Why free will probably does not exist, and why we should stop treating people -
February 8, 2017 at 3:27 pm
(This post was last modified: February 8, 2017 at 3:29 pm by WisdomOfTheTrees.)
- as though it does.
[This is a piece that I wrote a couple months ago on my blog, but wanted to share on this forum because I believe it has a lot of discussion value]
Maybe it’s futile, but I think this question seems to play through a wide range of variables of how I feel in general, it’s not just one concept I want to cover here.
The idea that free will exists hurts me to think about on a fundamental level, as a person who lives with a lot of anxiety. The idea that there will always be someone who doesn’t understand the way you behave, seems to be a universal problem for all human beings, it’s the reason why loneliness exists, and among the smartest people on the planet can feel lonely, because there will always be things inside of our mind that other people cannot understand and perhaps an intelligent person can’t even explain.
Ironically I don’t feel that intelligent, but I’ll get to that later. The idea that free will exists seems to suggest that everyone is responsible for their actions. This implies that whenever a person does something, it’s not because there are factors that influenced their behavior, but that their behavior is simply an act of their own will and governed by an independent mind. Leaving out the details of why I don’t think free will exists, this already creates a problem. It means that a person can always fall under scrutiny for their behavior, when in fact the people judging our behavior can’t even understand the way we think, or why we think. Looking at behavior from this perspective creates a scenario where a person can be judged for their actions, based arbitrarily on whether or not their behavior is good or bad.
It occurred to me that good and bad are arbitrary concepts as far back as high school, that I can remember. I realize that most people don’t think about concepts this deeply, I see this in the tendency of people to choose whatever narrative makes them feel most comfortable; I don’t. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to think what I am thinking right now, believe me. I am as far from being sanctimonious for thinking the thoughts that I’m thinking right now as I could possibly imagine. None the less, the concept that there’s good and bad behavior are the opposite, it is a sanctimonious stance to take, regardless of whether or not free will exists. It makes people think that they are superior to another person, when in fact they just don’t understand why another person behaves the way they do.
There’s no relativistic perspective here, some things aren’t more wrong than others. Everyone is inherently neutral, everyone’s actions are inherently equal. To to think the opposite - well, that’s what’s led to the entire form of society that we live in right now. Crime, punishment, guilty, not guilty, the gossip you hear vapid girls and boys walking down the street making about their peers. It all stems from this concept that people can be judged for their actions, it all stems from this hubris lie that human beings can be inherently judged for their actions. I don’t think that people realize this, but this form of thinking, this behavior which creates so much quarrel between fellow human beings, can only be possible if people accept that people are responsible for their own actions, regardless of whether or not they think that free will actually exists.
This is deeply concerning to me, because it means that I will be constantly judged for my actions, by people who don’t understand how the brain works, by people who are petty and lack understanding of my own mind, or even have a good reason to think what they may or may not think of me in the first place. This is a large dark vacuum where all knowledge and understanding is sucked out, and replaced by an empty void of judgment and vague reasoning. It pisses me off so much, that people can make these stupid, vacuous assumptions about other people, yet I don’t have any power over what they think, even if I try my best to explain why they should have empathy and patience and understanding for other people - by explaining to them why I think that free will doesn’t exist.
Free will most likely does not exist, and there’s already a lot of factors that we know play a role in why people behave the way they behave. Some of these factors include (but are not limited to, because the factors are infinite), a person’s upbringing and how this upbringing effects the development of their brain; a person’s environment, which could mean where they live and their economic and social status; the food they eat which effects the brain and the body - which effects the brain which is part of the body; a person’s genes which were passed down from their parents which dictate what behavioral traits a person will have, so much is passed down from parents. Already, we can begin to see that a person is not responsible for a lot of the factors that play into what makes them who they are. Furthermore, we don’t orchestrate what is going on inside of our head, our brains are the ones doing all the work and we just happen to notice the outcome of what goes on inside of our brain, it absorbs information from the world around us and it does all the processing, we just notice our thoughts which gives us the illusion of consciousness.
That’s another thing that baffles me, is how consciousness came to be. I honestly have no idea what consciousness is, and besides Daniel Dennett, apparently, a lot of other people don’t have much of an explanation for what consciousness is besides that it’s an illusion. I am inclined to believe that things are deterministic, (even if on a sub atomic level the universe moves unpredictably, unpredictable movements wouldn’t mean we’re free, it would just mean that our actions are more chaotic, as opposed to if everything ran like a smooth ticking clock, in which our actions are governed by the laws of physics, set forth in motion from the time that time began during the big bang). This would mean that all of our actions have been determined from the beginning of time, and that everything leading up to everything that has ever happened is completely unavoidable; everyone who has ever committed a crime was destined to end up doing it from the start. Or everything’s completely chaotic, and equally nothing is responsible for anything.
That would mean our entire concept of morality is wrong. The only ideas that seem to contradict my own that I have heard are extremely annoying. People tend to have these vague religious ideas which make no sense what so ever. I just wanted to say it here, it is so annoying. People choose to believe what they want to believe about the universe, because - and I shit you not - they have said they don’t like the idea of determinism. I’m sorry, you fucking dumbass, but it doesn’t matter if you think the sun doesn’t revolved around the earth either. There’s empirical evidence that shows that this is true, empirical evidence is the only way of accurately explaining what happens in the universe. And that’s so important, these accurate explanations, because they allow everything that you do which you might otherwise take for granted, like using a computer, people going to space, cars, phones; someone had to have evidence and rational way of thinking to make these things work.
[This is a piece that I wrote a couple months ago on my blog, but wanted to share on this forum because I believe it has a lot of discussion value]
Maybe it’s futile, but I think this question seems to play through a wide range of variables of how I feel in general, it’s not just one concept I want to cover here.
The idea that free will exists hurts me to think about on a fundamental level, as a person who lives with a lot of anxiety. The idea that there will always be someone who doesn’t understand the way you behave, seems to be a universal problem for all human beings, it’s the reason why loneliness exists, and among the smartest people on the planet can feel lonely, because there will always be things inside of our mind that other people cannot understand and perhaps an intelligent person can’t even explain.
Ironically I don’t feel that intelligent, but I’ll get to that later. The idea that free will exists seems to suggest that everyone is responsible for their actions. This implies that whenever a person does something, it’s not because there are factors that influenced their behavior, but that their behavior is simply an act of their own will and governed by an independent mind. Leaving out the details of why I don’t think free will exists, this already creates a problem. It means that a person can always fall under scrutiny for their behavior, when in fact the people judging our behavior can’t even understand the way we think, or why we think. Looking at behavior from this perspective creates a scenario where a person can be judged for their actions, based arbitrarily on whether or not their behavior is good or bad.
It occurred to me that good and bad are arbitrary concepts as far back as high school, that I can remember. I realize that most people don’t think about concepts this deeply, I see this in the tendency of people to choose whatever narrative makes them feel most comfortable; I don’t. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to think what I am thinking right now, believe me. I am as far from being sanctimonious for thinking the thoughts that I’m thinking right now as I could possibly imagine. None the less, the concept that there’s good and bad behavior are the opposite, it is a sanctimonious stance to take, regardless of whether or not free will exists. It makes people think that they are superior to another person, when in fact they just don’t understand why another person behaves the way they do.
There’s no relativistic perspective here, some things aren’t more wrong than others. Everyone is inherently neutral, everyone’s actions are inherently equal. To to think the opposite - well, that’s what’s led to the entire form of society that we live in right now. Crime, punishment, guilty, not guilty, the gossip you hear vapid girls and boys walking down the street making about their peers. It all stems from this concept that people can be judged for their actions, it all stems from this hubris lie that human beings can be inherently judged for their actions. I don’t think that people realize this, but this form of thinking, this behavior which creates so much quarrel between fellow human beings, can only be possible if people accept that people are responsible for their own actions, regardless of whether or not they think that free will actually exists.
This is deeply concerning to me, because it means that I will be constantly judged for my actions, by people who don’t understand how the brain works, by people who are petty and lack understanding of my own mind, or even have a good reason to think what they may or may not think of me in the first place. This is a large dark vacuum where all knowledge and understanding is sucked out, and replaced by an empty void of judgment and vague reasoning. It pisses me off so much, that people can make these stupid, vacuous assumptions about other people, yet I don’t have any power over what they think, even if I try my best to explain why they should have empathy and patience and understanding for other people - by explaining to them why I think that free will doesn’t exist.
Free will most likely does not exist, and there’s already a lot of factors that we know play a role in why people behave the way they behave. Some of these factors include (but are not limited to, because the factors are infinite), a person’s upbringing and how this upbringing effects the development of their brain; a person’s environment, which could mean where they live and their economic and social status; the food they eat which effects the brain and the body - which effects the brain which is part of the body; a person’s genes which were passed down from their parents which dictate what behavioral traits a person will have, so much is passed down from parents. Already, we can begin to see that a person is not responsible for a lot of the factors that play into what makes them who they are. Furthermore, we don’t orchestrate what is going on inside of our head, our brains are the ones doing all the work and we just happen to notice the outcome of what goes on inside of our brain, it absorbs information from the world around us and it does all the processing, we just notice our thoughts which gives us the illusion of consciousness.
That’s another thing that baffles me, is how consciousness came to be. I honestly have no idea what consciousness is, and besides Daniel Dennett, apparently, a lot of other people don’t have much of an explanation for what consciousness is besides that it’s an illusion. I am inclined to believe that things are deterministic, (even if on a sub atomic level the universe moves unpredictably, unpredictable movements wouldn’t mean we’re free, it would just mean that our actions are more chaotic, as opposed to if everything ran like a smooth ticking clock, in which our actions are governed by the laws of physics, set forth in motion from the time that time began during the big bang). This would mean that all of our actions have been determined from the beginning of time, and that everything leading up to everything that has ever happened is completely unavoidable; everyone who has ever committed a crime was destined to end up doing it from the start. Or everything’s completely chaotic, and equally nothing is responsible for anything.
That would mean our entire concept of morality is wrong. The only ideas that seem to contradict my own that I have heard are extremely annoying. People tend to have these vague religious ideas which make no sense what so ever. I just wanted to say it here, it is so annoying. People choose to believe what they want to believe about the universe, because - and I shit you not - they have said they don’t like the idea of determinism. I’m sorry, you fucking dumbass, but it doesn’t matter if you think the sun doesn’t revolved around the earth either. There’s empirical evidence that shows that this is true, empirical evidence is the only way of accurately explaining what happens in the universe. And that’s so important, these accurate explanations, because they allow everything that you do which you might otherwise take for granted, like using a computer, people going to space, cars, phones; someone had to have evidence and rational way of thinking to make these things work.
