I have a friend who’s convinced that there’s no such thing as free-will. We go back and forth on this frequently. Thinking about LLMs and how companies are investing billions in predicting what we want before we buy it or using LLMs to remove choice from us suggests to me that not only is free-will real, but is such a threat to things like capitalism that it is being actively fought against.
I generally approach the concept of free will like this: think back to a decision you mulled over for a while before finally making a choice. If you went back in time to that exact scenario again, being in the same state of mind, thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, experiencing the same experiences… if every single atom in the entire universe were in the exact same state as it was in that moment, would you ever really make a different choice?
Something made you choose one thing over another the first time around, and I believe that whatever factor that was would have always been there, causing you to make that decision again even if the scenario played out over and over on repeat. If that’s true, then free will, the concept that humans have the ability to make a decision completely freely from any physical factors, would be false.
For free will to be true, such a scenario played out multiple times in exactly the same way, down to the exact placement of the atoms in the entire universe, would be able to have different conclusions due to the decisions of creatures with free will. You would have the ability to make a different choice even when literally everything else is exactly the same as when you made the initial choice.
Essentially, I believe that if someone knew the exact state of every single atom in the universe at a given moment, they could figure out the next moment, and the next, and so on, thus predicting the entirety of existence throughout all of time. That’s obviously impossible due to the immense complexity of the task, but it would still mean that whatever happens was always going to happen, and thus free will doesn’t exist. Even the atoms in your brain would be predicted, including the decisions that arise from them.
Lack of free will shouldn’t be confused with the inability for your decisions to be swayed by various factors, it just means that those factors were always going to be there at that moment to sway you. That’s just my understanding of things, and I could obviously be wrong, but it makes sense to me.
Yeah, perhaps the real question is: What’s the definition of free will?
If you make your decision purely based on outside influences, then that’s not free will, that’s determinism.
So, you’d have to integrate something into your decision process that’s independent from outside influence. But something which is independent from the outside, that is either some constant (e.g. you always tend to say yes) or it’s effectively random.
Neither of those sound like free will to me…