Ask HN: How can you be rational and still believe in free will?

I remember beating myself over this idea in college, that there is no such thing as free will. I came to believe it. Then I realized something that was even more important: it does not matter if it is true. This is not a form of enlightenment that actually helps me or anyone.

Really, work through it. Congratulations: you discovered that everything you think and do is preordained by the first energy patterns of the universe. Now what? Do you second-guess your decisions? Isn't your second-guessing also preordained? Isn't your so-called enlightenment also just a part of the system? What does this knowledge really do for you?

Note that your quoted article does not oppose free will (unless you buy into the sensationalism). It points to the idea that a part of your brain figures out your next action before you are fully conscious of that decision. This does not invalidate free will; it just shows that you make decisions from multiple levels of your brain. You do not want too much decision-making power, like when your heart should next beat.

So, accepting that it is useless to believe in lack of free will, what happens if you decide to place your faith in having or acquiring free will? This opposite philosophy flows hand-in-hand with the idea of personal responsibility, the idea that you may actually be to blame for your own misfortunes and fortunes. There is a certain liberty in realizing that you have the power of Choice, that you can simply choose to leave these perceived/accepted traps and social constructs.

In other words, it would be irrational to not operate on the assumption that you have free will.

tl;dr - This philosophy does not help anyone. The opposite helps a great deal. Most people fall in the middle.

There's no scientific evidence for the number 7 or the letter "x". They're tokens and constructs relating to man-made abstractions. I put the concept of "free will" into this bucket, also.

> free will is an objectively observable phenomenon

Not true. To observe free will, you must have a really big picture view. You must have enough information at hand to be absolutely confident that the action was not a direct result of all prior experiences of the actor. Until you have that kind of measurement, free will is a matter of faith.

> god is not objectively observable

That is a very human-centric view, and it would behoove any rational thinker to look beyond their own limitations. Again, it is all about having an appropriate instrument to observe Him.

But you may have a point about who owns the burden of proof. (I will not argue either way on who owns it, and whether we should prove or disprove.)

Edit: Sorry, my definition of "objectively" is skewed. Both free will and God can be objectively observed. You just have to have the right instruments, enough information.

A related cartoon: http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/1243

"Free will" may be. But "rationality" can be given a clear, concise definition that most of us will agree upon in our context. Here, amichail probably talks about epistemic rationality: the art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible.

Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/

Now, the question of free will itself has been discussed. here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will and there: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_%28solution%29 are probably very good start points.

I haven't read these pages yet, but from what I have already read on http://lesswrong.com (which is quite a lot) is of outstanding quality.