A question of free will

Question

As I sit here aware of my consciousness I can adequately 'feel' like I have the choice of what to do in the very next moment.

I want to use the analogy of a plant growing toward the sunlight to elaborate on some context behind why I believe free will could be a hallucination.

A plant over time will extend its stem and grow toward the sunlight. If we knew nothing of plants one would reasonably assume this plant could hold consciousness by alterting its physical position in space for survival. We know this is not the case because we understand why this happens.

Just as a plant can seem conscious growing toward the light are we just seeming conscious not in any single person but collectively as a species.

For instance if you are a baby and in the wild you would not in your first generation know to brush your teeth without someone first telling you that you need too and understanding why.

The trials and errors of generations of humans have moulded a survival guide to live longer and how to achieve marvels like travelling to space and taking pictures of black holes.

But is this really our intelligence or borrowed from a rapid spread of information to grow stronger and live longer for as long as possible. Free will hasn't needed to exist for humanity to reach its growth or collective intelligence, I pose in the instance we make a decision it is always the decision you are going to make regardless. I mean it's all good saying I choose A and then when you have picked A, saying "but I could of chose B" so I have free will but thats not a legitimate argument because you didn't chose B and you can not rewind time to do it again to compare them both.

Whether you chose right (reward) or wrong (punishment) the collective hurd learns from your achievement or failure and reiterate it to the next generation. So do I have any free will at all or does it just ultimately to me as an individual it doesn't matter but regardless of my choice everyone will learn from it?

Welcome to philosophy. Your question has many duplicates, most of which are closed as off-topic: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/48288, https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/41801, https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/34125, https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/89525, https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/55885. Do you think your question is useful to others, given all the duplicates? — tkruse, Apr 22 '22 at 22:37
If you want to learn about free will in philosophy, it's best to first do your homework and read https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will — tkruse, Apr 22 '22 at 22:49
Thanks for the reference. I dont align with Diety theories of evolution though thanks. Non of the comprehensive study you've referenced is slightly related to anything in this post. My question poses free will not existing because of collective human data, which is nothing to do with Platos "God's will". I believe asking questions framed thousands of years ago serve no purpose in a modern era. As a comparative to now a high school student knows more than Plato ever did. I'd recommend some Carl Jung if you want abstract and dark like Plato — Barb, Apr 22 '22 at 23:02
Those articles are collective humans data on the topic. You want to talk about us learning as a collective, but you refuse to read up on the knowledge humankind has collected about your question? — tkruse, Apr 22 '22 at 23:24
From referencing a comparative to Plato is it not obvious I already have? Why are you offended? If you can't even comprehend the question you can't exactly give me an answer so no disrespect but I don't need to converse with you about nonsense — Barb, Apr 22 '22 at 23:28
No, citing the name "Plato" does not show that you have read more than the first section of the first article. I am afraid there is no short answer, so you'll have to read all of it. If you are interested. — tkruse, Apr 22 '22 at 23:34
@tkruse and down voting my post is called exacting revenge because you feel humiliated. Malevolence at work, you should look inside about what's causing you to be like that — Barb, Apr 22 '22 at 23:36
I counter-voted tkruse's hostile downvote. Petty downvoting based on personal opinion is not a proper way to be nice to new contributors. — Pertti Ruismäki, Apr 23 '22 at 03:28
I'd say the OP question needs to be clarified. If there's an argument in play, it looks something like, "Free will is not needed to explain anything in the actual physical world; therefore (assuming some other things, not clearly stated), it is very likely that free will does not exist, or that its existence is not even a meaningful notion." Fair enough, I suppose, though I doubt explanatory strength is the criterion by which to judge on the existence of abstract (or vague, or puzzling) postulated things. — Kristian Berry, Apr 23 '22 at 06:14

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 23 '22 at 10:40

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You’re right, we feel that we have free will but there’s no established way to prove that we do. A dropped object falls and we might say that it chooses to fall, but there’s no way to go back and see if it can choose not to fall.

When we make a decision there are a couple of ways this can go; either it’s a deterministic decision, in which case the outcome was predetermined by the physical state of the universe or it’s non-deterministic which means that there’s something beyond the laws of physics that determines what we do. In the former case there’s no space for free will because the universe will just play out in the ways that was doomed to happen from the beginning. In the latter case we would need to consider whether our decisions were uncontrolled (I.e. not free will) or controlled (free will). If we are to claim that they are controlled then we should put forward a mechanism that would explain how this might work, in other words where do there decisions come from?

answered Apr 23 '22 at 10:40

Frog

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Your answer is nonsense. A deterministic decision is an oxymoron. A non-deterministic decision is just a regular decision. Decision-making has nothing to do with physics. Decisions are not controlled, decisions are things that control the behaviour of the decider. – Pertti Ruismäki Apr 23 '22 at 11:28
This is exactly what I mean @frog. It would be nice to see a model or a theory towards what that would look like – Barb Apr 23 '22 at 13:43
@Barb the more you dig the harder it gets. Although we feel that we have free will and reasonably assume that people around us do too, trying to establish that free will exists in somebody else seems to be impossible; whatever test we can think of to determine that free will exists it would seem that it must be possible to make a clearly deterministic device specifically to pass the test. – Frog Apr 23 '22 at 21:19
Furthermore, for most purposes we have no way to go back and make a decision differently. One chink in the armour is that we can look at quantum physics which appears to allow multiple states to exist until an observer causes the superposition to collapse. I can’t immediately say how that could be exploited and I’m doubtful that a quantum-level event is useful in the context of what appears to be a decision at a human level. – Frog Apr 23 '22 at 21:24
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@Pertti Ruismäki on the contrary, the term is in common usage (and supported by it’s etymology) in computer science where a course of action is selected based on a dataset encountered at runtime that was not available to the architect at compile time. The outcome of the decision-making process is deterministic once the dataset is known. And to say that decision-making has nothing to do with physics contradicts the notion that decision-making determines behaviour that is demonstrably a part of physics. – Frog Apr 24 '22 at 01:43
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@Frog Computers don't make any decisions. The programmer has decided the computer's every action by writing the algorithms that determine the computer's "behaviour". Decision-making has nothing to do with physics. Only implementing the decision (moving some muscles) is physics. – Pertti Ruismäki Apr 24 '22 at 03:18
@Pertti Ruismäki that’s manifestly incorrect, most demonstrably in learning systems where the programmer doesn’t know how the system will solve the problem. Your claim about ‘implementing the decision’ implies some kind of interface between physics and ‘non-physics’ - are you proposing an extension to science and if so what form does it take? – Frog Apr 24 '22 at 06:50
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Computers cannot solve any problems. They don't have any problems. They are just tools made by people to help people to solve their problems. I am not proposing any extension. People deciding their own muscle actions has been business as usual since forever. – Pertti Ruismäki Apr 25 '22 at 02:48
@PerttiRuismäki the computer is analogous of free will. Where I say the first generation doesn't know they have to brush their teeth and why it implies the information is given to us, like a computer is given direction by a program. – Barb Apr 25 '22 at 07:47
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A computer has to be programmed by someone with free will. People with free will can program themselves. – Pertti Ruismäki Apr 25 '22 at 09:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 23 '22 at 03:44

Free will is an individual's ability to make choices.

We make our choices based on what we know and feel. It doesn't matter how we get the knowledge, how correct it is or how much of it we have.

We make our choices based solely on our own reasons anyway. Cumulative human knowledge can only help us make better choices, that's why we have educational systems.

A question of free will

2 Answers2