First of all, I need to say that, even if it is ignorant, I even do not bother to read philosophical speculations.
I am interested in empirical premises. I’ve heard that there is some research, where scientists, monitoring activity of a person’s brain, are able to predict which switch (s)he’s going to switch, before (s)he does, or maybe before (s)he’s conscious about the choice. This implies that our decisions are results of some chemical processes determined aside of our “free choice” and so called free will is only an illusion, a way in which alternatives presents to us, while the choice is made already deep in our minds unconsciously and maybe even deterministically. Does anybody know this research and could cite it?
Since I am constantly busy, I really sucks in the theory, so could anybody say what’s the Marxist stance on free will if any?
I am unclear what exactly your definition of free will is here. You correctly point out that reality functions according to a mix of deterministic and probabilistic laws but where exactly is the “free will”?
What I mean is this: picture reality as a board game. This game has strict rules determining how the pieces must be moved depending on where on the board they are currently at. Additionally, sometimes the rules call for rolling some dice, after which the move is altered depending on the result of said dice roll. Crucially however, there is no player input required, no decisions to be made. The game plays itself. The outcome of the game is dictated solely by a combination of deterministic rules and random dice rolls. How do we fit in “free will” in a game that has no players?
Sorry, I should clarify:
We as humans experience consciousness and ascribe agency (“free will”) to our actions. Determinists generally charge that free will is an illusion because every action is a reaction to something else: in other words, if we had complete knowledge, we would not be able to predict our actions.
As stated by Jeffrey Goines in the movie 12 Monkeys, “Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to - to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I’m ever gonna do before I know it myself.” The character believed that all his thoughts were determined, and a sufficiently advanced computer could predict his future decisions with high accuracy.
However, we know from chaos theory in mathematics that small changes in initial conditions can have widely divergent and unpredictable effects in complex systems. To use the 12 Monkeys system above, even sedating the character to run the theoretical algorithm he postulated may have changed the man’s experiences enough such that the algorithm is ultimately wrong very shortly after it’s generated, and over time it will rapidly drift further away so that Jeffrey’s life in 10 years would look nothing like the machine predicted. And this is just one person: multiply this across billions of people, and you have a system that is fundamentally unpredictable, even with a theoretically limitless AI taking readings and running simulations.
So we as humans experience our decisions as real things, and when we make decisions we have real effects on the world, and we know from our observations of the universe that it is impossible to fully predict our future decisions from past circumstances. That means that we as agents are really experiencing real choices with real impacts on the world that are not fixed, and thus our choices are free.
As was said, systems complicated enough may appear to us as non-deterministic, even if they are deterministic. But there is another possibility: we could have uncertain knowledge about some process. The process can be perfectly deterministic, but since our knowledge is imperfect, we may perceive this process as non-deterministic.
Whether or not it is practically possible to predict our actions doesn’t have any bearing on the question of free will. Neither does how we subjectively experience our decisions. Unless you redefine free will to mean something different and much lesser than most people understand it to mean. Which is why i asked how you define free will. If your definition of “free will” is simply that our actions are not predictable then dice have free will too. If you say that free will is simply having the impression that our choices are free then this is no longer a scientific debate but one about how we subjectively experience reality, which is certainly an interesting discussion but not what OP was asking.
Chaos theory is also in no way relevant here. Chaotic systems exist in classical physics too (two famous examples taught to every physics student are the double pendulum and the three body problem - do these have free will?) but classical physics is nevertheless deterministic.
The reason why chaotic systems are hard to predict far into the future is because we never have complete and perfect knowledge about the starting state. If we did and if we could run a simulation with arbitrarily high precision then we could in fact predict any classical system no matter how chaotic or complex.
The fact that this is not possible in practice is beside the point. A system is considered to be deterministic if it would be predictable given complete information and infinite computational power. It does not mean this has to be practically possible with any existing or even any possible future technology.
I think association between free will and probability comes back to Rene Descartes, who said that if we are perfectly deterministic, then we have no more free will than falling rock. But many his views are outdated and in stark contrast to materialists, so I write this comment only for some historical context.
The definition of free will I use is the philosophical one from disctionart.com:
the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces.
The argument against free will typically rests on the claim that human choices are determined. But if the universe has non-deterministic elements and small changes in conditions can have large changes in outcomes, then both of these together make human choice non-determined.
The analogy to dice fails because dice are not human decision makers.
We can’t have perfect knowledge of classical systems because those systems are built on top of a quantum system that has elements that are entirely probabilistic. Chaos theory is relevant for the very reason that they make systems impossible to predict. Again, going back to Schrödinger’s cat: we don’t know if it’s alive or dead until we open the box. The sensor is based on quantum mechanics, the cat and the gas are macro elements, but we can’t just ignore it because the decay does not fit with classical physics. It’s already been proven via the Uncertainty Principle that our knowledge can never be fully complete, so we would never be able to run such a simulation as you suggest.
Ultimately, the burden of proof is on those claiming that all choice is determined to show it, but considering the universe does not constrain choice to be 100% deterministic, there is no real reason to suspect it exists.
