Been reading a bunch of neurological studies. Apparently our brain makes decisions for us and then convinces us we made them. Weird.Your brain on drugs. Serotonin.There’s already proof our brain tricks us by constructing “narratives” so that we understand reality rather than experiencing just “plain old reality”.
This is a classic test. Focus on the black dot below and decide whether the moving object is going in a straight line or curved lined.It’s moving in a straight line but focusing on the black dot makes it look curved. Classic optical illusion.
So how else could our brains be tricking us? If they’re tricking us, do we really have free will?
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You only think you willfully answered this question.
Do we have free will?
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Anonymous
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I'd say it really depends.
If you're talking about a person that has no mental illness/disabilities or brain functioning illnesses/disabilities, then by scientific definition all of our choices are our own.
But a lot of the choices we make are more 'informed' and 'thought through' as we grow with age. That's why children, adolescents and very young adults tend to make more mistakes than grown adults. They are easily swayed by internal and external factors out of their control, these then alter their thought functions and processes and limit their free will.
From this point, you could argue that fully grown adults have more free will than children and adolescents. This is because they are their own individuals, they have learnt through experiences over the years and are not influenced by care givers and other external factors as much as children can be. So a grown adults choices are more likely to be their own. They are fully mentally developed and can say 'no' to what other people try to put in their heads and put them through.
If you're going along the mental illness and severe brain functioning defects/illnesses, then this is when it starts to get more confusing and heated.
Someone with a severe/serious mental illness, such as severe paranoid schizophrenia, although they are 'in control of their cognitive and physical functions' (not insane), will have very limited free will. I've seen it before myself. (This is my personal experience knowing of this)
They believe that everyone is out to get them. They walk down the street, everyone is staring at them. Everything and everyone is plotting against them. 'They're trying to destroy me. I need to get away'. (Paranoid delusions/hearing voices/hallucinations, could be all three together.) They then buy into these delusions and or voices/hallucinations. It becomes their reality. They stop seeing friends, they stop going to work or college, they stop communicating with other people and then they stop going out. Therefore, their thinking processes are still there, but now altered to this false reality.
They technically have very little free will now, as they cannot differentiate between what is real or not. How can you then make a fully-free decision if you have no grasp on reality? At least that's my opinion from seeing someone with it.
(Please don't take offence to this, it is an opinion. I'm not a trained psychologist or neurologist. This is my take on the subject of free will.)
I would admit that many scientists do not believe that humans have free will. Because most are reductionists. Like Hawking said, how can we have free will when according to Einstein, our future has already been played out in other parts of the Universe? Billions of light years away from earth, according to the laws of simultaneity, we have died, everything we were going to do in our lives we have already done. Every decision we made, ever choice we ever decided.
Hawking also explained, why would the universe allow for the existence of beings who's actions/behavior cannot be explained or predicted by physics?
The problem is consciousness.
Even if we don't think we have free will? Why do we think we do? We have this internal movie running, this first person perspective on reality that is not shared by anyone. And no matter what physicists claim, they cannot explain why would consciousness evolve as some requirement of survival. The most successful lifeforms in the universe don't seem to have any requirement of consciousness. And their behaviors can be perfectly predicted by science.
We don't seem to think there is a way to predict all human behavior. And that is where we are stuck. For free will to exist, we need to prove that the universe's future cannot be observed or determined. But we don't think that Einstein is wrong.
The only thing that seems to make sense is the idea of the multiverse. That there are other realms where every single decision, action, etc. happens. Giving us the illusion that we have free will and that the future is not determined.
I'm of the predestination from the big bang or before camp. I don't believe that self awareness or analysis creates the ability to free oneself from impulses, it just leads a person down the line of impulses they have in reaction to these other stimulus. You will interpret something as desirable or not, then act upon it using your various capacities and limitations. Our culture, mental capacity, and senses simply give us more options to weight during our impulsive, but sometimes drawn out, selection process. Our selection process can also be effected by urgency, but as I wrote, it is simply a process of impulses interacting with one another.
That's my take, at least. I think that hedonism (pain/pleasure principles) is what gives us and other animals a dialectic to work with. This gives us the illusion of choice.
If we study the behaviour of animals we find them predictable to the point they can be reduced to mathematical models. If humans conform to a models predictions them they're following their genetic program. Eg human eating to looking around rate correlates to the number sitting at a table, exactly as it does to grazing animals. But in other cases we don't fit in where we should. Eg our mating system should be one male and several wives. The fact it isn't is evidence of freewill. But we can argue this isn't freewill but a will imposed on us by society. The same logic can be applied to political views, most people tend to follow their neighbours which is why you get traditional left or rightwing cities.
True, but homosexuality and monogamy is present in nature. I’ll agree that monogamy is more human, but strangely the same percentage of the animal kingdom is homo as humans.
I don't see the fact that our mating patterns aren't the same as those of grazing animals is evidence of free will. It might simply mean our brains are more sophisticated.
We are more complex than monkeys so using the same model doesn't prove anything. The mechanisms behind any decision is not fully understood and because they're connected to a self only creates a form of self-deception.
Yes, we have free will. I am aware of the study but it gives no conclusive evidence on what is really going on. Perception is limited by the body and the brain, so that can indeed be tricked. And perception trickery is the way to control someone for sure and override their choices. I know they say that the brain decides what will happen before the physical action happens in our bodies, which of course makes a lot of sense. And some people then claim that these decisions were never truly ours, but thats not true.
To me i strongly believe the brain is a receiver of the individual, not the creator of one. So its your soul that decides what happens, the brain receives and follows. But to an inside observer we would merely be making these decisions seemingly randomly and then later become aware of what the decision was by executing on it. What you missed is what the decision originated from.
So if the point of origin is external to our physical bodies, you'd have no physical means to measure it or study it. But we do have a way of knowing in theory, once brain modification technology has matured we will know. Can someone be programmed to be identically minded to someone else? If so, then yes everything is an illusion and there is nothing beyond the body. But if they have to work around a will of its own if they program someone they'd have proven the existence of a soul. Same with cloning, if you can't clone the exact same behavior if you clone the body and mind you'd also proof the existence of a soul.
So if I didn't have the free will to answer this question, I wouldn't be given the free will to answer this question in the first place. That being said, since I'm indeed answering this question, it's safe to say I've been given free will to answer it.
Proverbs 16:9 - A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.
Revelation 3:20 - Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
"You only think you willfully answered this question."
-well yeah, otherwise I wouldn't be here to answer it. I had the choice to or not to answer it. This whole thing is coming from God predicting the future and knowing the fate of humanity in detail. God is God, don't think you can fully grasp him. God knows the future, but we still have free will. It must be a difficult concept for some, just as God had always existed.
No. It's not, you just don't understand it yet. God is God. Maybe his intelligence is soo great, He can accurately predict everything everyone will ever do till the end of time.
What's illogical when there is proof everywhere that smoking cigarettes causes health problems and lung cancer yet people do it anyways. Some have the free will to die and others quit and live.
We decide whether to stray from our motivations, senses, and self-preservation instincts or to heed their accumulated input. You can plan out what you want for your future. As far as we understand, we are the only organisms on the planet that can plan for on hypothetical situations that have not even happened or even to review the past and see what we may do differently. If you can simulate yourself into situations and plan for them, it certainly sounds like the most free will any biological form here can undertake. It's more mind boggling that our brain hallucinates the reality around us. Even if we have different frames of reference for how we see things, no one else (for now) other than us humans can even relate the experience of having this developed wet chemical mind. Fascinating!
Yes, but free will doesn't mean what you think it does, what you think it does is a logical inconsistency.
Free will is derived from godel's incompleteness and causality paired with complex beings selected to maximize some things. It's very related to the theory of mind.
I'm going to try to explain, because it's a hard thing to put together.
You have the "theory of mind" which means we model other's "minds". Here, mind means a sufficiently complex general AI that models both the world and other sufficiently complex general AIs which also model other sufficiently complex general AIs.
Yes, it's a self referencial nightmare, which is where gödel comes in. As gödel shows, no system is complete and internally consistent, and no system can prove it's own internal consistency.
So, those modelers will always, inevitably have imperfect models and therefore imperfect control over the environment and other modelers and itself. By not having control, what is meant is that it cannot predict with certainty, what actions the modeler takes or doesn't in order to ensure a future it predicts is not relevant.
That means that the modeler will attempt to take actions that it will fail to take, meaning it has an impetus which is not just a prediction of it's own future. That drive is what we call it's will. The goal of taking an action in order to secure a future knowing such move may fail, but not knowing whether it will fail or not, and knowing it's uncertain.
Words that designate future tenses tend to be words relating to desires, debts and promises, funny enough.
Now, because it understand other agents with the same modeling capacity, it can understand such "will" which is "unburdened" by such other agents. Nobody says that wanting to flap your arms and fly means that your "will" isn't "free". And most people don't say they are being enslaved by not having their will fulfilled by others, which can be translated to not having other's will's enslaved to theirs. That's because most of such agents understand the conditional absence of other agents.
It's even simpler than that, the fact that the universe works on laws prevents free will in the sense of choice from existing if you define free will as the ability to change your future
*laws induce predictability in a system and if a system is predictable from the start it reduces it's possibility of doing anything un predictable. If everything is fixed and you are doing what you were always going to do, do you have free will?
I'm not asking what set theory is, I'm asking how it is related to this assuming you are talking about something other than mathematical set theory. Assuming atoms and particles work the same way they do in a brain as they do in a ball fundamentally if one is predictable the other is too
The neurological tests have little to do with the theological concept of Free Will.
They are two different purviews.
Also, the brain and mind work differently in most people. It's where neurology and psychology intersect, but both are jealously kept apart everywhere else. Mainly as neuro studies are strictly medical. Where psych can go into criminology, social, medical and many other disciplines.
Yes because I have the free will not to just focus on the black dot we have the free will to do studies like this so that people can be warned of such things so we can decide to continue to be trick by optical illusions and such or to look deeper into things. FREE WILL
I would still claim that my subconscious and biology is a part of me and that we still have choices we just don't get the whole range of them. It's just that going against your nature is requiring more willpower.
Of course we have free will. I could just as easily have decided to refrain from responding to your question, but I decided to write this. As for the moving object and black dot, it still looks as though it's moving in a straight line to me. I don't see any difference. Are you sure about this "illusion"?
I think if your brain is tricking you. Technically it’s still you tricking yourself and not some other person manipulating you. So i guess it is free will.
So you didn't have the free will to answer this question asking if you have free will? 🤔
If the omniscient "God" knows a people's fate and gives you a book of the future, gives you have a choice of which fate you want, yet The Omniscient one already knows the answer, but yet which fate do you choose?
I will copy my reply here in case you didn't see it...
So if I didn't have the free will to answer this question, I wouldn't be given the free will to answer this question in the first place. That being said, since I'm indeed answering this question, it's safe to say I've been given free will to answer it.
Proverbs 16:9 - A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.
Revelation 3:20 - Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
Robots are not alive, they can't think, only be programmed. If people were that predictable, then I could see the irrationality of a person and correct their errors with ease.
Some are soo brainwashed there's nothing in this universe that can convince them of their errors. It's almost to the point that some have freewill and others don't, but then again, people have the free will to be blind.
