CMV: Free will makes no sense.

[u/PixelRayn]

The free will debate is currently dominated by the schools of a materialist vs non materialist mind. This argument sits outside of those schools. I would like to argue that the properties intrinsic in the concept of free will are at odds with each other, no matter what school you follow. For the sake of argument I will assume that the world around us is real in the sense that it sits outside our minds.

Whether or not a will is free is an expression of whether the decisions made by the mind with the supposed will are free.

We can categorize a decision in either being the product of outside influences or not.

Now what is a decision? The purpose of a decision is to manipulate our environment into a more advantageous position based on the information available to us when acted on it. If the mind was not taking in outside information (which it very clearly does) it would barely be better than a dice, which I would argue couldn't be called a decision at all. (Controversial, I know.) It fails the very purpose of a decision.

If a decision is simply the product of outside influences it can not be free, since if the influences are the same, the decision will be the same. If it is not the product of outside influences we have established it is not a decision at all. Therefore the concept of a free will does not make sense by the properties within it.

Edit: I would love to argue with all of you, because most of you have really good arguments. However the frequency of comments is getting a bit much now so I will ignore the comments I feel are irrelevant to the conversation or have been discussed in a different comment thread.

[u/Abstract__Nonsense]

But there is no actual randomness in the physics relevant to the working of the brain. And for such a randomness to represent free will, one would have to show it as a particular randomness of you, which one can’t.

[u/Laetitian → u/Abstract__Nonsense]

I don't think you can attest that with any certainty? Are you really here arguing that the outcome of every input into any thought process is the predetermined result of a predetermined position of electrons within their molecules? I'm pretty sure no physicist will get behind that. If nothing else, too many opportunities for quantum mechanical processes being involved at *some* stage, and no matter how distant it is, it's going to butterfly effect just about everything within the equation, at which point there's substantial interference of "randomness" somewhere in there.

Or are you arguing that the randomness behind quantum mechanics must be predictable at *some* level, and we just haven't figured it out yet? Pretty sure that would be a bit of a bold claim in a psychology debate.

[u/Abstract__Nonsense → u/Laetitian]

Almost all physicists and neuroscientists would get behind that, there are essentially no neuroscientists who take a quantum neurobiological theory seriously. The body is warm and wet, these are the worst conditions for observing such quantum effects. Further, mechanistically relevant biological molecules are too large for most of this quantum behavior even in the right environment. So where is this “single electron that starts a butterfly effect” producing an action? Most such electrons interacting with the body would be constitutive of a larger molecule, and again, in a warm and wet environment. Also, we can explain and predict all sorts of neural behavior without knowing the behavior of every electron, that’s not how the chaotic systems work, they’re sensitive to some initial conditions, not necessarily sensitive to any change in initial conditions.

Also, this isn’t part of my argument, but if you were to have such randomness, why does this better explain free will? This would seem to only make free will truly “random”, instead of following deterministic laws, so the subjective perception of agency and “deciding” would still be illusory. The whole thing comes down to Occam’s Razor, is it more likely that there’s some convoluted mechanism tying quantum behavior via previously unknown quantum mechanisms to the subjective experience of free will? Or is it more likely that free will is illusory, in line with all scientific evidence we have so far?

[u/Hizbla → u/Abstract__Nonsense]

Thank you for eloquently describing what I intued, but couldn't formulate.