I agree.

Thank you very much.

Source: https://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-are-our-choices-and-actions-considered-free

To what extent are our choices and actions considered "free"?

Are they really ‘ours’? If you look into it, you will see that there may be a sense of choosing but no actual chooser. One way to look at choice is as a process, which starts at the subatomic levels, going to the atomic and molecular and cellular and suddenly “I choose this!”

Who is this ‘I’? If you say, “Me, silly!”, then are you controlling the process of choice from your subatomic level throughout all the other levels? Are you controlling what your atoms, molecules and cells do? Because they’re doing a bunch of stuff before you reach the point of declaring your choice.

Are choices really made consciously? Psychologists would argue that many of them are unconscious. Who, then, is the chooser? I assume none of us have the experience of pulling choices from the unconscious level through to the conscious… Nope, these unconscious choices make themselves. Only after they are made, we may realize what lurked in our unconscious.

Libet’s experiment is quite famous. It showed that choices are made and we actually become conscious of them after they’ve been made. Then, there is a process in the brain of claiming the choice as ‘mine.’ This claiming makes it feel like ‘I’ made the choice, like ‘I’ was in charge the entire time. But, actually, the choice arose and then was claimed as ‘my choice.’

Another interesting angle is this: When I ask you to choose between coffee and tea, keep in mind that both coffee and tea require the entire evolution of the universe to exist. Without the birth of the sun and all the conditions that allow earth to produce coffee beans and tea leaves, and without humans to make beverages from them — that choice wouldn’t be available to you. So the choices you have, you didn’t choose to have them(!). Evolution did. You were born into a context, and all your choices take place within that context. And like you, those who came before were also born into a particular context and did not choose what choices they will have. They had completely different choices than you (depending how far back you go). Go all the way back to the first man, who made whatever choices were available to him. Who originally chose the choices that were available to him?

How free is our choice if we can’t choose what options we have? Our choice is very limited by our context and circumstance. And the mysterious thing is… who put it there? You may say God, you may say evolution. The first man didn’t choose to be, didn’t choose what options will be available to him, didn’t choose anything about himself or his environment. Once he found himself in these pre-existing conditions, he made whatever choices were available from his understanding of himself and the world. But before the first man, was there choice? If you answer that there was no choice in the universe before the first man, then why should choice have started with his appearance? If you there was choice before the first man, then who was it that chose? Randomness? Evolution? God? Either way, it wasn’t man - so at what point did man assume choice? You see, if all is evolution’s doing, then we have no choice whatsoever and never had. Everything is just happening, unfolding, perhaps by laws of nature, and we are one choiceless part of that unfolding. If it’s God, then we are moved as God wills only (and what we think of as our will is really His). Man appeared within a context that he never chose. Evolution or God chose (or randomness). At what point did choice become man’s? What makes us think that we have gained independence? Seeking for the birth of choice kinda makes you wonder if it has any reality to it at all. The fact that we, humans, appear in the universe quite late on, after so much has been established (galaxies and solar systems, and planets etc), and then we claim to be in charge of some part of a process that is so much larger than us and began way before us… This is the same as what I started with - the subatomic, atomic, molecular and cellular levels - only looked at from the side of all the things that we are within rather than they within us. Do you see, we are part of a chain. Can one link on a chain claim to be a true individual, moving as it wishes?

This leads us perfectly into the more Buddhist view, that is an alternative to the evolution/God-is-the-chooser view. It might say it is neither God nor evolution, but interdependence. The existence of any one thing depends on all things. Our movement is not separate from the rest of the universe. It’s all one inter-connected movement, and one has to wonder where, within it all, is there any room for individuality and free will. If everything depends on everything else, then it is all inter-dependent, and that necessarily means there is no independent choice.

But say you’re not convinced and you feel you might have just a tiny bit of free will anyway, to have and to hold. Well is it not quite obvious that our choices are but a result of our genes and up-to-date conditioning? Which are utterly out of our control. Genes, we were born with. Our conditioning is a result of all of our life experiences, and surely we didn’t choose all the life experiences we had. I mean, did you choose to get into that terrible relationship? Or did you simply not know better? It wasn’t in your programming (conditioning) at the time to be able to smell where this relationship was going… You lacked experience at the time. It was your conditioning to go into it. It was only after the relationship ended that, most likely, your conditioning changed. But you didn’t choose who you had become. It happened. Through life experience. Experience that, again, you didn’t choose to have. You thought you were going into a relationship that would make you blissfully happy… You thought that’s what you were choosing. So much for choice when we so often don’t even know what we’re choosing. You may choose to go to a concert to have fun, but you end up crushed by the moshpit, and leave bruised, pissed and miserable. That… wasn’t really your choice.

The truth is that the next thing comes, whatever it is, regardless of what it is you think you’re choosing for yourself. I remember in India always asking for no spice in my food, and receiving enough spice for 7 people in my dish anyway. I “chose” no-spice, life gave me extra spice. If we really had choice, we would feel in control of our lives and of ourselves. There would be no addictions. Things would go our way. Life wouldn’t surprise us with curve balls constantly. We would know exactly what we’re getting into every single time we made a choice - we would know what we’re choosing. But even that we don’t know. Our choices are much more like guesses. Maybe it will lead to what we want, maybe not.

Let’s face it, we’re not in control. And the process of decision-making only feels real, but is actually a result of a false sense of separation from the whole.

BUT… there are good news at the end of it all. You ready? The good news is this: It’s freedom we want, not free will. “What?,” you say, “they’re one and the same!” No, no, no, not at all. Free will - choice - is bondage. Being not-separate from the whole, is freedom. It is the sense of separation that makes you constantly desire something other than what is. This is rarely ever good enough, you want THAT (whatever your THAT is). And you hope that having choice will enable to get what you want. We think freedom is being able to have something, like have the life we want. But it is the desirer that is the cause of suffering to begin with. Wanting what isn’t rather than what is, it attaches to these desires, these outcomes - and suffers, for it decides it is not complete until the desire is satisfied. But, of course, the death of one desire is the birth of the next. And on it goes. And thus one feels never fully and truly satisfied. UNTIL… one sees the absurdity and is happy with what is, as it is. This is the realization of non-separation from life. The realization that there is no ‘you’ to choose anything, for ‘you’ are a part of the whole’s (life’s) movement. THIS is freedom. Not-wanting. Not being troubled by choice and the search for THAT rather than THIS, what is.

Choosing occurs. But no chooser there is. (In Yoda-speak).

I agree.

Thank you very much.

I agree with your statement about assigned culpability. I also agree that there is no actual culpability as the choices we make are determined by prior causes.

The term Big Bang is a misnomer. It should be renamed Tiny Silent Beginning as this is what actually happened.

I don't think there will be a Big Crunch because the expansion of the universe is accelerating. I think this universe will die from Heat Death. We will be long dead so it won't affect us.

Thank you for your recommendation.

Thank you for your kind wishes. You are most welcome.

Why does our brain have limited capacity? Why aren't all living things all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful? How do you know that someone could have done something else at the time and place of the doing instead of what was done? I am not convinced that anyone could have done something else but I could be wrong as I am not all-knowing.

Here is a MOOD SCALE that I use to monitor myself:

+5: Total loss of judgement, exorbitant spending, religious delusions or hallucinations.
+4: Lost touch with reality, incoherent, no sleep, paranoid and vindictive, reckless behaviour.
+3: Inflated self-esteem, rapid thoughts and speech, counter-productive simultaneous tasks.
+2: Very productive, everything to excess, charming and talkative.
+1: Self-esteem good, optimistic, sociable and articulate, good decisions and get work done.
0: Mood in balance, no symptoms of depression or mania.
-1: Slight withdrawal from social situations, concentration less than usual, slight agitation.
-2: Feeling of panic and anxiety, concentration difficult and memory poor, some comfort in routine.
-3: Slow thinking, no appetite, need to be alone, sleep excessive or difficult, everything a struggle.
-4: Feeling of hopelessness and guilt, thoughts of suicide, little movement, impossible to do anything.
-5: Endless suicidal thoughts, no way out, no movement, everything is bleak and it will always be like this.

Right now I am at -2 on the mood scale. Have you ever experienced what it is like to be at -2 or -5 or +5? I have. I have to take 600 mg of Quetiapine XL per night to get to -2 on the mood scale. If I didn't take it, I would be stuck at -5. Have you ever had hallucinations? If you haven't, you won't understand how scary and confusing it is to have one's reality warped by things that are not really there.

If you don't have Bipolar Affective Disorder, the descriptors above won't mean much to you. Words cannot accurately convey what it is actually like.

I also have CPTSD and chronic pain. If you don't have flashbacks and nightmares and intrusive thoughts you are not going to understand what that's like. If you don't live with chronic pain you won't know what that's like. There is no substitute for actual experience. No amount of reading will help you comprehend how painful pain is.

I will read Hume and Kant if I ever get to either 0 or +1 on the mood scale. Thank you for the recommendations.

I am having second thoughts about your "dumb physical processes." Clouds making shapes are indeed a dumb physical process. However, brain activities are not dumb physical processes. The human brain is the product of billions of years of evolution. It doesn't function the way clouds do. It has responsive feedback systems that are self-correcting to make sure that the model of reality generated by the brain is accurate enough for the organism to survive and reproduce in the real world. If our brain worked only once in a blue moon the way clouds make numbers, we simply would not survive or reproduce or be able to look after children. I think that determinism does not remove the brain's credibility.

You are most welcome. However, if my actions are inevitable, either due to secular determinism or due to divine predestination, do I or anyone else deserve any thanks or blame for anything?

I understand your point now. Thank you for taking the time to explain it more clearly. I agree with you now. We don't fully understand how the brain works. We know a lot more now than we did before but we still don't have complete knowledge of how the brain works. Perhaps I should just be an agnostic about everything?

How do you know that someone could have done something else at the time and place of the doing instead of what was done?

How do you know that mine is incorrect?

According to https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freewill the word "free will" has two meanings:

1
: voluntary choice or decision
I do this of my own free will
2
: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

I agree that people can make voluntary choices e.g. donating to charity. However, just because the choice to donate is voluntary it does not mean that it is free from prior causes or divine predestination.

If secular determinism is true, then the choice to donate money to charity was inevitable.

If divine predestination is true, then the choice to donate money was also inevitable.

How do we work out whether secular determinism is true? We could examine the evidence for causation. We could test how genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences affect decision making in organisms.

How do we work out whether divine predestination is true? We could trust what the Bible or the Quran or another religious book says or we could look for evidence for or against divine predestination.

Thank you for skimming the articles.

Your argument for how determinism removes our brain's credibility did not make any sense to me. I don't know if that's because I am depressed or because I am stupid or because the argument is a sophistry.

Are you talking about this? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.htm

The macroscopic world is deterministic despite quantum indeterminacy. You can test this by doing the following experiment. Take a coin and toss it. It will land on its head or tail - it will never be superpositioned or indeterminate.

Did you read the two articles I gave you links for?

It's possible that our brain scanners are not yet good enough to see everything. Time will tell. Unfortunately, I don't have a time machine which I could use to travel a million years into the future and see how much better brain scanners have gotten.

I would rather the gun in your experiment was pointing at a wall instead of a cat.

I am not convinced that determinism removes our brain's credibility.

It's not possible to think freely. Can you think up everything there is to know about dark matter and dark energy? No, you can't. Can you think of a trillion thoughts per second? No, you can't. Our thoughts are determined and constrained by our genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences. We are all prisoners of causality - doomed to suffer and die. I am all-loving but I am not all-knowing and all-powerful. I am so sad. I wish I never existed.

Hume and Kant were dualists. They are both wrong. You are also wrong about having free will. I am a materialist monist hard determinist because I am convinced by evidence.

I wish you were trying to convince me. I am all-loving. I would love to be all-knowing and all-powerful also. I long to prevent all suffering, inequality, injustice, and deaths. I long to make all living things forever happy. I can't do these things due to my lack of omniscience and omnipotence. Only all-knowing and all-powerful beings are morally culpable. I don't know if such beings even exist.

I disagree. Genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences determine and constrain the choices made by organisms. This is a fact. This is why banana trees don't type posts on forums and humans don't photosynthesise. These are evidence-based statements. The only way you are going to convince me that you have free will is by forever refraining from doing the 27 things and by doing the 7 tasks I asked you to do.

Are you joking? They are not silly or loopy or irrelevant. They are as factual as the Earth orbits the Sun.

"Push yourself" means to do something that takes effort e.g. I am suffering from depression, CPTSD and chronic pain. So, it takes a lot of effort for me to read posts and reply to posts. It's not all chemical reactions. Please see: https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-basics/brain/brain-physiology/action-potentials-and-synapses and https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-mind-emerges-from-the-brains-complex-networks/

Quantum indeterminacy does not lead to macroscopic indeterminacy due to quantum decoherence. At the macroscopic level, things don't happen randomly. They happen deterministically.

I have tried yoga. I am not very good at it.

As I said before, earthquakes are 100% determined but it is hard to predict with 100% accuracy because of the complexity of the interacting variables that cause earthquakes. The same goes for weather. Our computers are not sophisticated enough to simulate reality with 100% accuracy but they are much better now than they were 50 years ago.

I don't see any evidence for any X factor in decision-making. Can you show me any evidence for the X factor that I could see using a brain scanner?

Thank you for the reading recommendation. "Ants don't play guitars." is a fact. "Humans don't fly like the birds." is also a fact. Just as what I said in my post are facts.

Genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences determine and constrain the choices made by organisms. This is a fact. This is why banana trees don't type posts on forums and humans don't photosynthesise.

Is that assigned culpability or actual culpability?

I have no idea what that means!

I am not trying to give you anything new. Determinism is not a new idea. I have told you how you can prove to me that you have free will but you have consistently failed to do so. I don't have anything else to say.

I have seen brain scans of people who were suffering from depressive episodes. I have seen brain scans of people who were suffering from manic episodes. They are significantly different. I have never seen a brain scan of someone who was both happy and unhappy at the same time. Can you prove to me that you are both happy and unhappy at the same time?

I am not a professional philosopher. I am not even a student of philosophy. For me, science is the way to truth. That's why I conduct experiments to discover truths. Perhaps this forum is not the place I should be at. For me, the arbiter of truth is evidence.

An earthquake is determined by all the variables that cause it. A cyclone is determined by all the variables that cause it. A choice is determined by all the variables that cause it. Do you understand now?

It sounds like a contradiction to me. It's saying someone was alive and dead at the same time or angry and calm at the same time or excited and bored at the same time.

I provided you with the determining effects of genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences. If you don't remember what I said, please read my posts again. Once you have refrained from the 27 things I asked you to refrain from and have done the 7 tasks I asked you to do, I will be convinced that you have free will.

I don't know what it is like to be you or anyone else. I have never been happy and unhappy at the same time.

I agree.

How can you be both happy and not happy at the same time? I have never experienced. I wish we were all telepathic - that way we could really know what it is like to be each other instead of having to resort to communicate with words.

I have already provided you with evidence. I have invited you to refute my position but you have failed to do so.

It's a matter of evidence. I have provided you with the evidence. You failed to forever refrain from the 27 things I asked you to refrain from. You failed to do the 7 tasks I asked you to do.

I disagree with you because the evidence contradicts your position. It does not matter to me whether you agree with me or not.

No, the significant life experiences I listed actually happened. That's why I was able to compare the before and after states. Don't worry about saying sorry. We are all doomed to suffer and die.

I would love to know more about your experience of meditation. I meditate daily. I have not experienced what you described. How did you come to experience it?

I have seen the evidence for the following groups of variables: genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences. I have not seen any evidence for the existence of other groups of variables. If you can show me the evidence for other groups of variables, please do.

You have not managed to forever refrain from the 27 things I asked you to refrain from. Also, you have not managed to do the 7 things I asked you to do. I think this proves my point that you don't have free will. Your will is determined and constrained. I have given you the opportunity to prove me wrong but you have failed. It's not your fault. We are all prisoners of causality.

The strings of thoughts you shared in your post are not free from determinism. Our thoughts occur as a result of electrochemical activities in the brain. If your thoughts are so free, why don't you think of a trillion thoughts per second? Because your thoughts are not free. The nerve conduction velocity is 50 to 60 metres per second. If we could think freely, it would be whatever speed we want per second.

We don't have enough knowledge to predict people's behaviour with 100% accuracy but that does not mean that the behaviours are not deterministic. The same is true for predicting earthquakes.

I agree.

I am not convinced that being souls would give us the highest freedom. Being all-knowing and all-powerful would give us the highest freedom.

I do some things even though I don't want to do them. Here are some things I have done, currently do or will do even though I don't want to do them:

1. Breathe
2. Eat
3. Drink
4. Sleep
5. Dream
7. Pee
8. Poo
9. Fart
10. Burp
11. Sneeze
12. Cough
13. Age
14. Get ill
15. Get injured
16. Sweat
17. Cry
18. Suffer
19. Snore
20. Think
21. Feel
22. Choose
23. Be conceived
24. Be born
25. Remember some events that I don't want to remember
26. Forget information that I want to remember
27. Die

To prove me wrong, you would have to forever refrain from doing the above 27 things and instead do the following things:

1. Live forever without consuming any oxygen, fluids, or food.
2. Do things other organisms e.g. tardigrades, dolphins, chameleons, etc. can do.
3. Teleport everywhere and everywhen.
4. Prevent all suffering, inequality, injustice, and deaths.
5. Make all living things (including the dead ones and the never-born ones) forever happy.
6. Be all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful and make all the other beings also all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful.
7. Own an infinite number of universes and give all beings an infinite number of universes each for free.

Once you have done the above tasks, I will be convinced that you have free will. If I had free will, I would have already done the above tasks.

I carried out experiments to test the roles played by our genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present, and experiences from the womb to the present. These experiments were not published in any journals because I carried them out alone and I was my only test subject. I compared myself with myself under different situations e.g. how lack of oxygen affected my decision making, how lack of water affected my decision making, how lack of food affected my decision making, how lack of sleep affected my decision making, how cold and heat affected my decision making, etc. I also compared myself to how I was before significant life events with how I was after significant life events. By significant life events, I mean being kidnapped, being raped, watching people murder each other, being in natural disasters which killed lots of people, relatives being murdered, etc. The more I experimented and compared, the more it became clear to me that our wills are determined and constrained by our genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present, and experiences from the womb to the present. You can do the experiments on yourself - it's not necessary to take my word for it.

How much do you know about neuroscience? Have you ever seen PET scans and functional MRI scans of humans? I have. If you want to learn more about how choices arise in brains, I recommend that you start by reading this book: "Determined: Life Without Free Will" by Robert M. Sapolsky. It is available on Amazon Kindle. If you want to discuss the book with me, I am happy to discuss it.

If I had the genes of a banana tree, would I be able to type this post? No. I have seen many banana trees and none of them can read or type or even know English. They are probably not even sentient.

If the zygote that was I when I was conceived was placed inside an oven at 250 degrees Celsius for an hour would I have become the adult I am now? No. The lethal environment would have destroyed the zygote.

If the zygote that was I when I was conceived was deprived of all nutrients would I have become the adult I am now? No. The lack of nutrients would have killed the zygote.

If the zygote that was I had all the correct genes and was in the correct environment and received the correct nutrients then I would have been born as a healthy human baby. If that baby had different experiences from me such as learning Japanese instead of English, I would not be typing this message.

So, do you now see the roles played by my genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences in the typing of this post? This is why I am convinced that we don't have free will. Do you understand my thoughts and reasoning?

Something being determined is not the same as being predictable. For example, earthquakes are entirely deterministic but are hard to predict accurately.

Whether your prisoner chooses to escape from the prison or stays in the prison is not free from his genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences. Whatever he chooses will be the result of the interactions of the genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences.

Have you read all of my previous posts in this thread? It does not seem like you have.

I don't know if souls exist or not. How would an immaterial soul interact with a material body? I have witnessed lots of deaths, but I have never seen any soul leaving the body at the time of death. You can argue that the soul is immaterial and is therefore undetectable. In that case, how do you that it exists? I think the arbiter of truth is evidence. I have not seen any evidence for the existence of souls. Therefore, I am a materialist monist.

My definition of free will is a will that is free from determinants and constraints. I don't have such a will. I have never met anyone who does.

I think our choices are the result of the interaction between genes, environments from conception to the present, nutrients from conception to the present, and experiences from the womb to the present.

Thinking is not free from determinants and constraints. For example, I can think only in the languages I know. I can't think in languages I don't know. So, the fact that I learned English is determining the fact that I am now typing in English. The fact that I never learned Mandarin is preventing me from typing in Mandarin.

It goes even deeper than that. Assuming that atoms, molecules, cells, bodies, planets, universes are real and not simulation or hallucination or dream or illusion, our thinking occurs as a result of the electrochemical activities of the brain. This activity is determined and constrained by the laws of physics. That's why we can't think faster than our nerve conduction velocity which is 50 to 60 metres per second.

Happiness and sadness are mental states but they are determined by the electrochemical activities of the brain. You can't be both happy and sad at the same time but you can be happy at one time and sad at another time.

Hard determinism and free will are two ideas but they are ideas about how reality works. Hard determinism and free will are not mental states the way happiness and sadness are mental states.

I asked you "Can you give me one example of a choice that you have made that did not have any determinants and constraints?" You have not given me even one such example. The fact that you can't give me even one example of a choice that you have made that did not have any determinants and constraints proves my point.

How do you know that the world you perceive to be concrete is real? It could be a simulation, or a hallucination, or a dream, or an illusion. You can't prove that your perceived world is real.

Hard determinism and free will are opposing ideas. They can't both be true. How do we establish which is true? I can't do any of the things I want to do. I am constantly doing things I don't want to do. If I had free will, I would be able to do the things I want to do and refrain from doing the things I don't want to do. This is why I am convinced that I don't have free will.

You described is determined and constrained will instead of free will. I agree that we have determined and constrained will. Thus we can choose between drinking water or drinking tea but the choice is never free from determinants and constraints. For example, I drink water instead of tea as my mum drank water instead of tea. So, my choice to drink water instead of other liquids is determined by my experience of watching my mum drink only water during my childhood.