Is free will a myth?

[Teeqoz]

padib said:

Teeqoz said:

All this talk about physics is because our brain, like everything else in this universe, works through it. It's how the universe, and everything in it, works.

The thoughts in our brains are nothing more than electrical signals and chemicals reacting. The same goes for instincts, but the reactions are less complex but quicker.

Human's brains work in the same fundamental way as animals do. Telling ourselves anything else is just out of arrogance because we want to be special. Fact of the matter is, your brain is just a very complicated chemical reaction. Not some special supernatural thing that works differently than anything else in the universe. This isn't just an argument of instincts vs "decision making process". Yes, humans don't always act the way our instincts suggest we do. Sometimes, we have a longer thought process before we perform an action, and that longer thought process (read: complicated chemical reaction) sometimes gives us a different result than the quick instincts (fast chemical reaction). However that doesn't mean we decide the outcome of the longer thought process. It is still just a chemical reaction that we have no control over, and we don't decide the results conciously. It's just the result of the complicated chemical reaction, just like our instincts are the result of a quick chemical reaction.

Of course, there are those (quite a few of them actually) that believe in higher supernatural powers like a God or whatever. And that's the only way we could have free will: there being something supernatural that enables us to. I doubt it though.

It's not arrogance, because the other way to look at it is that we are pre-programmed to act the way we do and that is illogical. So it's not arrogant to aspire to logic.

If we are pre-programmed to do what we do, that makes our whole existence pointless. It makes all our emotions lies and illusions.

For instance, if I am honest towards someone and choose to do the right thing, it was all just my synapses doing the work. So it was not my work at all in the end. I didn't do anything, and I have no merit. Therefore I shouldn't be thanked.

So, if I shouldn't be thanked, why does the other person feel grateful?

It seems illogical to have such emotions when all this is robotic.

Why laugh that something is funny, if it was all just some synaptic trickery. The other person had it in their synapses all along, so why laugh?

Everything becomes predictable when we rule out any possibility of personality and freedom. And thus there should be no excitement, no surprise. Then why laugh? Why love?

See, this is exactly the point. It's a lot more romaticized and comforting to live with the illusion of free will than to accept that there is no such thing. But the cold hard truth is that there is no "meaning" to life. Life is just a bunch of boring "predictable" (if we knew every involved factor) chemical reactions happening on a very complex scale.

When someone says something funny, the reason you laugh is because just like it was in their synapses to say something funny, it's in your synapses to laugh at things that triggers an emotional (read: chemical) reaction in your brain.

Life isn't rosy and meaningful. There is no point to our existence. And we certainly don't have any say as to what happens to us. All the chemical reactions in our brains are reactions to other stimuli (and there is a whole shittonne of stimuli that impact the reactions in your brain!), and you don't control their outcome. But that doesn't really bother me. I just find it sort of peculiar.

 

But your post made me realize we evolutionarily it makes sense that we are under the illusion that we have free will.