Act as if there is no free will: It leads to less blame & better questions.

Set aside the philosophical debates and act as if there is no free will. It leads to less blaming and better questions
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-you-should-t...-two-weeks

EXCERPT: To break this habit, I suggest a small experiment. For two weeks, try living as though free will were not the most useful way to interpret behaviour. You don’t need to decide whether it exists. If you live as if there is no free will, blame is no longer the default; behaviour must instead be understood in terms of the conditions that produced it.

When someone says they believe in free will, they usually mean that, in a given set of circumstances, we all have the freedom to choose differently. But I take a deterministic view of behaviour: what we do emerges from our biological state at any given moment, and that state itself is the product of how our body and brain grew, including genetic influences (development), what’s happened to us until now (life experience), and the current immediate and wider situation (environment).

Environmental influences matter because biological systems are plastic and change in response to them. Determinism need not imply fatalism – the idea that outcomes are fixed regardless of what we do. I agree we have agency, but I believe our will to act is itself shaped by biological and environmental causes rather than freely chosen. (MORE - details)
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Behaving randomly (no acquired personal preferences and innate factors constraining you) is best exemplified by the actions and speech of severely insane people. It's not a condition that we would desire to be in to begin with. If producing satisfactory results, you often want "self as body" determinism according to your current interests and needs (rather than arbitrarily going against them). And should some of those be detrimental, then you do have the capacity to re-program yourself. That's the actual free-will. Not a demented longing for the body to lack regulation and be a non-ordered system (existing in the first place requires conforming to a structure and pattern of governance).

You can both believe in free will and understand that people do not, generally, act out of malice. Many behaviors can be excused as inattention, ignorance, dealing with something else mentally/emotionally, etc.. Overall, it's not useful to assign blame, in daily interactions, but better to assign responsibility. You are always responsible for your own actions and reactions... because we do have free will.

(Sep 7, 2026 06:16 PM)C C Wrote: Set aside the philosophical debates and act as if there is no free will. It leads to less blaming and better questions
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-you-should-t...-two-weeks

EXCERPT: To break this habit, I suggest a small experiment. For two weeks, try living as though free will were not the most useful way to interpret behaviour. You don’t need to decide whether it exists. If you live as if there is no free will, blame is no longer the default; behaviour must instead be understood in terms of the conditions that produced it.

When someone says they believe in free will, they usually mean that, in a given set of circumstances, we all have the freedom to choose differently. But I take a deterministic view of behaviour: what we do emerges from our biological state at any given moment, and that state itself is the product of how our body and brain grew, including genetic influences (development), what’s happened to us until now (life experience), and the current immediate and wider situation (environment).

Environmental influences matter because biological systems are plastic and change in response to them. Determinism need not imply fatalism – the idea that outcomes are fixed regardless of what we do. I agree we have agency, but I believe our will to act is itself shaped by biological and environmental causes rather than freely chosen. (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - -

Behaving randomly (no acquired personal preferences and innate factors constraining you) is best exemplified by the actions and speech of severely insane people. It's not a condition that we would desire to be in to begin with. If producing satisfactory results, you often want "self as body" determinism according to your current interests and needs (rather than arbitrarily going against them). And should some of those be detrimental, then you do have the capacity to re-program yourself. That's the actual free-will. Not a demented longing for the body to lack regulation and be a non-ordered system (existing in the first place requires conforming to a structure and pattern of governance).

Yes, indeed. 

Environment influences our biology. We are stimulus and response driven creatures. I happen to know that we do not have free will. But there is indeed a God, and I know that for a fact.

The idea of pre-determinism is not incompatible with a God. This universe is the unfolding of God's plan.

Quote:Behaving randomly (no acquired personal preferences and innate factors constraining you) is best exemplified by the actions and speech of severely insane people. It's not a condition that we would desire to be in to begin with.

If you've ever been around insane people, it is not the fluent free-flow of spontaneous freedom. It is a torturous victimization to a barrage of intrusive ideas and delusions, compulsive speech, and involuntary body movements where freewill no longer exists. I suspect that we are all on a spectrum from moments of more or less free and thoughtful decision-making, bursts of wild and spontaneous creativity, and ironically-relaxing and mechanistic predetermination by the prompts and constraints of our environment. Sometimes its good to claim credit for our decisions and actions. It gives a sense of empowerment and agency in a world too often forcing upon us a brain-numbing acquiescence.

(Sep 8, 2026 07:50 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:

Quote:Behaving randomly (no acquired personal preferences and innate factors constraining you) is best exemplified by the actions and speech of severely insane people. It's not a condition that we would desire to be in to begin with.

If you've ever been around insane people, it is not the fluent free-flow of spontaneous freedom. It is a torturous victimization to a barrage of intrusive ideas and delusions, compulsive speech, and involuntary body movements where freewill no longer exists. I suspect that we are all on a spectrum from moments of more or less free and thoughtful decision-making, bursts of wild and spontaneous creativity, and ironically-relaxing and mechanistic predetermination by the prompts and constraints of our environment. Sometimes its good to claim credit for our decisions and actions. It gives a sense of empowerment and agency in a world too often forcing upon us a brain-numbing acquiescence.

"Insane behavior" can appear random to an observer if there is no pattern or coherence to be abstracted from it. Even if internally there might be a mixture of quarreling reasons for the afflicted individual's unpredictable movements and speech. It's merely the best pseudo-example or illustration of what randomness would spell for a person no longer following any preferences and native human tendencies.

Randomness doesn't really equate to either will or freedom. It's just part of the errant mindset of the anti-FW establishment that deems indeterminism necessary or fundamental for free will (sans origins). Randomness would as much be an external invader hijacking the autonomy of a system as a deliberating puppet master. Although the trivial amount of it present in nature can be incorporated into decision-making and habitual impulses without derailing the actions of the overall self-determining or regulated human body.

If constant positive or constructive results were falling out of years of long-term spontaneity, then that wouldn't be randomness. It would be yet another hidden or subconscious preference guiding things. Random would be an averaging jumble of both negative and positive effects (or assessed as purely neutral in identity when absent of human judgement), until some surviving bias arose that started selecting more for one side than the other. A semblance of "will" thereby emerging, with "freedom" in volitional context being an eventual capacity to cull or re-program some of those biases, preferences, habits, and interests if they're actually causing unpleasant consequences.

(Sep 7, 2026 06:16 PM)C C Wrote: EXCERPT: To break this habit, I suggest a small experiment. For two weeks, try living as though free will were not the most useful way to interpret behaviour.

Isn't she appealing to her readers' free will, which she believes doesn't exist?

Quote:You don’t need to decide whether it exists. If you live as if there is no free will

Circumstances require us to make decisions constantly. What is making a decision, if not an example of the exercise of free will? Should we simply sit passively in our chairs and wait for some external force to knock us off our butts? Yes, I know that isn't really what she means...

Quote:blame is no longer the default

This seems to me to be the underlying motivation: a desire to eliminate ethics and moral blame.

Quote:behaviour must instead be understood in terms of the conditions that produced it.

But what if our ethical beliefs and motivations are part of what drive our behavior?

Quote:When someone says they believe in free will, they usually mean that, in a given set of circumstances, we all have the freedom to choose differently.

If we had wanted to. If we had understood the situation differently or had different motives.

Our behavior is rarely if ever simply random. That's epileptic seizures, not human action.

Quote:But I take a deterministic view of behaviour: what we do emerges from our biological state at any given moment

A believer in free will needn't dispute that. In fact free will depends on it being true. We act in such and such a way because we wanted to. Where the "we wanted to" very likely translates into preceding brain states.

Quote:and that state itself is the product of how our body and brain grew, including genetic influences (development), what’s happened to us until now (life experience), and the current immediate and wider situation (environment).

There's a big metaphysical assumption baked into that - the idea that causation is absolutely precise and (yes) determining with no probabilistic fuzziness at all. (A precise one-to-one mapping of past states and future ones).

If we go there, then every word I'm typing now was already predetermined by the precise state of the universe in 10,000 BC. Or for that matter, by the precise initial conditions in the Big Bang. (Which is a species of Creationism actually, since we don't know what established those initial conditions or the laws by which physical states subsequently evolve.)

Of course nobody can really know that, let alone ever test it. So it's just a metaphysical assumption. Whatever plausibility it might have seemingly depends on a 19th century concept of classical causality that might very well be wrong.

My own view is that causal chains aren't precisely delineated, they are fuzzy. That fuzziness can typically be ignored over short time scales, except perhaps in quantum experiments. But as time intervals increase, to hours, years and centuries, the fuzziness compounds. In other words, if we knew the state of the universe 10 billion years ago with whatever amount of precision is physically possible, given all the quantum stuff on the microscale, we couldn't even predict that the Earth would exist today, or that life would exist there, let alone me in this room typing these particular words.

If we knew the precise state of the universe in 1900, we could make much better predictions about the precise details of today. We would know about life and human beings, at least. Predicting the histories of the various countries might not be possible. Predicting that particular individuals exist and what their precise behavior is today might be impossible in principle.

I doubt very much that we could predict what I'm thinking and deciding to do right now if all we had was the precise details of the universe just a year ago.

Determinism implies a precise one-to-one mapping of past states with future states, such that if we know the past state, we know the future state as well. So I guess that I'm saying that I don't believe in determinism. Though we do seem to get closer and closer to it as time intervals decrease.

That said, I do believe in something very close to determinism (excluding quantum indeterminancy on the microscale) on the time scale of miliseconds. So the kind of determinism that free-will needs and depends on remains possible: I did X because I wanted to do X. And yes, it's entirely possible to interpret "I wanted to do X" in terms of brain states.

(Sep 8, 2026 08:45 PM)C C Wrote: Randomness doesn't really equate to either will or freedom. It's just part of the errant mindset of the anti-FW establishment that deems indeterminism necessary or fundamental for free will (sans origins). Randomness would as much be an external invader hijacking the autonomy of a system as a deliberating puppet master.

Randomness is an oft-used strawman against the existence of free will. No one who argues for free will claims that it's random, as that would obviously be contradictory... hence the strawman. This strawman, from determinists, just repackages their own view, that everything is determined. The actual argument is that quantum indeterminacy, which is probabilistic not random, allow the latitude or degree of freedom for free will.

I'm with chaos theory on this. My interpretation being that there are things which can fall one way or another and even theoretically .. the amount of information required to predict which way does not exist.
Stop for a coffee and you meet the partner you've always dreamed of, you live a long and happy life. Pass by the coffee shop and you die lonely, bitter and twisted. You pass the coffee shop because there's a tornado heading your way .. which turns out to be something to do with a pesky butterfly somewhere in Brazil.

(Sep 9, 2026 12:26 AM)confused2 Wrote: I'm with chaos theory on this. My interpretation being that there are things which can fall one way or another and even theoretically .. the amount of information required to predict which way does not exist.
Stop for a coffee and you meet the partner you've always dreamed of, you live a long and happy life. Pass by the coffee shop and you die lonely, bitter and twisted. You pass the coffee shop because there's a tornado heading your way .. which turns out to be something to do with a pesky butterfly somewhere in Brazil.

Yes, that's how I think of it as well.

There apparently are non-linear dynamical equations such that even infinitesimal differences in initial conditions can result in large and dramatic differences in how a physical system evolves over time. It's not like the linear equations that we studied in calculus class, where infinitesimal changes in the x axis produce infinitesimal changes on the y axis. Graphing such an equation doesn't produce a line, but rather a dust, a scattered collection of points.

Determinists often object that non-linear equations of chaotic dynamics are still deterministic, in the sense that each precise initial state is still mapped onto one and only one resultant state. But the sensitive dependence on initial conditions requires that initial conditions be absolutely precise, since any deviation would produce an entirely different result. So no matter how precisely we can measure conditions at time A, unless the measurements are absolutely precise, those initial conditions are consistent with a multitude of different states of affairs at distant Time B.

And quantum theory seems to give us justification in saying that conditions at time A can't in principle be known with absolute precision, since particles appear to behave probabilistically. Instead of saying that an electron is unambiguously here, all we can say is that it has some probability of being here.

Hence what I take to be the fuzziness on the microscale. And non-linear dynamics seems to provide the amplifier that boosts that micro-fuzziness onto the mesoscale where we live.

^^^ Like.

OP Wrote:behaviour must instead be understood in terms of the conditions that produced it.

Assume for a moment that humans have default factory settings which both cause and define 'acceptable' behaviour.

Speculating..

Religions tend to judge deviations from their (ideal?) factory defaults as 'free will' which result in good or bad behaviour.. the conditions that produced whatever behaviour are irrelevant.

'Humanists' tend to judge (bad) behaviour based largely on 'There but for the grace of God go I" which is entirely dependent on the conditions that caused the (bad) behaviour.. not much going on in the 'free will' department.

Syne's post shows this nicely .. either millstone or 'understanding' for Clancy..  using  'legal' is a wilful misunderstanding of the pov.
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-15927-...l#pid89344