There is no such thing as "FreeWill"

Well here's a simple way of understanding it:

If everything you do has a reason, you do not have free will.

If you are capable of doing things that transcend reason, you are a GOD! :p

True, but that's because I'm me, every personality has a different amount of free will in them. Me being quite logical and quite shy, means that personally my free will is limited, someone more gregarious and/or dumb has more free will due to the fact they may act stupidly/without reason/to see the reaction on some one's face etc etc. It's not the fact that there isn't free will in the world but more-so the fact that it is your choice to apply it to situations and if you don't want to, you don't have to.

my lack of free will is not letting me participate in this discussion

...wut

I seriously can't grasp this concept. The more you talk about how we don't have free will, the more it sounds like we have free will. xD

Yeah, the more you look at it, the more paradoxical it becomes. This is one of those conundrums that you can't really find an answer to.

I've thought a lot about this and I've come to my own conclusion that it's really like the Placebo effect. Basically, if you truly believe it to be true, it is, while if you don't believe it, it's not true. Some people can see it as us being controlled like we control Sims in the video game and someone else is controlling us. Life is a gift, and just because you're alive doesn't mean you're living. Whether or not you're under control, always remember that you're thinking about your decision first, and only get to live once (depending on your beliefs). If you go to heaven, sweet. If you go to hell, that sucks. Right now you have the opportunity to make your life what you want, so do that. I see it as you can either go out and live your life to the fullest knowing that you are making your own decisions, or live your life in fear thinking that you're under control.

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Originally Posted by WoodburyRaider

and someone else is controlling us

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There are more options here than just 'free will' and 'being controlled.'

Consciousness isn't special. It is a function of neurons firing. It does not take place in some magical alternate dimension; it is subject to the same physical laws as dropping a rock or the heart of a star.

By that token, given a sufficiently omniscient observer (what some people would call God, I suppose), it is very easy to see that 'free will' is an illusion created by the appearance of enormous choice in any given situation. We think we are choosing to have a ham sandwich instead of turkey, kiss that girl instead of that boy, turn left instead of right. In reality, the universe is (again, from the standpoint of a sufficiently omniscient observer) much more like a pool table; hit this ball at that angle with this velocity and it will go there. Chaos theory, while fascinating, is largely only a matter of filling the gaps of our imperfect knowledge with 'because.'

I agree 100% with the fact that there is no free will.
Also, one of my favourite songs Freewill by Rush.
I just want to point out a few things.

A planet of playthings,
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive

Its saying that everyone does everything for a reson, and the "strings" are all the factors, that make the desiding for us, and none of it can be controled.

All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate.
Kicked in the face,
You can't pray for a place
In heaven's unearthly estate.

Just more lines to say how we are controled by these factors

You have opened my eyes, this is a very good example of your "thery"

From my observations of the world around me, I believe that somehow, determinism and free will are both able to exist in this universe at the same time. Apparently this makes me a "compatibilist". Though I don't feel I can give a satisfactory answer as to how. I think Hume has an interesting point when he says it comes down to definitions. If, by free will, you mean that human beings can act without a cause, then the answer is no as far as I can tell. If; however, the question is can human beings act without compulsion, then the answer is yes.

What about Love? Isn't that the very definition of free-will?

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Originally Posted by wolverine_2008

What about Love? Isn't that the very definition of free-will?

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Not if it's already determined who you are going to fall in love with, though I'm simply playing devil's advocate here.

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Originally Posted by wolverine_2008

What about Love? Isn't that the very definition of free-will?

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Yet I thought you couldn't "choose" who to fall in love with... it just happens?
If I knew love was a freewill choice then I wouldn't have fallen for a girl I could never have :rolleyes:


As cold as it seems, "love" is just an evolutionary trait to keep a mating pair together to nurture their offspring.
I'm just an old fashioned romantic ;)



It's been a fascinating debate so far - well done all involved :D

So did Jesse actually make his own decision to take the whale back to the sea, or did fate make him do it?

I'm confused now.

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Originally Posted by Macnme

Yet I thought you couldn't "choose" who to fall in love with... it just happens?
If I knew love was a freewill choice then I wouldn't have fallen for a girl I could never have :rolleyes:

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I tried a few times to love a girl that wasn't interested in me. I'm going with it was their freewill that thought otherwise. :p

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Originally Posted by Macnme

Illusionists like Derren Brown can put this to great effect - where he has two envelopes, one full of money the other empty - and can even tell the person "The money is in Envelope B" - but because he knows how to manipulate their judgement call - they will 'always' pick envelope A".

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what if someoen chooses envelope B

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Originally Posted by Macnme

Freewill is an illusion created by your mind.
It's like imagining an Elephant - in your mind you can see the elephant, it's large, it's grey, it has a trunk... it is the essense of Elephant. But that Elephant does not actually exist, it is simply a construct of your mind.
Similarly, Freewill is simply a construct of the mind that we use to convince ourselves that our judgement call (based on the pre-existing set of conditions) is our own choice and therefore something we would want to do.

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Is it bad that my elephant didn't have a trunk until you mentioned it?

As for the discussion, it is an interesting concept. If it was true, who makes the choice? Is the future right until the end of time predetermined? I always saw time as what we make of it. There is no future, only 'now', which would mean time-travel to the future impossible because the furthest we could go is right now. This goes completly against that. Interesting.

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Originally Posted by Macnme

Actually - you are quite wrong.
The decision for me to post specifically on this website - specifically about this topic - is based on a myriad of pre-existing conditions which I played no part in.
Such as the discovery of electricity - leading to the eventual invention of computers, leading to the ineternet - leading eventually to LBPcentral.com.
Then there is the pre-existing factors of me being a creative type person - which I have a seeming genetic predisposition - making LBP one of my favourite games.
Then there is my argumentative nature - to do with my upbringing ;
Then there is the desire not to do work and instead post on forums: a judgement call that posting on forums will be more fun than doing work.

So a combination of environmental, genetic, and pre-existing factors such as upbringing - all determine that I will be posting this very post - and a similar set of circumstances dictate that you would post what you posted, in defense of freewill.

But at no point does "Freewill" need to enter into it.
Freewill has yet to be proven to exist.

Also consider - is it only humans that have freewill? - How do chimpanzees decide which banana to eat? - how do dogs choose what foodstuffs to eat? how do ameobas decide what direction to swim in?


We are simply making a series of "Judgement Calls" based on all of the pre-existing factors that have led us up to this point.

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Then how can you correct an ominous pseudoscience by renaming it? Clearly, it doesn't exist, so neither would your theory. So your thinking of "Judgement Calls" is a ludicrous as freewill itself; it's the same concept, but under a different name. It's called determinism, which both that and freewill fall into the argument of incompatibilism, which promptly denies either one of the two (or both). So, when you look at it, one side of this argument is as irrelevant as the other. So, if free will does not exist, then neither would Judgement Calls (or determinism for that matter).

True, there are always factors and variables when trying to comprehend various aspects. But how they're interpreted is an entirely different story. The mindset of each individual life form that'd encounter the situation presented before them will vary immensely between each mind. The independent variable (the thought process) is so anonymous that it's near impossible to crunch into a science. No two individuals are alike, human or otherwise.

And in the end, there's no point in arguing this if there's no possibility of indefinitely proving one or the other. Whether it be a choice pre-determined by various factors or decided upon independently, a choice is a choice; either way, it's made. And if they don't want to believe, they just don't want to believe. There's no actual freedoms or factors involved. It just happens.

So how can you openly say I'm wrong when you're in the same situation? And, if these points I've brought up mean anything, then that means both of us are wrong (or one of us are right, depending on the individual).

When I said you were flat wrong, I was meaning that of course the present is absolutely dependant on the past. The pre-existig conditions are the most important factor in determining the future state of something.

& I don't mean that there is no freewill, so therefore our lives are predetermined. I don't believe in 'fate'.
But the future is predictable to a certain extent - if you know enough about the present. Take the 3 to 5 day weather forecast for example. Weather is a chaotic system, so can only be predicted (right now) with a certain degree of accuracy - but as we understand more about the system, the better we are at predicting it.

What it means to have no freewill and live your life based on a series of judgement calls is that we are a constantly collapsing wave function. Like schrodinger's cat, you cannot know the state of the cat until opening the box... you cannot know the state of the future until we have got there. You can "imagine" a future, but how that future plays out may completely go against your "freewill" choice - so the choice will be adapted (showing that it is not freewill, but a series of judgement calls - ie; my "choice" didn't work out, so I will make this new 'choice' based on what has happened).
And as the state, position and momentum, of everything in the universe is dependant on it's state just prior to the measurement - then it follows that we are moving through time, at each moment making a series of judgement calls (move left or move right, jump out the way of that bus, eat now because I'm hungry, eat later because I'm busy etc) - rather than deciding how to act out of freewill.

It's helpfull to think of things in evolutionary terms.
An ameoba decides which way to move/what to ingest based on the outside stimulus - tiny chemical changes in the surrounding environment dictating which way it will move. Not *that* long ago in evolutionary history, we were also ameobas.
As we evolved, we evolved more complex sensors to detect what is surrouding us. like eyes, ears and noses etc. With these, we could detect other changes in our environment to a greater extent (it smells like there might be food over there) - and we would use this information to inform our movement/course of action.
Fast forward a few million years... to the proto-chimpazee that eventually evolved into a human. This chimp spent alot of time in the water (why we lost our fur) - and ate alot of sea-food (why we have a bigger brain). This idea that we are the chimp that tried to walk back into the ocean is also supported by the fact that new born human infants have a natural instict to swim, where-as our closest evolutionary cousins do not. This chimp-like animal developed some new ablities thanks to it's increased brain size... the abilty to plan "in it's head". The evolution of the nest also helped with this - as previously we would have to test all of our plans in the 'real world' - where the consequenses of a wrong decision would be death - now, in a safe comfortable nest we had the abilty to 'test out' differet behaviors (animals with "play" behaviours are more intelligent than other animals). What we developed was the "Nest in our heads" - the ability to test out different behaviors and outcomes as a mental construct rather than a physical reality.
The "freewill" software we developed was very handy for predicting the future events of certain actions - so that we could plan our actions (make pre-judgements) before actually acting them out. We could imagine what would happen if we walked up to the alpha-male of the group and stole his banana (the alpha-male will probably beat me to death) and adjust our actions accordingly. Rather than steal the alpha-males banana, you'd "choose" to go and eat something else.
Now would you say that that proto-human chimp was exersizing "freewill" in deciding that if he wants to survive, then stealing the alpha-males banana isn't a good idea? Or was it a sound judgement call, based on the surrounding environment/pre-existing conditions?


Also, your judgements can be impaired by environmental factors - such as a lack of oxygen or ingestion of chemicals, making you behave in "strange ways" - surely a mind that has freewill wouldn't be so dependant on such base chemical requirements?

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Originally Posted by Macnme

That's random chance isn't it...

Or is it?
Actually it isn't "that" random.
Where you stop and where you point, is again - decided by predetermined conditions... such as the starting point of you spinning... how long you can spin for without feeling dizzy - how long you can hold up your arm before it gets tired... all of these factors will affect the "end point" of where you are pointing.

But even so - how is randomly spinning and pointing an exersize in "freewill" - it's an exersize in randomness... as random as rolling a dice.
Do you have any "freewill" in determining what your dice roll will be?

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Over-all I am quite convinced about your theory, but if you did have a ticket and someone asked you if you did, you could lie and say, "No i don't actually" for no peticular reason. Wouldn't that be free will?

I'm going to try and mix up an argument which hasn't been answered yet and probably never will, odds on that this goes badly... how would freewill be affected if you had a time machine? Because if everything is already set for you and you could suddenly change them how would it work? Would the universe implode or somethin'? :p