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Assuming we don't have free will, why do we have the illusion that we do?

Three possibilities come to mind:

Is there an evolutionary purpose?

Does it arise as a consequence of our mental activities, a sort of side effect of our thinking?

Is it given a priori (something we have to think in order to think at all)?

EDIT: Thanks for all the responses! Just one thing I saw come up a few times I'd like to address: a lot of people are asking 'Why assume this?' The answer is: it's purely rhetorical! That said, I'm happy with a well thought-out 'I dispute the premiss' answer.

128 comments

  • Confabulation.

    Look at split-brain patients: divide the corpus callosum down the middle, and you effectively have two separate brains that don't communicate. Tell the half without the speech centre to perform some random task, then ask the other one why they did that - and they will flat-out make up some plausible sounding reason.

    And the thing is, they haven't the slightest idea that it isn't true. To them, it feels exactly like freely choosing to do it, for those made up reasons.

    Bits of our brains make us do stuff for their own reasons, and we just make shit up to explain it after the fact. We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we've primed our muscles to carry out the choice.

    I think a chunk of this comes down to our need to model the thoughts of others (incredibly useful for social animals) - we make everyone out to be these monolithic executive units so that we can predict their actions, and we make ourselves out to be the same so we can slot ourselves into that same reasoning.

    Also it would be a bit fucking terrifying to just constantly get surprised by your own actions, blown around like a leaf on the wind without a clue what's going on, so I think another chunk of it is just larping this "I" person who has a coherent narrative behind it all, to protect your own sanity.

    • We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we've primed our muscles to carry out the choice.

      Where can I read more about this?

  • You're conscious of the decisions you make. Sure they're the result of a million different variables, chemicles, memories, and predetermined traits, but some of that is active. You are making the choice. Whether you could have made a different one or not doesn't affect what the choice feels like

  • Assuming we don't have free will, why do we have the illusion that we do?

    You experience the world through your senses.

    What sense that your body has would you expect to give your brain a different set of inputs if your brain's actions were not deterministic, not set by the laws of physics? How would you expect it to feel different?

    You wouldn't expect to feel like some invisible force is in control of your limbs, which I think is perhaps what some people intuitively expect if someone says that their actions are pre-determined.

    It's not talking about anything that your brain can sense; it's talking about how your brain works.

    • Yeah, this is it.

      And to take a slightly different tack, if the biochemical and electrical activity in your brain were not deterministic, how would you ever know? It's one thing to believe that you made a decision on your own "Free Will", but how could you possibly rewind the entire universe (or at least some sufficiently small portion of it), including your brain's exact atomic state, and re-run the experiment to know for sure? At that point, what would "Free Will" even mean?

    • There are many thing my body does which I'm aware of, but that I don't will, and others that I have some control over, i.e., my will appears to play a role, but not the only role.

      I don't think it creates any kind of contradiction to suggest that, hypothetically, there could be more (or less) of either of those types of things, without my perceiving an invisible (external) force of some kind to be involved. After all, I don't ascribe my heartbeat to an external force, but I am aware that I don't will it.

      • After all, I don’t ascribe my heartbeat to an external force, but I am aware that I don’t will it.

        No, but you have the ability to sense your heartbeat, so you can tell that it's there.

        You don't have the ability to sense electromagnetic emissions in the X-ray frequency range, so you can't tell that they're there. You wouldn't know if X-rays of a given intensity were present at a given moment. It's like asking "why is there the illusion that there are no X-rays" when you wouldn't expect to feel differently regardless of their presence or non-presence.

  • I personally think the debate over the existence of Free Will is simply an extraordinary debate over semantics.

    If you look at a human being from its basic biological and cellular makeup, a human being is a walking bundle of competing desires that appears to present itself as a single cohesive corporate entity.

    The people who are against the concept of free will say that because you have innate desires for food sex and entertainment, that you have no choice to not act upon those in a desires and therefore any delusion that you carry about the choices that you make being done of an entirely unencumbered and Free Will are false.

    Then there are people who say that Free Will doesn't exist for religious purposes, that God is an all-knowing creature who knows the beginning and the end and everything in between and so you cannot make a choice that he or she or it does not already know that you will make and therefore your choices are not free.

    The people who say Free Will does exist on a biological level will point to people who choose to self-immolate or to starve themselves to death in protest of a spiritual or psychological issue, valuing the ideals that life has imprinted upon them over the biological necessities of continuing to live.

    The people who say Free Will does exist on a spiritual level say many things, such as we carry a spark of the Divine in us and therefore we are as little gods ourselves, capable of creating and destroying in roughly the same proportional magnitude as the greater gods above are, or they say that since we have the ability to make choices and we are judged by those choices than our choices must be free otherwise judgment is meaningless.

    I personally tend to lean into the Free Will side, while understanding simultaneously that sometimes there are exigencies that induce us to choose one option over another on a more likely than not basis, or to phrase it another way, our will is as free as we choose it to be.

  • Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist

    He thinks consciousness has to do with "quantum bubble collapse" happening inside our brains at a very very tiny level.

    That's the only way free will could exist.

    If consciousness is anything else, then everything is predetermined.

    Like, imagine dropping a million bouncy balls off the hoover dam. You'll never get the same results twice.

    However, that's because you'll never get the same conditions twice.

    If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level... You'll get the same results every time

    What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole "quantum bubble collapse" was a fundamental part of consciousness.

    That still wouldn't guarantee free will, but it would make it possible.

    There's also the whole thing where what we think of as our consciousness isn't actually running the show. It's just a narrator that's summarizing everything up immediately after it happened. What's actually calling the shot is other parts of our brains, neurons in our gut, and what controls our hormones.

    We don't know if that's not true either. But if it was, each person as a thing would have free will, it's just what we think of as that person does not have free will.

    Sounds batshit crazy and impossible, until you read up on the studies on people who had their brains split in half at different stages of mental development.

    There's a scary amount of shit we don't know about "us". And an even scarier amount we don't know about how much variation there is with all that

    • Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist

      I would recommend reading the philosophers Jocelyn Benoist and Francois-Igor Pris who argue very convincingly that both the "hard problem of consciousness" and the "measurement problem" stem from the same logical fallacies of conflating subjectivity (or sometimes called phenomenality) with contextuality, and that both disappear when you make this distinction, and so neither are actually problems for physics to solve but are caused by fallacious reasoning in some of our a priori assumptions about the properties of reality.

      Benoist's book Toward a Contextual Realism and Pris' book Contextual Realism and Quantum Mechanics both cover this really well. They are based in late Wittgensteinian philosophy, so maybe reading Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good primer.

      That’s the only way free will could exist...What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole “quantum bubble collapse” was a fundamental part of consciousness.

      Even if they discover quantum phenomena in the brain, all that would show is our brain is like a quantum computer. But nobody would argue quantum computers have free will, do they? People often like to conflate the determinism/free will debate with the debate over Laplacian determinism specifically, which should not be conflated, as randomness clearly has nothing to do with the question of free will.

      If the state forced everyone into a job for life the moment they turned 18, but they chose that job using a quantum random number generator, would it be "free"? Obviously not. But we can also look at it in the reverse sense. If there was a God that knew every decision you were going to make, would that negate free will? Not necessarily. Just because something knows your decision ahead of time doesn't necessarily mean you did not make that decision yourself.

      The determinism/free will debate is ultimately about whether or not human decisions are reducible to the laws of physics or not. Even if there is quantum phenomena in the brain that plays a real role in decision making, our decisions would still be reducible to the laws of physics and thus determined by them. Quantum mechanics is still deterministic in the nomological sense of the word, meaning, determinism according to the laws of physics. It is just not deterministic in the absolute Laplacian sense of the word that says you can predict the future with certainty if you knew all properties of all systems in the present.

      If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level… You’ll get the same results every time

      I think a distinction should be made between Laplacian determinism and fatalism (not sure if there's a better word for the latter category). The difference here is that both claim there is only one future, but only the former claims the future is perfectly predictable from the states of things at present. So fatalism is less strict: even in quantum mechanics that is random, there is a single outcome that is "fated to be," but you could never predict it ahead of time.

      Unless you ascribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation, I think you kind of have to accept a fatalistic position in regards to quantum mechanics, mainly due not to quantum mechanics itself but special relativity. In special relativity, different observers see time passing at different rates. You can thus build a time machine that can take you into the future just by traveling really fast, near the speed of light, then turning around and coming back home.

      The only way for this to even be possible for there to be different reference frames that see time pass differently is if the future already, in some sense, pre-exists. This is sometimes known as the "block universe" which suggests that the future, present, and past are all equally "real" in some sense. For the future to be real, then, there has to be an outcome of each of the quantum random events already "decided" so to speak. Quantum mechanics is nomologically deterministic in the sense that it does describe nature as reducible to the laws of physics, but not deterministic in the Laplacian sense that you can predict the future with certainty knowing even in principle. It is more comparable to fatalism, that there is a single outcome fated to be (that is, again, unless you ascribe to MWI), but it's impossible to know ahead of time.

    • Even if the brain is a quantum computer, it's quantum dice rolls controlling your neurons. So quantum consciousness doesn't enable the possibility free will.

  • I don't believe there is an "illusions that we have free will," either. Honestly, "illusions" don't really even exist as they're traditionally talked about. People say if you place a stick in a cup of water, there is an "illusion" created that the stick is bent. But is there? What you see is just what a non-bent stick looks like in a cup of water. Its appearance is different from one out of water due to light refraction. It's not as if reality is tricking you by showing you a bent stick when there isn't one, that's just what a non-bent stick in water really looks like.

    The only "illusion" is your own faulty interpretation of what you are seeing, which upon further inspection you may later find it is wrong and change your mind. There was simply no illusion there to begin with. Reality just presents itself as it actually exists, and it is us who interpret it, and sometimes we make mistakes and interpret it wrong. But it's not reality's fault we interpret it wrong sometimes. Reality is not wrong, nor is it right. It just is what it is.

    In a similar sense, there is just no "illusion of free will." Neural networks are pattern recognition machines. We form models of the external world which can approximate different counterfactual realities, and we consider those realities to decide which one will optimize whatever goal we're trying to achieve. The fact we can consider counterfactual worlds doesn't mean that those counterfactual worlds really exist, and indeed our very consideration of them is part of the process of determining which decision we make.

    Reality never tricks us into the counterfactual worlds really do in some way exist and we are selecting from these possible worlds. That's just an interpretation we sometimes impose artificially, but honestly I think it's exaggerated how much of an "illusion" this really is. A lot of regular people if you talk to them will probably admit quite easily that those counterfactual worlds don't exist anywhere but in their imagination, and that of course the only thing real is the decision that they made and the world they exist within where they made that decision.

    Hence, reality is not in any way tricking us into thinking our decisions somehow have more power than they really do. It is some of us (not all of us, I'm not even convinced it's most of us) who impose greater powers to decision making than it actually has. There just is no "illusion of free will," at best there is your personal misinterpretation of what decision making actually entails.

  • That's a very large assumption. The simplest explanation is that we feel like we have free will because we do. Quantum mechanics suggests some major challenges to determinism, and the best arguments to restore it require a very unsatisfying amount of magical thinking.

  • Perhaps it is the illusion of choice and the choice you make was always going to be that one due to all of the events that shaped you and the events that shaped the people that shaped you etc all the way back to the big bang.

    I contemplate this from time to time.

    • Yes, that's the question: if our acts are predetermined all the way back to the big bang, as you suggest, why do we feel that we determine them?

128 comments