Here is Less Wrong's official policy on free will.
Free will is one of the easiest hard questions, as millennia-old philosophical dilemmas go. Though this impossible question is generally considered fully and completely dissolved on Less Wrong, aspiring reductionists should try to solve it on their own.
I encourage you to try solving the puzzle yourself before reading the rest of this spoilery post.
Quantum mechanics does not operate at the level of the human brain. The human brain is too big and too warm for quantum indeterminacy to matter. The human brain is a deterministic system. Every choice you make has already been predetermined by classical physics long before the decision reaches conscious awareness.
And yet—it feels like we have free will. As I type these words, it feels to me like I get to choose what to type.[1]
What's going on?
Just because something feels real doesn't mean it actually is real. Many people hear disembodied voices. Many others feel like they're floating around outside their bodies. These experiences are hallucinations in the sense that the subjects' experiences conflict with what is actually occurring in the outside physical world. But the experiences are "real" in the sense that they represent real qualia and real internal physical brain states.
We tend to use the phrase "sound mind" to describe a state where your mind is functioning properly and your conscious experience is a correct model of reality. We use the inverse word "hallucination" to describe a state where your mind is malfunctioning and your conscious experience is a wrong model of reality. But those definitions are opposite corners of a 2×2 grid. They do not cover all possibilities. There are two corners unaccounted for. The illusion of free will describes a state where your mind is functioning properly even though your conscious experience is a wrong model of reality.
Most people feel like they have free will. But nobody actually does.
Then why do we feel like we have free will?
Some hallucinations are caused by malfunctioning wetware. But the illusion of free will isn't a malfunction—it's the human brain functioning as designed. If free will is by evolutionary design then there is a reason for it.
Why is the illusion of free will useful?
Because the human brain is a decision-making organ. It absorbs information and then decides what to do. Consider two brains competing at a fork in our evolutionary history.
- One mind knows that the universe is purely deterministic, that all of its actions are predetermined and that it cannot change the outcome of anything.
- Another mind believes (wrongly) that it has free will, that its conscious choices are not predetermined and that it can modify the universe via its actions.
What is going to happen when these organisms compete?
Keep in mind that these aren't modern human brains. They haven't been trained in philosophy or Newtonian physics. They might be fish brains from before our ancestors crawled out of the oceans onto land. They are much stupider than dogs and pigs.
The mind with (the illusion of) free will is more motivated to pursue goals.
The mind without (the illusion of) free will might fail to function at all.
Either way, the mind with (the illusion of) free will outcompetes the mind with an accurate model of the universe.
And we are descended from it.
Note: The "[REDACTED]" in the title was originally "a Useful Illusion" before I realized it spoiled everything.
At least—it used to feel that way before I did a bunch of meditation. Now I'm not so sure anymore. ↩︎
Curiously, people are willing to impute thought, choice, decision-making, understanding, purpose, action to achieve purposes, and so on, to machines like the GPT family, yet are often diffident or hostile to attributing these things to people. I find this very strange.
I left "free will" out of that list, because it is not clear to me what people are asserting, when they say they have "free will", or what they are denying, when they say they do not.
We can all agree that there is no such thing as a unicorn. We can do that because we all know what the word means: a supposed horse-like creature with a single horn in its forehead, and having magical attributes variously told of. Because we know what we mean, we would recognise one if we found one. But we know it is only a legend. Explorers have never found any such creature, not even something close enough to have inspired the legend. There is no such thing as a unicorn.
But when speaking of free will, whether to assert it or deny it, people describe it only in phrases that seem to point at the same thing in different words, whatever that thing is. "Choice", "the possibility of having done differently", and so on. Contrast "unicorn", which is described in terms that make no reference to unicorns.
Thus "free will" is the name given to a certain subjective experience that people are unable to articulate any further, the experience of acting in the world. When they try to articulate it they confabulate non-answers, answers that no more answer the question "what is free will?" than "gravity" answers "why do things fall?", or "energy" answers "how does a clockwork toy work?", or "fluency" answers "how do you speak a foreign language well?"[1] These non-answers are easily shown to be empty or absurd, but this does not negate the existence of the phenomena that they fail to elucidate. Things fall, clockwork toys move, and mastery of a foreign language is possible.
People clearly do think, choose, make decisions, understand things, have purposes, act to achieve them, and so on. Given that, what is left to talk about on the subject of "free will"? Free will is the quale of doing such things, and can be no more articulated than the sensation of hearing a trumpet.
The first two examples are from Feynman, and the last from my late mother, who often "explained" things in that manner. ↩︎