Free Will: A Reddit Discussion
Does free will exist, and does it matter whether it exists?
r/askphilosophy thinephilosopher
Does free will really exist?
Hi, I’ve had quite an overwhelming couple of days and was doomscrolling through the internet when I came across a video essay on free will by Joe Scott. Does free will exist? Or is it all just an illusion? He went into all the scientific dynamics surrounding the question. Split-Brain Experiments, the Emergent Theory, and the like. What was a little unnerving was that he chose to end on an ambiguous note, answering “yes and no.” What do you say to that? YouTubers alike produce videos with very catchy headlines only to conclude with a “maybe.” Almost half an hour wasted willingly haha. What do you guys think?
insightgalore
Now, I don’t know anything about this Joe Scott, but I know thought. I’ve recently come across a theory called the epiphenomenon theory. It posits that the brain interprets and analyses the context and deals with it as it comes, accordingly, shooting out motor impulses. The body, though, thinks it’s the one who chose to go through with it after an appropriate amount of thought is given to it. It is led to think it has free will. But sadly, as much as I’d like to think I came up with this badass comment, and regardless of how highly I think of the process, it is ultimately my brain doing all the work. As the late BF Skinner said with charitable humility, “I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.”
thinkmarkthink101
@insightgalore The average embodied mind theorist will disagree. Mind is not solely a product of the brain but the embodiment of both the body’s interactions with the environment and what the brain makes of it. If that doesn’t scream free will to you, I don’t know what will. We are made up of a small, intricate network of connections, the complexity and structure of which we cannot begin to comprehend. It is a popular evolutionary perspective to think of everything in connection with each other. Any sane science student knows it is not just our brain that evolved, our body evolved with it. Suffice it to say, body and mind are one. They communicate; the body is not merely a projection of the persona. Unless you’re a dualist, in which case you’re too gullible to have an argument with.
master0fallusion
@thinkmarkthink101 I can’t stand it when people come in and claim the side they’re on is the only right side and the oppositions are all deluded to think otherwise. Yes. We are one with the earth. Heck, the whole universe is one big family. Everything we do, any feat we’ve achieved, every relationship we’ve formed along the span of our life, was predetermined at the beginning of time itself, the moment our universe exploded into being. The idea that free will exists is incompatible with the laws of physics. We didn’t have a choice, we were just pushed to make believe with the illusion of free will. Think Mark, take Angstrom Levy for example. He got choice?
st0icnerd
The split-brain experiments conducted by Sperry & Michael provided much food for thought as the pair studied epileptic patients who had their corpus callosum cut out to alleviate seizures. The corpus callosum is the primary connection between the left and right hemispheres, and so the seizures were almost completely eliminated since the left and right couldn’t communicate, hence total isolation of seizure activity. But let’s get back to the topic at hand. As most of you nerds know, the brain-body relation is one of a contralateral nature. What our left senses pick up is interpreted by the right hemisphere of our brain, and vice versa. This was actually the first experiment that proved that. One of the participants was shown a photo of an attractive woman exclusive to the left half of both of the eyes, and he started blushing. When he was asked about it, he just said something along the lines of “I thought of something funny.” Even though the left hemisphere doesn’t know about the picture because only the right hemisphere was exposed to it, the left, which controls speech, will “confabulate,” i.e., go along with a plausible narrative, regardless of whether it is true, to make sense of the circumstances. This leads me to believe free will is an illusion; the left believed it knew what was going on and that it was real, but it wasn’t, and no one can convince it otherwise.
commonsensebrit
@st0icnerd With all due respect, are you hearing yourself? Someone asks about free will, and the only argument against it is an experiment involving an epileptic patient with a lobotomised brain. Arguments such as this demand the model individual to be someone with a sound body and mind. This guy you just mentioned clearly had his brain divided into two, rendering him with two severely distinct minds, and thus, he sadly doesn’t seem to be the ideal model, as he doesn’t have an optimal mind-body relationship. God didn’t have to create humans if he had already known the course their lives were going to take. He created humans because creation is most beautiful when it is uncertain. “For whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” -Galatians 6:7
freeg4l007
Hey, I know that guy! He’s not that bad. For sure, he led you on for almost half an hour and didn’t even give an affirmative answer to the primary question posed, but hey, now you got tons of information surrounding various experiments and theories that went into answering that same question. But in response to the original question, I’d say yes. Free will does exist. Atoms make up neurons that carry over different tasks. These neurons make up our nervous system and ultimately our body, and that is what carries out the collective objectives of all those neurons. Now, think about it through an integrative lens. Our environment does influence how we do what we do when we do them. But that doesn’t matter so long as that’s all natural and not God gaslighting you, which I think is highly unlikely. Just like the nature of food chains and symbiotic relationships, we humans rely on our surroundings to make decisions. The same dirt that we rose from will be our end.
boy0fculture
I want to take a middle ground here and draw a clear line between when we have free will and when we don’t. I haven’t brushed up much on this topic. So I would appreciate a little leeway. I’m in favour of the existence of free will, since if there exists no free will, then the justice system would have no point. The idea of good and evil would be a faux pas if everything were set to happen from the get-go. I don’t intend to drag this on for long, but I just want to say that for the sake of moral upkeep, free will must exist. There is this theory of compatibilism that essentially follows the principle of alternate possibilities, which proposes that there exist two types of causation: agent causation and event causation. See, if a choice was caused by an event, i.e., the environment, when there were no alternatives, then that choice came into being out of necessity. But if a choice was due to the agent sensing an event, perceiving and analysing it, and choosing to go along with a singular choice out of a collection of alternate possible choices, then that’d be an example of free will.
Some people mentioned laws of physics and atoms making up our bodies, but I fail to understand what atoms have to do with our choices. Our neurons can be set as the smallest unit of our conceivable body. Atoms being able to influence atoms doesn’t make sense as they’re on whole different levels of reality. Let’s say it did, then an atom’s components that are called electrons, according to the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty, are chaotic, and thus, their exact position and momentum cannot be pinpointed. Then that would mean our choices can’t be predicted. Which, I think, validates my point.
lamephy5icist
@boy0fculture It indeed very nicely verifies the validity of your point. But unpredictability doesn’t necessarily mean there is space for agency to choose freely. You see, a deterministic universe doesn’t guarantee absolute predictability. It simply negates the possibility of alternate choices. You claim an agent, by which I gather you mean internal factors, causing an action means the agent chose of his own volition. That it was exempt from external will. But this is false. In terms of determinability, some may refute that the action was simply a product of the desire, belief, and temperament of the agent at that time. In other words, the action was determined by the agent’s mental faculties at the moment of action. Maybe the course our lives took wasn’t determined fourteen billion years ago. Believe what you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s no evidence to support that we had the ability to have chosen otherwise at any point in time. We don’t pass through time, time passes through us.
thatslybastard
@boy0fculture You speak of morality as if it’s only meaningful if it’s a choice. But let me ask you this simple question. Which is better? Choosing to believe a criminal committed a crime because he chose to? Or because the environments he was hitherto exposed to led him to make this choice? The latter leaves room for the odds that he can be reformed if the environment is changed accordingly. Only if we believe people are inherently good can we change society for the better.
davesupreme
I know we have no free will. This has been my experience for the past four years since becoming a parent.
