Is Free Will just a beautiful lie? | Hacker News Reader

Is Free Will just a beautiful lie?

2 pointsmohi-kalantari5 comments

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how much credit do you give to yourself for getting to where you are?”

This question has always fascinated me. I’ve asked this question from numerous people and based on people’s background and how much they have suffered, I get all the numbers from 1 to 10. (or even higher)

I don’t know much about our “Soul” and its effect, whether we carry something from our past life (if we had any) but I can see these factors as things that truly shape us: - Family - Surroundings/Community (somehow family again) - IQ/brain capacity and our appearance

We have no say in any of these and are totally random. Whatever we do and decide, can be traced back to these factors.

I’d like to argue we humans are static functions generating the same results if fed the same inputs. If a supercomputer can capture all the inputs from the beginning and does the required processing, we can become deterministic creatures.

Back to the first question, people like to compare themselves with people of the same age, arguing I have decided to suffer and grow at some point blah blah and because of that give more credit to their “will” and themselves.

I’d say it’s easy to compare yourself when you are 25 or 30 but do you ever compare two kids aged 5 in totally different circumstances?

Another interesting fact supporting this: In 1983, Benjamin Libet and colleagues conducted a study revealing that the brain's readiness potential (Bereitschaftspotential) begins approximately 550 milliseconds before a voluntary action. Participants reported conscious awareness of their intention to act about 200 milliseconds before the movement, suggesting that unconscious neural processes initiate actions prior to conscious awareness. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/

In my mind all of this leads to “illusion of will”. Although I do not look at it in a nihilistic way, it just helps me be more humble and embrace the randomness of the world and appreciate what I have.

I've always struggled with this concept. I ask people to define 'free will' when they start to talk about it. As there only seems to be either causally determined processes or indetermined (random) ones. There's no inbetween where something like a consciousness can make a 'free' choice between options. That choice is always a product of weighted factors like memories, mood, stray particles blasting through my brain, etc.

My will is my ability to weigh up options but it's not 'free'.

The one angle that's started to pop up more and more in research that looks promising is that of the brain's possible use of micro-tubules that allow for cognitive interaction with a quantum state. i.e. possible decision-making within an indeterminate plane.

Here's a study on the concepts:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/integrative-neuroscienc...

Or that just means our brains found an evolutionary edge by shifting decision-making to a dice roll when being locked into totally causal decision-making was becoming a disadvantage. i.e. the ape that could innovate because it did random things came out on top more than the ape that was totally derivative in its behaviours.

> My will is my ability to weigh up options but it's not 'free'.

In what way? What do you want when you want it to be free?

Maybe the problem is just that "deterministic" and "random" both sound like "you don't get options". But you do get options. Then, subject to probabilities, you choose between them, like a process. Your will has to be a process: what else could it be?

I think the nuance here is that I mean there is no true free action of choosing. The choice is always controlled by something outside of my control, either a random chance or determined by my memories/experiences/biases etc.

I'm saying that 'free' is essentially meaningless, it can't be defined in this context.

If my will is a process whereby I come to a decision between options, but my decision is constrained by random or determined factors, there's no room for any personal freedom, I, my will, is controlled completely by those factors and is not free.

If "my control" is another way to say "my will", the issue becomes:

My control is controlled by something outside of my control

Which is technically true, but looks silly. It implies an insatiable desire for power, because no amount of control is satisfying so long as there remains something external. To rephrase again,

There is something outside of my control

Or even more simply,

There is something

So interacting with anything (even in a dream!) brings up this issue due to the thing being an obstacle. The complaint is really "things exist". Oh no!

I highly recommend reading "Determined" by Robert Sapolsky.

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