{"id":233,"date":"2011-08-28T18:46:11","date_gmt":"2011-08-28T23:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foreignersview.wordpress.com\/?p=233"},"modified":"2021-08-20T16:56:24","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T21:56:24","slug":"do-we-have-free-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmaluff.com\/es\/2011\/08\/28\/do-we-have-free-will\/","title":{"rendered":"Do we have free will?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For context, see part 1<\/a> and part 2<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s been a while since I’ve written, but I thought I should finish this series before I move on. In\u00a0the previous two posts I concluded that all human action is completely deterministic. Psychology, given enough time (and research grants), is reducible\u00a0to neuroscience. That is, a scientist with a machine that can read what’s happening in our brains and our environments could also, at least in theory, predict exactly what we will do as far in the future as he wants.<\/p>\n

This immediately suggests that free will as we commonly think of it is impossible. When I come to a fork in the road I’m walking, I don’t really have a choice of which path to take. This path was already determined long before I was born, or even before our Solar System was born. But does this necessarily mean that we have no free will?<\/p>\n

In the sense of being able\u00a0to choose what paths we walk, we almost certainly don’t. If the path is predetermined, the concept of choice itself becomes meaningless; one can only choose when one has more than one option. If I walk into a restaurant (and I’m forced to buy something) but the menu only has one item, I don’t really have much of a choice.<\/p>\n

This seems quite counter-intuitive to our first person perception of the world. When I walk into a restaurant now, I have many options of what to order. When I’m deliberating which of my many options I want, it seems to me that I am able to choose any of them\u2014otherwise it would be silly of me to take fifteen minutes thinking about it. But think about it this way: Imagine I write a computer program that spits out what the biggest number is of any list I feed \u00a0it. If I give it a very large list, it might take a long time to crunch the list and tell me what\u00a0 the biggest number is. This does not mean that the computer has a choice<\/em>\u00a0of which number to spit out in any meaningful way. Every time I run the program, it spits out the same number. The number it spits out is predetermined by the algorithm I wrote and the list I fed to it.<\/p>\n

In the same way, when I’m trying to decide what to order in a restaurant, my brain makes a choice based on an algorithm and the options in the menu. Of course, that algorithm is a million times more complex than the one I wrote on my computer. It takes into account all my past experiences with food,\u00a0the waiters’ recommendation, the prices on the menu, the amount of money I have in my pocket, what I had for lunch, etc. It then spits out what meal it thinks I will find most enjoyable. The process is\u00a0more complicated, but it’s just as deterministic as the computer. Our idea of having a choice between all the menu items is just an illusion.<\/p>\n

But there’s another way of thinking about free will. When my brain gives the order to my fingers to hit the keys of my keyboard, is it not me who types? Sure, it may have been pre-determined, but it’s still my “self” that types. The act of typing originates in me. And that, to me, is free will. The fact that, in some sense, my actions originate from me.<\/p>\n

In the epilogue of his book What Is Life?<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Schr\u00f6dinger writes:<\/p>\n

My body functions are a pure mechanism\u00a0according to the Laws of Nature. Yet I know,\u00a0by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am\u00a0directing its motions, of which I foresee the\u00a0effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in\u00a0which case I feel and take full responsibility for\u00a0them. The only possible inference from these\u00a0two facts is, I think, that I\u2014I in the widest\u00a0meaning of the word, that is to say, every\u00a0conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’\u2014am\u00a0the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of\u00a0the atoms’ according to the Laws of\u00a0Nature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is, anything that is conscious can have a claim to free will. For free will doesn’t necessarily mean the ability to choose what the outcome of my thought processes is, it is the thought process itself. As long as I can see the fork in the road ahead, and make a conscious decision to take the one that I like best, I have free will\u2014even if there was only one road for me to take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For context, see part 1 and part 2. It’s been a while since I’ve written, but I thought I should finish this series before I move on. In\u00a0the previous two posts I concluded that all human action is completely deterministic. Psychology, given enough time (and research grants), is reducible\u00a0to neuroscience. That is, a scientist with … Continue reading “Do we have free will?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[102,1],"tags":[26,38,39,69,70],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-politics","tag-determinism","tag-free-will","tag-freedom","tag-philosophy","tag-physics"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3A68f-3L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":41,"url":"https:\/\/mmaluff.com\/es\/2011\/06\/26\/psychohistory-and-determinism\/","url_meta":{"origin":233,"position":0},"title":"Psychohistory and Determinism","author":"Mauricio Maluff Masi","date":"June 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently read the novel Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. It was quite enjoyable and made me think about many things, so I thought I'd write a bit about it. In the Foundation universe, a mathematician named Hari Seldon develops a field of mathematics named psychohistory. This field is to contemporary\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/mmaluff.com\/es\/category\/philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/2\/25\/Foundation_gnome.jpg","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":24,"url":"https:\/\/mmaluff.com\/es\/2011\/04\/21\/the-problem-of-evil\/","url_meta":{"origin":233,"position":1},"title":"The problem of evil","author":"Mauricio Maluff Masi","date":"April 21, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm taking an introductory philosophy course this quarter, and we were recently discussing the problem of evil. Put simply, the problem states that it is contradictory to believe that there could exist a God which is at the same time omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent because if that were the case\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/mmaluff.com\/es\/category\/philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/e\/e0\/Nagasakibomb.jpg\/502px-Nagasakibomb.jpg","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":114,"url":"https:\/\/mmaluff.com\/es\/2011\/07\/11\/can-humans-be-truly-random\/","url_meta":{"origin":233,"position":2},"title":"Can humans be truly random?","author":"Mauricio Maluff Masi","date":"July 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"For context you may need to read the\u00a0previous post, if you haven't already. Warning: This post will be very sciency. Proceed at your own risk. Let's do a little recap of where I left off. 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