Would people know the difference between having free will and not having free will?

Question

How would you tell, say, if you didn't have free will?

Answer 1

Here's my view on the whole 'free will' business:

If we try to pin down what might be meant by the idea of free will, it melts away and slips through our fingers. Superficially it means the ability to make free choices, but what exactly is free about a choice? If the actual choice we make at any given point is the result of our innate nature, plus environmental influences, plus all of our life experiences, then it really comes down to cause and effect - a bit of this influence, a bit of that influence, factor in how happy or grumpy we happen to be that day, and out pops a choice, like plugging numbers into a spreadsheet and seeing the result appear at the bottom. It's hard to see that such a choice can be called 'free' in any significant sense - at least, not without saying that therefore tornados and rivers and volcanoes also have free choice. We are certainly complex, and hard to predict, but then so is the weather, and we don't therefore conclude that the weather has free will.

Is cause and effect the only principle to consider? Well, if we live in a non-deterministic universe, as seems to be the case, then we might also suppose that there is a genuine randomness which means that cause and effect can never be determined with 100% accuracy, but this doesn't obviously save the concept of free will either - to have our thoughts and actions influenced by entirely random factors over which we have no control would seem to *detract* from our free will rather than providing a sound basis for it... and again, we would be no different from any other physical process in that respect.

So, the idea of free will would appear to be not so much false, as simply unintelligible. If we are part of the material universe, made of atoms and molecules, subject to the same forces as any other physical object, then how can we claim to have some property that nothing else in the known universe possesses? What can legitimately be called 'free' about being driven by cause and effect and/or random chance?

Well, the one thing we do have, which other complex natural phenomena do not, is intelligence. Specifically, we have the ability to anticipate the likely consequences of our actions, and the tendency to modify our behaviour accordingly. A hurricane moving across the North Atlantic towards the coast of the USA might continue on its path, quickly lose its energy over the land and dissipate, or it might veer away and intensify over the ocean, but it is strictly governed by the forces of nature - it has neither the knowledge of what could happen to it nor the ability to change it. In contrast, human beings have the unique ability to foresee what is likely to happen, and that foresight is then an additional influence - usually a very large influence - on subsequent events. In principle there is nothing to stop me plunging my hand into a pan of boiling water, but my anticipation of the consequences far outweighs any inclination to try it. It's still the principle of cause and effect governing events, so in that strict sense the outcome is no more 'free' than the fate of the hurricane, but the anticipation and the will to act on it do make human actions qualitatively different from unthinking physical processes.

I think this is the way to resolve the apparent paradox that, on the one hand, we know we are made of the same stuff and are subject to the same laws of physics as any other object, and on the other hand that it *feels* like we have a freedom that inanimate objects and systems simply do not have. This way of accounting for free will is perfectly consistent with our current understanding of the material universe, it doesn't demand any exotic new kind of physics and it certainly doesn't require us to have any mystical component that influences the material universe but is not part of it (e.g. a 'soul' or a 'spirit').

To answer your question: Since free will, on this account, necessarily requires intelligence, then not having free will would mean that we were not intelligent and could not know anything at all, including the fact that we had no free will - a fact of which our hypothetical hurricane must be blissfully ignorant.

Hope my ramblings are of some interest... :-)

Answer 2

Leave religion out of this equation and consider what would happen if we didn't have free will.

There would been no need for social work or any of the social sciences. If there is no free will, we cannot change. There is no hope of changing anything.

Without free will, we will simply do what we have been conditioned to do. Period.

I understand that we do behave from conditioning to a certain degree - the way out is usually in the form of a crisis. The point of crisis events is to open our eyes to the opportunity available for change. It makes us search for something different, or we decide it's too risky to change and we become further entrenched in mindless propagation of what we've been taught.

Meatbot's argument doesn't make sense to me because I don't see the lack of being able to choose my consequence to bad behavior as a sign that I have no choice. I can, after all, choose not to behave badly.

Even in situations where I have not affected a chain of events and I suffer at the hands of others or arbitrary circumstances, I get to decide how I handle what happens.

That's free will. Love (as in the behavior, not infatuation), forgiveness, perseverance, courage, kindness - these are all acts of will. They don't simply fall on you. You choose them.

If we didn't have free will life would actually be a lot easier. There would be no internal conflict. You would simply want one thing, and that one thing would be dictated to you. We battle between our desires and our consciences (unless we're sociopathic). If I were oblivious to my lack of free will, people around me would see it.

Answer 3

You always have a choice, but we're nowhere near having infinite choice. So you may only have two options but your free to choose. Will itself is hard to define. I stopped smoking a little while ago, that required will.
So the sure way to know when you don't have free will is when you can't stop doing, consuming etc. something you like/love or ar addicted to. Or even when you can't do something you dislike.
You can always step away from it all and say that perhaps we are in an invisible cage, but this cage is quite nice at this time of year ta ta:)

Answer 4

If you've been born into/always lived in a society that says there's no free will I imagine you wouldn't know the difference.
But if you've been born into a society with free will you'd be more likely to recognize when you're being denied it.
So define free will:
"The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will."

Answer 5

I also notice the difference between not being able to fly and being able to fly.

I imagine not having a free will is about the same, although you might want to do something you dont for some unknown reason. hmmm maybe i mixe having a free will and executing the free will.

Answer 6

i imagine you're questioning that loose will is a lack of consequences. loose will is the skill to chosen an action. After that, the outcomes are depending on the action taken. in case you opt for to drink, and grow to be an alcoholic and distroy your existence, you made the preliminary decision. the outcomes would no longer were what you wanted, yet you probably did have the alternative to drink or no longer in the first position. similar with drugs, stealing, etc... strong alternatives enable for the continuation of loose will, and undesirable alternatives take a number of your loose will away.

Answer 7

I think you'd be able to tell because of others, say if noone had free will, then when you tell them something, they'd do it, eventually you'd notice something was off.

Or I guess you'd notice if you were easily led into doing anything that was asked because you could not say no.

The funny thing would be if someone told you to have free will when you had none. It's one of those robots with exploding heads thing.

Answer 8

That's kind of a scary idea. I suppose if you compared us to, say, some sort of gaseous based alien creature who is not bound to a physical form, we don't have free will.

But if you compare us to a hamster in a cage, we do. Except the hamster probably doesn't see it that way.

Answer 9

Animals don't have free will. They can make certain decisions, such as whether to run or attack when facing an enemy, whether to eat something or turn up their noses at it. But they cannot make moral decisions. They cannot do anything that is morally right or morally wrong because moral capacity requires free will, and lacking free will means having no moral capacity at all.
.

Answer 10

I know that I don't have free will, because everything about me, everything I say, do, or think I have decided, has been predetermined by my genes, my experiences, and my environment. I might like to think that I control what my brain does, but in reality, the brain controls what I do.