Is free will illusory?

The Buddha and his student were walking down a dirt road through the jungle, discussing how the world was an illusion and the path to enlightenment was to let go of the illusion.


Suddenly a rogue elephant came charging down the road, trumpeting in rage.

The Buddha dove behind a tree out of the way. His student stood there, arms crossed, eyes closed, with a look of peaceful calm on his face.



The elephant ran up, grabbed him with its truck, beat him against the ground twice and then threw him over its back.


When the elephant had gone, the Buddha came out of hiding and attended to his terribly injured student. "Why didn't you jump out of the way?" He cried to the injured youth.

The student said, baffled, "You told me the world is illusion. I was trying to let go of the illusion... why didn't it work? Why did YOU jump out of the way, Master??"

The Buddha said to his student: "Your body is part of the illusion, my student... and one illusion seems just as solid to another illusion. Especially an elephant."




The point of the little story is that it doesn't really matter: you'd better ACT as if you have free will, because if you make stupid choices YOU will be the one to suffer the pain.

ZapFinch42 said:

If you don't believe Free Will is an illusion, I'd love to hear your well reasoned rebuttal.

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Ask and ye shall receive.

This is a classic compatibilist argument made famous by Harry Frankfurt. Consider Suzy. Suzy has a chip implanted in her brain. Bob controls the chip. Via the chip Bob can not only read Suzy's mind he can also control her actions. Now let's suppose Suzy is standing on the sidewalk. An old lady is walking past. Bob decides that he wants Suzy to trip the lady. He waits and sees whether Suzy decides to trip the lady on her own. If Bob reads Suzy's mind and sees that she isn't going to decide to trip the lady on her own, Bob is going to press the button and force Suzy to stretch out her leg and trip the old lady anyway.

In Case A Suzy decides to trip the old lady. Suzy stretches out her leg and trips the lady. In Case B Suzy does not decide to trip the lady. Bob presses the button and Suzy stretches out her leg and trips the lady.

In either case the outcome is the same - Suzy trips the lady. But I contend there is a meaningful difference in regards to Suzy's responsibility in the two cases. I define that difference as "Suzy acting of free will" in Case A.

This is a common sense definition of free will. It requires no ghost in the machine, it is not incompatible with determinism (the example was clearly a case of utter determinism - no other outcome could have occurred), and it is in keeping with the colloquial use of the term.

Compatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Frankfurt cases - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ZapFinch42 said:

I recently had a discussion with a fellow atheist about Sam Harris' book Free Will and I was taken aback by just how hostile my colleague was to the idea that Free Will might be an illusion. I have come to believe that we do live in a deterministic universe and it seems to me the the benefits of thinking this way far out weigh the feelings of desperation my friend so afraid of.

With this in mind I am curious how others feel about this subject.
I welcome people of all creeds to chime in.

If you are an atheist, is this an idea that you have concerned yourself with? Do you find evidence in support of Free Will?

If you are a believer of some shade, do you feel that the loss of free will threatens your belief system or is there some way to reconcile the two? Remember I am asking a hypothetical here, if you suddenly found out beyond any shadow of a doubt that free will is an illusion would you still maintain your faith? On that note is free will something you take on faith?


For anyone, if society as a whole were to adopt this philosophy what benefits do you think we would enjoy? What negative consequences? (ie how would it impact our daily lives? Our system of laws?)

I am not attempting to start a religious debate here, I hope we can talk about free will on its own terms.

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If the natural world is deterministic at bottom, it is so in the sense that chance plays no role in causation, but not necessarily in the sense that anything is destined. It is possible for the laws and circumstances of such world to bring about the existence of an autonomous mind. Without that mind, that world would be consistent with the view of the determinist, in that any state of affairs would be predictable, in principle, with complete knowledge of the laws which govern it. Once the mind exists in that world, a free agent is part of the causal chain, and full predictability is impossible, while chance still plays no roll.

A free agent doesn't break the causal chain, as claimed by some determinists, in a literal sense. It merely introduces unpredictable results into an otherwise predictable world.

I think the idea that Libertarianism is not consistent with atheism comes from a misunderstanding, on the part of some Compatibilists, of the debate over indeterminacy in theoretical physics. It is over whether the indeterminacy inherent in quantum mechanics is epistemic or ontic, not about whether there is indeterminacy, as they seem to think. Indeterminacy is a given in quantum mechanics, but it may just be the product of a mathematical description of the world, and not of the world, itself.

I don't think it's something that should be taken on faith, but I do think it should be taken on experience. Our experience includes the power to choose. Causal Determinism introduces a superfluous notion of an illusion without adding anything to our understanding, so Occam's razor should cut it off.

I think free will is all semantics. We are a result of nature and nurture. We cannot control our biological makeup and we are born in a place that is not our choice to people who we did not choose. If I am born with an extra y chromosome and I witness my father murdering a woman, maybe I'll wind up doing the same thing. Is it my choice? Of course. Can I control that choice? I have no idea. We can change our surroundings and we can slowly, methodically change our behavior, which then changes the way we think.

But maybe we're not choosing to do any of that. While the implications are profound, I still don't think it really matters. As long as we don't know the strings are there, we appear to move quite freely, and I think it's better that way. But there's only one answer to the question posed in the OP. Neither I, nor anybody else can know with certainty.

ZapFinch42 said:

I recently had a discussion with a fellow atheist about Sam Harris' book Free Will and I was taken aback by just how hostile my colleague was to the idea that Free Will might be an illusion. I have come to believe that we do live in a deterministic universe and it seems to me the the benefits of thinking this way far out weigh the feelings of desperation my friend so afraid of.

With this in mind I am curious how others feel about this subject.
I welcome people of all creeds to chime in.

If you are an atheist, is this an idea that you have concerned yourself with? Do you find evidence in support of Free Will?

If you are a believer of some shade, do you feel that the loss of free will threatens your belief system or is there some way to reconcile the two? Remember I am asking a hypothetical here, if you suddenly found out beyond any shadow of a doubt that free will is an illusion would you still maintain your faith? On that note is free will something you take on faith?


For anyone, if society as a whole were to adopt this philosophy what benefits do you think we would enjoy? What negative consequences? (ie how would it impact our daily lives? Our system of laws?)

I am not attempting to start a religious debate here, I hope we can talk about free will on its own terms.

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I don't know if theirs free will or not ill act like the is if I can because if that's wrong it doesn't matter ill just do the same things I was always going to do any way

Often enough, yes.

grip said:

You'll never accept the answer, because it doesn't fall inline with your opinion.

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No, I honestly will Accept the answer if it's logical ....