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Illusions are thought to be things we think that aren't true. For example, I had the illusion to find all answers on this site. But I don't find them all. For example, when I approached the house, it turned out to be an illusion (the house, not the approach).
When it comes to free will though the situation is more complicated. Some people say that free will is just an illusion. Especially people like Dawkins. They think that our free will is not free at all and all our actions and thoughts are determined by the law that determines them: do and think according to the law to reproduce your genes and memes. So according to our friend I'm just typing this question to let my thoughts, my memes, about this subject survive. Likewise, his views on evolution, genes, and memes are dictated by this law. He just writes his ideas to let them survive. It's questionable if views about memes can be considered memes themselves though. Maybe they are transcendental memes or something like that. Anyhow, he projects his views about evolution, genes, and memes upon the real world of evolution, genes, and memes. So it depends on his view if the things he describes are subject to the law he's proposing.
There are brain scientists who think our thinking is determined by unconscious brain processes, of which this article is an example. The same reasoning applies: the thing they are describing, the brain and free will, depends on the views they project on these.

But what if people feel that their thoughts and actions are free? Why do these people say that the free will is not free at all? Why is it an illusion if the people themselves don't experience it as an illusion at all? What if the thoughts that lead to the denial of free will and making it just an illusion are not an illusion themselves?

Does it even matter for the value of free will if it is an illusion or not? If we are in fact controlled by selfish mechanisms (not my idea, but Dawkins') or materialistic laws (which is my idea, but I considered them necessary to be able to think or act in the first place)? All that matters if people can act how they seem it's right and think how they feel it's right (regardless of a supposed law laying behind them). They can always deny these laws (as I do). Most of the time people are limited in their actions and thoughts, not by the supposed laws behind but by men-made laws that prohibit them to think or do certain things.

So, if free will is an illusion, doesn't that mean it exists? Does it mean it doesn't truly exist? But if so, then what's the difference? That we're not truly free, while we do feel free?

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    Correct; one of the building blocks of human society is the principle that if you violate the law you are guilty; this principle is based on the **assumption** that free-will exists and human beings (in "standard" conditions) can act according to a free decision. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Jun 16 '21 at 14:44
  • @MauroALLEGRANZA There are more societies than western society though. For example, societies where there are no such things that are described by the books of law. Material goods don't weigh that much, actions that we call criminal simply don't exist of are dismissed as minor actions not to be evaluated. True, human society is these days synonymous to western (scientific) society. There is almost no escape from it. But I'm not talking about the law of justice. Well I wrote about it to make clear what you mean indeed. These laws change. Sometimes things forbidden become allowed. –  Jun 16 '21 at 15:15
  • @MauroALLEGRANZA I'm talking about the things I tried to make clear. The views that our free will is an illusion. What can be said about these views? –  Jun 16 '21 at 15:16
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    This is very much the direction Sartre takes things. Freedom is a part of responsibility, which is a psychological necessity. Since our psychology exists, and we have no choice but to provide for its necessities, freedom exists. Who cares what physics thinks? The problem is that we have very high expectations of science (or religion, or whatever else you put in that place) which cannot ever be met if determinism fails. We absolutely expect conflicting things. God must both know the future, and let us choose it. – hide_in_plain_sight Jun 16 '21 at 17:06
  • "Who cares what physics thinks?" this is what I meant. I totally agree. –  Jun 17 '21 at 08:10
  • If the water we see during mirages is an illusion, does it mean it is real? – armand Jun 17 '21 at 11:29
  • Responsibility and guilt are perfectly compatible with determinism. Even more: if someone is determined to be violent they are prone to do it again in the same circumstances. The cause of their act is in their personality, and society has a good reason to want them stopped and amended. Wether if they are free, they could always choose not to be violent. – armand Jun 17 '21 at 11:36
  • @armand. But totally incompatible with notions like extenuating circumstances, the insanity defense, or intent in the degrees of murder. If your personality is one that precipitates bad things, who cares how you, yourself see it? Well.. we do, almost everywhere in the world. We limit responsibility to intent, and excuse the mentally ill or unlucky. Your suggested social Darwinism would lead the opposite direction. – hide_in_plain_sight Jun 17 '21 at 15:38
  • @armand. The mirage is something. Nobody said it was water. This argument from necessity only goes so far. There is always the compatibilist view that freedom is something, it just might not be what the most naive interpretation suggests. It still needs to be something that allows our moral exceptions to make more, rather than less sense than biology, or we would have evolved differently. – hide_in_plain_sight Jun 17 '21 at 15:43

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The idea of free will exists in the same way that the idea of unicorns and vampires exist; the existence of the idea does not prove the existence of the object itself.

Frog
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    +1 Essentially correct. Two problems: a) impossibility of proof: it is impossible to prove free will, so it is just an idea; b) existence: this answer describes precisely how the idea of free will exists in someone's head; given that free will is an idea, it exists as such. – RodolfoAP Jul 20 '21 at 14:38
  • I suggest that proving free will is not known to be impossible, although it’s obviously difficult and problematic, and I certainly don’t know how to do it. – Frog Jul 20 '21 at 21:20
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What you are talking about is compatibilism: the idea free-will is meaningful, but not fundamental. Eg it is emergent, or a kind of heuristic to make conversation & prediction of others easier, or it's psychologically (a way to organise our behaviours to match our aims using the short-hand of intentions) or biologically (global workspace), or computationally (self-model in a strange loop) useful.

The majority of philosophers are compatibilists, according to conference surveys. The main alternative pictures are, incompatbilism like metaphysical libertarians who don't accept determinism for minds, and hard determinism which says freedom of will is impossible & a meaningless or misleading illusion. Many religiius people take the former. And many atheist scientists choose the latter. Honestly it seems more like cognitive biased writ large though, because those stances are very hard to keep hold of in extensive debate, at least when approached with an open mind.

To really get to grips with free will, we need to think hard about causality:

Is the idea of a causal chain physical (or even scientific)?

and time:

Why is the universe governed by very few laws of high generality instead of lots of particular ones?

Not everyone is 'willing to', pun not intended, but, valid..

CriglCragl
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Free will is our ability to decide what we do.

There is no way it could be an illusion. Someone has to decide anyway, someone must be controlling you, if you exhibit a controlled behaviour. There is no-one else.

We exhibit controlled behaviour when we attempt to make a more preferable future. Future-oriented behaviour cannot be caused by history.

Pertti Ruismäki
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  • "Future-oriented behaviour cannot be caused by history." - It can as demonstrated by machine learning. – Philip Klöcking Jul 22 '21 at 09:08
  • The machine is not trying to achieve anything. The programmers are. They decide what the machine does. – Pertti Ruismäki Jul 22 '21 at 09:13
  • You are not up to date on machine learning, are you? Google did stop and reset various projects so far because the machines started to do things they did not expect nor understand, for example, developed a language of their own so rudimentary and cryptic the programmers lost track of possible meanings. Also, as much as I myself am a proponent of (some kind of) free will, your "argument" is just wishful thinking/faith: We could just as well say "The neurological processes in your brain decide what you do, not 'you'." You effectively state it's the case because you think it's the case. – Philip Klöcking Jul 22 '21 at 09:18
  • BTW you did not really address the question, which is about whether the naming of free will as illusion doesn't imply the existence of something we call free will, ie. what is gained or said by calling it an illusion. – Philip Klöcking Jul 22 '21 at 11:35
  • "Someone has to decide anyway" as usual, you are begging the question by assuming an actual decision is made in the first place. – armand Jul 22 '21 at 11:37
  • a) Bad definition of free will. b) "There is no way it could be an illusion", "...cannot be caused by history": the answer is an opinion, not an answer from a philosophical perspective. – RodolfoAP Jul 22 '21 at 13:23
  • Free will as an illusion is not a true philosophical idea at all. It is only a half-wit half-idea for a party trick. Nobody has ever been bothered to explain what it means. What is it about free will that is supposed to be illusory? The existence of free will is a matter of definition., not a matter of debate. I define free will as the ability to make decisions. We obviously do have this ability. We can decide which muscles to move and when. My answer is not an opinion. It is the only logical conclusion. We constantly try to achieve a better future, so we must have the ability to try. – Pertti Ruismäki Jul 23 '21 at 05:42
  • You are the one doing the party trick. If "we" decide, what are those neurological activities building up action potentials way before (well, in a sense) we consciously do decide we want to move a muscle at all? Yes, there are many philosophers who maintain that this is a distinct descriptional cosmos where it is perfectly valid to say free will exists as the capacity to act as one pleases. This does in no way address the metaphysical question or enables you to get into meaningful discourse with people using other, for example physicalist, language for description. – Philip Klöcking Jul 23 '21 at 08:29
  • All you are able to say is that phenomenologically, we think we are the ones who act freely. And maybe we even cannot really do otherwise (or we would live in ataraxia), but this is not even part of the discourse, nor contested in any way. The real question is whether our thinking or perception is **correctly reflecting metaphysical reality** (or "illusionary" in the sense that self-perception and the reality of what causes us to do something diverge). Whether this question, on the other hand, is meaningful, is a completely different matter. But it has to be addressed in some way. – Philip Klöcking Jul 23 '21 at 08:32
  • This is basically one of the core questions of philosophy for millennia, you cannot dismiss it just because you arbitrarily define something. – Philip Klöcking Jul 23 '21 at 08:34
  • Spinal reflexes are caused by stimuli. Voluntary actions are caused by our decisions to act. We can make the distinction between them. What is illusory about that? – Pertti Ruismäki Jul 23 '21 at 09:00
  • Who says that it is our decision and not some complex interplay between stimuli, memory, and neurologically hardwired heuristics which causes the action, with our "decision" being a mere rationalisation of this unconscious process? You? I? On what grounds and with which authority? These are genuine philosophical considerations. Mere assumptions are not philosophy. – Philip Klöcking Jul 23 '21 at 11:38
  • A decision means the selection of a course of action out of multiple options for the purpose of achieving a goal in the future. No physical process can make a decision, which is immaterial knowledge about immediate actions. Decision-making is a mental process requiring a living brain with the capacity to process immaterial information. – Pertti Ruismäki Jul 23 '21 at 15:36
  • That is nothing but meaningless babbling as long as you do not have any arguments for why this description of the processes at work is any more valid than saying that the processes and the information are physical in nature and our abstract (read "immaterial") rationalizations of them are nothing but a superimposed *way of description*. Language is nothing but an arbitrary symbolization of pragmatic relations. Even if you repeat it a thousand times, it does not make it any more valid. – Philip Klöcking Jul 26 '21 at 08:50
  • Philip: But the processes and the information processed are nonphysical *by definition*. They have no measurable physical properties, there is no theory, no method to analyse the physics of the mind, there is no physics. The physiology of the brain is not the same thing as the psychology of the mind. Apparently you have no idea about psychology or information theory. You have no valid arguments against the non-physical nature of information. You have no valid reason for your hostile attitude against me, I am no threat to you. – Pertti Ruismäki Jul 26 '21 at 09:23