Free Will and Religion - Page 12

On March 05 2012 21:43 Skilledblob wrote:
is it my decision to move? yes it is, nothing could force me to lift my leg. Instead if I make the conscious decision to move my leg my brain will send out electric impulses that start the biochemic reactions that take place in my muscles so that I can move my leg.

There is no outer force or atomic movement involved here which I can not control. I move because I want to and not because an electron randomly decides to move down my spine into my leg.

so I think your point is invalid.


on the point of free will in religion. Take islam for example there is no consens in that religion if we have free will or not. Some say we do and some say we dont and based on that the texts are different. And the islam is based on the old testament, so it's not as convinient as you make it out jsut because some like to think that religion begins and ends with Christianity.


the only things that you have to do in life is eat, shit, sleep and die the rest is optional.

No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power and those without. Look there, at that woman. My God, just look at her. Affecting everyone around her; so obvious, so bourgeois, so boring. But wait. Watch, you see, I have sent her a dessert...a very special dessert. I wrote it myself. It starts so simply; each line of the program creating a new effect, just like...poetry. First, a rush. Heat. Her heart flutters. You can see it, Neo, yes? She does not understand, why? Is it the wine? No...what is it, then, what is the reason? But soon it does not matter. Soon the why and the reason are gone, and all that matters is the feeling itself. And this is the nature of the universe; we struggle against it, we fight to deny it, but it is of course pretend, it is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. [inhales] Causality. There is no escaping it. We are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the why. Why is what separates us from them, you from me. Why is the only real source of power, without it you are powerless. And this is how you come to me: without why, without power, another link in the chain. But, fear not, since I have seen how good you are at following orders, I will tell you what to do next. Run back, and give the fortune-teller this message: her time is almost up. [stands] Now, I have some real business to attend to, so I will bid you adieu and goodbye.

By the late 1980s, Aharonov had seen a way out: He could study the system using so-called weak measurements. (Weak measurements involve the same equipment and techniques as traditional ones, but the “knob” controlling the power of the observer’s apparatus is turned way down so as not to disturb the quantum properties in play.) In quantum physics, the weaker the measurement, the less precise it can be. Perform just one weak measurement on one particle and your results are next to useless. You may think that you have seen the required amplification, but you could just as easily dismiss it as noise or an error in your apparatus.

The way to get credible results, Tollaksen realized, was with persistence, not intensity. By 2002 physicists attuned to the potential of weak measurements were repeating their experiments thousands of times, hoping to build up a bank of data persuasively showing evidence of backward causality through the amplification effect.

On March 06 2012 02:25 hypercube wrote:


Reasonableness has nothing to do with it. People have an intuitive idea of free will. Maybe it's self-contradictory. Or it's incompatible with determinism. But defining it as something completely different is confusing as hell.
edit: But certainly not wrong in the logical sense.

On March 05 2012 21:37 paralleluniverse wrote:

To preempt that, I felt that I should write down my own thoughts on free will.

I simply cannot see how free will can fit into what we know about the universe. The universe is governed by the laws of physics, therefore there is no scope for free will to exist. Everything in the universe, and hence every thought and action made by a human is simply the motion of particles obeying certain laws. Therefore, free will does not exist because we cannot choose how the particles that constitute our body move, they move in accordance with the laws of physics. Random or deterministic, it doesn't matter, because we cannot exert influence nor make choices independent of the motion of particles that are dictated by these laws in either case.

As with everything in the universe, every thought and action made by a person is not a result of free will, it's a result of the laws of physics acting on particles.

Not even the intrinsic randomness of Quantum Mechanics saves the free will hypothesis, as this would imply that your thoughts and actions are caused by fundamentally unpredictable random processes. If so, then they are the result of a universal RNG, thus they would still not be free.

The only reason theologians and religious people latch on to the completely unscientific notion of free will is to "explain" why bad things happen. If God is good, then why did he let the genocide in Rwanda happen? Why does he not intervene in the the mass-murder being conducted by the Syrian government, as we speak? Why is there evil in the world. Because God gave us free will, allegedly. This is then neatly tied into the Original Sin myth, whereby Eve exerted free will and chose to eat from the Garden of Eden, and this frivolous reason somehow necessitated that Jesus die on the cross.

Religions abuse this nonexistent notion of free will in an attempt to explain away the gaping flaws of the God hypothesis and the existence of evil.

On March 06 2012 02:36 Hypertension wrote:
The multiverse doesn't save you from determinism. It is simply that the vast number of consistant outcomes occur. You did not get any choice in them happening, they were all predetermined by physics.

On March 06 2012 03:07 Oshuy wrote:


You are getting closer, but that is still not it.

Your last sentence that all possible outcomes are predetermined by physics should not have been added, since it doesn't negate anything here. I do not need an event to be inconsistent with physics in any sense. As long as 2 outcomes are available, choice may exist. Current physics grant me those numerous outcomes. Current physics cannot select a specific future and known laws cannot define which valid universe state I will exist in next, all its states is that a vast number of possibilities are consistent with the current state.

I agree that the main argument against free will in a multiverse is your third sentence: that the validity of the choice may be lost if all alternatives are followed. The only attempt as preserving a true form of free will in that context that I have read about would be Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, but it's fiction and not philosophy (I could have sworn there was a dead pixel here on my screeen ...)

The risk in your argument though is that if I take away the multiverse, you remain with a world where multiple alternatives consistent with physics are available, only one will occur, and you don't have anything available to explain the selection of the alternative. Which means you have no argument against someone deciding to call it free will.

On March 06 2012 03:10 Hypertension wrote:

The part I bolded is the part in contention. What makes you think that two options exist? Current physics only allows for one outcome to any one interaction. We don't have any idea how a "free will" might work. As far as we know, cause follows effect, with maybe some randomness thrown in. There has been no physical explanaion that accounts for "choice".

On March 06 2012 02:56 mcc wrote:

It is not defining it as something completely different, that is stretching it, not even mentioning that you said opposite, not different in your post. That definition is consistent with the people's intuitive idea of free will, just the social one and not the mystical one.

On March 06 2012 03:17 hypercube wrote:


I said, almost, but not completely opposite.[1] I think most people would say the statement: "Your thoughts are predetermined, but that doesn't mean you don't have free will" is obviously false. Hard to check though so we might just have to agree to disagree.

[1]Supposed to be a reference to the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy where the computer on the Heart of Gold that gave Arthur a beverage that tasted almost, but not quite entirely, unlike tea.

On March 06 2012 03:13 ReturnStroke wrote:


My feeling is that even if there seems to be "2 choices" physics will still determine it, not you, even if it has to do it randomly. Is this what you're saying?

On March 06 2012 03:20 trashman wrote:
Random Side Note: those "we found that subjects scratched their ears without making a decision to do so, then went back and made up memories/justifications for doing so" experiments are a long way removed from any sort of real decision making, even something as basic as which flavor of ice cream to choose; that the neuroscience set keeps peddling those results as evidence that we're not in control of real decisions is deeply disingenuous.

On March 06 2012 03:02 Saaph wrote:
I think the only obstacle to total determinism in the Universe lies within Quantum Mechanics and more specifically within Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. That being said though, this principle only apply at an atomic and subatomic scale. When talking about the brain we are not talking about single atom or particles, and if you're considering a set of particles everything becomes deterministic again due to statistical effects.

That's why I like to talk about 'statistical' determinism when talking about determinism. (Not sure if the two words put together makes sense, but I hope you will get the idea behind it.)