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Comment by stickperson | Hacker News Reader

I had a professor in college who was adamant that we do not have free will. His argument basically boiled down to this: we are who we are because of our genes, our environment, and random events that go on in the brain. We can't control any of them. Sure, you may be able to control your environment, but how we choose to do so is influenced by everything in the past. We think the way we do because of events we couldn't control.

Here's an interesting paper he wrote on the subject: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full

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The problems with/about free will have more to do with people's emotions than anything else.

For some reason people just can't accept determinism; possibly because it often seems to lead to a belief in nihilism and that is judged (perhaps rightfully so) to be destructive/dysfunctional.

On the other hand the only way free will makes sense if it's a property of all the universe and thus essentially is just the phenomenological experience of the passage of time.

Since we conflate free will and consciousness that would mean people would have to accept that there's nothing special about human consciousness and that your dog is also conscious and that even your table must then in some be 'at least a little-bit' conscious.

And that is something we also categorically seem to refuse to accept.

Either way I'd say determinism and universal consciousness are just different sides of the same coin and our opposition to them says more about our adherence to religious concepts and insistence about humanity's 'special status' in the universe than anything else.

I think it's not arguable that our free will is significantly constrained. For example I've never heard of someone willing themselves to float into the air, or grow a third arm. I can imagine and think of a dragon, but I cannot bring it into existence by free will.

On top of that I have all sorts of biological activities in my own body that are not subject to my will. I can't simply choose to stop my heart, or to stop breathing, or to not heal a wound in my skin.

And the counter side is true as well: if you damage my brain, I can't just freely choose to continue thinking the same way as before the injury.

On top of that there are the emotional constraints. Even though I physically could kill my family, I won't. But do I freely choose not to do so, or am I prevented from doing so by emotional reactions that I did not choose to feel? Why don't I choose to just starve to death? Why don't I step off of high places, even though I feel a compulsion to do so? Are those examples of free will, or examples of constraints on my free will?

All that said, there are still quite a lot of decisions and actions by an individual person that we cannot predict with any precision or reliability. From a purely practical perspective, it is useful to assume the existence of free will because otherwise, why can't we predict these things?

>From a purely practical perspective, it is useful to assume the existence of free will because otherwise, why can't we predict these things?

Why? I've never heard a coherent non-religious explanation of what substance or system that free will is even supposed to be. I don't see how it could help at all from a practical perspective. Would it somehow help us understand next weeks weather (that we cannot predict with any precision or reliability) better if we assume that wind and water have free will?

Well the difference between manslaughter and murder is intent. What is the concept of crime if we believe our actions are predetermined? Does that mean there is no crime? Or that every crime is prosecuted under strict liability?

Would a person still be pleased and surprised to get a nice birthday card if they believed it was the inevitable result of the clockwork universe?

>What is the concept of crime if we believe our actions are predetermined?

That's a rationalization of society's reaction to people's behavior. If you need to make up things that you don't absolutely believe exist in order to justify actions that you're taking in the real world, that's bad.

>Would a person still be pleased and surprised to get a nice birthday card if they believed it was the inevitable result of the clockwork universe?

Not believing in a soul or spirit doesn't give you precognitive powers, other than in the fact that your reasoning about the future doesn't involve magical effects, so is generally going to be more accurate.

A powerful point, but it relies on the idea that a single set of initial conditions can only result in one outcome. I'm not sure that's true?

> a single set of initial conditions can only result in one outcome

Nobody knows if this is true or not, or even whether we could know this to be true or not.

For more info: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

No, thats not accurate, not having free will means we dont consciously choose what we do next - not that there is only one choice we will make in any given circumstance.

For example, I chose to ride a boat today, but it was raining, so I read a book instead.

I understand the definition. Unless I misinterpreted, the suggestion was that due to circumstance, you can only be expected to ever make one choice. Therefore set of initial conditions = predictable outcome.

That was what I was questioning, as the poster above noted, this isn't something you can assume. It's not really an argument for or against free will, just that particular explanation of why we don't have free will.

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