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If we have 1000000 identical ppl and we tell them to choose left or right, roughly 50% will choose each direction. Same thing if repeated million times. Then are they really free?

The only definition that makes any kind of sense for free will is that they can work outside the laws of physics.

I think if the % converges to fixed value every time, then they can't be free else that % will be a physical law or due to underlying law.

I'm actually talking about quantum mechanics in this post and was wondering about Dyson's hypothesis of free will for electrons. So, the % in above example is closer to 99.9 than 50.

Edit2: On further analysis I think Dyson is talking about the feeling of free will. I think even he agrees that free will doesn't exist in the sense of what I was talking. He's saying electrons are conscious and have the feeling of free will. This feeling is amplified in human system.

Could Atomic Science Explain Free Will? video with Freeman Dyson.

'The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words' edited by Nancy Frankenberry, Freeman Dyson chapter p1923, topic: the argument from design is theological and not scientific.

CriglCragl
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Razor
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    See [The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion) for a good overview. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA May 16 '22 at 10:09
  • If they are **identical** (whatever it means) and they are driven only by "physical laws" they must **all** choose the same direction. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA May 16 '22 at 10:11
  • @MauroALLEGRANZA Not really. I'm actually talking about quantum mechanics in this post and was wondering about Dyson's hypothesis of free will for electrons. – Razor May 16 '22 at 10:14
  • @Razor Would you please add a rerefence to Dyson's hypothesis on the free will of electrons? Thanks – Jo Wehler May 16 '22 at 13:34
  • @JoWehler https://bigthink.com/videos/could-atomic-science-explain-free-will/ – Razor May 16 '22 at 13:35
  • @JoWehler https://books.google.co.in/books?id=6TtCs9vbXP4C&pg=PA376&lpg=PA376&dq=%22the+argument+from+design+is+a+theological+and+not+a+scientific+argument%22&source=bl&ots=11dR2fdy81&sig=ACfU3U0Hr7Q3fowxo32Pk3TDZym5BbSDcQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi0u8-FheT3AhUYSGwGHRKoBCAQ6AF6BAgDEAI#v=onepage&q=%22the%20argument%20from%20design%20is%20a%20theological%20and%20not%20a%20scientific%20argument%22&f=false – Razor May 16 '22 at 13:35
  • There is not only a binary choice between libertarian-freewill & no-freewill. There is also: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism – CriglCragl May 16 '22 at 15:58
  • As a thought-experiment one could take this even further and imagine God rewinding history to a given point in the past (restoring all time-dependent states to what they were then, including states of non-material souls or minds if such things exist) and then running it forward again, and doing this over and over an infinite number of times. If the frequencies of different choices on different runs of history converged to definite ratios, how would this be different from replacing 'choices' with a probabilistic model that had those ratios as probabilities? – Hypnosifl May 16 '22 at 18:27
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    Free will as a perennial philosophical topic has been extremely mystic, modal, and profound, and is outside of current math/probability/stats vocabulary. It can only be settled from your philosophical school of thought/position so far... – Double Knot May 16 '22 at 19:36
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    @DoubleKnot Thank you, I appreciate it :) – Razor May 16 '22 at 20:00
  • IMO *Free will* is not a "scientific law", it is a "social assumption": if we do not **assume** that the individuals are responsible for their decisions and actions, **no** organized society can "survive". – Mauro ALLEGRANZA May 17 '22 at 09:53
  • @tkruse https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27515/did-freeman-dyson-say-that-atoms-have-awareness My question is valid regardless of its relation to Dyson. – Razor May 17 '22 at 12:52
  • @Razor, please add that link to your question as reference. – tkruse May 17 '22 at 13:00

4 Answers4

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The observation of consistent statistics of choices in populations of agents do not confirm our disprove common definitions of free will in general.

So if we assume some population of agents having assumedly whatever flavor of free will, a consistent distribution of 50/50 or 40/60 is similar for roughly equivalent choices does not contradict that those agents have free will.

Rational agents can be assumed to make rational choices, so if you ask people to take 100 dollars or swallow poison, it is reasonable to assume most will take the money, and that does not contradict free will as an ability.

More specifically, free will theories do not require every single decision if agents to be made rationally, whether to pick coca cola or Pepsi cola does not need to be a decision made using the capacity of free will.

So even if we did observe consistently bad decision making in population of agents, such as chain smoking or people believing in crazy religious claims, this would still not disprove the ability to make decisions based on free will.

Only if we observed populations of agents consistently incapable of making a given reasonable decision would free will be seriously in doubt. As an example, lack of intelligence restricts certain animals from making available choices that would satisfy best their instinctive needs, which leads to valid inference that in such situations other non-free factors determine the behavior of those animal species.

With humans, such observations have not been consistently found, even if individual humans may e.g. suffer from drug addictions seemingly unable to stop those habits.

tkruse
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I would rather leave this as a comment rather than an answer but I don't have the 50 required rep to do it. You are touching the problem I have with the concept of free will: If someone's behavior isn't determined by the laws of physics alone (for instance because said laws are nondeterministic), then what determines it? Free will comes as a handy rug under which we like to hide the dust under. Is the chance to choose left over right 50%? If so, this is a law. If not then what are the odds? 40%? 20%? 80% "because you're right handed"?

Those are still laws no matter how uneven the distribution is. Even for more complex choices you could describe the possible outcomes with a measure (probability), which makes it into a law, which in the end reduces free will to just complex coin flipping whose odds depend on your past experience. In what way is this free will? I can only relate to the kind of free will that is defined under compatibilism, which is significantly different from the "original" meaning of free will.

Uretki
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  • "If someone's behavior isn't determined by the laws of physics alone (for instance because said laws are nondeterministic), then what determines it?" I think we want to associate free will to our consciousness. We want consciousness not to be an epiphomenon for existence of free will. – Razor May 16 '22 at 13:54
  • You might be interested in this question of mine https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3820145/true-random-number-set – Razor May 16 '22 at 13:58
  • What I mean to say is that I can't conceive any way for it to be anything but determined or random or a combination of deterministic and random processes. Even if the reasons lay outside of physics, they are still a reason and I can't think of any alternative other than those three: the reason can be decomposed into "elementary reasons", ultimately eliminating any free will, or they can't and we're back to sweeping it under the rug, "the reason is: because it willed so" but it still is a reason, a cause for the choice, or there is no actual reason and then we're left with only randomness. – Uretki May 16 '22 at 14:40
  • Freely willed voluntary actions are determined. They are the very opposite of random. But they are not determined by prior *events*. They are determined by the agent's *decision*. – Pertti Ruismäki May 16 '22 at 18:35
  • @PerttiRuismäki - Presumably you would not say the decision itself is determined by anything prior though--does that mean it's in some sense determined by itself, or determined in a non-temporal way by the agent's whole being at that very moment, or is it fundamentally undetermined? Even if not determined by anything prior, and also not a probabilistic function of prior events, would you say that decisions are "influenced" by prior thought processes in some sense, even if the nature of that influence is neither deterministic nor probabilistic? – Hypnosifl May 16 '22 at 23:09
  • @Hypnosifl Decisions are not determined. Decisions determine actions. Decision-making is not a physical process. It is neither deterministic nor a probabilistic process. Decision-making is knowledge-processing, where knowledge about past events is used to generate knowledge about future actions. – Pertti Ruismäki May 17 '22 at 03:16
  • @PerttiRuismäki have you found any argument to support that position yet? – armand May 17 '22 at 05:13
  • @armand What position are you referring to? – Pertti Ruismäki May 17 '22 at 06:14
  • @PerttiRuismäki - Even if we grant that mental processes are non-physical, most people seem to have no problem with types of causal language about the mental realm, like saying that a certain sensory stimulus (suddenly seeing a growling dog) caused a certain feeling (getting scared) to arise, or at least made it likely that feeling would arise. Do you think there is not even an informal sense in which prior knowledge-processing makes certain decisions more or less "likely"? People may speak of one's thought-processes increasingly leaning towards one option before a decision, for example. – Hypnosifl May 17 '22 at 08:36
  • @Hypnosifl We do have reflexes that are directly caused by stimuli. They are involuntary actions. Voluntary actions require a decision. Applying the concept of causality to mental processing of knowledge is a category error of the worst kind. In psychology there are other rules describing how one thought might lead to another, but they are not as simple and exact as the laws of physics. – Pertti Ruismäki May 17 '22 at 09:59
  • @PerttiRuismäki - I wasn't talking of reflexes but of emotions, which probably involve various kinds of less-than-fully-conscious (but perhaps not fully unconscious) quick intuitive interpretations of the situation, as discussed [here](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/i-got-mind-tell-you/201911/emotion-is) and [here](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/25/im-extremely-controversial-the-psychologist-rethinking-human-emotion). Do you assume a sharp boundary between fully conscious choices involving free will, and less conscious decision-making which doesn't? – Hypnosifl May 17 '22 at 16:11
  • Also, the second part of my question wasn't assuming deterministic or probabilistic causality, I was just asking if whether you think there is some meaningful sense in which the thought-processes prior to a decision can make it more or less "likely" that a person will make a given choice (feel free to interpret 'likely' in terms of some subjective expectation that can't be precisely quantified) – Hypnosifl May 17 '22 at 16:14
  • @Hypnosifl I assume no boundary. I consider these automated decisions to be kind of pre-decided, practiced routines. Of course people are more likely to decide one way instead of another. However, these probabilities are difficult to estimate and impossible to calculate for one individual. For larger groups we can find out some statistics. – Pertti Ruismäki May 17 '22 at 16:45
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    @Hypnosifl -- You are describing Swinburne's dualist model of causation in psychology. Swinburne accepts influences on the dualist mind are causal, and we have multiple influences, of varying strengths, and the sum of them determine an action. He limits free will to when those influences are in close balance -- basically when they are within the limits of an effective mental "Heisenburg uncertainty limit". He also limits free will to moral decisions. As an advocate of libertarian free will, I find Swinburne's model fails entirely to capture what **I** mean! – Dcleve Jul 22 '22 at 17:09
  • @Hypnosifl -- Here is a review of Swinburne: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R18J8OJA7QPLKX/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0199662576 – Dcleve Jul 22 '22 at 17:10
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VERY SHORT ANSWER

Yes, you are correct, libertarian free will is not compatible with a probabilistic "law".

MUCH MORE COMPLICATED ANSWER

You have a lot of suspect assumptions behind your set of questions.

The first is how one gets to reality. The method of science is Locke/Popperian indirect inferential realism. NOT the rationalism implicit in your post (start with rules/assumptions and then derive reality). Indirect realism is tentative, contingent, and in most cases does not support global/absolute claims. Our indirect realism models may, and often do, contradict each other. See quantum dynamics and relativity for an example of this. We think both are "true" but they contradict.

This is a key issue for the reasoning you are using. You are treating logic, deterministic causation, the lawlike nature of science, and physical causal closure as all givens, and dismissing free will based on its being in conflict with them. But multiple incompatible models CAN be "close enough" to true, and be accepted as working hypotheses. And free will is strongly supported by lots of evolutionary evidence (see my answer to this quesiton): Which evolutionary concepts or theories are used to either support or undermine 'perception of free will' as accurate?

Meanwhile our physics is not deterministic (see my answer): Is it the incorrect assumption of an "a priori determined universe", which creates the paradox of determinism versus free will?, it is not "lawlike" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.93.25.14256, and there are infinite possible logics not One True Logic https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/abs/guide-to-logical-pluralism-for-nonlogicians/EDFDFA1C9EB65DB71848DABD6B12D877. And while your critique of its advocates being unable to identify what is meant by libertarian free will is valid, there is a similar and also valid critique of causation (see my answer here) How is free-will formally defined as distinct from determinism, randomness and determinism-randomness hybrid to support moral responsibility?

So -- your points about logic and definitional problems for libertarian free will are correct, but we still have strong reasons to accept the reality of free will, and instead just acknowledge and live with logical incompatibilities in our worldview, given the MUCH less than ironclad cases for one true logic, physical causal closure, law-like science, etc. None of these current assumptions is likely to be absolutely "true" if we try to project into the future to a fully reconciled worldview.

Dcleve
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Of course free will works outside the laws of physics. Decision-making is not at all about physics.

The probability of an individual choosing right over left is probably more than 50%. Right-handed people may be more likely to choose right. In some languages right has a more positive feeling to it than left (~wrong). In such a test setup people have no better reasons to choose either way.

Anyway, the people's decisions are not driven by any fixed percentage value. The percentage value reflects the people's choices.

Pertti Ruismäki
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  • I have added some more information to the question. – Razor May 16 '22 at 10:32
  • Electrons don't have any kind of will. Free or otherwise. – Pertti Ruismäki May 16 '22 at 13:20
  • That's what I want to argue for. What's your argument for its non-existence in electrons? https://bigthink.com/videos/could-atomic-science-explain-free-will/ – Razor May 16 '22 at 13:29
  • https://books.google.co.in/books?id=6TtCs9vbXP4C&pg=PA376&lpg=PA376&dq=%22the+argument+from+design+is+a+theological+and+not+a+scientific+argument%22&source=bl&ots=11dR2fdy81&sig=ACfU3U0Hr7Q3fowxo32Pk3TDZym5BbSDcQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi0u8-FheT3AhUYSGwGHRKoBCAQ6AF6BAgDEAI#v=onepage&q=%22the%20argument%20from%20design%20is%20a%20theological%20and%20not%20a%20scientific%20argument%22&f=false – Razor May 16 '22 at 13:30
  • Electrons are not living beings. Imagining any kind of mental functions on them is downright absurd, a category error of the worst kind. – Pertti Ruismäki May 16 '22 at 13:41
  • Yeah, it's not obvious that electrons are not living beings i.e. they don't have consciousness. Do you have any argument for non existence of mental properties for electrons? – Razor May 16 '22 at 13:48
  • Philosophy is not a permission to ignore scientific knowledge and definitions. Whether electrons are living or not is determined by biologists. Philosophers have no say in the matter. – Pertti Ruismäki May 16 '22 at 15:29
  • I think you need to check hard problem or consciousness, panpsychism and works of Chalmers... just a suggestion :) – Razor May 16 '22 at 16:19
  • I have no problem with my consciousness :-) – Pertti Ruismäki May 16 '22 at 17:48
  • @Razor -- Chalmers presumes causal closure of the physical, and his pan-psychism is therefore epiphenomenal. We can reasonably dismiss epiphenomenalism as false, as qualia appear casual in our consciousness (experiencing a need to urinate can wake ME up!). And the theory of causal closure fails in any enclosed space in physics, the whole universe, within physics theory itself ((pluralism and emergence break it) and the boundary of physics/non-physics (science is pluralistic, and scientism is false). Plus Chalmers one-way causation is justified only by wishing -- why not just accept two way? – Dcleve Jul 22 '22 at 17:00
  • @Razor -- reject epiphenomenalism in consciousness for the agents we have reason to infer it to, and then there is no reason to infer it for electrons. Consciousness does not DO anything for electrons, so no reason to infer it. – Dcleve Jul 22 '22 at 17:02