Someone contacted me through Quora recently because they were having an existential crisis — it was stimulated by the ostensibly scientific notion that humans do not have free well.
Any theory that insists that we do not actually make choices is going to causes distress among many people who valorize academic thinking. Many hard-nosed metaphysicians simply don’t care about the mental well-being of the general public. I find this attitude simultaneously patronizing and irresponsible.
The frequently heard suggestion that humans beings could be better off not believing in free will seems to miss a crucial aspect of the topic. If free will doesn’t exist in some form, then conscious experience is a kind of elaborate prank: a scripted show designed to fool you into thinking audience participation is involved. Everything we do is then a brute consequence of events outside ourselves, which in turn are traced back to the big bang and/or random fluctuations. Despite all evidence to the contrary, in a universe without free will humans seem to cause nothing.
You can of course argue that the unpleasantness of an idea is not evidence against it. This is true, but it still strikes me that there is something inaccurate about a metaphysical view that does not distinguish between the lack of freedom of a slave and the lack of freedom of a slavemaster.
Let the missionaries of scientism predict the motion of an amoeba from first principles before pontificating about human agency.
In any case, rational thought is not a monolith — plenty of physicists, neuroscientists, philosophers and other thinkers see room for free will in their theories and experiments. Given that no one can decide among the various competing theories of agency yet, I see nothing unscientific about drawing attention to the pro free will camp. As far as I am concerned, nothing short of an app that successfully predicts what I am going to do — even when I see the prediction and have time to react — would count as proof that free will doesn’t exist. This would be a constructive proof (despite being destructive of sanity, perhaps).
As a bonus, investigating the possibility of a coherent theory of free will can enrich your intellectual life, regardless of what you believe right now. You will encounter some of the most baffling questions from the frontiers of science and philosophy, such as the nature of causality (not as obvious as you might think), the emergence of life and selfhood (not obvious to anyone), and the question of what exactly the word ‘exist’ really means (barely even asked, even by scientists).
So I freely admit that I may be wrong, but my choice is to believe in free will.
Quora an ugly place “furnished opinionistically well”.
What this contact, he wrote to you, is not implausible, or at least suggests something sensible … do we really have free will? the answer is yes. But is this completely free? the answer is no.
I am more concerned with the border between the two parts just mentioned, because that border is true free will; interesting article anyway (despite the word Quora I was about to trash the newsletter).
wrong website url (link) in last comment, my bad (fixed in this self-reply)
Welcome! I guess there is a lot of rubbish on Quora, but there is some decent science writing, and the people have generally been polite and engaged. I’ve made a few real-life friends through it. And it gave me some good pop sci writing practice. 🙂
I honestly do not understand the concept of (libertarian) free will. I also think that if we all rejected the notion of free will the consequences might not be bad at all. We might become kinder to one another, for example.
I think it’s best to differentiate two levels of reality when talking about free will (although I’m aware that people will defend free will even at the level of physics): https://medium.com/@cdelosada/free-will-af8e582688b8?source=friends_link&sk=8f97e41da38664188f1a2549e5e271eb
I think that there are very interesting arguments from the combatibilists. Jennan Ismael’s book on this sounds interesting. She also did an interview with Sean Carrol recently.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/how-physics-makes-us-free/
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/20/80-jenann-ismael-on-connecting-physics-to-the-world-of-experience/
For me, the idea that people will behave better if they disbelieve in free will is some kind of paradox: how can they change their minds without free will? Anyway, ultimately these ontological differences stem from different starting assumptions/axioms.
Thanks. I found your post on emergence very intriguing. I posted a comment on it but I don’t know why it doesn’t show. Maybe it’s because it was a bit long, not sure… Or it may have been because first I attempted to post it with an email associated with a WordPress account that I used to have (WordPress wanted me to log in even though I deleted that account months ago). So then I entered a different email account, but apparently WordPress blocked it or something, even though I didn’t get an error response or anything. Any way… Maybe I’ll try again later.
Glad you liked the emergence post! I didn’t see any comment from you there… perhaps it was a transient error.
Yeah, apparently a transient error. I just tried again and it worked fine. 👍
Have you read Sam Harris’s “Free will”?
I think he explains how it might be useful for us to not believe in free will.
And the confusion about how can one change mind if they don’t have free will can be easily be seen throuh if one does meditation.
Once you distance yourself from mind, you find that your desires thought appear just like that and are not really in your control many times.
So, it’s practically possible to see how we don’t have free will.