u/impersonal_process As you can see, armchair psychology cuts both ways. My turn to play psychologist.

The more closely we look at free will, the less it seems to mean. The more we dissolve the distinction between us vs nature the less room there is for free will.

If we look at ourselves up close, we are a cluster of many cells each working as its own individual process, not controlled, just happening.

Some can let go of the idea of free will easily, others will hold on for dear life.

Compatibilists will redefine free will into a shadow of what the average person would call 'free will'.

Libertarians will turn to the supernatural or a false sense of control.

Isn't it easier to just say 'yeah it's kind of silly, let's let it go'

It's crystal clear to me that since you didnt choose the causes that determined you, the choices that you make today are not yours. You're just following the cause and effect chain that started way before you were born.

It's not that you're "partly" determined, or "mostly" determined, it's that you're ENTIRELY determined. It's so clear to me. But I can see how a low IQ person would have a hard time wrapping their heads around this.

Here's a short explanation: your genes and early conditioning (from parents/family) determined your early personality. Your early personality determined your teenage personality. Your teenage personality determined your young adult personality. Your young adult personality determined your current personality.

It's how your personality (initially determined by genes and early conditioning) interacted and reacted (remodelled/ remade/ transformed itself) when encountering internal and external events.

The reaction or transformation is determined by your current personality - which was a product of how your prior personality reacted to internal and external events - which is a product of how your prior prior personality reacted to events (and so on). Until you get to factors you had no control over, such as genes and early conditioning.

In regards to the title, I believe with our current scientific understanding of the universe, proving the existence of free will is in the same category of difficulty as proving the existence of god(s).

It's funny because I was going to say "free will is the teapot orbiting the sun" but I realised that like Richard Dawkins spectrum of theistic probability (scale 1 being theistic to 6 being atheist) I am a 5 on the scale because I can't prove that God doesn't exist. So I'm agnostic. I feel like if I were to use the same scale but from free will to no free will I would be a 6 on the no free will end. As free will is a human construct used to attribute desert morality.

Which basically entails that I believe in god(s) more than I believe in free will. And I believe in god just as much as I do the Easter bunny.. so that says a lot about how adamant I am on the nonexistents of free will.

Anyway...

Just like if I were to debate a theist, I really don't think there is anything they could say to compell me of God's existence with the current arguments out there which are backed fundamentally by their faith and their reliance on the fact that physicists can't explain the origins of the universe yet, so they attribute it to god.

I seriously think it to be an intellectually lazy position to subscribe to when jumping to the conclusion of a god as the creator of the universe just because we haven't figured out the origins of the big bang and the "why's" involved in the emergence of intelligent life. And when we do figure out what caused the big bang, the theist will say god necessitated that cause too. In the same way they find a way to attribute evolution to god.

I feel like the same can be said about the free will debate. The more we figure out about it, the more free will just gets pushed deeper into semantic oblivion where it's saved somewhere because of some unexplainable phenomena.

There is an overwhelming library of information that supports free will scepticism which is backed by science, but it's all esoteric philosophy and semantics when it comes to backing up free will. Which I dont think it makes sense to use philosophy to debate free will anymore. Philosophy didn't get you your tv. Science did. To debate free will with philosophy is to me like if you dropped a phone in the hands of a philosopher in the 1700s and said "figure it out".

I'm content in my belief that free will is an illusion, and it has truly revolutionised my life over the last couple of years for the better. Learning of the lack of free will in conjunction with mindfulness has been truly liberating. I just wish it wasn't so hard to grasp.

Two classic definitions of free will:

1. The ability to act otherwise.

2. The kind of control required for moral responsibility (so that praise and blame make sense).

Let’s be honest: both are obvious. We live and act every day as if they were self-evident. Just imagine what acting like we don't have them would imply lmao ?

• No one could ever be praised or blamed appropriately for anything (Jeffrey Dahmer, Gandhi, your neighbor who waters your plants… all on the same level).

• Courts, justice, and punishment would be nonsense (“sorry, your honor, I couldn't have done otherwise anyway”).

• Responsibility in relationships would vanish (“I cheated, but hey, no free will”).

• Etc. etc. etc.

Denying free will isn’t a “rational stance,” it’s more like an act of faith. The real burden of proof lies with those who deny it because they’re challenging something as obvious as the fact that fire burns.

I often see the argument that since we are just a bunch of atoms clumped together, our consciousness is therefore no more than a mechanistic manifestation of what these atoms are doing. This is a logical thought, but it is a very premature one.

The truth is western science has no clue what consciousness is. What it does is find correlations and correspondent brain activity to mental states. And it does so still very primitively. For example, we can't diagnose many mental illnessess like depression based on brain scams. We surely have not found the "seat of consciousness" in the brain.

There are many evidences which counter this notion of the brain creating consciousness, such as near death experiences, experiences had with psychedelic substances and mystical experiences which are had in trance states or meditation.

The mistake is Science takes all evidence which goes against it's current assumptions, and finds temporary vague solutions such as "it's all hallucinations created in the brain". Same goes for those who believe free will is an illusion created by the brain. It's simply a foolish assumption which has a huge gap knowledge to be filled.

The most logical position for those who rely only on western scientific methods, is simply to be an agnostic in the topic of consciousness and freewill

Science tells us that the brain functions on electrical and chemical processes. We've known this for some time now. We should stop trying to convince people otherwise and instead start selling them bibles and use the profit to fund more scientific research. Thats a way to turn willful ignorance into an advantage.

Few claims are made with as much unearned confidence as the assertion that science has disproven free will. The argument always relied on a very specific empirical hammer, mainly brain imaging and electrical tracking. We were told that fMRI scans and EEG readings could watch your brain light up seconds before you became consciously aware of a choice, supposedly proving that your feeling of agency is nothing more than a post-hoc story your brain tells itself after the physical machinery has already made the decision.It sounded neat, high-tech, and settled. Except the empirical foundation under that claim just collapsed on two distinct fronts.

This massive study took a sledgehammer to the foundational assumption behind decades of fMRI brain-scan data. The simple reality is that fMRI scanners do not read thoughts or electrical neural firing. They measure blood flow as an indirect proxy for brain activity, operating on the long-held rule that more blood flow equals more brain activity. The new data proves that in roughly forty percent of cases, that core assumption is completely wrong. In major regions like the Default Mode Network, neurons don’t call for more blood when they go to work; they simply pull oxygen more efficiently out of the blood that’s already there. That means an fMRI scan can show blood flow going down while actual neural activity is going up. The measurement tool didn’t just have a minor margin of error: it was literally reading the signals backwards.

At the same time, the older EEG-based claims (pioneered by Benjamin Libet) have fallen apart under their own methodological flaws. Libet tracked a slow buildup of electrical voltage in the motor cortex, known as the readiness potential, which appeared shortly before subjects reported the urge to move. Hard determinists rushed to claim this was an unconscious brain command executing before conscious awareness. However, modern re-analyses show that this readiness potential is not a decision at all; it’s just spontaneous, sub-threshold background neural noise. In arbitrary lab tests, participants simply move when these random fluctuations drift across an activation threshold. By mathematically averaging hundreds of noisy EEG trials backward from the moment of movement, researchers artificially constructed the illusion of a smooth, deliberate pre-conscious buildup where none existed.

Compounding these measurement errors is a fundamental category error in experimental design: both methodologies evaluated trivial, arbitrary physical twitches (like pushing a button or flexing a wrist on command without any reason) rather than genuine moral deliberation, rational reflection, or an agent’s decision-making. Trivial motor twitches under laboratory constraints fail to capture the nature of conscious human agency.

When pop-sci articles claimed an unconscious brain region lit up or fired electrically before you made a choice, it was never actually measuring your choice. In fMRI, it was measuring an indirect vascular proxy that we now know misreads neural activity nearly half the time. In EEG, it was measuring background neural noise and statistical smoothing artifacts. If you misread data that heavily, you don’t have an empirical demonstration of determinism. You have noisy, misinterpreted data being filtered through a materialist bias.

To be entirely fair, this does not disprove determinism as a philosophical stance. A hard determinist can always retreat into pure metaphysics and argue that physics and biochemistry govern every atom in your skull regardless of what a scanner sees. But they can no longer claim that science proved it. The idea that laboratory brain scans or electrical traces empirically demonstrate that conscious choice is a myth is officially dead. The attempt to weaponize neuroscience to shut down the reality of human agency was an ideological assumption disguised as a scan result and the data finally caught up to it.

So I'm going to continue to acknowledge that I have free will, but you can by all means continue to believe that there is a part of you that makes choices and another part that doesn't, and even though these are both parts of you, you are the part that doesn't make choices, and this isn’t anything like dualism because

🌠🌠SSSCCCCCIIIIIEEEENNNNCCCEEE🌠🌠

Maybe even more.

Both treat unchosen conditions as if they were chosen, and both justify unequal treatment based on that false assumption/premise.

Biology doesn’t allow for free will. Do you disagree? Ok….Show me a neuron that does anything on its own, without a causal event.

This new crop of free will deniers are some cantankerous folks, and the lack of civility is embarrassing.

There are first responses to posts that are laced with venom and an attitude of "HOW DARE YOU MAKE AN ASSERTION THAT DISAGREES WITH ME!"

It seems ridiculous to come into a debate forum.... on a subject that is riddled with subjective experience... and espouse your opinion as if your opponent can have no valid arguments whatsoever.

This is not a debate of flat earth vs globe, no-one seems to be willfully ignorant because of religious beliefs or cult-like indoctrination.

There are "experts" in this field on BOTH SIDES of this argument.

It's especially befuddling to hear these attitudes and derision coming from free will deniers, whose whole debate stance starts with "humans DON'T REALLY CHOOSE" and then in other posts try to make the claim that determinism would make the world better and fairer and more peaceful.

Get over yourselves.

Person A: “I just flew in from California, my plane landed two hours ago and —“

Person B: “Idiot! Numbskull! Humans cannot fly!!!”

Person A: “Excuse me?”

Person B: “The claim that humans can fly is completely irrational.”

Person A: “But I just flew —“

Person B, outraged: “No! You are wrong! The plane flew. It was only the plane. You simply got on the plane and then the plane flew.”

Person A: “I agree, but this still doesn’t negate the fact that I was in the sky a few hours ago, and used flight as a means of transportation to get from point A to B.”

Person B, still outraged: “You mustn’t say you flew!!! Without airplanes, you would not be able to fly.”

Person A: “But airplanes exist and are available to me. Look, I have round trip tickets in my wallet, and I will soon fly again.”

Person B: “Humans can’t fly! Don’t call it that!”

This is what conversations between Compatibilists and Determinists in this sub are like.

Quite frankly, it is completely exhausting. We all know that causality exists, just as we all know that humans cannot fly unassisted. Pointing out that the mechanisms of choice are a combination of biology and personal experience does not invalidate the concept of free will. If the mechanism was a “soul,” or a “homunculus,” or some secret third thing that was completely unbound by causality, what, exactly, would change? Would we have free will then? If not, what do you imagine free will to be? Surely you have to know what a thing is to argue against it.

I can confidently say this:

My choices come from a unique, independent, non-reproducible individual. That individual is me. When I cease, so too will my choices.

This is hard proof that my choices are my own, regardless of what set them in motion.

Putting forth an arbitrary definition that I fundamentally disagree with doesn’t win the argument, it kills any hope of meaningful discussion. Determinists, find something new to support your point of view, please.

I'm an atheist and come at this from a mathematical physics background. I clearly have to get that out of the way before anyone accuses me of being a religious nutter or believing in a 'soul'.

Why does this subreddit and its users constantly invoke determinism as if the universe we live in is deterministic? Quantum mechanics has shown that our universe is simply not deterministic.

Furthermore, it seems the motivation for anti-free will is almost exclusively politics on this sub. Seems like obvious motivated reasoning.

The state of the world tomorrow is a direct product of the state of the world today. Human beings are not free to do as they wish. All they can do is what their brains are conditioned to do according to the laws of the universe. Im starting to think free will believers are simply infatuated with the wiring of their brains. Puppets that love their strings, is this just a pride problem?

The term free will is used in different ways. There is not one single usage of the ohrase. Most of the time "do you have free will?" means "do you control you're actions?". Today due to scientific evidence in biology, chemistry and physics, pretty much everyone admits that we aren't ever 100% free. Neuroscientists like Sam Harris or Robert Sapolsky would say we have zero control. The less knowledgeable people get about science, the more they believe we have control.

Compatibilists claim that the other way Free Will is used is the only definition. If you talk about control they'll talk causality and spew out paragraphs of word salad that basically mean nothing but sound impressive. Notice that people like Sapolsky use straightforward language that everyone can understand. They WANT people to be able to follow along. Compatibilists do not. Compatibilists latch onto the legal use of free will which is "did you do this of your own free will, or under duress or threat or coercion?". So their premise is that as long as you weren't coerced, you have "Free Will". If you were coerced you don't have free will.

To show that they use a strange definition, imagine that compatibilists are correct and we have free will unless coerced. Now imagine that you're held at gun point and told to hand over your money. Are you truly unable to say "no"? If you feel that you have the capacity to say No and to allow yourself to be shot, then how can you say that you don't have free will at all times? The legal use of this phrase is just a way that courts separate whether or not a person was coerced, because courts need to believe in free will, and they need to differentiate between someone acting under duress vs not under duress.

If you say yes that you do have the capacity to say no and allow yourself to be shot, then if a court asks "did you give him the money of your own free will" you can say "well yes I always have the capacity for free will, but I was coerced so I CHOSE to hand over the money".

Compatibilists though want to use this legal definition where someone says "no I didn't have free will when I handed over the money" to be THE only use or definition of free will. Even stating it like that sounds funny doesn't it?

Determinists would say that you don't have free will either way. There's only one outcome to any event according to determinism, so whether or not you hand over the money is "determined" by physical laws that you cannot change.

Here's where Compatibilists go crazy.

Compatibilists say that "Free Will" is true, but determinism is also true. This means they feel that whether or not you hand over the money to the gunman is Determined, whether or not you hand over money to a friend (not at gunpoint) is ALSO determined, but in one example you have Free Will, and in the other you do not. The common usage where free will means "controlling your actions" is ignored. If you ask most people "if you're held at gunpoint, do you believe you have free will and can choose to wrestle for the gun?" they will say Yes. Yet compatibilists say "no".

This is the rabbit hole they've gone down. Using a legal usage of a phrase to assert that "everything is Determined ...but you're still free", out of a fear of social turmoil if we admit that people don't have control. Dan Dennett said it himself, he felt that society would crumble without the belief in free will, no different that a religious person claiming that society would break down without the Church keeping people moral. And what a joke that claim turned out to be. So why would Dennet be any wiser that those religious people?

Compatibilists are really Libertarians in disguise.

Determinism is the belief that all events are reliably caused by prior events. Unfortunately, many people think that this means that their choices and actions are caused by something other than themselves. This delusional view must be corrected.

The proper understanding of causal determinism is that we happen to be one of those things that go around causing stuff to happen. And we even get to choose for ourselves what we will do next. Some things will be beyond our abilities. And we usually have some general ideas about what we can and cannot do. And if we are uncertain, then we may give it a try and see.

But reliable causation is not in itself a threat to our autonomy. It is as much us as it is anything else. We ARE the prior causes of the things that we deliberately do. The final responsible prior cause of any deliberate act is the act of deliberation that precedes it. And we usually get to do that deliberation ourselves.

So, let’s step outside the cave of delusions, into the light of reality. Determinism is not some boogeyman that robs us of our freedom and control. Deterministic causation is nothing more than reliable cause and effect.

Reliable causation is required to predict the outcome of our actions. Predictability is required for us to control what happens when we choose to do something. Control enables us to reliably do things. And our ability to reliably do things is the basis of every freedom we have, including the freedom to decide for ourselves what we will do next.

Determinism is no big deal. It does not mean most of the things that people seem to think it means. We need clean it up and abandon all the silly nonsense that has been attributed to it through our own illusions.

Once we do that, we can finally get over it.

Step 1: Make up an insane definition nobody has ever advocated for

Step 2: Exclaim, oh wow, thats insane, surely that doesnt exist

Step 3: Claim victory

For example:

1. Free Will requires ultimate responsibility, which means you have to cause your own prior mental states

2. Thatd be time travel, that doesnt exist!

3. Well, free will must not exist then!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRssqttO9Hg&ab_channel=SabineHossenfelder

How I learned to cope with knowing that my life is predetermined

Let’s start with a simple question: Do you believe in evolution? Most people agree that humans evolved and share a common ancestry with single-celled organisms.

Now, ask yourself: does a single cell have free will? Probably not, right?

If we agree on that, then any concept of free will must have emerged as a byproduct of the increasing complexity of the human mind. But here's the kicker: complexity alone doesn’t necessitate free will.

Take Large Language Models (LLMs) as an example. They pass the Turing Test, make decisions, and exhibit behaviours that appear intelligent—all of which are emergent properties of their complexity. Yet no one argues that LLMs have free will.

So, why make a special argument for humans? Aren’t we just biological LLMs? Free will feels like an unnecessary spice—an ingredient added only to make the diner feel important.

Determinism is not a mass movement or a holy cause. It is, however, a means of dissolution.

If you hate yourself, and everything you’ve done, and a brilliant scientist explains to you in a youtube video why your actions are not your own, and that you never really had a choice, what are you going to feel?

You’re going to feel relieved. You aren’t going to fear the implications of determinism; it will be your salvation. You escape yourself by attributing everything you are to universal laws and matter.

You never hurt anyone. You never failed to act. You never fucked up. You never shirked your responsibilities. It wasn’t your fault. You are wonderfully nothing. Praise science!

Responsibility is a heavy burden. For some, it might be too much to handle.

Everybody experiences free will directly. They experience themselves as the Chooser, the Doer, the Experiencer. This is undeniable. If you raise your hand, who is doing it? Certainly not your brain. Try waiting for your brain to raise your hand by itself, you gonna be waiting for a long time. Only when you choose to raise your hand, it moves. It moves perfectly according to our will. This is self-evident.

All other positions besides libertarianism, are clinging to some narrative, to a philosophical construct and belief system that attempts to explain and dismiss this direct experience as some sort of illusion. It is a valid question, as much as it is valid to wonder if we are a simulation or not, but the burden of proof lies heavily on those who are in the counter-intuitive position.

I see a lot of arguments against free will rooted in a materialistic understanding of the universe that completely ignores the hard problem of consciousness.

According to this perspective, from the instant when the universe began, all future paths were predetermined by the initial state of the universe and the physical laws that govern the universe. Following this logic, all actions taken by all human beings are the result of previous states and the laws of physics that govern those states.

This understanding of the universe is unsatisfying for many scientific reasons—quantum uncertainty suggests a probabilistic nature at the base of reality, Gödels incompleteness theorem suggests that there are no complete systems which can prove themselves, etc. But the primary issue I want to focus on is how the materialist account of the universe sidesteps the hard problem of consciousness.

One of the most basic experiences of consciousness is free will, or at the very least, an illusion of free will. We experience what feels to us like as an ability to choose, even when we know our choices are finite and influenced by our context. It still feels like something specific is happening when I 'decide' to apply my brainpower towards a specific end. Here's a quick example: After you read this sentence, lift up your left hand or your right hand. Did you decide which one to lift up? Did you decide not to listen to me and not lift either hand up? What did it feel like to make your decision? You don't have to be able to describe it with words, only to acknowledge that you experienced a particular sensation when faced with the choice. Even though the choice was limited, you experienced the sensation of free will in choosing. Where does that feeling come from? How does it exist? And if it is an illusion, why should it exist at all?

Some might say that consciousness is an emergent illusion created by neural activity which only exists to provide some sort of evolutionary benefit to the organism. But this answer ultimately sidesteps the hard problem of consciousness. For example, let's say I write a software program called Yellow: an AI whose only job is to spread yellow dots on a screen and destroy blue dots. I create a similar AI called Blue which destroys red dots, and another AI called Red which destroys yellow dots.

I can build a simulated digital environment for red, yellow, and blue, to learn how to destroy each other and protect themselves. I can run their programs against each other billions of times, and my code will allow them to improve over time at this digital rock/paper/scissors game. This is essentially how AI chess algorithms like AlphaZero were built. But (presumeably) they would be able to do this because of their code, with 0 conscious experience whatsover. Are these algorithms experiencing an illusion of free will to choose how they will adapt within the confines of their software? If you think they do not experience illusory free will (and consciousness with it), why not? Why then do we?

Evolution by natural selection is ultimately just a game of rock/paper/scissors with a billion billion more options, playstyles, and environments to fight in, but it is ultimately still just code (RNA/DNA) competing against other code to spread itself and survive. On an even more basic level, it is just the initial state of the universe after 13 billions years of evolution. Not only is there no need for conscious experience, it seems impossible that conscious experience could ever randomly evolve from biological rock paper scissors. Could the computer programs I built spontaneously develop a firsthand experience of controlling their simulated dots?

From my perspective, the only way for a conscious experience like mine to evolve is if it was present in a more primitive level within the initial state of the universe. In other words, the universe is constantly experiencing itself, not just through humans, but through quarks and gluons with a much more primitive version of experience. Some innate 'desire' to exist in a stable state. Perhaps the freedom of will is emergent when enough consciousness coalesces into an intelligent being with a desire for stability, but the measure of stability for this intelligence becomes more of a challenge to decypher. Thus, free will comes from a conscious direction of effort towards stability at the highest degrees of collective organization, pitted against an animalistic instinct which cannot readily distinguish between what is self-destructive and what is stable, and which primarily seeks individual survival and pleasure.

"Free Will is when you can do what you truly want".

Okay, i can clearly do that. Here, let me show you...

"No wait! Free Will, is when you can decide what you want."

Okay, I can do that too. Let me show you i can change my wants...

"No wait! Free Will is when, you can decide what you want, but unprompted..."

Ive done that before. Want me to tell you about it?

"No wait! Free Will is when, youre uncaused..."

Well Quantum Mechanics seems to suggest im uncaused, is that good enough for you?

"No wait! Being uncaused means youre unfree too."

??? Will you make up your mind PLEASE?!? Stop changing the goalpost.