About Will
About Will
Maybe this has come up before, but I still wanted to ask. Lately, I’ve been a bit confused about whether we really have free will or not. I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in metaphysics. I’d probably call myself agnostic. I’ve just been questioning life more than I used to, and this thought keeps popping into my head.
Do we actually have free will? Like, can we really choose things the way religious texts say we can? What made me think about this is how predictable the micro world seems to be—but when you go deeper into the quantum level, things get really chaotic and complex.
On top of that, as people, we’re constantly shaped by what we go through, and it feels like our reactions and choices get more limited over time.
What do you think about all this?
There are a few possibilities for how the universe ultimately functions:
- Determinism - under determinism, every event is the direct-and-only-possible outcome of the causes that preceded it. Everything that is or occurs is ultimately due to the unfolding conditions initially set by the big bang. What set those conditions though?
- Stochasticism - everything is, at root, random. If QM effects don't directly impact the macro world (is an electrons "choice" of up or down spin a butterfly's wings upon the larger system it entangles into?), then at the very least the initial conditions of the Big Bang were randomly set.
- Super-determinism - not only is everything deterministic, but so are seemingly stochastic processes. Maybe there are infinite universes with every possible starting condition? Maybe every quantum event splits the multiverse onto various paths were each possible outcome is taken? (This is basically what I believe.)
- Will - there exists an object which can "choose" things without any calculation process. It simply "decides" something, but this isn't a random process. It will usually choose the same outcome giving the same coniditons, but not always so it isn't a purely deterministic object either. We have to treat this like an Oracle, that is mathematically, it's a thing that spits out answers but has no internal process we can understand. This object could be God (divine will) or something inside some or all acting beings in the universe (free will).
This problem with Will is that it's undefinable. Look at the axioms most mathematicians use: ZFC, the (Z)ermello-(F)ranco axioms plus (C)hoice. We can do math with or without Choice, both make sense, but we can't prove that you need it or not. And the axiom of choice is purist expression of Free Will that I know of: either you are allowed to have some undefined means of selecting one item from (possibly infinite) sets, or you must have a definite (calculable) means of choosing. Free will, or determinism? Even math can't decide!
I tend towards Daniel Dennett's views on this. The universe is fundamentally deterministic, but we can act as though we have free will.
Because whether that will is possible or not kinda doesn't matter. Did you make any choices today? Yes, of course you did. But who are you? You're a product of the universe, a complex system of neurons and physics that generate a consciousness that we don't really understand.
I think every system is deterministic as much as it can be defined and reasoned. Macro world is working with deterministic principles in my opinion. A robber steals something due to maybe greediness or starvation etc. reason and they're being judged with reason to protect the safety of people and order.
But I cannot say the same thing about the micro world. Because even science can't reason and explain it too much when things goes quantum mechanics. We just make it "serving" for our goals. Like using a useful stuff which we don't even know how it works.