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Yes, this is a thread on TL that involves religion, but I hate to think that our policy should be to blindly close every such thread. Sam Harris is a writer whose books are both insightful and have sparked many good discussions in the past and as long as the thread doesn't derail I'd like to leave it open. This should be the basic premise for every such thread, no matter how high the odds of it derailing. In that light, these posts that just predict the downfall of this thread (whether it be pre-determined or not) are 1) Not contributing to the discussion 2) Backseat moderating 3) Annoying 4) Actually contributing towards derailing it. I'll keep 2 daying people for this. | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:15 Uncultured wrote: Yep. Done trying. Talking to a brick wall. You haven't made much of an attempt to show how free will is compatible with science. If all you intended to do was to namedrop "stochastic" and link to articles on philosophy, then there's really no point, as the former is a debunked argument and the latter isn't science. | ||
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Tachyon
Denmark146 Posts
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Railxp
Hong Kong1313 Posts
another way I would approach this type of argument is to say, ok say i'm right, or you're right, what changes? Well clearly if i believe in free will i will look both ways to cross the road. But at the same time, a determinism would argue for the same action. So it seems to me the determinism position always cedes to the free will position everything and every concrete behavior argument, with exception to the beginning "free will" part. So i'm never quite sure how to argue about freewill vs determinism. since ... well theres no real consequences or way to convince the other side. As a free will believer, i'm perfectly willing to reverse my position if i loose control of my body one day and it decides to do a little dance on its own, after i hear a voice from the sky commanding me to. Obviously this is a ridiculous and highly improbable scenario, but thats where my bottom line is. Cross that and i'm a believer. That said, i dont see what the bottom line for a determinist would be, therefore i find it very hard to argue and take that position seriously. | ||
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Uncultured
United States1340 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:20 paralleluniverse wrote: You haven't made much of an attempt to show how free will is compatible with science. If all you intended to do was to namedrop "stochastic" and link to articles on philosophy, then there's really no point, as the former is a debunked argument and the latter isn't science. I'd love to see you cite some sources that suggest Stochastic Processes as debunked.... I wonder if you can understand the absurdity of such a notion. | ||
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JustinL
Australia58 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:00 Rye. wrote: So many misguided posts. The argument about predicting the particles in our bodies is flawed. You cant do it. Quantum mechanics allows for things to happen that shouldnt be possible. And therfore are unpredictable. more detailed reading can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunneling Because of this phenomenon it becomes impossible to predict a particles motion with 100% certainty. You dont know when its going to tunnel, it just suddenly does. Physicists use statistical probabilities when dealing with sub atomic particles. Radiation is the perfect example. You can watch a single a uranium atom for a long time, and never know when it is going to decay. It doesnt give any clues, it just suddenly decays. Someone said Well... the laws arnt strict. When dealing with subatomic particles, you have to use probabilities. So lets say you can predict the behaviour of a particle to 99.999999999999% accuracy. You have 2 particles, each has a 99.999999999999% predictability. When looking at them interacting with each other this becomes. 0.99999999999999 * 0.99999999999999 = 0.99999999999998 as you can see, the probability has decreased. Now do that calculation for the billions and billions of particles in your body. I think you'd end up with a tiny tiny number. (This is a simplified example. the real statistics would be impossible to calculate, but would still result in a number close to 0) Perhaps this is purely due to our lack of understanding of the universe. But whilst it is the current theory, unless some amazing physicist comes up with a better model, we're going to have to stick with it. I'm glad you brought up quantum mechanics, it is the greatest argument for free will in my opinion. When thinking about this subject a while ago, that exact argument was the one thing keeping me from rejecting free will. However it is flawed in its explanation of free will. Yes, we cannot know the position and momentum of a particle and thus have to rely on probabilities, which lead to consequences such as quantum tunneling. This suggests that the laws that rule over the processes in our brain are not strict. But when I call them strict laws, I am including quantum mechanics here. Just because the brain follows processes which may have a completely random element does not mean we have free will. Free will would imply that we have control over this random element. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that the human brain can have an influence over random events. When using arguments for free will that involve random elements such as quantum mechanics, you must also give reason for the brain to control these random elements. It will be interesting to see how future developments in quantum mechanics could alter this viewpoint. | ||
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ZasZ.
United States2911 Posts
I'm no physicist, but I know that if I want to lift my leg, I lift my leg. If I want to lift my leg 1,000 times, I do it until it hurts too much and I want to stop. Do I physically control the electrical impulses that cause my leg to move? No, not directly. But unless I have a movement disorder or neurological condition, it moves when I tell it to. Same goes for any of the other "choices" I make every day. Does free will need to be "sorcery" in order to be free will? Seems kind of egocentric to assert that free will is only such if we are actually manipulating the laws of physics. Regardless, what is the point of discussing it? If we can't do anything about it, and the way we operate our societies is based on the assumption that we do have free will, what can be gained from this discussion? | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:26 Uncultured wrote: I'd love to see you cite some sources that suggest Stochastic Processes as debunked.... I wonder if you can understand the absurdity of such a notion. What is debunked is that even if quantum fluctuations are fundamentally stochastic, i.e., completely random and unpredictable, it still does not imply that free will exists. Probably the 8th time I've said it in this thread, without anyone offering a counterargument. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Physics If a person's action is the result of complete quantum randomness, however, this in itself would mean that such traditional free will does not exist (because the action was not controllable by the physical being who claims to possess the free will).[50] | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
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GGTeMpLaR
United States7226 Posts
This specific argument for determinism seems entirely dependent on an idealized scientific holism, which quite frankly, probably isn't going to ever happen. Take away that assumption and it looks like the entire argument falls apart aside from being piece of metaphysical speculation filled with assumptions that needed scientific holism to be more than such. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
On March 05 2012 23:51 paralleluniverse wrote: Yes, I agree that the question of free will is more basic than any questions about religion. Do you really? Why call people dogmatic then? Under the assumption of no free will everyone is dogmatic. You say "free will [...] is abused to justify the existence of evil." But if there's no free will there's no moral basis to condemn this behaviour. Your statement has the structure: "There's no free will. Therefore you should stop using using it as an excuse." Or even more simply: "There's no free will. I demand that you stop what you are doing." Hope you see the absurdity in that. | ||
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Deleuze
United Kingdom2102 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:32 koreasilver wrote: Is Harris even introducing any new ideas in this? Or this is just another pop book. Pop book. I'd be very surprise to hear of any new developments in this area. The End of Faith has a very revealing analysis of torture and subjectivity. But overall it is polemic. | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:37 Deleuze wrote: Pop book. I'd be very surprise to hear of any new developments in this area. The End of Faith has a very revealing analysis of torture and subjectivity. But overall it is polemic. Yeah, I've been reading literature on this topic for a little while and there was basically nothing conclusive. I doubt I would even touch this book since it's just going to be a bad version of academic literature that leads to nowhere. | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:37 hypercube wrote: Do you really? Why call people dogmatic then? Under the assumption of no free will everyone is dogmatic. You say "free will [...] is abused to justify the existence of evil." But if there's no free will there's no moral basis to condemn this behaviour. Your statement has the structure: "There's no free will. Therefore you should stop using using it as an excuse." Or even more simply: "There's no free will. I demand that you stop what you are doing." Hope you see the absurdity in that. As I've said, the universe works as if it had free will. People are sometimes convinced by compelling arguments, although this is very unlikely amongst those who accept religious dogma. | ||
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Failsafe
United States1298 Posts
pretty much it's impossible to be 'free' in the sense of having a mind independent from the rest of the universe because the universe and the brain are made of matter and stuff that in dennett's theory of empiricism probably behaves like matter that we're aware of. so that's possibly an error in the theory that there's matter and field mechanics that we either don't know about or if we do know about their existence we don't know how they operate which means that we can't be said to know of their existence because we can't successfully define what they are unless we have some knowledge of how they operate. in dennett's conceptualization (although he was not the first to 'espouse' this perspective he is probably one of the best people in terms of putting it in a way that people makes sense), anyway in the conceptualization presented in dennett's book about the evolution of freedom; he says that the matter of the universe comprises the universe without much reference to other possible stuff in the universe which doesn't operate like the matter we're familiar with and which isn't necessarily quantum stuff either. anyway to my knowledge there's no successful attempt to merge classic newtonian physics or whatever or way it's einsteinian physics; anyway there's no way to merge einsteinian newtonian stuff with quantum mechanics stuff that we are successfully mathemateizing in equational stuff so, that being the case i think there's a pretty big lapse or gap in our knowledge of the physics stuff that we know about (much less the stuff that we don't know about); so since there's no successful formulation of 'microgravity' or whatever you want to call the merge to newtonian/einsteinian physics (physics of big stuff) with quantum stuff (physics of small stuff) or whatever in simplest terms except for stuff like string theory which is a pipe dream to say the least and probably pretty tough to put into traditional mathematical formulation so since these gaps in our knowledge of traditional physics stuff from traditional physics matter (einsteinian) to less traditional physics matter (quantum) it's pretty tough to draw any useful conclusions from physics about the nature of free will. but dennett's postulation is also philosophical or of some purely logical abstractness in its nature and he claims that it simply doesn't bear thinking about in the human mind that we could have free will because stuff operates according to known principles of principles that are an extrapolation of principles that we think we understand or in other words principles that about which we have an approximation that a lot of people agree is something like what's in fact the case (if 'fact' here is something that can't change in time; that is that water droplets can't fly upward; alhtough in the minds of some people this is 'in fact' conceivable or possible) so anyway i guess the way it might be described about the operation of the brain is that we have a brain made of matter and it's not quantum stuff and doesn't invovle other stuff we don't know about. and so since the brain is matter and behaves according to the laws of physics that we use to approximate the operation of the physical matter in the universe, the brain doesn't do free will stuff because our conceptualization of free will is that we aren't simply wind up robots that just oh fuck i left the hose on and my dog's pen is flooding brb well fuck there was a leak where the hose met the spiggot or whatever and the water is in the drive way in a big puddle and then there's a veritable lake in the dog's pen flowing out into the car parking area and even into some of the plants. some guys are gonna be removing some extra trees and an extra random fence that's blocking my view of another fence that's between my house and the forest and stuff that's behind my house but unfortunately some damn people bought some of the land back behind my house where i used to enjoy sauntering in the forest and they built a house there and i hate them i told my parents to buy that lot and they didn't because they're bastards and it's on the flood plane so maybe that's why they thought no one would build there but someone always does something to inconvenience me so of course they're gonna go putting buildings in my favorite forest area and they even there was a secret path like a road or something and it got all messed up and now it's just like there's a house on one side and there's a little forest that's not even worthy of being called a forest on the other and you still can't see the creek so that's okay but i can't feel like i'm adventuring into the forest now that they've build a house there and it's just like walking into suburbia instead of my favorite forest area so our original conception of free will is that there's some mysterious force or something that is our 'mind' which is separate from our brain in some way that isn't encapsulated in traditional physics, and dennett is of a different opinion that the brain is generates the mind and that nothign else generates the mind like the environment has no impact on the behavior of the brain and that the brain is just a closed circuit or something that doesn't make reference to the body or the environment in which the body is at a time and that the brain is what generates the mind to the exclusion of everything else and that there's nothing in the brain that we don't understand or can't conceive of according to traditional western empiricism that doesn't know everything about physics or anything 'real' about physics that isn't some approximation that's mathematized according to math that approximates stuff that we observe in a very particular way that divorces all phenomena from everything else to make things simple and models comprehensible or mathematizable according to traditional equation stuff and to be honest i'm not sure that's how things work because i think that there's a lot of interrelationships that determine the course that matter takes and that you can't just say well this is an equation for force or this is an equation for motion and this is an equation for impulse and that we can just from this deduce that the brain operates in this way and that the brain operating in this way implies that the mind generates this way and that leads me to be of the opinion that free will isn't real my own opinion is that there are some gaps in our knowledge merging empirical science with mathematics to give an accurate account of physical phenomena that we observe with imperfect tools. and then our need to compartmentalize each element or each event into something that can be summarized in an equation that approximates the behavior that we observe; i think that tendency creates what we acknowledge to be the necessary simplifications required to create a 'model' in the traditional sense; although one of my favorite economics lines is that "we have a perfect model and that model is the world" or something like that and that to make sense of the owrld we simplify the world and then we draw conclusions so to speak about what we see in our simplification which is like to be interrepted according to evolved tendencies (dispositions that are a combination of genetic and environemntal in nature) and that those predispositions 'color' our perception in a 'particular' way so that we see the world in a way that makes sense to us. and then we mathematice what we see according to math that exists at the time of our conceiving our thought and so the thought of a time on a subject is very much subjective despite the goal of objectivity and is so much the product of the person's exposure to knowledge and information and his innate propensities or predilections; so it's pretty tough to draw objective unequivocal and conclusions without biases because of these factors and then there's the possibility of error and also the fact that we don't know everything and so to extrapolate conclusions that are as poignant like the conclusion that there is no free will which is something that i'm sure dennett is of the opinion to be true because it's something he's spent a lot of time in thought about and then sam harris writes a summary of his work in a sensationalist way and isn't this the same guy who coat tails richard dawkins and the god delusion and just does all of it to make money or something like that. so anyway i would take what he says with a grain of salt and if i wanted a real well-developed opinion and argumentation on the subjects of evolution and atheism and free will i'd probably turn to the authors like richard dawkins and daniel dennett who give a more development and sincere account without sensationalist bias to make money (even if they have their agendas they are at least sincere in their effort and truly believe what they're writing about and do their best to give an account of the stuff they're talking about) and i'm sure sam harris isn't a bad sort of guy but i get the impressoin he's motivated other than the true knowledge he writes about and he's probably misleading a lot of people on essential subjects and 'kowtowing' disturbing conclusions that cause a lot of strife and dissent among people who are quite 'understandably' alarmed about authority figures pronouncing that there is no such thing as free will which is quite a strong statement and we probably don't in my opinion have the necessary knowledge to make such a proclamation at this time i'll probably write some morre about this stuff in the high thread or something where i think it belongs lol | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:32 GGTeMpLaR wrote: I always liked Compatibilism and the idea that determinism and free will are actually not mutually exclusive. This specific argument for determinism seems entirely dependent on an idealized scientific holism, which quite frankly, probably isn't going to ever happen. Take away that assumption and it looks like the entire argument falls apart aside from being piece of metaphysical speculation filled with assumptions that needed scientific holism to be more than such. Compatiblism is semantics. It waters down the definition of free will to make it compatible with determinism. If the universe is deterministic, I would be a compatiblist by definition. What is scientific holism, and how does it relate to my argument? My argument is that free will is not consistent with the laws of physics, it's got nothing to do with viewing things as wholes. | ||
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Felnarion
442 Posts
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Uncultured
United States1340 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:31 paralleluniverse wrote: What is debunked is that even if quantum fluctuations are fundamentally stochastic, i.e., completely random and unpredictable, it still does not imply that free will exists. Probably the 8th time I've said it in this thread, without anyone offering a counterargument. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Physics Now you're just going in circles. That very same article proposes a theory for compatabilism to be true, from Stephen Hawking himself. And that's exactly what this all is, theory. You keep citing physics as if this is all pinned down as fact, but even Hawking and Schrodinger both assert that they could be wrong about their beliefs of free will. You have cherry picked that single idea out of a plethora of possibilities and dote on only it, as fact. You keep trying to make it out like I'm arguing for Free Will, when I'm not. I'm arguing that free will is a possibility, along with determinism, along with both of them working together. | ||
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MiraMax
Germany532 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:45 paralleluniverse wrote: Compatiblism is semantics. It waters down the definition of free will to make it compatible with determinism. If the universe is deterministic, I would be a compatiblist by definition. What is scientific holism, and how does it relate to my argument? My argument is that free will is not consistent with the laws of physics, it's got nothing to do with viewing things as wholes. Can you explain what you mean by "compatibilism is semantics"? Certainly you would agree that in order to determine whether "X exists" one should clear up the meaning of X in the first place. Can you think of any notion of "free will" that would be facilitated by "indeterminism" but not by "determinism" or by "some particles moving unlawfully some of the time" instead of "all particles moving lawfully all of the time" as you seem to imply in your OP? I sure cannot, so I think compatibilism is the only tenable position. If that is the case however, you seem to fail to give a convincing argument against free will, since no successful argument could be based on any natural laws governing the motion of particles. I think you might need to try another angle then. | ||
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Uncultured
United States1340 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:41 paralleluniverse wrote: As I've said, the universe works as if it had free will. People are sometimes convinced by compelling arguments, although this is very unlikely amongst those who accept religious dogma. Who's arguing semantics now? | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
On March 06 2012 00:41 paralleluniverse wrote: As I've said, the universe works as if it had free will. People are sometimes convinced by compelling arguments, although this is very unlikely amongst those who accept religious dogma. So the emotionally loaded language and the moral condemnation is just the laws of nature playing themselves out in one part of reality (you) affecting another (the mental state of your readers). I'd still hold that this kind of behaviour is inconsistent with your proffessed beliefs about reality but it would be unfair of me to criticise you for something that you have no controll over. I could, hoping that this criticism, however unjustified, would cause the behaviour to change, but I have a suspicion it wouldn't. | ||
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