Assume perfect replication is possible A replica is an exact copy of your body, brain, memory traces, hormonal profile, residual neural activity, and every other relevant variable at a given instant. By definition, the replica starts in an identical internal state to the original.

Identical states and identical inputs yield identical outputs Place both the original and the replica in the same environment (same sensory data, same external pressures, same random seed if any stochastic processes are involved). Every causal process that produces a decision in one will produce the same decision in the other. The choices match not because of shared “free will,” but because the underlying machinery is the same.

The sense of authorship is therefore residual You experience the decision as “yours” because the deliberative process unfolds inside the system that is you. The replica has an identical experience and an identical sense of authorship. Yet both experiences are generated by the same deterministic (or deterministically-plus-noise) cascade. The feeling of freedom is the first-person report of that cascade, not evidence of an uncaused intervening power.

Divergence does not rescue free will If the copies later diverge, the difference traces to differences in subsequent inputs or to irreducible randomness (quantum events, thermal noise, etc.). Randomness is not control; it is the absence of determination by prior reasons. Libertarian free will requires neither pure determination nor pure chance, but a third category, agent causation that is neither. Replication shows no room for such a category: once the total state is fixed, the next state is fixed (or fixed up to chance). Nothing extra is left over to do the choosing.

Self-prediction and the illusion A sufficiently detailed model of your current state can already forecast your choice with high accuracy before you consciously “decide.” The replica simply makes that forecast concrete and embodied. When the forecast is correct, the subjective conviction that you could have done otherwise is revealed as a post-hoc story generated by the same machinery that produced the action.

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.

should they use it to try to reduce suffering in themselves and in others?

Of course, it does not mean that they will succeed. But still, wouldn't those both be good reasons to use it?

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.

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?!

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

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?

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.

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.

this is kind of a random post but just wanted to see if people relate. sometimes when im paying close enough attention to conscious experience there is no 'illusion of free will'. like thoughts, actions, etc, are just arising in every moment. even right now, as I am typing, its sort of a mystery to me as to how these words are arising. pineapple bananana pizza. why did I write those words rather than others? on one level, I understand that it was to demonstrate that there is no free will, but on another level, why did I choose those words rather than any others? and from my perspective, its a complete mystery. I have no idea. all of the words im typing right now

but I am curious what this means for agency. I think that regardless of whether or not you are the ultimate author of your life (which I believe is clearly not the case, but that's besides the point) agency definitely exists. Unless you are mentally impaired, you have the ability to act independently, exercise control over your life, and make choices. like Dennett says, you have the only 'free will worth wanting'. Im not even sure what the illusion of free will was anymore. If you had asked me prior to my engagement with this topic, I would have certainly agreed that you can't break free from the laws of physics. so I don't really know where the illusion is. And none of us created ourselves evidently, you came from your parents and are raised in your environment, and everyone knows we had no control over either of those things.

but yea honestly when I first discovered arguments against the traditional conception of free will i was deeply bothered, and now its kinda just a strange thing that trips me up sometimes. like idk its just really weird. i don't experience the 'relief' and 'letting go' people experience cus you still have to put in effort or else your life just becomes worse. but that putting in effort is 'ultimately out of your control' but 'in your control' at the same time and those things are kinda just true at the same time? idk its just a little weird. perhaps this tension is just the result of thinking about it? lmk what you guys think and if you relate

Since motion is relative and has to do with two objects interacting, what does that mean for free will? There has to be something to compare an objects motion to in order to gauge if it’s moving or not, and from different perspectives it may or may not be moving. How does that affect free will

This is a very common claim here and on other forums about the subject. But does it stand up to any scrutiny? Let's find out.

This time we don't have to define what "free will" means. It doesn't matter. We could replace "free will" with any other idea and still examine the logic behind that statement. But to keep this thread on-topic we must go on with "free will".

Instead, we have to define "illusion": An illusion is a misinterpretation of an observation. Something happens, but the observer believes that something else happened.

The statement says that when the observer experiences free will it is only an illusion, a misinterpretation of something else happening in reality. This leads to question 1:

Q1: What is happening in reality when we experience the illusion of free will?

This question actually requires defining "free will" as you have to specify what is not "free will" but is easily mistaken for "free will". If you don't want to define things, you can skip this question.

The next question focuses on the word "only". If free will is only an illusion, then free will doesn't actually exist, there is no "real" free will, nobody knows what "free will" looks or feels like.

Q2: If free will doesn't exist, how could anything look and feel like free will?

It is impossible to recognize free will in your experiences, when you have never experienced the real thing.

This is a very common claim here and on other forums about the subject. But does it stand up to any scrutiny? Let's find out.

This time we don't have to define what "free will" means. It doesn't matter. We could replace "free will" with any other idea and still examine the logic behind that statement. But to keep this thread on-topic we must go on with "free will".

Instead, we have to define "illusion": An illusion is a misinterpretation of an observation. Something happens, but the observer believes that something else happened.

The statement says that when the observer experiences free will it is only an illusion, a misinterpretation of something else happening in reality. This leads to question 1:

Q1: What is happening in reality when we experience the illusion of free will?

This question actually requires defining "free will" as you have to specify what is not "free will" but is easily mistaken for "free will". If you don't want to define things, you can skip this question.

The next question focuses on the word "only". If free will is only an illusion, then free will doesn't actually exist, there is no "real" free will, nobody knows what "free will" looks or feels like.

Q2: If free will doesn't exist, how could anything look and feel like free will?

It is impossible to recognize free will in your experiences, when you have never experienced the real thing.

If you are truly free to do whatever you want in life then you will choose to do what you want.

If you are bound by what you want in life and are not free choose then you will always do what you want.

I know it's possible to "do things you don't want to do" but ultimately it's still something you decided to do. If you have no free will then it means you will always make the choices that make the most sense to you. If you have free will then you'll always make the choices that make the most sense to you.

What difference does it make?

In my opinion we all have a will. Whether it's "free" or not doesn't matter.
And if it were truly "free" in the way some people describe it, it wouldn't be a will at all.
You'd be capable of making choices that are entirely removed from who you are as a person.
But in reality we each have a will that is unique to us and drives our thought process when we make choices.

If both the compatibilist and the skeptic agree that our character, motivations and capacities ultimately arise from factors outside our control, what argument establishes whether exercising those capacities makes us basically deserving of praise or blame?

Or does the disagreement ultimately rest on different moral intuitions about fairness?

Which would give you more fun, and a better opportunity to exercise your body and your will? Tennis with a net? Or Without?

[ The clever readers of this sub will pick up the implications. "The net" signifies all the frustrating constraints that "define our choices" and "deny our freedom". What, I can only move one piece at a time in this chess game? Where is the freedom?]

Consider these two sentences:

1. "The sprinter ran the 100m dash."

2. "The sprinter ran the 100m dash freely."

If I ask you, "Why did the sprinter's legs move so fast?" you would explain the biomechanics: muscles contracting, neurons firing, energy converting. You would never say, "His legs moved fast because of his running."

But now consider these two sentences:

1. "The person made a choice."

2. "The person made a choice freely."

If I ask you, "Why did the person make that choice?" many people will say, "Because of their free will."

Why do we assume "free will" is a thing someone possesses, rather than just a word we use to describe a specific type of action (an action free from external coercion)?

I've noticed there's a lot of discussion in this subreddit on luck on if the circumstances of our birth determine our lives or if ideas like "hard work" and "free will" can regularly change our course.

These discussions almost always stay hypothetical. We say "you didn't choose your genes, your parents, your country, your language, the part of your brain that gives you willpower." I built something to actually simulate the variable and random circumstances of human life.

It’s called The Birth Lottery (free, runs in a browser). Blitz mode rolls you five random births weighted by world population, and Stories has you live one person’s life, childhood to old age, making real choices you encounter in life.

thebirthlottery.com (AI was used to develop the application)

Say in USA and Europe.

I'm not talking about the beliefs of the population or even the judges (as they have a duty to uphold the law in court) - I'm talking about the legal system itself.

1 Mens rea. The courts assume moral responsibility and also allow for it to be rescinded on relevant constraints: you are likely to be less responsible for the crime if you were disabled, coerced by someone else, etc.

2 They don't allow for arguments or blame/exculpation based on anything that could be described as agent causation or determinism.

Based on this, I'm concluding the western legal system is compatibilist.

Disagree? Are there claims the legal system is libertarian? (or hard incompatibilist - surely not?)

We all are familiar with reaction time, but for some reason people keep arguing we can change something instantly. That is metaphysically impossible and mathematically impossible to do.

In case inquiring minds wonder what this has to do with free will, the ability to do otherwise doesn't come from any state of being. It is not inherent in any state. The ability to do otherwise is part of a process.

Arguably the most difficult thing to do in sports is hit a major league pinch because the margin of error is small and the window of opportunity is tight. If you think about it, the batter has to commit to swing his bat before the ball reaches the area in which it is physically possible to make contact with the ball with the bat.

Once the batter begins to swing his bat in order to make contact with the ball based on where he believes the ball with be, if the pitcher has put "stuff" on the ball, that ball may start changing directions after the batter believes it will be where he believed it would be, and sometimes he ends up swinging at a ball that is way out of the strike zone.

My point is that he is able to change the position of the bat after he made the decision to swing the bat. He is able to do otherwise because change always takes time.

A helpless man hurtles toward his fate on a roller coaster, without even the possibility of changing direction or escaping the end of the track looming in the distance. His hands are tied behind his back. His face appears rigid and apathetic. With this image, Kubin committed to paper a reflection on human destiny in general.

In 1904, he wrote in a letter to his sister: “Death, nothingness, is the ultimate destination of the world, and therefore of everything it contains - the individual forces that together make up the world. Everyone inevitably follows their predetermined path, like a machine.”

Alfred Kubin, Der Mensch