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Not everyone thinks free will exists, and from personal experience I don't find freedom of will in my actions or emotions(I suppose I am assuming that's where it's located). It was once something I believed in, but now I don't.

If free will exists, how might this be possible?

It seems contradictory to me that I might not be aware of my most substantial vehicle of control. How could one say that I am in control of something, if I don't even know it exists. How do I use it? Maybe I stopped having it when I stopped believing in it, but I don't remember free will then either. Maybe my true self is beyond thought or experience? I guess there are a lot of ways you could explain this pseudo paradox, how do you?

EDIT: Changed the title in order to holistically reflect the body of the question.

George Allen
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    Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Philip Klöcking Sep 02 '22 at 05:16
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    Free Will is forced on you - you have no choice! – Scott Rowe Sep 02 '22 at 15:07
  • Art. It is in being a creator. "“The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now. We could only know them if causality were an inner necessity, like that of logical deduction. —The connection of knowledge and what is known is that of logical necessity” -Wittgenstein TLP 5.136 – CriglCragl Sep 03 '22 at 00:48
  • "To the extent to which a man believes that it is in his power, or in any man's power, to promote desirable behaviors in others, to that extent he believes in psychological causation and not in free will." -Bertrand Russell – CriglCragl Sep 03 '22 at 00:52

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Choosing to believe something (or becoming convinced of it) does not make that thing true. You could become convinced that you are Thor (lacking only Mjolnir to prove your divinity); you could become convinced that you are an alien masquerading as a human; you could become convinced that you are a robot. It's possible you actually are one of those things, but the weight of evidence suggests not, and we should always test our beliefs against experience.

The subjective experience we all share is that we make choices. We don't experience the world as a succession of events over which we have no control; we experience it as series of decisions we make, often within constraints but rarely with no flexibility or ability to choose otherwise. The only people who regularly deny subjective free will are psychiatric patients undergoing delusions or criminals trying to escape accountability for their actions.

In order to believe that one has no freedom of will, one must discount all experiential evidence to assert an otherwise unsupported theory. It's an unscientific approach. That isn't to say it's not true; merely to say that it's not a belief based on best evidence.

Ted Wrigley
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Misattribution. You have an experience where you use your free will to make a decision, but you attribute that to some other factors.

The opposite could also be the case, a person with no free will believes they have free will, and they maintain that belief by attributing decisions they make to free will rather than to other factors.

People are notoriously bad at investigating our minds and motives, so the existence of people who believe in free will and the existence of people who do not is unsurprising.

To be more clear: generally, people have the experience of making decisions. That is, they have memories in which there were two options, and by some deliberate process, they chose an option. This is generally what people mean by free will, that they are an agent who could have, at some point in time, made a different decision than they did.

So if you have have the experience of making decisions, you either possess free will or alternately experience the illusion of having free will. But what experience you have is in no way dependent on whether you do or do not have free will.

It also isn't dependent on whether or not you believe you have free will. One could believe that one is a deterministic automata, and that the experience of free will is an illusion, and yet be exercising free will all the time.

If someone did not experience decision making at all, if they never had the subjective feeling that they were considering potential actions, I suppose in that case it would be difficult to see how they were exercising free will.

philosodad
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    I think I could swallow the possibility of misatribution for many other proposed phenomenon. But my understanding is that free will is distinguished by what I have personal control over. By what mechanism could I exercise control and not know about it? – George Allen Sep 01 '22 at 18:42
  • I don't think the issue is necessarily that George Allen is attributing it to other factors, maybe more a type of "agnosticism" where the experience itself doesn't give you any clue as to whether the decision was caused by prior causal factors outside one's conscious experience, or whether it was wholly uncaused. Similarly if I see an image in front of me, there's nothing in the experience itself to tell me if it's caused by photons hitting my retina or if it's a hallucination, both are just abstract concepts I might connect to the experience, not part of the experience itself. – Hypnosifl Sep 01 '22 at 19:25
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    @GeorgeAllen because there isn't any internal difference between exercising control and not exercising control. Unless you literally always feel like everything action "your" body takes, and every thought "you" have, happens spontaneously and is completely outside of any control, you have an experience that most people would consider "making a decision". If you have no such experience, it could be because you are deliberately choosing to reject any such experience. – philosodad Sep 01 '22 at 19:44
  • every thought "you" have, happens spontaneously and is completely outside of any control How would the feeling of "happens spontaneously with no outside control" differ subjectively from the feeling of "happens due to causes outside your ability to consciously detect/infer"? As I said, it seems like your belief in the former rather than the latter is an abstract concept you add to the experience, not part of the experience itself. – Hypnosifl Sep 01 '22 at 19:50
  • @Hypnosifl because in one case you would have a memory of making a decision and in the other case you wouldn't. – philosodad Sep 01 '22 at 19:51
  • Why do you think you wouldn't have a memory of making a decision in the latter case? The experience of making a decision seems just like a shift from having several viable options to having one I have the feeling of approving of/preferring, nothing in my direct experience rules out the possibility that the shift to a feeling of approval had causes outside of my conscious experience. – Hypnosifl Sep 01 '22 at 19:54
  • Because if you have the experience of making a decision you have the experience of exercising free will, whether you actually have free will or not. – philosodad Sep 01 '22 at 19:55
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    @Hypnosifl Yes your last sentence gets at what I think is happening. I feel like I am making decisions, but I don't find this enough evidence to conclude that I had the freedom to have made any another decision. I just know I made the decision I made. – George Allen Sep 01 '22 at 19:57
  • @GeorgeAllen then you have the experience of free will, which you are attributing to other factors. – philosodad Sep 01 '22 at 19:58
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    @philosodad Where is the freedom in the experience? – George Allen Sep 01 '22 at 19:59
  • Because if you have the experience of making a decision you have the experience of exercising free will, whether you actually have free will or not. So you are defining "the experience of exercising free will" in such a way that an AI which is actually lacking free will (unless you are a compatibilist) could possibly still have the experience of it? But that seems to contradict your earlier claim that "in one case you would have a memory of making a decision and in the other case you wouldn't", since the two cases differed only in whether the being actually had libertarian free will or not. – Hypnosifl Sep 01 '22 at 20:04
  • @Hypnosifl you misunderstand me. No comment I have made in any way relies on the existence or non-existence of free will. I am only talking about the subjective experience of free will, or not having the subjective experience of free will. Whether that experience is accurate is irrelevant. – philosodad Sep 01 '22 at 20:17
  • So someone can freely choose the thing they did in fact choose, yet not have been able to choose otherwise. Huh. – Scott Rowe Sep 02 '22 at 15:10
  • @philosodad. We were at loggerheads in the chat over something free will related ages ago. Reading your chat with Ted Wrigley re. this question though, I found myself agreeing with almost everything you said, so I'm wondering if my position on our earlier argument may have changed at all. Do you remember what the question was? – Futilitarian Aug 02 '23 at 14:19
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    @Futilitarian it's also possible that my position has changed somewhat based on questions you asked or objections you raised! I don't remember the specific question either, though. – philosodad Aug 09 '23 at 15:53
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I'll tell you how I do it: I am free to behave as though I have free will, which is what everyone expects of me, and when I think about that it seems like it should count for something. When a thing impresses itself upon me in terms of "should", I give it the benefit of the doubt.

Steven Harder
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You seem to think of free will as an ability to control something. And there seems to be a mismatch between what you know you can control and what you feel you can control.

We do control our own actions and through them we have a limited control over what happens around us. For some people this is enough to be called free will.

We do not control other people's actions or events happening to us.

We do not control our own feelings, preferences, personality, personal history, imagination, needs or desires.

In other words, we do not control the problems we face or question we are asked. We can only control the solutions and the answers.

Pertti Ruismäki
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