“Yes we have freewill. Free will of the spirit. Though we do not realize this at a body level, so it looks like an illusion. Earth is a ‘free-will’ zone meaning that: anything goes. We create our own karma and resolve our own karma through way of our actions, agreements, contracts, and treatment of others.”
“We know free will does exist for many reasons. I’ll stay away from quantum mechanics for now and list three obvious reasons we know free will is a factual part of consciousness. 1. We directly experience it. I make choices all the time. I’m pretty sure you do too. You can decide to go for a ride or to lay out by the pool. You are not forced against your will to do these things. Materialist religion holds that intelligent agency does not exist, so this rather vocal minority of adherents will insist that when you think you are deciding things, it is just an “illusion”, they say.
Word to the wise: Always seriously question anybody who tells you evidence, logic and your own direct experience is an “illusion” and you are to align with their beliefs instead, because they said so.
2. It is mathematically insane. If anyone is seriously buying into the denial of free will, give some serious thought to the alternative. If free will does not really exist, even though it seems very much like it does, then our actions are not based on our intelligent decisions, but on the happenstance of, I suppose… chemistry, of all things. I don’t know what else UN-intelligent they could possibly be claiming, and they ARE materialists after all.
So these magical materials force us to do things, but they just happen to align with both our needs AND our wants, not because we chose them, goodness no, but because we got lucky in a cosmic dominoes game.
Just go ahead and try asking them what the odds of those constant, moment by moment lucky breaks are, but don’t expect a straight answer. The odds against any living thing accomplishing complex functional movement by chemical necessity rather than conscious volition is as close to zero as any odds that could ever be calculated and then some.
3. It fails to take into account how mental states work. In the materialist religion, all things mental are also an “illusion”, somehow magically caused by standard chemistry by constant extreme luck. Lets be clear here: If the brain was formed by random slop rather than intelligence, then the resultant mind would be incoherent noise with no relation whatsoever to reasoning or problem solving.
Fortunately, this isn’t a hopeless problem because we do know that the brain IS formed by our thoughts, not the other way around. In fact, it is repeatedly demonstrated that if you think a thought intensely enough or repetitively enough, neuroplasticity in the axons and dendrites will alter the neural pathways of your brain. This is known as Hebb’s Law and it is the very cornerstone of neuroscience.
Thoughts aren’t physical, but they can intelligently control the physical. Intelligent agency is a demonstrable reality. Free will is what agency does. When we make a decision, there are not-so-coincidentally chemo-electric data transmissions happening, even though these reactions weren’t happening when we didn’t need them somehow, and the neural pathways these reactions travel along form only when we choose for them to.
There aren’t nearly enough neural pathways in the brain to account for all types of thought or for that matter, even one aspect of thought, such as facial recognition. The brain is a tool used for reflexivity, standardization, speed and efficiency, recall (not memory!), perceptions and body control as directed by free will. The mind is the originator of all thought, reader of perceptions, rememberer, creator of all unique, abstract and moment by moment thought, subjective experiencer, chooser and user of the mind-brain partnership.
So…. the fact that it SEEMS like you have a free will is quite simply because you do.
When all else fails, and two sides are making contradictory claims, would the materialists in the room please try not to be offended if we use the scientific method? Lets test it out to see who is right. Make a choice. Yep go ahead… Decide to do something that you CAN do, if you choose to. Were you able to do it?
Yep, me too…..
“Free Will is an illusion, and here is the logical reasoning that explains why: A chess program thinks for a moment, its algorithms running at inconceivable speeds. Split seconds pass by while it assesses billions of potential moves and counter moves. It finally chooses, and in an instant you realize that you’ve been crushed again by the computer. This is the shared experience of any chess player who bravely challenges the world’s top chess programs. Even the best human players can no longer avoid this experience. Yet do humans get the last laugh? Does free will put us above such rudimentary processing machines? It seems that way, but logic says otherwise.
Choice
When you think of free will, inevitably you’re brought to the human idea of choice. Yet choice itself proves nothing. The chess playing program chooses every time it decides upon a move. The choices just happen to be the result of a complicated algorithm capable of beating human chess players.
You need to illustrate that you are free to choose to logically illustrate free will. This should be easy you might say. But I promise you, its not only difficult ~ it is logically impossible!
Prior Causes
No matter how impressive the playing skills of a chess computer, we know that every choice it makes is entirely the result of a prior cause. The program takes a series of data (moves, position, time, theory) and calculates its best move. There is no freedom involved, each decision is entirely chained to the data. Change the inputs, and the choices it makes will change.
We can definitively say that any choice that is the result of a prior cause is not the result of freedom – it is the result of that cause. Just like the billiard ball whose motion can be traced back through a series of prior causes, so can each of the moves of a chess playing program provided you can understand its coding.
What about you? How many of the choices you make are the result of prior causes versus free will?
Consider how much freedom you had in your choice to think about chess playing programs just now. Or purple monkeys. Both ideas were just input into your mind because you read these words. These are prior causes, which by definition are void of free will.
But take it a step further. What about every preference you have? Did you choose your favorite color or is it an existing preference derived from elements outside of your influence? Though your preferences can change, do you control this? If you prefer the color blue, can you force yourself to prefer the color purple?
Any choice you make based on a preference, whether it be something simple like an apple over an orange, or more complex that mixes many preferences like a particular career path – each time these choices are developed entirely on preexisting data that your brain processes.
You are capable of choosing, but you are not capable of changing the elements that influence those choices any more than you can change the past or that chess playing programs can alter their inputs. Yet you say, I am free to choose an orange even if I prefer an apple. But what would cause you to choose against your preferences? As soon as you can answer that, you are back to another cause, and in fact just replacing one cause for another. As long as there is a cause, just like with the chess playing program, there can be no free will.
Life Experience
With every decision, you have a lifetime of experience to rely on. Yet all your wisdom and moral leanings are based on what you’ve developed up that this point in life. Your values, no matter how they are developed, are mere inputs that influence each decision in the same manner that the chess playing program uses certain principles to decide its best move.
You may argue that your moral compass isn’t based on any life experience, you were born a certain way, or your soul defines who you are. But what freedom did you have to be born a certain way or with a particular soul? Even if these elements represent the overwhelming source of what influences your choices, you are still not free to choose them at birth any more than you are free to choose your parents or your genetic composition.
Illustrative Example
Sam Harris offers an astoundingly simple yet profound experiment in his book“Free Will” that demonstrates how easy it is to overlook a lack of free will. To paraphrase: There are over 2 million cities around the world. Pick a particular city.
Think about the process that just took place in your brain. Were you free to choose any city on the planet? You would have to know the name of every city for that to be even possible. You were therefore not free to choose any city.
But even among those cities that you do know, were you free to choose any of them? Did you consciously review every city you know the name of and rule most of them out? What naturally occurs is a small selection of cities appear in your thoughts, and you chose from among this group. But what causes this particular list of cities to appear?
Perhaps you visited these cities recently, read about them, or saw a picture of one on the wall. Maybe they are places you have lived, saw on television, or heard mentioned in a nearby conversation. What is important to note here is that you have no conscious control over the small selection of cities that popped into your thoughts. The entire selection you had to choose from is the result of prior causes, many of which you might not even be able to explain.
Take it a step further. What made you choose the particular city from this small group? Personal preference? Randomness? It had to be something. And whatever it was, it had a cause. If it had a prior cause, its was not free.
You can analyze the process of any choice in this manner. It is always either a prior cause, an external factor, complete randomness, or a combination of all three. Yet in none of these areas does logic permit free will
Back to Billiards
Consider for a moment a game of billiards. A shot is taken that sets multiple balls into motion. If the exact same setup could be reconstructed, and the exact same initial shot taken, the balls would end up in the identical position. The laws of physics do not permit otherwise.
Compare this to the manner in which you define your choices. If you could live your entire life up to this moment the with the exact same set of experiences and circumstances, would you choose a different city in the experiment above or the same one? If the answer is the same, then you understand how you are entirely locked into your choice by the sum of all your prior experiences and preferences.
If the answer is different, then there must be a variable that changed, and this new variable is a new cause. You are thus replacing one cause for another, but still tied to a prior cause. And if you assume your answer could be different because it may be entirely random, then you are still left void of freedom.
What is Human Choice?
When you follow the logic, choice falls entirely within the confines of one or more of three distinct elements, none of which allow for free will:
1 – the influence of prior causes
2 – external influences
3 – randomness
What part of choice falls outside of any of these? It is difficult to accept, but in any given moment, you have no control over what you will choose next.
Even if you stop reading at this moment and walk away in disgust, this is a choice that is the result of preexisting preferences and biases that elicit emotions with regard to the topic. You did not consciously choose to like or dislike this any more than you consciously chose to like or dislike a particular food.
And if you still don’t agree, imagine that you lived your entire life over again up to this very moment. Would you possibly feel any different?”
“There are only infinite possibilities in every given moment. Free will means conscious will which means one that has a choice. This can only happen if one is conscious every moment and not hindered by the effects of the mind which can only conjure up situations and experiences of the past. If one is only living through the constructs of the mind which are system operations of one’s conditioning, then everything can be calculated and it is pre-determined through cycles of cause and effect.”
“Given that time trails off from present to past like the wake of a ship, we have access to the spontaneous, ecstatic creativity of the present moment. Yet, our decisions in the moment are usually generated by our habits or our conditioning. This, I do not believe to be free will. To exercise free-will is to illumine the moment with the spotlight of awareness. Symbolically, to turn on the light in order to see the moment more clearly. Awareness is the doorway to exercising free-will.”
“Everything is pre-determined to give us the illusion of having free will. By maintaining the illusion of free will, we continue to act without questioning the source of our decisions. We are like prisoners who have never seen the outside world and believe the prison walls to be the edge of our domain. We humans perpetuate this theme all over the world. For whoever or whatever created our existence, they were strategic enough to keep us imprisoned in our own ignorant perception of freedom.”
–The Kid
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