this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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As someone who's slightly center-right, a significant number of my opinions are unpopular on this platform. But setting politics and social issues aside, I'd say the nuclear bomb of my unpopular opinions is my belief in determinism - and, by extension, my claim that free will is an illusion.
By that, I mean the idea that you could have done otherwise in a given situation is false. If we had a time machine and could replay a moment exactly as it was, you'd make the same choice every single time. Whatever caused you to make that decision the first time would cause you to do it again - without exception.
A related belief of mine is that the sense of self is also an illusion. To me, these are two sides of the same coin. By “self,” I mean the feeling that there’s a subject behind your face, looking out at the world. But that’s just brain chemistry. There’s no point in the brain where it all comes together - no central “you” making decisions. That’s why there’s no free will either - because there’s nothing making the decisions. They’re simply being made.
The illusion comes from the fact of consciousness. The fact of subjective experience. It feels like something to be you, from the inside. There’s qualia to your existence.
I'm sorry to say, but I find that thinking really scary!
Can't it be used as an excuse everything? It wasn't me it was everything that others did before. Oh, and there's no me. There's no you either! So don't say that I hurt you, as that's impossible!
Well, it does remove the justification for blame - there’s no one to blame - but it doesn’t excuse bad behavior. If someone hits another person and says, “I couldn’t help myself, I have no free will,” then while that statement may be factually correct, it still signals how they’re likely to behave in the future. So jailing them is reasonable - not as punishment, but to protect others.
It’s similar to when a bear wanders into a residential area and attacks someone. We don’t shoot the bear because we think it’s evil - it’s just a bear. We do it to protect innocent people.
Laws do work as a deterrent. Knowing that actions have consequences affects how people behave. Retroactively, you could argue it’s not fair to jail someone who couldn’t have acted differently, but if people catch on that there are no real consequences - that we’re just bluffing - then more people will start breaking those laws. That’s why we need to follow through with those “threats,” even if, philosophically, it doesn’t fully make sense.
How? People are automatons programmed by laws? How are the laws made?
If you know that driving over a certain speed limit will increase your chance of getting a ticket, then you're less likely to do so.
You can't because you've no free will. Regardless of the law, the speed you'll drive is the speed you'll drive, no?
The speed you'll drive is the product of innumerable in-born and external influences (which include past experience). Laws would be useless if people had free will, actually. They work because of a deterrent effect; getting pulled over paying fines, and maybe going to jail feels bad. It's the threat of feeling bad that makes laws an effective incentive, and we can't change that emotional response.
If humans had free will, though, we could decide how we emotionally react to anything. We could decide to flip a switch in our minds so that jail is emotionally fulfilling and preferable to freedom. Then there'd be no way to punish anybody, and thus we could have no laws.
Exactly! ❤️ That's the trap that sadly keeps a person locked in his mind. The slave's curse. And I'm sorry it's happening to you. I've been there before, as well.
Know that you are more than the sum of your environment and history, good or bad. You can decide to do something, just because you like doing it. You might not even remember what you like doing. It can take a while to find out, but you'll find it. And from there it will grow.
You're not trapped, just hurt. 🌸
Can you decide that you'll enjoy cutting off one of your fingers? If so, it seems silly not to, since you'll enjoy it!
Sadly you can, and it happens. What also happens is harming others because of one's own pain :( . I know as both victim and perpetrator.
Luckily you can try other things first! 🎵
No, I mean you, right now, with your free will.
Luckily I have free will. I don't need to do what you tell me to do! I get to decide myself.
And so do you: you can decide what you want to do ❤️
I'm not telling you to do anything, it's all hypothetical: Could you decide that punching yourself in the face—hard—is enjoyable? It seems like if you could decide that right here and now, that'd be a real easy way to make life (as good as it may be) even better.
Cards on the table, I'm pretty sure we all know the answer. No, we cannot decide to improve our lives by cutting off digits or socking ourselves in the nose, because those things are damaging, and we cant simply decide to make them feel good. I feel very confident that I can't convince you to to it. (Thank goodness!)
The things that we can change our emotional reaction to are things that we were conditioned by an external stimulus (tradition or trauma or whatever) to have a certain reaction to. The decision to change is always driven by discomfort with that emotional reaction, another stimulus. Nobody is going to decide that they need to stop enjoying social affirmation, for instance, unless there's some powerful, outside factor driving that decision.
In short, if we all react to the same stimulus in predictable ways, where's the free will?
In the past, I have participated in auto mutilation, yes. At a certain point you want to feel anything.
You're right! And it's very scary, facing the thing that's causing the discomfort.
That's why I spend so much time trying to occupy my mind with puzzles, code, games, alcohol. Anything to distract me! Anything to direct that racing mind towards. But in the end I had to face the discomfort, walk inwards, towards it, to find where it came from.
It wasn't my body, it wasn't the calculating part of my mind.
Luckily we don't all react to the same stimulus in the same way. We can look back and learn from past mistakes.
We can share experiences, learn from eachother.
We can look eachother in the eyes.
I'm sorry that you've had such troubles in the past. Learning from past mistakes isn't an example of free will, though.
You're thinking of a fatalistic universe, where the future is predetermined, rather than a deterministic one, where every action follows from a prior cause. It’s not that you choose to follow the speed limit out of free will - you simply don’t want to get into trouble, so you’re compelled to obey it. But even that want isn’t something you chose.
I figured out recently from Lemmy discussions that people have different concepts of what free will means. Humorously, one of them operates within a deterministic mindset, while the other points out the determinism.
Best analogy that I can think of at the moment is the difference between a drill press and a 4-axis CNC mill. The drill press has one degree of freedom, down and up. It's locked in. The mill has 4 degrees of freedom, and it can run code that makes its behavior highly complex. For some people, that's good enough: The mill has free will while the drill press does not.
The view of free will that recognizes determinism says that humans have innumerable degrees of freedom, so our behavior looks complex, but our conscious choice is just the various competing influences shaking out.
Why's that?
The same reason you don't want to keep your hand on a hot stove. It's uncomfortable.
Exactly, we tend to fear uncomfortable things, no?
We're scared thus avoid, and avoid, and avoid, untill we feel trapped.
Each day starts to feel the same. Each holliday too, even. Nowhere to escape to. Mind racing.