I think it’s more complicated than free will existing or not.

If you knew every single possible value about the universe at its start and had a perfectly accurate model of physics, you could theoretically predict/simulate everything that would ever happen. For practical reasons, though, that’s impossible, even ignoring weird quantum effects, for the simple reason that that is a lot of data points, more than any of us could reasonably keep track of- it’s like how, in sufficiently controlled conditions, a fair dice can roll the exact same number 100% of the time, but there are enough variables that are hard enough to control for in a normal situation that it’s basically random.

Similarly, if you knew everything about every human on Earth, you could theoretically predict exactly what any of them would do at any given moment. Of course, that’s just not practical- the body and brain are a machine that is constantly taking in input and adapting to it, so in order to perfectly predict someone’s thoughts and actions, you’d need to know every single detail of every single thing that has ever happened to them, no matter how small. Then, you’d need to account for the fact that they’re interacting with hundreds of other people, who are also constantly changing and adapting. It’s just not possible to predict or control a person for any reasonable length of time like that, because one tiny interaction could throw off the entire model.

Just look at current work with AI- our modern machine learning algorithms are much more well-understood and are trained in much more contained environments than any human mind, and yet we still need to manually reign them in and sift through the data to prevent them from going off the rails.

So, technically, I suppose free will doesn’t exist. For practical purposes, though, what we have is indistinguishable from free will, so there’s not much point getting riled up about it.

Hard determinist here. It doesn’t make the future predictable by me, but I don’t see how randomness could really occur. And then likewise there’s no such thing as free will.

You react to choices the specific way you do because of experiences you’ve had previously.

Reverse time without changing anything, you’ll always make the same choices because you’re having the same thoughts each time every time, because you’ve been conditioned the way you are.

The universe doesn’t “know” where it’s going, but the plan is already in action. You can choose whatever you want to do, but if you were the same person in the same circumstance, you would and will always make the same decision.

My brother and I have been having an ongoing debate about this and Simulation Theory for a good few years.

In my mind, it’s a pointless question to try and answer. It makes for a nice thought experiment, but actually having a belief in it is useless.

Indeterministic + free-will doesn’t exist and can’t exist. You literally end in impossible contradictions if you entail its existence in a consistent universe (as in, one where everything that exists is subjected to the same natural laws).

As a side note for OP, Hisenberg has proven there’s no such thing as “knowing the initial condition”.

The question is underspecified. Why do you want to know if free will exists? What will you do differently if it does exist vs if it does not exist?

This is similar to questions like, “is water wet?” You can generate endless debate on the topic, but it’s all intellectual masturbation until you are genuinely looking for the answer to a specific question.

Well let’s start by examining the phrase “free will”

The term free has at least two different meanings in common language.

A) free as in beer ( free from cost) B) free as in speach (free from control)

Both of these could be broken down more (e.g. Monetary cost, entropic costs, mental cost and societal control, individual control, physical control… Etc)

Now, “will” is a bit more tricky. In this context we generally use it to mean “choice” However desire, and intention also get mentioned in the definitions.

1. desire
2. intention
3. choice

When commonly discussed I would say people tend to talk about B3(the ability to choose without external physical control)

I would argue 3 requires 2 which requires 1

So now we discuss B1 - are we free to pick our desires.

This I find to be interesting. We often see people desiring things which seem foolish. Foolish as is Unwise. What makes something foolish? Seems to me foolishness is caused by a lack of data and poor modeling.

At this point my phone battery is at 6% So I’ll cut my response short. I see no truly free will. I think our desires can be shaped over time via our input (previous choices) however we can’t roll a die and pick our desires.

I don’t think this is a bad thing. Just maybe not ideal but what is in this world?

I have the feeling most people cling to free will as a concept because not having free will raises questions if a “self” truly exists. However the existence of free will can be as scary if not more, since how could we define a “self” if it could freely do something not based on what defines it.

I think an important question to ask is what “free will” actually is. I find people throw the term around without necessarily having a concrete definition for what they personally mean. When I use the term free will, I am saying that the the choices a sapient being makes would somehow be independent from all of the variables within the natural Universe. If it is dependent on natural variables (whether we know of them or not) this makes it deterministic, simply regular reactions to an unimaginably large domino effect.

The only hypothetical test I could conceive of would be if someone were able to rewind literally all variables of the Universe to a point in time just before decisions were made by another being, and doing this countless times and seeing if the outcome ever changes. I’d consider this to be entirely untestable, and as such I do not entertain the idea. For now I hold to what seems to be demonstrably true, which is that everything seems to operate and behave based on their properties, and react based on other variables which interact with them. With enough variables, we can make models to accurately predict the world around us, I do not expect our will to be any different.

I think the universe is deterministic, but also that absolute prediction is impossible and that there might even be actually random events in it (or not, I’m just not certain either way about that part). Even if you have an absolutely random uncalculatable die tho, that doesn’t mean the future is not predetermined. If hypothetically I had a time machine, rolled the die, recorded the result, and then went back to before it was rolled, then watched the roll again, then if it always gets that same result, despite not being “caused” by any external factors, then the universe would still be deterministic even with the presence of randomness

Deterministic with no actual free will, but complex enough that we’ll never be able to tell the difference. Essentially, our choices may technically be predetermined but for all intents and purposes, they are indistinguishable from free will and can’t be predicted.

Religion warning:

I think free will exist but there is also a bigger plan. Like think of an open world video game, you can choose to do some things which will affect some other things but there are some parts fixed/determined to happen

Quantum mechanics are probabilistic, which serves as a good argument for the universe as a whole being probabilistic. The position of a single particle could change a great many things!

So that’s a topic that fascinated so many people forever.

With all these people fascinated by it, some of them weirdos put their whole life’s at it.

And these weirdos came to a few absolutely terrifying conclusions:

1. The ultimate future is predictable: 2nd law of thermal dynamics means the universe will eventually end with energy being equal everywhere, so there is nothing because there is no difference. That’s the heat death of the universe.

2. Otherwise nothing is absolutely predictable: the uncertainty principle says you can either know the precise position of a particle, or you know the precise movement of a particle, you can’t know both at the same time. So yeh if you know the initial condition you can make a prediction, but you can’t know the precise initial condition at particle level, and since the world is made of particles, you can only make imprecise predictions without 100% certainty.

You could argue that the human mind is a quantum machine. You don’t know it’s initial condition. Nor do you know the precise initial condition of every human mind in the world. The impreciseness of any prediction, even if it could be small individually, adds up in the scale of the world, the universe. So that can be you foundation of free will, up to the heat death.

As @[email protected] said, free will and determinism aren’t necessarily tied together. You can have one without the other. It’s been a while since my studies so I’m rusty on the academic side of philosophy so I won’t start naming names, but I’ll start off with the fact that a coin is a much more simple thing than a human. So while a coin might land on just one of its two sides or, in a freak accident on its edge. For humans, there are way more outcomes as to what could happen when someone’s thrown into a complex situation.

Personally, I am what one would call a soft determinist (I probably don’t fit the label completely, so feel free to correct me) which is considered to be a cope-out-of-the-discussion type of position, which I believe is a bit unjustified. I don’t think we have enough knowledge about the world to definitely answer the question of whether our actions are deterministic or not or whether our will is free or not. But it sure as hell feels like we have free will, that’s acting at least if not always then frequently. And as Argv already said, physics involves a heavy dose of randomness. So going by that I tend to sway towards the non-deterministic side. You can will yourself out of situations that other people would consider beyond their control, but if there’s a boulder rolling towards you through a narrow tunnel it’s very likely that you are going to run away from it, not towards it. In that sense, some action is determined by the instinct of self-preservation. But again, theoretically, who’s to stop someone from accepting the situation and letting the boulder roll over them?

So yeah, for me, as with most things, free will and determinism are on a spectrum, not binary. It depends on the context and level (quantum to Newtonian physics) that we’re speaking about.

P.S. How do I mention someone in the thread? I just linked Argv’s comment in a very brute way.