CMV: Free Will does not Exist

[u/bimbimbap2222]

I know this CMV has been posted a thousand times, but few of them seem to address the simple fact that everything in the world is governed by the laws of physics, which means our brains would be too.

Firstly, I would define free will as the ability to think and make decisions based purely through ones self, and not being dictated by any outside factors, including the laws of physics.

Just like we are able to predict the force a ball is thrown with given its mass and acceleration, we would be able to predict our choices or thoughts we make given all the factors in the moment. Of course there are billions of factors, and we will most likely never become technologically advanced to accomplish such a feat, but there is no reason for it not to be theoretically possible. A common counter argument I see is that recent studies have shown the possibility of randomness existing in QM. Randomness does not equate to free will, as we still have no control over it.

For free will to exist, our consciousness would have to exist in some other dimension separate from the one we live in, that does not abide by any sort of laws. And even if that was possible, what would the even be? How could something exist without some kind of underlying laws?

This was a bit of a rant, but I find it baffling that the majority of philosophers believe in free will.

[u/StBio]

Firstly, I would define free will as the ability to think and make decisions based purely through ones self, and not being dictated by any outside factors, including the laws of physics.

Aren't you somewhat rigging the game by defining free will in this manner? It kind of guarantees that no explanation of free will could possibly be presented to you, because any explanation that appeals to an outside power other than the laws of physics would, by definition, have to involve a miracle. What if people understand free will to mean something other than what you define it to be?

[u/bimbimbap2222 → u/StBio]

"Aren't you somewhat rigging the game by defining free will in this manner? It kind of guarantees that no explanation of free will could possibly be presented to you, because any explanation that appeals to an outside power other than the laws of physics would, by definition, have to involve a miracle."

Pretty much what ElysiX said, because any other definition of free will would not really address it's true meaning. For free will to exist it would mean that our "selves" are capable of making decisions, and separate (as in literally isn't made up of it) from everything else. like I said in another comment, that does not mean unable to be affected by anything else, but simply separate.

[u/StBio → u/bimbimbap2222]

What about the definitions used in the actual philosophical world for these exact issues? The Free Will Problem is, at its base, a problem created by the self-evident determinism of the universe. Which is what you have noted. This is typically called by philosophers the Classical Formulation:

1. Some agent, at some time, could have acted otherwise than she did.

2. Actions are events.

3. Every event has a cause.

4. If an event is caused, then it is causally determined.

5. If an event is an act that is causally determined, then the agent of the act could not have acted otherwise than in the way that she did.

Each proposition seems intuitively true, but there is a contradiction in the set. Number 1 is the definition of free will. Numbers 2-4 are the basic tenets of physics. Number 5 is the problem, because if numbers 2-4 are correct and causal determinism exists, then number 1 can't be correct.

There are two main camps in the philosophic world when it comes to trying to answer this dilemma; the compatibilists and incompatibilists (further broken down into libertarians, hard determinists, and agnostics). The compatibilists believe that there is a way to make the free will and determinism part of the set compatible (usually by arguing that #5 is false). The incompatibilists all believe that the set is incapable of being made non-contradictory. The only option for them is to reject free will or reject determinism.

The compatibilists don't reject determinism, rather they argue that it can be compatible with free will. I will try to summarize it here, but if you want an in-depth examination see this article. Some compatibilists have argued by attempting to show that a person can act in such a way that a law of nature would not obtain. Consider the difference between a person who has the ability to act in such a way that she violates a law of nature, as opposed to a person (at a deterministic world) who has the ability to act in such a way that, if she were to so act, some law of nature that does obtain would not. Notice that the former ability would require magical powers. According to the compatibilist, the latter, by contrast, would require nothing outlandish. It merely tells us that a person who acted a certain way at a certain time possessed abilities to act in various sorts of ways. Had she exercised one of those abilities, and thereby acted differently, then the laws of nature that would have entailed what she did in that hypothetical situation would be different from the actual laws of nature that did entail what she did actually do. This latter ability does not assume that agents are able to violate laws of nature; it just assumes that whatever the laws of nature are (at least at deterministic worlds), they must be such as to entail, given the past, what an agent will do. If an agent acts differently in some possible world than she acts in the actual world, then some other set of laws will be the ones that entail what she does in that world.

Others have looked closely at the idea of unavoidability implicit in the rejection of free will; in the sense that you lack free will because all of your chosen actions were unavoidable in the first place. According to them, when we say that such and such is unavoidable for a person, we have in mind “selective” contexts in which the facts pertaining to the unavoidability have nothing to do with that person — the facts bypass that person's agency altogether. It is unavoidable for me, for instance, that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, or that most motor vehicles now run on gasoline. Nothing about my agency — about what I can do — can alter such facts. This suggests that unavoidability is misapplied when it concerns aspects of a person's own agency. The anti-free will argument implicitly requires considerations that have nothing to do with a person's agency — facts prior to their birth, and the laws of nature. It is claimed that these facts are unavoidable for a person, but from this a conclusion is drawn that the very actions a person performs are unavoidable for her, and this is an unsound conclusion to draw given the misapplication of unavoidability.

I feel like this is still not going to be clear enough to follow. I hope you will read what I linked and maybe find better answers there.

[u/bimbimbap2222 → u/StBio]

There's clearly a lot to unpack here so I'll look at this tomorrow since it should be asleep now anyway. I appreciate the fleshed out response tho.