Discussion of philosophy
I tend towards Daniel Dennett's views on this. The universe is fundamentally deterministic, but we can act as though we have free will.
Because whether that will is possible or not kinda doesn't matter. Did you make any choices today? Yes, of course you did. But who are you? You're a product of the universe, a complex system of neurons and physics that generate a consciousness that we don't really understand.
I've never really understood any argument for free will, because I've never really understood exactly what they mean by 'free will'. Take me through it, exactly what does it mean if you 'make a choice'?
As free will, we can handle any choice you make. At least that's what I mean. Everything you choose in life, whether you brush your teeth this morning, whether you drink tea or coffee. More broadly, your ideologies, your reactions in life, whether you choose to be a "bad person" as a result of bad experiences. The holy books say we can choose these things. That we can determine our destiny by these decisions and that it is up to us to choose between heaven or hell. I think this is wrong and I wanted to ask you all my opinion. There will always be certain criteria and certain limits when we make choices. But what I am curious about is the predictability of our choices.
Ok, let's take one example. You said you can choose whether you brush your teeth this morning or not.
If you do choose to brush your teeth, what caused you to do so?
That's exactly what I'm trying to ask, what caused this? Was it already prepared and foreseeable? Or did I just want to brush my teeth. I think we humans don't live in a cause-and-effect relationship and so I think it's difficult to give a clear answer to that question. Maybe if I could come up with a rationalization, it would be: I need to be clean, for the health of my teeth, to keep up the routine, etc.
Why can't it be that it happened because you wanted to brush your teeth, and the reason you wanted to was deterministic?
I'm asking how we want it. I'm asking what kind of causality the brain uses to want it. It's very difficult to explain what's in my mind. Let's take earthquakes for example, earthquakes don't just shake the earth as they please, right? There are certain continental movements, land plates form, these plates move with certain underground movements and we shake because of the friction, movement, cracks and pressure. Take the winds on Earth, the wind doesn't just blow wherever it wants to, certain pressures, landforms, antecedent and successor winds, things like that allow winds to happen where and when they want to happen. Before we humans knew about these mechanics of earthquakes and winds we thought they were random, but thanks to science we have mapped them and now with our current knowledge we can at least make high-powered predictions. And if you are not a religious person, you are more likely to think that the "life" of us humans and other living beings is not something that was created in such a monumental way. It is, in essence, a complex structure of energy cycles in which inanimate beings live with each other in a given ecosystem. And human beings have a lot of mechanics. There are many details that affect our will. It's not random and we can't decide anything. Can we be predictable beings with a lot of mechanics like emotions, thoughts, certain movements of atoms and molecules inside us, the society and the world we live in?
Detaching it from science and what's actually going on inside our brains, I see two logical possibilities for why something happens. Either it was the result of a deterministic prior cause, or it was random. Neither of those are 'you choosing' for it to happen.
Yes. I was just looking for that kind of answer. My poor English might made it become waste of time but thanks for sharing opinion.
I suspect we don't know enough about the mechanics of consciousness yet to determine what free will really means. We certainly know enough about psychology to understand predispositions to make certain choices and humans as a group are fairly predictable.
If you can't define the thing you're arguing for, then I don't think you can really reasonably claim that it exists.
There's a lot of schools of thought on this.
One to consider is that every time we make a decision, the universe basically does an instant mitosis. You find yourself in one of them. This would be a sort of non determinism, and if this school of thought intrigues you, that's a good keyword. This is the Many Worlds interpretation.
Conversely, there's the Block Time model, which kind of asserts through relativistic fuckery that all time exists. There is no now (only a relative now), and yeah, you have no free will whatsoever.
I tend to favor a blend of Block Time and non deterministic ideas. I think we have free will that operates on a sort of plane of possible actions which limits our will, and that we (consciousness) are just a really, really, really small facet of some larger dimension that is being crushed through a higher dimensional black hole, and some really hard-for-us-to-wrap-our-heads-around shit is getting full-on Allegory of the Cave'd into what we experience as consciousness.
So I think we're sort of conscious, I think we're sort of having free will, but I think we operate within confines that we can't see which limits our free will. We're kind of just along for the ride.
I think we have free will that operates on a sort of plane of possible actions which limits our will [...]
Kant argues for something similar when he says that as humans, we are citizens of two worlds: the sensible world of phenomena in which we are bound by the laws of nature as well as the intelligible world of noumena, which is subject to reason and, by extension, freedom of will.
I think it's important to remember that Kant doesn't see free will in the same way for example St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas define it — they believe free will to be the capability of arbitrary choice ('liberum arbitrium') — but as the product of rational thought. Freedom (autonomy), in the Kantian sense, is being able to make the reasonable, responsible choice.
Edit: Paraphrased and translated from Kaufmann, Arthur. Rechtsphilosophie. C.H. Beck. Munich: 1997. Pp.240-1 (German philosophy of law textbook)
Wow, you've given me a lot of research topics. I can't say that I am as well versed in the culture of philosophy as you are, so I will research the topics you mentioned one by one and get back to you.
There are a few possibilities for how the universe ultimately functions:
This problem with Will is that it's undefinable. Look at the axioms most mathematicians use: ZFC, the (Z)ermello-(F)ranco axioms plus (C)hoice. We can do math with or without Choice, both make sense, but we can't prove that you need it or not. And the axiom of choice is purist expression of Free Will that I know of: either you are allowed to have some undefined means of selecting one item from (possibly infinite) sets, or you must have a definite (calculable) means of choosing. Free will, or determinism? Even math can't decide!
We can do math with or without Choice
Five Stages of Accepting Constructive Mathematics - Andrej Bauer very good talk on that topic
I think every system is deterministic as much as it can be defined and reasoned. Macro world is working with deterministic principles in my opinion. A robber steals something due to maybe greediness or starvation etc. reason and they're being judged with reason to protect the safety of people and order.
But I cannot say the same thing about the micro world. Because even science can't reason and explain it too much when things goes quantum mechanics. We just make it "serving" for our goals. Like using a useful stuff which we don't even know how it works.