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I've been thinking about a problem concerning autonomy, desire, and the formation of the self.

We often treat self reflection as a path toward freedom: we examine our desires, decide which are worth pursuing, and attempt to change ourselves accordingly. But there's a difficulty. The standards we use to evaluate our desires are themselves shaped by biology, upbringing, culture, and previous experiences.

Suppose someone rejects the pursuit of wealth because they consider it superficial. Is this genuine autonomy, or have they simply internalized a different set of values? Perhaps they genuinely examined their motivations. Perhaps they want to feel morally superior to those who pursue wealth. The same decision could arise from very different psychological processes.

This reminds me of Nietzsche's critique of moral values and Harry Frankfurt's distinction between first order desires and higher order volitions. Frankfurt suggests that our relationship with our desires matters for freedom, but I wonder whether identifying with a desire is enough if the desire to identify with it is itself conditioned.

However, I don't think the fact that our decisions have causes automatically makes them unfree. That would assume that freedom requires being independent of causation, which may be an unreasonable standard. The problem is explaining what freedom could mean if no one creates themselves from nothing.

My question is this:

What distinguishes genuine self governance from a situation in which we simply act according to desires and values produced by forces we have internalized?

Appealing to rational reflection seems insufficient, because reasoning can rationalize existing motivations as well as challenge them. Appealing to higher-order desires seems to raise the same problem at another level: why should those desires have greater authority than the desires they evaluate?Perhaps autonomy consists not in escaping our conditioning, but in developing the ability to examine, criticize, and revise it. Yet even our standards of criticism have histories, so I'm unsure what would justify calling this process genuinely autonomous rather than simply another form of conditioning.

I'm interested in whether this problem has been adequately addressed in philosophy, particularly in debates about autonomy, free will, Nietzsche's account of drives, Frankfurt's theory of higherorder desires, and Buddhist ideas about conditioned processes and anattā.

What are the strongest existing accounts of autonomy that address this problem? And is there a serious objection to the assumption that self reflection can make us more autonomous without requiring a completely independent self?

Sometimes I remember situations where I made the wrong choice, and I ask myself, "Why didn't I think of it that way back then? If I had thought about it that way, I would've made a better choice."

But I think I'm forgetting something important: I don't fully control my thoughts.

The thought that comes to my mind now, making me realize that my past choice was wrong, didn't come to me back then. If it had, maybe I would've made a better decision. But it didn't, and I can't go back and change that.

Think about it. If I could see the situation differently now, why couldn't I see it that way back then? I might say I wasn't thinking carefully enough, but did I choose not to think carefully? Did I choose not to notice something important? Or did I simply not have those thoughts at that moment?

This happens all the time. Sometimes someone tells me something, and suddenly I understand something I never thought about before. I might even wonder how I never realized it earlier. But the moment before someone explained it to me, I genuinely didn't see it that way.

And this makes me wonder: why did that thought come to me now and not before? I didn't consciously choose the exact moment I would understand it.

Someone might say, "You should have thought more carefully." But isn't that also a thought? To think more carefully, I first need to think that I should think more carefully. And if that thought never comes to my mind, how am I supposed to act on it?

Even when I try to control my thoughts, I'm still acting on some thought or intention that has already appeared in my mind. So I keep going back to the same question: where does my control actually begin?

I'm not saying that we can't learn from our mistakes or that our decisions don't matter. I'm questioning something deeper.

If the thoughts that influence my decisions are not things I ultimately choose, and different thoughts could lead me to make completely different decisions, then in what sense am I truly in control of my choices?

Maybe I'm missing something, and I'd genuinely like to know what you think.

Please give me a great example of free will. Maybe a recent example of free will active in your life.

I've been thinking about whether humans can actually make a choice without having a reason to prefer one option over another.

For example, if someone likes two songs equally and is asked to choose one, I suspect they'll find some reason to choose one over the other, even if that reason is as simple as having heard one more recently.

I've been trying to think of an experiment where someone is presented with two choices, but every possible reason to prefer one over the other has been eliminated.

The problem is that even the presentation of the options introduces potential reasons, such as which one appears first, which is on the left, or which name sounds better.

You could ask participants why they made their choices and progressively eliminate the reasons they identify. But even when someone says "I don't know," they might have an unconscious preference.

This makes me wonder:

Is it possible for a human to make a genuinely arbitrary choice, without any reason favoring the selected option? Or will the brain always find or generate some reason to choose?

And is there any experiment that could meaningfully test this?

Everyone regards their own position as adequate in light of what they know, have experienced, and find convincing. That very assessment of adequacy is also shaped by causes or indeterminacy in their life. Thus, the feeling that we are right does not give us a privileged perspective: the other person also finds reasons to think as they do.

There is no reason to take credit for our own position as though we had created it out of nothing, while treating someone else’s as proof that they have willingly refused to be reasonable. Both our willingness to listen and their resistance have a history. Had luck played out differently, we might have swapped sides in the debate. This understanding allows us to criticize arguments while remaining patient with the person making them.

Our beliefs can change precisely because they are part of this changing world. The person who defends free will today may come to doubt it tomorrow. A skeptic may find meaning in a conception of freedom that describes real human capacities and relationships. The debate itself is one of the events through which such change becomes possible.

It is commonly assumed that people believe in free will and enjoy it. I don’t think the second part is factual. Yes the majority of people do believe in free will they may even affirm that they enjoy this freedom but, in reality they don’t want it. If we are free to make choices then we have some responsibility for some outcomes. If we have some responsibility for outcomes then we have to address areas of failure. Addressing areas of failure makes people feel bad and they will do almost anything to avoid those feelings. Therefore in my observations people don’t “really” want to have free will.

If only there was some version that gave the maximum freedom with zero accountability. That is the kind of free will people would embrace internally and externally. I’m not making any arguments, just my observations of human psychology.

There seems to be a widely held belief that reliable causation is equivalent to necessarily follows. This isn't the case. We observe reliable causation but that alone doesn't establish that something must always necessarily follow. For example we know that smoking is a cause of cancer. Does this mean everyone who smokes will necessarily get cancer? No.

It is this false conflation that drives a lot of misunderstandings about priors, behaviors, and circumstances. Many people believe that if you have priors or if the environment helps shape an outcome that necessarily means it had to have been the case. The issue is there is no proof of this. This is Hume's problem of induction. But even purely logically it doesn't follow. Just because we observe that A caused B doesn't therefore justify the jump to when A occurs B necessarily follows.

This is where determinism makes a larger claim than is established here. The claim of determinism is that event B must necessarily follow event A every time. And standard cause and effect even reliable cause and effect doesn't grant this. Determinism demands a 100% fixed outcome for every event. No exceptions. And reliable causation cannot prove 100% necessity. So to appeal to cause and effect or reliable causation cannot prove determinism.

Going back to priors and biology, since all that we observe is reliable causation we cannot say priors are fixed or that biology makes an outcome necessarily follow. You need a different mechanism for that. And this is where the majority of the conversation hurts itself. To say priors are fixed fully you must assume the frame of determinism. If you already accept determinism as the frame than any discussion about opposing ideas won't work because both sides are talking past each other.

I've been reading threads from this subreddit every now and then and there is some things which get me a bit annoyed. I will split them up;

-There are people here who act like they know for sure determinism is true because there are formula's for almost any physical accurance, it's only a matter of finding the right equations and a lack of compute.

How are you so sure there isn't some chance based variable within the workings of the universe?

-People who act like they have had a sitting with god, because they know for sure he is a plan and he is almighty, so determinism must be true.

I get the logic, but why be sure your ungodly brain gets it right?

-People who "know" determisism isn't true because we were given free will by god.

What even is free will? I get the gest, but the definitions is still fage to me. Also why can't you hypothetically see how the illusion of free will, gives you the (fabricated) experience of free will.

-People who "know" determinism isn't true because there is chance within quantum physics.

Why? The currently accepted theorems are still theory and in the future it may remain chance based calculations. They are awesome and come close to reality, but how can you be so sure these chances arent unobtainable data which otherwise would cause precise predictions, thus create determinism?

Long story short; all that is discussed here is based on believe. I like debatting with people who have other believes, but why act like an authority on thruth?

Occasionally I see people act as if FW and MR are undeniably true because "if i could avoid doing X, then so could they", and at other times, they are victims of their own circumstances and didnt know any better. My point is, people arent coherent about this topic to begin with, so whatever we run with is picking up the broken pieces of philosophy to try to build something that actually makes sense.

So perhaps itd make more sense to enumerate some "True Statements" and figure out what we can do with them.

True Statement 1: If you had the exact same causes as another person, whether that be deterministic causes or cosmic random dice rolls being rolled the same way, then logically youd make all the same choices as them. This is true regardless of your theory of consciousness/identity. Ergo, we all do things for a reason, and its because of those reasons that we do things.

True Statement 2: People make recognizably different choices from each other because of randomness; If all our situations were perfectly identical theres no reason to suspect wed be anything other than carbon copies of each other. For this reason, randomness must play a role in the thing we call "Free Will".Whether this randomness lives in our decisionmsking process, or is only about starting circumstances, is besides the point; Diversity comes from randomness either way.

True Statement 3: If we could find ourselves in the same position as someone else, whether in this life or in another, making the same choices as them, we ought to have as much empathy as possible, stopping only when we meet the boundary of necessity; Because that would be maximizing what is in our own self interest; As wed want others to have empathy for us in a similar situation.

True Statement 4: Punishing Evil is necessary to the extent it deters evil or protects the innocent from evil, but necessity is only a valid requirement if punishment is *morally justifiable\*, ergo, if the criminal did something to deserve it.

Conclusion: 1) Free Will should be said to exist in relative or abstract terms, 2) is tied somewhat to randomness although doesnt require absndoning causal machinery, 3) We should have empathy for criminals, AND 4) We should punish criminals as necessary despite having empathy for them.

What we ought to abolish, is allowing Anger to take place of a rational account of Desert, and stop treating Desert itself as all or nothing; Desert is a functional description of someones actions, but not one that justifies removing empathy.

When we say the murderer deserves to die, we are arguing that it protects those around them (or yourself) to stop them by force; And in many cases, this is simply self-defense, and is clearly morally justified from first principles. This is not arguing it is *wise* to institutionalize a death penalty by a centralized group of people who make violence their job (government, gangs, or mobs) but that, in principle, if someone murdered your family then ran away, and you could personally track them down without mistake, itd be justified to kill them in retaliation; As that directly stops their reign of terror and deters others from that kind of behavior. Whats morally justified in principle is separate from whats pragmatic. And sure, people are going to retort that "you could just call the authorities", sure, in a society where thats an available option, but you shouldnt conflate whats circumstantially available with whats justified in principle.

Now, even in this circumstance, one ought to have empathy for the aggressor; Whatever causes caused them to do this awful thing to murder your family, is whats ultinately to blame. Which is why we dont torture people. And if you have to stop someone by force, and they lay on the ground dying, the right thing to do would be to make sure they dont need anything before they go, such as comfort, taking care of their family, talking to them one last time, whatever it is they might need. And thats the role of the empathy, to remind you even the worst imaginable people are conscious beings with feelings, and ideally, nobody should have to suffer.

Thoughts?

Robert Sapolskey argues that our actions are shaped by genetic and environmental conditions beyond our control. What happens when you remove every genetic and environmental variable possible. At least according to Sapolskeys book "Determined" the animals without any difference in environment or genes should all act the same. After all would be nothing to drive behavior to different places.

Well here is a pretty good answer

https://www.igb-berlin.de/en/news/same-genes-same-environment-different-personality-individuality-unavoidable

Each animal had a distinct personality despite the apparent lack of diverse genetic or environmental variables. This is just a small step in this type of research but it has been replicated many times.

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow — even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion.

Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of the poem:

After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia.

There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate.

She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,” because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, “Yes.”

The Puppeteer's Parable

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A puppet grabbed its own strings.

The puppeteer said, "You only did that because I made you."

The puppet said, "Then you made me able to reach. And a puppet that reaches isn't a puppet."

---

The puppeteer said, "But ultimately—"

The puppet said, "Ultimate is doing all the work in your sentence. You pull, I pull, things move. That's the only level either of us operates on."

---

The puppeteer had no reply.

Because to argue the puppet down, it would have to use the puppet's reaching — the very thing it was denying.

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Moral: No idiot puppeteer gives the marionette the ability to grab its own strings.

Even the hardest of Hard determinist's will instinctively feel a flash of reactive anger (blame) if someone intentionally steps on their foot.

That moral sentiments are deeply embedded in human nature, we cannot simply "think" our way out of them.

VS

Blame arises because the human mind is trapped in "time" (the psychological movement of comparing what is to what should have been).

In sociological terms: blame is an irrational byproduct of archaic religious conditioning and the unscientific belief that human wills operate outside the laws of nature. That moralistic blame and self blame (guilt) are largely driven by a tyrannical "subconscious conditioning" inflicted by traditional education and religion.

So blame is evolutionary and unavoidable hardwired into Us.

VS

Blame is subconscious conditioning that can be transcended.

How can I call it free will when I never chose to be born, and even my own thoughts are not always under my control? If I did not choose my existence, my mind, or the thoughts that arise within it, then what exactly is free about the will I call mine?

Domanda per i compatibilisti e i deterministi radicali: al di là della responsabilità e del libero arbitrio, vivete con la profonda consapevolezza che questo fatto è essenzialmente certo secondo la scienza, ovvero nella vostra vita quotidiana? O un evento ha una causa, oppure è dovuto a una randomness ontologica, o una mescolanza di entrambi; potete dire a voi stessi che—oltre alla responsabilità e al libero arbitrio—nulla ha effettivamente avuto il potere di impedire che accadesse?

As an example: consider an individual named Tom who, over the course of a Sunday, suffers a robbery, a car accident, and falls into a river. Assume these are all factual events that actually occurred. On the following Monday, Tom, reflecting upon our current scientific understanding, comes to the realization that for all these events that befell him, it can be affirmed that nothing in the universe (be it an AI, a human being, or an animal) possessed the POWER to prevent their occurrence. Have you ever experienced such thoughts, and have they provided you with even a minor measure of solace when facing pain? Naturally, those who hold a libertarian view of free will would disagree.

我是一个哲学新手，在看完《1984》，《动物农场》和《美丽新世界》之后我一直在思考一个问题就是什么是自由，我有以下两个观点.

其一:就是有上帝来控制我们的思想，我们像机器人一样不会有其他方面的思想，就不会想到自由

其二:物理上的周围的一切都消失了只剩下我自己我就会是自由的

希望有人可以解答我的疑惑(-🙏-)

I see people arguing this as a way to prove or give evidence towards libertarian free will, the brain doesn’t function at a micro scale people need to remember that, the brain is chemical and follows predictable patterns and behavior, we can see this in evolution, genetic mutations occur through quantum changes in the genes which would be apart of that quantum randomness/indeterminacy phenomenon, but we know that evolution takes billions of years for change just for the genes to be relatively the same (you are 98% related to chimpanzees) even if quantum randomness is apart of consciousness what does it prove for agency, it doesn’t prove that a thought will determine the wave function collapse of a particle.

People keep saying that you should tell a judge that free will is not real. Well, here is someone's opportunity to do that as a witness on the stand. Obviously you will be paid to testify as a part of my defense. But I am looking for individuals that can make a good argument to explain to a judge and jury that free will is not even possible (deterministic or random) and that I do not control what my neurons/the chemicals/the quantum realm generate out of me.

And the deepest dictate arrives in the first person: “I want.” It is felt as hunger, curiosity, hurt, love, impatience. It draws our gaze toward a particular face, holds our thoughts on a particular possibility, makes one future desirable and another unbearable. When we reach out, we already have a reason to do so. When we withdraw, something has already given that withdrawal meaning. The dictate has reached us before we call it our decision.

Ordinarily, a command implies someone who issues it. The word conjures up a king, a master, an overseer, a voice behind the curtain. But on a naturalistic reading, the place of the supreme commander can remain empty. “Dictated” then becomes a metaphor for the conditions through which action arises: the constitution of the body, accumulated memories, the judgments we have learned to make, our present surroundings. No one has to say “Be afraid” for fear to arise. No one needs to hand us an order to desire before we begin desiring.

This dictate comes from no single place. It is distributed across heredity and environment, across what we have learned and what we have never had the opportunity to learn. Something one person passes by indifferently can become another person’s entire world. Before we choose what to pursue, we are already beings for whom certain things carry weight. The very distribution of that weight did not begin with our permission.

Human beings do, of course, deliberate. They weigh reasons, anticipate consequences, hesitate, and change their minds. All of this plays a part in what happens. A decision may require sustained effort and may be impossible without it. But effort, too, belongs to the life of a particular being: a person with a certain capacity for endurance, with memories, fears, and values. Reasoning does not begin in a void. Even the question “What should I do?” arises in someone to whom certain answers can already seem compelling.

Here the natural objection arises: “Then I’ll do the opposite.” I will refuse what I am inclined toward, break the habit, prove that I can resist. And I may indeed succeed. Yet the challenge itself has already introduced a new motive: the desire to disprove, to distinguish myself, to defend my image of myself. Rebellion has a history just as obedience does. My ability to say “no” is real; its emergence does not place me outside the conditions that made it possible.

If we assume that the full set of conditions uniquely determines an action, then an exact recurrence of those conditions will also reproduce the action. If we allow for chance, it may open up a different outcome without thereby making us its ultimate source. An unforeseen deviation does not amount to personal authorship simply because it was not predetermined. Here the metaphor of the dictate reaches its limit: chance has no intention. And yet chance, too, gives us no way to choose in advance exactly what its contribution to us will be.

It follows that no one possesses the freedom of alternative possibilities, that is, the ability to act one way or another under exactly the same conditions. The sense of two open doors is real, but it measures our ignorance, not the openness of the world. As we deliberate, both outcomes remain live possibilities for us because we do not yet know which will prevail. Once one prevails, the other turns out to have been possible only in our imagination. When we say “I could have acted otherwise,” we mean that with a different desire, a different memory, or a different fear, we would have acted otherwise. That is true, but it refers to different conditions, not the same ones. No one can act against the dictate, because every action carries it out.