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Are people scared of free will?

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thesoundofmotion

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May 1, 2007
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I have been thinking about the free will vs. determinism argument a lot lately.

It is very hard for me to believe that our lives are somehow determined and that we have no control over our lives. It seems that someone who believes in determinism without free will could be inclined to chalk up all the things that happen to them as beyond their control.

Sort of how like a criminal can't be at fault for crimes he commits because it was determined.

Now I can see causal relationships between things but I don't think this means anything is determined.

Are people scared of the fact that it could very well be that besides your biological makeup you are free to do whatever you can possibly do and that you actually direct your life?

It seems scary at times that it's our own responsibility to make our lives yet it's very liberating as well.

I personally don't believe it is as black and white as this though. I don't believe words have anything to with reality in a sense and there really is no such thing as free-will or determinism. There just is what is. Which again leaves us a bit trapped.

Thoughts?
 
what if anything that makes me nervous about free-will, is the initial process for ones true-will to be realized. if we were to live in a society of 'true free will' which would after time be that of peace, the starting process would be maybe uncomfortable, but with other people, many other people with an understanding of what is happening, there would be even more empathy amongst each other, so this peace that is craved by all, would be much greater then we even know, atm.
 
it isn't fear. it's just difficult to discern the difference between a causal thought from a free one. look into intentionality if you are genuinely interested in the subject.
 
Free will, by its nature, is probably impossible to define and contradictory. If it is an absolute that we have free will, then we actually don't. Its as self cancelling as saying 'this statement is false'.
 
I agree danny.

Determinism does seem like a magical view on reality.

If it does hold up though that would mean everything is determined down to every single thought we have.

I honestly can't believe that although I do see or at least I think I see cause and effect in my life.

It does feel like we are in the drivers seat.

Some things are just too strange to think that they could be predetermined by our universe.
 
it's not one way or the other. i think a great majority of our actions and thoughts are predetermined by a combination of genes and environment (nature and nurture). the spark of will only comes into it at very fleeting moments of creativity. you know, that quiet place where you find epiphanes.
 
I've wondered this in a way to, on a different scale. A lot of people, in my experience, seem reluctant to accept probabilistic or randomness in the sciences. (Not so
much scientists/academics as lay people) i.e. even uncertainty* and superpositions and the randomness of radioactive decay.

*which is not even random, just that measuring the state of something will indeed change its state, thus limiting your possible precision.

The fact people are opposed to the idea that a tiny little particle might behave in a manner which is not 100% deterministic makes me think they'd be really opposed
to the idea their life may not be.

I personally think that a large fraction of your life is neither deterministic nor 'free will' but is, like radiodecay, a random/probabilistic process, which you could not
predict to perfect precision even with 'perfect knowledge' nor change with free will.

I think a lot of the rest of it is complex system/chaotic. Strictly speaking, that would be deterministic, but is so sensitive to so many possible things affecting it, that
it can be, for most purposes, treated as random. (A common example would be a dice or a roulette wheel, which are deterministic due to physics/mechanics, but can generally be treated as random)
 
willow11 said:
Free will, by its nature, is probably impossible to define and contradictory. If it is an absolute that we have free will, then we actually don't. Its as self cancelling as saying 'this statement is false'.
Click to expand...

I can't understand what you're getting at here - freewill is just an absence of causal factors or a perfect balance between the yea & nay causal factors - it is an absolute that people will have the opportunity to exercise freewill if the optimum conditions are met.
Seems to me that you're saying having freewill foisted on you negates freewill when in fact it's just a situation that can arise sometimes.
Scary yes it could be terrifying depending upon the situation.

The more ignorant ( innocent ? ) a person is may equate to them having greater amount of opportunities to exercise freewill - thoughts
 
i observe a lot of people who seem reluctant to take responsibility for their actions/decisions/the consequences of either of this/their own words, which is much easier to do if you believe in determinism, so I'm inclined to agree with the OP.

i agree with rangrz that rather than being deterministic or truly our own will, there are random/probabilistic processes at play. we certainly are complex systems and much of what happens in our bodies proceeds, on a higher level, deterministically even though the lower level description are statistical.

i think it probbaly works the other way round too- there are many layers of abstraction between our brains and our consciousnesses and as far as i know, even if the relveant brain processes are deterministic (i don't know that they are), by the time we reach an appropriate level of abstraction, we have indeterministic processes. perhaps ones which can occur from a number of different brain configurations, each of which would evolve in a different way after that process.

i peronally don't really mind either way, but recent evidence and my own experiences in rather extreme mental states strongly suggest that our will is a lot less free than we perceive it to be.
 
thesoundofmotion - why do you think what you feel has any bearing on whether things are predetermined or not?

thesoundofmotion said:
Some things are just too strange to think that they could be predetermined by our universe.
Click to expand...

What makes them less strange if they happened through free will?

I believe in determinism, or what what rangrz described, a random/probabilistic process. A random/probabilistic process is still not free will though. Conscious thought has no bearing on a random outcome.

I think anyone who uses 'determinism' as an excuse to not take responsibility for their life has only a very superficial and naive understanding of what the term means. thesoundofmotion, I'm interested in your opinions on free will. How do you believe we exercise it, on the most basic level? In other words, how do you think the brain, a property of, and arising from, the material world, can change the laws of physics?
 
L2R said:
it isn't fear. it's just difficult to discern the difference between a causal thought from a free one. look into intentionality if you are genuinely interested in the subject.
Click to expand...
I second this. Do we even have a free will? Aren't we constantly being manipulated into liking/disliking, opinions being formed on subjective phrasing of information which we regard as truth.

Responsibility and authority are the keywords here in my opinion. A few interesting pieces to read are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Click to expand...
 
Grondelduck said:
I second this. Do we even have a free will? Aren't we constantly being manipulated into liking/disliking, opinions being formed on subjective phrasing of information which we regard as truth.
Click to expand...

surely if we have no free will, no manipulation can change our actions? if we were gonna do whatever we were gonna do anyway, then the manipulation makes no difference. i do get what you mean about how we're constantly being suggested to do one thing or another, but i don't think thats the type of free will being discussed here. i think the type discussed here would be equally debatable in a world with no adverts etc. manipulation appears to me to be predicated on free will.
 
B9 said:
I can't understand what you're getting at here - freewill is just an absence of causal factors or a perfect balance between the yea & nay causal factors - it is an absolute that people will have the opportunity to exercise freewill if the optimum conditions are met.
Seems to me that you're saying having freewill foisted on you negates freewill when in fact it's just a situation that can arise sometimes.
Scary yes it could be terrifying depending upon the situation.

The more ignorant ( innocent ? ) a person is may equate to them having greater amount of opportunities to exercise freewill - thoughts
Click to expand...

I think I meant that if it is absolutely certain that we have freedom to do what we want, we then cannot possibly avoid doing what we want, therefore making free will conditional and not free will at all.

I don't personally believe this idea, I tend to think that absolutes generally don't describe the world or life very well. And what I'm saying is more of a semantic or logic problem, but I can't help trying to contradict everything I believe...:\

I can't understand what you're getting at here
Click to expand...

Something about something, to be sure....

:)
 
i may not have free will now but one day i will, for i am so determined to achieve this!


/one of my old jokes.
 
From having spent time in cultures where fatalism is something of a national mindset, I can say that there is definitely a certain ease involved with taking a fatalistic or deterministic outlook to your life. If nothing is really in your control, then it's a whole lot easier to avoid being hard on yourself, or wishing things had gone differently. It's a great mindset for being at peace with a life of seemingly endless hardship, failure, or mediocrity. If nothing is really under your control, why even try? Why not just let life happen to you and take whatever comes as inevitable? I don't much relate to this mindset, mind you. But I can definitely see its attraction.

Freedom can be daunting, because the flip side to it is responsibility.
 
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