My Diogenes answer would be to walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.” That’s tongue and cheek sure, but the point I feel stands.
Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.
I disagree. But we’re not going to solve free will in HN comments. Personally I don’t think “free will” means anything or makes sense any more than “god” makes sense. It’s just a bundle of feelings that means something different to everyone.
> We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.
Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up.
If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know if you'll do it again. It doesn't matter if there is free will or not. Society has decided to put annoying elements in a huge bastille and call it a day.
I'm going to nominally disagree with you, my genes are in total control and I must.
Free will is a matter of definition, and certain definitions, no matter how hard we try, can't be formulated as easily as one does in, say, Euclidean geometry.
So you can come up with a definition of the free will you don't have, let's call it "absolute determinism", and it has all sort of interesting criminal applications, beyond slapping people on the face (yes, who does that anyway?).
For example, you could use your[^1] absolute determinism to build a very advanced AI that relies on a pseudo-random generator with a fixed seed. Fallibility is the result of using stochastic search methods, and your AI shows it. In that respect and many others, your AI acts exactly as a human would because you programmed it that way. Yet, you have the strongest argument possible to affirm that the AI you created has no free-will. One day, the AI leaves a bunch of children mentally dysfunctional[^2]. But it has no free-will, all it is emanates from you. So you must be charged for the AI's crime.
Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature. The prosecutor brings a priest to say that God gave you free will. The judge says that precedent demands you be thrown from a high mountain, but it's feeling like a good day for a crucifixion. Of course, the trial is a shamble, a racket run by Sapiens' genes to ensure that they are passed down. And from that point of view, you committed the ultimate sin.
The way out? Submit to your genes, do what they tell you to. Believe in free-will.
That is not true. Your gene expression is influenced by experiences, and not just yours, but your grand-grand parents' experiences, too. See: epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
> Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature.
Some say that lack of free will, i.e. determinism undermines moral responsibility, which in turns means that it conflicts with punishment and so forth. I believe that it ultimately does not matter; you can punish for the behavior alone.
If you believe in determinism, then it is likely you also believe in physicalist monism (“there is only the matter and consciousness arises/derives fully from it or is an illusion”).
Normally there is not much I can say to change your mind on that, but just note—there are other views, like idealistic monism, which unlock other possibilities wrt. free will, and which cannot be disproven or proven compared to physicalist monism (which cannot be proven or disproven either).
I'll just echo this, in that monistic idealism (especially, as a personal preference, in the declination of analytical idealism) is a worldview able to supersede the incongruous, untenable and for the most part, epistemically moot physicalism/materialism, which is sadly still considered the default mainstream worldview.
As parent said, many open questions and interpretations become relatively trivial under idealism, while preserving 100% of our scientific understanding and method.
The problem with any form of physicalism is that if consciousness arises from physical principles, then the vast majority of the universe consists of unobserved physical interactions. Does the universe really exist at that point? If it doesn't, how come I am here to experience it? If it does, it would be more likely that I am a disembodied boltzman brain than a human that evolved on earth, since there is no reason for the unobserved portion of the universe to not be infinitely large. You simply wouldn't know it.
That is true, whether or not you believe in free will at a specific point in time is a result of your previous history (internal and external influences).
Who's this "society" and how has it managed to have free will?
If someone can't "decide" to slap their neighbor in the face and is determined to do that, why can't the same reasoning be applied to society? Society didn't freely choose to lock someone up, it was determined to do so.
> walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.”
Of course they could. Anger is a way for the body to react without choosing as a defense mechanism against the next slap. Either your biology would recognise the anger and step back, or the other person would punch you back, making you afraid to repeat what you did.
I’m not siding with or against free will, I just don’t think your example works to prove the point.
There's free will in the sense that the system is so chaotic and complex that it's impossible to predict for us now at current technology levels, maybe never possible to predict, but I don't see anything in science that would allow free will to be a thing. We're complex automata in the end.
I think this is a failure in imagination not a failure in science.
Still, all these free will deniers are basing their worldview on the (radical) assumption that.
1. Everything has a cause
2. Everything is explainable
3. physical matter is all there is
4. Science can describe literally everything about the universe
4a. Corollary - things that aren’t describable by science don’t exist
All of those claims are unfalsifiable at best and demonstrably false at worst (depending on how hard you squint). Science is effective for repeatable experiments, but that’s not a guarantee that there aren’t events that are one-and-done.
I agree, but I have to admit that once we have to invoke mysterious one-off miracles and unknowable states of existence to explain something so radically basic like “free will” we have IMO gone off track.
This feels like a God of the gaps type argument and those give off a particular smell.
Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.