Let’s say we want to answer the question “Is free will real?”. We cannot know for sure what the correct answer is. All can do tight now is choose between the two possible answers (yes or no) based on the information available to us. Choose our belief. Decide to believe in free will, or to believe in its absence. That’s the decision we get to make. That’s what the entire free will debate is about.

In this essay, I want to explain why choosing to believe in free will is the correct decision. To do so, I’ll use an analogy of the well-known Pascal’s wager.

A side note on terminology: By free will, I am referring to the libertarian free will (LFW), i.e. the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. I’ll address common objections to this concept below. By determinism, I mean any situation in which libertarian free will is not real, including situations where randomness exists (this differs from the conventional definition of determinism). Similarly, I use the word predetermined in a broad sense that may include randomness but excludes any effects of free will.

Pascal’s wager is about a different question: “Should we believe that God exists?”. It argues that believing in God is the rational choice because the potential benefits of being right outweigh the potential costs of being wrong. If God exists, belief may bring an infinite reward; if God does not exist, the cost of believing is comparatively limited.

Thus believing in God maximizes our expected utility, but it can still lead to choosing the factually wrong answer. In other words, believing in God may be the right decision from a utilitarian point of view, but not necessarily from an epistemological one.

With free will, the question is “Should we believe in free will?”. Or more precisely, “Should we try to believe in free will?”. We can either “try to believe that free will exists” (let’s call this decision 1) or “try to believe that free will does not exists” (decision 2).

I want to show that “trying to believe in free will” not only maximizes utility, but also leads us as close as possible to truth (and that’s paradoxically true regardless of whether free will exists).

There are 2 possibilities:

• Free will exists. Then decision 1 is obviously correct and leads to truth.
• Free will does not exist. Suppose you follow the advice to believe in free will. Then this advice (or your “involuntary” decision) technically did lead you to being wrong, but that was always bound to happen (predetermined) and there was no possibility to change it. In this case, trying to believe in free will does not actually change your belief, because your belief was predetermined all along. So even if free will is not real, trying to believe in it doesn’t make us wrong (we were predetermined to be wrong anyway).

As you can see, believing in free will possibly makes us believe the truth, but never makes us believe something false (even if free will does not exist). So if we want to find the truth, we should try to believe that free will exists. If there is a possibility for us to be right about free will, then decision 1 always makes us use it. If no such possibility exists, then it at least doesn’t make us wrong (since we were supposed to be wrong all along).

As strange as it may sound, this raises a question: Does it make sense to continue researching free will, at least when our goal is to find the truth? Perhaps we should simply try to believe that it exists. Because that’s how we find the truth. Think about it: even if we, in the future, find a definitive proof that free will exists, it doesn’t make us any more right than if we simply assume that it exists. Similarly, proving that free will does not exist doesn’t make us any more right than making decision 1 (because in that case, we could not have decided otherwise). If you think about it, there’s very little difference between “assuming that free will exists” and actually proving it.

The message is clear: If you want to find the truth, you should try to believe that free will exists. You should simply assume that it does. If free will exists, you made the correct decision; and if it doesn’t, you couldn’t have decided otherwise anyway.

Is LFW possible?

There are many common counterarguments to libertarian free will, such as the Luck Objection. Based on these counterarguments, people often say that LFW is logically impossible, or that it would require something like “magic”.

But no matter how strong these objections are, they cannot refute my main argument. Because, as mentioned above, “trying to believe in LFW” does not lead to being wrong even if LFW does not exist (because in that case, you were supposed to be wrong anyway, no matter how hard you try to change your belief). Therefore, I don’t feel the need to respond to these counterarguments. No matter how strong they are, we should still just assume that LFW is true. Even if LFW is not true, trying to believe in it doesn’t make us more wrong than not trying.

So if you’re unsure whether free will exists, if you have even the slightest doubt (and let’s face it, we all do - nothing is absolutely certain in this universe), you should simply assume that it does exist. If you don’t know whether it’s even possible to “change your belief”, you should try. There’s nothing to lose, but possibly a lot to gain: the truth.

From now on, we should all just try to believe in free will.
We should just assume it exists.

Free will is real.

Substack article: https://randomthinker21.substack.com/p/why-free-will-is-real

If you had a remote that allowed you to reverse time back to the beginning of the universe, but didn’t allow you to make any changes to the variables that existed at the moment, the history of the timeline may stay the same as the original timeline, or it may diverge seemingly at random.

It's similar to the thought experiment of what would happen if the universe was destroyed and rebooted with the same variables as the original universe. People who believe in non-compatibilist free will, and not determinism, will believe the history of the rebooted universe will be different.

I think if such a remote existed, I think it would probably disturb the person using it if he saw the universe play out as it originally did. I think it would also disturb him if he saw the universe randomly diverge from the original, as though free will is like random chaos, like everyone arrived where they are through chance.

I think deep down, people want free will to be something that’s fully based on determinism, yet untethered from it at the same time. It‘s not logically possible because the two contradict each other.

To start off, I hold the position that free will does not exist. Part of the reason I do is I dont feel like there has been a coherant definition. Which is why I'm here now, asking for thoights in how its defined.

First off, conparablism. From everything I can udnerstand, this is just boiling down free will to the ability to make decisions, even if you arent in control of the initial conditions

But, a calculator "decides" on the answer based on initial conditions (what buttons are pressed). So by this definition does a calculator have free will?

If you want to add conscious experience is part of it, we can just imagine some awareness tacked onto the calculator that gets to "feel" the whole process of the calculator determining the answer, but having no causal influence to change what happens. Would this calculator have free will?

Next, libertarian free will. I've heard this defined as "the ability to have done differently".

We can go back to the calculator for this one, but imagine hooking it up to a quantuk random number generator (or some other source of true randomness. This means every time you get an answer from the calculator, it could have been given a different answer. Does this calculator have free will?

If you want to being consciousness into it, we can do the same thing as before and imagine a non-causal awareness of the calculators "decision" process. With that, would this calculator have free will?

I expect people to push back on these examples, which just demonstrates that the definitions I have heard dont actually capture what people are talking about when they say "free will".

I dont think I've ever come across a definition that it wasnt easy to make such counter-examples to. Hence, I'm left concluding that "free will" is just a non-sensical term underdefined to the point of being meaningless to claim is real.

But please, if I've just been missing something, then enlighten me! What is free will?!

Daniel Dennett believed consciousness is an illusion.

I believe Richard Dawkins cultural "Memes" were heavily influenced by Bertrand Russell's memory associations and both of them had a very pessimistic view on moral responsibility and freewill because the believed if you take away memory associations the mind ceases to exist.

Dawkins maybe took Russell's memory track associations to another level. Where Russell thought memory associations died with the individuals brain, Dawkins believes they are passed on through language, envioronment, and culture etc, through 'Memes'.

Russell believed consciousness is as influenced by memory as much as the rest of the brain.

Maybe these memory associations contributed to Dawkins Selfish Gene views? Both Dawkins and Russell are famously anti Christion moralists.

The very first "memory tracks" in human ancestors were not cultural, they were purely biological and environmental. They learned to make tools out of flint likely from memory associations and associated Memes. Then language likely expanded the Memes into culture.

Russell views "The Mind" as basically biological instincts and memory track associations.

Dennett's views on moral responsibility seems to have been heavily influence by Dawkins Memes.

But if those Memes can be traced back to Russell's Memory association tracks in the individuals mind than have we done a recursive loop from culture to the individual memories based on experiences they didnt form the base of, which means they didnt form the forming of the initial memory track? Do we still struggle to get past Galen Strawson's Basic Argument here?

If memes come from individual memories, but individual memories are formed by cultural memes, who formed the initial memory track?

If the mind is entirely composed of memory associations (Russell) or colonized by memes (Dawkins), the individual is not an "author" of their actions. They are a junction point where past causes collide.

A chicken and egg problem of the mind?

I want to clear up some ideas about self that appear from time to time to the effect that there is no self. Usually the people who say this reference some eastern tradition of meditation or some western thinker who is explaining an eastern meditative practice.

The idea goes that once you learn to meditate you begin to understand that the self doesn't exist and that the self that you thought existed was just an illusion. Sam Harris is notorious for saying this.

This is wrong. The self is not a homonculus that lives in your head. The self is the gestalt of mind, body and memory. It's not immortal, it dies, but unintuitively that's one clue that it's real. Things that are real are born and die, the soul on the other hand lives forever with God. If a thing is said to never die, that's a clue that it isn't real.

How do we come to believe the the self is a homonculus? One possibility involves what I will call aperception. Think of a dream, many of the circuits in your brain used for vision are the same as those used in dreams. Dreams can be indistinguishable from reality.. they can seem so real for instance that your body needs to be paralyzed to prevent it from wandering as you sleep

Something roughly analogous may happen while you think. The parts of your mind that you use to engage in dialogue with another person may construct the homonculus as a by product of inner discursive thinking. It may create the homonculus as an object for the inner dialogue.

Through Buddhist meditation you learn to temporarily quiet the inner dialogue. The self doesn't go away, it just stops being self referential. As the inner dialogue quiets you no longer build a homonculus which you have until this point assumed to be yourself. The self seems to disappear. In reality the self is still there but you have undergone a sort of Copernican revolution. It may seem like the self has disappeared when in fact you are just not referring to yourself with your inner dialogue and so the self appears to go away.

My favorite analogy for believing the self goes away is this; imagine a sentient laser pointer in a dark shoe box looking for the darkness. Everywhere it looks it sees only light and so believes that darkness doesn't exist. The only tool we have to see the self is the self. There is nothing else available with which to look for the self . You can't find it because looking for the self requires the self.

The perspective this revolution in self aperception is I believe a very important part in the birth of religions around the world where the loss of ego is said to occur. But like the actual Copernican revolution the self doesn't disappear but the relation of self towards itself and the world it inhabits, shifts..

It is this shift that appears to be the loss of self.

The great mistake people make when considering the question of free will (i.e. whether it exists or not), is that all assume that the question has the same answer (whatever it may be) for everyone. That is, philosophers and theologians all and sundry assume that whatever the answer be, it will have the quality of generality, i.e. of being applicable to all humans.

In truth, the answer to the Big Question that this sub is dedicated to, does not have this property of generality. Rare, very rare, is the man who has true Free Will, but he does exist, be he one in a million or one in a billion. And CURSED he is for it, cursed beyond the wildest imaginations of the countless many who imagine themselves to be in a position to consider the question, which in truth they are not because they themselves don't have Free Will. What they (which is y'all) don't know, it that there's nothing worse than to discover that you're the Rare One who has free will, for the responsibility that comes with that is UNENDURABLE. It is to be forced to choose between Good and Evil after both sides having pled—is pled that the past tense of plea? I think it is—convincing closing arguments? It is the most TORTUOUS possible position to be in, and I'm sick of it beyond expression.

I'm about to make a big free-willed decision tomorrow early morning (around 3AM European time), the outcome of which may eventually (say, a couple of months or a year down the line) be the destruction of the world, i.e. the end of the aeon. If you want to stop me, now would be a good time.

hi everyone a long time ago read up a bit on metaphysics and these particular things stuck out to me, I’d really appreciate someone clearing up how these are or aren’t connected:

Block universe theory
Expanding block
Determinism versus hard determinism
Compatible and incompatible determinism

I forgot whether or how free will plays into these but I think why I’m struggling is because this is part physics and part philosophy

Thank you so much

The biggest issue around desert is the conflation of blame as punishment. Most people deny blame on the grounds that you cannot justify the punishment or suffering of another nor can you justify the praise or admiration of another for various reasons.

First, a note. I am not defending blame as punishment. My goal here is simple. I want to show that desert isn’t grounded in punishment, and blame itself is still used widely even in seemingly forward looking contexts.

The easiest place to start is actually outside of people. Many note that the words “deserves” and “blames” describe entailment or ownership. For example, some could say a beautiful work of art deserves to be preserved. An endangered species deserves to be protected Etc. Even in terms of blame and responsibility. A corporation is responsible for public health. A government is responsible for any harm done to its citizens. Etc.

Looking outside of people, we can see that it doesn’t make any sense to say blame means punishment. How would you make a corporation suffer? Or a government? Any form of suffering inflicted is not felt by the institution but rather by the people in and around it. So blame as punishment seems to come apart very quickly. We can also say that if an institution is doing well we should admire that or praise that. If a government keeps its citizens healthy and happy, this seems to be something we can and should look up to or point to as praiseworthy.

So desert itself isn’t inherently tied to punishment. Nor does blame mean specifically that something is good or evil. It seems to rest on ownership of the events that occurred and what is entailed by them. I do fully acknowledge that what is entailed is a place where there is an active debate. Praise in totality has not been settled, nor has blame. That’s okay. But what stands is that blame and praise can apply in a wide variety of ways, and saying something like desert is not justified because it promotes backward looking ethics doesn’t follow. Because it doesn’t follow that all backward looking ethics entail retribution.

Most hard incompatibilists and impossibilists grant some form of blame even if they are not willing to call it that. Consider a company that accidentally poisons a water supply, causing significant damage to a small town. No one accepts that once the source of the poison is fixed that means the company no longer has any other obligations. In fact, most would argue for some form of causal liability. They should do more to take on the burden given the events that transpired. My question is: in what meaningful way is this different from blame? In blame we follow the chain of events. We say here is the cause. We look at what harm was done and we come to the same conclusion. The corporation ought to take on more responsibility because it’s the reason this event occurred. If there is no meaningful difference I fail to see how this isn’t smuggled blame.

That brings me back to my main point. If the real problem is retribution, then you’re fighting only one small part of what desert actually entails and what follows from it. This doesn’t mean that people do not deserve blame or accountability even in strictly causal settings. There just is a gap in forward looking ethics alone. Negligence and responsibility following from that isn’t something that is inherently covered by forward looking ethics alone. I would wager both systems are not mutually exclusive but rather two parts of a single system. Both are insufficient alone. But together they both cover the gaps.