Whether you believe in free will or not is dependent on how you classify you.
If you believe you consist of everything that’s inside yourself, you ought to believe in free will because there is no external actor making your choices.
If you think your conscious thoughts are different from the processes your brain and microbiota influencing it you probably either don’t believe in free will or think that information your conscious thought access is processed elsewhere.
Our brains do processing all the time, we access only the part of it. You do things without conscious effort because of that but it’s still you doing things of your free will.
What free will?
I hope this is a miscommunication between the scientists and reporter because otherwise it’s a very embarrassing experiment
No just an exaggerated tittle.
The article makes it clear. The experiment just suggest free will is more mentally taxing and calculated then random will.
Instead of “illusion” (as the text says), I’d say free will is a fiction, or perhaps an abstraction. It has desirable legal, moral, and social consequences; but we should not confuse that with “real”.
In other words: no, you don’t have free will, but it’s better for everyone if you act as if you did.
“We don’t have free will but we have the experience of freedom” - Brian Greene
We do things for two reasons: either we have to, or we want to. There’s obviously no freedom in having to do something but we’re not free to choose our wants either. It obviously feels like freedom when you have a desire to do something and then you do it, but what else could you have done?
Also, free will implies there’s someone making a decision. What is that “someone” and where is it?
My personal view is that it’s not so much that we should live as if free will exists, but simply that the concept of no free will is incomprehensible - or even destabilizing - to some people. Being acutely aware of it may not be useful for everyone.
Also, free will implies there’s someone making a decision. What is that “someone” and where is it?
Yup, I agree it isn’t something epistemically real.
The reason I still find the concept of free will a desirable fiction is that it pushes people towards doing things that benefit other people, not just themself, without necessarily curbing down their power. You can use it for example to drill people “yes, you have the choice to cause harm, but you should not act on it”.
…or something like this. It’s one of those things that is rather clear for me in my thoughts, but not so much when worded.
Gateway paper to dictatorship
I don’t think so.
The main problem with dictatorship is that whoever is in power will act to their own benefit, even when this harms you. You don’t need to rely on the concept of free will to show this is a bad idea.
Free will can only exist if we had the supernatural ability to change the past. This idea is something lots of people really don’t like, so they come up with all sorts of ways to magic their way out of it like thinking the supernatural is real, rejecting the scientific method, and/or inconsistent ideas like compatibilism.
We sort of do and don’t. Determinism or not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle means that people can make decisions which are completely unpredictable.
Does uncertainty or our inability to predict it, mean we can will it? How are we outside how everything else in the universe works? Are our brains magical? Do we have souls?
No :)
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