Hacker News Reader

Comment by bellerose | Hacker News Reader

You never have "real" control over your own actions because free will is an illusion. Thus, my emotional state tends to rarely get angry compared to when I thought free will was a possibility. Since understanding there isn't any control over anything makes me realize what can a person reasonably blame others or themselves if nobody has any choice over how they came to be or act. I don't necessarily gain control but I'm more functioning in society than before. That's typically the goal for everyone because than we have a better living experience.

View on HN

> You never have "real" control over your own actions because free will is an illusion.

This is facile, and you certainly haven't proven the absence of free will just bey stating it here.

I believe the best assumption, since we feel as though e have free will, is to behave as though we and other people (and animals) have free will.

But aside from that, the fine article isn't really saying anything new. It's a known thing that anger has a dis-inhibiting effect. IIRC, it bypasses the prefrontal cortex in favour of the limbic system.

This is why so many religions and philosophies (esp Buddhism) warn us about the dangers of acting on our anger.

Anger makes us do ill considered things, and we often harm people and regret it later.

There are some interesting arguments that we'd be better off not assuming free will. Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame) talks about it quite a bit. He mentions his stance briefly in this interview https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/05/yuval-noah-h... , but he goes into it deeper in his books. One of his main points is that, as neuroscience and AI get better, external actors to you are able to "understand you better than you understand yourself" and basically start to program you. People are already concerned that this is happening to some degree (the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example), and it's likely to get more and more severe as technology improves. And one of his big points is that the people who believe most in the sovereignty of their own will will be least likely to protect themselves from such outside influences.

The reason I think we should assume we have free will is a moral one.

If you believe you don't have free will, it can be easy to excuse all sorts of behaviour, because it was 'predetermined ' anyway.

Sort of like, stealing candy bars from a store then saying, I don't have free will, what can I do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I agree there would be a large moral shift, and it kind of boggles my mind to try to think about it, but I don't think it's necessarily untenable.

Taking the candy bar example, in current society, even someone who doesn't believe in free will probably won't steal a candy bar, since there's a good chance they'll get caught, and then shamed and fined. There can still be a system of rules without a sense of free will.

The mindset would probably affect every aspect of life, but just looking at criminal justice, my intuition is that we would reduce how retributive it is, and switch to something more rehabilitation focused. Then again, it's hard to imagine what the knock on effects of that would be. I could see it going too far and getting exploited. Still, I'd be happy to see society experiment with moves that direction.

Oh, I thought the article was about psychology and where what we have studied illustrates determinism and where nothing has ever shown free will. I mean even what comes out of neuroscience shows how the brain reacts before we're even aware. Free will is an impossibility, how can oneself make choice or decisions that are unaffected by the external forces exerted upon oneself. One's birth being the "starting point" into reality is all that decides everything until the end.

You might be interested in Daniel Dennett’s thoughts on the matter, if you aren’t already familiar with him.

He should have just invented another word for his interpretation of what he defines as free will. Otherwise it creates confusion for people who assume they're making their own choice and without understanding the choice was derived from all the external forces upon oneself; where nobody has any control in what the future experiences shall be.

Why even bother trying to explain something to others if free will is an illusion? What are you relying on to persuade them if they don't have a mind capable of understanding you?

It's not like they had a choice…

Indeed. Even if you don't believe in it at a philosophical level, you don't exactly have any choice in the matter. We all behave as if we have free will -- the only alternative would be to just stop doing anything (e.g. being catatonic).

This as well.

I personally believe in free will, but persuasion and learning can still exist even if free will doesn't. It could be argued that people's deterministic reactions led to them reading something someone else posted and that leads to their mind changing. Memes and movements would exist even without free will. It happens in experiments on simple organisms that arguably lack free will (those with very narrow and predictable behaviors).

Some of HN understands hard determinism and once in awhile I see an interesting post. Otherwise it's just a comment triggered from reading the article. I enjoy it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com