Is free will real?

[The Grand Nudger]

Right off the bat. When they say "observer" in qm....they don't mean a thinking thing watching. A particle can "observe" a particle. So it doesn't matter whether its a robot or a human or a shoe, with regards to observer effects. I'm shooting any qm woo with both barrels the minute it shows it's ugly head.
-I'll state upfront that the only bit of qm I know with any confidence is the different species of qm woo...I find qm woo to be more amusing than qm (ironically)...and also infinitely easier to understand.

Okay, so here we have a case where the philosophical idea is taken as true (or, maybe, that it is most likely true given the evidence). And yet, even knowing free will to be false can't make the instinct we CALL "free will" any less convincing. Or, even knowing that the sense of self, as we conceive it, is illusory, doesn't stop us from being fully immersed in that sense.

I-ll be addressing this last, cause I have words and stuff.

Is this really so different than acting as though a table is flat? A table IS really flat in a sense, because the density of particles along one side of a plane really is higher than that on the other side.

A table is flat, so it doesn't take much acting. If free will isn't free or will...that's going to require some "acting".

Couldn't I say of my ideas and memories that SO MANY are related to this mythical, illusory "self" that this relationship is sufficient to say the self is real?

You could, and I do....but you shouldn't (if you're shooting for logic) use this to say that your experience -is accurate-...and this has been my measure of what is real (is yours different?). That we have an experience is not a guarantee of it's contents - some experiences are more or less accurate than others. Some experiences refer to different types of things, different limitations and advantages.

That is, that the self is the keystone which holds all ideas about the world into a coherent web, rather than allowing every experience I've ever had to remain discrete, unrelated, and therefore useless as part of a greater system of thought?

I don't think the self is holding anything together at all. Things that don't appear to have self seem to be doing fine. I think that self is an experience, a map of the operation of a system - not of the environment in which that system operates. Discrete variables are incredibly useful from a systems standpoint. They give you excellent yields on data (because, being discrete, they can be played with, juxtaposed set against a wide array of each other). But hey, we don't experience this anymore than we experience it when our computer is doing it to send each other a post. Because we're incapable. It happens at a level beyond our sensory capacity to detect - I think...both in the case of the computer and in the case of "self" for precisely the same reasons.

Now, for the meat-

It actually does make it less convincing...but it doesn't make it any less habitual, and it doesn't help me to break the habit any more than knowing smoking causes cancer helps me put down my reds.

Let me give you a little taste of how I view self. Suppose we're logic machines. Does that mean that our every conclusion is concrete simply because the experience is inescapable (if it were)? No, it does not. For example-

All mammals have legs.
John Has legs
Therefore John is a mammal.

So sometimes..we get it right for the wrong reasons, perhaps based on poor assumptions. Nevertheless, that assumption -did- help us to "get it right". I think self is a service to the organism. "Getting it right" is a measure of survival, not a measure of the accuracy of the description or process. If there is life to the left and none to the right "I" will "choose" to go left. It may actually be that there is not "life to the left" and my "choice" gets me killed..........

- but I'm an organism that needs to go left or right, that needs metrics upon which to base complicated behaviors to achieve an effect. I can't sit still and wait for life to come to me (in every sense of that phrase) like an autotroph (and that doesn't always work for them either). So I find it unsurprising that we have a method for achievinbg this effect. I also find it unsuprising that the "machine" is unaware of the totality of whatever experience it finds itself in, our senses give us a hard cap..and then our ability to process that data reduces the yield even further. That we experience it (even in an inescapable way) is unsurprising - since we are capable of experience (and, again, inescapably so). That the experience -may be inaccurate- is also unsurprising and for pretty much the same reasons. Our sensory package limits our ability to describe as an experience a great deal -of what we experience-. The old "describe love" song and dance. It limits us in this way not only when we attempt to encapsulate or communicate an experience to others, but also, if I could be so bold as to suggest we all have this experience....to ourselves. We aren't really capable of describing our every inner working because we lack the machinery required to do so. This, in a nutshell, is the undercurrent of why we invent equipment like glasses. It's also a great example of machine interface we all have experience with...and yet we do not "experience" people with glasses to be cyborgs -they are-, so...circles and shit.

[Mudhammam]

And one more thing. If free will is real on any level, then we are possibly at a border condition-- what would the mechanism be for free will? We may need to make more progress into how matter can be sentient, for example. Maybe we'll discover in a lab an incredible relationship between QM mechanics and the mind, for example.

Not to be a pain in your ass () but freedom or novelty in the sense of spontaneous generation doesn't get you to metaphysical free self-willing though. Whether I'm guided to type this sentence because of innumerable causal directives of varying strengths theoretically traceable in a step-by-step regression to the past few moments of my morning, my early education, or our planet's extinction events, or whether actions are selected on the basis of thoughts and instincts "popping" into being uncaused, philosophical determinism is still true in the sense of a) changes in probabilities effecting future events and that b) "I" am not "freely willing" such actions, though they may be said to be freely willed... by something.

[The Grand Nudger]

Okay...no joke, I walked into my daughters room and I hear this come from the set -"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, he is as real as love or beauty. How dreary the world would be if...."

Benny, you been moonlighting?
(hahaha, now the credits are rolling and the soundtrack is reiterating that point, but adding hope to the list of things that Santa is as "real as" - I need to find the remote so I can share this gem.....)

[Angrboda]

Couldn't I say of my ideas and memories that SO MANY are related to this mythical, illusory "self" that this relationship is sufficient to say the self is real? That is, that the self is the keystone which holds all ideas about the world into a coherent web, rather than allowing every experience I've ever had to remain discrete, unrelated, and therefore useless as part of a greater system of thought?

You're defending one poorly defined entity with an even more poorly defined entity? Say it ain't so. An adequate definition of the self has eluded philosophers since time immemorial.

[bennyboy]

Couldn't I say of my ideas and memories that SO MANY are related to this mythical, illusory "self" that this relationship is sufficient to say the self is real? That is, that the self is the keystone which holds all ideas about the world into a coherent web, rather than allowing every experience I've ever had to remain discrete, unrelated, and therefore useless as part of a greater system of thought?

You're defending one poorly defined entity with an even more poorly defined entity? Say it ain't so. An adequate definition of the self has eluded philosophers since time immemorial.

My argument from the beginning has been that the anti-free-will camp are cherry picking. Either we accept the human myth as a context in its own right, by which some aspects of reality may meaningfully be defined, or we go full-on materialist, and abandon all these abstractions.

It doesn't make sense to me to abandon free will and still pretend that the idea of the self matters, or that there are such things as meaning or beauty.

---

Okay...no joke, I walked into my daughters room and I hear this come from the set -"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, he is as real as love or beauty. How dreary the world would be if...."

Benny, you been moonlighting?
(hahaha, now the credits are rolling and the soundtrack is reiterating that point, but adding hope to the list of things that Santa is as "real as" - I need to find the remote so I can share this gem.....)

I think it's great. In a literal sense, you and I are no more real than Santa Claus is. We are, all three, symbolic representations, and no more, of some aspects of experience and humanity which have become memorable to us.

[Angrboda]

My argument from the beginning has been that the anti-free-will camp are cherry picking. Either we accept the human myth as a context in its own right, by which some aspects of reality may meaningfully be defined, or we go full-on materialist, and abandon all these abstractions.

It doesn't make sense to me to abandon free will and still pretend that the idea of the self matters, or that there are such things as meaning or beauty.

I think you're creating an unnecessary dichotomy. In this context, I view something as an illusion if it appears as one thing, but in reality is something else. Just as I know that David Copperfield can't make an elephant disappear, it may appear as if he has done so. In that sense, I suspect many of these things — free will, self, consciousness — are illusions, but we lack the backstage pass to see how they are done. Nonetheless, in different contexts, it may make sense to treat them as illusions, while in other contexts we can just sit back and enjoy the show. If free will is an illusion, it makes no sense to treat a person as if it were real when it comes to things like punishment; that would be cruel and unusual. And in other contexts, such as mental illness and depression, it would be counter-productive and cruel not to acknowledge the limits of free will and the degree to which our behavior is determined. The very treatment of mental illness implies some illusory qualities to free will. Still, in our day to day lives, since we can't see behind the curtain, we must treat the illusion as real; anything else is paralyzing. So to argue that we must choose between the illusion and the reality is to ignore that we can embrace both and still be rationally reasonable. This is not to admit that the context in which the illusion is real should have equal status with other contexts; perhaps the personal context is the limit of what we should consider real.

[Whateverist]

Ahhh .. the voice of reason. With you singing Rasetsu, I can just lean back, close my eyes and hum along while you do the heavy thinking.

[bennyboy]

I think you're creating an unnecessary dichotomy. In this context, I view something as an illusion if it appears as one thing, but in reality is something else.

That describes exactly everything that we call real. I don't think you can reasonably argue that there is anything that appears to us exactly as it really is.

If free will is an illusion, it makes no sense to treat a person as if it were real when it comes to things like punishment; that would be cruel and unusual. And in other contexts, such as mental illness and depression, it would be counter-productive and cruel not to acknowledge the limits of free will and the degree to which our behavior is determined.

Things I said just a couple of posts ago, in discussing the scientific benefits of studying free will.

Still, in our day to day lives, since we can't see behind the curtain, we must treat the illusion as real; anything else is paralyzing.

So we are talking about an idea so central to human existence that we cannot sensibly continue existing without it.

So to argue that we must choose between the illusion and the reality is to ignore that we can embrace both and still be rationally reasonable. This is not to admit that the context in which the illusion is real should have equal status with other contexts; perhaps the personal context is the limit of what we should consider real.

As I've said from the start of this line, whether something should be considered real is context-dependent, and in the context of living our lives as human beings, free will is as real as anything else, including the sense of self.

Unless I'm missing something, you've gone back an efficiently summarized almost all my original ideas about the nature of free will as it relates to the human experience. From post #65 of this thread:

I want to point out the difference between big-r "Reality" and reality as we live it. The line isn't sensibly drawn at free will: everything we think, feel and experience is real in its own context, and unreal in a more global context. [. . .]

So let's not draw the line at free will. Does humanity exist as anything more than a biological robot? Does the self exist? Does meaning, in any form, really exist? I contend that free will exists at least as much as any of the other things we consider concrete aspects of human life. It has to-- because all those concepts are tied into the instinctive understanding of free will.

I imagine you'll find a way in which this is entirely different from what you've just posted, but you'll have to explain in your own words what that is.

[Jolnir]

we have a free will to an extend, but we are ruled by our needs and our desires, we will always need to eat for example, but on the other hand there is no universal law that says we have to be like this, its just how we are.

[IATIA]

we have a free will to an extend, ...

That is an opinion.

... but we are ruled by our needs and our desires, we will always need to eat for example, but on the other hand there is no universal law that says we have to be like this, its just how we are.

That is the discussion. Our free will may be controlled by a universal law. Determinism, basically. We only think we freely made any choice that we make. There are studies from the 70s that show each thought requires a chemical/electrical action prior to each thought we have. Because of the ramifications of this study (IMHO), few studies have been done since.

Welcome to the forum.