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Tioben t1_jbl4pmr wrote

The first time I tried tickling myself, I expected to experience the urge to laugh. Not experiencing that urge violated my own expectations. However, I would not say that I freely chose to not experience the urge to laugh.

I wrote the last sentence with an expectation of what my behaviors and their experienced outcomes would be. My prediction was as reliable as one might expect, yet I feel like my choice free, or at least more free than the earlier not-experiencing of the urge to laugh.

Since I can observe myself, but resolutions of expectated observations seem orthogonal to my sense of freedom, I doubt violations of expectation say much about free will one way or the other.

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MonteChristo0321 OP t1_jbl69oo wrote

Predicting yourself isn't relevant to free will because being free means that you aren't controlled (or perfectly predicted) by anything else. You are you. So if you predict you, that's fine. You control you. And you can also be free without actually making any prediction of what you'll do.

So violations of your own expectation of yourself don't say much about free will one way or the other. But violations of Laplace's demon's expectations say a lot.

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WrongdoerOk6812 t1_jblr57b wrote

I think that by tickling yourself, you created a beautiful picture of how an observation could both prove and disprove free will simultaneously, determined by how you measure it.

It's almost like saying a photon can be a particle and a wave at the same time, but completely different 🙃

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