Free will isn’t a concept (unless you mean determinism)

post by KatjaGrace · 2007-07-15T13:51:00.000Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

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Imagine something happens. For instance you make a decision. There are three possibilities for this occurence:

  1. It could be related purely to other factors (determinism)
  2. It could be not related to other factors (randomness)
  3. It could be a combination of these (a mixture of determinism and randomness)

None of these are free will (as commonly understood). So where does the concept of free will fit in? How could an occurence escape from being in one of these categories? Clearly it can’t. So there is no possibility of a concept of free will that is in opposition to determinism, let alone a chance of it existing in reality.

But you feel like you have free will (whatever that is – just don’t think about it), don’t you? Or to put it another way, you feel like your actions are neither determined nor random. You choose them.

And that is precisely why they are determined. They are determined by you. And you already exist to the finest detail at the time you are making the decision. If you made choices (or some element of them) not controlled by your personality, experience, thoughts and anything else that comes under the heading of ‘the state of your brain as a result of genetics and your prior environments’, they would be random, which still isn’t free will (not to mention being a less personal and less appealing model, if that’s how you choose your beliefs).

You might argue that you can choose what to think and how to feel , and how heavily to let those things influence you, when making a decision. That doesn’t alter the situation however. Those are then choices too, and your decisions for them would presumably have to be made based on other thoughts and feelings , which you would presumably choose, and so on. The point at which free will should have occurred would just be shifted back indefinitely. Again you just have a long chain of cause and effect.

The closest thing you can have to free will is for your actions to be determined purely by the state of your brain. Free will is determinism.


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comment by TAG · 2024-06-25T18:16:58.506Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

None of these are free will (as commonly understood

Some believe that free will must be a tertium datur, a third thing fundamentally different to both determinism and indeterminism. This argument has the advantage that it makes free will logically impossible,and the disadvantage that hardly any who believes in free will defined it that way. In particular, naturalistic libertarians are happy to base free will on a mere mixture of determinism and indeterminism.

Another concern about naturalistic libertarianism is that determinism is needed to put a decision into effect once it had been made. If one's actions are unrelated to ones decisions, one would certainly lack control in a relevant sense. But it is not the case that we are able to get the required results 100% of the time, so full determinism is perhaps unnecessary to achieve a realistic, "good enough" level of control. Additionally, there does not have to be the same amount of indeterminism at every stage of the deciding-and-acting process. In "two stage" models, the agent alternates between going into a more indeterministic mode to make the "coin toss" , and then into a more deterministic mode to implement it.

If you made choices (or some element of them) not controlled by your personality, experience, thoughts and anything else that comes under the heading of ‘the state of your brain as a result of genetics and your prior environments’, they would be random, which still isn’t free will

Because of the stipulative definition? Such choices can still relate to onesaims., values personality , and history.

And that is precisely why they are determined. They are determined by you

If they are determined by me and nothing else, that would be something like free will...but it's not pure determinism, because pure determinism means everything is inevitable from the dawn of time , including my decisions. It is something you can get from a two stage theory, though.