Did Neanderthals have it? Do dogs have it? Do chickens? Do trout? Do wasps? Do ladybugs? Do lice? Does a paramecium? Does an amoeba?

Where do you draw the line at what has free will?

Does it extend to non living things, like atoms? How about protons? Quarks?

Where is the line, and why is the line drawn where you think it is?

Under Bertrand Russell's Neutral Monism which aligns alot with Sapolsky's work, a thought turns from hard physics to a mental event largely through memory and habit. These memories and habits form well worn tracks in the brain.

Mind and matter operate on the same universal stuff.

So physical pain can be seen as feeling through pure physics of mechanics of nerves and memories of past pain associations.

Which is abit like touching a hot stove and the pause we feel like we a waiting for emotion to catch up with physics to be able to move ones hand away.

When you first touch a hot stove we are talking pure deterministic physics.

The secondary reaction of emotion is determined by memory and habit. The pause is merely the time it takes for a complex physical system (the brain) to process memory data.

The first pure physics reaction is also primed by the secondary reaction and vice verca like a loop.

This aligns with Hume's Reason is slave to the passions and Custom and Habit, and Galen Strawson's Basic Argument and "New Hume" theories.

Now replace the hot stove with someone cutting across you in their car.

Dennett’s compatibilism relies on a sort of evolutionary pragmatism: we feel autonomous, and our complex brains can predict the future, so we might as well call that "free will."

To him his "The pause" allows for rational, autonomous deliberation to guide the next move. That we are "free enough" because our minds can rewrite our programming based on reasons.

Dennett's evolved pause VS The pause is entirely physical.

But if the initial reaction is pure physics and the secondary reaction gos through the well worn paths in the brain that are like conditioned tracks worn out in a river by the flow of water dictated by experience and conditioning (memories and habits), then the rewriting of programming is just more conditioning. You don't choose your past associations or how your brain encodes them.

Then is it really morally responsible to judge a person to have lacked moral responsibility based on 5 minutes of their life on their split second reaction through well worn tracks formed by experience?

5 minutes of madness or 5 minutes of physics fate?

Let's cut through the academic fluff for a second. There is a whole crowd of people online writing massive philosophical essays trying to convince you that free will doesn't exist. They want you to believe that every choice you make was predetermined by a chain of atoms at the Big Bang, and you are just a meat-robot blindly executing a script.

​It’s complete bullshit.

​If you work in the real world, you already know exactly how this works. Let’s look at the shop floor. Yes, my decisions are influenced by my past experiences, my training, and the raw materials in front of me. My physical brain chemistry matters. If you poison the hardware with drugs or haven't slept in three days, the system glitches. Nobody is arguing that we are magical floating ghosts operating outside of biology.

​But having data and raw materials doesn't mean the project builds itself. If I’m looking at a set of prints and a sheet of metal, the tools don’t automatically execute the cut. I am the conscious operator standing in the middle. I have to evaluate the variables, weigh the outcomes, and actively make the choice to pull the trigger. Influence is not the same thing as a predetermined outcome. ​These determinists are basically trying to write the driver entirely out of the vehicle so their math works on paper.

​If their theory was true, and we are just mindless chemical reactions, then there is no difference between a faulty stove burning down a house and an arsonist doing it on purpose. But you don't put a stove in prison. You throw broken hardware in the trash. You hold a human accountable specifically because they had the highly evolved cognitive ability to not do it, and they chose to do it anyway. Intent matters. ​You don't need a theoretical physics textbook to prove a hammer falls when you drop it, and you don't need a philosophical source to prove you have agency. You are a biological organism with physical hardware, but you are still the operator behind the wheel making the cut. That is free will.

Compatibilism has a doctrine and the obvious tenet is that free will is compatible with determinism.

However since posting on this sub, I learned a few more from the experts:

1. We don't have to believe determinism is true
2. more philosophers believe in compatibilism than don't
3. An argument from an incompatibilist cannot be premised by anything any incompatibilists believe because that constitutes question begging

Are there any more?

These days i was doing a lot with ai and i kept thinking if a non free consciousness is even possible since an ai can give a lot of output that even in its production seems conscious like, but the big problem is ai cant chose its thought or goals. Than i thought can we as humans chose pur thoughts and goals? I saw the other day the markov law who pretty much proved that something like a rigid, purely reactive chain of fixed probabilities cannot account for true, self-directed goal generation. But for me personally thats not really enough.

When we look closer, thoughts themselves are not what consciousness is, goals are. Thoughts just happen to us. We can’t fully control or predict which thought pops into our head next (that’s why current LLMs can fake consciousness so well through pure text generation). But goals are different. True consciousness seems to be the ability to independently set an objective, evaluate the “Now” against that objective, and then steer toward it. If you can’t choose your goals by yourself you actively can’t be a consciousness, and if you can choose your goals you are free in a way.

I think the way our body developed is that it used this random/free objective-setting mechanism and started clamping it through emotions and other harnesses, with the ability to change the clamping so it becomes useful for survival. The body doesn’t hard-code the goals. It continuously restricts (//late edit i dont mean restrictions in the sense that the body completely blocks certain goals, what I mean is that the body influences you through something like a moral or emotional compass and assigns different weights to possible decisions and makes some groups of decisions less heavy) the available range of choices the consciousness can make. If a chosen goal is too costly or harmful, the body shifts the boundaries until a goal appears that is still freely chosen inside the new frame, but compatible with the body. Inside that frame the consciousness still has genuine choice, and it decides whether and how much weight to give to past experiences only if they help the current goal.

Importantly, the body is not a perfect clamper. It is blind in many respects and produces plenty of false positives. Emotions and tension often clamp the wrong things, overreact, or clamp ranges that aren’t actually useful (or even harmful) for survival. The clamping is crude, noisy and frequently off-target, which leaves even more room for the core to set goals the body didn’t “intend.”

This way the body strongly constrains us, but the innermost act of setting the goal remains free and the body’s imperfect, blind clamping makes that freedom harder to fully suppress.

I used AI for some rephrasing (English isn’t my native language), but every thought is my own. Im really open for any critique im not a neural network or philosophy god so i might have missed out on some fundamental stuff which would prove me wrong really fast.

Ok... I need to make this 100 letters long so that it can be posted... I guess the mods want total elaborated posts that people may get bored reading and completely miss the point of what is being said.... that being said and out of the way .... Free will only exists while you are awake. Here is a plain example... you can choose not to breath... once you are no longer conscious you lose the free will, your subconscious (lack of free will) takes over and you get back to breathing.

It isn't that free will exists, it is just that it isnt 100% all the time choice...

Unless I am missing something obvious, it seems to me that it's logically impossible to prove that free will exists. Because no matter how convincing of a proof we can find, it will always be plausible that finding the "proof" and declaring that free will exists was already predetermined. Does this reasoning have a mistake somewhere?

The manipulation argument (Mele ,2006),

Pereboom’s four-case argument (2001, 2014)

Van Inwagen’s consequence argument (1983)

Galen Strawson’s basic argument (1986, 1994)

Fischer’s no-forking-paths argument (1994)

Levy’s luck pincer (2011)

​

Our decisions depend on a complex history of biological dispositions, upbringing, experiences, beliefs, and circumstances. We generally did not choose the initial conditions from which our character and decision-making capacities developed.One response is that moral responsibility does not require being the ultimate cause of oneself. A person may be responsible because their actions express their intentions, respond to reasons, or arise through capacities for deliberation that are appropriately their own.A critic may question whether these conditions are sufficient. If a person's character and capacity for rational reflection are themselves products of factors beyond their ultimate control, why should acting through those capacities make them ultimately deserving of praise or blame?Compatibilists may argue that this demand for ultimate self-creation is mistaken, while incompatibilists may contend that determinism or the absence of ultimate origination undermines a relevant form of responsibility. Libertarian theories of free will offer another approach, though they face their own explanatory challenges.

I am not assuming that determinism is true, that indeterminism would automatically produce freedom, or that causal explanation eliminates responsibility.

What account of moral responsibility best explains the difference between actions that genuinely express an agent's agency and actions attributable to coercion, manipulation, compulsion, or circumstances that substantially impair their control?

In the spirit of anti-freewill, choices and actions are nothing more than an echo of our past conditionings. A continuous web that has no beginning, not for us anyway.

So any output we might produce must require an external prompt to cause it, the same way an LLM requires it, for without prompts, the LLM is useless.

​

Our beliefs and values are influenced by upbringing, culture, language, education, biology, and personal experience. These influences do not necessarily make our beliefs irrational or false. However, they raise a question about autonomy that seems harder to resolve.

Suppose I critically examine a belief I inherited from my society and reject it after considering the evidence. It might seem that I have exercised intellectual independence. But my standards for evaluating evidence, my conception of rationality, and even my motivation to question inherited beliefs have themselves developed through a combination of social and biological influences.One possible response is that autonomy does not require being free from causal influences; it requires the capacity to reflect on one's motivations and respond to reasons. But if this reflective capacity and its standards are also shaped by influences that the individual did not choose, what distinguishes genuine self-governance from a sophisticated form of conditioning?

I am not assuming that being causally influenced makes a belief invalid, or that autonomy requires an entirely uncaused self. The question is whether reflective endorsement provides a sufficient account of autonomy, and, if so, what additional conditions it requires.

How have philosophers approached this problem, particularly in debates about autonomy, procedural independence, manipulation, and the social formation of reason?

"Life is just a series of decisions, and the experiences along the way"
Life is like a path. decisions are things that help shape that path. together, these decisions shape a unique and special path that u alone are the lone traveler. Each decision opens a new path, which are the experiences we get with each decision.

Now one could ask about uncontrollable circumstances. But, at the end of the day, your response to it is still your decision. Uncontrollable circumstances are like trees in the middle of our path. It's still our sole decision how we'd react to it: go around it, crash into it, ... .I will admit, it is something i haven't thought over for way too long, but i find the thought valid and un-arguable. am i right? I'd really like to know

People who were born with a sociopathic brain do bad things to others out of their nature.

People who were born with an altruistic brain do good things to others out of their nature.

The reason you don't see 100% evil or 100% good in others is because sociopathy and altruism exist in spectrum, mixed in most people.

Even if environment is taken into account, you don't freely choose your environment so do not downvote please.

I am pretty sure there is no free will.

Arguments tend to force a thinker to believe certain things. However any thinker can pick his own dogmatic beliefs based on any justification he can freely choose to use.

I think its a simple and clear enough question:

Has anyone ever done bad intentionally?

Of course the point of the question is to understand what is the effect of determinism (or other factor that ends our free will) on this.

I usually use Merriam-Webster for the defintion of words. Looking up free will, it looks like their online dictionary now has a new feature called Simple Definiton. This feature appears to provide definitions from their Learner's Dictionary.

And the simple definition of free will is:

"the ability to choose how to act"

Before this feature, the first definition of free will was:

"voluntary choice or decision"

That now becomes definition 2 of 2.

And always remember that Merriam-Webster is a highly credible, trusted, and authoritative dictionary for American English.

I think saying you don't have Free will is a way to lay blame on something bigger than yourself. Just as I choose to believe I have Free will I choose to live within the confines of the law to stay as Free as one can be. Free will isn't suppressed more and more by every law made.... but that sure increases the consequences. So if those lacking accountability can convince the accountable that they have no Free will then maybe they feel they can act how they want without consequences. Who knows... but I am posting this because I want to... rest assured... nobody is making me.

I do not choose what thoughts will occur to me, when they will occur, what information I will encounter, whether I will want to seek out more, what kind of character I will have, how strong my self-control will be, or whether it will occur to me to think more carefully at the crucial moment. Even my ability to learn from my mistakes depends on prior conditions I did not choose.

If a different thought had occurred to me, I would probably have acted differently. But whether that thought arises is not something I choose in advance. And if we say, “You should have thought more carefully,” the question remains: where was the very impulse to think more carefully supposed to come from?

That is why I would say that control is real, but it is not independent of luck. I act through the causes I have received, not from some point outside them. Given a different distribution of heredity, environment, experience, attention, and thoughts, I could have made an entirely different decision.

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

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.

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.

​

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?

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

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?