Being able to shoot lazer beams from my eyes to melt my enemies would probably be a survival advantage, but it doesn't mean that it 'will most definitely evolve into existence in the future'.

That said, evolutionary theory already accommodates for the fact of niche construction, which is the when organisms alter their environment so as to be better accommodated to it. That niche construction occurs says nothing about 'free will' though, so we can keep the science while dropping the bad metaphysics.

Free Will may not be a "survival advantage" because the freely chosen preferences of the individual need not align with the survival of the genes.

We all know people who prefer not to have children. Their genes have been deselected.

That said, evolutionary theory already accommodates for the fact of niche construction, which is the when organisms alter their environment so as to be better accommodated to it. That niche construction occurs says nothing about 'free will' though, so we can keep the science while dropping the bad metaphysics. — StreetlightX

So animals can construct niches, but people can't make choices?

I didn't say we can't make choices. I said it's irrelevant.

So, when someone choses to be barren, that is irrelevant to the evolutionary success of their genes?

If you think we make 'choices' in that manner, sure, but that's extrinsic to the theory of evolution.

That niche construction occurs says nothing about 'free will' though, so we can keep the science while dropping the bad metaphysics. — StreetlightX

I may be wrong but success in life, generally speaking, has been attributed to making the right choices.

I do agree that other animals lack the cognitive capacity to make choices and yet they too seem to be ''successful'' at life. But look at success in terms of degrees. Humans, apparently able to make choices, seem to be at the top of the food chain. To what extent do you think this ''achievement'' can be assigned to our ''free will''?

Free Will may not be a "survival advantage" because the freely chosen preferences of the individual need not align with the survival of the genes.

We all know people who prefer not to have children. Their genes have been deselected. — tom

There's a difference between the type of choice you make and the ability to make them (free will). It is possible to choose extinction but that doesn't mean our ability to select life-sustaining options is not a survival advantage.

I may be wrong but success in life, generally speaking, has been attributed to making the right choices. — TheMadFool

Success in life has nothing to do with evolution. Look at all the successful, rich and powerful people whose genes have been deselected via the choices of the phenotype.

According to the theory of evolution (TOE) traits that confer an advantage in the environment survive while those that are disadvantageous lead to extinction — TheMadFool

It is relevant in my view to emphasize the difference between individual and specie in the TOE.
Sometimes, there are genetic mutations in individuals, which sometimes is and advantage for these, sometime for the specie (or for both), another times is a (individual and/or specific) disadvantage, and sometime is not any of them. "Advantage" for individual and specie means "staying alive", "to survive". It is a "comparative" relation: the trait "A" is an advantage respect to B in the sense X (this case to staying alive).
However, these "advantageous" traits must be in addition genetically transmissible to be also specifically advantageous; if not, then these traits explain the success of individuals, but not species (the problem or phenomena for TOE).
Then, we can resume the TOE as "New species appear when, in individuals, they are produced genetic mutations that 1) are genetically transmissible by reproduction and 2) they fit traits that increase the individual success (the are individual advantages)".

Regarding free will: it is a mathematical or "abstract" concept to my (lack of objective determination or mechanism). If we would have "free will" then actions of people should not be predictable in absolute, so it would be scientifically intractable and hence biologic psychology would be impossible.

Success in life has nothing to do with evolution. Look at all the successful, rich and powerful people whose genes have been deselected via the choices of the phenotype. — tom

To what do you correlate the success of humanity? Isn't it our ability to weigh alternatives and choose the best outcome?

One could say that e.g. a scientist has no option but to be one, driven by his proclivities. Same for a musician or a writer or even a murderer. However, without the ability to compare and contrast choices no real discovery can be made. Just as an example, there were two competing theories on gravity - Newton and Einstein. We looked for evidence and chose the best one, right? This same thinking model can be applied over all human endeavor, meaning our ability to choose is critical to our success.

Perhaps free will has already evolved.

Thanks for your post. Read my reply above to another poster. What do you think?

Free will could be genetically transmissible as I seem to be able to choose just as my father or mother can. I expect my children too will have this ability.

Thanks for your post. Read my reply above to another poster. What do you think? — TheMadFool

I'm agree. Basically, free will could be viewed in an operative sense as the ability of 1) wanting to do something and 2) multiple possibilities. 1) refers to desires and 2) to knowledge (perceived options) and reality (objective options).

I don't think there's a lot of point in trying to isolate the evolutionary causes of such human traits as the exercise of will. I mean, there might be a serious reason to consider it from the perspective of formal evolutionary psychology, but in the context of philosophy it's likely to amount to a just-so story - after all you can argue indefinitely about likelihood but it’s all totally conjectural without any hope of empirical validation. So - don’t seek for philosophical answers in scientific theory.

But isn't our ability to think of alternatives a very basic reason for our success, if we could call it that?

I just wanted to hear what people made of the possibility that free will could (must, in my opinion) evolve as a survival tool.

‘Reasons for success’ don’t equate to biological traits. Free will or intellect or rationality are something more than simply adaptions and to try and conceptualise them in those terms exaggerates the explnatory power of evolutionary biology. Have a read of It Ain’t Necessarily So, Antony Gottlieb.

To what do you correlate the success of humanity? Isn't it our ability to weigh alternatives and choose the best outcome? — TheMadFool

By what standard is humanity more successful than, say, bacteria or insects? An objective look at the Earth would conclude that life consists mostly of single-cell organisms along with some of their multi-cell descendants.

Free will could be genetically transmissible as I seem to be able to choose just as my father or mother can. I expect my children too will have this ability. — TheMadFool

Free will is not a trait, it is a metaphysical condition. Whether or not you have it is not a matter of fact, it's a matter of value, context, perspective. Sometimes it makes sense to think of ourselves as having free will, sometimes it doesn't.

This is a very amateur question, so mea culpa up front, but I can't think of free will having any meaning at all outside of a theodicy ? It pre-supposes some supernatural being that either grants it, or denies it it with some level of predetermination.

Libertarian free will is a logically incoherent concept. Every event including our actions is either determined or random. There is no third option. If it was determined then we couldn't have done otherwise so their was no "choice" since choice means there must be more than one option. If it is a random action then it was done for no reason and the agent is not the reason and therefore not responsible.

So evolution is irrelevant.

There is quite a gap between the atomic happenings in nature and the reasoning of human minds - one may choose the appropriate model depending on the situation. For example the simple rule that you may not steal as you would get punished is made to people viewing them as subjects of their own decisions. It would be quite hard to show the purely physical effect of that letters on a piece paper causing most people not to do so. This is explained in other terms: Who would decide to do so desipte of the punishment? It is a different level of understanding.
When it comes to the consequences it is not such a big difference between calling criminals morally corrupt or simply disfunctional.

--

If watching two people playing chess they sit there and think about their moves. At the very least they think they are making a decision there. This is free will. They do not just sit there, looking at the board and suddenly see their hand move a piece.
The abscence of subjectivity - and hence free will - is something associated with extraordinary or clinical conditions of the human mind like being drunk, drugged, shocked or more generally: the perceived loss of self-control.

I just wanted to hear what people made of the possibility that free will could (must, in my opinion) evolve as a survival tool. — TheMadFool

Maybe it has got to do with you being made of matter, so the matter cannot simply think for itself but you have to do it...

According to the theory of evolution (TOE) traits that confer an advantage in the environment survive while those that are disadvantageous lead to extinction. — TheMadFool

Who said this?

Dinosaurs were imminently successful by all counts for 100 million years and, as far as we know, they didn't have free will. We haven't been successful for very long at all -- Homo sapiens is < 1,000,000 years old--maybe more like a mere 400,000. Very recently we have been a brilliant flash in the pan, but it is not al all clear whether we will be here in so few as 400 years.

Is that success?

That's one of the interesting questions about the role of evolution in culture. As it is now our 'theory of everything', then it's easy to fall into thinking that it has something meaningful to say about humanity's place in the scheme of things. But does it really? I remember many, many forum conversations where I was faulted for suggesting that human beings have any more significance than blue-green algae or cockroaches. But I think that's because evolutionary biology is, well, biology - it's not philosophy at all, much less existential philosophy. When viewed from that perspective, then, sure, h. sapiens is simply 'another species'; but that really amounts to hardly saying anything at all.

Dinosaurs were imminently successful by all counts for 100 million years and, as far as we know, they didn't have free will. — Bitter Crank

You really know such things?

Who said this? — Caldwell

What is the TOE say then? The basic claim of the TOE seems to be that pro-survival traits get passed on and ant-survival traits die out.

Maybe it has got to do with you being made of matter, so the matter cannot simply think for itself but you have to do it... — Heiko

Can you expand on that. Thanks

Dinosaurs were imminently successful by all counts for 100 million years and, as far as we know, they didn't have free will. We haven't been successful for very long at all -- Homo sapiens is < 1,000,000 years old--maybe more like a mere 400,000. Very recently we have been a brilliant flash in the pan, but it is not al all clear whether we will be here in so few as 400 years.

Is that success? — Bitter Crank

May be I spoke too soon. But our ''failure'' can be attributed to poor choices we make. If everybody realizes the fact that we're harming the planet and takes action then we would surely survive for longer than the dinosaurs barring, of course, catastrophes like asteroids and volcanoes.

Dinosaurs were imminently successful by all counts for 100 million years and, as far as we know, they didn't have free will. We haven't been successful for very long at all -- Homo sapiens is — Bitter Crank

It's not entirely fair to compare dinosaurs - an entire taxonomic order - with humans, a mere species. One fun fact that often goes unrecognized is that we live closer on the timelime to the T-Rex than the T-Rex did to the Stegosaurus. So yeah, not cool to compare us to dinosaurs as a whole.

Free will is always misunderstood. Free will is the ability to make choices outside of natural instinct. The first mention of free will, in terms of human history, was in the bible; Genesis. Paradise was when humans were a natural part of the earth controlled by self regulating natural instincts. The original free will was connected to departure from paradise.

Free will appears when humans learn to make choices apart from instinct, based on knowledge of good and evil, which is subjective. If jumping off the ledge into the water below gives one prestige in the group, this is good and will be chosen. This is not natural, since vanity or ego-centricity is not what drives nature.

Before free will evolved, choices were confined to the parameters of natural instinct, allowing humans to be part of the integration of nature and ecosystems. Choices were more limited and very close to deterministic. Selective advantage was in the context of these instinctive choices in a changing physical environment.

Free will or the ability to choose outside natural instinct, dissociated humans from nature and from the integration with nature. Individual free will choices cannot only cause the individual to depart from natural, but it can have a ripple affect with unexpected consequences beyond yourself. For example, if you believe in manmade global warming, this never started out as the goal. Rather it was an unexpected consequence of free will, that took decades to be seen. The natural man or women would never go there, in the first place, since instinct will not go there. It is about integration and not dissociation of nature.

In terms of evolution, the ripple affect due to human free altered the environment and added new pressures on the rest of nature, which then altered the direction of evolution for the flora and fauna of the earth. Human will power also alter the direction of human evolution, by altering the environment into manmade environments and by changing the selective pressures due to these unnatural environments.

For example, in nature, the weak and sick become part of the food supply for other animals. The weak and sick are a natural resource for stronger predators; recycle. In the human world, the weak and sick are a large consumer of resources. In nature, resources are slanted to the healthy. Natural selection has been turned on its head, due to will power. This is causing human evolution to follow a direction that favor medical issues. This is an unintended consequence of using willpower for jobs and money.

Today, in rich countries, almost everyone can point to some medical issue, large or small, which is not how nature does it. Nature is about fitness.

The brain can process data in both in 3-D and 2-D. Natural instinct is based on 3-D due to the way it integrates. Free will is based on 2-D thinking; differential. Tree of knowledge of good and evil is 2-D, with good and evil (x,y). Free will evolved due to the brain being induced to slow down so it could no longer consciously process in 3-D. The brain still uses 3-D but this is mostly unconscious.

According to the theory of evolution (TOE) traits that confer an advantage in the environment survive while those that are disadvantageous lead to extinction. All life-forms extant have been passed the test of survival. Am I right? — TheMadFool

So far. Do not presume that there are no further tests to come.

Having free will implies that we have the ability to choose over many options. With free will we can choose from the environment elements that are beneficial for our survival. In other words having free will is a survival advantage. — TheMadFool

Nothing to date suggests that the ability to choose inherently results in choosing that which is beneficial. And even if that were true on an individual level, can that really be extrapolated to a species?

And I also question the degree to which the colloquial understanding of evolution is still and your post is an excellent example. If free will is an evolutionary trait, then does not that in and of itself suggest that evolution after the age of free will may no longer be random, if it ever was?

Good post.

I remember many, many forum conversations where I was faulted for suggesting that human beings have any more significance than blue-green algae or cockroaches. — Wayfarer

I won't fault you for suggesting such a thing. To us, we are infinitely more important and valuable than algae and cockroaches (especially cockroaches.) Still, if we take a very unnatural global and billions of years long-term view, blue-green algae created the atmosphere we and all other animals breathe. The weight of all the ants, termites, cockroaches, and >4 legged beings far exceeds ours. Our error isn't thinking that we are so important, but that everything else is dirt under our feet. Given your Buddhist studies, you likely hold the other 0-2-4-6-8-and-more-legged creatures in higher regard than many do.

Sure, biology is biology and that's a very good thing. And we are not in an either/or situation, either it's existentialist philosophy or it's biology. Our situation is that we have both, and we need to pay attention to biology or we won't be around to think about existential philosophy.