Free Will and Religion - Page 44

I don't understand why physic laws is a key element for people arguing against free will. Because since we are talking about 'we' as a biological being or thing (isn't it the same 'thing'), then it's biology as a science that will explain free will, of course as beings or things we are subject to physics but it is irrelevant.

Through history 'we' have explained unknown things through poetry or philosophy, because there was nothing better for us at hand, back in the days the earth was flat because through 'our' eyes it cannot be otherwise, the notion that we could live in the 'south' part of a sphere and not fall seemed impossible. In modern times with our knowledge of science, gravity, etc, we know better, the world is a sort of sphere.

The brain is a complex thing, certain animals do feel emotions because their brain allows them to, as long as those emotions are very basic. Because the brain is so complex maybe at some point for an evolutionary reason we ended up having free will. It is restricted by the environment but everything is restricted by the envionment, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and no, there is no need to bring a dual body/mind religious thing to support the notion of free will.

The brain is the complex structure that made possible for us to take complex choises, all that we have built is because the brain made it possible, 'creating' 'ideas' out of nothing created the technology possible to discuss these matters in this fashion. Evolution creating free will to take survival of the fittest to the next level seems like a good evolutionary tool, after all there is over 6 billions of us and we keep reproducing, isn't that the whole point of evolution? Have more offsprings than other species.

'Free will' just because it cannot be explained at the moment, doesn't mean it cannot exist. Biology one day will be able to explain what is it that causes free will to exist, maybe the brain got so complex at some point that all those things that long ago 'we' could only explain through philosophy, like ideas, creativity, free will, conscience, logic, morals will be explained. But look how all those concepts are good to our survival, actually is the difference between us as a superior species to the rest. Sheer brain complexity, honestly, made it all possible.

Determinism trying to explain the Mona Lisa, Jules Vernes, Michael Angelo and a bunch of other things is lacking, because at some point a decisition out of nothing was made. Out of their own choise.

The greeks argued that a minimum particle existed and that the whole world was made of it, I'm sure back then a lot of people argued that it didn't exist because it couldn't be proved. But the atom exists, it just took a long time for science to prove it. To them it made sense through simple observation that that particle existed, to us through observation makes sense for something like free will to exist. It is my decisition to move my leg, if "the brain took the decisition before... you moved... the leg..." I am my brain, since it is a part of my body.

That I posted it earlier but I'm reposting it.
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Honestly people like to jump into a bandwagon and it seems to me that one of the new cool things to say it's claiming that free will doesn't exist. Of course we are influenced by our environments profoundly some more than others... but, it reminds me a little bit of people supporting communism in my country (Venezuela, where communism is still cool) it doesn't matter how many examples you give them or how much logic do you use because they have the books to prove you are wrong no matter what.

I say this because in one of the videos posted in this thread showed as proof that there is no free will a scientist gives an example about a young guy that worked on railroads who had an accident losing part of his brain, after that he says that people used to say the guy wasn't the same anymore, that he just wasted his money on gambling and prostitutes... but put yourself in that guy's place. You are young, muscular, probably good looking and you lose part of your brain and face, people will look at you like you were some kind of monster it is like it is. I know this because it happened to me, I had an accident and a few surgeries where I ended up wearing external metal nails in a broken arm, my friends had a hard hard time looking at it... (I promised that if surgery went wrong I would commit suicide, I was lucky but it was pretty close, nothing wrong with my brain though), people on the street even took pictures or all looked at me and said things like "Oh gross!", now imagine losing part of your face... it is the end of the world for you, why not use all your hard earned money on prostitutes (trust me you won't get in a healthy relationship with only half your face, unless it's a daughter of Gandhi with infinite love, and even she likes normal guys), and gambling, things you wouldn't do otherwise but it doesn't matter to you anymore, because you will start thinking you are DONE.

I could see that being (part of) the truth. Sure removals of part of the brain can influence people's behavior, but to claim that especifically removing a part will make you 'waste' money on prostitutes and gambling it's stretching your argument too much.

In that same video, the scientist talks about a guy who had a brain tumor and suddenly started to like watching naked kids... his wife said he knew him all his life and that he wasn't like that 'before'. He had a surgery and the tumor removed, suddenly the desire to watch naked kids went away... but then the tumor grew again and the desire came back. A tumor is not a part of the brain, the part of the brain that was removed didn't grew back, the whole thing seems like a silly excuse to me, how the hell does your wife find out you like watching naked kids, maybe she got him watching child pornography or something then blamed everything on the tumor, started crying saying it wasn't his fault and after surgery... with a straigh face says (hey I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve) the desire in him is no more... good excuse for both of them to sleep at night.

My conclusion of this wall of text is: Removing a part of the brain sure can change a person, but to claim that a specific conduct is born because of it, it's stretching reality to fit your argument.

I appreciate your contribution frog, you are always a beacon of calm and authoritative exposition in a sea of petty disagreements. I also give credence to swede's critique. In my opinion your hierarchy of modes of the possible is a meaningless partition of systems with "laws" that share constituents which we casually take to be the same. More precisely each system you named should be thought of as separate with convenient points of similarity that bear the same name. However, I gather it's not controversial and I don't want to contest it seriously because that's just another fencing match over semantics.

Which is so often how, it seems, I reframe things to correct them. I would hope you grant that there is reality, and we are a part of it. The distinction between the physical and "higher up" (aka metaphysical) seems meaningless. There are other directions to go, but let's assume we perceive physical reality correctly and our science is accurate with ever increasing depth and acumen. If we can think of things, those thoughts are built in "physical" existence because our brains are made of atoms, yada yada. Is not the conception of a logical statement a physical phenomenon? Moreover, regardless of what you want to call it, the various constituents of reality must be interactive with one another and homogeneously comprised at some level. Otherwise a hypothetical counterexample would not be a part of reality. So I don't see the necessity of ordering possibilities as it pertains to this discussion. In fact the same line of reasoning I just explained goes to, I would hope, elucidate the decidability of free will as a defined concept. If not that, then it is a meaningless phrase. You said this yourself in so many words while leaving wiggle room for different viewpoints to cling to equivocal validity, but I don't see why. Of course you will see I go on to speak in these distinctions below, because they are natural shorthand, so only take the above as seriously as you might care to.

I will reiterate what I hastily spit out in my earlier post in this thread because I think it could make an impression on those of you who are following the real discussion here. (Presently let me point out my own thinly veiled elitism. Ahem.)

What I would say to you I say from the standpoint that the question of free will is clearly decided, but what I have to say would apply if you still have your doubts. It has to do with what we are able to know -- in other words, information. Disregarding problems of epistemology, there is a limit on what we can learn about the universe (which you can take to mean reality, if you prefer). To argue this in the broadest sense, imagine if that were not the case. It would mean you have perfect knowledge of all constituents of reality. This is tantamount to monism. I will return to this point later, but for now I hope we can agree that attributing agency capable of universal comprehension to a subset of the universe is either contradictory or pointless or both. (To elaborate about the pointlessness, given that were true, things like the passage of time, spatial displacement, any sort of identity due to distinction with a hypothetical other, would not mean anything.)

It seems more natural to me (and surely more practical) to deal with information in terms of our current scientific knowledge of the physical universe than to bother with higher philosophical problems you might incur (because they would have no bearing on results scientific). To wit, my assertion above can be understood readily by thinking of physical properties of matter and energy as data storage. If we know anything it is because some subset of matter (which I'll call brain for convenience without laboring the definition) can hold information because of a configuration of constituents' properties, or some ongoing process of interaction among them (based on those properties... same thing). There is a terribly large but finite number of states the brain can be in, potentially representing a lot of information, though in my conception most of that potentially relevant data is just randomness, or overhead. In any case that terribly large number of states could not possibly be sufficient to cover all possible states of the entirety of the universe.

By extension, if we want to arbitrarily attribute agency to any subset of the universe, it cannot know the universe.

This is what prevents a fated universe from being a disaster of meaninglessness. It doesn't matter that things are deterministic, or may be, or whatever you want to believe, because your access to actionable knowledge is constrained. I would even argue that self-examination leads to no better ratio of information (namely less than perfect), but that's not important here. The thing to see is that even in a deterministic environment, fate is a meaningless notion because existence itself is a constant process of discovery by and among its constituents. Put casually, any person lives in a world where anything can happen and can act freely in that world, because it is impossible to dictate otherwise.

Now, we arrive at an interesting thing to ponder. You may think of a neuron in your brain. It is a complex entity and we might some day ascribe some measure of "awareness" to it, and delineate what that even means and how it contributes to our own awareness. However we would naturally believe that the neuron cannot become aware of the being of which it is a part. In the same way, are we perhaps just a part of an aware universe? That would be one conclusion not difficult to reach if you believe that our "inert" constituents interact somehow to result in our awareness yet themselves seem not meaningfully aware. (Indeed, how could they be when the "laws" that govern their existence don't allow any freedom from their inert, predictable states. So to speak.) So, in the end I think monism is the only available conclusion but strangely we have only a partial awareness. I don't know what to make of that.

The paradigm I am hoping to share here really has less to say about free will than about consciousness in general. Backing up for a moment, it seems to me at the outset that the question of consciousness is intimately related to any question of free will. Therefore in addressing the nature of consciousness one could reasonably expect you might be able to decide about free will. Free will has to do with what leads to your choices. Consciousness is your awareness of those causes as well as the outcome, the choice. I have seen some posters discussing ideas about unconscious entities and their free will or lack thereof. My line of thought is motivated from a similar place. That sort of question is really asking about what leads to a given event. I think the only suitable answer is "everything". Lacking awareness of everything, I can't see how it's a person's choice, even though we have a consciousness that shortcuts that logical conclusion with the de facto experience of free will. We are a machine whose inputs are everything and whose output is the only action it could be, but that process is represented by the idea of decision-making.

On the topic of responsibility of agents (punishment for crime, etc), it's worth thinking about, but I would immediately try to build some kind of infrastructure around this same idea of unknowableness and discovery which functions as the familiar concepts on which much of our social philosophy is based like self-determination, choice, and will and action. This way we don't lose out on meaning or morality simply by accepting determinism. Personally I find those concepts to be antiquated but I concede they are nonetheless still useful in the wider world and there's no reason to let them fall by the wayside, because, for example, you could never explain any of this to a child, but it's very useful to tell a child "it's bad to harm other people".