The Erosion of Free Will: Why Society's Loss of Belief in Freedom Is Dangerous

https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/the-erosion-of-free-will-why-societys

by lxm • 3 years ago

121 76 3 years ago

read.lukeburgis.com

UncleOxidant• 3 years ago

Hasn't a lot of the swing towards determinism and away from free will been driven by modern physics?

learnedSloth• 3 years ago

Mainly wishing that man would be just matter.

labster• 3 years ago

Modern physics has turned pretty hard against determinism and towards a probabilistic view.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

That's just a convenient way to model something that isn't truly understood. That doesn't rule out determinism.

stametseater6• 3 years ago

The probabilistic indeterminacy of quantum physics is scarcely a refuge for free will. You may as well say a computer has free will because you gave it a Geiger counter.

wizofaus• 3 years ago

At the quantum level perhaps, but my understanding is that quantum level indeterminism isn't likely to play much of a role in the functioning of the human brain. Even if it were, while it might seem to theoretically at least allow for free will, it doesn't help explain what it really means at the physical level. Personally I accept that the only sensible explanation is that it's an illusion, but it's a sufficiently powerful illusion that's essentially indistinguishable from what genuine free will might actually be, and hence there's little point worrying about whether it genuinely exists. I do worry a little what it might mean for our criminal justice system if gradually everyone were to accept free will was just an illusion though.

highwayman47• 3 years ago

anon291• 3 years ago

I have noticed this belief amongst tech workers and other science-minded types since at least 2010. It was a common enough belief in university.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, free will has been foundational

This is not correct in the case of Christianity, I can't comment on Judaism because I'm not familiar enough with it. In the Catholic tradition the importance and nature of free will varies a lot depending on the period, in Protestantism there's a significant emphasis on predestination. Starting with debates between Erasmus and Luther, but most strongly in Calvinism where ultimately fate is responsible for salvation alone.

It’s not easy to accept that someone else may have chosen to hurt you, and even harder to accept the fact that you have chosen to hurt someone else. It’s easier to claim that we had no choice.

I think generally the opposite is the case. It's psychologically easier to accept that we're responsible for our actions because that imbues them with meaning. Hurt that is either inevitable or random is significantly harder to swallow because it renders us insignificant. A good example is probably the intentionality people ascribe to disease: "My cancer is punishing me and is the consequence of my actions", rather than accepting that your cells just went randomly haywire. It's easier to accept responsibility than to acknowledge you're powerless.

Religion and psychology aside from a secular or scientific point of view free will is a very instrumental concept. It's very clear from the way the author talks about it, suggesting we end up with pre-crime divisions and top-down societies that he's simply afraid of the consequences in case our attachment to free-will vanishes. That in itself though is not evidence for the existence or usefulness of free-will as a concept, it's just motivated reasoning.

woodruffw3• 3 years ago

It’s somewhat true of Judaism: the duty to obey god presumes the ability to disobey, without which there’s no meaningful sense in which a duty can exist. In other words: duties cannot be involuntary, and so the mitzvah requires free will.

However, as you’ve noted: this wasn’t integrated into all (or even most) Christian doctrines, and so the author’s Judeo-Christian-style argument doesn’t really hold water. It reads closer to paleoconservative rhetoric around fundamental unity between the two (with the implication that Islam is somehow fundamentally different).

DangitBobby• 3 years ago

in Protestantism there's a significant emphasis on predestination. Starting with debates between Erasmus and Luther, but most strongly in Calvinism where ultimately fate is responsible for salvation alone.

That's very interesting. I grew up Southern Baptist and there was a huge emphasis on free will and being responsible for your salvation because you would always be able to accept Jesus. To believe people were just always going to Heaven or Hell no matter what they did kind of seems... Well that's definitely not a religion I would want to be a part of.

I guess there was always this "but he knows what you're gonna do" thing that almost feels like destiny, but it was because he knows you so well, not because you were destined to.

lapcat3• 3 years ago

If there’s no free will, every solution must be a top-down one. If people aren’t free to choose, then “people don’t change”—they can’t change.

Neither of these claims is justified or even explained by the author.

htag• 3 years ago

The loss of societies's expectations to support a claim with an argument is dangerous.

Constructing an argument to defend this statement is left as an exercise for the reader.

simonh• 3 years ago

I came to comment on the same core claim. Clearly people do change, we see it happen in our own lives. People undergo religious conversion, change their political views, decide to become vegetarian, give up a life of crime. Giving up a belief in philosophical free will doesn’t negate any of that. The physicalist view is that we are physical systems, and obviously such systems are entirely mutable.

Determinism means I as a physical being choose my actions based on my knowledge, experience, preferences and other mental attributes. It means there is a direct causal link between my state and my choice. That’s responsibility.

However it also implies that I am not entirely responsible for who I am. There are influences such as my genetics, hormonal balance, childhood environment, etc that affect my choices which are beyond my control. For me, what this implies is a humanistic approach to responsibility. It means humans are mutable, in practically applicable ways.

In terms of justice it has lead me to a much more rehabilitative rather that retributional view on the role of incarceration. If people are fixable, if they can be helped, we should help them.

The article is almost wilfully, deliberately obtuse on these issues. It’s basically the same argument as the old sore that without a belief in gods moral authority, there would be nothing to stop us from attacking, raping and stealing from each other. It’s literally only fear of god stopping us from falling into anarchy. In this case it’s only a belief in philosophical free will stopping us from, I don’t know, all acting like mindless zombies or something. It’s absurd.

lapcat3• 3 years ago

It’s basically the same argument as the old sore that without a belief in gods moral authority, there would be nothing to stop us from attacking, raping and stealing from each other.

Yep. The good news is that many people are not actually free to do these things things, restrained by an innate sense of humanity. Society has a lot of problems, but it would completely fall apart, becoming a Hobbesian war of all against all, if we depended on everyone deliberately choosing to be good rather than simply being good.

Brian_K_White5• 3 years ago

Neither of those statements are claims that need to be explained or justified.

They are proposed lines of reasoning that themseves explain and justify other arguments.

You might still challenge them, but the challenge would just be your own counter statement. For instance, are you claiming that: If people aren't free to choose, they can still change just fine?

lapcat3• 3 years ago

Neither of those statements are claims that need to be explained or justified.

Heh, this claim itself needs to be explained and justified.

They are proposed lines of reasoning that themseves explain and justify other arguments.

I would call them unexamined assumptions.

You might still challenge them, but the challenge would just be your own counter statement.

The burden of proof is on the author to support the conclusions of the article and convince the readers of those conclusions. I remain completely unconvinced.

For instance, are you claiming that: If people aren't free to choose, they can still change just fine?

I am claiming that people obviously do change, as an empirical matter. This is not magically an argument for metaphysical free will. It would be such a trivial argument. If anything, perhaps people have no freedom to not change.

After all, we're changing every moment, if only by aging. I wish I could avoid aging! You could liken the human body to the Ship of Theseus, constantly adding new parts and removing old parts, until hardly anything is the same years later. Moreover, we're constantly being affected by external stimuli. Or to put it in another way, we learn! How could we not change in reaction to that?

woodruffw3• 3 years ago

This is reactionary drivel, of the first order: make up a claim (that people “no longer believe” in freedom), and then somersault backwards into blaming whoever’s on the menu today (in this case, vague motions towards social justice).

One might wonder whether these sorts of authors find themselves involuntarily compelled to write these sorts of things. No amount of actually asking people what they believe would support it.

traject_• 3 years ago

Why is "reactionary" inherently wrong or "progressive" inherently correct? Why can't people use more clear language rather than relying on Whig history to make their points. If what they are saying is morally wrong according to the truth (and that might be so), clearly state why that is the case rather than obscuring with terms like "progressive", "social justice" or "reactionary".

“We are fond of talking about 'liberty'; but the way we end up actually talking of it is an attempt to avoid discussing what is 'good.' We are fond of talking about 'progress'; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about 'education'; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good." - G.K. Chesterton

woodruffw3• 3 years ago

I didn’t use the word “progressive.” I only used the word “reactionary.”

I’m not interested in an argument about “Whig history,” because this isn’t a house party. It’s a comment chain on a tech forum where the originating post doesn’t even do us the dignity of substantiating itself: it just proudly assumes that we all know these things, and that we’re all going to agree with the author if we can just pay attention for long enough and get over the “ick” factor.

That isn’t moral reasoning, of the kind you’re talking about with the Good. It’s just a sneaky way to say “we all know I’m right.”

uoaei3• 3 years ago

"Why is progress bad?" is not a take I'd have expected to see on HN considering the wealth of techno-utopianism happily and repeatedly expressed here.

dang• 3 years ago

You may be right (I haven't looked) but please don't call names or fulminate in HN comments. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

No one is saying you owe somersaulting reactionary drivelers better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

renewiltord• 3 years ago

This is particularly a big force in America because the underlying primary moral foundations of the two large parties force them onto a convergent path of loss of freedom.

- Those who are Blue Tribe aligned have a high Care moral foundation which has brought them to the minmax conclusion of maximal paternalism. But paternalism requires you to reject the agency of those for whom you are Pater. You constrain them for their own good.

- Those who are Red Tribe aligned have a high Divinity moral foundation which has brought them in turn to the minmax conclusion of absolute state intervention in the manner in which the state must bind its subjects.

I don't claim to be of some third enlightened state who has no particular unique intelligence. Instead, I am merely of those who have a high Liberty moral foundation and so we often reject the state binding individuals - a result that can often lead to poor outcomes.

There is no total order on the 5-D MFT vectors we have, so ultimately the question is merely which of us can compete over what period. So, like tribes warring over territories, our beliefs fight over minds. And like technology gives tribes advantages, our power waxes and wanes.

Those who are of my tribe are innately disadvantaged: authoritarian unity provides time-proximate strength and high-Liberty groups must win every time and none of their victories will stick since they must necessarily permit the propagation of the ideas of low-Liberty groups (ToI etc etc).

Still, the only way to live is to live congruent with one's purpose, so that is how I shall live.

photochemsyn2• 3 years ago

"In the Jewish and Christian traditions, free will has been foundational"

"The view from Athens (the city of Reason) has been mixed"

Come on, isn't this just a bit of a narrow-minded set of premises to start arguing from? Can't we at least stretch out Athens to encompass the Babylonian and Egyptian astronomers and numerologists, at least? And, hey, why'll were at it, you could admit that the Abrahamic tradition that this all is apparently opposed to does include Islam as one of the three main branches, hmm???

Oh gosh, and look, there are these Hindus and Buddhists and Shintoists and Taoists and pagans and what not who've probably been debating free will since before Abraham was born.

Perhaps nobody has ever pointed this out to you? I'll be charitable and take account for ignorance before proceeding to condemnation.

lambdaphagy• 3 years ago

I think you're getting downvoted for suggesting that all the great world religious traditions were comparable in their influence on Western civilization, the civilization that the author knows best, is part of, and writes about.

In point of fact, the West draws primarily from the Hebrew messianic tradition and Hellenic philosophy. The influence of other systems of thought, while not literally zero (notably in the case of Islam) is just not comparable to that of Athens and Jerusalem. However valuable these other traditions might have been, they didn't shape the West like these two.

photochemsyn2• 3 years ago

I think I'm getting downvoted because some people don't want to come to grips with the actual argument, and persist in grasping onto their benighted picture of history because it helps them to perpetuate their own modern-day mythology, if you follow?

Spivak• 3 years ago

This article is a lot of puffery to make two not very strong points half way through that, to me, stand out at the reason the article was written in the first place.

The denial of free will is probably behind the view that if you’re born with a certain color of skin you have blind spots that you are incapable of seeing or escaping from unless you submit to programmatic training by the people who accuse you

Which basically boils down to "I felt uncomfortable in my D&I training at work" and don't like people telling me that, no, I'm not the exception among white people and don't have internalized prejudice formed over anywhere between 20-50 years of fleshy machine learning. Everyone thinks that and everyone is wrong. It doesn't even work like that, it's not a thing you are or aren't.

Honestly I can't tell at this point if it's a failure of people involved in diversity training or a huge success for the people trying to undermine it that this confusion persists so strongly.

If there’s no free will, every solution must be a top-down one. If people aren’t free to choose, then “people don’t change”—they can’t change. It’s fair to write them off forever or make irrevocable choices in relation to them.

"I don't like when rules are made with a systems point of view because, again, I don't need it and exceptions should be made for me." It can't be that people respond to the incentive structures they're placed under and changing those structures changes behavior. Or the same thing from the other angle anything that causes a broad social change on an individual level was top down we're just pretending not to see what changed the tide.

---

Unrelated but also not unexpected given the rest of the article.

A society that loses its belief in freedom loses the ability to believe in conversion [...] It loses hope A person can justify any action because they were “born this way.”

I accept that I could be reading into it because the author is talking about crime but this seems to subtweeting the lgbt hard. There are basically no other modern usages of the phrase "born this way" that aren't medical or makeup. It's hard not to see this as someone who's frustrated at not being able reject someone's sexuality because they were in fact born that way; the "unnatural lifestyle choice" is a piece of rhetoric that's never really left us.

camdenlock• 3 years ago

Everyone thinks that and everyone is wrong. It doesn't even work like that, it's not a thing you are or aren't.

Yikes. Found the true believer.

com2kid• 3 years ago

There are basically no other modern usages of the phrase "born this way" that aren't medical or makeup.

In defense of the author on this one point, I loved the Lady Gaga song when it first came out and I had no idea until last year the phrase "born this way" had anything to do with LBTQ+.

Some people are just dense.

cypherpunks014• 3 years ago

"Without free will, there can be no real love."

What? This seems totally backwards. Author thinks that real love comes from free conscious decisiomaking? Like freely choosing which model of car to buy?

I almost laughed out loud when I got to the subhead "A Childish Conversation". Some points are okay, but overall this is just not a well argued piece. Strikes me as just conveying numerous fairly boring grievances.

shswkna• 3 years ago

There is merit in trying to understand where the author is coming from (which I am choosing to do), as opposed to critiquing the piece from the framework of contemporary society (which is also a valid approach).

"Without free will, there can be no real love."

This reveals something about the author and his possible life experiences.

When it comes to love between humans, what does love actually mean? We ”fall” in love, which is largely based on chemical and physical characteristics. Correct, it is debatable how much choice there is.

I am still to meet a couple that after 20 years together, still feel like they have fallen in love, in the original sense. At some stage, there comes a point where it feels like a choice is made: Do I appreciate the person for whom they are? Do I choose to get hung up on their annoying characteristics, or do I make an effort to see them for who they are? Do I give them the security to reveal their unguarded version of themselves? And so on.

This applies to all human relationships, even to one’s children. We can close our minds and avoid or hate, or we can overcome and seek.

That is what I think the author meant with love. “Falling in love”, is not the kind of love that is chosen.

cypherpunks014• 3 years ago

Thanks for the perspective, you make some good points on the evolution and changes of love that can become more of a free choice with time.

fsckboy2• 3 years ago

real love without free will is like two magnets attracting, i.e. nothing to glorify.

I'm not saying that I or OP have solved any thorny free will philosophical problem, but the first step is recognizing the problem. If you believe two magnets attracting is what love is, that's fine, but promise me you'll tell that to your spouse in your vows and on every anniversary and make sure your kids don't start to imagine that you are anything but a choiceless automaton in your feelings toward them. Please don't use chatGPT to write their birthday cards, chatGPT is liable to convey feelings.

cypherpunks014• 3 years ago

Promise I will henceforth cease to write their bday cards using GPT : )

Brian_K_White5• 3 years ago

Even "nothing to glorify" leaves room to interpret poorly.

I would say it is fine to revel in, but no special virtue.

If it really is beyond choice, then it's no better than a form of lust.

It can still be fine to experience and engage in, but it doesn't make the participants heros or good people, or bad.

npunt• 3 years ago

This could have been a lot better. Good premise but the author seems to want to make some relatively unsupported points rather than digging into some real interesting questions within the premise.

The piece missing to me was that they basically ignore psychology. They allude to people in SV saying 'of course we don't have free will' but kinda miss the reason why people say that: because we can prove that in certain circumstances where we think we have free well we don't really, whereas we can't prove in any circumstances that we do.

Sure this article is not supposed to be about 'do we have free will' and instead about the implications of how much we believe we have free will, but you can't really come to conclusions about that without wading into the messy world of 'what if we just have some free will'. And I don't see the author doing that.

HEmanZ• 3 years ago

Kind of a side point but “free will” means so many different things to so many different people, that conversations about it are pretty useless unless you have a lot of shared understanding about how it’s defined. The author seems to assume some unified understanding of the concept that just isn’t true.

E.g: when my evangelical Christian relatives ask if I “believe in free will” the answer is “definitely not”. When a friend who I know is sincere and thoughtful asks, the answer is “yes, but it’s complicated”. When a professor of philosophy asks, the answer is “what kind of question is that?”

stametseater6• 3 years ago

I think the question of free will is irrelevant from the perspective of a government. The relevant question is whether a government can modify the behaviors of people by manipulating systems of incentives and punishments. This can be empirically tested, and the answer is clearly yes. All governments on every corner of the world do it in one form or another.

If there are no punishments for not paying taxes, then few will pay. If there are harsh punishments, then most will pay. This is common sense. Whether or not a thing called 'free will' plays a roll simply doesn't matter.

mistermann4• 3 years ago

If there are no punishments for not paying taxes, then few will pay. If there are harsh punishments, then most will pay. This is common sense. Whether or not a thing called 'free will' plays a roll simply doesn't matter.

What about edge cases?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

And if one node can defect from the system default programming, might it be possible that others can as well?

stametseater6• 3 years ago

What about edge cases?

What about them? You tell me, you're the one who evidently thinks they're relevant.

Animats• 3 years ago

That's a mess of an article. It confuses "free will" and "freedom".

"Free will" is an internal issue within brains. "Freedom" is about what you can do before some external constraint stops you. Confusing the two does not help.

On the free will side, there are various technical arguments. One science fiction author has one of his robots, asked about free will by a human, say that they have a random number generator, and that's the same thing. There's also the paradox of Buridan's Ass, having to choose between two equally attractive alternatives and getting stuck.[1] That turns out to be related to the arbiter problem, where two requests for the same resource at "the same time" have to be resolved. It's a theorem that resolving such conflicts cannot be done in a bounded time, and hardware to do it has to allow for occasional delays while something in a metastable state settles. The non-technical concept is trying to decide who wins with rock-paper-scissors. If both parties offer the same value, you have to try again. With retries, the odds of getting a decision keep improving. But there's no number you can say is always enough.

There are psychology experiments which indicate that the explanation for a decision is generated after the decision is made.

On the "freedom" side, there's much political exploitation of the term, on both sides. Not going to go there today. The Economist had a cover article on this recently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Buridan%27s_ass

Nevermark6• 3 years ago

There are psychology experiments which indicate that the explanation for a decision is generated after the decision is made.

Beyond experiments, there just isn't an alternative.

Unless our decision making was completely conscious and objective (lists, arithmetic, logical selection or elimination, etc.) then it includes subconscious components (feelings, instinct, intuition, reflex, etc.) whose processes we don't know, and which are dependent on so many parameters that they likely could never be accurately summarized. Even if we could somehow be conscious of our activity at the individual neuron, synapse and neurotransmitter reservoir level.

So for most decisions, there is no alternative to conjecturing/confabulating our decision making process. For the same reasons we have to conjecture/confabulate other's decision making processes.

Other than simply self reporting that we don't know, and we know that we don't know ("I have a bad feeling about this!")

In both cases, the point is that it is better to have some model to predict future decisions by ourselves and others, inevitably incomplete and inaccurate, than to have no model at all.

morpheos1372• 3 years ago

What will really blow your mind is when "you" learn there is no "you."

Brian_K_White5• 3 years ago

I thought right at the beginning they not only stated pretty plainly, but also illustrated with a simple enough example, that they are concerned with neither simple physical limitation nor a simple idea of will, but with the effects of ideas.

You are physically free to do something(freedom, by your description), and able to decide to or not(free will, by your description), but there is another govorner which is what you believe or how you reason on all manner of other possibly related topics.

You don't do something, and it's not because you aren't free to, nor because you have no free will to imagine it, nor because you don't want to.

danaris• 3 years ago

There are psychology experiments which indicate that the explanation for a decision is generated after the decision is made.

While this is true (IIRC it found that for the decisions it was tracking, the "real" decision was made subconsciously seven seconds before it was consciously stated), it is trivially disprovable that this is universally true. All you have to do is present people with a novel decision to make, and force them to make it in a very short amount of time.

Since we know that humans are capable of reacting and making decisions based on new information in well under seven seconds, it is clearly dangerous to overgeneralize the results of the experiments you cite.

krapp• 3 years ago

That doesn't disprove anything. It could just as well be the case that the subconscious decision-making process can be done more quickly when necessary.

mgh2• 3 years ago

The misunderstanding is understandable, since there is a bias in 1st world countries, living in too much "choice" (fueled by marketing): https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...

Nevermark6• 3 years ago

Free will, like our concept of ourselves and other objects as identifiable "things", is simply a useful approximation.

It is useful to think of an island as a clear concept, with an area and border with the sea. But the more accurately you attempt to identify its shape, at higher and higher resolution, the more complex its perimeter and shape become. Until quantum mechanics kicks in and you have superpositions of particles being exchanged at the border between "land" and "water", etc.

Islands, their perimeters and areas, are real, but they are models, not actually "real" in a fundamental sense.

Likewise, our ability to make our own choices independent of our environment, "choose what we choose", is also real, in a useful self-modeling sort of way.

But if we had complete monitoring access to all our decision making processes, we would quickly realize our decision making is overwhelming implemented with vast subconscious components, that we don't have direct control over, nor were even given the opportunity to "choose".

(I.e. trillions of neurons, synapses, neurotransmitter levels, etc. And that our environment both physically, and via sensory input, constantly and chaotically impacts all of these parameters, in ways we are neither aware of, or can resist. And the quantum nature of our chemistry even further decouples our ability to coherently choose what we choose.)

Free will is a very useful concept in our every day lives.

But free will doesn't exist, even as a viable concept, at any fundamental level.

mistermann4• 3 years ago

But free will doesn't exist, even as a viable concept, at any fundamental level.

Have you not accomplished the impossible: knowing what cannot be known? You may lack free will, but this remarkable ability (involuntary Oracle?) may more than make up for that shortcoming.

Nevermark6• 3 years ago

I agree with you where you are going completely.

Being conscious, experiencing, being able to ask these questions, ... it doesn't matter what the answers are. Mysterious or not, waking up to an existence as a self-reflecting hologram in a brain (or whatever poetic analogy fits best) is amazing.

No matter our limitations or illusions!

than3• 3 years ago

While it is an interesting diatribe, its clearly echo chamberish.

There's a psychology study showing that people's sense of freedom and agency are significantly reduced in the presence of coercion. That's a much more interesting topic than this article.

Why should we bother reading 8 pages of text (all that air) if they only want and care about comments from paid subscribers? Seems like a fruitless and wasteful diversion.

morpheos1372• 3 years ago

Using the word "dangerous" to describe ideas is dangerous.

It matters not what people think or whether they are free or not.

Everybody on earth is bound for death regardless.

All that matters under the Sun is what is done.

piloto_ciego• 3 years ago

I see a lot of comments critiquing this perspective, but very few attempts to refute it.

I have been noticing a trend towards saying people are simultaneously awful and fundamentally unable to make any choices. Those two ideas are at odds with one another.

isghoor• 3 years ago

There is no free will... But acting on the belief that there is no free changes the outcome. The human mind is best served by the quote of "Last Samurai": "I believe a man does what he can until his destiny is revealed to him".

Thus striking the perfect balance between effecting change when needed and acceptance of what is happening (reducing unnecessary psychological suffering).

This too is just one interpretation of free will which is truly a mechanism of no free will.

The Erosion of Free Will: Why Society's Loss of Belief in Freedom Is Dangerous

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