Science Suggests Free Will Doesn't Exist

Do we have free will? Or is life predetermined? A question pondered by philosophers for millennia…and science might just have the answer

Merch!
I think Scientists are Rockstars so I made t-shirts to celebrate it

00:00 Free Will Does Not Exist
00:59 Free Will and The Foundations of The Universe
6:08 Ad Read
7:05 Is Free Will An Emergent Property?
13:32 Using Science To Read Your Mind
15:24 Your Brain Is Lying To You. We Have Proof

#freewill #universe #science #evidence

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[zefellowbud]

for me living with adhd, free will has always felt like an illusion.
alot of my action is dictated not by MY wishes. but by my minds whims, mood, and focus.
hearing about the whole split brain experiment in my childhood i kind of have accepted an idea that the self is less like you are in control of who you are and rather. you have a collection of selves that bicker and argue inside your head about what you will do, what you believe, what you think about, etc.

productivity is when interests aligns amongst the "selves" and such.
not to say that you cannot work to improve yourself if you have no free will cause like.
there are aspects of your self which WISH to be better. one just has to focus on those.
the illusion of will at least lets you choose which aspect of yourself to give more priority to.

free will is not as big of an issue for me as is "how i define myself" and i think thats really a big factor that affects my actions and behavior.
am i those aspects of me which bring about laziness? am i those aspects of me which are spiteful and sour toned?
the answer is both, BUT i can also define myself as my better aspects.
i am also me who seeks my happiness, the me who seeks self improvement, the me who draws art because its fun.

excuse me for my nonsense. just wanted to chatter

[DaGolfViking]

"What you do with that information is your choice"
Ummm, apparently not. 😂

[velisvideos]

Thanks for this. I showed the video to my wife, and she now finally agrees that I cannot avoid drinking in the afternoon.

[sarfcowst]

I have to disagree that "science" suggests anything about free will. The main (but not only) difficulty is the way the conclusions have been drawn by Dr Miles and other people using this argument. The argument from the "laws of physics" showing the cause and effect sequence in the development of the universe is flawed on many levels as it is inductive reasoning - a weak way to make conclusions in science. Free will is undoubtedly not present in the universe without life, but we cannot say what previous causes produced life as we have no accepted theory for the origin of life so it's invalid to extend this into the realm of living things. Also the primary metabolic proces to sustain life, photosynthesis, is an unexpected outcome from any incipient causes. The argument from neuroscience is intriguing but also insufficient (it has has been studied by many experts who do not agree on its significance.) Using only the most reliable deductive reasoning, we have to say that - because theory is inseparable from observation - the observations of what we call free will are not overturned by the much less convincing premises presented here. Free will is also a concept that is defined philosophically, and I doubt that a scientific definition is more useful. This is by no means all that can be said but this forum is quite limited here.

[klaasbil]

Anyone who believes that free will does not exist, cannot blame me for continuing to believe in free will.

[chad-yq]

I'm having several problems with Ben's conclusion.

In the first section, he just hand-waved away the quantum effects by saying that it falls under a probability distribution. That doesn't really work in a deterministic reality, if an outcome of a specific quantum effect can't be determined beforehand even if the state of every particle is known then that's a problem for a deterministic reality.

The study referenced at 13:35 was published in 2008, not 2018. Also what the study states is that the state of your brain in the seconds leading up to a decision influences your decision and can be used to predict your decision. Also I couldn't see in the study how accurately they were able to make this prediction. Stating that the previous state influences the current state is kinda intuitive and not really evidence for or against determinism.

All the last chapter is really saying is that if you remove the brains ability to process certain types of information then it can't do certain things. Not really evidence for free will or determinism. Really interesting information though.

He doesn't provide references to any of the studies he talks about in the video.

[Robert_McGarry_Poems]

Every point you make, gives me pause for thought, and then you go and cover exactly what I'm thinking...😊 It makes me smile!

[askedofgod]

This is a great argument for a
“Pre-crime judicial system”. 😂

[lyledal]

If free will doesn't exist, then there really isn't any point to anything at all. It would explain a lot, frankly.

[RubberJONNY]

I already agree with your stance on free will.
However, I also think there's more arguments for free will that have been overlooked here:

Firstly I think using a law of physics to argue a point on psychology isn't that relevant.
In the case of cause and effect, I think it can be argued both ways (for example - you may chose a life path based on your parents or siblings, and some choose to go in a completely different direction. In this case, a negative opinion of your parents caused this effect, but ultimately, a choice was made based on the information your brain was given.)

In the case of your brain deciding for you, - of course we can read electrical signals BEFORE a decision, that is the 'computational energy output' of our fleshy network that enables an action. This doesn't mean we are any less in control. Our brains are programmed for certain impulses or desire that often link to self preservation, reproduction and pleasure, but ultimately there are also cases of people making decisions despite having this programming, like suicide, asexuality and abstinence.


It's easy to say free will is an illusion created by our brains, but then what are we, if not a unique bio-chemical finger print pressed against the the cold, cloudy looking glass of lived experience. YOU CHOSE to read this comment, and just because you're able to explain and even predict this, response doesn't change disprove it was made freely. - let me know if you disagree

[williamsteveling]

You overstate your case. We can't remotely cover the topic of free will until we crack the hard problem of consciousness (and I have my doubts that we can). I'm down for discussions about the limits of free will (and there's no question that there are limits), but science hasn't "proven" much in this space, merely found evidence.

This idea that constraining choices limits free will is inherently a false application of logic. Bounds to all things exist. If I'm given a binary choice, I'm constrained, but I still (in theory) have the freedom to choose as I wish between them. Free will, like all possibilities, will be limited by said possibilities.

I'm in a gray space on the idea that the brain processing before we're aware of it is somehow a bypass. Some of this may come to self-awareness. I can kind of see my thinking both as a separate part of my conscious state. It's incomplete, no question, and I won't pretend it's somehow different: It's my experience.

So then we get to the interpreter side of things as you stated it. To me, and this one is a lot more... nebulous? We have the two halves of the brain, possibly with their own mind-states, in constant communication normally. If you sever that, they have to start trying to anticipate and explain to themselves why their other half acts out. There's no way to know if extrapolating that to a normally functioning brain is in any way the correct solution or not. And again, there's the hard problem of consciousness.

Assumptions are being made about how what we're seeing is actually working. I'm sure there's something to this. I'm also sure there's more than we're able to see yet. So, if you tell me free will is minimal for decisions in the heat of the moment, I'm down for that. If you tell me that me taking my time and weighing my options isn't a state where my free will is in effect, you're going to have to bring a lot more to the table to convince me

[josefcomorales]

Anyone interested in this topic should read “Determined” by Robert Sapolski. The author is a researcher that tries to convince the reader that there is no free will and the implications of it

[MindForgedManacle]

This video does not live up to its title and falls into the standard lack of reading about free will discussions that has been common for ages. The video doesn't even contemplate what free will is as far as the definition goes. It's barely any better than a lay person talking about it if I'm being frank. Akin to the people who think ethics are subjective merely because people have different views on ethics (they don't extend this logic to every domain where people disagree).

If you wonder why I conclude this, please read up on the compatibilist theory of free will. You will learn more about conceptions of free will even under a deterministic universe than the "Determinism, ergo no free will" video you get above. The fact free will isn't given a working definition for the video was an immediate red flag to me that the uploader was going to make a bad argument. What argument can you give if you're not even specific about what your topic item means?

Even just the logic kind of falls flat. If determinism implies no free will, indeterminism ought to imply free will. Otherwise the initial supposition is either false or the uploader is saying his undefined concept of free will is incoherent. But even the video recognizes a universe with randomness doesn't get you free will by default. So it's not even clear the uploader has a conception of free will fleshed out and he doesn't bother arguing it's an incoherent idea.

[dialexnunes]

If there's no free will and everything is pre-determined then you don't need to ask the viewer to "like and subscribe". They will do it or not, regardless what you say, it's pre-determined, there's no free will, so why are you suggesting it? You don't believe what you say. What I know is that I chose to waste 18 mins of my life, even tho I knew after 6 mins this was going nowhere.

[chrissscottt]

Agreed, we have no free will. Any 'choices' one makes could never change if one was able to go back to a precise point in spacetime within an identical universe. That means the universe conspired to give us only one real 'choice', the one we chose.

[etinarcardiaego]

At a fundamental macro-scale level, one only needs to show "1" example to conclude that determinism does not exist, this being the 3-BodyProblem (Poincaré). At best, and most probable, is that |Non-Determinism <&>Determinism| are 2 extremes of a spectrum thereof, and therein....where the Mind-Body fluctuates within this |ND<&>D| spectrum. The Brain-Mind complex, differentiated among all people, may facilitate the emergence of free-will in some people and not in others.
There's a grave misunderstanding about the 'reflexive neural action" experiments that are being used today as proof that free-will doesn't exist.
Nevertheless, if one can show just “1” fundamental example in nature that “Determinism” does not exist, via the 3-Body Problem, then "Determinism" should not be promulgated as defining our realm, thereby sending the sciences into erred trajectories. Its a foolish determination.

[scienceexplains]

*7-second delay and “no control”*
This is only at the immediate level.
Let’s say that when I go to bed I always think of something bad and I can’t seem to help it and it interferes with my sleep.

So I decide that as soon as I start thinking of something bad in bed I’m going to start thinking of something soothing.

I tried that and it worked. So I can control what I’m thinking about in some ways. That doesn’t disprove determinism, because because I could have been determined to find that solution, but it does put some perspective on that delay of the decision reaching our consciousness.

[ArturoTorras]

No it is not OK, to say free will doesn't exist, because then we can also give up morality and responsibility. Science not only knows so little about consciousness but also does not consider it a priority to understand. Consciousness exists in many different frequencies, our waking world (in which science is trying to understand the world) is only one of the frequencies of consciousness. In other frequencies of consciousness the laws of Physics are not the same.

[DM-dnrf]

"What you do with that information is your choice." Really? How can I have a real choice if I don't have free will?

[StrongMed]

You present some interesting ideas here. A suggestion: when so explicitly citing research, you should consider including the actual citations either on screen and/or in the video description. (Also, corpus collosotomy is still performed for refractory epilepsy.)