Questions tagged [free-will]
for questions concerning the freedom of choice of rational agents (often as opposed to determinism)
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What would an “unmanipulated election” look like?
If we consider the claim that it would be wrong for Facebook to partake in social engineering to influence election outcomes, we may ask, to what extent are people already swayed by this or that ...
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Does quantum superposition enable the possibility of free will?
I've been thinking about the problem of free will. In a deterministic universe, it seems like everything is just dominoes falling, one after the other. No room for choice.
But what about quantum ...
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Can the goals of an organism be imputed from observation?
For example: we observe an ant carrying food back to its nest. We may speak like the ant has a goal of increasing the amount of food in the nest. We observe a student proofreading an essay. We may ...
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What passage in Aquinas's Summa does this refer to?
From Chapter 18 of R. A. Lafferty's historical novel Okla Hannali:
There is an interesting question in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas and also in an old science fiction story, the name of which I ...
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Can an action be both determined and free?
The classical argument against free will, is that, in a deterministic universe, since everything is determined, so are human actions, and thus no human action is free. But this relies on the hidden ...
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What is wrong with the following case against determinism?
I am thinking of determinism in the following way: if we knew all the laws of nature and the complete state of the universe at a given time, we could predict everything that would happen in the future....
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What is free will skeptic stance on will and morality? [closed]
Before I try to give a definition of will, I will first present some statements and an argument for them.
Will is not free.
Will is separate from external forces.
Will is separate from transient ...
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Free will as ignorance of future decisions [closed]
I find the following definition of free will appealing:
An entity that has free will...
always pays an exploration-exploitation tradeoff
is capable of higher order thought (i.e. it has an internal ...
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Are there certain plausible assumptions, such as block or physical determinism, that lead us to conclude that everything we do is equally rational?
It seems that with certain assumptions about reality, everything we can do is equally rational.
Max Tegmark's theory of the multiverse, often referred to as the "mathematical universe hypothesis&...
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Is the existence of free will even important?
I don't see the existence/non-existence of free will as meaningful, ethically speaking. I'll explain what I mean.
Let's say we have some agent, and the agent takes an action we think is bad. In a ...
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Can we be only certain that we have free will if there is no God?
I deduce there could be these permutations of the universe.
Temporally, it is either bounded or unbounded.
If it is bounded, then it is possible God could exist to have created the universe. If God ...
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Dennett vs Sapolsky on free will: A clash over different claims?
On a recent Youtube episode of Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal Daniel Dennett, author and Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, discusses his views of Robert ...
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'Free will' as a 'confused concept': Is Ned Block correct?
A recent episode of Robert Kuhn's web series Closer to Truth puts the question of free will to Ned Block, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of New York.
Block states 'free will' ...
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Libertarian free will and major decisions
I seem to remember some philosophers who believe in LFW posit that it only comes into play with major life decisions; you may not consciously decide to raise a forkful to your mouth, but you might ...
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Is it possible to restore the motivation lost by rejecting free will without introducing cognitive dissonance/logical fallacies?
I've read in a few places that people tend to get depressed and lose motivation in life after losing their belief in free will; that even if you "know" free will does not exist, you are ...
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Does the encoding/exemplifying distinction affect the question of willing evil-for-the-sake-of-evil-in-general?
I tend to gravitate towards thinking that willing evil for its own sake "as such," is impossible for reasons of the nature of practical reasoning/intellection. I can accept that there is ...
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Queries and Thoughts on The Evolution of Free Will
I have been thinking on the differentiations between animal and man and it has yielded all but one viable point of divergence.
That point is free will. Not free will in it's typical chemically and ...
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Do we make informed choices or random choices?
In everyday life we have to make choices are we making informed choices or random ones.
I propose that in most circumstances in order to make a choice we have to way up our options then we make a ...
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Can Free Will be Explained?
Explanations are causal, at least to the extent that I'm aware. If I explain X then I basically identify and expand on the cause of X (if X involves an ontological claim the explanans is all about ...
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Is there a difference between will and free will?
In Leviathan, Hobbes argues that it is not the will that is free but that which exercises the will. So is there only will, exercised by beings who may or may not be free?
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Can anyone suggest a reading list for perspectives on aesthetics, specifically two dimensional visual art?
Can anyone suggest a reading list for perspectives on aesthetics, particularly visual art? I am interested in the critical interpretation of specifically two dimensional drawing and painting through ...
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Is the argument from freewill further supported by causal arguments
The argument from freewill is a paradox that can be loosely described as, if God is omniscient or all knowing then God subject's, man , cannot have freewill as the 'fate' or actions of man have been ...
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On the linguistics of math affected by freewill?
After thinking more about: Daniel Dennett's concept of free will as an equation of state?
I am super confused about the linguistics concerning mathematics. For example, "take the limit of x ...
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Daniel Dennett's concept of free will as an equation of state?
I was thinking of Daniel Dennett's concept of free will, in which he argues that our choices are the result of complex computations that take into account our desires, beliefs, and goals, as well as ...
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Freewill independent of determinism? [duplicate]
So I'm confused on how this is possible.
If determinism is true freewill does not exist:
If determinism is true, then every event has a cause, and every cause has a unique effect.
If every event has ...
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Is belief a choice or a state of being convinced with regard to a particular statement?
When presented a statement or argument x, and relevant background information B(x), what determines whether the listener's assent to the truth of x can be interpreted as a choice vs an induced state ...
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Would the kind of probability involved in strong/hard free will be non-unitary?
By "unitarity" I mean that the sums of the probabilities in the given cases would be 1. Non-unitarity would, I assume (for now!), allow for final negative probabilities as well as imaginary-/...
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Does compatibilism redefine free will?
In an essay titled "How to Think about the Problem of Free Will", Peter van Inwagen writes:
‘free will’, ‘incompatibilist free will’, ‘compatibilist free will’, and ‘libertarian free will’ ...
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Best arguments against compatibilism?
According to the 2020 PhilPapers survey, 59.2% of philosophers are compatibilists when it comes to the free will/determinism debate. Despite its popularity among professional philosophers, what are ...
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Is everyone's sense of power always predicated on diminishing that of someone else's? [closed]
Why think that everyone's sense of power always predicated on diminishing that of someone else's, and is it the case? I think the question isn't a trivial "no reason to think it".
power ...
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Is free will even experienced? If not, can this be evidence for epiphenomenalism?
Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.
Many of the challenges to this view revolve around how it ...
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Is the existence of free will falsifiable?
Is the existence of free will falsifiable? A lot of people debate about free will, but it seems to me they do this by pure argument, not by scientific experimentation. Can some scientific experiment ...
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Does choice exist?
I've been thinking about a few legal quotes that have initiated my investigation into whether or not choice actually exists:
A "universal and persistent" foundation stone in our system of ...
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On the framing of causality?
So I shall restrict Nagarjuna's dependent arising of phenomena to the physical realm*. The source of my understanding is "Part Two, Chapter one - Examination of Conditions" of the book the ...
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Does philosophy, based on Archimedean solids, permit an infinite-face prism projecting a fifth dimension of infinite realities from a third dimension?
To quote the MIT work on the Hypershere: 'Considering that the largest Archimedean solid, the hyper truncated icosahedron, has over 14,000 faces, this object alone could contain within it an entire ...
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Schopenhauer and the 'ability to make decisions' as a metric for free will
I've been having a less than productive discussion with someone about perspectives on free will. I feel confident in my position, but experience has taught me that my confidence is often in direct ...
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What's the meaning and roots of the notion of "fault"?
This may sound naive and I'm not a native english speaker, but recently I've started wondering what people really mean by the notion of "fault", for example in the context of saying "it'...
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Why use a concept of free will in reasoning if it's unproven?
The concept of free will is indeed to much religious reasoning, yet its existence is still unproven. Using an unsubstantiated assumption to prove other conclusions is problematic from a logic ...
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What is the rigorous definition of free will?
What is the rigorous definition of free will? There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of debate around free will. These debates seem to go nowhere, and that is because (so I think, anyway) ...
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Fatalism vs Determinism vs Free-Will
To my understanding, physical causal Determinism means that if E is a physical event, then there is a physical event C such that C causes E. Fatalism means that if some event C happens, then any event ...
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Has this definition of free will been discussed before? ('free will' is the ability to act against instinct)
I want to preface this by saying I'm not a 'professional' philosopher. I like to ignore pre-existing ideas to make my own route as much as I can. As such, I'm not aware of who has written papers on ...
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How is decision making under libertarian free will meant to work?
Sorry if this question is stupid or answered in another post but I really can't imagine how people who believe in libertarian free will think decision making happens.
If I am meant to choose between 2 ...
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How do adherents to Plantinga's "free-will defense" against the problem of evil explain that God is free and immune to moral evil at the same time?
The free-will defense is an argument commonly attributed to Alvin Plantinga, who developed it as a response to the logical problem of evil. However, in developing this argument Plantinga unwittingly ...
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Eternal recurrence and free will
In rereading Nietzsche, I had a question: Is Nietzsche a determinist? As far as I understand from reading Beyond Good and Evil, it follows that it does not, for Nietzsche himself, as I understand it, ...
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Does Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis drives toward irrationalism and low self-control?
Presentation:
According to Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis:
Human behavior is partly driven by the subconscious. The subconscious is a kind of psychological black box, inaccessible directly by the ...
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Can beliefs be immoral?
Suppose a white supremacist to whom non-white races are inferior. Do they commit an immoral act insofar as they verbally or physically act on what they believe? Or is the belief itself immoral?
What’s ...
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How do philosophers answer the following question about a counterfactual notion of free will?
So let's assume that free will requires the ability to have done the opposite.
Suppose we abstract from the world (and from our mind) and can reproduce an event in the same conditions as given ...
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Brain states, morality and free will: What can we discern from the case of the schoolteacher who became a pedophile post-brain tumor?
Roughly 20 years ago, a disturbing story hit the news media: Nightmare experience for man whose cancer turned him into a pedophile.
The presence of an egg-sized brain tumour is claimed to have ...
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Might there be a Bell-like theorem for free will?
I suspect this question deserves to be closed on a number of grounds, but I am posing it anyway in the hope that some of you might find it interesting (most of the near duplicates were asked some ...
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When and by whom was the Strawsonian Framework extended to forward looking responsibility?
As I understand it, theories concerning forward-looking responsibility existed before Strawsons 1962 "Freedom and Resentment".
The Categorization of it as backward-looking and the ...