Is free will just an illusion?

Many people no matter what their stance is on life believe that we have complete control of our lives. However, is this really true? In life, we do indeed have choices available to us, but its not quite clear whether the choices we make is really of our own accord. If you're a theist, then most likely you believe that a God gave us free will. Yet, God being all powerful knows what we are going to do before we even do it. Saying God gives us free will is like saying a director gives his actors free will to do what they want on stage. We all know that isn't the case because actors have scripts to follow and can't act out of character.

Now let's say there is no God, do we have free will now? Consider the idea that our subconscious is the one giving the orders while the conscious fulfills them. When you're hungry, you have to eat. When you're sleepy, you have to sleep. When you have to use the toilet, well, you get the idea. Trying to fight those urges goes against nature, and you're certain to fail.

Other factors that may dictate our choices are emotions, consequence, classical conditioning, social conformity and IQ (There's more, but I'm not gonna list them all). We behave differently based on our emotions. Emotions are triggered by internal (thoughts) or external (weather) influences. Anger, sadness, happiness and fear all determine what we do or say in life. Emotions and consequence go hand in hand. We make choices depending on how we feel about the outcome.

We are habitual creatures. Rarely do we do anything spontaneous. What we do today is a result of what we did yesterday and the day before that. If you liked a video game, chances are you're going to buy the sequels (or at least another game of the same genre). Our choices reflect the people we are exposed to. Hang around caring, loving people, chances are you're going to behave that way.

Our reasoning skills affect the decisions we make. If your IQ is low, chances are high that you will be more prone to criminal activity, more religious and/or unemployed. Whether you have a high IQ or a low one, your choices will be narrowed down and limited by your thinking process. You're a prisoner inside your own mind. We think we have complete control, but there are so many factors that influence what we do. So I ask of your opinion on this matter, is free will an illusion or not?

Yes, i think free will is an illusion or that we do not have free will in the sense that we are consciously free to act or do what we want. Sam Harris has a great video on youtube about this subject. Firstly though i would say the thing about god giving us free will is just bullshit since god doesn't exist.

I would say every decision we think we make consciously is guided by our subconscious which on the other hand is shaped to what it is by a multitude of different factors, such as your parenting, your society, your culture, your experiences, etc. Every single decision from buying a specific flavored ice cream to 'choosing' to come to this hentai website, is ultimately not because of our conscious freedom of will, but from our personal, individual subconscious instinct. Even though we differ from other animals in a way that we are consciously aware of ourselves, i don't think we have lost the instinct that we had (we still have it) that other animals have. I know we mainly use the concept of instinct only when we talk about other animals, but i firmly think that we have within us the concept of instinct and are using that basically in everything subconsciously, it just has evolved from trying to survive everyday to our daily human lives (even though we still have to survive everyday).

Do i therefor believe that our conscious is just a living witness to the human body it was assigned to? No i don't.

Of coarse there is a possibility to a change, of coarse when we learn and experience new things our personalities can change. If you are consciously aware of who you really are, what your personality really is and you want to change something, it is a fact that it is not impossible to change.

If for example you are shy (like i am) in certain circumstances, then you can change that and one good way to change that attribute about your personality is actively going into the situations where you find yourself shy and consciously battle against it, in time those situations start to become more and more familiar to you and there for you loose your normal bodily reaction to them which is to become shy or freeze or what ever. I think the saying "If you are shy, pretend not to be, it will eventually come naturally" or something on those lines. Same thing if you are socially awkward.

Emotions i think have almost nothing to do with what we 'choose' to do or with freedom of will. I mean, i doubt anybody 'chooses' to become sad when a loved one dies, it is a natural reaction that our brain creates when it acknowledges that a person dear to us is no longer with us. Same thing with happiness, or laughter or the feeling of love. I think the difference is pretty clear when you just instinctively laugh at a joke or funny movie to a fake laughter you do in social pressure. If you are heterosexual did you choose that? Did you choose that you are more sexually aroused and attracted to the same sex if you are homosexual? I would say no, you didn't.

For now i leave it there, i could probably go on a lot more, but i tend to loose track of mind and subconsciously repeat myself when writing these long posts.

I am not talking about me performing an action and that i chose freely to perform that action, the point here is where does the thought come to you to perform that action. It would mean you would have to think the thought to do something before you even think of doing that something, because if you do not think the thoughts of thinking of doing something, it means you do not have free will. Meaning there is no problem in my logic.

If you think you have free will, it would mean you would think about thinking to do that something, and if that was the case it would only result in a infinite regress, because you would have to think the thought of thinking the thought of thinking the thought of doing that something, so on and so fort.

Me 'choosing' or deciding to write, that action comes to human beings from thought. "I am gonna respond to this serious discussion topic" <- i had to think consciously of writing before i can start to write. But where does that thought come to you to think consciously of writing something? Because if you don't consciously make that decision to think of thinking about writing, it comes from subconscious which you do not have control over, there for you do not have freedom of will.

Free will will remain free until all of the variables that infuence the choice is actuated. The one that has such knowledge is known to possess to a degree of power and control, the ultimate form of such is coded a "god". That's an exceprt frommathematical philosophy, if that sparks anything...

I've living outside society most of my life, yet I lived on it a few years. I must admit that it makes me see very clearly how people restrict themself of doing what they wish all the time because parents, society and so. For example when I exit, sometimes I just don't feel to do waxing, people looks me weird: who cares. Other times I feel I want it for mere fun and I do it. But other gals, gosh, they just fear so much to get criticized that they don't even consider the idea! (Even when they don't want to most of the time!).

Maybe the biggest impact is that people have their dreams... but they blank it because society tells them that X idea is crazy and impossible. Quite sad.

About the definition:

Basically, free will doesn't mean to have full power and control over anything. Free will just mean you have freedom of thought and freedom of realizing those thoughts, with the limitations of respecting others freedom (unless there is a clash, then competency arise), along responsibilities (that are dynamical in nature). It's easily to feel you're having free will, but as long you have that common sense that tell you that "certain things are impossible, or not worth considering, or not worth allowing others to consider", you aren't truly free willing, but rather just restricting yourself.

If you stop having unjustified fear and think about what are you doing and why are you doing it, then you can archive, just in that moment, a huge portion of free will (fully free will is technically impossible because the nature of our superstitious brain).

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts".
- President F.D.Roosevelt

Aside free will there also exists guided will, that is when you just do what others tells you to do without questioning it that much. There also exists (fully) restricted will, that is when you're being physically restricted of neither the tools needed to think (like knowledge), or when others will are passing over your will and you're too weak to defend yourself (your will). All of us have a current % for each of the three types of will, with different proportions each one.

In a nutshell, we have a degree of freedom, restriction and outside influence, with each person currently having a different distribution for each.

The choices we supposedly make are guided by our subconscious. How can you call your mind free, when out of a million options you could do at any given time you subconscious gives you the illusion that you can either choose to write on a hentai website or not, and also affects the outcome of your conscious decision? It is not about absolute control or about processing every iota of information, it is about you having consciously little to no effect at all in anything.




And that conscious minds choice is effected by subconscious and other factors you don't have any control over, therefor the impression of free will you have is just an illusion. And if you concede that subconscious has to load these multiple problem-solving mechanisms in the first place, where on earth is there freedom of will?

Yes I believe in the concept of free will, I believe human thoughts are unhindered by others and are at most influenced by a third party (e.g political belief, religious belief) but that there is a degree of choice about this and people ultimately make their own choices at the end of the day to do something. It's more like a believe in 'guided free will' where someone is influenced to make a choice but they ultimately have the decision always there to do and say whatever they want no matter the situation they are. That constitutes free will for me at least.

As for the idea that God could be influencing humans and it is like a director telling his actors to act however they want, I disagree (I believe specifically in Deism which is the belief of a creator but the rejection that religion should have authority over those who chose not to believe in it) since I think God just idly watches over us, ready to judge us based on our free will and whether or not he considers is morally justified based on the society someone was raised in (e.g a someone who was raised in a society to kill intruders would be considered equal to someone killing out of self defence, so long as there wouldn't be any malicious intent/enjoyment bar what society deems necessary).

As for our subconscious mind, that's still an important part of who we are not just as a species but as individuals and without it one could argue we would have no thoughts whatsoever to do anything (only way you could prove that is by creating a human being without one and I don't know how to go about that, closest thing would be a lobotomy) so regardless of its influence over our decisions since we need it. It may limit our true free will but without it we'd probably have died off long ago. As I said, guided free will, so whilst there is not true free will it's the closest possible thing to it without being some kind of all powerful being.

I don't think the subconscious is "another self" that isn't "free willed", but it's also true that the subconscious tends to adds an important degree of guided will and restricted will to the equation. Nonetheless, the mind itself is imperfect as heck, but you can improve it (just a certain degree), improving the subconscious with it. If our mind standalone were perfect we couldn't need peer reviewed papers for science, for example. Basically I kind of agree with Futabot and Yuria-chan.

Oh, yeah, (fully) free will isn't exactly perfect in nature, neither. For example if you take a bad action and harm yourself with it, it is most likely you'll live less and worst, or in the past, survive less (natural selection). So it is healthy to have a certain (yet, should be small) degree of guided will, others sometimes know better what is better for us than us, we aren't perfect, but we can complement yourself with others! And restricted will... a few things aren't practically good ideas to consider seriously.

We all have free will but the very fact that we have a choice limits those choices. Say for example that we all chose to eat dinner 100 miles away tonight? The restaurant has really good food for example so we decide to go eat there. That choice has costs though. Time spent getting there means we cant spend that time doing something else. Money spent getting there means we cant spend it on anything else. I don't doubt that instincts and our environments may shape who we are to a certain extent but to say that that is all we are or that some higher power is instructing us suggests that people cant change and I doubt there are too many things further from fact than that.

The whole point here is that you specifically don't have the free will to do as you supposedly please, because you are given choices by your subconscious, those choices given to you were not made by you consciously. And i believe that even 'choosing' between A and B is still guided by our character, our personality, by our subconscious.




The idea that you can somehow know what your subconscious is giving to you and then doing the opposite would defeat the whole idea of subconscious (as far as i know this can't be done, not yet at least). What ever it is you think you are doing consciously, is guided by our subconscious and therefor making the concept of free will an illusion, that is what i believe.

The problem is how do you define free will and illusion. The biggest problem is the word illusion because its fun to relax the concepts of everything to realize that everything is an illusion. Possession, feelings, pain, thought, want, god, touch, relationships, even what we see, read, type and understand with dealing with this thread is illusion. No, I am not getting to some matrix type conclusion, what I am saying that illusion is just a way we can describe any concept of anything.

As for free will, to be free of all needs of nature means we are in no need of anything thus no need to have a will to be free with. To simplify it, free will is truly not possible because you will encounter something that impedes movement(in action or thought) in the pure intended direction. You can't even head in a direction without being affected by gravity, wind, imperfect ability to walk straight and that dog poop that was in your way.

My conclusion is that there is no true free will, only attempts at the general idea that is affected by personal and external force. And that everything can be considered by some way or another an illusion. So in other words, this is just a Koan with no solution unless you narrow concepts.

Sure, i may have worded it poorly, but that is because i am not a scientist and we do not yet fully understand the concept of subconscious.
But what we do know is that subconscious mind can be seen as the source of dreams and automatic thoughts and it also have been theorized to exert an impact on behavior. Your conscious thoughts are automatic, you do not think about thinking about thinking about doing A instead of B. And that is what makes your freedom of will an illusion.




Our conscious thoughts do not come to us by us thinking about them, they just come to us. We do not choose our conscious thoughts. You could say that is what i meant when i said our conscious is 'guided' by our subconscious.

Edit: For some buggy reason i don't see your newest reply and can't respond because of it.

Freewill isn't an illsuion, but it is misunderstood. And I really don't think believing in freewill is a religion-exclusive belief.

It really depends what concept of free will you want to choose.

If free will being able to do anything then according to determinism, free will does not exist because all actions are bound to causality, each and everyone of them an effect of the previous cause, and thus it is impossible to choose to do anything other than what we can do, based on causality. In this instance, free will is non-existant.

But if free will is being able to to what you want to do, then free will is true because you can choose what you want inside of the choices that causality has offered you. This is compatibilism, were determinism and free will coexist.

So it really depends on what your perception of free will is.

Read Kant and Hume for some good dissertaions on free will.

Edit: thought of something after mulling over my post.
Even if you introduce random actions in your life, such as dice rolls etc, causality simply shifts around the dice roll for the moment where you are not making the decision, then shifts back to you.

For example, if you decide that on heads you do something, tails you do another, causality treats the coin as a binary system with two outcomes leading back to your branch of cause/effects. The coin flip is merrily a side step from your choice tree, to which you come back immediately.

The notion that we have the freedom to consciously make the choice of either following or not following what subconscious is throwing at us i think is simply not true based on what we even currently know about how our brains work.

Objectively we know that everything that you are consciously aware of, all your thoughts and your intentions and your impulses and your impulses to resist those impulses and thoughts, we know that all those things are preceded by events in your nervous system of which you are not aware, that you didn't create. The state of your brain in every sense this very moment is the product of variables of which you are not responsible for, you didn't pick your genes, your environment, your parents, you were not responsible for how your interaction with the world and other people changed the micro structure of your brain to its current form. You haven't created your neurophysiology and yet that neurophysiology is responsible for every single conscious thought you are going to have.

The tug of war you have with your self when faced with a decision, do i cheat on my diet or not, even though it seems as if you are making the decision, the decision you ultimately end up making comes out of no where and the supposed reasons you give to yourself to justify the decision ultimately come to you only after you actually have made the decision, even though it seems that the reasons come first and then the answer.

There been studies (don't have any links right now, but if you want i can try to find them for you) where the test subjects are asked to either press the right button or the left button, they were hooked up to machines that actively measure your brain activity, and the scientist were able to predict some seconds earlier which button you were going to press before you actually pressed it based on the activity that was inside your brain.