Discussion of philosophy
Choosing to believe in free will because it would be better or "more rational" than not is "argument from consequence". It also privileges "rationality" as though those concepts were divine and beyond examination.
It's saying that Free Will is a concept so essential to dear ideas like religion and social order that arguing against it rocks the boat too much. It would be better if it were true, so let's just go with that.
While I think you make some fair points, I also don't hear an argument against the belief in free will :)
For what it's worth, my argument was never that free will must be true, so I didn't fall for the argument from consequence fallacy. I merely said it's better that we should believe in it for our own good. There's a recognition of the limits of the argument in there.
But even though we recognise such limits exist, doesn't mean we should come to the conclusion that free will itself doesn't exist. I'm also not limiting my argument to rational ones, as I cite several empirical studies that also conclude that a belief in free will is better for us.
So yeah, it's fair to point out some limitations, but I wouldn't say that any of these arguments are divine or beyond examination. Please do examine them! But until there is a convincing argument against the belief in free will (rational or otherwise), I'll stick with my conviction that believing in it is indeed better for us.
Hossenfelder has put some out on her youtube channel. Its basically since everything can be determined from previous states and mehanisms we don't have free will. I think I would need to go through it again. Personally I find free will and not free will to be sorta pointless. If everything we do is based on processes but those same processes dictate our personality and how we react to our environment. Well that just as well is just the framework of our will. Yeah you could call it not free because we like what we like and don't like what we don't like but life itsself is an opportunity to test the levels of those choices. We overindulge and don't like something as much for some time or get completely turned off and we grow to like something we used to hate. Its the process of life itself this recieving of sensory input and action output that acts and interacts with the world and other life that also acts and interacts. We define ourselves with our actions which influence how we make decisions in the future and the world molds us to do it as well. Its all the same.
This is effectively Spinoza’s argument indeed, which relies on nature / the universe to be fully deterministic. As I mentioned in the post, I don’t agree with determinism though. Science doesn’t either, because as we know from quantum mechanics, reality is probabilistic rather than deterministic. So saying that everything can be determined from previous states is an assumption that is not supported by science.
I think a definition that better aligns with intuition is that free will is the ability to behave in a productive (i.e., non-random, goal-oriented) way that nevertheless can’t be predicted by anything in your environment.
Whether that’s compatible with a deterministic universe then depends on whether there’s an omniscient agent in your environment.
I can agree with the first sentence to some extent, but I think the "in your environment" is unnecessary, whereas you seem to need the "in your environment" qualifier to arrive at the conclusion of the second sentence? Why would it be more intuitive to argue about free will not from my perspective, but rather from the perspective of my environment? I am me, and my ability defines me. My environment may influence me, but it would be backwards to make my ability determined by what the environment can predict about me.
I suppose you do believe in a deterministic universe? If so, that could at least explain why you think such a reasoning is more intuitive, but it doesn't align with my intuition at least.
The defining case where we unambiguously lack free will is when there’s another agent that actively constrains our actions. But for one agent to constrain another, it has to be able to anticipate the other’s potential actions—which depends on the abilities of the constraining agent, not the one constrained.
We have (I think) an instinctive sense of when our behavior is susceptible to that kind of directed constraint, and the idea of a deterministic universe raises the possibility that that susceptibility can’t be escaped—but only if there’s a constraining agent that can actually exploit the susceptibility.
Ah yes, I agree that's a fair way to look at it. I think if you combine that reasoning with the idea of a deterministic universe, then you also basically arrive at Spinoza's view where it is said that God is Nature, because effectively Nature then is the constraining agent.
But it does still lead me to question the sentence you posited at the start:
Whether that’s compatible with a deterministic universe then depends on whether there’s an omniscient agent in your environment.
If such a constraining agent does not exist, doesn't that imply that the universe is not deterministic? Unless you also believe that free will can exist in our mind without the ability to act upon the universe. This too was argued by Spinoza, though personally I never found such an argument to be convincing.
I don’t think Spinoza’s God can be called an agent, exactly—at least not an active one. To be an agent, there have to be future states of the world you can’t (yet) predict, because those are the only states your current actions can have an effect on.
Yes, I was trying to draw the analogy, but I agree it wouldn't be an active agent at least.
But bringing back to where we came from: The problematic part to me is still whether a deterministic universe is compatible with free will. I mean, I don't think they're compatible, but you said it depends on whether an omniscient agent exists. I still don't see how that follows. If the omniscient agent exists, and it is indeed an active agent, then by definition the universe wouldn't be deterministic, no?
Sure... I was just addressing why determinism might make us feel like our free will was in jeopardy—I wasn’t implying that it was a logical possibility.
Like I said, I think it’s an instinctive feeling rather than a logical one. Like if you’re playing cards and you realize your cards are visible, you feel like the game is compromised—even if the other players can’t see them in practice.
If I'm required to believe it, how can it be free?
Nah, it's not required. Certainly I wouldn't force it upon you :) But I strongly believe it's better for you if you do.
Not a believer. An MRI scan will show our brain firing to take action split seconds before we think it. Our brain decides, begins action, sends an executive summary to the little homonculous behind our eyeballs and he says, "I did this!"
Unfortunately it also fires in the counter situation, which undermines the interpretation of that series of events
The author doesn't present all of the options. I believe that there is no "true" free will, but choose to act as if I do.
I think your position represents a paradox then. If you “choose” to act, that choice is either of your own volition, in which case it is an example of true free will, or it is predetermined in which case it isn’t a “real” choice. Both branches represent a contradiction with your position, no?
Regardless, since you don’t believe in free will, you are either covered by option 2 or 4, depending on whether free will is real or not. How you choose to act doesn’t affect whether it exists or what you believe to be true.
I act as though I am responsible for my actions and treat others as if they are responsible for theirs. However, I reject any non-materialistic view of reality. The "gap" is a lack of an explanatory and determinative model of consciousness.
Well, consciousness was indeed out of scope for this post, but I will cover it in future posts. Spoiler alert: I do believe in a non-materialistic reality.
I respect and appreciate your up-front disclosure. I have no desire to debate that topic.
We disagree on the fundamentals of reality. I do not expect that we can find a set of definitions that would allow us to have productive discussions.
I do wish you well.
I wonder what you think of this news: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-mathematical-proof-debunks-idea-universe.html
It seems the nature of the universe is proven to be based on a non-algorithmic understanding of reality. Now intuitively that makes me think this also eliminates a pure materialistic view of reality, because if it were purely materialistic, that should theoretically be able to be modelled by an algorithm. But I wonder if I’m skipping a step in that case…
If borne out, all it seems to prove is that we are not within a simulation. To my thinking, an unrelated topic.
For there to be no free will, the universe has to be deterministic.
Run a simple thought experiment....assume a nondeterministic universe with no free will: If there is no free will, then ALL your actions have to be predetermined. Now if some random event occurred, you would be unable to react to it. As it wouldn't be in your preset actions.
This makes no sense. You can react to any event that comes along.
Second argument against no free will. Where is the information stored for all your future actions? Is this information stored in your great grandmother's egg?
A note to someone trying to make the argument's that the universe is deterministic. While true randomness is still up for debate, chaotic interactions are not.
Alright, I’ll bite.
Both of your arguments are assuming a non-deterministic universe or non-deterministic systems, but to that you only briefly toss around the phrase “chaotic interactions” which is highly unspecific. You need to elaborate on that and how it can distinguish a deterministic universe from one that is non-deterministic for your arguments to be logically sound.
Sorry, I kinda hate typing on my phone. And I made the assumption that this audience would have an appreciation of the nature of reality.
Chaotic systems; are systems that future states cannot be determined by information about the current state or past states.
examples:
There are so many examples in reality where the interactions have unknowable future states. Not just because of lack of information; but because the outcomes exist in a probability space, there is no determined outcome.
The universe is non-deterministic in reality; we KNOW this. It hasn't been up for debate for a long time. So arguing from a deterministic universe point of view, is a thought experiment; it doesn't reflect reality.
I'm more interested in reality; thus the non-deterministic universe situations are the only ones worth serious consideration.
I am not saying that having free will means that you have any choice open to you. Are your choices in any given situation constrained, yes! Are there situations where it feels like you have to choose a preset option, sure, and it doesn't feel like there was much point in having the "choice".
But in every situation, you will always have a choice. Sometimes the choices will be shit, the worst of the worst; do I kill my baby to save a room full of people, or do I let it cry out and have the soldiers hear us and kill us all....
Perhaps I don’t quite understand the chaos argument. Some of those systems that you mentioned, particularly famously the double pendulum, have been simulated using computers running deterministic programs.
A computer can determine the current state of a double pendulum by using information about the past state, so doesn’t that mean that the system is not chaotic?
Is there something fundamentally different about double pendulums in reality vs ones that we can simulate? And how would such a difference be proven?
There is a big difference between solving numerically, and being able to use current information to predict into the future for arbitrary time.
Take for example the two body gravitational problem, given the appropriate current information, you can predict the state of the system at any point in the future.
In the three body problem, you have to calculate small steps in time over and over to get the future state. This has limitations, as the error grows over time, this is why NASA etc refine the predictions as more measurements are taken.
Chaos doesn't mean we know nothing, it means we can't predict arbitrarily far into the future. We can't "solve" chaotic systems.
Another example is weather prediction; if we could "solve" chaotic systems, we could predict the weather far in advance, think months or even years. We have 10 day predictions now, but this is mainly driven by throwing more compute at it and solving the system over and over and over again for small time jumps....yes the models have gotten more sophisticated; but brute force is the bulk of it.
Ok, so from what I understand, the key difference between reality and our simulations of chaotic systems, is that in our simulations, we need to use a discrete time step to do the calculations (over and over) to find future states.
Reality, on the other hand is continuous, so these models are only approximations that get more and more accurate as we decrease the time interval of the steps in the simulations. It’s impossible to exactly model these systems because we can’t use an infinitesimal interval in a simulation. The amount of steps we need to calculate grows towards infinity.
However we haven’t been able to confirm that time is actually continuous (www.clrn.org/is-time-discrete-or-continuous-data/). If time is not continuous, then it would be possible to use a discrete model to predict these chaotic systems arbitrarily far into the future in our universe.
Well done; that is exactly correct. As we want to model the systems more accurately the computational resources get insane.
If time is not continuous, then it would be possible to use a discrete model to predict these chaotic systems arbitrarily far into the future in our universe.
Not necessarily; in fact (in my opinion) all that would do would set a lower bound on the time step required in your numerical simulation to achieve a "perfect" model. You would still have to solve the equations over and over again to know the future state.
Quantum computers may be able to help us solve certain classes of problems much more efficiently. But even these don't change the fundamental nature of reality; there are still unknowable future states.
It also doesn't matter if time is discrete or continuous; since we live inside time, we cannot experience the difference. The universe could run for a second, then stop for a year and then run again for a second, we would experience it as two continuous seconds.
Maybe in the future we will work out some way to step outside the normal flow of time and answer that question.
Ah, I think I wasn’t quite careful enough in the wording. Being able to predict a future state is different from being able to determine it. If time is discrete, and a chaotic system requires every state in between the current and some future to be calculated, then it is impossible to compute a future state sooner than that future time. This means that chaotic systems can’t be predicted.
What I meant to say is that if time is not continuous, then it is possible to determine the state of a chaotic system at some arbitrary time in the future. There is a lower bound on the time step required in the numerical simulation, so that means there is an upper bound on the amount of steps that would need to be computed for a perfect simulation. If there are a finite number of steps, then it can be calculated, and determined.
I see where you are coming from.
Basically you are saying if time is discrete. There are a finite number of states. And in theory, we could compute any arbitrary future state, based on the current state.
Quite possibly, the only caveat to that is it may not be computable, given a finite universe.