How would not having free will feel to you?

Shmi

13 How would not having free will feel to you?

20th Jun 2013

1 min read

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Given the spike in free-will debates on LW recently (blame Scott Aaronson), and the usual potentially answerable meta-question "Why do we think we have free will?", I am intrigued by a sub-question, "what would it feel like to have/not have free will?". The positive version of this question is not very interesting, almost everyone feels they have free will most all the time. The negative version is more interesting and I expect the answers to be more diverse. Here are a few off the top of my head, not necessarily mutually exclusive:

Epistemic:

Knowing that someone out there already predicts my behavior perfectly
Knowing that someone out there can predict my behavior perfectly, whether or not they actually bother doing it
Knowing that it is potentially possible to perfectly predict my behavior, even if I know that no one is doing it
Knowing that I am in a simulation
Knowing that I am in a simulation where repeated runs with the same inputs give identical outcomes
...?

Psychological:

Feeling constrained by the environment to act in certain ways
Feeling constrained by the environment to act in certain unsatisfactory ways
Voices in my head compel me to do things
Voices in my head compel me to do bad things
Feeling unable to complete thoughts I would like to think through, as if someone censored them
...?

Physical:

Observing myself act in ways I never intended to act, whether beneficial to me or not
Observing my arms/legs/mouth move as if externally controlled, and being unable to interfere
...?

For me personally some of these are close to the feeling of "no free will" than others, but I am not sure if any single one crosses the boundary.

I am sure that there are different takes on the answers and on how to categorize them. I think it would be useful to collect some perspectives and maybe have a poll or several after.

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13 How would not having free will feel to you?

by Shmi

20th Jun 2013

1 min read

13

Epistemic:

Knowing that someone out there already predicts my behavior perfectly
Knowing that someone out there can predict my behavior perfectly, whether or not they actually bother doing it
Knowing that it is potentially possible to perfectly predict my behavior, even if I know that no one is doing it
Knowing that I am in a simulation
Knowing that I am in a simulation where repeated runs with the same inputs give identical outcomes
...?

Psychological:

Feeling constrained by the environment to act in certain ways
Feeling constrained by the environment to act in certain unsatisfactory ways
Voices in my head compel me to do things
Voices in my head compel me to do bad things
Feeling unable to complete thoughts I would like to think through, as if someone censored them
...?

Physical:

Observing myself act in ways I never intended to act, whether beneficial to me or not
Observing my arms/legs/mouth move as if externally controlled, and being unable to interfere
...?

For me personally some of these are close to the feeling of "no free will" than others, but I am not sure if any single one crosses the boundary.

I am sure that there are different takes on the answers and on how to categorize them. I think it would be useful to collect some perspectives and maybe have a poll or several after.

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Leonhart13y110

It's all about the physical components. Not having free will feels like sleep paralysis; it's a disconnection from your muscles.

Have you ever been playing an immersive video game, for example a story-driven FPS, and become completely used to looking around, moving etc. with the controls; and then hit a point where the developers take that control away to do something narrative? Suddenly your head turns to look at something and you didn't tell it to? The fraction of a second of vertigo and confusion, before you remember you're playing a game? That's no-free-will.

Feeling unable to complete thoughts I would like to think through, as if someone censored them

I can't make sense of this one. How would you even tell? You can't have an endless tower of meta-thoughts monitoring the first thought to see if it halted.

Luke_A_Somers13y40

I don't remember that, but I do remember gorging my character on food because I was hungry.

Took me a minute to figure that one out.

7TheOtherDave13y

I've had the subjective experience of feeling unable to complete thoughts I would like to think through, mostly as a consequence of post-traumatic stress. It most often manifests as something like "A, therefore B, therefore C, therefore oh look a bird!" repeating over and over, along with an intuitive feeling that all the aborted chains are pointing roughly in the same direction. It sometimes manifests as "A, therefore NOT B" in cases where if I abstract over the particulars sufficiently it's obvious that A -> B, and I can't figure out why on earth I concluded NOT B in any particular instance. (Often followed by "A, therefore NOT B" in the particular instance again.) I typically describe both of those experiences as my mind skittering off the surface of a thought rather than engaging with it, though the actual experience isn't kinesthetic like that at all. That said, I don't experience any of that as being at all related to the sensation of "free will" the OP is talking about.

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