Do animals have free Will?

[Rokcet Scientist]

Of course animals have free will. Just not the cerebral capacity to exploit that free will to the extent that we humans can.

[Anomalocaris]

Here's the problem. This argument is not subject to levels of free will. Either all animals have free will or they do not. Saying a crocodile is more controlled by his instinct than a human is a moot fucking point. More or less, it does not matter. If animals have free will, which they clearly do, the free will hoopla perpetuated by Christians flies out the window.

Nothing has free will. But humans have the capacity to misanalyze their actions into a instinctive and flawed framework they call freewill.

The mental framework of "freewill" is but one of the many instinctive, quesi-emergent mental frameworks we are wired to attempt to apply to create mental representations of the world suitable for making useful predictions of its behavior. They are all flawed for the purposes of making predictions accurate enough to easily survive checking by modern science, but were nontheless good enough to have offered vital evolutionary advantages in our evolutionary history.

[Shell B]

Here's the problem. This argument is not subject to levels of free will. Either all animals have free will or they do not. Saying a crocodile is more controlled by his instinct than a human is a moot fucking point. More or less, it does not matter. If animals have free will, which they clearly do, the free will hoopla perpetuated by Christians flies out the window.

Nothing has free will. But it is human nature to fit complex but deterministic behavior by themselves and those perceived to be like themselves in a flawed but instinctive framework they call freewill.

There you have it. I disagree that all behavior is deterministic, but it's either you have it or you do not. It's not worth arguing levels of free will.

[Edwardo Piet]

We are all slaves to our motives, animals don't have free will as humans don't either.

[Minimalist]

At the time of action it is against my chosen nature to kill my wife. I could, by choice, choose to kill my wife.

Actually a good analogy, Tacky. Animals kill for a reason - usually hunger. Humans kill for any number of reasons....or no reason at all.

Perhaps what sets us apart is our seemingly unlimited capacity for mayhem?

[RW_9]

As usual, this is a topic that requires you to explicitly define your terms. If by free will you mean having thoughts and reactions to events around them, then yes animals have it. If by free will you instead mean a conscious rational ability to choose, then it would seem they do not.

[Cosmic Ape]

Why would you ask if animals sin? they have no concept of this make believe judgement system of a god passing laws in their behalf. Other Animals like US of course have the altruistic traits that all social animals need to develop any form of advanced Evolution. Just because one animal came up the ranks and was able to evolve quicker doesnt mean we get to denigrate every other animal on the planet and try to distance them from ourselves by thinking we are somehow more special than other animals even though we are their cousins. Our niche in the world was intelligence, that is something the species either needs or doesnt, it's not necessarily a necessity for survival. You wouldnt ask a snail if it had a god.

Jellyfish have been around for longer than any mammal but it still survives because it's niche is different, any idea of sin is superfluous to its life. And of course sentient animals feel compassion and feel they have some sort of free will to an extent but why put a religious label on it. There are things that are bad for life and good for life, sin is an illusion. The cold hard truth is that we are accountable for each other, the real sin would be to try and hinder your own fellow animal cousins and your own planet by trying to hold us back with the shitty idea of sin. We survived for hundreds and thousands of years without sin, we had to live in tribes and learn that we didnt want to steal and murder each other and it just turned into bullshit stories attached to things they couldnt explain when they really sat down and thought about it.

Let's pretend for a minute you've never played with a dog or cat before. Have you never heard of how complex and deep Elephants are? I could get going for awhile about how "human" they are and in some respects sometimes even more emotional about losing loved ones, let alone having "free will" that's just a term. And besides that, Humans are called Homo-Sapiens, a kind of ape. Thus an animal. Right off the bat you're fractally wrong about what you are.

[5thHorseman]

No such thing as free will, everything is probability no matter how teeny the odds, you never do anything through free will as the choices are forced upon you.

'Quantum mechanics defines probabilities to predict the behavior of particles, "rather than determining the future and past with certainty". Because the human brain is composed of particles, and their behavior is governed by the laws of nature, Stephen Hawking says that free will is "just an illusion".'

[genkaus]

So..human beings have "more" free will than animals do? (We've got quite a bit of hard-wiring ourselves). Setting the bar for free-will as an action that only human beings do and then declaring that because of this, human beings have free will whereas others do not (or more free will) is anthropic bias. In effect, we've made the criteria for free will "to be human", and then declared that because only human beings are human beings, only human beings have free will.

You have to start quoting atleast some text so we may know who you are replying to.

If this is directed at me, then no, I'm not saying that at all.
I'm saying that in order to have free-will, the first thing that is required is the awareness of the will itself. That means self-awareness, awareness of your actions, your motivations, your thoughts. This makes free-will not a result of a graded consciousness, but emergent only after a certain level of consciousness.

Self-consciousness cannot be achieved without conceptually abstracting your self from its concrete representation, i.e. your body. I don't know where the line is, but somewhere along the gradation of consciousness, there is a threshold above which an animal is capable of that abstraction. And once it is capable of it, self-awareness is possible and with it free-will.

And this doesn't indicate any anthropic bias. Any animal with that level of consciousness would have free-will. In fact, as I said, I consider quite a few of higher order mammals to have free will and I do not consider babies to have any.

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I think the ability to conceptualize is certainly an area where humans excel way beyond other animals. But I don't think that is central to the free will issue. For me, free will is the ability to delay automatic or instinctual response in order to modify behavior in a way that reflects prior learning. Apparently it is the frontal cortex that makes this possible and boy do we ever have a big one. But all mammals have it too to various degrees and many animals are able to learn.

The ability to conceptualize can widen the scope of perceived options but it is the mighty frontal cortex holding back the onslaught of instinctual response that makes it possible to act on those options.

I think you are downplaying the role the ability to conceptualize plays in the process.

Before you are capable of delaying or modifying automatic or instinctual behavior, you need to be aware of what that behavior would be. That is self-awareness. Before you gain self-awareness, you need understand what the concept of "self" means. That idea of an abstract "self" as something that is not any single part of your body, but representative of its whole, is not possible without the process of conceptualization.

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Here's the problem. This argument is not subject to levels of free will. Either all animals have free will or they do not. Saying a crocodile is more controlled by his instinct than a human is a moot fucking point. More or less, it does not matter. If animals have free will, which they clearly do, the free will hoopla perpetuated by Christians flies out the window.

Not all animals have free-will. Some do. What is the threshold or the criteria do determine if a particular animal has free-will or not has not been determined yet.

[The Grand Nudger]

At the time of action it is against my chosen nature to kill my wife. I could, by choice, choose to kill my wife.

Actually a good analogy, Tacky. Animals kill for a reason - usually hunger. Humans kill for any number of reasons....or no reason at all.

Perhaps what sets us apart is our seemingly unlimited capacity for mayhem?

Animals also kill for "no reason at all". Chimps became famous for this.



(they're moving in a column under "lights out" protocols....that's what always gets me about this...it's not random, it's well conceieved and well executed, chimp military action. They all seem to know the SOP too, wonder how they worked that out..hehehe. Obviously I picked chimps because they are animals which do things that are immediately recognizable to us, could have picked an ant war, or anything really, sport killing kittens, etc...)

@Genk, so, not graded, but only reached after certain level? That's a difficult idea to comprehend....Something that has no "grades" but is determined by "levels". How have you determined that some animals have free will and some do not if the criteria have not yet been established btw?
(*In case you were wondering I'm of the opinion that free will is just something we've made up, (criteria created to suit a conclusion already reached))