Do we all really have free will?

[Danoff]

Not in a way that could be considered free will.

This is confusing. An example of what I meant is depressed people having specifically cultivated neural pathways that lead them to further depression, a downward spiral. When these people get help, and realize that they can cultivate new neural pathways, they can come out of depression with a sort of exercise of their mind. Part of their brain can control and curtail the thoughts of other parts of the brain until a new neural groove is formed, and a new pattern of behavior is adopted. You literally can change your own mind. You use part of your mind to change another part.

That's not new information, is re-combining existing information, which is what the brain does best. We can't really invent anything new, but we can combine past experiences to create a hybrid from them.

That's definitely wrong. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, whether it's that you have an odd or impossible definition of "new" or what, but this appears to be a fallacy that flies in the face of all human progress. You literally have everything that humanity has developed to contend with, including the computer you're using.

If you think that all of human development is simply a hybrid, then the hybrid is so special, so independently useful, so distinct from all other hybrids, that it is worthy of being called "new". You can claim that a work of literature is nothing but a hybrid combination of previously used words, but the particular combination is so distinctly valuable and noteworthy that we can call that new work of art "new".

If you think that a brand new page-turner that entertains millions does not demonstrate novelty of mind or free will just because it's a combination of words that have been used previously, then you have an over-constrained idea of what "new" is and have lost the point of the conversation.

My interpretation doesn't require anything extra compared to the multiverse, it also doesn't require an infinite amount of parallel universes, each of which exists with the same amount of matter in it. When a new branch is created it also requires all matter in the universe to sprout an identical copy. I think that is as far fetched as it goes. We just assume natural laws do not apply, but I've seen no compelling explanation why.

You don't really understand the multiverse concept then. We are the waveform. It's not that we're some invented new copy, it's that we're a manifestation of the waveform from the perspective of a specific entanglement. The piece of the waveform we see and interact with looks like it does because of how we're entangled with it, and it looks different from different entanglement. Imagine a wave that leaves behind a little vortex as it passes by. You're claiming the vortex sprouted from nowhere, but it is the wave, a piece of the wave, and how the wave looks from a particular sliver.

The observation is what causes the decay, if nobody checks on it, it could exist in limbo indefinitely.

It's not limbo, it's the wave. All this does is demonstrate exactly what I've been saying, that the waveform is the fundamental nature of reality (and this is experimentally borne out), your entanglement with a particular outcome is a narrowing of your view of it.

The burden of proof is not on the one making an assertion. The assertion here is the existence of free will.

The burden of proof is on the one making the assertion, you asserted that you have no control over your brain. This is you:

all your actions are governed by chemical and electrical processes, that you have zero control over

I'm saying the brain is biological computer that functions based on the input it gets.

I understand what you're saying, and I'm saying that you need to actually prove that.

The outside influence your brain encounters is the chance part. Well, strictly speaking it might not be chance per see, but it is still as random as a random number generator in a computer.

The specific results of an RNG is not at all random, as if you repeat the same RNG in the exact same moment in the exact same situation it will always give the exact same result. The brain works exactly the same way. Seemingly it can produce different results that can be interpreted as free will, but I think it is impossible for your brain to come to a different decision in a repeat scenario of the exact same situation. Thus no free will. Of course in practice you cannot do a repeat of a situation ever, even the best controlled experiments are not that precise. I'm talking about literally rewinding time, and testing again. But for this the observer would need to exist outside of linear time. So we are not going to have laboratory tests for free will any time soon, possibly ever.

As I said, no room for chance.


Edit:

For the record, the burden of proof here looks like this:

"We have no free will" requires proof.
"We have free will" requires proof.
"We don't know whether we have free will" does not require proof.

 

[Imari]

That's not new information, is re-combining existing information, which is what the brain does best. We can't really invent anything new, but we can combine past experiences to create a hybrid from them.

If that's your definition of new, there is nothing new in the universe.

The specific results of an RNG is not at all random, as if you repeat the same RNG in the exact same moment in the exact same situation it will always give the exact same result. The brain works exactly the same way. Seemingly it can produce different results that can be interpreted as free will, but I think it is impossible for your brain to come to a different decision in a repeat scenario of the exact same situation. Thus no free will. Of course in practice you cannot do a repeat of a situation ever, even the best controlled experiments are not that precise. I'm talking about literally rewinding time, and testing again. But for this the observer would need to exist outside of linear time. So we are not going to have laboratory tests for free will any time soon, possibly ever.

This is an assumption. As you say, it hasn't been (and can't be) tested, so you can't possibly know that this is true.

 

[Danoff]

One of the coolest things she says about free will in this video is this:

"You see, the thing you call 'free will' should in some sense allow you to choose what you want. But then, it's either determined by what you want, in which case it's not free, or it's not determined, in which case it's not a will."

It is a bit of a conundrum and I see her argument that "free will" is itself logically incoherent. It's essentially determined indeterminacy. Your will must simultaneously be determined and undetermined. If it's not determined, it's not your will, it's random. But if it is determined, it's not free.

I think instead, what we think of as free will is actually the perceptions that our brains control our actions, and that much is true. As I mentioned earlier, our brains can even control our brains, so our brain can control how our future actions will be controlled. But you never get away from it being your brain that's doing the controlling, and so you never get to some ethereal "will" that is free of the biological and physical confines of your brain.

I think I'm satisfied with the idea that "free will" is just my brain doing the controlling and not the idea that my brain is truly free of its own physicality. I don't think this actually harms the use of the concept of free will. And I also don't think that the idea that my brain can be predicted (in theory anyway) is even problematic to the use of the concept of free will.