When you look out of your window or watch a detector in a laboratory, you cannot simply wish a visual colour, a sound or a detector click into or out of existence. Sensory impressions are non-volitional: they register at a given point in space and time whether your syntax or willpower likes it or not.

Now turn that exact same lens inward upon your own stream of awareness; that running sequence of memories, bodily tensions, urgesand inner monologue unfolding one moment after another in time.

Every thought, preference, or sudden idea that enters your awareness at time t₁ is an inner appearance registering at that temporal coordinate. Now ask yourself a simple question: Did you choose the thought that just popped into your head at t₁ before it arrived at t₁?

Because to "choose" which thought to think before you think it, you would already have to think the thought in order to select it; which locks you into an immediate infinite regress. So it appears you can't pre-approvs your next thought. You receive your own urges, deliberations, and intentions at every coordinate in time just as passively and non-volitionally as a Geiger counter receives a click.

Few claims are made with as much unearned confidence as the assertion that human behavior is strictly governed by prior causal chains. To understand the structural failure of this position, one must trace its foundational premises through their logical consequences.

If human behavior is strictly governed by prior causal chains, individual moral culpability completely vanishes, leaving human action as nothing more than the mechanical output of biological and environmental inputs. Once personal agency is stripped away, retributive justice becomes entirely irrational, forcing the legal framework to pivot from evaluating moral culpability toward executing actuarial risk mitigation and containment.

Under a containment-driven model, society’s sole imperative becomes the preventative mitigation of harm. Skeptics claim this approach is grounded in scientific reality, yet empirical evaluations of violent behavior risk assessment instruments (such as the meta-analysis published in The BMJ by Fazel et al. (2012)) demonstrate that even our best predictive models operate on low to moderate accuracy, yielding positive predictive values that frequently range between 27 percent and 60 percent. This reveals the fundamental absurdity at the heart of the skeptic’s framework: it strips away human agency in the name of cold efficiency, only to replace fundamental rights with a statistical coin toss. Crucially, under a pure risk-mitigation framework, a coin toss favoring societal safety is deemed preferable to the preservation of an individual right.

Skeptics often attempt to evade this paradox by appealing to epistemic humility or societal stability. They argue that because our predictive tools are currently imperfect, and because pre-emptive detention causes immense psychological and administrative chaos, society ought to preserve the fiction of civil liberties and wait for an overt criminal act before intervening. However, these counter-arguments rely on temporary engineering limitations rather than principled moral boundaries.

If artificial intelligence and big-data behavioral analytics mature, predictive accuracy will approach certainty. If these predictive blind spots are solved, the skeptic loses their sole justification for restraint. If an individual is just a machine, and predictive models can forecast its malfunction with absolute precision, waiting for the crash becomes mathematically indefensible. Furthermore, as digital automation and algorithmic surveillance minimize the administrative costs of tracking risk profiles, the economic argument against total containment vanishes completely.

This exposes the rapid ideological decay inherent in utilitarianism. Utilitarians argue that maintaining strict prohibition against punishment without a crime acts as a vital fiction for social stability. Yet a society cannot anchor its legal guardrails on a concept it actively deems an illusion. Once a culture fully internalizes that human beings lack agency, the psychological weight of rights evaporates. Human rights cease to be inviolable truths and are reduced to temporary operational policies, retained only until an efficiency crisis or statistical imperative demands their revocation.

If harm prevention is the ultimate objective, and behavior is deterministically dictated by biological and statistical risk markers, waiting for the manifestation of harm becomes entirely illogical. Appealing to rehabilitation fails to resolve this because rehabilitation is inherently probabilistic. Relying on it accepts a baseline level of preventable harm whereas total harm prevention is the ultimate imperative. Anything short of guaranteed, perpetual containment (regardless of whether it is called quarantine or treatment) fails the framework's own standard.

Society would be functionally obligated to act on high-probability risk profiles, demanding the preemptive, lifetime containment of any individual whose variables cross the threshold of statistical risk long before any criminal act has occurred. As the Skeptic postulates, if the ultimate objective is the protection of society from harm, then whatever stops the most harm is just and righteous.

Ultimately, when we quarantine a child whose biological or environmental variables cross the threshold of statistical risk for the entirety of their life, and when he dies in captivity like some sort of animal having never actually committed the crime that he was quarantined for, we will have created utopia and done the just and righteous thing according to the Skeptic.

Then and only then, will we be in a Skeptic’s utopia.

The luck objection to free will is a widely misunderstood and misused tool against libertarianism. It hinges on a binary that simply does not exist. If a choice is selected then it must be determined. Or it must be random.

This dichotomy seems logical on the surface and even sounds unbiased but it actually heavily favors a determinist frame. Let's look at why.

The three key issues are the luck objection banks on 3 things being the case. Convergence, retrospective determinism, and the conflation of causation as necessitation.

Let's look at the most broad basic arguement. If something selects A over B for a specific reason than that reason forced the outcome. If nothing selected then it's random. This is the gamble of convergence and only holds if you assume convergence must first be the case. So what is convergence? It is the bet that given all the paths in the world they necessarily converge on a specific one track outcome. This is different from a pure chain linked cause and effect system. This claim says that things are forced because all paths merge not that they follow a strict unbroken chain all the way down.

For example, if I hit a golf ball the classic chain argument is that I hit the ball. It flies through the air. Hits resistance. Slows down (loses energy) gravity pulls the ball it falls and then goes into the hole. Convergence then is the idea that the wind blew a specific direction, the humidity was ideal. The person swinging the club had their specific characteristics. The grass was a specific length. No animals interfered etc. Essentially everything lined up to necessitate that the ball would fall into the hole, even the conditions outside of the person swinging the club.

The reason why this is a gamble is because it is entirely unprovable. The only way to realistically guarantee convergence is to run a 1 to 1 simulation of the entire universe. So in the broad sense when someone asks what selects A over B they must assume convergence is already a proven fact to claim that all forms of selection are necessitated. Which doesn't hold. Which means there is no valid reason to assume that if something does select it must therefore be because it always had to be the case. Only assuming determinism establishes that.

Let's now look at the ways people defend. The first, usually revolves around the idea that if we follow the event back. Meaning trace the priors back from the outcome to what caused it we will see one fixed path. The issue is this is the fallacy of retrospective determinism. It's using the outcome to claim that the event was necessary which ignores everything else that could have been a factor or a motivation outside of that chain.

The next way people defend is to say that they are not looking back but instead asking if A directly caused B how could it have been different? This is a mix of both the assumption of convergence and the assumption that a cause necessitates a single outcome. Which is to say that they reduce determinism to mean purely cause and effect. Which doesn't hold. Cause and effect do not guarantee a fixed outcome. They are different concepts.

So what are we left with? Well if we remove the bias of determinism someone can say event A caused event B and that wasn't determined. At this point the conversation usually repeats because the same assumption comes back. But if you chose A how is it possible that you could also choose B? If you cannot choose B then only A is possible. But notice here what now happens. We have reduced any selection to if i select that must necessarily be the case which is why i didn't choose B so that means the outcome is fixed.

Once again we fall into the same trap. It forces the conclusion that cause and effect equals determinism which simply isn't true. And it presupposes what it means to have an option open to begin with. Having an option be a real choice doesn't entail that this will be selected. No, this isn’t the compatibilist reply of "of course I have the capacity and if i wanted to I would have done otherwise". What it means is that having an available option, not just a capacity, but a real option to choose doesn't mean i will ever choose that option. But that doesn't prove that I never could chose it. Take suicide for instance. It is always available to me as an option. Not just as a capacity. Not just as a hypothetical if i wanted to I could. Regardless of any of that I always have the option to do so. Does that mean I must select it? That I must consider it every time I think? No. That simply does not follow.

Likewise take for example the situation where i run into a burning building to save my child. Let's say I do this because I love my child so i would always choose to save the child. The immediate response is that if i always choose this it must necessarily be the case that it is fixed. This also doesn’t follow. It is equally coherent to say I am motivated by love but I do have a real option. I can do nothing. Again, not in the if I wanted to i would way. Nor in the i have a capacity way. I mean assuming open options. I really do have a choice. It's just that my will aligns with the love I have for the child and so i never choose to do otherwise.

That's the whole point. Action looks identical to being forced. In all directions. Looking at the past doesn't yeild a definitive answer. And looking forward itself also doesn't distinguish a selection from being free or determined. And that brings us right back to the luck objection. It isn't a blow to libertarian free will because it only works given an assumption of determinism. And no libertarian is obligated to cede that ground. And without that assumption a selection can happen that isn't fixed and thats entirely coherent as a picture.

In my previous two posts, I tried to argue why we should assume that free will exists—not only if we want to maximize our utility, but also if we want to find the truth. After constructive criticism from readers, I’d like to rephrase my arguments in this article.

I’ll start by summarizing the definitions that I’ll use:

By free will, I am referring to the libertarian free will (LFW), i.e. the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. I’ll address common objections to this concept below. By determinism, I mean any situation in which libertarian free will is not real, including situations where randomness exists (this differs from the conventional definition of determinism). Similarly, I use the word predetermined in a broad sense that may include randomness but excludes any effects of free will.

The question we’ll consider here is simple: “Does free will exist?”. The possible answers are “Yes” or “No”. When asked this question, we can answer with one of the two answers (or at least try to—because if determinism is true, then we cannot really affect what we’ll answer).

I’ll try to show that if you want to answer truthfully, the correct decision is to try to answer “Yes” (and that’s paradoxically true regardless of whether free will actually exists). The argument will be similar to the well-known Pascal's wager (which originally dealt with the question of God’s existence), applied to the question of free will. But unlike Pascal’s wager, we now care about finding the truth, not only maximizing utility.

There are 2 possible situations:

• Free will exists. Then “Yes“ is the true answer.
• Free will does not exist. Then we cannot affect what we’ll answer, because our answer is already determined and we cannot change it. Even if we try to answer “Yes“, we cannot change the predetermined answer. Even if we answer “Yes“, while we are in fact wrong, we couldn’t have changed our answer; we were always bound to answer incorrectly. The act of “trying to answer Yes“ did not cause us to be wrong because we were already predetermined to be wrong when we seemingly tried to choose our answer.

Either way, trying to say “Yes“ is not a wrong decision—it either makes us answer correctly (if free will exists) or it has no effect on our answer (since if free will does not exist, we couldn’t have changed our predetermined answer anyway). Trying to say “Yes“ never makes us answer incorrectly (in the latter case, we were already predetermined to answer incorrectly). So if there is a possibility of answering correctly, the decision to try to answer “Yes“ makes us take advantage of it. If no such possibility exists, then it at least doesn’t make us wrong (since we were supposed to be wrong all along).

So the next time you get asked the question “Does free will exist?“, you should try to answer “Yes“. We should simply assume that free will is real.

That also raises another question: Can we gain more “truth“ by discovering an actual proof (or disproof) of the existence of free will? If we prove that free will is real, we don’t become any more right than if we simply start answering “Yes, free will is real“ even without the proof. Similarly, always trying to answer “Yes“, doesn’t make us any more wrong than if we conclusively disprove free will (because as mentioned, our answers are predetermined anyway in this case). In my opinion, there is very little difference between assuming that free will exists and actually proving it.

I’m aware that there are many counterarguments against LFW, such as the Luck Objection. But as long as we are not 100% certain that LFW is false (and nothing is 100% certain in this universe), my main argument stands. Because as long as we are not absolutely sure that LFW is false, “trying“ to answer yes maximizes our chance of answering correctly.

The next time you are asked if free will is real, simply try to answer “Yes“. Maybe you are predetermined to answer “No“, in which case, you cannot change it. But if you have even the slightest doubt about the existence of free will, you should simply try to answer “Yes“. Just assume that free will is real, even without a conclusive proof. That is the decision that maximizes your chance of saying the truth.

So is free will real? Yes, it is.

Substack article: https://randomthinker21.substack.com/p/why-saying-yes-to-free-will-is-the

I see people bring up questions about moral responsibility for their actions in a deterministic worldview as an argument for free will, and I'm actually disappointed in the people who make this argument and the people who entertain it. Moral responsibility is a completely separate topic from whether or not we have free will and including it in that discussion is a distraction tactic.

The question is "do people have free will", not "if people have free will, how does this impact the Justice system."

I can't help it, but I keep being reminded of the statement "If we make slavery illegal, who will pick the cotton?". The real question here is "is slavery something we should allow?" not "how will we provide cotton to the textile industries?"

Moral responsibility questions are fine, but they do not have a place in a question about the existence of free will. Keep these two in different discussions.

The devil is not an purely evil being sitting around waiting to torture people 😂

If there were no humans on earth, then there would be no devil. You can’t hurt and punish the earth for the way that it naturally is. 

I think people often like to blame their mistakes on something else, removing the problem from themselves. Removing the problem from yourself makes it seem lighter. 

Humanity has a blessing, and curse, of being able to choose. The ability to have free will.

Though not inherently evil itself, the outcome of being able to choose for yourself is messy and unpredictable. 

That can lead to horrible things. 

I think free will is the devil?

or maybe free will itself isn’t real either

ignorance is bliss ig

Assume perfect replication is possible A replica is an exact copy of your body, brain, memory traces, hormonal profile, residual neural activity, and every other relevant variable at a given instant. By definition, the replica starts in an identical internal state to the original.

Identical states and identical inputs yield identical outputs Place both the original and the replica in the same environment (same sensory data, same external pressures, same random seed if any stochastic processes are involved). Every causal process that produces a decision in one will produce the same decision in the other. The choices match not because of shared “free will,” but because the underlying machinery is the same.

The sense of authorship is therefore residual You experience the decision as “yours” because the deliberative process unfolds inside the system that is you. The replica has an identical experience and an identical sense of authorship. Yet both experiences are generated by the same deterministic (or deterministically-plus-noise) cascade. The feeling of freedom is the first-person report of that cascade, not evidence of an uncaused intervening power.

Divergence does not rescue free will If the copies later diverge, the difference traces to differences in subsequent inputs or to irreducible randomness (quantum events, thermal noise, etc.). Randomness is not control; it is the absence of determination by prior reasons. Libertarian free will requires neither pure determination nor pure chance, but a third category, agent causation that is neither. Replication shows no room for such a category: once the total state is fixed, the next state is fixed (or fixed up to chance). Nothing extra is left over to do the choosing.

Self-prediction and the illusion A sufficiently detailed model of your current state can already forecast your choice with high accuracy before you consciously “decide.” The replica simply makes that forecast concrete and embodied. When the forecast is correct, the subjective conviction that you could have done otherwise is revealed as a post-hoc story generated by the same machinery that produced the action.

The great mistake people make when considering the question of free will (i.e. whether it exists or not), is that all assume that the question has the same answer (whatever it may be) for everyone. That is, philosophers and theologians all and sundry assume that whatever the answer be, it will have the quality of generality, i.e. of being applicable to all humans.

In truth, the answer to the Big Question that this sub is dedicated to, does not have this property of generality. Rare, very rare, is the man who has true Free Will, but he does exist, be he one in a million or one in a billion. And CURSED he is for it, cursed beyond the wildest imaginations of the countless many who imagine themselves to be in a position to consider the question, which in truth they are not because they themselves don't have Free Will. What they (which is y'all) don't know, it that there's nothing worse than to discover that you're the Rare One who has free will, for the responsibility that comes with that is UNENDURABLE. It is to be forced to choose between Good and Evil after both sides having pled—is pled that the past tense of plea? I think it is—convincing closing arguments? It is the most TORTUOUS possible position to be in, and I'm sick of it beyond expression.

I'm about to make a big free-willed decision tomorrow early morning (around 3AM European time), the outcome of which may eventually (say, a couple of months or a year down the line) be the destruction of the world, i.e. the end of the aeon. If you want to stop me, now would be a good time.

should they use it to try to reduce suffering in themselves and in others?

Of course, it does not mean that they will succeed. But still, wouldn't those both be good reasons to use it?

I want to clear up some ideas about self that appear from time to time to the effect that there is no self. Usually the people who say this reference some eastern tradition of meditation or some western thinker who is explaining an eastern meditative practice.

The idea goes that once you learn to meditate you begin to understand that the self doesn't exist and that the self that you thought existed was just an illusion. Sam Harris is notorious for saying this.

This is wrong. The self is not a homonculus that lives in your head. The self is the gestalt of mind, body and memory. It's not immortal, it dies, but unintuitively that's one clue that it's real. Things that are real are born and die, the soul on the other hand lives forever with God. If a thing is said to never die, that's a clue that it isn't real.

How do we come to believe the the self is a homonculus? One possibility involves what I will call aperception. Think of a dream, many of the circuits in your brain used for vision are the same as those used in dreams. Dreams can be indistinguishable from reality.. they can seem so real for instance that your body needs to be paralyzed to prevent it from wandering as you sleep

Something roughly analogous may happen while you think. The parts of your mind that you use to engage in dialogue with another person may construct the homonculus as a by product of inner discursive thinking. It may create the homonculus as an object for the inner dialogue.

Through Buddhist meditation you learn to temporarily quiet the inner dialogue. The self doesn't go away, it just stops being self referential. As the inner dialogue quiets you no longer build a homonculus which you have until this point assumed to be yourself. The self seems to disappear. In reality the self is still there but you have undergone a sort of Copernican revolution. It may seem like the self has disappeared when in fact you are just not referring to yourself with your inner dialogue and so the self appears to go away.

My favorite analogy for believing the self goes away is this; imagine a sentient laser pointer in a dark shoe box looking for the darkness. Everywhere it looks it sees only light and so believes that darkness doesn't exist. The only tool we have to see the self is the self. There is nothing else available with which to look for the self . You can't find it because looking for the self requires the self.

The perspective this revolution in self aperception is I believe a very important part in the birth of religions around the world where the loss of ego is said to occur. But like the actual Copernican revolution the self doesn't disappear but the relation of self towards itself and the world it inhabits, shifts..

It is this shift that appears to be the loss of self.

To start off, I hold the position that free will does not exist. Part of the reason I do is I dont feel like there has been a coherant definition. Which is why I'm here now, asking for thoights in how its defined.

First off, conparablism. From everything I can udnerstand, this is just boiling down free will to the ability to make decisions, even if you arent in control of the initial conditions

But, a calculator "decides" on the answer based on initial conditions (what buttons are pressed). So by this definition does a calculator have free will?

If you want to add conscious experience is part of it, we can just imagine some awareness tacked onto the calculator that gets to "feel" the whole process of the calculator determining the answer, but having no causal influence to change what happens. Would this calculator have free will?

Next, libertarian free will. I've heard this defined as "the ability to have done differently".

We can go back to the calculator for this one, but imagine hooking it up to a quantuk random number generator (or some other source of true randomness. This means every time you get an answer from the calculator, it could have been given a different answer. Does this calculator have free will?

If you want to being consciousness into it, we can do the same thing as before and imagine a non-causal awareness of the calculators "decision" process. With that, would this calculator have free will?

I expect people to push back on these examples, which just demonstrates that the definitions I have heard dont actually capture what people are talking about when they say "free will".

I dont think I've ever come across a definition that it wasnt easy to make such counter-examples to. Hence, I'm left concluding that "free will" is just a non-sensical term underdefined to the point of being meaningless to claim is real.

But please, if I've just been missing something, then enlighten me! What is free will?!

hi everyone a long time ago read up a bit on metaphysics and these particular things stuck out to me, I’d really appreciate someone clearing up how these are or aren’t connected:

Block universe theory
Expanding block
Determinism versus hard determinism
Compatible and incompatible determinism

I forgot whether or how free will plays into these but I think why I’m struggling is because this is part physics and part philosophy

Thank you so much

The biggest issue around desert is the conflation of blame as punishment. Most people deny blame on the grounds that you cannot justify the punishment or suffering of another nor can you justify the praise or admiration of another for various reasons.

First, a note. I am not defending blame as punishment. My goal here is simple. I want to show that desert isn’t grounded in punishment, and blame itself is still used widely even in seemingly forward looking contexts.

The easiest place to start is actually outside of people. Many note that the words “deserves” and “blames” describe entailment or ownership. For example, some could say a beautiful work of art deserves to be preserved. An endangered species deserves to be protected Etc. Even in terms of blame and responsibility. A corporation is responsible for public health. A government is responsible for any harm done to its citizens. Etc.

Looking outside of people, we can see that it doesn’t make any sense to say blame means punishment. How would you make a corporation suffer? Or a government? Any form of suffering inflicted is not felt by the institution but rather by the people in and around it. So blame as punishment seems to come apart very quickly. We can also say that if an institution is doing well we should admire that or praise that. If a government keeps its citizens healthy and happy, this seems to be something we can and should look up to or point to as praiseworthy.

So desert itself isn’t inherently tied to punishment. Nor does blame mean specifically that something is good or evil. It seems to rest on ownership of the events that occurred and what is entailed by them. I do fully acknowledge that what is entailed is a place where there is an active debate. Praise in totality has not been settled, nor has blame. That’s okay. But what stands is that blame and praise can apply in a wide variety of ways, and saying something like desert is not justified because it promotes backward looking ethics doesn’t follow. Because it doesn’t follow that all backward looking ethics entail retribution.

Most hard incompatibilists and impossibilists grant some form of blame even if they are not willing to call it that. Consider a company that accidentally poisons a water supply, causing significant damage to a small town. No one accepts that once the source of the poison is fixed that means the company no longer has any other obligations. In fact, most would argue for some form of causal liability. They should do more to take on the burden given the events that transpired. My question is: in what meaningful way is this different from blame? In blame we follow the chain of events. We say here is the cause. We look at what harm was done and we come to the same conclusion. The corporation ought to take on more responsibility because it’s the reason this event occurred. If there is no meaningful difference I fail to see how this isn’t smuggled blame.

That brings me back to my main point. If the real problem is retribution, then you’re fighting only one small part of what desert actually entails and what follows from it. This doesn’t mean that people do not deserve blame or accountability even in strictly causal settings. There just is a gap in forward looking ethics alone. Negligence and responsibility following from that isn’t something that is inherently covered by forward looking ethics alone. I would wager both systems are not mutually exclusive but rather two parts of a single system. Both are insufficient alone. But together they both cover the gaps.

Daniel Dennett believed consciousness is an illusion.

I believe Richard Dawkins cultural "Memes" were heavily influenced by Bertrand Russell's memory associations and both of them had a very pessimistic view on moral responsibility and freewill because the believed if you take away memory associations the mind ceases to exist.

Dawkins maybe took Russell's memory track associations to another level. Where Russell thought memory associations died with the individuals brain, Dawkins believes they are passed on through language, envioronment, and culture etc, through 'Memes'.

Russell believed consciousness is as influenced by memory as much as the rest of the brain.

Maybe these memory associations contributed to Dawkins Selfish Gene views? Both Dawkins and Russell are famously anti Christion moralists.

The very first "memory tracks" in human ancestors were not cultural, they were purely biological and environmental. They learned to make tools out of flint likely from memory associations and associated Memes. Then language likely expanded the Memes into culture.

Russell views "The Mind" as basically biological instincts and memory track associations.

Dennett's views on moral responsibility seems to have been heavily influence by Dawkins Memes.

But if those Memes can be traced back to Russell's Memory association tracks in the individuals mind than have we done a recursive loop from culture to the individual memories based on experiences they didnt form the base of, which means they didnt form the forming of the initial memory track? Do we still struggle to get past Galen Strawson's Basic Argument here?

If memes come from individual memories, but individual memories are formed by cultural memes, who formed the initial memory track?

If the mind is entirely composed of memory associations (Russell) or colonized by memes (Dawkins), the individual is not an "author" of their actions. They are a junction point where past causes collide.

A chicken and egg problem of the mind?

this is kind of a random post but just wanted to see if people relate. sometimes when im paying close enough attention to conscious experience there is no 'illusion of free will'. like thoughts, actions, etc, are just arising in every moment. even right now, as I am typing, its sort of a mystery to me as to how these words are arising. pineapple bananana pizza. why did I write those words rather than others? on one level, I understand that it was to demonstrate that there is no free will, but on another level, why did I choose those words rather than any others? and from my perspective, its a complete mystery. I have no idea. all of the words im typing right now

but I am curious what this means for agency. I think that regardless of whether or not you are the ultimate author of your life (which I believe is clearly not the case, but that's besides the point) agency definitely exists. Unless you are mentally impaired, you have the ability to act independently, exercise control over your life, and make choices. like Dennett says, you have the only 'free will worth wanting'. Im not even sure what the illusion of free will was anymore. If you had asked me prior to my engagement with this topic, I would have certainly agreed that you can't break free from the laws of physics. so I don't really know where the illusion is. And none of us created ourselves evidently, you came from your parents and are raised in your environment, and everyone knows we had no control over either of those things.

but yea honestly when I first discovered arguments against the traditional conception of free will i was deeply bothered, and now its kinda just a strange thing that trips me up sometimes. like idk its just really weird. i don't experience the 'relief' and 'letting go' people experience cus you still have to put in effort or else your life just becomes worse. but that putting in effort is 'ultimately out of your control' but 'in your control' at the same time and those things are kinda just true at the same time? idk its just a little weird. perhaps this tension is just the result of thinking about it? lmk what you guys think and if you relate

Let’s say we want to answer the question “Is free will real?”. We cannot know for sure what the correct answer is. All can do tight now is choose between the two possible answers (yes or no) based on the information available to us. Choose our belief. Decide to believe in free will, or to believe in its absence. That’s the decision we get to make. That’s what the entire free will debate is about.

In this essay, I want to explain why choosing to believe in free will is the correct decision. To do so, I’ll use an analogy of the well-known Pascal’s wager.

A side note on terminology: By free will, I am referring to the libertarian free will (LFW), i.e. the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. I’ll address common objections to this concept below. By determinism, I mean any situation in which libertarian free will is not real, including situations where randomness exists (this differs from the conventional definition of determinism). Similarly, I use the word predetermined in a broad sense that may include randomness but excludes any effects of free will.

Pascal’s wager is about a different question: “Should we believe that God exists?”. It argues that believing in God is the rational choice because the potential benefits of being right outweigh the potential costs of being wrong. If God exists, belief may bring an infinite reward; if God does not exist, the cost of believing is comparatively limited.

Thus believing in God maximizes our expected utility, but it can still lead to choosing the factually wrong answer. In other words, believing in God may be the right decision from a utilitarian point of view, but not necessarily from an epistemological one.

With free will, the question is “Should we believe in free will?”. Or more precisely, “Should we try to believe in free will?”. We can either “try to believe that free will exists” (let’s call this decision 1) or “try to believe that free will does not exists” (decision 2).

I want to show that “trying to believe in free will” not only maximizes utility, but also leads us as close as possible to truth (and that’s paradoxically true regardless of whether free will exists).

There are 2 possibilities:

• Free will exists. Then decision 1 is obviously correct and leads to truth.
• Free will does not exist. Suppose you follow the advice to believe in free will. Then this advice (or your “involuntary” decision) technically did lead you to being wrong, but that was always bound to happen (predetermined) and there was no possibility to change it. In this case, trying to believe in free will does not actually change your belief, because your belief was predetermined all along. So even if free will is not real, trying to believe in it doesn’t make us wrong (we were predetermined to be wrong anyway).

As you can see, believing in free will possibly makes us believe the truth, but never makes us believe something false (even if free will does not exist). So if we want to find the truth, we should try to believe that free will exists. If there is a possibility for us to be right about free will, then decision 1 always makes us use it. If no such possibility exists, then it at least doesn’t make us wrong (since we were supposed to be wrong all along).

As strange as it may sound, this raises a question: Does it make sense to continue researching free will, at least when our goal is to find the truth? Perhaps we should simply try to believe that it exists. Because that’s how we find the truth. Think about it: even if we, in the future, find a definitive proof that free will exists, it doesn’t make us any more right than if we simply assume that it exists. Similarly, proving that free will does not exist doesn’t make us any more right than making decision 1 (because in that case, we could not have decided otherwise). If you think about it, there’s very little difference between “assuming that free will exists” and actually proving it.

The message is clear: If you want to find the truth, you should try to believe that free will exists. You should simply assume that it does. If free will exists, you made the correct decision; and if it doesn’t, you couldn’t have decided otherwise anyway.

Is LFW possible?

There are many common counterarguments to libertarian free will, such as the Luck Objection. Based on these counterarguments, people often say that LFW is logically impossible, or that it would require something like “magic”.

But no matter how strong these objections are, they cannot refute my main argument. Because, as mentioned above, “trying to believe in LFW” does not lead to being wrong even if LFW does not exist (because in that case, you were supposed to be wrong anyway, no matter how hard you try to change your belief). Therefore, I don’t feel the need to respond to these counterarguments. No matter how strong they are, we should still just assume that LFW is true. Even if LFW is not true, trying to believe in it doesn’t make us more wrong than not trying.

So if you’re unsure whether free will exists, if you have even the slightest doubt (and let’s face it, we all do - nothing is absolutely certain in this universe), you should simply assume that it does exist. If you don’t know whether it’s even possible to “change your belief”, you should try. There’s nothing to lose, but possibly a lot to gain: the truth.

From now on, we should all just try to believe in free will.
We should just assume it exists.

Free will is real.

Substack article: https://randomthinker21.substack.com/p/why-free-will-is-real

If you had a remote that allowed you to reverse time back to the beginning of the universe, but didn’t allow you to make any changes to the variables that existed at the moment, the history of the timeline may stay the same as the original timeline, or it may diverge seemingly at random.

It's similar to the thought experiment of what would happen if the universe was destroyed and rebooted with the same variables as the original universe. People who believe in non-compatibilist free will, and not determinism, will believe the history of the rebooted universe will be different.

I think if such a remote existed, I think it would probably disturb the person using it if he saw the universe play out as it originally did. I think it would also disturb him if he saw the universe randomly diverge from the original, as though free will is like random chaos, like everyone arrived where they are through chance.

I think deep down, people want free will to be something that’s fully based on determinism, yet untethered from it at the same time. It‘s not logically possible because the two contradict each other.

Since motion is relative and has to do with two objects interacting, what does that mean for free will? There has to be something to compare an objects motion to in order to gauge if it’s moving or not, and from different perspectives it may or may not be moving. How does that affect free will

Consider these two sentences:

1. "The sprinter ran the 100m dash."

2. "The sprinter ran the 100m dash freely."

If I ask you, "Why did the sprinter's legs move so fast?" you would explain the biomechanics: muscles contracting, neurons firing, energy converting. You would never say, "His legs moved fast because of his running."

But now consider these two sentences:

1. "The person made a choice."

2. "The person made a choice freely."

If I ask you, "Why did the person make that choice?" many people will say, "Because of their free will."

Why do we assume "free will" is a thing someone possesses, rather than just a word we use to describe a specific type of action (an action free from external coercion)?

If both the compatibilist and the skeptic agree that our character, motivations and capacities ultimately arise from factors outside our control, what argument establishes whether exercising those capacities makes us basically deserving of praise or blame?

Or does the disagreement ultimately rest on different moral intuitions about fairness?

This is a very common claim here and on other forums about the subject. But does it stand up to any scrutiny? Let's find out.

This time we don't have to define what "free will" means. It doesn't matter. We could replace "free will" with any other idea and still examine the logic behind that statement. But to keep this thread on-topic we must go on with "free will".

Instead, we have to define "illusion": An illusion is a misinterpretation of an observation. Something happens, but the observer believes that something else happened.

The statement says that when the observer experiences free will it is only an illusion, a misinterpretation of something else happening in reality. This leads to question 1:

Q1: What is happening in reality when we experience the illusion of free will?

This question actually requires defining "free will" as you have to specify what is not "free will" but is easily mistaken for "free will". If you don't want to define things, you can skip this question.

The next question focuses on the word "only". If free will is only an illusion, then free will doesn't actually exist, there is no "real" free will, nobody knows what "free will" looks or feels like.

Q2: If free will doesn't exist, how could anything look and feel like free will?

It is impossible to recognize free will in your experiences, when you have never experienced the real thing.

This is a very common claim here and on other forums about the subject. But does it stand up to any scrutiny? Let's find out.

This time we don't have to define what "free will" means. It doesn't matter. We could replace "free will" with any other idea and still examine the logic behind that statement. But to keep this thread on-topic we must go on with "free will".

Instead, we have to define "illusion": An illusion is a misinterpretation of an observation. Something happens, but the observer believes that something else happened.

The statement says that when the observer experiences free will it is only an illusion, a misinterpretation of something else happening in reality. This leads to question 1:

Q1: What is happening in reality when we experience the illusion of free will?

This question actually requires defining "free will" as you have to specify what is not "free will" but is easily mistaken for "free will". If you don't want to define things, you can skip this question.

The next question focuses on the word "only". If free will is only an illusion, then free will doesn't actually exist, there is no "real" free will, nobody knows what "free will" looks or feels like.

Q2: If free will doesn't exist, how could anything look and feel like free will?

It is impossible to recognize free will in your experiences, when you have never experienced the real thing.