I'll ask you the same question that clarified my thinking on this: what is it you want from your free will? For me, it's that I want to be the one to decide my actions.
Do you want your actions to follow no laws at all? Then they're essentially random. You cannot possibly be in control of what you do, in that world.
Since I don't think most people want that, what kind of laws do you want them to follow? Because whatever laws determine your actions, and whatever you are, you exist within them, not outside them. In order for 'you' to freely choose your actions, they must be sufficient to determine what you choose.
Do you want to not be influenced by anything outside yourself? Then you have no ability to take account of the state of the outside world in deciding what to do. You've given up any chance of steering the future state of the world you live in, or of achieving goals involving anything outside your own body.
What I want is for the primary locus of control, the proximal cause of my actions, to be within me. I want to minimize certain kinds of external influence on my decision-making processes, which I loosely categorize under labels like "coercion" or "violence" and so on, despite not having or expecting precise definitions of those things. That list also includes minimizing certain biases built into me by history and evolution from before I was conscious, which is how I first ended up here on lesswrong. None of this has much of anything to do with what the laws of physics are. I have a lot of that, and I get more of it the more I learn about what things influence and determine my thoughts, choices, and actions.
Therefore, we can say that the conclusion is that it really does not matter if free will exists or not, what matters is whether we believe it exists.
Woah there, slick!
It matters a whole lot whether some degree of freedom exists. In fact, if there is no free will, then it also doesn't matter whether one believes in it or not, as that belief is just as destined as every other thing.
Most people have concluded that free will is the freedom to make any decision
No. Most people define it as the ability to make some decisions freely, for some value of freely.
I agree with the above bullets as they are presented, and Libet results appear to reinforce this. But Libet himself argued that free will existed.
Libet argues that there is a conscious veto -- but it itself deterministic, Sternberg's argument is not refuted.
A neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet demonstrated it.
He is usually cited as having demonstrated the oppoiste.
Free Will is basically the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded, according to Wikipedia (seriously, I shudder to imagine how the world will be without Wikipedia. It’s so useful) It is when you can choose to do what you want when you want without any form of opposition or duress.
For a long time, at least since the Enlightenment when philosophers began popping up like flies, one of the most often-debated questions has been whether humans truly have free will. On one hand, humans have very strong feelings towards freedom. We love it so much. We hold it up as an ideal. We have killed each other over it. This our strong sense of freedom always leads us to believe that we have free will. We even believe that civilization as we know it depends on this free will and losing it will have calamitous consequences. We have built many aspects of society on the assumption of that we have free will – from our code of ethics to democracy to aspects of our religion to criminal law. If we take away free will, society stands on shaky ground. As my friend P says “I believe free will exists. The alternatives if it doesn’t, are too scary to consider.”
But is this belief in free will just in our heads?
Science these days has been bolder in claiming that there is really no free will, that all human behavior, from love to anger to chivalry to everything else, can be explained through precise clockwork laws of cause and effect and chemical reactions. This claim can be traced to 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin published ‘On the Origin of Species’, where he laid out the theory of evolution. His cousin Francis Galton began to infer some radical implications. He said that if we have evolved, then our mental faculties (such as intelligence) were hereditary. And since we use these faculties (which, from evolution, some people are bound to have in a greater degree than others), our ability to choose is not free, it depends on our heredity*. Hence, according to his theory, Einstein's descendants have a greater free will than, say, Trump's.
This was obviously controversial then, but these days, not so much. Brain scanners have allowed us to peer into our brains when we make decisions and see intricate networks of neurons that fire when we make most of our decisions. Many point to the research and experiments of the American physiologist Benjamin Libet in the 1980s**, which demonstrated that before a person does any action, say, moving her leg, electrical activity built up in the brain before the person consciously made the decision to move. The brain has already decided we would move before we make the choice (which is what free will is all about) to move.
It is also common knowledge that changes to brain chemistry can affect our behavior. We only need to look at the effect that weed and alcohol and so on have on us. Scientists have even determined that alterations in brain structure causes pronounced changes in behavior. There have been cases of normal people that become psychotic murderers or psychopathic pedophiles after developing brain tumours. The parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which we get from our cats, can alter your behavior and make you more peaceful or more aggressive.
The arguments and evidences above means that determinism is becoming very popular. Determinism simply says “Free will? That’s bullshit.”
But what happens when people begin to believe that free will is a myth? Won’t they become morally irresponsible? Well, leave it to psychologists to find out.
In 2002, two psychologists, Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler, came up with an experiment***. They asked participants to read a passage that argued that free will was an elaborate societal deception. They then asked another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then they tempted the participants. They made cheating easy on a math test, and people in the first group were more likely to cheat. The groups were also told to take a certain amount of money from envelopes. The first group were more likely to pilfer extra. Another psychologist, Roy Baumeister****, found that students who didn’t believe in free will were less likely to volunteer to help a classmate, and were less likely to give a homeless person money. In essence, people who didn’t believe in free will were more likely to behave immorally.
Also, Baumeister found that those who didn’t believe in free will had more stress, unhappiness and a lesser commitment to relationships. They had a lower sense of life’s meaningfulness. It made them less creative, more likely to conform, and less willing to show gratitude. Another study last year even linked diminished belief in free will to poor academic performance.
Therefore, we can say that the conclusion is that it really does not matter if free will exists or not, what matters is whether we believe it exists.
I just realized that this if these studies are really true, then this post may have made you unhappy, immoral, uncreative and academically dense. It has made you an asshole in essence. But the good thing is that at least, you learnt that people have names like Schooler and Baumeister. So that’s a win for you. Yay!
*'Hereditary Genius' by Francis Galton, 1869.
**Libet, Benjamin; Gleason, Curtis A.; Wright, Elwood W.; Pearl, Dennis K. (1983). "Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential)". Brain. 106 (3): 623–42. doi:10.1093/brain/106.3.623. PMID 6640273.
***Vohs, K. D.; Schooler, J. W. (January 2008). "The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating". Psychol. Sci. 19 (1): 49–54. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x. PMID 18181791. S2CID 2643260
****Baumeister, R. F., Crescioni, A., & Alquist, J. L. (2011). Free will as advanced action control for human social life and culture. Neuroethics, 4(1), 1-11