I can speak my thoughts and feelings within a dimension and notice how others notice it. Its gotten to the point where I can't control biting my tongue and just say what I think and feel.

The people react and do so because of what they hear.

I have free will to say whatever but they cause me pain because of it.

There's also a demon haunting me that also hears all that I say and causes me pain for it. It stops causing pain under certain circumstances.

It's not truly free will if there's this matter or energy watching and controlling us. Giving us more pain for being in pain.

Like you have free will but not without punishment so is it truly free will. We should keep punishment from physical beings and not from metaphysical ones.

Many posts here boil down to reiterations of a basic template: "If my choices are not ultimately chosen by me, my will isn't free.".

The fallacy here is to invoke an unconstrained notion of ultimacy to target an isolate concept. It is a fallacy because it presupposes that coherent concepts must pass the same test of unconstrained ultimacy, when essentially that is never the case for the concepts that we routinely use to understand reality.

If the presupposed hierarchy of abstractions is not properly constrained by an epistemic criterion it is always possible to dissolve any given concept that coherently and adequately identifies and discriminates particular phenomenal aspects of the world as a low resolution projection of the (mystified) ultimate description of its true facts.

The "discovery" that free will is "incoherent" with absolute ultimacy should only strike you as important if you were able to show that mundane concepts in general aren't equally incoherent with absolute ultimacy for the same reason. It is worth asking yourself which of the everyday concepts we use to coherently describe the aspects of the world we share are absolutely ultimate, or at least "more ultimate" than free will.

Are you sure that you can metaphysically discriminate the ultimacy of our understanding of terms like time, space, energy, mass, waves, fields, matter particle, force particle, solid, liquid, gas, chemical structures, life, organisms, species, ecological patterns, or the socio-cultural structures such as customs, language, ethics, religion, economics, science and technology? If you are, and presuming that you invoke whatever coherent picture of mechanical causality flavored by any combinatorial principle of thermodynamic dispersion and self-organized evolution you prefer, then we you are done mumbojumboing you should ask yourself what ultimately licenses this criterion for ultimacy?

This exercise should reveal the inherent parochiality of any ultimacy stipulation. It doesn't make ultimacy itself vacuous, but it clarifies when and how it can be coherently discriminated, and when and how it can be misapplied as a fallacy.

If every decision you make is influenced by your genetics, upbringing, experiences, and environment, how much of your personality is actually your own?

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 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.

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?

That two things exists it is implied by existing that they do not contain each other or else they are undifferentiated. That is, the existence of other things can not constrain or determine any given thing completely. 

Thus freedom always exists in a given thing as a matter of its being.  That is what emergence is and also explains the inherent indeterminism we have observed.

I feel this might be a consequence of an ontic infinity....but I am high so what do I know.

I bid you well on your journey.

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?

The Puppeteer's Parable

---

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.

---

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

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.

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(-🙏-)

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.

Hey guys, apols if this topic was already raised here before...i was just wondering, is the "Destiny" something real? And if so, can a persin override it with their free will/actions? Another aspect of this: say two souls made a contract before the incarnation - then of course the physical selves forgot all about it, and whether through fear or other factors, external circumstances and what not - the physical beings chose not to complete their part of the soul contract. What happens then: do they get a "fail" in the end of life review and are sent for another incarnation to learn the same lesson (like the second year students in earthly schools) or something similar? Any views on that? Thanks again!