Free Will vs. Determinism

[UserNameGoesHere]

Define 'choice' then, independent of the concept of free will. In other words, define choice but do not use 'free will' anywhere in the definition.

[FictionJunction]

there's no such thing as choice if free will isn't there. Choice would be an illusion of free will and nothing more if considered from a deterministic point of view.

I can't define choice without free will as both concepts are entwined.

[UserNameGoesHere]

Interesting. Suppose I have three cards, a Jack, a Queen, and a King.

You are to choose one of them.

Now, it doesn't matter which one you choose as two will remain, and each of the ones that remains, while not chosen, was still a choice, correct? So even if you declined to play the game entirely (hence not freely choosing any of them), they would still all three be choices, and this is independent of your free will choosing one or more than one or none of them at all or any other combination, I think.

If it can follow that a choice is independent of the chooser, it should follow that one can have free will independent of determinism.

Or I may just be very confused.

[Reach]

Originally Posted by FictionJunction

I find girl A and girl B attractive. I wouldn't go out with girl A because, despite being attractive, she isn't to my liking. Girl B is where it's at.

if you can prove to me that preferences are biological then I'll consider your theory. And pardon my ignorance in this subject, but I just find it to be pretty awkward for it to be true. I always figured preferences came from experiences more than anything.

Either way, I stray from determinism as a defensive impulse because the mere thought of being a part of a bigger chain of events, playing a literally mindless role just bothers me a lot. Whether or not it's true, though, doesn't mater because we wouldn't know the difference now would we.

It's not that it's entirely a biological preference, but his point was that at some level, biological preference is a variable influencing your decision. Also, preferences come from your biology and experience. You are hardwired with many, many preferences, and this serves as a template for how experience will mold and potentially change some of these preferences. Others will always remain unchanged. This is not really debated at all in the literature.

For example, humans are predisposed to like sweet tastes and dislike bitter ones (if this isn't obvious to you, look again, specifically at the size of society lately D: ). These trait preferences are linked back to specific trait locus on our chromosomes. However, as you can probably tell from experience, the degree of liking for certain sweets is not the same in everyone, and this is highly influenced by experience.



As I see it, the free will debate can be simplified down to something like this:

Let's say I ask you to consciously, out of your own free will, snap your fingers when you're good and ready...whenever you choose to do so. Does the command to snap your fingers proceed before or after the conscious perception of snapping your fingers?

The dichotomy is essentially either (simplistic version):

1) Input information -> motor information runs into the thalamus -> redirection of the information to the frontal lobes and conscious processing of the command -> choice to redirect the information to motor cortex and then back into the spine, which is then followed by a finger snap.

2) Input information -> motor information runs into the thalamus -> redirection of the information to the motor cortex and associated movement areas, command to snap fingers is processed unconsciously -> information is redirected to the frontal lobes and the conscious perception of the command is formed -> information redirected back into the spine, followed by the finger snap.

Now you see, #2 is more along the lines of what actually happens. This is a problem, because it means the perception of choice actually follows the command to perform the action, which seems to imply that choice is only an illusion. You can't infer directly though that we have no choice at all, that at some level we didn't have an influence on the information, but it doesn't appear to be that way.

[MrRubix]

"I find girl A and girl B attractive. I wouldn't go out with girl A because, despite being attractive, she isn't to my liking. Girl B is where it's at.
if you can prove to me that preferences are biological then I'll consider your theory. And pardon my ignorance in this subject, but I just find it to be pretty awkward for it to be true. I always figured preferences came from experiences more than anything."

The mere fact you are even attracted to girls in the first place is indicative that there is something influencing your decisions that you may not know about, considering how many people share your preference.

If attraction to the opposite sex was entirely based on free choice, we'd have a lot more people who simply "don't have any inclination to pursue the opposite sex at all," if you understand what I mean. It'd be like me saying "all humans have a biological inclination for Brussels sprouts" -- when you see those sprouts, you instantly have this natural urge to be with it/touch it/stroke it/whatever. But that is not the case -- we're hardwired to pursue *people*. When we see someone really hot, something in our brains is drawing us to that. Even though you may "think" you are preferring one girl over another, my point is that your attraction to the opposite sex is something likely hard-coded in the first place.

I did not explain myself very well here, but I am saying that there are all sorts of "hardwired" preferences. Even though these preferences are shaped empirically as well as through other factors/preferences in your brain, they all start there.

Saying we are entirely free from determinism is a huge fallacy because there are just too many things that are pre-wired. If we were truly free-thinking agents, we'd be born totally free from all biological mental encodings. The fact that we are not free from those is one example of why so many of our decisions are merely part of causal chains.



"For example, humans are predisposed to like sweet tastes and dislike bitter ones (if this isn't obvious to you, look again, specifically at the size of society lately D: ). These trait preferences are linked back to specific trait locus on our chromosomes. However, as you can probably tell from experience, the degree of liking for certain sweets is not the same in everyone, and this is highly influenced by experience."

Yes, this is a good example of what I mean.


"2) Input information -> motor information runs into the thalamus -> redirection of the information to the motor cortex and associated movement areas, command to snap fingers is processed unconsciously -> information is redirected to the frontal lobes and the conscious perception of the command is formed -> information redirected back into the spine, followed by the finger snap."

This is also correct. Another way I would explain this is that if I were told to snap my fingers, I would imagine the process would be determined as such (I am going to explain the conscious and subconscious decisions in the same vein here):

I am sitting there, basically chilling. I know that I have been told to snap my fingers (purely input so that we interpret our order). So, I now have time (now) until (whenever my preferences have indicated that I'm waiting too long and being ridiculous in accordance with empirical evidence and preferences for how people get irritated with too long of a wait, i.e. waiting ten hours would be unreasonable. Same with 8, 6, 4... eventually we reach some idea of an upper extreme) to snap my fingers. However, the time in which I choose to snap, I would argue, is not up to us (the subconscious command to snap fingers). I would say that even the time we choose to snap is determined. Maybe we're hungry and anxious. Maybe I am feeling apathetic/lazy/slow/lethargic/tired from my day/nothing else to do that has satisfied my preferences, and so there is some weight placed on snapping later. I could go on and on, but there are millions of variables like these that push and pull to help determine exactly "when I snap my fingers" -- the earliest end being if I wanted to snap as soon as I heard a command, and the furthest end being if I were told to wait as long as I could stand without snapping. A combination of subconscious physical factors and environmental factors (we were told to simply choose a time to snap without any mentioning of preferred timeframe, meaning it is up to us to make that judgment call, and that call is shaped by our past experiences). At the end of it all, all these variables are essentially pointing to a moment in time where we think "Ok, now is a good time to snap" and we then execute the physical command. We think we chose when to snap, but really that time point was determined by a push-pull relationship of an absurd number of variables beyond our conscious comprehension.

Again, a really bad explanation on my part, but I hope it makes some sense. You could imagine that the real thing is just like my example explanation, only infinitely more detailed with a better outlining of how variables relate to one another and how much they push/pull. Our decision to snap, to me, seems to be no more exempt from physics than that of an apple falling off a tree.

[Tokzic]

lmfao this reminds me of the topic where i came to the conclusion of determinism on my own before even realizing it had been thought up already

Free will is entirely a lie. It's an uncomfortable truth, yes, but it is truth. Everything acts under the laws of reality as we know it, and even as we are sentinent matter, we are still matter nonetheless. When we are presented with a decision, there is no other possible result than the outcome because the outcome is a direct result of your brain's state. Sure, you consciously consider each possible choice, but even our conscious thought is hard-wired. Anything that is situational is simply the result of the hard-wiring progressing through time, and not even worth considering because the way our situation influences our decision is a direct result of our hard-wiring.

It's both comforting and mildly disturbing that there's only one possible fate of the universe.