Ask HN: If all events are random or deterministic is there free will

It's an interesting discussion and one that has bothered philosophers for millennia. I'm afraid you won't have a true answer to your doubts and it's a matter of what makes sense to each of you.

As usual, Wikipedia does a decent job of surveying the landscape so you can deep dive into any of the philosophies as you wish: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

Determinism is compatible with a free will. Determinism simply mean that the future can be accurately predicted from the present. Its only implication on the subject of free will is that the same person in the same situation always will make the same choice, i.e. theres nothing inherently random about our decision making processes.

There is no contradiction between being causal and non-deterministic. QM is both, for example.

So your argument fails at that point. Not that that helps much in determining whether or not we have free will, just that this isn't a good argument against it.

Why do you care about free will? If you are a healthy human being, you are capable of making decisions based on the knowledge you have and your ability to think. Why does free will matter in this case? Or am I missing something?

What do you mean by free will?

TL;DR: Check your presuppositions.

> I’m supposing that all events are the result of a train of consequences (determinism) or are completely random (quantum stuff). Is this correct?

In "He Is There And He Is Not Silent", Francis Schaeffer points out that, if everything had an impersonal beginning, then free will is impossible. A bunch of other stuff is impossible, too: love, morals, meaning, real beauty. Everything we think of as making us human is dead. All we are is deterministic machines made out of atoms, with quantum uncertainty injecting some noise at the lower layers. We're peers to robots. This is the consequence of your supposition in your second paragraph.

But, Schaeffer points out, there is another possible starting point - that everything we see had a personal beginning, that is, God. In that case, our aspiriations to being real persons rather than just machines are in line with what has always been - true personality. And if that is so, then your second paragraph is an incorrect supposition.

Most everyone has a materialistic starting point as such a deeply-buried presupposition that they never question it. But the logical consequences destroy our humanity.

It's kind of like this: Have you ever put a T-shirt on backward? It looks like it should work, and it covers everything that it should cover, but it just doesn't fit. And you try to wiggle it around so that it fits better, but no matter how you wiggle, it never fits right. In the same way, the materialist presupposition looks like it explains everything. But who it says we humans are doesn't fit us. It's untrue to our experience of living as human beings.

I assert that this isn't just a cruel joke played on us by an unfeeling universe. I assert that this is evidence that the materialist presupposition is in fact incorrect. It doesn't explain who we are as human beings. It doesn't explain how we can have real personality.

You are going to have to define free-will.

I think that the same person put into the same situation makes the same choices. So it is the result of history. There is the chance that neurons fire semi-randomly, potentially meaning someone might connect a different thought given the same scenario.

Either way, does it matter? Are those things free will? I believe people can chose thier actions. They can choose to be better or worse or any of a million other things. This ability to choose is free will, and is independent of determinism. Even if it is an illusion (and you are just successive, deterministic events), it is important that people chose to be who they are. That is how society can exist.

All of these comments are good points. I have thought of free will too. My idea was mainly nondeterministic free will, but also a kind of two kind of free will: "classical" free will which is less free but has more effect, and "quantum" free will which is more free but less effective. I also thought of a kind of deterministic free will where free will is somehow encoded in the initial state; possibly transcendental numbers might be required in order for this to work. And yet there are still more questions. I have read Wikipedia and other stuff too.

One of the pointers Advaita offers is to start observing your “choices” — what and when are you “authoring”?

I’ve been doing this for a while and am yet to observe any choice which is not determined by circumstances, conditioning, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, desires, bodily needs, or genetic make up. None of these are under my control, so where’s this “free” will?

I recommend I am That, a book collecting talks with Nisargadatta Maharaj. If you’re lucky, it’ll blow your mind.

There is actually a solution to this problem similar to Pascal's Wager [0]. This is the argument.

1. If there is no free will and you believe you have free will then it doesn't matter.

2. If there is free will and you believe it doesn't exist then you have wasted your life.

3. Our knowledge of the existence of free will or not is incomplete.

The end result of these three statements is no matter how unlikely free will is (all evidence suggests it doesn't exist) you must act as though free will exists since there is some finite probability that it does and you will waste your life by believing free will doesn't exist.

Does anyone know who first proposed this solution in the literature?

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

This is a deep rabbit hole, for further confusion I proffer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice