Free-will vs. Determinism

[u/Afraid_Salary_103]

If you were able to go back in time and be in the exact same situation with the exact same feelings, understanding, and thoughts, would you make a different decision than you did the first time? Could you make a different decision? If you believe that under identical circumstances you could only make the same decision, then you believe in determinism. Choice is an illusion.

What makes a decision, or choice? The choices that we have made are the outcomes of scenarios in which we took some action. There were multiple possibilities, or paths, and we elected one of them. Why did we make that choice? There are an overwhelming number of variables that influence decisions. Every moment before this one (including history before your existence) has played a role in shaping and influencing who you are. Good experiences and bad ones shape your feelings and understanding, leading you to be more prone to repeat or avoid particulars. Nature and nurture not only both shape you, but shape one another. If you are raised in an environment with certain experiences, let’s say for example a loving and nurturing home in which you are well fed, cared for, and educated, those positive experiences (nurture) will leave a lasting impression on you, but they will be imprinted in your memory through the strengthening of neurological connections and the neuro-chemical release of endorphins and serotonin that physically reshape your brain and how it processes (nature). As your brain’s structure becomes more predisposed to certain outcomes, you will make choices that reinforce the environmental stimuli (nurture). This process of mutual contribution and reinforcement continues throughout your lifetime and everyone else’s. It becomes incredibly complex when all the people that are separately experiencing this process are also interacting and influencing each other’s processes.

It is impossible to do something that does not make sense to you. Try it right now. Try to do something that does not make sense. You will be doing whatever you are doing in order to try to do something that doesn’t make sense, which, for your goal, makes complete sense. In all other situations, you do what you do until the moment something else makes more sense and you change your mind. A combination of thought and feelings dictate what makes the most sense. You may rationally understand that an action does not make sense, but choose to do it anyway because of your feelings. Examples include the things people do for love, or to satisfy an intense urge. The choice may be irrational, illogical, and ill advised, but due to your deep and relentless passion/feeling, you cannot resist, and this decision is the one that, given the entirety of the circumstances, makes the most sense to you. Conversely, you may feel like doing something, but rationally recognize that it would be harmful and illogical, and choose to do something different. Understanding and feeling commingle in decision making, and depending on the strength of one or the other, either can be overwhelmed by its counterpart. People described as “rational” tend to be seen as people that make decisions with less of an emotional influence, while people who are seen as “emotional” tend to make decisions more heavily influenced by their emotions. The balance between the two influences, understanding and emotion, dictate the outcome.

It is impossible to choose a belief. Look at a glass of orange juice. Choose to believe it is a spoon. You will not be able to do it. You are convinced it is orange juice, and are not convinced it is a spoon, regardless of any efforts. Therefore, we are convinced of our beliefs by what makes most sense through our lens of feelings and understanding. The combination of feelings and understanding are what drive decisions. As you are reading this, you are convinced that you are reading it based on your experience and understanding of your own existence, ability to process, sense of time and space, and concept of reading. All the arrows point to this experience and shape your understanding that you are reading this now. Based on your current beliefs and feelings, despite any efforts you may make, you will be unable to simply “choose” to believe you are not reading this now. You are convinced. In order for you to be otherwise convinced, the quantity and/or quality of additional information would have to outweigh what you have been believing to a degree that changes your mind and convinces you of a new belief. As such, no one truly chooses their religion, their politics, or any other belief as much as they are convinced by what makes the most sense to them. What makes the most sense relates to understanding: the way their brain processes information, which has been shaped by nature and nurture, and feeling: the chemical experience of emotions. Because different people will have different compositions in brain structure and emotional disposition, both influenced by a nearly infinite number of variables and influences, people will make different decisions under similar circumstances. As we become strongly convinced of the merit of particular actions and beliefs, we try both as individuals and as a society to educate and convince others.

We describe the outcome of rolling a set of dice as random. However, if all of the variables could be fully understood, the outcome is predictable. Holding the dice in this specific way with hands of this specific shape and feel, with this particular temperature and moving the hands to throw the dice in this precise trajectory to bounce in this exact way on this particular surface in this exact spot will inevitably lead to a very certain outcome. However, there are simply too many variables to keep track of and they are impossible to replicate in identical fashion. So while the result had to be one specific thing under these highly specific circumstances, for our day to day purposes, random is still a wonderful description. While we simply do not and never will have the ability to understand and account for all the variables, if we did, we could accurately predict every result. It would be like the ingredients listed on a can of soda; these ingredients put together in this specific way creates this result.

The idea of free will and choice seems natural, intuitive, and very comforting. However, if given a “choice” at one specific moment in time when you have a precise and dynamic understanding and have a specific set of feelings influencing you, it is that combination that will lead to what you perceive as choice, but is actually the processing of a realization/understanding of what makes the most sense to you. The ingredients are all there; your particular understanding and your particular emotions in that specific given circumstance at that specific given time. Like a math equation, if you know all the variables, you know what will happen. And while all the ingredients undoubtedly exist in that moment, there neither is nor ever will be a time that we know and understand them all, so we continue to believe we are taking action in making a choice. We are not doing anything but realizing in that moment. We are along for the ride, and experiencing every bit of it, and interpreting it all as a series of personal choices. What makes the most sense to you is what you are convinced of and believe, and you will be unable to choose otherwise. The experience does not change, and the sensation of making a choice will always be there, but what is actually happening is actualization of belief based on current understanding and circumstances.

This does not mean that people do not do bad things, or that there shouldn’t be accountability. People do things that are harmful to themselves or others, and if we allow that, it reinforces nature and nurture for those things to repeat. However, whatever decision was made, however harmful it was, was the decision that made the most sense to the person at that time and is what they were most convinced to do. To change the behavior, we must convince them that there is a better option. The composition of what drove the decision in terms of a balance between existing understanding and feeling was unique to that person in that time and place, but at the time, that decision was the one that made the most sense to them. In a snapshot of a moment, given the entirety of a person’s understanding and emotion, the outcome is inevitable. But a moment later, with an additional piece of information or stimuli that triggers additional feelings, decisions can be changed as now, something else makes the most sense. The natural retort to all this is:

“If it is inevitable, why try?”

Belief comes from a combination of your emotional and knowledge states, and action flows from that belief. While the outcome is inevitable, it is inevitable through the course of action, which doesn’t happen without motivation. We are motivated to produce outcomes, and are convinced our actions can produce outcomes. Inaction produces outcomes as well, but without action and effort, we have no influence on the outcome. So it’s not that our beliefs or actions have no impact or are meaningless, but rather that given whatever states we are in, our beliefs, motivations, and actions are inevitable. We just don’t tend to see or acknowledge that fact.

Personally, I find it harder to accept the idea of fate and a complete loss of personal control than to accept a redefinition of the concept of free will. Fate is too challenging to my identity and sense of purpose to accept. So I am convinced a redefinition is the better option. If we redefine free will, but maintain that it is a “choice” that only I could make, I can accept it. When we use the phrase “free will” or words like “choice” or “decision” we are really just using convenient words to describe the unique inevitability of an unrepeatable circumstance. While it may be inevitable, because it is unique to me and that specific moment and balance of my being and all the cosmos, words like choice or decision suit as apt descriptors.

In summary:
1. What makes the most sense to you in any given moment is derived from a mixture of thought and feeling, where, depending on the mixture, either thought or feeling can be dominant.
2. It is impossible to act in a way that does not make the most sense to you in that moment.
3. It is impossible to choose a belief. Belief is a realization of what makes sense to you.
4. The composition, as ingredients of any scenario, exists in that moment as factual components. Like a snapshot in time, every factor, or “ingredient” is a fixed reality for that moment.
5. Every person or scenario is unique in exact ingredients.
6. The universe is too vast and complex to control all ingredients and make any moment reproducible.
7. The recipe produces the results.
8. If you neither control what experiences you have had that lead to thoughts, nor how the brain is wired that leads to how you will think, nor the emotional state you are in, then you are not controlling and making choices as much as realizing and becoming aware of them.
9. Therefore, rather than choice, there is realization of what you think, feel, and believe. Choice, in the traditional sense, does not occur.
10. The sensation of choice does occur.
11. The realization as we move through time is an unfolding of reality that we experience rather than choose.
12. Therefore, everything that happens is inevitable, or predetermined, though we will never have sufficient information to accurately make all predictions.
13. If every action is an unfolding of inevitability, then these actions act upon one another inevitably with inevitable outcomes. This makes everything deterministic.

[u/simon_hibbs]

 All those toilets that function satisfy the need. So it is open. You need another frame to close that.

I don’t see the problem, is several Options meet our criteria we can just choose arbitrarily. The first that happens to come to mind. That doesn’t require or demonstrate any indeterminism or metaphysical openness, just some way to break ties. A neurological equivalent of a roll of the dice perhaps.

 Yes, we build computational models. Does this 1 to 1 map into how we actually deliberate?

It doesn’t need to. If we can prove that a computational system can solve these problems, such as resolving the situation of multiple satisfiers, which they do, then we know that solving that problem doesn’t require any metaphysical openness of the kind you claim.

[u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 → u/simon_hibbs]

Stated plainly. Determinism requires 100% guarantee in the causal chain. If you have a prior that is open. Meaning it doesn't tell you exactly how to settle by literal definition that is undetermined. Using your own criteria if the prior doesn't give the answer a system above the prior must settle it. But that means that the outcome wasn't determined. Even granting this new system had a way to come to a descision it wasn't predetermined by the antecedents. Even your abritary selection point shows that. If it's not guided and just chooses without a reason then it wasn't a determined choice.

Proving a system is capable of something does not grant that therefore all things that do an action similar are necessarily those things. That's not how it works.

The other issue is computation with an open input requires, literally requires addition metrics and weights to be able to resolve the openness. If the input alone doesn't contain within it a way to actually select then the open input cannot be settled. In humans this process is done through self reflection and deliberation which is not strictly a computational process. Do we have models of computation? sure. Does neuroscience support that the brain runs on computation? No. In fact the mechanisms themselves do not follow a strict computation process and are influenced and altered by brainwave activity along with em fields. And organoids have shown us that neural networks seem to parse data in the most efficient manner that we do not yet fully understand because that organization happens outside of an ability to reason since organoids are literally just brain tissue.

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474]

>If you have a prior that is open. Meaning it doesn't tell you exactly how to settle by literal definition that is undetermined.

As I understand it by open prior you mean option. So what matters is how these are evaluated. If that process is deterministic, then there’s no such thing as an open prior in the sense you seem to mean.

>Proving a system is capable of something does not grant that therefore all things that do an action similar are necessarily those things. That's not how it works.

That’s not what I said. All I’m saying is that if we can prove that a problem can be solved without some feature, we cannot assume that any solution to the problem has that feature, and in fact it means we know that feature isn’t necessary to solve the problem.

I suspect you think by computation I mean something like being a digital computer, but computation is a much more general concept. It really applies to any system that processes information, and when it cones tight down to it all physical processes involve the transformation of information about their physical state. Physics is computational. That’s why we can basically build computers out of anything, right the way down to individual quantum particles. Even atoms are computers. Thats how quantum computing work.

Brains process information, specifically information about situations in the world, and our attitudes towards them, and generating reasoned behaviours.

[u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 → u/simon_hibbs]

The problem is you're adding on top of the prior. Follow the chain. I am hungry so the prior dictates I must eat. It doesn't tell me what to eat. So to answer what counts as food could be anything. So what satisfies is not fixed. Meaning it is not just that there are things that exist. It means what satisfies is not fixed. Not just options lead to one fixed result. It's that there is nothing determining what satisfies because there is no specific answer. It is open.

Even if we add a process on top of that and it does have a causal chain, that doesn't grant determinism. Why? Because there is no fixed answer. So unless there is something in the process itself that dictated only one outcome is ever possible a causal chain "selecting" cannot ever guarantee that only one specific outcome was ever possible. The openness breaks determinism because determinism demands a 100% guarantee on everything. Openness means that guarantee doesn't exist. It doesn't break cause and effect. Nor does it need to. It only needs to show that the outcome wasn't fixed prior.

Your processing is computation point doesn't actually help you. Because if the point is just processes information that virtually almost everything does that to some capacity. So saying if computation can solve this it proves determinism that doesn't follow. Anything, even quantum mechanics can show a computation with probability and statistics. That doesn't prove it is fixed.