If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear
I will choose free will
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I continue to not understand why anyone thinks people being non-deterministic should make them more responsible for their actions, as if being the puppet of dice was somehow more free than having your choices be determined by your own personality, beliefs, and experience. The whole premise makes no sense to me.
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It seems to me that people who claim free will doesn’t exist, are still acting as if free will does exist. Just unconsciously. The act of sincerely trying to change someone else’s mind, requires believing on some level that the person can be convinced into choosing a different viewpoint.
In any case, whether or not free will exists the most optimistic and pragmatic way forward is still to act as if it does.
If it does not exist, we aren’t any worse off than before. If it does exist, then we can activate and use it.
Thanks for choosing to read to my Ted comment.
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I’d argue that anyone who thinks that the existence or absence of free will can be proven by a scientific experiment doesn’t understand the philosophy very well.
I’d also argue that even if you knew for sure that free will did or didn’t exist, that wouldn’t actually be grounds to change your behavior in any way
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I dunno. I don’t believe in free will from an empirical or scientific perspective. I think all that will happen will happen because of what has happened and what is. Like… in terms of material existence or space and time.
That being said I think a lot of what we experience as individual sentient life is totally independent of this in that it simply is not impacting anything outside of ourselves and our vastly small world really no matter how profoundly it impacts us.
Can we control the outcome of the future with our every choice? Probably not.
Is the belief in being able to direct some aspect of our lives necessary for psychological health in the average human? Yeah… probably.
Is the belief that biologically we can determine what some one is going to be or become before that person is even born destructive and dangerous? HELL YEAH!
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Um… wait a minute…
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I think in this situation, free will would be the null hypothesis, in which case you wouldn’t necessarily need evidence for it. Rather, you would need strong evidence to refute it.
I haven’t read Sopolsky’s book yet, but I’ve read some of his other work and heard him discuss his views on free will in interviews. He’s a super smart guy - definitely smarter than me. But based on what I’ve heard, the evidence isn’t super convincing. It sounds like it rests primarily on the fact that scientists have conducted experiments demonstrating that nerve signals to initiate action are sent from the motor cortex to the muscles before the prefrontal cortex has been has processed the incoming signals from the stimulus.
This is indeed intriguing, but I don’t think it’s a nail in the coffin of free will. It will be interesting to see the additional evidence and arguments in the book.
Ultimately, like others here have posted, I’m not sure if we will ever find a way to adequately test this hypothesis. I think it’s similar to questions like, “Is there a god, What existed before the creation of the universe, and if I stand on the edge of the universe and stick my hand out, what am I sticking it into?”
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Can a random (not pseudo-random) number generator be said to have free will?
This is exactly my reaction to climate change, which is literally Capitalism run amok.
I suspect that the average individual perception of Free Will would increase in a truly Democratic society, and perceptions of determination are more likely in an highly alienated and marginalized one.
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Yeah I wonder how it works with neuroplasticity. Like we probably can’t change the universe that much, and we can’t just decide not to have an organic brain issue, and we definitely can’t change the past, but we really do have some limited ability for change/adaptation within the context of our own emotions and perceptions over our lifetime and that can make our experience and others’ a little more enjoyable sometimes.
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Pascal approves this comment, just in case it’s right.
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A hungry dinosaur, overcome by pity, exercises its free will by choosing not to eat another wounded dinosaur?
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You had no other choice!
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Evolutionary ‘drivers’ forced you to diversify your diet for survival. 
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More or less, yep:
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My position is that I choose to believe in free will. If I’m wrong, I was predestined to be wrong and it’s not my fault, so you can’t blame me.
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See below:
One more example of why Chiang has become my all time favorite in short form SciFi writers.
He more deeply explored aspects of the free will vs determinism question (along with several other related ideas) in “Story of Your Life” - which was the basis of the excellent movie Arrival.
@frauenfelder 's link above is a great free introduction to Chiang’s writing. Also there is " The Great Silence ", a really moving story about humanity’s blindness in seeking to find if there are other beings in the universe to communicate with.
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