Deep and pertinent title

I was into a choose your own adventure books when I was a kid, there was one in particular that you are told in the beginning that there is a perfect ending but you can't get there by choice. There was no path in the book that got you to that page. You had to just decide to not follow the rules and turn to that page.

I think I remember that one, unless it's a reoccurring element in choose your own adventures. It was about ice cream and parallel universes or time travel or something right?
- Had aliens in it. They were abducting sentients from all over to try to see if anyone knew how to get to space-paradise.
- It's not the book that OOP was thinking of, but you're probably thinking of Meanwhile by Jason Shiga.
Such a clever use of the medium. I love this sort of brilliance.

A moment of silence please for all the text in this image that's been mangled by JPEG compression.

Thank you.

To be unfunny:

The whole idea of a balls hitting each other universe went out the window when we hit the quantum era. We have had to adapt to a reality where matter is somehow a statistical phenomena, and the details are always hidden from us in one way or another. Entanglement is another confusing thing, and its super common - not just some rare phenomena in a lab, it's more of a fact of particle interaction

So our brains are somehow statisical-chemical-electric sugar powered supercomputers that have entangled state. And the brain actually stretches across the body, with various chemistry being produced throughout

In short, nobody has any idea how brains really work, it's way more elaborate than current AI. It's also likely impossible to fully simulate a brain - it would have to BE a brain

There's a separate question about the nature of randomness in the universe, but all we can know is that follows a normal distribution over time. It seems truly random from our point of view. Of course, who's to say if God likes to fudge the numbers a little

Yes, but none of that refutes the argument that we lack free will. The trillions of interactions leading up to an 'action' on our part can be random, determined, or some mixture - but they still 'cause' our next action, rather than our 'free will ' causing the action. If you believe in free will, you believe in a magical quality we possess which is somehow neither random (else it wouldnt be 'will') nor determined (else it wouldn't be 'free')
- I personally find all discussion around free will annoying. Whether or not I have free will I still have to decide to do shit. I can’t just go on autopilot.
- So if there's more than 1 action that your brain can decide upon, does that mean free will because you have a choice, or no free will because you are confined within those finite choices?
Ridiculous, this is like some facebook post from my religious uncle. Brains are quantum entangled with the body? Bro you don't even know what that means or that information is not preserved in entanglement
I almost want to ask for a source but I shutter to think what might be dredged up
What? Every chemical reaction within every neuron is still governed by physics. Just because we don't understand how the physics works doesn't mean we get to throw physics out the window. Even then, even if we ignore the physical aspect of it, from a philosophical standpoint, you can easily argue that free will doesn't exist.
Let's say for a moment that I'm wanting to go get dinner somewhere, and as I'm walking there, I start to cross a street and get hit by a bus. I wake up and Death is laughing. Wiping tears from his eyes he says, "man, that'll never get old. Listen, I'll give you a second chance. I'll rewind time to the moment before you decided to cross the street without looking, and if you make it across, I'll leave you alone." I take the offer (who wouldn't), and time gets rewound. I'm now standing at the curb, getting ready to cross the street, with no memory of the events that transpired after I stepped off the curb. Will I try to cross the street again, or will I decide not to?

Edit: how the fuck do spoilers work? They don't show up on liftoff
- Yeah, that's my understanding of it, too. If you go back in time to any point in your life, you'll be exactly the same, with all the same experiences and the exact same thoughts running through your head. Every single atom in the entire universe will be exactly the same as it was at that exact moment, so of course you'll make the exact same decision.
  The universe as a whole is just a huge, insanely complicated chemical reaction. Ultimately, we're free to make whatever choice we want, but that choice was what we were always going to choose.
  It's like how flipping a coin or rolling a die isn't really random - if it were possible to gain an insanely in-depth understanding of all of the forces acting on the object, and you had the power to manipulate your throw to give it the exact force needed, you could have it land exactly how you want it to every time. Instead, we call the act random because it's too complicated for us to manipulate it effectively.
- I don't wanna get into a whole thing about it, but physics makes no guarantee that events will play out the same way twice under time. The stochastic nature of the universe is that every particle interaction creates a whole universe of possibilities, virtual particles, and the tail ends of that possibility are almost endless. Physics may easily break its own "rules", with small probability
  So your mechanistic view is that if you rewind time, all the billiard balls will get hit the same way. I my probabalistic view, something new will happen. Of course, we can't time travel, so the whole hypothesis is pointless and undefeasible
- The spoiler works for me on memmy
Looking past the technobabble...
The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.
In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.
In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.
One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.
Except.
We are looking at this through a kind of implied metaphor that the brain is some mechanism, separate from "us" that we are forced to think "through'. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.
But there is no deeper "self". We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn't matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it's statistical and we just have a baked "likelihood" of that response.
The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it's deterministic or not it's just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.
- Absolutely. And to add to that: quantum mechanics doesn't disproof determinism either. The fact that we use a probabilistic model to some success does not mean the universe has a probabilistic nature. Perhaps the process that determines the outcomes of quantum mechanics is a well behaved random function that can be understood in principle, but is computationally irreducible.
Cool so you have awareness of and/or control over the quantum particles that make up the baryons that make up the matter of your brain? No? Then you don't have free will.
- Even just from a biological perspective the idea of free will is iffy.
  Any decision you make today is influenced by a chain of decisions going back to the beginning of all decision making. Everything from what you had for breakfast to what your great grandfather had for breakfast to what tiktaalik had for breakfast has affected your own individual biology and internal chemistry to lead you to any choice you're about to make. Even locally there's so much going on in our bodies that we're not aware of and don't have control over and which are influenced by things we don't have control over that directs our daily lives in profound and complex ways.
  The eminent Robert Sapolsky is able to put this idea into better terms than I am if anyone wants to peek into this area further.
Sure, we don't know everything and quantum mechanics deeply relies on statistics, but you'd be clutching at straws if you want to use that to hold on to the notion of free will or a god.
Not saying that there are no deep mysteries left and that neuroscience is right, but the notion of a free will is fairly obviously the last hold out of the geocentric model of the universe.
To be even less funny the ideal gas law is a single result from a subject that used to fill at least one huge dense textbook, produced in the 19th century. It is a statistics based branch of science.
are somehow statisical-chemical-electric sugar powered supercomputers that have entangled state.
Citation need on the entanglement part.
I like that idea, that quantum entanglement and free will are related :)
- They aren't
- You should join scientology. They've got many interesting ideas you might like :)

From all the discussions I've read about Free Will, I'm convinced the term actually doesn't mean anything at all. What would a world with free will look like? What would a world without free will look like? How would a person with/without it behave? Would there be any tangible difference between them?

As far as I can tell, free will is supposed to be a property of a person, which may or may not have something to do with physics, either everybody has it or nobody has it, and nobody has a definition that would let them measure it (without reducing the question to a disagreement over semantics). I think that whether someone believes in free will is a trick question; you can't believe or disbelieve in a something that isn't even a real concept to begin with.

It's like the "are we living in a simulation" question. It's impossible to prove or disprove and ultimately does not affect our lives in any way that we can control. Just a thought experiment.
- It may be possible to prove if one day we can prove whether universe is or isn't deterministic.
It can in theory be disproved - if we ever manage to prove that universe is deterministic, free will by definition cannot exist.
- Not necessarily, even if everything is determined randomly we still end up without free will, because then it's not us that somehow introduce the randomness from both outside and within the system, it is randomness itself that makes us
- Disagree. Look up compatibilism
- What is the definition of free will that is only possible in a non-deterministic universe? Is non-determinism the only requirement for a universe to qualify as having free will?
There are so many cases like that. For example, define intelligence. If you try to, you'll run in loops of equally undefined abstract concepts.
And that's basically what philosophy is about.
- Even though intelligence isn't precisely defined, people still have enough of an idea about it to have some consensus about how it should be measured. An animal that keeps running into a wire fence trying to get through is showing less intelligence than an animal that notices an opening a few feet away and walks through that instead. Free will is much less defined than even that.
I think the the divide in this is Thought vs Action. You can choose to think of whatever. Imagine things whether possible or not.
To be able to act on those thoughts could be an entirely different thing.
But even with thoughts, we're still limited by our humanity. For you and I, we could likely find common ground on many things. Come to similar conclusions. But trying this with any other animal and it all falls apart.
Absolutely right. There are of course definitions of free will that would grant us free will, like one could argue that a traffic light has free will, but there is no reason to believe that humans are not just reducible to a set of (complicated) biological processes. People of all religions and even plenty of atheists believe that somehow human consciousness is something special that transcends the material laws of the universe. That is what most people still seem to think, so it seems. Even I would dare to say that most people, including you, who know that this is likely false still have some deep rooted belief in the illusion. You may not believe in truly free will, but that is only the top of the iceberg part of your mind. The rest is deeply invested in the notion.
Interestingly Buddhists have as one of their central tenets that there is not only no free will, but not even a self. The idea of a self is nothing more than an idea. It has a function, but is inherently an empty construct. What it means to be a human can only be experienced in the moment. If one looks closely enough at that experience, the illusion of free will can be relented even at its deepest root. Paradoxically, I can report, this is incredibly freeing.

Sam's explanation of free will is compelling and difficult to argue against. The way we feel about it reveals something about us. He cites examples of people who found comfort in the idea of an absence of free will but also people who are terrified of the idea. Meanwhile, the universe hasn't apparently changed. The more I think about this stuff, the more I come to believe that we construct the world in our imaginations and fit the data to that model, not the other way round. We see what we want to see.
- There's also a third group of people who find the absence of free will neither comforting nor terrifying, but just don't give a fuck. The absence of free will is just a simple fact, and it doesn't have any impact on my life whatsoever. I'm still doing what I was always gonna do and my brain will still produce the feeling that I'm in control of myself and my life, just like everyone else. I don't understand what there is to even have feelings about on the matter.
- We see what we want to see.
  We were visiting friends, long drive. Decided to stop at a plaza to get something to eat. A truck was blocking me and then moved. Within about a second
  Me: oh nice hamburgers
  Wife: sushi, grand opening
  4 year old daughter: ice cream!
  I slammed my foot on the brake. Sure enough right there was a hamburger place next to a sushi place (with grand opening sign) next to an ice cream place. I just sat there trying to understand the implications of what just happened. 3 people were shown the same thing at the same time and each of them saw exactly what they wanted to. It was like the poem about the blind men examining the elephant but freaken real.
  Never going to forget that moment.
- The way we feel about it reveals something about us. He cites examples of people who found comfort in the idea of an absence of free will but also people who are terrified of the idea.
  I was personally raised agnostic, and after a long existential road including at least one severe crisis and mindfulness / CBT therapy, came to found the idea of a lack of free will be to be incredibly comforting.
  My generally similarly minded father, however, seems to find the idea pretty terrifying.
  To me the lack of free will and physics of the universe provides a comforting structure that I lacked for life, to him, as someone raised Catholic with a lot of moral teachings about choice, I think it represented a terrifying teardown of the underlying foundation that he's known and built his life on.

What is this from?

Gave me a chuckle.

The Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, iirc.
- Is that basically a text adventure in book form, but with less features and more page turning?
- it's intriguing, reminds me of videogames where the storyline changes depending upon your choices

That's not an argument for free will. Chaos is just a mathematical property of certain systems.
We can mathematically prove that the complexity of certain systems means that their outcomes are unpredictable if you look far enough into the future because of exponentially how many possible outcomes there are.
That's all chaos theory is, the idea that even if the universe behaves according to deterministic or probabilistic physics, and we could map the position and properties of every single particle in the universe, we still wouldn't necessarily be able to predict the future in X years.
That's not an argument for free will though, tons and tons and tons of relatively simple systems (like the famous three body problem) that do not involve free will produce chaotic outcomes.
Thanks for bringing up Sexy Beefcake Dr Malcolm.
Right emergence. That doesn't mean that you couldn't in theory predict exactly what a human being would do if you had perfect measurements.
To me we should stop worrying about free will and worry about agency. You have more agency than a slave, a billionaire has more than you. We know that people have agency.

Slams book shut in disgust

When I first played Life Is Strange I already knew about the choice at the end, but without context it didn't really mean much to me. I thought that over the course of the game I'd come to prefer one option over the other.
By the time the final mission started I was still very much on the fence, so I went and choose the third option: Closing the game and leaving it's characters in a limbo of uncertainty

turns to page 73

A team has been dispatched to your location.

Oooooo You cannot go against nature Because when you do (Go against nature) It’s part of nature too

Our little lives get complicated It's a simple thing Simple as a flower And that's a complicated thing

Due to quantum mechanics, we know this is not true. There is a level of uncertainty and probability and the smallest level of our universe. The deterministic model of the universe has been put to rest a century ago.

No. On average things are average. So while not everything can be fully predicted you don't usually need to. A laser, a transistor, a diode are all devices that depend on QM theories being true. We have lasers, we have screens, we have neat flashlights, we have computers. Just because we can't say everything doesn't mean we can say nothing. Every time your lungs fill it is only because vacuums are unlikely, not impossible just unlikely.
Uncertainty doesn't save free will, at most it sets limits to it.
There is a level of uncertainty and probability and the smallest level of our universe. The deterministic model of the universe has been put to rest a century ago.
This is true, what we instead have is a probabilistic model of the universe, which still obeys very clear statistical rules and probabilities, also seemingly leaving no room for free will.
A dice roll doesn't have more free will just because it's random.
- The fact that we have a probabilistic model of the universe does not proof the universe is non-deterministic. It may just be computationally irreducible and therefore best modeled through probability. Quantum mechanics' use of probability does not proof that the universe throws dice. There are many explanations possible, but the short of it is: we don't know and quantum mechanics doesn't give us the answer.
I think you are not getting it quite right. Those "low level" things are predetermined. Where you get the uncertainty is that there is always a bigger or smaller picture.
Determinism and uncertainty are both perfectly compatible with each other.
if you agree to this hypothesis, turn to page 72 70% of the times
if you disagree, turn to page 72 40% of the times
if you're viewing this through polarized glasses, turn to page 72 80% of the times
if you're an electron, rotate 360° to page 72
Unless superdeterminism is true. But does it make a difference anyway? "Free will" is overrated.
The fact that quantum mechanics models physical processes stochastically does not mean that there is free will neither that the universe is non-deterministic. This statement is strictly true.

Pretty sure that "free will" is just our monkey brains attempting to rationalize what we mostly do based on instincts.

For anyone who's skeptical about 'free will' being illusion, please read consider this book "Free Will" by Sam Harris, it will change allot.

Edit: there is another one, "Predictably Irrational". This does not deal with the matter directly but can help developing a opinion on the matter.