Depends how you define irrational. Regardless, none of that has to do with determinism. If you want to fixate on neuroscience, where is the evidence that free will exists? The problem is that free will is assumed to be true because it is the encumbent belief. But free will never validated itself. People just pandered themselves by giving themselves free will. Free will is the more absurd idea while determinism is the far more self-evident idea.
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Free Will vs Determinism: Where do you stand?
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Langdon Alger
Banned
Consciousness is what brains have that computers lack.( Although, of course, the fact that people are conscious doesn't mean that people have free will.) But you're assuming a kind of dualism when you say "brain chemistry that is meant to stimulate you". "You" ARE brain chemistry. Why are you making a distinction between the brain and it's functions and "you". They're the same thing. Also, I would say that it's pretty easy to imagine a sufficiently advanced AI having free will. Data from Star Trek, if he was real, would have free will. I also think a lot of animals have free will.
That's true, but the structure of the decision making machine is fluid, the brain reacts to information by altering it's substructure. If the machine could not react to inputs then it would be non-functional.
So if you have a computer with advanced AI that you consider free will, what is the component that is free will? If every decision it makes is still based on binary instructions that a CPU's architecture can take advantage of electrons to create a deterministic response, where is the free will?
not psycho
Member
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
Compatibilism always seemed obvious to me.
Determinism is necessary for free will to exist. Obviously. Without determinism it would be impossible for you to do anything out of free will, because instead you would do it out of randomness. It is only because of determinism that me being who I am lets me choose to write this post. A person having free will which is not determined by the person themself, and also not random, has never been coherently defined.
Compatibilism always seemed obvious to me.
Determinism is necessary for free will to exist. Obviously. Without determinism it would be impossible for you to do anything out of free will, because instead you would do it out of randomness. It is only because of determinism that me being who I am lets me choose to write this post. A person having free will which is not determined by the person themself, and also not random, has never been coherently defined.
There are many, many deterministic philosophers and scientist all around. So many horrible ideas...
LookAtMeGo
Member
Why is it the ones who believe in free will the ones who have the stigma of having a "god like" figure involved with it? It seems like the deterministic route is the one that follows a set of "rules".
Maybe I should have said life came to be from random events and not the entire universe. Isn't life the result of random events?
And if quantum mechanics is at the very foundation of all that exists, and is random, how can one in the same breath say that the universe is deterministic? Its very confusing.
This is my first time having this conversation ever so bare with me. I do keep an open mind about everything but I have always thought of having free will so naturally I'm defensive of a viewpoint I've had my whole life.
'Will' implies a desire to achieve a certain outcome. How can anything have a will if it does not make decisions based on the information available to it? What would be the difference between Data's decision making process and that of an ordinary human? Without a deterministic component there cannot be a will of any kind.
Horrific acts can be shrugged off if you believe in fate and not in the responsibility of each individual.
"It couldn't be helped" is the most dangerous phrase ever.
Again, for this to be so, the following criteria must be met.
- The separate self is a real phenomena, not a cognitive and social illusion
- This self and its duality allows it to act in absence of factors the organism is innately linked with
- This separate actor of actions in the universe implies this cosmos to be dualistic, with there being distinct, isolated divisions between process and self
This is already implausible because the first point is already not so. Everything else relies on that to be so, and every one of those claims can be refuted by science. We already know enough of the brain and its processes that there's no central mechanism for a self to be hiding, and that's not even considering the wooly metaphysics one makes about such a rotten concept.
It only can be helped with conditioning. Think of the mind like jello, and someone pours hot water over it. Eventually, the jello will melt and there will be left crevices for the water to flow into. Do that enough and the jello has a fixed form that the water will naturally flow through. For the acts we consider harmful and destructive, they are the results of conditioning that produces the mind in such a manner. To believe people have the choice when the mind works in such a manner is pedestrian, at best. One is a result of conditioning, and the only way one would ever act in opposition to what they normally perceive to be harmful is if they've had some conditioning to lead them to question it. Nobody ever thinks their own thoughts and ideas, which should make it clear that what happens are results of information, experience, culture, genetics, and anything that conditions and molds the organism. There's no rider in any of that to be beyond that, because the idea of there being a rider is factually untrue.
All actions are the result of this. There is no fate, and yet, no individual responsibility, for actions are a result of that happening. There is no doer to those deeds, yet no outside driver. What we have is a happening of itself, and all that can ever be done is point to processes and circumstances that result in what happens.
It could be helped if more people didn't have their minds befuddled into illusions of dualism and division, because by getting that wrong one's mind will already be using a factually incorrect lens. Language doesn't help, for this very post will give the impression that you and I are standalone egos, only feeding this illusion.
Tim Lott has an interesting article talking about a state with no fate nor free will, and it might help some people here get it.
Razorback
Member
Isn't the foundation of Newtonian determinism the belief that there is no such thing as true randomness?
And then Heisenberg came along and proved that to be wrong with his uncertainty principle. The state of quantum particles is probabilistic.
Why isn't this the end of the discussion?
And then Heisenberg came along and proved that to be wrong with his uncertainty principle. The state of quantum particles is probabilistic.
Why isn't this the end of the discussion?
Chainsawkitten
Member
Determinism is a red herring. Free will is nonsense regardless of whether the world is deterministic or nondeterministic. How exactly does randomness = free will?
That's the very opposite of what determinism states. There's a massive difference between determinism and fatalism. Fatalism states that certain things will happen regardless, determinism states cause -> effect. So if we prevent the cause we prevent the effect. If the availability of guns leads to more mass shootings then curbing the availability of guns will decrease the number of mass shootings. That's determinism. Fatalism would state that the availability of guns doesn't matter, the shootings are destined to happen someway.
That's the very opposite of what determinism states. There's a massive difference between determinism and fatalism. Fatalism states that certain things will happen regardless, determinism states cause -> effect. So if we prevent the cause we prevent the effect. If the availability of guns leads to more mass shootings then curbing the availability of guns will decrease the number of mass shootings. That's determinism. Fatalism would state that the availability of guns doesn't matter, the shootings are destined to happen someway.
There are two parts to the randomness of Quantum Mechanics. The first is that although the processes are stochastic, trends can be easily discerned. In other words, while individual processes cannot be predicted (in general) larger scale events are produced by many such processes and thus can be predicted. Biological processes are made up out of large samples of systems, which lets us test and predict how pain killers and vaccines work within our bodies.
There's a caveat here in that I don't know exactly how this works when it comes to thoughts. I would expect action to be a result of several responses from different parts of the brain, but I personally don't know if this has been verified.
Anyway, the second part is that even if thought and action is produced by single quantum events, does that really constitute "free" will? When it comes down to it, it's some biological machine that takes some input and produces an output. Here's the part where I drop out of the discussion, since it becomes uninteresting to me.
Tertullian
Member
Water does not have an emotional reaction. Water rippling does not carry the implication that hitting it is in some sense an offense. Getting angry at someone for hitting you, stating an objection to someone hitting you, telling someone they're an asshole for hitting you, etc. does carry that implication. So water's reaction is non-rational or sub-rational, while the emotional and verbal reaction is irrational.
You try to escape from morality in this paragraph, but you appeal to concepts that you have no right to given your position. You say "all we can do is act and think from humanity," but the ideal of acting in a humanistic or humanitarian way is itself a moral concept. You speak of avoiding "acts that are affronts to reality," but that assumed that our morality should somehow be in accord with what's true or real. But why should it be? If there are no genuine moral principles, then "act in a way that is in accord with reality" can't be a real moral principle. Why shouldn't our illusory morality be based on what's false and arbitrary? If you throw out all moral principles, you throw out all moral principles. There is literally nothing you can fall back on to rationally justify, say, treating pedophiles in this way rather than some other way.
We know, at the very least, that we have a "separate self" in the sense of a center of consciousness that experiences qualia, evinces intentionality, grasps concepts, and makes rational judgments. Attempts to reduce all of those things to the deterministic motion of purposeless matter are fraught with serious philosophic problems.
Sheer question-begging assertion. Most people would say that free will is obvious from introspection, and that determinism involves denial of the obvious (that we make choices, and that our choices are causally related to our actions). Determinism is not intuitive at all. If the burden of proof is on anyone, it's on you to prove determinism.
Langdon Alger
Banned
That's true. But the brain altering it's substructure in response to information kind of seem to argue in favor of free will.
We need to get noise out of the way. Determinism means that if you knew every atom's position in the universe, right now, you could input that into a computer simulation, and in that simulation, everything would unfold the exact same way in both the simulation and the real world. That is the universe being deterministic. People who think determinism means that "you got a PS4 because your previous experiences made you biased towards that" aren't looking deep enough. Determinism is debunked. At any given point during our universe, even when it was completely life-less, there have been quantum randomness at work, making everything unable to determine. After The Big Bang, back when the universe was a conform cloud of matter, quantum mechanics made some parts of that cloud more dense than others, which in turn attracted more matter, which in turn created galaxies after billions of years. Even taking the universe at its current stage, and even just isolating the earth, the quantum mechanics randomness of atom positions, would inflict rippling differences in every simulation of our universe. It's the butterfly effect, except with atoms instead of butterflies. Minuscule minute differences would cascade into vastly differing simulations.
The physiology of the brain is equally susceptible to this, where a neuron's action potential would, by quantum physics, randomly be subjected to slight differences in a K+ ions placement, or perhaps change the properties of the ion channels, and in that, delay or speed up the signal, ever so slightly. The way this propagates and cascades, it is completely impossible to determine the universe.
This shows the inherent false dichotomy of free will vs determinism. Due to quantum effects, and even disregarding that, the inherent imprecise system a brain is removes determinism. It means the whole idea of "everything you've ever been is what determines what you will do next" of course might apply in a statistical sense. Most people who experience this reacts such and so. But on an individual scale, it doesn't. The tons of imperfections along the signal path of the senses, the coarse way thoughts mitigate, all of this makes us imprecise and indeterministic.
That doesn't contradict nor support free will. A pencil balanced perfectly on its sharp end will always fall, but we are unable to determine which way it will fall. Is it the same way with the mind? All its impressions are what makes the decision? Well, of course. That's what we are. We are an intricate system of responses to stimuli. We cannot be determined, but we react to what happens. What happens is completely random, as described above. In some simulations, you'd be killed by a car. In others, you'd be a celebrity, and in some yet again, you'd be doing what you do now. It's random, but it's all a response to random. That response is due to undeterministic structures of your brain, that have come from what you've experienced. You are a result of your choices, and you are a result of random. Both to varying degrees.
I have volition. I can get up right now and kill myself. Or just get a yoghurt. If me doing those things spontaneously is due to what I've experienced before, it's still volition. We have free will to the extent anyone can have free will. Nothing is more free than we are. That goes the same for the ocean and the trees.
Yeah, this is the definition I was talking about. It's more of an opposite to determinism than a definition on its own, because by itself it doesn't really mean anything. What do you mean without a previous actor causing it to happen? Do you mean its completely random then? But then you're just talking about a random number generator, doesn't have much to do with consciousness etc. Decisions never stem out of nothing, otherwise it would be a completely random act, which would be meaningless, none of our actions would make any sense. Without a procedure before making a decision, you're not actually making a decision - you're just doing something random. So yeah, this is not really a definition.
An "emotional" reaction is a reaction non the less. The reaction of water rippling is the reaction the water has to something hitting it. You reacting in anger by something hitting you is your reaction. You may call that "emotional" and give that some implicit value, but it has none.
Reading the rest of the post further, it seems you somehow mix free will and morality. That's just a more intricate system, but it's still just a fact that people are people. Water is water. They react differently, but they both react.
It's a dichotomy that I just debunked.
Razorback
Member
Imagine I have a machine that reads me the state of an electron. What if I decide to base my decisions on the readings of that machine. If the electron is in such position I'll take the bus instead of the car to work. If it's in another I'll eat pizza for lunch instead of a sandwich.
No, that is not free will. Everything you do is because of something that's already happened. You're spiritualizing the subject to the point where it's removed from reality. A domino has no means to fall down "by itself". You have muscles that give you that ability. That is not free mind. That is two different things. Have you ever seen a double pendulum? They're fascinating and unpredictable. They can often continue to go back and forth for quite some time, but they were set in motion at a point. We are much like that. We're an intricate set of pendulums, and we all make these fascinating patters by ways of indeterminable motions, much like the double pendulum looks to dance. You are so complex of a multi-pendulum, that you at some point flop down when standing amidst dominoes. That is not free will. It is the same set of things, set in motion, being you, doing the things that being you implies.
You are not choosing to do things "without previous input or agent acting upon you", because those agent have acted upon you a long time ago, and you're simply still going.
There is absolutely no evidence supporting this claim. It's a nice idea and I do think is worth thinking about it, but quantum mechanics as awesome as they are, are somewhat embedded within the quantum scale. Thinking that our brains might be susceptible to quantum physics is going too far to be honest. The probability of knowing the position or the velocity of one single electron is somewhat high. Raise your scale to molecules and that probability becomes infinitely small. Thinking about neurons, action potentials, information flow in the brain, brain networks and so forth psychology is going too far.
Chainsawkitten
Member
A lot of people would say God's existence is self-evident from introspection. Not exactly helpful or convincing.
I disagree with determinism not being intuitive. We are hardcoded to see cause and effect even where it doesn't exist. As the animal I am, I would be very pleased to see a deterministic world that I can understand. X->Y is easy. Probabilities however, very few people understand (I've taken statistics and yet I do the same probabilistic fallacies as everyone). But intuitive does not mean true. Just because I would like to see the world that way, so that I can understand it, doesn't mean that's the way the world is. Maybe it all boils down to determinism underneath, but as humans, we have to view the world as probabilistic. We will never know the position and state of every particle in the universe, so for our intents and purposes there will always be noise. And perhaps the universe does have elements of randomness even from an omniscient view.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. To me, making 'choices' based on dice rolls or the spin of a particle is not something I would call 'free will', even if the 'dice' are in your head.
RumblingRosco
Member
Isn't your post essentially admitting that every chemical and electrical movement within the brain is in fact entirely predictable, save for the fact that humans lack the computational power to do so?
Unconvincingly.
Point is whether or not we have free will... it's useful for us to act as though we have some measure of internal causality. But also be aware of the mechanisms that shape our minds and by extension our actions. This awareness is useful for allowing us to have more efficacy with our internal portion of the deterministic (probabilistic or not) feedback loop.
There is no universal concept of right and wrong. Morals are fundamentally a human construct.
Then that is random. That's not free will.
I can't firmly refute this, but what we do know is that we are rather crude. Sensory input is crudely transmitted. That data is crudely processed, and thought mitigate crudely. If quantum processes would randomize that is moot, because the point is that, physiologically, we are indeterministic by way of our crudeness. I may have cluttered two points, one being that, the other being that the world at large is altered by quantum events, and the other that our crude nature makes us indeterministic. There's a famous physics professor that once he was playing pool noted that a ball that was balancing right on the edge may have no fallen in because of the placement of an atom on the sun. It is a way of saying that the most minuscule thing will change the outcome of the world in ways we can't imagine. Those small things start on the quantum level, and it is basically the reality of the proposition that if you walk at a wall, you will at one point simply pass through because of quantum mechanics. It is that thought experiment taken to the world we live in. Randomness, as stated by laws of quantum physics, makes our world inherently indeterministic. If that doesn't affect our brains, it most certainly will affect random small things that one day might amount to a person begin hit by a car, or not.
The point I was making is you went with a childish example of that there being no free will, that it means you can get away with hurting others and they will not have a response of anger or sorrow, as if those are the results of free will. The organism responds similarly to the water in that an action from one formation will have a resonance, or response, in another. None of that has anything to do with free will.
An example/story of this, while a little wooly, is the Hinduistic concept of Brahman. It argues everything exists in and of Brahman, which is a guiding principle to all that exists, like a ground of being. The story goes that a person, realizing he was of Brahman, walked in front of an elephant believing it would have no reaction to him, for he was Brahman. He was knocked by the elephant into a ditch, cutting up his arms. Wondering why he was hurt, he asked his guru, and his guru told him the elephant was Brahman, too. The point of that story was to show that if that person exists in the ground of being called reality, so does every other form and process that naturally exists there, too. There's no preference or possibility that the processes react in different ways by having a greater understanding of them, for that feeds into an illusion that one is somehow "beyond" them.
The reason I cite this story is to show you that a mistake you are making in this sense is a bit of egocentrism in that you think that you should expect to get away with actions because of the reality free will doesn't exist, and that a response to you with this understanding seems irrational. Instead, in the cosmos as it is, this and that go together. To believe that because there is no free will that there's a lack of response between other factors your organism influences with is very asinine. Your example of free will is a parable to this: by assuming there is no free will, you expect the already natural response mechanisms and process in and of an organism to somehow stop working or be busted. The parody here is that free will has no bearing on any of that, and even if we are to be accountable to the facts, free will already doesn't exist, so your example is already a falsified one.
When I mentioned relying on humanity, I simply meant relying on what is. There is no good, nor bad in this cosmos, for those are merely evocations and projections onto the goings on. This is the first key to get, because most of our moral actions are based on the incorrect notion that there is an absolute plus and minus, failing to realize the plus and minuses only exist in the mind. They're only concepts, not innate real features on what's being evocated. The saying "there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so" covers the point I am trying to express a little clearer.
If we act on morality, as we have as a society, we'll fuck it up. We define people by human variation as greater thans and less thans based on skin tones, live entirely for a social conception of wealth and confuse that as innate, real wealth, we assume division and duality in a cosmos that doesn't have any, and we consistently evocate and stamp our images onto the world, confuse these as innate with the world, and create conflict therein. Morality is a terrible base to be jumping off of.
Prove this separate self. Many people assume this self thinks thoughts, feels feelings, and the like. Awareness exists prior to the arrival of thoughts and emotions, and a core failing of the self issue is one assumes they only are the thoughts and emotions that arise, not the awareness they arise in. That's the mistake here: we define ourselves as the contents arising in awareness, which creates the separate self, failing to realize what we are innately is the awareness that the contents come in and out of.
Think like a screen you're watching a movie on. You may become so engrossed with the contents on the screen that you fail to realize everything you see is inside the screen; you get lost in its contents but not what it's appearing within. This is the significant mistake we make with awareness and the creation of the separate self. This is a core experience one gets first hand with Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, for they're experiential philosophies to help one grasp the difference between awareness and the contents in it. The ego is the contents, and that's not really you, because you are the awareness in which the contents arrive in. What you are exists prior to that ego image, but instead we define ourselves only in and of that ego image.
To make it a bit clearer, it's like this: the separate self is mostly a concept of the mind, for something exists prior to that conceptualization in awareness. The mistake of free will is the mistake of the separate self is that by defining yourself incorrectly as a standalone series of ideas and images, you will naturally assume that such a concept is divided from everything else, giving the illusion of true individualism and freedom, thus free will.
This concept of being a standalone caricature is wrong on any level of sincere inquiry.
I see everything as a probability pool and I do agree that quantum physics are indeterministic, and not locally realistic. But we need to be careful while generalizing the butterfly effect as a mechanism that has an impact at bigger scales. You might be completely right that quantum physics (true natural randomness) has an impact on our beings. If so, you're right, the world and the Universe is indeterministic. But you might also might very well be wrong. It might be that these random effects are true only and only within the quantum realm and if it's so, the world as we know it might be completely determined and as you said, any hypothetical simulation of the universe taking into account the exact same position of every atom would yield to us here, writing and discussing in NeoGAF. Truth is, we don't know. I tend to think that the world (at our scale) is deterministic. Btw, a group of physicists at Delft University just published in the journal Nature an awesome experiment regarding quantum entanglement. You can read a summary in this link!
See above
I've studied some physics and philosophy at my university, and I can only guarantee the veracity of the statement that the universe is indeterministic
They've been things that have interested me since my teen years. The universe isn't determinsitic due to the effects of quantum mechanics. It isn't to say that a planet's orbit might once just do the complete opposite of what it should be doing, because, as you say, on a macro-scale, the probability of such a thing is near naught. However, on small scales, small indeterminabilities happen all the time. Those propagate in very small ways that eventually cascade in a butterfly effect. This is not the same as quantum randomness "ganging up" on the classical physics world. It is the fact that a pencil balanced perfectly on its sharp end will predictably fall, but it is indeterminable to which side. These are the quantum effects that make our world as a whole indeterministic. The way atoms bounce around when they hit each other in the sun is random, which you may have seen, if you've seen fancy circular tracings in settings of quantum mechanics. It's the randomness of excitation and the likes. In intricate manners, these minuscule effects cascade in a way that makes the universe indeterministic. I would argue that the same is true of certain physiological processes. Not that quantum mechanics create free will by way of randomness in our thoughts, but by the way that some sensory input at some time will be affected by a tiny randomness that is completely unpredictable. It is to say that if we had a perfect simulation of where everything is, it would not unfold the same in that simulation as in reality, due to these small effects.At the same time, I'm saying that indeterminability does not prove free will.
Orbis Tabula
Member
Yeah, put me in the "no free will" camp.
bakerbakes
Member
I firmly believe that nothing happens to you that you don't create for yourself. But that builds in a world of forces, free will and determinism being among them. It's all gray.
John Kowalski
Banned
limited self regulatory freedom of choice
cloud_sleep
Member
Notions of self and free will are useful mental constructs but don't represent any fundamental truths about reality. Having an intellectual understanding of this, however, does not lesson the power that these ideas exercise on us. Who we are and what we do are the products of all previous moments, wether they are caused by deterministic or probabilistic means.
I just pulled this out of my arse. Forgive me, I had no choice.
I just pulled this out of my arse. Forgive me, I had no choice.
I'm pretty confident the pendulum will swing the other way, sooner rather than later, where people will laugh at all us for thinking free will doesn't exist.
I think I like the ability to make order of random letters. So that it creates reason in of its self.
I have a 'gut feeling' we're missing part of the picture, the education required to make the right choice here. We don't know what we don't know.
I think I like the ability to make order of random letters. So that it creates reason in of its self.
I have a 'gut feeling' we're missing part of the picture, the education required to make the right choice here. We don't know what we don't know.
1.21Gigawatts
Banned
I think the world is mostly deterministic. There probably are random events in quantum physics though.
But randomness doesn't equal free will.
The concept of free will doesnt even make sense. What would that even be?
But randomness doesn't equal free will.
The concept of free will doesnt even make sense. What would that even be?
The ability to choose different. Philosophers do tend to believe in local agency. I.e ability of a judge or jury to choose if an alleged crime has been committed. I mean lots of people do choose to lead morally responsible lives.
1.21Gigawatts
Banned
I dont believe in something like that. Our brains dont work like that.
We are all the slaves of our genetic make up, our upbringing, our experiences and billions of other concious and subconcious factors we have no control over.
If anything there is just the illusion of choice.
boiled goose
good with gravy
Free will is an illusion, but a useful framework for us to understand and interact with each other.
Doesn't really affect too much except that there is no need for excessive punishment. When we do something bad, we should be treated as defective machines and be removed from society (prison) with the goal of rehabilitation when possible.
Things like suffering and happiness are experiences that allow us to have empathy.
Determinism all the way. It makes life and the human experience that much more precious and wonderful
Doesn't really affect too much except that there is no need for excessive punishment. When we do something bad, we should be treated as defective machines and be removed from society (prison) with the goal of rehabilitation when possible.
Things like suffering and happiness are experiences that allow us to have empathy.
Determinism all the way. It makes life and the human experience that much more precious and wonderful
The Hermit
Member
I though I was The only one who though that.
Anyway, I agree with the notion that we have free will to an extend, a very tiny part actually. Most of it is either determined by past experiences and chance.
But I don't believe in fate or that we are meant for something.
Always-honest
Banned
It's always a bit weird. I make decisions. But ofcourse there is no real "i".
My biggest worry would be people saying they can't influence their own behaviour.
My father always says: "everything happens for a reason". Fuck that.
I believe in free choice eventhough there is no real freedom. Fuck science.
Also, squirt is not piss.
My biggest worry would be people saying they can't influence their own behaviour.
My father always says: "everything happens for a reason". Fuck that.
I believe in free choice eventhough there is no real freedom. Fuck science.
Also, squirt is not piss.
boiled goose
good with gravy
You are pretty confident huh?
The more we learn about the brain, the less mysterious it becomes. Any cognitive scientist worth a damn probably disagrees with you, but you know better somehow. Ah a gut feeling.
Laughable.
There is already tons of research out there that demonstrates that our brains make choices before we are consciously aware of them.
Sorry you want to feel special, but in the end we are apes, biological machines, etc.
That doesn't make the human experience any less meaningful.
It depends on how you define free will. Like is it the ability to make a choice out of a list of possible choices? Than yeah. Is it the ability to make a choice unbound to reality? Less likely.
Yeah, this is a good way to see it.
Yeah, this is a good way to see it.
Orbis Tabula
Member
Definitely agree with this, and I think it's an important point. When this topic comes up, there are always posts like "why does it matter? Whether we have free will or not, the end results are the same." But I disagree. I know some of my beliefs are informed by my lack of belief in free will. It's one of the chief reasons I oppose the death penalty, for example.
astroturfing
Member
absolute 100% determinism.
PeskyToaster
Member
i dunno tell me what I'm going to do five minutes from now and we'll see
Confidence requires proof. The arguments against free will are far newer and less in volume than the arguments that were once made that we had these things.
Free will boils down to this: prove a self. We already know that's an illusion, but it's in that illusion that free will gets any modicum of credibility. How can it be credible inside a falsehood?
Your argument is a pseudo god-of-the-gaps argument to deny the reality that there is no you as a controller in your mind, at least in the sense one normally assumes one to be there.
Razorback
Member
That's just wordplay. Words like control and choice are only useful if society at large agrees on its meaning.
We do have control and choice in our lives. We use those words to distinguish us from inert matter. We can and do exert conscious action on the world. Rocks do not.
We can use language to deconstruct anything and make it seem reasonable even if it doesn't make any sense.
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