will does not inevitably lead to a nihilistic funk.

Funks are often caused by an abrupt shift in worldview without a corresponding
set of tools for integrating that worldview into the rest of your life.

~~~
unixbeard1337
Calvinists and Sunni Muslims don't believe in free will. Neither one as a
class could be said to be in a nihilistic funk.

------
pron
If some process M behaves according to fixed rules yet no other process can
exist that can determine, with certainty, M's behavior ahead of M, then M is
still "deterministic" in the physics sense of the word, but is it
deterministic enough to claim no free will?

I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is,
could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely
well-defined.

------
wbhart
I don't see how conflating inscrutible with non-deterministic is useful. But
this is the argument the author is making. They seem to argue that it is a
useful thing to do scientifically. Perhaps philosophers would do well to focus
on whether a different person in the same circumstances would be forced to
make the same decision. The answer is clearly no. But not because of a lack of
determinism.

------
jenkstom
This is just another false dichotomy theists like to use to argue their case.
It's like arguing whether humans are inherently good or evil - no, humans
create both of those things. Or whether the universe was created or not. Why
make up stories for something we can never know?

------
bitforger
I wrote a koan about free will not too long ago...

[http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-
will.html](http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html)

------
Phenomenit
As long as the concept of infinity exist it's impossible to say that existence
is deterministic or not. It's rather determinism wrapped in indeterminism and
that wrapped in determinism so on and so forth.

------
Balgair
Does anyone know of a good text that will better help explain the concept of
'free will' and the agruments around it? Kant et al are completely opaque and
nearly unreadable.

------
athroway
Before you go on disparaging the author and philosophy in general like the
proverbial xkcd physicist, take a look at this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism)

