Maybe you’re not trying

> particles that behave deterministically

I'm not a physicist I'll admit, but this seems like a controversial statement.

Not unless you're talking about quantum indeterminacy, do you think that's where OP's agency comes from?

Or what about the Indian stalker's agency, should they "try harder" to reverse the genetics, pre-natal nutrition, toxin exposure, and gut biome that led them down the path of mental illness?

> Also, people are made up of particles that behave deterministically. Agency is an illusion.

I like to slap people talking this to my face. Why? I was predetermined to slap them, the universe was set up that way. But I had only one occasion to really do this. The guy was thinking about this for two days. And when I say about this every proponent of "Agency is an illusion" then has some cop-out about responsibility, because in truth they use "no agency" as an excuse to explain their bad behavior.

Most people will accept a brain tumor as an excuse for bad behavior, but not low blood sugar.

I have successfully convinced people that hungry judges have less agency than full ones, though. (google hungry judge effect if you're curious).

The original study was flawed I’m afraid https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41091803

Freeze peach is an illusion.

Sounds fun - I'd slap back!

Someone always brings that up. I guess you couldn't help it?

Upvoted because many people genuinely believe that agency is an illusion and therefore there's no point in trying.

But the "therefore" part is not true.

The state of believing that you can do it is a state that precedes actually doing it. This is true regardless of whether the universe is deterministic.

As a person who would like to excuse my overeating on confirmed problems with blood sugar, I agree with you fully. We have different amount of willpower in different situations and in the same situation between different times of day. But we still have some agency, it's not fully predetermined. And like being overweight, training can help. I would even say that combating fat needs willpower and increases your available willpower too.

Sure and what precedes that is brain activity. You're not "willing" neurons into firing in such a way that will result in a thought to try harder.

Even if agency is an illusion, there's still a point in trying. Assuming determinism, whether or not those neurons fire in such a way depends on whether you believe "agency is an illusion, therefore there's no point in trying".

And whether you believe that might depend on whether you read this, so consider yourself lucky.

That's not my position at all. Obviously you had no agency in your genetics. I assume you don't believe you had agency in pre-natal nutrition or the circumstance of your upbringing.

The rest of your life is just reacting to things downstream from that with an algorithm based on your nature and your nurture.

If it weren't for quantum effects you could model the outcome and it would be the same every time.

> And whether you believe that might depend on whether you read this, so consider yourself lucky.

See right there you're saying trying depends on something I don't control which is making my point for me.

"No agency" doesn't mean "no consequences". If there's an asteroid flying towards earth, we may blow it up, instead of going "well it's not the poor rocks' fault it's gonna wipe out humanity, so we should just let it."

Also not a physicist, but yeah -- seems equivalent to saying, "entropy does not exist."

I never refuted your hypothesis, I just pointed out the fact that the universe being deterministic has nothing to do with whether it's worth it for you to believe that you can achieve things and therefore try. Nor did I say that whether you believe it depends on something you can control. Assuming determinism, it's always worth it to believe that you can achieve things and try, even if it's as a result of me saying this.

Believing -> trying -> accomplishing

The arrows are causal links. Whether the state of believing is achieved through chance or choice is irrelevant.

> That's not my position at all.

I would like to understand your position more. Most people believe that they have choice. They could for example do more work or lie on a couch. You mean they have no choice and whichever decision they took is not from their will, but only from their circumstances? I agree that a lot of the weights in such decision is a result of previous happenstances, but "no agency" model suggests to me that we can't make any serious changes in our life, because whatever happens, happens and maybe we were not destined to change our life. This further suggests: "why even try".

"No agency" for me means pretty much that. What does "no agency" mean for you?

Difficult to accurately give expression to "the absence of this particular illusion".

In the asteroid metaphor: It means that if you can very clearly see the asteroid coming towards you, instead of going "no, the asteroid is going to do the right thing", you make preparations knowing that there is no do-er inside the asteroid.

And after getting hit by it, you do not go "if only the asteroid had had more willpower it would not have hit us. The next time for sure I'll convince it!"

So by agency, in this context, I mean the ability to change the way reality is into what one thinks it ought to be. (But reality is only ever one way, disregarding quantum mechanical magic for a minute)

I believe OP's original implied position was "the universe is deterministic, so why even try", but I was able to convince them that trying is worth it regardless. In fact, the universe being deterministic would mean that it's always worth it to believe that you can accomplish something (if you want to increase the probability of accomplishing that thing).

> You mean they have no choice and whichever decision they took is not from their will, but only from their circumstances?

It is from their will, but a person's will is either completely or partially derived from circumstances. If you believe that the universe is deterministic, then a person's will (brain and body state) is completely derived from their circumstances (prior interactions with the rest of the world).

Wait, no, there's no "increasing the probability" if you really had faith in determinism. That was my lack of faith leaking through while trying to emulate the thought process of a person that has faith in determinism.

Instead it's more like, "if you're reading this already, your brain state is destined to change this way." Whatever I say is just a necessary process to get you to that brain state. Be glad that you're there now because you're no longer doomed to an undesirable future, or at least you can't tell anymore even if you are.

From what we know, universe is not deterministic. For example even trying to calculate motion of two massive objects with gravity with good precision runs up against heisenberg limit. For massively complicated systems like out bodies, there is just too much uncertainty. Also from neurobiology we see that our brains operate at the limit of noise in neurons. We are as close to total noise on our neuronal links as possible, while still operating properly. And thanks to better neurons than animals, we can operate with lower signal-to-noise ratio. It's not like we use some special quantum effects as a base of our consciousness, we just use quantum noise as a base and amplify it so that we actually respond properly to stimuli.

As for being only shaped by circumstances - IIRC there were experiments with cloned fish, where all of them were kept in conditions as similar as possible and those fish still had behavioral differences. Having deterministic universe is meaningless for agency.

> And after getting hit by it, you do not go "if only the asteroid had had more willpower it would not have hit us.

I don't understand this. You tell me that not having agency is not applicable to asteroids?

> (But reality is only ever one way, disregarding quantum mechanical magic for a minute)

I think we can't really disregard quantum mechanics when talking about very complicated systems operating on the edge of being too noisy for any recognisable transmission in our neurons.

  You tell me that not having agency is not applicable to asteroids?

The opposite: Having agency is not applicable to non-asteroids, any more than to asteroids. The asteroid was a metaphor for humans. I recognize I am not at my best at explaining right now.

  I think we can't really disregard quantum mechanics

Then we can allow that there is a magical being outside our observable reality that is influencing the result of random-seeming quantum processes, itself unbound by deterministic physics. You may call this being "your self" and this being would indeed have agency that transcends "chain-of-dominoes" causality. I cannot disprove such a theory. But is that an interesting conversation to have?

It sounds like you're saying that a being with no free will should strive to overcome that somehow, and you can't understand how ridiculous that is.

No, that's not what I'm saying. And I never said that you're a being with no free will. In fact, you have free will. It's just that your idea of free will refers to a deterministic process if we're in a deterministic universe.

It's not possible to know what a non-deterministic process is in a deterministic universe. If you have faith that the universe is deterministic, then your definition of "non-deterministic" is equivalent to "deterministic" because you've never observed anything other than deterministic processes.

The only reason we're even able to talk about this in a meaningful way is because we both know your assumption is just an assumption rather than the truth, and we abstractly distinguished some phenomena as different from others, and say that one group defines determinism, while the other group defines non-determinism.

But since you're assuming that the universe is deterministic, then according to you, free will means the capacity for deterministic decision-making, which you have. The process of decision-making still happens in your brain, it's just a deterministic process.

I've merely pointed out that accomplishing something is a state of reality that can only come after trying to do that thing. If you don't try, you won't accomplish. And if you don't believe you should try, you won't try. So if you don't believe you should try, you won't accomplish. All of these statements are true in a deterministic universe.

If you don't believe you should try, then there can only be one outcome: you won't accomplish. If you believe you should try, then there can also only be one outcome (according to your assumption), but you don't know what it will be. The universe may have predestined you to accomplish something, but it can only begin with you believing you can do it. Why not start believing you can do it? Believing is a necessary precondition to accomplishment, even if that belief is predetermined. Just do it.

Oh this is interesting, so you're saying the cloned fish "free-willed" themselves into having different personalities? Like one of them woke up one day and said "From now one I will be the sassy one."

I mean, it's a silly idea on it's face but let's say it's true: where did that thought come from? It came from a long sequence of effects that followed prior causes (starting with the Big Bang), plenty of quantum noise, I have no objection to that (superpositions collapsing / parallel universes forking) and ends with tiny neurons firing in a fish brain, do you not agree?

So where's the free will?

I think that free will ends up in that randomness of neurons firing. That can't be really predicted and steered. Free will is essentially freedom from manipulation/overriding external to the entity having free will. Theoretically that doesn't even need randomness.

And I don't think those fish free willed themselves. They just grew more random due to randomness inherent in our universe, despite us trying to force them into being exact. This was example of randomness of complicated biological processes, not of free will.

Are you guys even talking about the same thing? Because it doesn't seem like you are. You should try to define "free will" first and know exactly what you mean by it. Otherwise you're just arguing over the definition.

I agree with you. Like I said in sibling comment: Free will is essentially freedom from manipulation/overriding external to the entity having free will.