Free will is way too vague of a concept, that it's probably not worth pursuing the answer.

You react to choices the specific way you do because of experiences you've had previously.

Reverse time without changing anything, you'll always make the same choices because you're having the same thoughts each time every time, because you've been conditioned the way you are.

The universe doesn't "know" where it's going, but the plan is already in action. You can choose whatever you want to do, but if you were the same person in the same circumstance, you would and will always make the same decision.

Hard determinist here. It doesn't make the future predictable by me, but I don't see how randomness could really occur. And then likewise there's no such thing as free will.

The question is underspecified. Why do you want to know if free will exists? What will you do differently if it does exist vs if it does not exist?

This is similar to questions like, "is water wet?" You can generate endless debate on the topic, but it's all intellectual masturbation until you are genuinely looking for the answer to a specific question.

If a being computes a decision from its inputs from equally beneficial outcomes, is that not the being enacting its will?

I think it's more complicated than free will existing or not.

If you knew every single possible value about the universe at its start and had a perfectly accurate model of physics, you could theoretically predict/simulate everything that would ever happen. For practical reasons, though, that's impossible, even ignoring weird quantum effects, for the simple reason that that is a lot of data points, more than any of us could reasonably keep track of- it's like how, in sufficiently controlled conditions, a fair dice can roll the exact same number 100% of the time, but there are enough variables that are hard enough to control for in a normal situation that it's basically random.

Similarly, if you knew everything about every human on Earth, you could theoretically predict exactly what any of them would do at any given moment. Of course, that's just not practical- the body and brain are a machine that is constantly taking in input and adapting to it, so in order to perfectly predict someone's thoughts and actions, you'd need to know every single detail of every single thing that has ever happened to them, no matter how small. Then, you'd need to account for the fact that they're interacting with hundreds of other people, who are also constantly changing and adapting. It's just not possible to predict or control a person for any reasonable length of time like that, because one tiny interaction could throw off the entire model.

Just look at current work with AI- our modern machine learning algorithms are much more well-understood and are trained in much more contained environments than any human mind, and yet we still need to manually reign them in and sift through the data to prevent them from going off the rails.

So, technically, I suppose free will doesn't exist. For practical purposes, though, what we have is indistinguishable from free will, so there's not much point getting riled up about it.

Indeterministic + free-will doesn't exist and can't exist. You literally end in impossible contradictions if you entail its existence in a consistent universe (as in, one where everything that exists is subjected to the same natural laws).

As a side note for OP, Hisenberg has proven there's no such thing as "knowing the initial condition".

That's a wild question.

And I asked myself this earlier in the shower.

I decided I would probably never know, and ended up upset I needed to get out and get ready for work.

Sometimes I wonder if the cosmic joke is we could comprehend a situation like free will, but never actually find out of it exists.

Quantum mechanics shows the universe really does just operate on probabilities. On the smallest scales we can probe we see that the universe is non-deterministic. But average out those probabilities 10^20 times for a coin and everything may look pre-determined to our macroscopic lives.

I have the feeling most people cling to free will as a concept because not having free will raises questions if a "self" truly exists. However the existence of free will can be as scary if not more, since how could we define a "self" if it could freely do something not based on what defines it.

My brother and I have been having an ongoing debate about this and Simulation Theory for a good few years.

In my mind, it's a pointless question to try and answer. It makes for a nice thought experiment, but actually having a belief in it is useless.

Deterministic with no actual free will, but complex enough that we'll never be able to tell the difference. Essentially, our choices may technically be predetermined but for all intents and purposes, they are indistinguishable from free will and can't be predicted.

Free will doesn't exist, but we can't perceive ourselves as anything but free creatures.

The way I like to see life is like a striped funnel: you're going in that direction and will ultimately die, and there are a series of things you will encounter (the various colored stripes) and others you can and can't encounter.

I can only perceive me as endowed with free will, but I can think of a synthesis between free will and determinism. So if my father and grandfather had some kind of illness, I know I will probably have it too, if I'm born in Germany I know I'll never be U.S. President, if I was born poor I know that I probably won't be able to do some things.

But if we're talking about "how reality works", we aren't really free.

This makes me think of MGS2's ending

So that's a topic that fascinated so many people forever.

With all these people fascinated by it, some of them weirdos put their whole life's at it.

And these weirdos came to a few absolutely terrifying conclusions:

1. The ultimate future is predictable: 2nd law of thermal dynamics means the universe will eventually end with energy being equal everywhere, so there is nothing because there is no difference. That's the heat death of the universe.

2. Otherwise nothing is absolutely predictable: the uncertainty principle says you can either know the precise position of a particle, or you know the precise movement of a particle, you can't know both at the same time. So yeh if you know the initial condition you can make a prediction, but you can't know the precise initial condition at particle level, and since the world is made of particles, you can only make imprecise predictions without 100% certainty.

You could argue that the human mind is a quantum machine. You don't know it's initial condition. Nor do you know the precise initial condition of every human mind in the world. The impreciseness of any prediction, even if it could be small individually, adds up in the scale of the world, the universe. So that can be you foundation of free will, up to the heat death.

I just wanted to say that if you guys truly want to see what serious answers can be given to these type of questions you can always take a look into philosophy and just so happens I'm trying to build a philosophy community on Kbin so feel free to check m/AskPhilosophers, and m/LearnPhilosophy.

Now see, if you're looking at things from a biological point of view, it's important to recognize the forest from the trees. A few trees are, well, just a few trees. But a great many trees together constitutes a forest, and becomes more than the sum of its parts. I feel the same way about the human brain. Yes, it's a series of electrical and chemical impulses, but there are so many of these working in tandem that it becomes exponentially more complex, akin to ever-advancing computer technology. It's complex enough that we think, we talk, we make decisions. And those decisions aren't based solely on instinctional drive, and can even be made in opposition to them.

It's true that human behavior can be accurately predicted based on an individual's natural tendencies, but there are never any guarantees. There's always a choice, a chance to veer off course. Decisions can be prudently made after careful research, or made on a frivolous impulse. Maybe you even realize that you would ordinarily take one action in a given situation, but do the exact opposite. You consciously chose to ignore your first impulse. If free will is an illusion, it's a damned convincing one.

Well, first things first, it is not a "simple" philosophical question. The best minds of humanity have been tackling this problem since forever, and there is still no definitive answer yet.

Ironically, for all the religions since the dawn of time, some kind of evidence for free will has emerged from the frontiers of science. Quantum mechanics, for instance, is based on the fact that at the subatomic level, nothing is known for sure. Therefore, the "initial conditions" issue is no longer true.

Someone with a greater intellect than mine once stated that the quantum nondeterminism underlying the functioning of the human brain could be the key to freeing it from the conundrum of cause and effect. In other words, yes, we have free will. Suggested readings: "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter, "The Book of Job" in the Bible.

Just my 2¢...

I believe in free will, yeah. Though I see it as something that fluctuates.

As @[email protected] said, free will and determinism aren't necessarily tied together. You can have one without the other. It's been a while since my studies so I'm rusty on the academic side of philosophy so I won't start naming names, but I'll start off with the fact that a coin is a much more simple thing than a human. So while a coin might land on just one of its two sides or, in a freak accident on its edge. For humans, there are way more outcomes as to what could happen when someone's thrown into a complex situation.

Personally, I am what one would call a soft determinist (I probably don't fit the label completely, so feel free to correct me) which is considered to be a cope-out-of-the-discussion type of position, which I believe is a bit unjustified. I don't think we have enough knowledge about the world to definitely answer the question of whether our actions are deterministic or not or whether our will is free or not. But it sure as hell feels like we have free will, that's acting at least if not always then frequently. And as Argv already said, physics involves a heavy dose of randomness. So going by that I tend to sway towards the non-deterministic side. You can will yourself out of situations that other people would consider beyond their control, but if there's a boulder rolling towards you through a narrow tunnel it's very likely that you are going to run away from it, not towards it. In that sense, some action is determined by the instinct of self-preservation. But again, theoretically, who's to stop someone from accepting the situation and letting the boulder roll over them?

So yeah, for me, as with most things, free will and determinism are on a spectrum, not binary. It depends on the context and level (quantum to Newtonian physics) that we're speaking about.

P.S. How do I mention someone in the thread? I just linked Argv's comment in a very brute way.

Quantum mechanics are probabilistic, which serves as a good argument for the universe as a whole being probabilistic. The position of a single particle could change a great many things!

You forget, the underpinnings of physics involve a heavy dose of randomness. Contrary to the opinion of a certain famous scientist, God does, in fact, play dice. Lots and lots of dice.

So no, the universe is not deterministic.

Note that this doesn't mean free will exists. Your decisions may not be entirely predetermined, but them being determined by random chance doesn't fit the definition of free will, either.

Well let's start by examining the phrase "free will"

The term free has at least two different meanings in common language.

A) free as in beer ( free from cost) B) free as in speach (free from control)

Both of these could be broken down more (e.g. Monetary cost, entropic costs, mental cost and societal control, individual control, physical control... Etc)

Now, "will" is a bit more tricky. In this context we generally use it to mean "choice" However desire, and intention also get mentioned in the definitions.

1. desire
2. intention
3. choice

When commonly discussed I would say people tend to talk about B3(the ability to choose without external physical control)

I would argue 3 requires 2 which requires 1

So now we discuss B1 - are we free to pick our desires.

This I find to be interesting. We often see people desiring things which seem foolish. Foolish as is Unwise. What makes something foolish? Seems to me foolishness is caused by a lack of data and poor modeling.

At this point my phone battery is at 6% So I'll cut my response short. I see no truly free will. I think our desires can be shaped over time via our input (previous choices) however we can't roll a die and pick our desires.

I don't think this is a bad thing. Just maybe not ideal but what is in this world?

I think the universe is deterministic, but also that absolute prediction is impossible and that there might even be actually random events in it (or not, I'm just not certain either way about that part). Even if you have an absolutely random uncalculatable die tho, that doesn't mean the future is not predetermined. If hypothetically I had a time machine, rolled the die, recorded the result, and then went back to before it was rolled, then watched the roll again, then if it always gets that same result, despite not being "caused" by any external factors, then the universe would still be deterministic even with the presence of randomness

To be deterministic there should be someone or something what determine it, as an agnostic i don't believe neither at 100% just a 50/50, we should prove first if there is something out there or not who/what determine or not things.

I'd say free will exists. Sure, you are shaped by your environment, your genetics and so on, but in the end you can still decide what you want to do. In theory I could simply quit my job tomorrow, wander off into the sunset and then drown in the next ocean. Or as someone brought up criminals, you could stab someone just trying to disprove the universe is being deterministic.

If you know every single atom in this moment and had unlimited computing power, you'd probably be fantastic at telling the weather. Or if you map every neuron in someone's brain you might know what they are about to do next. But at this point you are just looking at the present data and can maybe calculate the next few seconds (but not even that is 100% sure, just a very good guess).

The question is how far forward would you be able to look just based on current and past data? A minute? A day? A month? At that point the whole thing breaks apart in my opinion. It's like looking at the stock market where you have tons of past data and think you can predict the future simply based on that.

There's so many complex sources of randomness, the most likely solution is that things are just that, random. And you can decide what you want to do with your own life, at least until you die (or don't, who knows what the future brings). Honestly the whole question is dumb, there is no single being that knows everything, so it really doesn't matter. In the grand scheme of things even humanity is just a tiny blip on the timeline and we're with very high probability not unique. Just based on numbers there is a high chance other life forms have existed before us, might exist right now with us (somewhere else in the universe I mean, there's also plenty on Earth) and will exist in the future.

Some entities are more deterministic than others. A rock is more deterministic than an animal and a human is less deterministic than an animal because its "causal inertia" (the opposite of free will) is weaker: it can be influenced by more factors than the rock and is more unpredictable. Some people lead more deterministic lives than others.

The concept of belief is rooted in free will, is it not?