Do we truly have freewill? Deterministic approach.
What does it mean to have freewill?
Having freewill means that you choose that path you go down in life, you make hundreds of choices a day and each choice has a different outcome, the act of choosing to go in one direction rather than another is practicing freewill. You make a choice which leads to another choice and so on and at each crossroad it is down to you to make a choice.
Having free will means that you are in charge of your own life, you are able to control what you do and who you are. If you are walking down the street and someone is about to walk past you, you choose to walk past them or to stop and ask them a question; and the fact you can do this surely proves the fact that humans have freewill, does it not?
Consciousness
Are we conscious beings? And do you need to be conscious to have freewill.
To be conscious is to be aware of your surroundings along with being aware that you can and will have impact on your surroundings.
"The awake person is not at odds with the world. He is a part of it, but not attached to the outcome. Instead of being an automatic response mechanism, responding to the world based on unconscious rules, beliefs, fears, and limitations, he is able to consciously evaluate each situation, in the moment, and instantly and instinctively know exactly what to do and how to respond in order to gain the most resourceful outcome, both for himself and for others".
From this you may agree that humans are conscious as we are aware of who and what we are, however it isn't really that simple as thinking you are conscious without actually being conscious is completely possible.
For example a person could build a robot and program out every action the robot will ever do, and include code that makes the robot return home if moved of course, then the programmer could add code so the robot thinks it is making choices and believes it is aware of these choices. The robot would then think it is conscious along with thinking it has freewill, when in reality it has neither and is just doing exactly what it was programmed to do, and it would be hard to prove any different if the case is the same for humans.
In the case of humans we are essentially biological machines and we contain code the same as a computer just in the form of our DNA so we could very possibly be the same as the robot that thinks it has freewill and consciousness.
Deterministic approach.
The idea of determinism is the idea that every outcome there ever has been and ever will be is already laid out. If you look at life as a whole from a completely mathematical and scientific point of view you are able to work out every outcome in every situation no matter the scale or where this event is happening.
Of course at this point in time people don't have the technology and understanding of the universe to a high enough degree to actually work things like this out. However it is saying that if you were able to, through a lot of maths, work out how one atom interacts with another you can follow that chain of reactions infinitely and work out the outcome of anything.
For example; you would say if I walk up to a random person in the street and say "I have a problem with you, fight me, right now", you wouldn't know exactly how they would react. You would assume they would either be rather shocked or except the challenge and fight me. However of you look at every event in that person's life along with their specific personality traits you would be able to predict, quite accurately, the outcome of how they would react.
To an even further extent if you could look even further back into everything that has ever happened leading up to this person in the streets existence, atom by atom, you would be able to say exactly how they would react because one atom will always react with another atom in the way you expect, if you know what type atoms you are dealing with. So in this scenario you know every atom involved in this exchange and from this how it will react with its surrounding atoms.
Also if you are to rewind this situation so I approach said person in the street in the exact same way the outcome will always be the same because we know how every atom will react with each other, you can run the scenario and infinite number of time and the outcome will always be the same.
So if you look at things from this perspective it means that we really don't have any freewill because every reaction going on around us can be calculated and from this you can say there is only one outcome to every situation. You can work out that outcome and all future outcomes by simply following the chain of reactions.
One atom moves which makes the one next to it move and the one next to that and if you see how one atom interacts with another and eventually work out how every atom will react with the next you can work out any outcome.
How determinism fits with freewill and consciousness
This would mean that people don't have freewill at all as everything in the future is really just waiting to happen, for example; If I said right now I am going to stop writing this and I am going to go and run until I can no longer run to prove that you can have random actions that you choose. When in actuality that action is not random at all but rather was always going to happen and you could have worked out it was going to happen by following the chain of events.
So from a deterministic approach of looking at the world people think they have freewill and will likely continue to, however we really don't as every outcome is essentially already determined.
The deterministic approach also raises a few questions about consciousness. You can be aware that you are conscious and that you are alive on this planet and that everything around you is real, however you are also aware that you don't have freewill and your path is laid out.
Though that doesn't have to take away from life and make it so you don't need to try "because what will be will be". It just means that if you "choose" to give up at the point you do, you were always going to and if you "choose" to start trying to improve yourself you always were going to at that point.
I definitely think that it is a very strange idea to think that as humans we don't have freewill we just think we do, it also means we might be conscious but at the same time we might not actually be. Although that is very hard to actual say because through the deterministic approach actually being conscious and just thinking you are doesn't really make a huge difference to how things work.
TLDR:
So to summarize in as short away possible the deterministic approach looks at the outcomes of every event and says that what happened was always going to happen and in the way it did, because one atom moving will always make another move and from watching how one makes another move you can work out how the other will move and so on. Also as we know how different chemicals react and that they always will react in the same way.
So you can accurately predict every decision a person will make because there actions are just another part of a long chain of actions and reactions, which in-turn means that you don't really have freewill because every action you make you were always going to make as you are made of atoms at the end of the day. However you may or may not actually be a conscious being it doesn't matter that much
Comment and all that, I did my best to explain the idea, if I am wrong about anything please let me know and I hope I explained things well enough :)
Thank you for your post. I personally believe that there is no free will, there seems to be an illusion of "free will". The entity or whatever it is, which tells me there is an "I" is probably an illusion . . . or nowadays one could say it is fake news. :-)
I find it very hard to say if we as humans truly do have free will because even if you ignore the deterministic approach or disprove it there is still a lot more to discuss.
We can say that we are all a product of our environment to an extent and we are all influenced by what we see and hear from people around us, so in that sense we don't completely have free will.
We are not rational beings, but rationalizing beings.
Maybe we know we live in a deterministic world, but rationalize that away with the concept of free will because our fragile little animal brains are too terrified of the thought of not having control.
Definitely a good point of view. It is a very scary thought to actually have no control over your own life and what we think are our own decisions.
I don't know. I find the deterministic view somewhat comforting. I mean, it makes no difference to my life experience really. A good cup of coffee in the morning is still a good cup of coffee, determined or not. And the bad things that happen, well, it was going to happen no matter what. So even though the concept of personal responsibility has been pre-determined within societies-- psst, psst, our little secret-- there was nothing I could do about it.
I completely agree that in reality whether it is true or not it doesn't actually make a difference to life and how you enjoy it. Though it is an interesting idea to look at as it does raise a lot of questions in more areas than just philosophy and science.
Free will is built into the cosmos by virtue of quantum uncertainty. Although you reference determinism on the level of atoms, on the quantum level there cannot be any such determinism because quantum effects are probabilistic.
In the universe there are really only two properties: energy and charge. Matter does not really exist. It only appears to exist from our perspective. But at the quantum level, matter and mass are artifacts created by energy that has acquired charge, and from this the illusion of matter is created.
But matter is all based on statistics -- when you look at an electron, for example, you find that there is no "there" to the electron -- rather, there is only a probability of where you will find the greatest effect of the idea of an electron.
That statistical uncertainty about where exactly the electron is, and therefore what its interactions will be with other particles, which we call probability, introduces unpredictability into the universe, and the outcome for us at this level of existence is free will.
Can we prove though that quantum indeterminacy has any significant effect for linear, macro-scale events?
Can't predict radioactive decay, which is a feature of quantum indeterminacy ;-)
And, if you talk to computer chip manufacturers, they will tell you that quantum tunneling, where indeterminacy will occasionally cause electrons to pop into existence outside of a wire, limits how small we can make computer chips.
Sorry for the late reply. This is indeed interesting, but not enough to defy the linearity of time (past-present-future) which is precisely what limits our free will. Although quantum effects are probabilistic, on the macroscale we always end up with a definite result.
For example, although it's impossible to predict the decay of individual atoms, an element will decay at some point and you can make predictions for larger numbers of atoms together. Combine this fact with the countless interactions that happen every day on all levels, that lead to a certain result at a specific point in time, which in turn is combined with countless other results and lead to yet another one. That result couldn't have happened any other way because everything which lead up to that point has already happened. The world seems so chaotic, but it only seems so because the interactions are just to many for us to predict any result. So it's seemingly random. But if, say, we had a supercomputer that could somehow note all the chains of variants... we could predict the outcome.
All I'm trying to say is that the randomness that exists on the quantum level cannot significantly affect linear interactions. An electron might not be here and be there instead, a particle might end up doing something unexpected; but a glass, which is a whole bunch of particles, will still break when falling from a table. This is also about statistics. The possibilities of all particles "agreeing" to be modified in such a state each that the glass un-breaks are so low they are practically zero.
Additionally, even if there was some level of randomness, that still does not mean it's free will. Our decisions would still be based on outside factors beyond our control. The definition of "free" requires something that exists on a separate space-time frame, not bound to anything, which is not possible. Such belief does not differ from a religious one.
A fellow steemian wrote another
article on the subject. He agrees that free will is an illusion, let me know what you think.
I agree with all of what you say about macro versus micro. It's the whole "river" analogy -- you can splash about all you want and create some local ripples, but the steady flow of the river very quickly erases any record of your presence.
Sort of.
The reality is that the ripples we create are part of a dynamic system, but that dynamic system follows strict rules. In theory, if you had a powerful enough computer and the ability to track precisely each and every molecule, including precise information on speed and location of each and every molecule, you could reverse engineer every single ripple that ever happened in that river in the past as well as the future, because the system is roughly the equivalent of a hologram in its ability to store a record of every interaction that ever happened with it.
Sort of.
Because, you notice, I said "precise information on speed and location", and that's where the whole quantum indeterminate issue starts to affect the whole system. Imagine one molecule being in a slightly different place -- won't have macro effects today, but that will start a ripple, a chain of events that will get steadily larger, and if you looked at the outcome 5 years from now, the river might actually be running differently than it would have had that molecule not been in a slightly different place. It's the whole butterfly effect thing. You can't actually predict its exact state 5 years from now because those small indeterminacies start to have larger and larger effects the longer the system runs. It's like a rifle whose position you change by a fraction of a millimeter -- the location of the bullet 1 inch from the gun will not be detectably different, but you go out 2 miles and suddenly that bullet is 2 feet off from where it otherwise would have been.
I sense that you and the other article you reference are equating free will with the ability to do whatever we want without those choices being affected in any way by the system, but that is only one definition of free will. Another definition would be that there is nothing outside of the system that forces the system to stay in any particular configuration -- and that, I believe, we do have.
Have you ever read anything about the effect of intention on random number generators, or the effect of "healers" of many different belief systems on medical outcomes?
He can't predict shit. Many say we are living in a quantum timeline with all possibilities playing out simultaneously.
Very interesting point of view, I haven't heard that before. I will definitely have a look into what you are saying!
It can certainly be this way. I guess there is no way of finding out, but my guess is that we have free will up to a certain point. I believe that we die when we are supposed to and we meet the people we are supposed to, but i strongly believe that control is an illusion.
The more we hold tight, the more we loose the grip.
Give up the need to control and go with the flow.
I completely agree, not being in control does not have to be a bad thing at all and can often help you realize a lot about yourself.
Why on earth do you give up so easily?? LOL These secrets are known to men.
You can try to control the outcomes of what is happening to you all you want, it's not a matter of giving up. It's a matter of realizing that they way you react to what is happening to you is defines how your future Will be!
Well, you're wrong. Not even close to right lol
It's not about who is wrong and who is right, it's about accepting that what might be right for you is not right for me! But i guess I'm wrong about that to?
Yep, this is the current sciencism rhetoric.
Right alongside the big bang theories.
But, in this analysis you are missing something big, HUGE.
Sciencism like to divide the world into the known and the unknown.
However, the world is divided into the knowable and the unknowable.
The unknowable is where chaos comes from.
So that idea of knowing exactly how atoms will interact is bunk. We only know how they will interact 99% of the time, while we are watching. We have very little clue of how they interact if we are not watching them. Yes, science gets weird at this point.
There is a quantum science experiment where if the experiment is watched it usually comes up with 1 of 4 outcomes. But, if they take special precautions to not watch it, it has 32 possible outcomes.
Further, being conscious is not being able to think, it is being able to think about your thinking. Thus, being conscious allows you to change your programming. To not react in the same way to the same stimulation.
And the thing that is missing the most in this argument is that the mind is not the same as the brain. Yes, we may be able to make a brain, or a robot that is equal in computing to a human brain, but that doesn't create consciousness. That comes from outside the brain. That comes from the place where dreams come from.
That comes from a place that sciencism will never go.
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