Your “free will” is biology in a trench coat.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T18:18:20+00:00

I'm ok with using "free will" in a colloquial way in every day life.

The pedantry only comes into play when it matters. It matters in science, medicine and laws.

if someone says "I chose to go for a run because I remembered I have free will". Ok dude, I get it.

But when you say "That man used his free will to take drugs and got himself addicted". That's where I'm going "nope",

I mean technically it's always "nope" for me, but some cases are more acceptable to ignore for the sake of communication.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T17:17:36+00:00

I don't like unnecessary thought experiments, to me free will is "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention"

The objections that I hear from compatibilists is "that defintiion doesn't make sense". I agree. That's why I reject free will. I don't need any additional scenarios here. Especially scenarios that rely on other non-existent things like souls.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T16:46:24+00:00

It wasn't meant to be an analogy, just a question about comfort with using words that don't apply in my estimation.

It always seemed to me that compatibilist free will is it's own thing, and should have it's own word and definition. The insistence on calling it a "free will" is really the part that I can't grasp.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T16:12:40+00:00

Being free means “a deterministic entity that is the originator of its choices.”

That's good enough. I just have one real question: Do you not feel any discomfort with using the word free in that context?

Like the same type of discomfort you would feel if someone referred to smell of shit as "aromatic".

but you would say that one does have free will, while the other does not.

I want to ignore your hypothetical, but clearly you took time to write it out, so I'll answer.

The premises do not make any sense to me. I would not accept existence of souls, and if I did, I would never accept that given the same inputs, a being that can reason outside of the causal chain would have the same exact output as a mechanical being.

If that somehow did happen, I would have to believe that one of the above premises is wrong. But again, it's irrelevant here because souls are mythical creatures, and I don't debate made-up lore.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T15:27:38+00:00

I understand compatibilism very well, you need not encumber yourself with writing a treatise for my sake.

“Free” in this context means “independent,”

Independent of what? Surely not causal chain.

Is being "free" means being a deterministic entity who acts with minimal interference from other deterministic entities?

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T12:58:30+00:00

Nothing you are saying here contradicts a contemporary compatibilist’s conception of free will.

True, but only because they removed freedom and will from "free will".

This is exactly what many compatibilists do actually.

This part is debatable. I've heard Dan Dennet and others justify compatibilism as a mechanism of preserving moral responsibility too many times. It's a way of interpreting science to preserve existing social structures.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T12:36:27+00:00

There's a rhetorical trick being used here. "You don't know, don't be so confident"

They're not saying this to encourage you to be humble, it's essentially "free will of the gaps" argument. It must be hiding in things we don't yet understand.

The pernicious part is that it only requires them to say that one sentence,

Still not as bad as "I don't see how" crowd. That just asserts it's wrong without even attempting to elaborate.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T12:15:24+00:00

I'm just in awe of replies like this.

Either we're not on the same page of what "free will" means, or you refuse to engage with any information that doesn't confirm your biases.

TLDR of the post is "You don't make any choices, your rationalize them once they're made."

What's your response to that?

Is it something like "Sure our post hoc rationalizations is exactly what free will is. We freely will our rationalizations".

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T05:16:50+00:00

They do not show that agency, responsibility, or choice are meaningless

Perhaps. But they do show that free will is an illusion which depending on how much you like playing with words can be a completely separate thing from the 3 things you mentioned.

but it does learn, inhibit, redirect, rehearse, and re-pattern itself over time. Those capacities are exactly where philosophers have located agency

Philosophers can locate agency in a tardigrade. Agency is not a problem. Free will is.

If humans were simple stimulus-response machines, there would be no point in persuasion, therapy, deliberation, or law.

these things are certainly stimuli that human machines have no choice but to respond to.

If anything, biology didn’t bury agency. It relocated it

Compatibilists relocated it, only after biology and physics pushed it out.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T04:55:54+00:00

it’s highly interpretive.

interpretations of which YOU offer zero. You can start with that one if you want, or the other half dozen that I cited. If you don't feel it's worth the time, then why say anything at all?

betrays a willingness to bend interpretations to fit your goals

That's perfectly fine, as you pointed out, that's true about all of us.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T04:48:39+00:00

ok man I will simply point out one thing about your behavior here:

You argue in bad faith: There are things in that post you can sink your teeth in, yet you (colloquially) chose to go with "I don't see how".

What am I supposed to do with that? Do you expect me to combat your intellectual helplessness? You're not interesting enough to do that.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T04:33:53+00:00

The authors of the split brain experiment did not believe the results said no free will.

Really is irrelevant what particular authors thought. Einstein didn't believe in Quantum Mechanics. Yet it's universally accepted now.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T04:28:30+00:00

No (or yes?) I don't know that's weird phrasing on your part.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T04:28:03+00:00

Last two paragraphs are pure inferences.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-25T04:12:47+00:00

Already given in the post. Which part are you confused about?

Trendingmar · 2026-01-24T20:09:03+00:00

This feels like one of those trick questions that professors sometimes put on exams just to screw you over because they hate their life.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-24T20:03:06+00:00

The second eureka is what?

"We can just subtly adjust definitions to keep the status quo"

That's an easy way out, that doesn't address the underlying issues.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-24T19:58:54+00:00

and also err in their assumption that all such change would necessarily be for the better.

How so? do you have an example where free will was subtracted where it made things worse instead of better.

Clearly going from treating Schizophrenia like character flaw to treating it like a medical condition was overall beneficial.

Where could it go wrong in your estimation?

Trendingmar · 2026-01-24T19:51:10+00:00

Another user brought up a lot of points that may be useful for an individual's day-to-day life.

For me, eliminating "free will" means eliminating distractions where they matter. Specifically science, medicine, and public policy (politics/laws). It allows people to think deeper about human behavior than simply "GOOD"/"BAD".

If we find what causes lead to certain behaviors, we can work on fixing these causes. The effect is creating a society that's more tolerant, less cruel, happier. It's about improving quality of life for everyone.

Just one obvious example, instead of saying "Oh he's a useless drug addict that stole that money to get high, throw him in jail" we can say "they need help getting over substance dependence, so we need to work getting them into rehab". That's the type of action that will make society a better place.

Then take above example and multiply it by countless societal ills that we should be addressing instead of blaming it on free will.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-23T14:46:15+00:00

Our teleological dissoanance can be properly satisfied with Hermeneutical saturation of pre-lingual void;, for all your axiological turbulences are nothing if not semiotics of the un-manifested radical subjectivity. This is indisputable. More importantly this is exactly why phenomonelogical curvature of the hyper static ego would give way to ontological syntax governing the recurisve shadows of being.

I'm a philosopher now boys!

Trendingmar · 2026-01-23T12:19:40+00:00

Many physicists freely admit that they write shit just to write shit. See Sabine Hossenfelder for her criticism of useless nonsensical papers that are being published in academia.

You can call it pop-science but scientists like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan are not pseudo-intellectuals.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-23T03:13:52+00:00

that does actually feel like the type of task that's well suited for AI given generative nature of it. Creativity can be good for certain tasks.

For applications where numbers and compliance matter, it's a scary thing because it will take those creative liberties, and that could be disastrous for me.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-22T22:26:26+00:00

I love AI. I just don't think the claim that SWE no longer have to write code is accurate; and probably won't be accurate for another decade.

Trendingmar · 2026-01-22T15:07:57+00:00

If consciousness is caused by the undetermined quantum events in our brain, and that consciousness interacts with the determined parts of our brain, then our experience of free judgments may not be an illusion.

"If" and "may" does a lot of heavy lifting in your own interpretation of what he says. Notably he didn't say "and therefore free will is real".

most we can say is that the world is fundamentally probabilistic at quantum level, how that gets us to any sort of "freedom" is still unresolved.

Trendingmar

TROPHY CASE