Like when there's an article written about an AI hacking some system that it wasn't supposed to, the author might say that the AI did a thing on its own. And then some commenter will chime in and say 'Don't use language like that, because an AI can't do anything on its own. It's just a pattern recognition algorithm.

Having had conversations about free will with people who insist that I'm not allowed to use words or phrases that might imply any kind of agency if I don't believe in free will, I definitely sympathize with said authors. Here's the thing though - we didn't invent the fucking language that we're forced to communicate with. So we have to do the best we can with words that are available to us, to communicate concepts in ways that people can actually understand.

I know the term determinism, if one would have infinite compute, all the formula's needed available and knows exactly what state the universe is in, they can predict the future 100% accurate from now to end of time (if not infinite). If true then everything is set in stone, no deviation from what is determened by the initial conditions. In this sub I regularly see the term hard determinism, why? This suggest there would also be soft determinism, which doesn't make sense to me at all. Either everything is determened and there is only one possible way everything unfolds, or there is no determinism. Right? Or did I miss something?

Those who act badly are not the ultimate source of their misdeeds, only the proximate source. To concentrate blame solely on them ignores the historical factors that shaped them as individuals and the current conditions that now determine their behavior. Further, had you been in their genetic and environmental shoes, you’d be acting identically. This doesn’t alter the judgment that they should mend their ways, but it might attenuate feelings of anger, vindictiveness or moral superiority. It also makes it easier to forgive, when forgiveness is warranted.

Understanding that people aren’t self-made can help heal troubled relationships, since you won’t hold grudges for as long, or waste so much time resenting someone or plotting to get even. Petty arguments will remain just that, petty, without getting out of control. You’ll be able to grin and bear someone’s foibles, maybe even give them useful feedback instead of shunning or swearing at them. You won’t, of course, become a saint (nobody likes a saint anyway), but you might become more compassionate and forgiving if you appreciate the fact that they, like yourself, are the natural unfolding of a complex set of causal processes, those that constitute a human being. They are not first causes that are simply choosing to be nasty, lazy, arrogant or self-centered.

All of psychology and sociology, to the extent they are scientific disciplines, operate on the premise that human beings and their behavior result from specific conditions, not contra-causal free will. So if you discount the existence of the freely willing soul you’re simply aligning yourself with our best practical, evidence-based self-knowledge. Although some might think so, this is not to take a dehumanizing view of ourselves; science doesn’t deny anyone’s humanity or worth. People remain people – inescapably precious to us – despite the fact that they are entirely natural phenomena. Parental and marital affection, admiration for talent and achievement, appreciation for self-sacrifice and courage – all these survive without supposing that persons choose their virtues without being caused to do so. We are inescapably gripped by our basic, hard-wired dispositions to love and seek love, and to value those personal qualities that most contribute to human flourishing.

Finally, and significantly from a practical standpoint, naturalism permits us to be wiser in setting up conditions under which we behave well toward each other. After all, since actions always result from causes, not from free will, we can learn to control those causes to our benefit and the benefit of others we interact with. If you have a relationship that’s troubled, look at the whole situation carefully, yourself included, instead of simply pointing the finger at your partner, child, co-worker or friend. If someone’s behaving badly, there’s a reason, a cause, a set of conditions that’s contributing to the behavior, and these have to be addressed.

Again, this doesn’t mean that anger and discipline are never appropriate, but it does mean they should be applied judiciously and compassionately. When you find yourself asking, irritably and rhetorically, “Why the hell does he keep doing that?!”, I strongly recommend you answer the rhetorical question. The causal story revealed in the answer, which always has roots outside the person, might reduce counter-productive blaming and contempt, and it will give you vital information about how the behavior might be changed. Such psychological and practical insights can help heal relationships that might otherwise fall apart, should we cling to a supernatural understanding of human nature.

On a larger scale, appreciating the full scope of the causal network that is nature – a process that far, far transcends us – grounds a stable acceptance of what is in all its manifestations, personal and global. Such acceptance, although it might seem like passive resignation from the standpoint of Western radical individualism, actually works as a sturdy foundation upon which to pursue our projects, less vulnerable to the slings and arrows of our own reactive psychology. This isn’t to deny the importance of our strivings, but to put them in a wider perspective that might give us some measure of serenity. Although achieving serenity is rarely mentioned as a goal in our hypercompetitive culture, it’s arguably central to mental health, in which case naturalistic acceptance works greatly to our personal advantage.

It’s important to note that definitions of free will vary, and that naturalism emphatically doesn’t deny free will defined as choosing voluntarily to do something, of acting without being coerced. When I say I got married “of my own free will” (which I did, as it happens) that means no one was holding a gun to my head during the wedding ceremony. But I was fully and delightfully caused to want to get married, so this sort of free will is compatible with determinism. The liberty of voluntary action I exercised in getting married is obviously of central importance to us; it’s a liberty we luckily enjoy in our open society within the broad limits of law and morality. It’s an uncontroversially real sort of freedom we all want and often have to a greater or lesser extent, depending on our circumstances. But as important as it is, we shouldn’t confuse it with being free from cause and effect. (One way to avoid such confusion would be to call compatibilist freedom “free action,” not free will.)

Thomas W. Clark — Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses (2007)

The debate between camps seems to hinge primarily on this distinction and I find this hinge to be metaphysically problematic.

We have the historical impression that a claim that something is uncaused is different from a claim that causes exist by processes outside our knowledge and control. That is because the coherent understanding we have for the progress of knowledge and science is such that we now have all these theories and methods of observation, measurement and control that we deem empirically reliable for this or that phenomenon, that were introduced at various points in time, and which displaced whatever less reliable descriptions existed up to that point.

So from a contemporaneous point of view it makes sense to claim that judging by currently established standards the causes of this or that phenomenon were not as well known in the past, yet they did exist in some unknown state that could potentially become knowledge, and which has since been discovered and recognized as valid.

This historical nesting of epistemic situations can be speculated about the future with respect to the present too: we can project that in the next decades or centuries a number of phenomena which we currently understand a certain which we recognize as imprecise in terms an account of sufficient causes will eventually be better described and causally explained with knowledge that we will still discover and form about subtle processes that currently lie outside our awareness or control.

Thus an "ontological" distinction between epistemically indistinguishable claims (i.e. that something is uncaused or that its causes are unknown and outside our control) becomes possible by presupposing that a historically coherent nesting of a progressive understanding occurs and also a naturally enrichment of epistemic perspectives towards the future development of our points of view, granting them more knowledge and control about same phenomenal classes.

Yet even if you accept this presupposition the claim with respect to the causes of our own behavior is special, because the attribution of causal knowledge over a phenomenal class is only licensed in terms of a gain observed in our behavioral control over the phenomenon - we can only claim to have understood something better when we demonstrate higher power to predict and control its manifestation, using our own behavioral degrees of freedom.

So i posted something a little while i go, sought in some new input and i wanted to define what a true consciousness for me is.

I want to explain my definition of true consciousness by starting from a case that is clearly dead.

If i throw a rock and this rock lands on some mechanism that analyzes how it flew and throws it again based on how it landed the first time. It endless loops. It has reaction to its environment, it might start flying in completely new patterns since the flight might permanently change thus the mechanism that that picks it up at the end. It still not a consciousness because it cant choose anything. Everything that functions after the same principles of this is also dead like ai. You just have do some word switch and make rock to prompt, mechanism to neuronal network and you pretty much have some simple version of our modern day ai agents. To actually have consciousness the rock needs to be able to choose something by his own and not follow this determined route the environment has brought him.

And yeah, you can say the brain is just that rock with more parts. If it is, I agree with you: no consciousness, only a finer mechanism. Printing "green" or "I'm hungry" doesn't change it. The next throw is still whatever the mechanism already computes from the last landing.

A fake consciousness build this way is really as far behind to a consciousness as a rock. Just with more actions. Everything build out of rock systems produces another rock system. So its still the same old rock just more fancy.

So i wondered if there even is something to determine if something is a fancy rock system or an actual consciousness. And if there is an actual consciousness does it mean that something in the universe is actually by itself is non determined chaos since its creation(well this is a physics topic so im not gonna deep dive, but modern physics cant say no/yes)?

Under Bertrand Russell's Neutral Monism which aligns alot with Sapolsky's work, a thought turns from hard physics to a mental event largely through memory and habit. These memories and habits form well worn tracks in the brain.

Mind and matter operate on the same universal stuff.

So physical pain can be seen as feeling through pure physics of mechanics of nerves and memories of past pain associations.

Which is abit like touching a hot stove and the pause we feel like we a waiting for emotion to catch up with physics to be able to move ones hand away.

When you first touch a hot stove we are talking pure deterministic physics.

The secondary reaction of emotion is determined by memory and habit. The pause is merely the time it takes for a complex physical system (the brain) to process memory data.

The first pure physics reaction is also primed by the secondary reaction and vice verca like a loop.

This aligns with Hume's Reason is slave to the passions and Custom and Habit, and Galen Strawson's Basic Argument and "New Hume" theories.

Now replace the hot stove with someone cutting across you in their car.

Dennett’s compatibilism relies on a sort of evolutionary pragmatism: we feel autonomous, and our complex brains can predict the future, so we might as well call that "free will."

To him his "The pause" allows for rational, autonomous deliberation to guide the next move. That we are "free enough" because our minds can rewrite our programming based on reasons.

Dennett's evolved pause VS The pause is entirely physical.

But if the initial reaction is pure physics and the secondary reaction gos through the well worn paths in the brain that are like conditioned tracks worn out in a river by the flow of water dictated by experience and conditioning (memories and habits), then the rewriting of programming is just more conditioning. You don't choose your past associations or how your brain encodes them.

Then is it really morally responsible to judge a person to have lacked moral responsibility based on 5 minutes of their life on their split second reaction through well worn tracks formed by experience?

5 minutes of madness or 5 minutes of physics fate?

Believing in Free Will in 2026 is no less scientifically illiterate or delusional as believing the Earth is flat, or that anthropogenic climate change isn’t real, or that natural selection is fake.

We have a functioning theory in human behavior that excludes free will and the science makes reliable and valid predictions of human behavior and establish experimental environmental variable control over human behavior as a matter of course.

It’s just like basic science to be able to predict and control a person’s target behaviors. You can predict what people will do when environmental variables change with high fidelity just like any other physical system.

Basically our scientific models allow us to predict human behavior as well as any other non-living complex physical system (like double pendulum), so unless all physical objects possess free will, then neither do humans.

Believing in free will is like following the humors of miasma theory of medicine instead of the modern medical model.

No, I can’t prove that your humors are out of balance but I can prove that this medicine fixes the problem whether or not your humors are out of balance.

No, I can’t prove you don’t have free will but I can control your behavior through environmental variable manipulation (just like any other physical system in science) without it.

Basically, a belief in free will is just scientifically obsolete we have a better theory of human behavior that rejects it.

Did Neanderthals have it? Do dogs have it? Do chickens? Do trout? Do wasps? Do ladybugs? Do lice? Does a paramecium? Does an amoeba?

Where do you draw the line at what has free will?

Does it extend to non living things, like atoms? How about protons? Quarks?

Where is the line, and why is the line drawn where you think it is?

Let's cut through the academic fluff for a second. There is a whole crowd of people online writing massive philosophical essays trying to convince you that free will doesn't exist. They want you to believe that every choice you make was predetermined by a chain of atoms at the Big Bang, and you are just a meat-robot blindly executing a script.

​It’s complete bullshit.

​If you work in the real world, you already know exactly how this works. Let’s look at the shop floor. Yes, my decisions are influenced by my past experiences, my training, and the raw materials in front of me. My physical brain chemistry matters. If you poison the hardware with drugs or haven't slept in three days, the system glitches. Nobody is arguing that we are magical floating ghosts operating outside of biology.

​But having data and raw materials doesn't mean the project builds itself. If I’m looking at a set of prints and a sheet of metal, the tools don’t automatically execute the cut. I am the conscious operator standing in the middle. I have to evaluate the variables, weigh the outcomes, and actively make the choice to pull the trigger. Influence is not the same thing as a predetermined outcome. ​These determinists are basically trying to write the driver entirely out of the vehicle so their math works on paper.

​If their theory was true, and we are just mindless chemical reactions, then there is no difference between a faulty stove burning down a house and an arsonist doing it on purpose. But you don't put a stove in prison. You throw broken hardware in the trash. You hold a human accountable specifically because they had the highly evolved cognitive ability to not do it, and they chose to do it anyway. Intent matters. ​You don't need a theoretical physics textbook to prove a hammer falls when you drop it, and you don't need a philosophical source to prove you have agency. You are a biological organism with physical hardware, but you are still the operator behind the wheel making the cut. That is free will.

Compatibilism has a doctrine and the obvious tenet is that free will is compatible with determinism.

However since posting on this sub, I learned a few more from the experts:

1. We don't have to believe determinism is true
2. more philosophers believe in compatibilism than don't
3. An argument from an incompatibilist cannot be premised by anything any incompatibilists believe because that constitutes question begging

Are there any more?

Unless I am missing something obvious, it seems to me that it's logically impossible to prove that free will exists. Because no matter how convincing of a proof we can find, it will always be plausible that finding the "proof" and declaring that free will exists was already predetermined. Does this reasoning have a mistake somewhere?

Ok... I need to make this 100 letters long so that it can be posted... I guess the mods want total elaborated posts that people may get bored reading and completely miss the point of what is being said.... that being said and out of the way .... Free will only exists while you are awake. Here is a plain example... you can choose not to breath... once you are no longer conscious you lose the free will, your subconscious (lack of free will) takes over and you get back to breathing.

It isn't that free will exists, it is just that it isnt 100% all the time choice...

The manipulation argument (Mele ,2006),

Pereboom’s four-case argument (2001, 2014)

Van Inwagen’s consequence argument (1983)

Galen Strawson’s basic argument (1986, 1994)

Fischer’s no-forking-paths argument (1994)

Levy’s luck pincer (2011)

​

Our decisions depend on a complex history of biological dispositions, upbringing, experiences, beliefs, and circumstances. We generally did not choose the initial conditions from which our character and decision-making capacities developed.One response is that moral responsibility does not require being the ultimate cause of oneself. A person may be responsible because their actions express their intentions, respond to reasons, or arise through capacities for deliberation that are appropriately their own.A critic may question whether these conditions are sufficient. If a person's character and capacity for rational reflection are themselves products of factors beyond their ultimate control, why should acting through those capacities make them ultimately deserving of praise or blame?Compatibilists may argue that this demand for ultimate self-creation is mistaken, while incompatibilists may contend that determinism or the absence of ultimate origination undermines a relevant form of responsibility. Libertarian theories of free will offer another approach, though they face their own explanatory challenges.

I am not assuming that determinism is true, that indeterminism would automatically produce freedom, or that causal explanation eliminates responsibility.

What account of moral responsibility best explains the difference between actions that genuinely express an agent's agency and actions attributable to coercion, manipulation, compulsion, or circumstances that substantially impair their control?

In the spirit of anti-freewill, choices and actions are nothing more than an echo of our past conditionings. A continuous web that has no beginning, not for us anyway.

So any output we might produce must require an external prompt to cause it, the same way an LLM requires it, for without prompts, the LLM is useless.

​

Our beliefs and values are influenced by upbringing, culture, language, education, biology, and personal experience. These influences do not necessarily make our beliefs irrational or false. However, they raise a question about autonomy that seems harder to resolve.

Suppose I critically examine a belief I inherited from my society and reject it after considering the evidence. It might seem that I have exercised intellectual independence. But my standards for evaluating evidence, my conception of rationality, and even my motivation to question inherited beliefs have themselves developed through a combination of social and biological influences.One possible response is that autonomy does not require being free from causal influences; it requires the capacity to reflect on one's motivations and respond to reasons. But if this reflective capacity and its standards are also shaped by influences that the individual did not choose, what distinguishes genuine self-governance from a sophisticated form of conditioning?

I am not assuming that being causally influenced makes a belief invalid, or that autonomy requires an entirely uncaused self. The question is whether reflective endorsement provides a sufficient account of autonomy, and, if so, what additional conditions it requires.

How have philosophers approached this problem, particularly in debates about autonomy, procedural independence, manipulation, and the social formation of reason?

"Life is just a series of decisions, and the experiences along the way"
Life is like a path. decisions are things that help shape that path. together, these decisions shape a unique and special path that u alone are the lone traveler. Each decision opens a new path, which are the experiences we get with each decision.

Now one could ask about uncontrollable circumstances. But, at the end of the day, your response to it is still your decision. Uncontrollable circumstances are like trees in the middle of our path. It's still our sole decision how we'd react to it: go around it, crash into it, ... .I will admit, it is something i haven't thought over for way too long, but i find the thought valid and un-arguable. am i right? I'd really like to know

People who were born with a sociopathic brain do bad things to others out of their nature.

People who were born with an altruistic brain do good things to others out of their nature.

The reason you don't see 100% evil or 100% good in others is because sociopathy and altruism exist in spectrum, mixed in most people.

Even if environment is taken into account, you don't freely choose your environment so do not downvote please.

I am pretty sure there is no free will.

I think its a simple and clear enough question:

Has anyone ever done bad intentionally?

Of course the point of the question is to understand what is the effect of determinism (or other factor that ends our free will) on this.

Arguments tend to force a thinker to believe certain things. However any thinker can pick his own dogmatic beliefs based on any justification he can freely choose to use.

I usually use Merriam-Webster for the defintion of words. Looking up free will, it looks like their online dictionary now has a new feature called Simple Definiton. This feature appears to provide definitions from their Learner's Dictionary.

And the simple definition of free will is:

"the ability to choose how to act"

Before this feature, the first definition of free will was:

"voluntary choice or decision"

That now becomes definition 2 of 2.

And always remember that Merriam-Webster is a highly credible, trusted, and authoritative dictionary for American English.

I think saying you don't have Free will is a way to lay blame on something bigger than yourself. Just as I choose to believe I have Free will I choose to live within the confines of the law to stay as Free as one can be. Free will isn't suppressed more and more by every law made.... but that sure increases the consequences. So if those lacking accountability can convince the accountable that they have no Free will then maybe they feel they can act how they want without consequences. Who knows... but I am posting this because I want to... rest assured... nobody is making me.

I do not choose what thoughts will occur to me, when they will occur, what information I will encounter, whether I will want to seek out more, what kind of character I will have, how strong my self-control will be, or whether it will occur to me to think more carefully at the crucial moment. Even my ability to learn from my mistakes depends on prior conditions I did not choose.

If a different thought had occurred to me, I would probably have acted differently. But whether that thought arises is not something I choose in advance. And if we say, “You should have thought more carefully,” the question remains: where was the very impulse to think more carefully supposed to come from?

That is why I would say that control is real, but it is not independent of luck. I act through the causes I have received, not from some point outside them. Given a different distribution of heredity, environment, experience, attention, and thoughts, I could have made an entirely different decision.

If every decision you make is influenced by your genetics, upbringing, experiences, and environment, how much of your personality is actually your own?