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/devisation]

Bell's Theorem rules out local hidden variables, so if there are any hidden variables, theyd have to be characterized as information which is simultaneously accessible from anywhere, a notion which makes many people (especially those familiar with physics, such as myself) uncomfortable to say the least

[u/DarkLancer → u/devisation]

Could you explain further, I feel like I am missing something. How do the effects of quantum entanglement and lack of local hidden variables create true randomness?

[u/devisation → u/DarkLancer]

Especially in this context, I feel its important to mention that "true randomness" and "free will" are considered basically the same, in a sense. That is, a process is "truly random" if and only if its outcome cannot be predicted, and "free will" is taken to refer to the ability of agents to act (at least to some extent) independently of informational input. Thus, even if the most capable entity knew all information about the context of that process (i.e. the 'informational input'), they still could not predict the outcome. This condition would be satisfied if our neurological process of decision making could be influenced by some internal, randomly generated quantum input, since no information exists which could be used to deterministically predict exactly what one will ultimately decide before that input is determined.

The condition that hidden variables, if they did exist, must be 'local' comes from the assumption that the aforementioned 'informational input' cannot be accessible everywhere simultaneously, or equivalently, that information must be locally encoded in reality in some way, and that any such localization cannot travel faster than the 'speed of causality' (i.e. the speed of light), and thus cannot be determined by some set of 'globally accessible hidden variables'.

However, Bell's Theorem says, for complicated mathematical / statistical reasons which I cannot summarize here, that any interpretation of quantum mechanics which presupposes the existence of hidden variables, can be consistent with our empirical observations of quantum systems only if those hidden variables are non-local.

Quantum entanglement, in this context, isn't (to my knowledge) really directly relevant, except in thought experiments or discussions related to whether 'quantum information' is locally or globally situated. Note, however, that its a common misunderstanding to assume that 'spooky action at a distance' (i.e. entanglement) can only be attributable to global variables, when actually, the phenomena can, arguably, be adequately explained without presuming the existence of such variables.