Do we have free will?

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It just sounds like the definitions of the words 'determinism' and 'free-will' have been confused to the point of being useless.

I try to keep my working definition of determinism to saying that there is nothing I or anyone else will ever do that isn't precisely what I or someone else (or something else for that matter) was going to do. If my course through time is ultimately one place, one point at any x interval then my internal processes I might deem choice are complexities of equation, they feel like something substantial, to the extent that my brain chews through ATP and calories thinking about them they are, but the output seems by all intents and purposes like it's a given and the feeling of having made a decision is first and foremost an experience rather than an actuality in the ultimate sense.

If people want to consider the level-3 multiverse where every point with fractional p-values splits off into as many universes based on the possible out comes, the math on the number of universes that would boil off every Planck second would probably be something reasonably close to n! where n is the number of subatomic particles in the universe. To me that works much better as cross-sections of waves or lines rather than suggesting that a blistering-speed of high-yield matter duplication is happening. Regardless of what the mechanism might be - that's probably the only place where I'd say that yes, multiple outcomes are happening at once. Do I have any liberty on whether I end up with P = .04, P = .15, or P = .45? Technically I'm splitting in three so to speak so nothing's really happening aside from the 'tech' wave taking three forms that may rejoin or may not. It still seems frozen, just a lot more complex than without level-3 multiverse model.

Other than the level-3 universe where anything I was going to possibly do I split in all directions and do all things I might have done, I find it more likely that I do exactly what I was going to do.

What most people want to call free will I'd rather call unobstructed agency and a lot of what you mentioned about reaching back into the past to weigh and measure your best alternatives, even reaching out now on the internet or to friends when you get an inkling that you don't have an awareness of all of your options and want to gather in more alternatives - that would fall under unobstructed agency when you're able to think back or reach out without any kind of internal or external disruption to your effort.

You say: I try to keep my working definition of determinism to saying that there is nothing I or anyone else will ever do that isn't precisely what I or someone else (or something else for that matter) was going to do. and

What most people want to call free will I'd rather call unobstructed agency and a lot of what you mentioned about reaching back into the past to weigh and measure ...etc.

So here's where we are: I feel you look at the past immediately before someone takes action (or thought) and say: Look, the present just happened because of the past....well this is no surprise to anyone. And then you say, look, I'll play it over again and no one is surprised that if you are presented with the exact same conditions each time you will make the same decisions...to do less would make you unstable.

And then we see, in the past, that I've interjected my hot chocolate experiment wherein I had hot chocolate spilled on me once, and because I remember this incident, I use my free will to avoid the next spill and now THIS becomes part of the new "wave front" I (and others) will use.

Free will is what creates our past which we then use to plan our future. All the complexity of our modern world (as opposed to total universal chaos) is created by our free will as we come into contact with the universe.

I believe your philosophy is very mechanistic and should life never have arisen in the Universe it would be 100% correct. But by use, of what you call "unobstructed agency" (and I call free will) we are able to bend the flow of our universe to our use.

If I use my "unobstructed agency" to decide I don't wish to have hot chocolate spilled on me again then I've changed the universe to present myself with a different set of choices, the difference being this is now created by me, call it "free will or unobstructed agency."

My argument from the beginning was that the sense of you choosing not to get hot chocolate spilled on you a second time or at least avoiding the person's space if they're carrying a hot beverage, and all the new choices this brings, is just another piece in a frozen story where you would have done exactly what you were going to do - ie. one path through time that we've traced all our lives, will trace into the future, and are at the play point right now.

QM, as complex a fabric as it weaves of space, doesn't seem like it would do anything aside from create more complexities to the dynamic which seems to dazzle us but it doesn't explain how anyone can have a volition that can be pulled from outside of cause and effect, nor even how divine interruption and inspiration doesn't simply become a part of the time structure and in a way we might deem it to have always existed (if our space time geometry was a big crystal and space that an asteroid smashed into and chipped off large pieces - we'd have know way of knowing the difference because there'd be no concept of a before or after to tell!). The other thing you said, about creating our past, as far as I can tell the only thing I can see that we do is either forget significant pieces of the past or fabricate things that didn't happen either where certain mental paths converge by mistake or where we truly feel our invented version is preferable to the original. The very act of doing that, the nights of sleep perhaps where the thoughts are forgotten as the mind holds its corporate minutes in dream or the activity of consciously creating a false memory - all within time, all following an order and all living in the realm of cause and effect - thus not only is nothing created by forgetting or false memory but you're also still doing exactly what you were going to do in the universe without the slightest bump in your 100% predestined routine.

I am compelled to say that we do.

Well put!

Quite.

First I'd like to say I'm reminded of the story of the elephant and the blind men. You may agree or not.

You said (in your first paragraph): " ,is just another piece in a frozen story where you would have done exactly what you were going to do - ie. one path through time that we've traced all our lives, will trace into the future, and are at the play point right now."
And:
" but it doesn't explain how anyone can have a volition that can be pulled from outside of cause and effect"
And then:
"The other thing you said, about creating our past, as far as I can tell the only thing I can see that we do is either forget significant pieces of the past or fabricate things that didn't happen either where certain mental paths converge by mistake or where we truly feel our invented version is preferable to the original."

I mentioned earlier, if we (you and I) turn our minds to look at the past we see a frozen tableau. And at this point we can declare "Look, it's frozen, right up to this nanosecond, and what's gone before can not be changed, but we can use this information to alter our path and TADA , our past, including changes, has now been frozen. So our choices and actions have changed our (frozen, according to you) future.

Because I don't believe a broken glass can reconstitute itself, I DO believe in entropy (always moving from a higher to a lower state). We look at our past frozen stream of time and see how human thought and action has changed the nature of our environment and declare humankind has now taken control of it's own destiny...we are no longer only products of random chaos, and we will now decide our future path (which, naturally, will be "fixed" as well.")

Your viewpoint depends on how you view time. If viewed from the present, where we mostly abide, it's easy to say we directly control our destinies. And looking at time from the end-of-time we can easily see our frozen paths and declare "Time is unchanging."

But when I look at our "frozen" past I see, what I describe as "signs of intervention." In your thought you might treat this as the result of purely random action? But to my way of thinking this is not entropy but exactly the opposite and difficult to explain except by the action of an "outside" force.

How could/would you explain this? As an insignificant effect no different than two asteroids bumping against each other? Please consider the "non-random" effect of intelligence has now appeared in the Universe.

Maybe this is one of those "BOTH particle AND wave forms" types of phenomena? We certainly haven't learned everything about this style of conundrum.

Have I asked you yet how you've proven the "future is frozen?" The past "speaks for itself" but since we are living in the present (at least many of us) I'd like to know if there is any (in your definition?) evidence to prove your theory (which I feel may be disproven, considering many examples of creation vs. entropy).

I still feel like you're reading forms of pessimism into determinism that commonly creep into these analyses unexamined but really have nothing to do with determinism.

To your first point - you use the information from your past to make the best possible choice in the present, sometimes you take every ounce of strength in you to introspect into a life-shattering problem, out of a sublime thrust of will you come out victorious rather than collapsing into whatever horror you narrowly escaped falling back into, like a speed-sprinter giving so much of the last bits of fumes they have in them to win the race that they collapse afterward and end up with the flu for a few days afterward. This conversation's not about how much fire you have in your gut or how sublime human will can be at the right times. What I'm suggesting is that everything you ever have or will do is exactly what you were going to do and that the bad choice you narrowly escape with new information or the terrible circumstance that you sublimely claw your way out of, in any future sense, was a fiction - there was 0% chance of it happening in the real sense because it wasn't what you were going to do, what you were going to stand for, or in the case of a heroic effort still being swallowed in defeat - the unknown impetus of the environmental hurdle was too high and the basic math of the situation didn't pan out in that person's favor.

As far as intervention and random actions - I have to admit, in the context of what I'm talking about I have no idea what those terms would mean. I'm talking about time, every act of will is a variable. You end up in a car wreck and, just like on a late night 'Angels Are Real' show a deeply familiar voice tells you 'unbuckle your seatbelt', you do, go limp, the collision happens, you land safely while your car turns into a fireball. I never invoked materialist atheism, I invoked time. Thus all of the events that I just described - angelic intervention, higher self intervention, gods and goddesses being big brother and big sisters for mortals, whatever have you - all are events playing themselves out in time, which is a frozen thing. To whatever extent an angel, god, or goddess wades into time it's wading into cause and effect and it's actions are just as frozen in history as are our own.

This one actually can be summarized in a breezy one-liner - every point in the past was just such a 'now' point where what was yet to come after was just as much the future from that perspective. If I can look back at any point in the past and conceived of a future from that point then I can answer my own question as to whether the future is just as fixed as the past because, relative that point, it is in my past.

Thanks. I think this says it very well.... ++++.

I think somehow you're "begging the question." The question of free will and whether we have control over our lives has been asked before. I look at the past....see obvious evidence of man's touch on (the frozen past) of time and I see people have made changes to the entropy you'd expect (if there were no human influence)... So now I say people have examined their past and made changes to alter their future.

Then you say LOOK LOOK: That person has examined his/her (frozen) past and decided to use their ability to examine the past and make changes and alter their future. And you say if this person played out this example 10 billion times and viewed his/her (frozen) past each time he/she would make the same decision each time.

I feel you may say this inability for the past to change, over billions of repetitions, shows there is no free will, but I say it was the choice of the individual to make a particular decision and saying it would be the same after billions of iterations only means you are saying this act of free will would be repeated billions of times as well.

As I said this pattern is shown in the Universe..and not the total entropy your system desires. You would have to propose (for example) our civilization is purely a result of random creation after the chaos of our early universe because entropy is one-way. But you haven't really addressed how this happens. Or you might say the reversal of entropy was merely created by a happy combination of random events (?).

I believe an infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually churn out all of Shakespeare's works, but our Universe doesn't happen to have experienced infinite time (yet ). So the random effect of the early chaos is now effected by something not in evidence in the early days of the Universe: Life.

The question of :"Do we have free will?" has nothing to do with your concept of determinism. I'm not sure why people may think otherwise.

I dislike "semantic" arguments. They seem so pointless.

a few lucky souls seem to have tremendous executive control over their lives, the rest of struggle with balky and intermittent control levers of life, and a persistently abject portion of the latter group have no control whatsoever and just stumble and drift from one situation to another, without a clue as to how to change that. I guess what is commonly perceived as free will is but a triumvirate of top-notch genes, top-notch brain and top-notch timing. to me, that is simply LUCK.

I think my problem then is calling it 'free will' when its describing inputs that aren't ours and processors (mind and body) that were given to us by our parents and cultivated by environments. Everything ever done internally or externally is a reaction. Not owning the inputs or the processing, no matter how dearly we adapt and defend them due to the intimacy of how they effect us, means that we don't own any of our thoughts or behaviors. Our I experiences are an inheritance that we take very seriously and get very wrapped up in, because we're fully wired in to pain and pleasure cascades with them, but they're still just that - inheritance.

The thing that I think might be too fine a point to be able to communicate at all with people is that adoption and origination are two very different things. To say 'I did what I felt like' is an adoption in this case - not origination. If people want to define their adoptions as free will I can't stop them from doing so if they want to qualify it that way but they could do just as well to define cats as animals of the canine family domesticated from wolves that man has hunted with and bred for millennial and always caveat that it's their 'cat' rather than the popular use of the term cat.

If I go with google's cover example for free will:

.

I'm arguing absolute fatalism. Maybe my problem is that I'm confusing terms and fatalism and determinism aren't the same thing?

To help clarify. This is from Wikipedia:

"Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. It is closely linked to the concepts of responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgments which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. There are numerous different concerns about threats to the possibility of free will, varying by how exactly it is conceived, which is a matter of some debate.

Some conceive free will to be the capacity for an agent to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events. Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with the existence of such free will. This problem has been identified in ancient Greek philosophy,[1] and remains a major focus of philosophical debate. This view that conceives free will to be incompatible with determinism is called incompatibilism, and encompasses both metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus free will is at least possible, and hard determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus free will is not possible. It also encompasses hard incompatibilism, which holds not only determinism but also its negation to be incompatible with free will, and thus free will to be impossible whatever the case may be regarding determinism.

In contrast, compatibilists hold that free will is compatible with determinism. Some compatibilists even hold that determinism is necessary for free will, arguing that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of how choices will turn out.[2][3] Compatibilists thus consider the debate between libertarians and hard determinists over free will vs determinism a false dilemma.[4] Different compatibilists offer very different definitions of what "free will" even means, and consequently find different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue. Classical compatiblists considered free will nothing more than freedom of action, considering one free of will simply if, had one counterfactually wanted to do otherwise, one could have done otherwise without physical impediment. Contemporary compatibilists instead identify free will as a psychological capacity, such as to direct one's behavior in a way responsive to reason. And there are still further different conceptions of free will, each with their own concerns, sharing only the common feature of not finding the possibility of determinism a threat to the possibility of free will."

To continue:
The idea of free will I originally thought we were discussing was what I assumed the OP meant in his post.

If I wanted to have an endless discussion about determinism (had I been the OP) I might have indicated such in my post.

Most people on this forum (I think) are more concerned with how their choices may effect their lives and not how our actions may look if we could only freeze time and stand outside as an observer.

One idea is a tool to understand and fit in the world around us, the other a philosophical discussion that can never be resolved.

So my message to the OP would be: Yes. We certainly do have free will. You are absolutely right. You have the ability to control your own life (with the understanding some may be more successful than others). Good luck.

and a great proportion of all the self-help books/authors out there purport to be able to increase your free will by reading and applying principles of thought written in their books. your mileage may vary. somebody moved my cheese.

So in other words, regardless of the underlying mechanics and setting, free will is real because it really feels like you're choosing and the sensation of choosing is enough to satisfy a popular definition of what is free will.

I can agree with that on a sensory experience like consciousness proving consciousness exists because it doesn't need to produce any kind of unique external effect to be there. I can't say that about choice anymore than I can say that my living room cheering made the Browns win or my booing made the Steelers lose. For me to argue that I felt like I made the Browns win or the Steelers lose is only false if I'm lying about what I experienced, arguing that I actually made the Browns win or Steelers lose is a completely different matter.

The OP could have titled the thread 'Do We Feel Like We Have Free Will?' if he was curious about people's subjective experiences in that way.