If you can predict, but not controll what I'll do, I still consider that free will.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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I have proven free will because my brain would never opt to drink as much as I do. check! mate!!
I choose to start drinking, my brain choses to continue.
Research and brain scans indicate that your choices are already made and decided in the decision making portion of your brain before you're even consciously aware that you have a decision to make in the first place. The sum total of individual experienced reality is just your brain post-hoc rationalizing your sensory input and reactions.
Even if that's true, there's a bootstrap paradox with that though because the decision was still made in the decision making part of your brain. So what made that part of your brain make that decision?
What it implies is that decision making is entirely subconscious and the whole conscious experience of making a decision is just our brains way of providing a sense of agency where none seems to actually exist. You really wanna bake your noodle look into split brain experiments. There might be more than one person in our heads.
Think of it like this: once Goku and Vegeta did the fusion dance, there was only Gogeta.
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wait till you get one of those neuralink chips and you're forced to like all of elon's tweets
Free always needs a qualifier... Free from what? Free from other people, for now... Free from physics? No.
I consider free will to be the concept that whenever you make a choice A/B you as in a subjective consciousness have the power to decide any way and are not bound by a deterministic system to always give one output for the same input.
For example if we were to decide the universe is deterministic except for the conscious beings that are humans it would mean the universe looks exactly like it does in all timelines after it's start but those timelines diverge once free will enters, since the deterministic system gets random input from free will.
So free from physics
basically. well you see like you said you can define some higher order that could exert some control over your will and that could be physics or something metaphysical. in case of some religions that is a devine force, while others say devine forces relegate the power of free will to humans and in most cases they don't interfere with the decision making processes of people. i would say if any sort of higher order retains perpetual control over your decision making process that calls the concept of free will into question. if you believe your brain is the sole source of your decisions and is bound by deterministic physical processes then that's not free will in it's purest form. you could say it's free will in the sense that no other being of the same level can accurately predict or manipulate your choices but i would say that only grants the illusion of free will.
i personally believe that the source of consciousness and as such free will is metaphysical in nature and is not generally manipulated by any process, so it's free will as per my definition.
edited in everything after 'basically' because i decided i had more to say
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It's interesting, because some people are doomed to say, be evil. But that still counts as free will, even though they literally can't just choose their way out of it.
So now, that means the punishments, and torments we put on those people for being evil, they can do nothing to actually prevent.
So now we have another interesting idea: what's the difference between putting down a bad person for doing something bad, and a "bad" person, for "being" bad. Like say, disabled people, people of a skin color you don't like, country origin...
Neither of them really get to choose, you can argue now that skin color is free will.
Of course, I don't really want this to happen.
"Now, your honor, as the jury will have read in this clinical, peer-acknowledged study, our superintelligent quantum AI regional supercluster determimes guilt accurately in over 98.9% of cases, in various scenarios, in thousands of simulations.
"With no margin of error, this system has determined the defendant would have acted within the next few days, perhaps even hours!"
But what about the 1.1% that determines innocence? You know, the minority in the report.
If you don't go full Minority Report on it, having something that could predict crimes with 98% certainty could be amazing.
Imagine if instead sending everyone to jail, you could use the predictions to just prevent the crime. For example, if someone was likely to commit murder as passion crime, maybe society could have a team of trained councillors to mediate the conflict before it happens.
Imagine finding out your wife is cheating on you, because a supercomputer sent a shrink over to your house, to help you come to terms with it.
If you are already going to get bad news anyway, might as well get them from a professional.
Your brain IS you. It's the one choosing
Not technically...
Cutting edge (and relatively proven) theory is:
"You" is the quantum superposition that exists inside connected microtubules.
That's why for anesthesia or just getting knocked unconscious, you don't need to remove the brain, you just do something to break up the connection of microtubules and boom: the person is unconscious but their brain is still functioning which keeps the body alive. Eventually the microtubules reassemble and you're able to be conscious again.
The brain is just another organ the "you" manipulates to interact with your surroundings.
It's also the only way we could actually have free will.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12060853/
For bonus 80s coolness tho, it would mean that what is "us", is a laser zooming around an incredibly tiny race track in our brains.
Quick edit:
Microtubules are basically biological nanites too, they're in every cell of the body and to give you an ideal of their size, they're what pulls DNA apart during cell replication. So these incredibly tiny little buggers link up to basically form a fiber optic cable which is how we can have quantum superposition in warm/wet environment like the brain.
Which if you know anything about how hard it is to sustain quantum superposition, well, anywhere, it explains why it considered a crazy theory for decades till we actually observed it just a couple years ago.
Holy shit that's nanners. And this has been observed? I gotta read that paper.
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If such an intelligence existed, I would simply call it a nerd and spray whipped cream in its face
you fool it manipulated you into getting bukkaked
Pshh, how will my subconscious dictate my free will if it’s pushed into a locker?
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will
People who try to apply game theory to fictional super AIs and David Chalmers can both fuck off.
Not the old man with the white beard, noooo
.... and usage of candles in fictional video, one of my pet peeves!
I like to replace the concept of "free will" with that of "agency".
The Britannica definition of free will is "the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe". But it seems to me that any state where you temporarily cannot act or communicate would automatically rule out free will, at least while that condition persists. Do you lose free will every time you fall asleep? Are people who are aware but whose bodies are nonresponsive - people who are "locked in" - lacking free will? Certainly both conditions lack agency, but these are still inarguably people - yet free will is so tightly bound with the concept of personhood, that it's supposed lack is often used to imply one is "less human"!
Frankly, free will seems like too broad and binary a concept to match what people actually do and deal with day to day. Agency comes in degrees, and can be gained and lost - which seems to me a much closer match to what people were trying to describe with the phrase "free will".
Underrated comment.
I can plan to do something X years in advance, long after any chemical impulse has stopped dictating to me. I am my brain and my brain is me.
I am reading “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahniman.
This seems to be way more true than I am comfortable admitting to myself.
most people can't stand the idea that they're not in control, which is funny, because a lot of those people can't even be bothered to try and take control of themselves
Well, I'm more than happy to be some AI's pet human.
Did anyone here, including myself, post a comment because we had no choice?
I wish I still believed in free will. It would make getting stuff done a lot easier. Feeling like you are fighting the universe to accomplish something you don’t want to do is much harder than feeling like you just don’t want to do something today. It’s the exact same situation either way, but the illusion of free will is, imho, valuable psychologically.
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Early into college I convinced a few people there isn't free will because it contradicts everything we know about psychology. That said, I also explained it didn't matter since there's so much going on that it's difficult to predict a person's behavior with absolute certainty, even with a multitude of information about them.
To simplify, a coin flip is considered random even if all the forces are physical and deterministic. The angle and strength of the flip, the air resistance, gentle breezes, the precise gravity where it takes place given the pull from the earth and hell, even the moon... you can factor in so much and be right maybe 99.9% of the time with proper controls and yet there's always something.
Human brains have magnitudes more going on, so even if some factors are strong predictors, there's always an illusion of free will since there are so many other factors we haven't even imagined.
I don't think it needs to convince you about anything. brains run on less energy than a friggin lightbulb seems like it would be pretty open to suggestions
I'm going to knock your shoes off with real science.
All our senses, touch, hearing, seeing, smell, taste, vision, are all based on a delayed system where a thing is sensed and then a little later the brain gets that information and processes it. In other words we live in the past while our bodies are in the present reacting to the future.
After smelling a bear the brain reacts and sends a message to the legs to run like hell. However the bear has already grabbed you so as a result someone else who did run far away enough hears your cries from a few milliseconds in the past, turns around and sees your legs waggling like you wanted to run.
We are basically only aware of the recent past from a few milliseconds ago.
Meh I wouldn't call it that super
Often it hides the fact that it's a superintelligence by acting like a complete dumbass.
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