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On July 08 2013 11:52 Myrddraal wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2013 11:23 wherebugsgo wrote:
Something being governed by a stochastic process does NOT mean that you cannot influence said process.
For you to show that free will must exist, you still need to show evidence that the brain does influence the process. Show nested quote +A good example is artificial selection. You can influence the outcome of artificial selection despite not being in full control of it. It has random elements, but you can use constraints to force these random elements to take on certain values within a range that is predictable. This is precisely how farmers breed fatter animals and hardier crops, despite genetics being non-deterministic. In the case of quantum mechanics it generally means that when you observe something its probability function gets squished to a spike at the location it's most likely to be (because your observation affected the probability density) Your argument as far I can reason it:
The universe has probabilistic aspects.
The processes of the brain may be probabilistic.
We are able to affect some probabilistic processes.
<Insert logic gap here>
Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. There's no logic gap, because given our current evidence, processes of the brain ARE stochastic. The current prevailing ideas all support that. None of them suggest that the brain operates deterministically, and there are no prevailing physical theories that suggest the universe is deterministic, either. (if it were, then everything else would be deterministic too-but because it's not, nothing can be) The problem is when you say there is NO free will. When you say there is no free will, that means you accept that decision-making must be deterministic. Why? Because in the same definition you used for saying there is no free will, you said that given the same operating conditions, the same choice would result no matter what. No, I accept that it is stochastic, I was only using the deterministic approach before as a theory for why no-will "could" exist, because you are arguing that it "couldn't" and I find the deterministic argument simpler to explain and I haven't seen any evidence to show that it makes a difference, except that determinism means definitely no free will and stochastic means "maybe" free will. And yes there is a logic gap, because you still have not provided proof that our brain can affect the probability. You don't have a leg to stand on until you can fill that gap, and until then you must accept that your argument is not logically sound. Show nested quote +The problem is that this is impossible with a stochastic process. By definition, you cannot know the result of a stochastic process until after it has been calculated (i.e. after its results have been observed). Thus, you can get the exact same conditions multiple times and get different results each time. All I'm doing is saying that by your own definition of what it means for there to be "no free will", the idea that there is "no free will" does not actually conform to physical reality as we know it. On July 08 2013 11:16 lebowskiguy wrote:On July 08 2013 11:09 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:36 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. Well I should have specified, if you believe it is deterministic then yes the same result would be expected, if you believe it is stochastic then there are multiple possibilities with the same conditions, (I don't fully understand the stochastic theory, but SergioCQH tried to explain it in the first few pages of the thread, where it's a matter of neurons firing and which happens to fire/arrive first, though he could not say with certainty if it is truly random, or if it just appears random because we don't have the technology to know any better) Nonetheless, assuming we believed in a deterministic or probabilistic approach, how does this break the idea? The only way for free will to exist if we believe in a probabilistic solution, is if we were somehow able to control the randomness. I am not suggesting that we can or we can't, but I don't see how you could say for sure that we can. The only evidence that you can really give is your own experience, but I would argue that if we don't have free choice, we still have the illusion of free choice, so your own experience does nothing to disprove the no free will argument. Well based on current understandings of the universe, probability has a huge part in physical reality. It's a key feature of quantum mechanics. If you subscribe to modern physics then you accept the idea that the universe is not governed by wholly deterministic phenomena. Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist. Probability leads to uncertainty, and the reason we view things deterministically is partly because the very act of observation affects results. You can influence probabilities (or randomness as you've said) pretty easily-people do it every day whether or not they realize it. In fact, people do it merely by existing. On July 08 2013 10:30 DoubleReed wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. edit: also, you have to clarify the bolded. If it wasn't you who chose for you, who did? Some supernatural force? If it was in your biology, then...it was you? I don't quite follow. Probabilistic doesn't really change the free will aspect of it, though. It's not as if there's different choices. That would just be random or probabilistic. There's still no choice involved. Changing deterministic to probabilistic doesn't really get you anything. Sure it does. When a process is not deterministic you have an element of uncertainty. If things were completely deterministic then of course there would be no free will. Given the evidence, though, there is no basis to believe that the universe is completely deterministic. On July 08 2013 10:36 Tarot wrote:On July 08 2013 10:23 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:21 Tarot wrote:On July 08 2013 10:11 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:00 Tarot wrote:
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A biological version of a series of if and switch statements. I don't quite follow. In other words, if condition X, result Y. How does this account for someone changing their mind later? Condition X occurs but then you don't do Y. You're acting on your own discretion. If you mean that what you do is ultimately based upon your biology, you are not accounting for the fact that what you do very well may affect said biology. It's like a chicken and the egg problem. The inputs change and when the conditions are checked again, the results are different. Right, so now we have a problem of where the inputs are coming from. You're choosing what goes into the function. e: Imagine I do this. Everyday suppose I have a choice to make, to go to a restaurant I like, X, or to a second restaurant, Y, that I haven't been to before. The exact same day repeats itself over and over, and I have no memory of what I did the previous day-thus, the conditions for the decision making process are perfectly repeated every time. My decision process works like this: I flip a fair coin. If it lands heads, I pick one of the two restaurants. However I pick doesn't really matter-some days I may pick the restaurant I like, some days I might not. If it lands tails, I flip it again to determine which restaurant I will go to-heads, I go to X. Tails, I go to Y. I don't make the same choice every time. The input you receive from your eyes certainly wouldn't be the same.  Sorry? I don't understand how you came to that conclusion or what relevance it has to the experiment. On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:
Well I'm not trying to argue for my own belief, I am trying to argue for the concept of no free will in general. I think the most common answer would be a combination of biology and circumstance, (nature + nurture if you will). So yes it would be "you" essentially, as an entity, but not the conscious "you" that lives in the present. The definition of free will that seems most fitting to me, is one that means the conscious "you" is able to make decisions. You can subscribe to a different meaning of free will if you wish, and if yours does not allow for the concept of no free will to exist then that is fine too. But it doesn't make yours any more valid, or anyone else's any more ludicrous. Sure it does-if my concept is logically consistent, and the other concept is not, then of course one is more valid than the other. So far, based on the arguments in favor of no-will, it doesn't actually seem to be logically consistent. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Actually my argument is more logically consistant than yours, unless you can fill in the logic gap that allows our brain to control the probabilistic process. Your argument as far I can reason it: The universe has probabilistic aspects. The processes of the brain may be probabilistic. We are able to affect some probabilistic processes. <Insert logic gap here> Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. So unless you can fill in that logic gap (with solid evidence), your point of view is the ludicrous one from my perspective. "Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist" - I may have made a mistake, from your posts on the last page, I thought you were arguing for why no-will is impossible, I was only trying to say that it is possible, I am not trying to argue against the possibility of free will, as I believe at this stage, that either is possible until we can some time in the future get enough information to figure out which is actually the case. you are not wrong on that last part, consider it a personal victory because shortly after you started posting he changed his defending position drastically :D Now he thinks it's not absurd to believe in free will because the universe is not fully deterministic. At first he thought even decisions couldn't be possible with no free will... Actually, I still think this. No one has yet been able to adequately explain how a world without free will is even possible. That logical hurdle has not been crossed yet.E: I should clarify that my definition of "decision" is significantly different from what I think your definition of "decision" is. Maybe that's why you think I've changed my position. This bolded part is important, because you dodged my question and you state this, so I will ask again. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will.
Dude...seriously. You are not convinced that there is enough evidence to say that the brain influences the decision process?! This was probably just a slip...
What it comes down to is this: You, lebowskyguy and wherebugsgo seem to me in total agreement now on the relevant facts of decision making. You agree that it's people who make decisions by using external stimuli and internal faculties and that they can be dissuaded or motivated by arguments and they can then follow their formed intentions with actions. This is the definition of compatibilist free will. Thus wherebugsgo insists there is free will and finds your stance contradictory. Yet you two seem to think that there is still something missing for (libertarian) free will, like some mystical 'total control' of mind over matter or the transcendental ability not only to 'want something' but 'to want what to want'. All three of you agree that this is nonsense however. So your remaining disagreement on the free will issue seems semantic in nature that's why you will not make any progress. The substantial part of your disagreement is on whether compatibilist free will (or whatever you want to call it) is sufficient for moral responsibility.
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On July 08 2013 15:57 MiraMax wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2013 11:52 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 11:23 wherebugsgo wrote:
Something being governed by a stochastic process does NOT mean that you cannot influence said process.
For you to show that free will must exist, you still need to show evidence that the brain does influence the process. A good example is artificial selection. You can influence the outcome of artificial selection despite not being in full control of it. It has random elements, but you can use constraints to force these random elements to take on certain values within a range that is predictable. This is precisely how farmers breed fatter animals and hardier crops, despite genetics being non-deterministic. In the case of quantum mechanics it generally means that when you observe something its probability function gets squished to a spike at the location it's most likely to be (because your observation affected the probability density) Your argument as far I can reason it:
The universe has probabilistic aspects.
The processes of the brain may be probabilistic.
We are able to affect some probabilistic processes.
<Insert logic gap here>
Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. There's no logic gap, because given our current evidence, processes of the brain ARE stochastic. The current prevailing ideas all support that. None of them suggest that the brain operates deterministically, and there are no prevailing physical theories that suggest the universe is deterministic, either. (if it were, then everything else would be deterministic too-but because it's not, nothing can be) The problem is when you say there is NO free will. When you say there is no free will, that means you accept that decision-making must be deterministic. Why? Because in the same definition you used for saying there is no free will, you said that given the same operating conditions, the same choice would result no matter what. No, I accept that it is stochastic, I was only using the deterministic approach before as a theory for why no-will "could" exist, because you are arguing that it "couldn't" and I find the deterministic argument simpler to explain and I haven't seen any evidence to show that it makes a difference, except that determinism means definitely no free will and stochastic means "maybe" free will. And yes there is a logic gap, because you still have not provided proof that our brain can affect the probability. You don't have a leg to stand on until you can fill that gap, and until then you must accept that your argument is not logically sound. The problem is that this is impossible with a stochastic process. By definition, you cannot know the result of a stochastic process until after it has been calculated (i.e. after its results have been observed). Thus, you can get the exact same conditions multiple times and get different results each time. All I'm doing is saying that by your own definition of what it means for there to be "no free will", the idea that there is "no free will" does not actually conform to physical reality as we know it. On July 08 2013 11:16 lebowskiguy wrote:On July 08 2013 11:09 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:36 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. Well I should have specified, if you believe it is deterministic then yes the same result would be expected, if you believe it is stochastic then there are multiple possibilities with the same conditions, (I don't fully understand the stochastic theory, but SergioCQH tried to explain it in the first few pages of the thread, where it's a matter of neurons firing and which happens to fire/arrive first, though he could not say with certainty if it is truly random, or if it just appears random because we don't have the technology to know any better) Nonetheless, assuming we believed in a deterministic or probabilistic approach, how does this break the idea? The only way for free will to exist if we believe in a probabilistic solution, is if we were somehow able to control the randomness. I am not suggesting that we can or we can't, but I don't see how you could say for sure that we can. The only evidence that you can really give is your own experience, but I would argue that if we don't have free choice, we still have the illusion of free choice, so your own experience does nothing to disprove the no free will argument. Well based on current understandings of the universe, probability has a huge part in physical reality. It's a key feature of quantum mechanics. If you subscribe to modern physics then you accept the idea that the universe is not governed by wholly deterministic phenomena. Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist. Probability leads to uncertainty, and the reason we view things deterministically is partly because the very act of observation affects results. You can influence probabilities (or randomness as you've said) pretty easily-people do it every day whether or not they realize it. In fact, people do it merely by existing. On July 08 2013 10:30 DoubleReed wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. edit: also, you have to clarify the bolded. If it wasn't you who chose for you, who did? Some supernatural force? If it was in your biology, then...it was you? I don't quite follow. Probabilistic doesn't really change the free will aspect of it, though. It's not as if there's different choices. That would just be random or probabilistic. There's still no choice involved. Changing deterministic to probabilistic doesn't really get you anything. Sure it does. When a process is not deterministic you have an element of uncertainty. If things were completely deterministic then of course there would be no free will. Given the evidence, though, there is no basis to believe that the universe is completely deterministic. On July 08 2013 10:36 Tarot wrote:On July 08 2013 10:23 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:21 Tarot wrote:On July 08 2013 10:11 wherebugsgo wrote:
[quote]
I don't quite follow.
In other words, if condition X, result Y. How does this account for someone changing their mind later? Condition X occurs but then you don't do Y.
You're acting on your own discretion. If you mean that what you do is ultimately based upon your biology, you are not accounting for the fact that what you do very well may affect said biology. It's like a chicken and the egg problem. The inputs change and when the conditions are checked again, the results are different. Right, so now we have a problem of where the inputs are coming from. You're choosing what goes into the function. e: Imagine I do this. Everyday suppose I have a choice to make, to go to a restaurant I like, X, or to a second restaurant, Y, that I haven't been to before. The exact same day repeats itself over and over, and I have no memory of what I did the previous day-thus, the conditions for the decision making process are perfectly repeated every time. My decision process works like this: I flip a fair coin. If it lands heads, I pick one of the two restaurants. However I pick doesn't really matter-some days I may pick the restaurant I like, some days I might not. If it lands tails, I flip it again to determine which restaurant I will go to-heads, I go to X. Tails, I go to Y. I don't make the same choice every time. The input you receive from your eyes certainly wouldn't be the same. Sorry? I don't understand how you came to that conclusion or what relevance it has to the experiment. On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:
Well I'm not trying to argue for my own belief, I am trying to argue for the concept of no free will in general. I think the most common answer would be a combination of biology and circumstance, (nature + nurture if you will). So yes it would be "you" essentially, as an entity, but not the conscious "you" that lives in the present. The definition of free will that seems most fitting to me, is one that means the conscious "you" is able to make decisions. You can subscribe to a different meaning of free will if you wish, and if yours does not allow for the concept of no free will to exist then that is fine too. But it doesn't make yours any more valid, or anyone else's any more ludicrous. Sure it does-if my concept is logically consistent, and the other concept is not, then of course one is more valid than the other. So far, based on the arguments in favor of no-will, it doesn't actually seem to be logically consistent. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Actually my argument is more logically consistant than yours, unless you can fill in the logic gap that allows our brain to control the probabilistic process. Your argument as far I can reason it: The universe has probabilistic aspects. The processes of the brain may be probabilistic. We are able to affect some probabilistic processes. <Insert logic gap here> Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. So unless you can fill in that logic gap (with solid evidence), your point of view is the ludicrous one from my perspective. "Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist" - I may have made a mistake, from your posts on the last page, I thought you were arguing for why no-will is impossible, I was only trying to say that it is possible, I am not trying to argue against the possibility of free will, as I believe at this stage, that either is possible until we can some time in the future get enough information to figure out which is actually the case. you are not wrong on that last part, consider it a personal victory because shortly after you started posting he changed his defending position drastically :D Now he thinks it's not absurd to believe in free will because the universe is not fully deterministic. At first he thought even decisions couldn't be possible with no free will... Actually, I still think this. No one has yet been able to adequately explain how a world without free will is even possible. That logical hurdle has not been crossed yet.E: I should clarify that my definition of "decision" is significantly different from what I think your definition of "decision" is. Maybe that's why you think I've changed my position. This bolded part is important, because you dodged my question and you state this, so I will ask again. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Dude...seriously. You are not convinced that there is enough evidence to say that the brain influences the decision process?! This was probably just a slip... What it comes down to is this: You, lebowskyguy and wherebugsgo seem to me in total agreement now on the relevant facts of decision making. You agree that it's people who make decisions by using external stimuli and internal faculties and that they can be dissuaded or motivated by arguments and they can then follow their formed intentions with actions. This is the definition of compatibilist free will. Thus wherebugsgo insists there is free will and finds your stance contradictory. Yet you two seem to think that there is still something missing for (libertarian) free will, like some mystical 'total control' of mind over matter or the transcendental ability not only to 'want something' but 'to want what to want'. All three of you agree that this is nonsense however. So your remaining disagreement on the free will issue seems semantic in nature that's why you will not make any progress. The substantial part of your disagreement is on whether compatibilist free will (or whatever you want to call it) is sufficient for moral responsibility.
What I mean is specifically the stochastic (or random) part, in order to make it (that specific part of the process) not random, but instead controlled by the brain. I admit, I don't have the best understanding of the stochastic theory, but logic dictates that if these processes are random, and he is using their randomness is proof that we have free will then there needs to be some step that links these two together.
I suppose you are essentially right, that my belief is that we have some form of compatibilist free will, though I can't speak for wherebugsgo because he seems specifically against determinism and stated the meaning of free will as: The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Which is much more vague in my opinion.
However I want to clarify that I was not trying to argue for my belief in free-will or that free will is not possible, I was trying to argue that no-will is possible, though like you said it is semantic in that it depends on what definition you use for free will.
As for the moral responsibility part, I agree that was the most interesting, though I was not particularly involved in that argument, as I was only participating in it to show how lack of (libertarian?) free will does not by definition mean lack of choice.
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On July 08 2013 16:35 Myrddraal wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2013 15:57 MiraMax wrote:On July 08 2013 11:52 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 11:23 wherebugsgo wrote:
Something being governed by a stochastic process does NOT mean that you cannot influence said process.
For you to show that free will must exist, you still need to show evidence that the brain does influence the process. A good example is artificial selection. You can influence the outcome of artificial selection despite not being in full control of it. It has random elements, but you can use constraints to force these random elements to take on certain values within a range that is predictable. This is precisely how farmers breed fatter animals and hardier crops, despite genetics being non-deterministic. In the case of quantum mechanics it generally means that when you observe something its probability function gets squished to a spike at the location it's most likely to be (because your observation affected the probability density) Your argument as far I can reason it:
The universe has probabilistic aspects.
The processes of the brain may be probabilistic.
We are able to affect some probabilistic processes.
<Insert logic gap here>
Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. There's no logic gap, because given our current evidence, processes of the brain ARE stochastic. The current prevailing ideas all support that. None of them suggest that the brain operates deterministically, and there are no prevailing physical theories that suggest the universe is deterministic, either. (if it were, then everything else would be deterministic too-but because it's not, nothing can be) The problem is when you say there is NO free will. When you say there is no free will, that means you accept that decision-making must be deterministic. Why? Because in the same definition you used for saying there is no free will, you said that given the same operating conditions, the same choice would result no matter what. No, I accept that it is stochastic, I was only using the deterministic approach before as a theory for why no-will "could" exist, because you are arguing that it "couldn't" and I find the deterministic argument simpler to explain and I haven't seen any evidence to show that it makes a difference, except that determinism means definitely no free will and stochastic means "maybe" free will. And yes there is a logic gap, because you still have not provided proof that our brain can affect the probability. You don't have a leg to stand on until you can fill that gap, and until then you must accept that your argument is not logically sound. The problem is that this is impossible with a stochastic process. By definition, you cannot know the result of a stochastic process until after it has been calculated (i.e. after its results have been observed). Thus, you can get the exact same conditions multiple times and get different results each time. All I'm doing is saying that by your own definition of what it means for there to be "no free will", the idea that there is "no free will" does not actually conform to physical reality as we know it. On July 08 2013 11:16 lebowskiguy wrote:On July 08 2013 11:09 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:36 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. Well I should have specified, if you believe it is deterministic then yes the same result would be expected, if you believe it is stochastic then there are multiple possibilities with the same conditions, (I don't fully understand the stochastic theory, but SergioCQH tried to explain it in the first few pages of the thread, where it's a matter of neurons firing and which happens to fire/arrive first, though he could not say with certainty if it is truly random, or if it just appears random because we don't have the technology to know any better) Nonetheless, assuming we believed in a deterministic or probabilistic approach, how does this break the idea? The only way for free will to exist if we believe in a probabilistic solution, is if we were somehow able to control the randomness. I am not suggesting that we can or we can't, but I don't see how you could say for sure that we can. The only evidence that you can really give is your own experience, but I would argue that if we don't have free choice, we still have the illusion of free choice, so your own experience does nothing to disprove the no free will argument. Well based on current understandings of the universe, probability has a huge part in physical reality. It's a key feature of quantum mechanics. If you subscribe to modern physics then you accept the idea that the universe is not governed by wholly deterministic phenomena. Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist. Probability leads to uncertainty, and the reason we view things deterministically is partly because the very act of observation affects results. You can influence probabilities (or randomness as you've said) pretty easily-people do it every day whether or not they realize it. In fact, people do it merely by existing. On July 08 2013 10:30 DoubleReed wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. edit: also, you have to clarify the bolded. If it wasn't you who chose for you, who did? Some supernatural force? If it was in your biology, then...it was you? I don't quite follow. Probabilistic doesn't really change the free will aspect of it, though. It's not as if there's different choices. That would just be random or probabilistic. There's still no choice involved. Changing deterministic to probabilistic doesn't really get you anything. Sure it does. When a process is not deterministic you have an element of uncertainty. If things were completely deterministic then of course there would be no free will. Given the evidence, though, there is no basis to believe that the universe is completely deterministic. On July 08 2013 10:36 Tarot wrote:On July 08 2013 10:23 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:21 Tarot wrote:
[quote]
The inputs change and when the conditions are checked again, the results are different. Right, so now we have a problem of where the inputs are coming from. You're choosing what goes into the function. e: Imagine I do this. Everyday suppose I have a choice to make, to go to a restaurant I like, X, or to a second restaurant, Y, that I haven't been to before. The exact same day repeats itself over and over, and I have no memory of what I did the previous day-thus, the conditions for the decision making process are perfectly repeated every time. My decision process works like this: I flip a fair coin. If it lands heads, I pick one of the two restaurants. However I pick doesn't really matter-some days I may pick the restaurant I like, some days I might not. If it lands tails, I flip it again to determine which restaurant I will go to-heads, I go to X. Tails, I go to Y. I don't make the same choice every time. The input you receive from your eyes certainly wouldn't be the same. Sorry? I don't understand how you came to that conclusion or what relevance it has to the experiment. On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:
Well I'm not trying to argue for my own belief, I am trying to argue for the concept of no free will in general. I think the most common answer would be a combination of biology and circumstance, (nature + nurture if you will). So yes it would be "you" essentially, as an entity, but not the conscious "you" that lives in the present. The definition of free will that seems most fitting to me, is one that means the conscious "you" is able to make decisions. You can subscribe to a different meaning of free will if you wish, and if yours does not allow for the concept of no free will to exist then that is fine too. But it doesn't make yours any more valid, or anyone else's any more ludicrous. Sure it does-if my concept is logically consistent, and the other concept is not, then of course one is more valid than the other. So far, based on the arguments in favor of no-will, it doesn't actually seem to be logically consistent. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Actually my argument is more logically consistant than yours, unless you can fill in the logic gap that allows our brain to control the probabilistic process. Your argument as far I can reason it: The universe has probabilistic aspects. The processes of the brain may be probabilistic. We are able to affect some probabilistic processes. <Insert logic gap here> Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. So unless you can fill in that logic gap (with solid evidence), your point of view is the ludicrous one from my perspective. "Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist" - I may have made a mistake, from your posts on the last page, I thought you were arguing for why no-will is impossible, I was only trying to say that it is possible, I am not trying to argue against the possibility of free will, as I believe at this stage, that either is possible until we can some time in the future get enough information to figure out which is actually the case. you are not wrong on that last part, consider it a personal victory because shortly after you started posting he changed his defending position drastically :D Now he thinks it's not absurd to believe in free will because the universe is not fully deterministic. At first he thought even decisions couldn't be possible with no free will... Actually, I still think this. No one has yet been able to adequately explain how a world without free will is even possible. That logical hurdle has not been crossed yet.E: I should clarify that my definition of "decision" is significantly different from what I think your definition of "decision" is. Maybe that's why you think I've changed my position. This bolded part is important, because you dodged my question and you state this, so I will ask again. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Dude...seriously. You are not convinced that there is enough evidence to say that the brain influences the decision process?! This was probably just a slip... What it comes down to is this: You, lebowskyguy and wherebugsgo seem to me in total agreement now on the relevant facts of decision making. You agree that it's people who make decisions by using external stimuli and internal faculties and that they can be dissuaded or motivated by arguments and they can then follow their formed intentions with actions. This is the definition of compatibilist free will. Thus wherebugsgo insists there is free will and finds your stance contradictory. Yet you two seem to think that there is still something missing for (libertarian) free will, like some mystical 'total control' of mind over matter or the transcendental ability not only to 'want something' but 'to want what to want'. All three of you agree that this is nonsense however. So your remaining disagreement on the free will issue seems semantic in nature that's why you will not make any progress. The substantial part of your disagreement is on whether compatibilist free will (or whatever you want to call it) is sufficient for moral responsibility. What I mean is specifically the stochastic (or random) part, in order to make it (that specific part of the process) not random, but instead controlled by the brain. I admit, I don't have the best understanding of the stochastic theory, but logic dictates that if these processes are random, and he is using their randomness is proof that we have free will then there needs to be some step that links these two together. I suppose you are essentially right, that my belief is that we have some form of compatibilist free will, though I can't speak for wherebugsgo because he seems specifically against determinism and stated the meaning of free will as: The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Which is much more vague in my opinion. However I want to clarify that I was not trying to argue for my belief in free-will or that free will is not possible, I was trying to argue that no-will is possible, though like you said it is semantic in that it depends on what definition you use for free will. As for the moral responsibility part, I agree that was the most interesting, though I was not particularly involved in that argument, as I was only participating in it to show how lack of (libertarian?) free will does not by definition mean lack of choice.
Just to not bring philosophy of statistics into the debate (which is a whole new can of worms) we could maybe agree that the way the brain is structured seems to at least influence the probabilities of given actions in certain situations. People typically do not act "at random" in the sense that every possible action has the same probability to take place. In my book this would be enough to show that there is relevant influence, even if he rest is a dice roll. Just like you, I disagree with wherebugsgo that the dice roll could in any relevant way enhance my freedom of will. Especially because I do not see any relevant quality that stochastic processes have over deterministic processes. Not all deterministic processes are predictable and some are much less predictable than other stochastic processes and even if this weren't the case, I would not see how the possible predictability would limit my freedom (in principle). In fact I sure do hope that I am predictable most of the time, in the sense that I aim to act rationally which severely reduces my set of choices in a given situation.
I think the power of the compatibilist concept is that is captures exactly the part of 'freedom' that people care and should care about while leaving any additional metaphysical baggage behind. It shows what is different about us than stones, ants or other apes and these differences are demonstrable so they remain irrespective of how he world is structured fundamentally (e.g., deterministic or indeterministic).
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On July 08 2013 05:23 oneofthem wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2013 04:25 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 08 2013 02:32 Zahir wrote:On July 07 2013 23:53 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 07 2013 22:40 Zahir wrote:On July 07 2013 20:02 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 07 2013 07:26 EatThePath wrote:On July 07 2013 04:23 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 07 2013 03:15 EatThePath wrote:On July 06 2013 22:34 Snusmumriken wrote:[quote] The problem of consciousness is not about complexity. You're completely missing the mark. There are many things about what we ordinarily call consciousness or consider part of it that aren't subject to controversy. Aspects of memory for example are likely explainable with physical language alone. The real problem is why im actually experiencing something when I think of a particularly good moment in my life. There is currently no one who can explain or even give something close to a coherent explanaition of how the qualitative aspects of consciousness (qualia) can exist in a purely physical world. In the end we either end up with a physical world we no longer can make sense of, or we pretend there's no ghost in the machine when there clearly is (eliminativists do this). The problem is there is a ghost, that we cannot doubt, but for all we know there really shouldn't be. David Chalmers on Consciousness The appeal to qualia is so misguided; I don't get why this is still a thing. Why can't there be unique states of a system based upon unique inputs? The universe will never be in the same state twice, nor will you or I, first of all because we're different and second for the same reason the universe won't. You make a philosophical hypothetical proposition that qualia could be identified because they could be in principle, and then go on to say that physicalism doesn't handle this. You're right! Why would an impossible hypothetical be manifest in reality? This is no kind of argument against physicalism. 1. How does that have any bearing on the issue at hand? 2. I dont have to make any hypothetical proposition regarding subjective experience, its quite evident to all of us I'd say. To quote Sam Harris, "it's the one thing that cannot be an illusion". There are various reasons for why non-physical explanations of consciousness fail to deliver, but physicalism is just slightly less nonsensical. To refer to qualia is to inject subjectivity into your ontology, and I don't see any grounds for doing this, but more importantly it's just a claim, not an argument. With regard to 2, I agree consciousness doesn't make obvious sense. It need not be intuitive, though? Subjectivity is the one thing any ontology of the world can't do without. To try and circumvent the one truly obvious thing to each and every self-conscious being is just bad science and bad metaphysics. It reminds me of how Moore responds to the skeptic: "This is a hand". Well here the skeptics position is being held by the eliminativist who claims that somehow the very thing that cant be an illusion actually is! I may be mistaken about the unicorn I saw in the forest, I may be mistaken about there being a forest, but its impossible for me to be mistaken about there being the experience of seeing a forest. Indeed few neuroscientists and philosophers of mind hold the elminativist position, among the few are the Churchlands and in some sense Dan Dennett (though it is somewhat unclear to me if he truly is a hardcore elminativist or more of a soft one, I lean towards the latter). More often we find reductionists, but I have yet to see an example of anyone actually making sense of the idea that the actual taste of ice-cream, while not an illusion in the eliminativist sense, is simply neurological activity. That is not to say that epiphenomenalists or property-dualists are in a better place, in my opinion its an even bigger mess in a lot of ways. ps. Some types of epiphenomenalism may be in a similar spot as reductive physicalism with "only" one big issue. Jaegwon Kim holds the position that only intrinsic properties of qualia are epiphenomenal for example, and that qualia as relational properties are reducible. I don't think that position makes any sense whatsoever though. It's not impossible for you to be mistaken about there being experiences, it's impossible for you to NOT be mistaken. Consider that a p zombie (brain without consciousness) would have no way of realizing it wasn't conscious. Assuming that our brains are somehow impervious to the same physical phenomenon that cause beliefs to arise within a theoretical metaphysically 'conscious' person, is to assume to existence of metaphysics from the start. First of all, the possibility of zombies is a pretty hot potato. Not that many would agree that theyre even possible. Secondly, I have no idea what you're saying there. What is a "theoretical metaphysically 'conscious' person" exactly? Why would one assume that "our brains are impervious to the physical phenomenon that cause beliefs to arise", when that is clearly not the case as beliefs, excluding the phenomenal parts, are quite clearly caused by our brains. At the end of the day, assuming zombies are possible, the zombie is still in the same boat as a computer. Or a rock. There is nothing mystical going on when a zombie is "mistaken", and indeed talking about being "mistaken" about having experiences is like talking about a computer being "mistaken". its nonsense. The zombie isn't phenomenally conscious in the first place and its beliefs are thus analogous to the "beliefs" of a computer. I on the other hand cannot be sure about others having experiences, but I cannot doubt my very own phenomenal experiences at this moment. That's what I'm trying to get at, you literally cannot doubt it, whether it's true or not. The conundrum being discussed is why people feel like they are conscious rather than not feel like they are conscious. My point is how do you rule out the latter possibility? You can't, because the evidence for the former is exactly the same as for the latter: in either case, your brain would believe itself to be conscious, due to its chemical/electrical state being identical in both cases. First of all this is only true if phenomenal consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and epiphenomenalism is a metaphysical dead-end in my opinion (and not all epiphenomenalists would accept the possibility of zombies). Second, its only true in a trivial sense. It is similar to the old beetle in the box problem by wittgenstein. The zombie would say he has a beetle in the box even if there is no beetle in the box, but the fact remains: In the zombies case, there IS no beetle in the box. Similarly, the zombie would say he is conscious, but he would not be. If we exchange the zombie for a computer who has beliefs in the same sense a zombie would have beliefs, ie not at all in what we normally call conscious beliefs as they have myriads of phenomenal qualities attatched to them, then what youre saying is more or less that a computer programmed to answer "yes" when asked "are you conscious" somehow shows how we cannot doubt our own consciousness "even if its not there". The whole problem arises because language is sloppy and "belief" has no strict definition. If it had we would have to use different words for "zombie-belief" and our own belief as the zombie-belief is no more than how a computer "beliefs". The computer does not feel pain, even if it "believes" it does. To me there is no issue of not being able to rule out being a zombie, because the one thing that is self-evident to me (and presumably all self-conscious beings) is that im conscious. If I truly was a zombie then I would still "believe" that in a sense, but only in a trivial sense and as a result of the vagueness of natural language. you are cutting eepiphenomenalism too little slack. if u take it to use a negative definition of qualia as whatever that is not physical then kim's distinction begins to make some sense. what he says is that what you feel is meh, but the structural info mirrored by the feeling is legit. will have to get myself to a computer for this... but imo the problem is not so much vagueness of natural language (or that answer is itself too vague ). it's really about trying to represent mental representation while being restricted to incommensurate representational faculties . we can seemingly identify the same situation mentally (pain) as well as in terms of physical description (neuron firing). the mental object populated description doesn't represent its own physical causal mechanism (intuit epiphenomenalism ), but is itself factually identical to pure physical scenario (reductive physicalism ), yet does represent some thing in the world that is not commensurable with physical representations of the same situation . basically the qualia populated story is about le world, but the way it latches, identifies with the world is through the sense of self(or sense of bat lol. indexicals) such stories engage. in a heisenberg twist of sort the physical account gives the facts but cannot give the experience and for the qualia story vice versa. but qualia stories always piggy back on a subject indexical (whose identity is trivial precisely because of the indexical nature) for its hook onto the world. taken by itself it becomes a dubious abstract object with no location the abstract object with a world ly shadow , but we ought to understand that it is still only a shadow
While I understand the gist of what youre saying, youre expressing yourself far too vaguely. Be more concice please if your goal is actually to be understood. Anyway, first I would say that epiphenomenalism is not the intuitive answer, its property dualism or emergentism, though in my opinion they make as little sense in the end as epiphenomenalism. Second I agree with parts of what youre saying though a lot is vague and Im unsure what youre actually getting at in the end. What do you mean by "its still only a shadow"? Are you doing so in reference to Kims account of qualia? The problems with reducing qualia as relational properties but having them as "intrinsic" properties remain epiphenomenal are many, some can be found in quining qualia by Dan Dennett. For example they seem to put me in a similar spot as the zombie. Would it matter was what in my box? Not as long as it stays in the same place in relation to my other boxes it seems. But before I talk more about that, first make yourself clear.
It also seems that youre making the assumption that physicalism enecessitates being possible to express in (or understood by) physical language. Some would argue that while qualia arent epistemologically physical they are so ontologically (though my response would be that we end up with a physicalism we no longer can make sense of if thats the case).
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On July 08 2013 17:32 Snusmumriken wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2013 05:23 oneofthem wrote:On July 08 2013 04:25 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 08 2013 02:32 Zahir wrote:On July 07 2013 23:53 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 07 2013 22:40 Zahir wrote:On July 07 2013 20:02 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 07 2013 07:26 EatThePath wrote:On July 07 2013 04:23 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 07 2013 03:15 EatThePath wrote:
[quote]
The appeal to qualia is so misguided; I don't get why this is still a thing. Why can't there be unique states of a system based upon unique inputs? The universe will never be in the same state twice, nor will you or I, first of all because we're different and second for the same reason the universe won't. You make a philosophical hypothetical proposition that qualia could be identified because they could be in principle, and then go on to say that physicalism doesn't handle this. You're right! Why would an impossible hypothetical be manifest in reality? This is no kind of argument against physicalism. 1. How does that have any bearing on the issue at hand? 2. I dont have to make any hypothetical proposition regarding subjective experience, its quite evident to all of us I'd say. To quote Sam Harris, "it's the one thing that cannot be an illusion". There are various reasons for why non-physical explanations of consciousness fail to deliver, but physicalism is just slightly less nonsensical. To refer to qualia is to inject subjectivity into your ontology, and I don't see any grounds for doing this, but more importantly it's just a claim, not an argument. With regard to 2, I agree consciousness doesn't make obvious sense. It need not be intuitive, though? Subjectivity is the one thing any ontology of the world can't do without. To try and circumvent the one truly obvious thing to each and every self-conscious being is just bad science and bad metaphysics. It reminds me of how Moore responds to the skeptic: "This is a hand". Well here the skeptics position is being held by the eliminativist who claims that somehow the very thing that cant be an illusion actually is! I may be mistaken about the unicorn I saw in the forest, I may be mistaken about there being a forest, but its impossible for me to be mistaken about there being the experience of seeing a forest. Indeed few neuroscientists and philosophers of mind hold the elminativist position, among the few are the Churchlands and in some sense Dan Dennett (though it is somewhat unclear to me if he truly is a hardcore elminativist or more of a soft one, I lean towards the latter). More often we find reductionists, but I have yet to see an example of anyone actually making sense of the idea that the actual taste of ice-cream, while not an illusion in the eliminativist sense, is simply neurological activity. That is not to say that epiphenomenalists or property-dualists are in a better place, in my opinion its an even bigger mess in a lot of ways. ps. Some types of epiphenomenalism may be in a similar spot as reductive physicalism with "only" one big issue. Jaegwon Kim holds the position that only intrinsic properties of qualia are epiphenomenal for example, and that qualia as relational properties are reducible. I don't think that position makes any sense whatsoever though. It's not impossible for you to be mistaken about there being experiences, it's impossible for you to NOT be mistaken. Consider that a p zombie (brain without consciousness) would have no way of realizing it wasn't conscious. Assuming that our brains are somehow impervious to the same physical phenomenon that cause beliefs to arise within a theoretical metaphysically 'conscious' person, is to assume to existence of metaphysics from the start. First of all, the possibility of zombies is a pretty hot potato. Not that many would agree that theyre even possible. Secondly, I have no idea what you're saying there. What is a "theoretical metaphysically 'conscious' person" exactly? Why would one assume that "our brains are impervious to the physical phenomenon that cause beliefs to arise", when that is clearly not the case as beliefs, excluding the phenomenal parts, are quite clearly caused by our brains. At the end of the day, assuming zombies are possible, the zombie is still in the same boat as a computer. Or a rock. There is nothing mystical going on when a zombie is "mistaken", and indeed talking about being "mistaken" about having experiences is like talking about a computer being "mistaken". its nonsense. The zombie isn't phenomenally conscious in the first place and its beliefs are thus analogous to the "beliefs" of a computer. I on the other hand cannot be sure about others having experiences, but I cannot doubt my very own phenomenal experiences at this moment. That's what I'm trying to get at, you literally cannot doubt it, whether it's true or not. The conundrum being discussed is why people feel like they are conscious rather than not feel like they are conscious. My point is how do you rule out the latter possibility? You can't, because the evidence for the former is exactly the same as for the latter: in either case, your brain would believe itself to be conscious, due to its chemical/electrical state being identical in both cases. First of all this is only true if phenomenal consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and epiphenomenalism is a metaphysical dead-end in my opinion (and not all epiphenomenalists would accept the possibility of zombies). Second, its only true in a trivial sense. It is similar to the old beetle in the box problem by wittgenstein. The zombie would say he has a beetle in the box even if there is no beetle in the box, but the fact remains: In the zombies case, there IS no beetle in the box. Similarly, the zombie would say he is conscious, but he would not be. If we exchange the zombie for a computer who has beliefs in the same sense a zombie would have beliefs, ie not at all in what we normally call conscious beliefs as they have myriads of phenomenal qualities attatched to them, then what youre saying is more or less that a computer programmed to answer "yes" when asked "are you conscious" somehow shows how we cannot doubt our own consciousness "even if its not there". The whole problem arises because language is sloppy and "belief" has no strict definition. If it had we would have to use different words for "zombie-belief" and our own belief as the zombie-belief is no more than how a computer "beliefs". The computer does not feel pain, even if it "believes" it does. To me there is no issue of not being able to rule out being a zombie, because the one thing that is self-evident to me (and presumably all self-conscious beings) is that im conscious. If I truly was a zombie then I would still "believe" that in a sense, but only in a trivial sense and as a result of the vagueness of natural language. you are cutting eepiphenomenalism too little slack. if u take it to use a negative definition of qualia as whatever that is not physical then kim's distinction begins to make some sense. what he says is that what you feel is meh, but the structural info mirrored by the feeling is legit. will have to get myself to a computer for this... but imo the problem is not so much vagueness of natural language (or that answer is itself too vague ). it's really about trying to represent mental representation while being restricted to incommensurate representational faculties . we can seemingly identify the same situation mentally (pain) as well as in terms of physical description (neuron firing). the mental object populated description doesn't represent its own physical causal mechanism (intuit epiphenomenalism ), but is itself factually identical to pure physical scenario (reductive physicalism ), yet does represent some thing in the world that is not commensurable with physical representations of the same situation . basically the qualia populated story is about le world, but the way it latches, identifies with the world is through the sense of self(or sense of bat lol. indexicals) such stories engage. in a heisenberg twist of sort the physical account gives the facts but cannot give the experience and for the qualia story vice versa. but qualia stories always piggy back on a subject indexical (whose identity is trivial precisely because of the indexical nature) for its hook onto the world. taken by itself it becomes a dubious abstract object with no location the abstract object with a world ly shadow , but we ought to understand that it is still only a shadow While I understand the gist of what youre saying, youre expressing yourself far too vaguely. Be more concice please if your goal is actually to be understood. Anyway, first I would say that epiphenomenalism is not the intuitive answer, its property dualism or emergentism, though in my opinion they make as little sense in the end as epiphenomenalism. Second I agree with parts of what youre saying though a lot is vague and Im unsure what youre actually getting at in the end. What do you mean by "its still only a shadow"? Are you doing so in reference to Kims account of qualia? The problems with reducing qualia as relational properties but having them as "intrinsic" properties remain epiphenomenal are many, some can be found in quining qualia by Dan Dennett. For example they seem to put me in a similar spot as the zombie. Would it matter was what in my box? Not as long as it stays in the same place in relation to my other boxes it seems. But before I talk more about that, first make yourself clear. It also seems that youre making the assumption that physicalism enecessitates being possible to express in (or understood by) physical language. Some would argue that while qualia arent epistemologically physical they are so ontologically (though my response would be that we end up with a physicalism we no longer can make sense of if thats the case).
Could you flesh out the bolded part a bit more! I was under the impression that epiphenomenalism is a form of property dualism?! Or do you mean substance dualism here? Could you further elaborate why you think the emergentist account makes 'as little sense'. Are you talking about ontological or epistemological emergentism? And is your main issue that the account is not substantive enough yet or do you see some insurmountable conflict in the approach?
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On July 08 2013 16:35 Myrddraal wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2013 15:57 MiraMax wrote:On July 08 2013 11:52 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 11:23 wherebugsgo wrote:
Something being governed by a stochastic process does NOT mean that you cannot influence said process.
For you to show that free will must exist, you still need to show evidence that the brain does influence the process. A good example is artificial selection. You can influence the outcome of artificial selection despite not being in full control of it. It has random elements, but you can use constraints to force these random elements to take on certain values within a range that is predictable. This is precisely how farmers breed fatter animals and hardier crops, despite genetics being non-deterministic. In the case of quantum mechanics it generally means that when you observe something its probability function gets squished to a spike at the location it's most likely to be (because your observation affected the probability density) Your argument as far I can reason it:
The universe has probabilistic aspects.
The processes of the brain may be probabilistic.
We are able to affect some probabilistic processes.
<Insert logic gap here>
Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. There's no logic gap, because given our current evidence, processes of the brain ARE stochastic. The current prevailing ideas all support that. None of them suggest that the brain operates deterministically, and there are no prevailing physical theories that suggest the universe is deterministic, either. (if it were, then everything else would be deterministic too-but because it's not, nothing can be) The problem is when you say there is NO free will. When you say there is no free will, that means you accept that decision-making must be deterministic. Why? Because in the same definition you used for saying there is no free will, you said that given the same operating conditions, the same choice would result no matter what. No, I accept that it is stochastic, I was only using the deterministic approach before as a theory for why no-will "could" exist, because you are arguing that it "couldn't" and I find the deterministic argument simpler to explain and I haven't seen any evidence to show that it makes a difference, except that determinism means definitely no free will and stochastic means "maybe" free will. And yes there is a logic gap, because you still have not provided proof that our brain can affect the probability. You don't have a leg to stand on until you can fill that gap, and until then you must accept that your argument is not logically sound. The problem is that this is impossible with a stochastic process. By definition, you cannot know the result of a stochastic process until after it has been calculated (i.e. after its results have been observed). Thus, you can get the exact same conditions multiple times and get different results each time. All I'm doing is saying that by your own definition of what it means for there to be "no free will", the idea that there is "no free will" does not actually conform to physical reality as we know it. On July 08 2013 11:16 lebowskiguy wrote:On July 08 2013 11:09 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:36 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. Well I should have specified, if you believe it is deterministic then yes the same result would be expected, if you believe it is stochastic then there are multiple possibilities with the same conditions, (I don't fully understand the stochastic theory, but SergioCQH tried to explain it in the first few pages of the thread, where it's a matter of neurons firing and which happens to fire/arrive first, though he could not say with certainty if it is truly random, or if it just appears random because we don't have the technology to know any better) Nonetheless, assuming we believed in a deterministic or probabilistic approach, how does this break the idea? The only way for free will to exist if we believe in a probabilistic solution, is if we were somehow able to control the randomness. I am not suggesting that we can or we can't, but I don't see how you could say for sure that we can. The only evidence that you can really give is your own experience, but I would argue that if we don't have free choice, we still have the illusion of free choice, so your own experience does nothing to disprove the no free will argument. Well based on current understandings of the universe, probability has a huge part in physical reality. It's a key feature of quantum mechanics. If you subscribe to modern physics then you accept the idea that the universe is not governed by wholly deterministic phenomena. Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist. Probability leads to uncertainty, and the reason we view things deterministically is partly because the very act of observation affects results. You can influence probabilities (or randomness as you've said) pretty easily-people do it every day whether or not they realize it. In fact, people do it merely by existing. On July 08 2013 10:30 DoubleReed wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:10 Myrddraal wrote:
"It means you'll always make the same choice no matter what, which means there was never a choice to begin with." It means that given the exact same circumstances from the beginning of your life to now you would yes, however something in your life had gone differently, you may have made a different choice. Either way you participate in the act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities, either way you have the illusion that you had control over that choice. There was a choice, just because your conscious being was not the one who ultimately decides what to choose, does not make it any less of a choice. Except, this is where it breaks. This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. edit: also, you have to clarify the bolded. If it wasn't you who chose for you, who did? Some supernatural force? If it was in your biology, then...it was you? I don't quite follow. Probabilistic doesn't really change the free will aspect of it, though. It's not as if there's different choices. That would just be random or probabilistic. There's still no choice involved. Changing deterministic to probabilistic doesn't really get you anything. Sure it does. When a process is not deterministic you have an element of uncertainty. If things were completely deterministic then of course there would be no free will. Given the evidence, though, there is no basis to believe that the universe is completely deterministic. On July 08 2013 10:36 Tarot wrote:On July 08 2013 10:23 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:21 Tarot wrote:
[quote]
The inputs change and when the conditions are checked again, the results are different. Right, so now we have a problem of where the inputs are coming from. You're choosing what goes into the function. e: Imagine I do this. Everyday suppose I have a choice to make, to go to a restaurant I like, X, or to a second restaurant, Y, that I haven't been to before. The exact same day repeats itself over and over, and I have no memory of what I did the previous day-thus, the conditions for the decision making process are perfectly repeated every time. My decision process works like this: I flip a fair coin. If it lands heads, I pick one of the two restaurants. However I pick doesn't really matter-some days I may pick the restaurant I like, some days I might not. If it lands tails, I flip it again to determine which restaurant I will go to-heads, I go to X. Tails, I go to Y. I don't make the same choice every time. The input you receive from your eyes certainly wouldn't be the same. Sorry? I don't understand how you came to that conclusion or what relevance it has to the experiment. On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:
Well I'm not trying to argue for my own belief, I am trying to argue for the concept of no free will in general. I think the most common answer would be a combination of biology and circumstance, (nature + nurture if you will). So yes it would be "you" essentially, as an entity, but not the conscious "you" that lives in the present. The definition of free will that seems most fitting to me, is one that means the conscious "you" is able to make decisions. You can subscribe to a different meaning of free will if you wish, and if yours does not allow for the concept of no free will to exist then that is fine too. But it doesn't make yours any more valid, or anyone else's any more ludicrous. Sure it does-if my concept is logically consistent, and the other concept is not, then of course one is more valid than the other. So far, based on the arguments in favor of no-will, it doesn't actually seem to be logically consistent. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Actually my argument is more logically consistant than yours, unless you can fill in the logic gap that allows our brain to control the probabilistic process. Your argument as far I can reason it: The universe has probabilistic aspects. The processes of the brain may be probabilistic. We are able to affect some probabilistic processes. <Insert logic gap here> Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. So unless you can fill in that logic gap (with solid evidence), your point of view is the ludicrous one from my perspective. "Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist" - I may have made a mistake, from your posts on the last page, I thought you were arguing for why no-will is impossible, I was only trying to say that it is possible, I am not trying to argue against the possibility of free will, as I believe at this stage, that either is possible until we can some time in the future get enough information to figure out which is actually the case. you are not wrong on that last part, consider it a personal victory because shortly after you started posting he changed his defending position drastically :D Now he thinks it's not absurd to believe in free will because the universe is not fully deterministic. At first he thought even decisions couldn't be possible with no free will... Actually, I still think this. No one has yet been able to adequately explain how a world without free will is even possible. That logical hurdle has not been crossed yet.E: I should clarify that my definition of "decision" is significantly different from what I think your definition of "decision" is. Maybe that's why you think I've changed my position. This bolded part is important, because you dodged my question and you state this, so I will ask again. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Dude...seriously. You are not convinced that there is enough evidence to say that the brain influences the decision process?! This was probably just a slip... What it comes down to is this: You, lebowskyguy and wherebugsgo seem to me in total agreement now on the relevant facts of decision making. You agree that it's people who make decisions by using external stimuli and internal faculties and that they can be dissuaded or motivated by arguments and they can then follow their formed intentions with actions. This is the definition of compatibilist free will. Thus wherebugsgo insists there is free will and finds your stance contradictory. Yet you two seem to think that there is still something missing for (libertarian) free will, like some mystical 'total control' of mind over matter or the transcendental ability not only to 'want something' but 'to want what to want'. All three of you agree that this is nonsense however. So your remaining disagreement on the free will issue seems semantic in nature that's why you will not make any progress. The substantial part of your disagreement is on whether compatibilist free will (or whatever you want to call it) is sufficient for moral responsibility. What I mean is specifically the stochastic (or random) part, in order to make it (that specific part of the process) not random, but instead controlled by the brain. I admit, I don't have the best understanding of the stochastic theory, but logic dictates that if these processes are random, and he is using their randomness is proof that we have free will then there needs to be some step that links these two together. I suppose you are essentially right, that my belief is that we have some form of compatibilist free will, though I can't speak for wherebugsgo because he seems specifically against determinism and stated the meaning of free will as: The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Which is much more vague in my opinion. However I want to clarify that I was not trying to argue for my belief in free-will or that free will is not possible, I was trying to argue that no-will is possible, though like you said it is semantic in that it depends on what definition you use for free will. As for the moral responsibility part, I agree that was the most interesting, though I was not particularly involved in that argument, as I was only participating in it to show how lack of (libertarian?) free will does not by definition mean lack of choice.
You should study stochastic processes, or really just some basic neuroscience (I'm not a neuroscientist, but I do know the basic workings of neural networks and neurons because of my interests and work in AI)
What you're saying is similar to the smear that creationists put on evolution, that natural selection is a "random" process because it has random elements. That's not true at all. Evolution is not directed but it's one of the furthest things from random.
The human brain clearly does not function randomly. It is governed by stochastic processes as its inner workings, but to say that an individual is not "in control" of the decision-making process is pretty naive. There is no way to "control" the random element, just as in QM there is no way to simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle. This does NOT however mean that the process itself is uncontrollable or random. A small part of it may be random, and the rest of it can use that randomness in a (relatively) predictable way.
Objectively, by the definition you are using, no-will is not possible. By definition it needs a deterministic decision process, which is clearly wrong for the same reason Newton was wrong about forces. At best, the brain is approximately deterministic on a macroscopic level, but "approximately" is not good enough if you want to eliminate uncertainty, which is what is necessary to support no-will.
E: and to clarify, yes, I do support compatibilism.
Determinism exists in the sense that everything that has already happened can be strung together as a chain of deterministic causes and effects. Even if a process is not deterministic, if it has already occurred, and its results are observable, then in hindsight you can trace its causes.
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"Determinism exists in the sense that everything that has already happened can be strung together as a chain of deterministic causes and effects. Even if a process is not deterministic, if it has already occurred, and its results are observable, then in hindsight you can trace its causes."
No i dont see how this is possible, The specific outcome of a truly stochastic process has no cause (though the stochastic process itself can have a cause of course), if there was a cause its outcome would no longer be stochastic?
Stochastic or deterministic does not matter for free will, in neither case you can realy speak of a free will (though i am aware that some people here have different definitions of free will wich would allow for it)
Maybe free will can be seen as the way in wich order emerges from the stochastic processes in our brain.
Free will could then be a mathematical concept and a by product/emergent phenomena of stochastic events.and the free will we experience is infact the "will" of the math, the way in wich mathematics "creates" order out of a huge amount of random processes. With different outcomes of the stochastic processes different orders will emerge.
For a specific outcome of the stochastic processes the order will be deterministic,from the same outcome of the stochastic processes the same order will always emerge.
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On July 09 2013 07:50 Rassy wrote:
"Determinism exists in the sense that everything that has already happened can be strung together as a chain of deterministic causes and effects. Even if a process is not deterministic, if it has already occurred, and its results are observable, then in hindsight you can trace its causes."
No i dont see how this is possible, The specific outcome of a truly stochastic process has no cause (though the stochastic process itself can have a cause of course), if there was a cause its outcome would no longer be stochastic?
Stochastic or deterministic does not matter for free will, in neither case you can realy speak of a free will (though i am aware that some people here have different definitions of free will wich would allow for it)
Maybe free will can be seen as the way in wich order emerges from the stochastic processes in our brain.
Free will could then be a mathematical concept and a by product/emergent phenomena of stochastic events.and the free will we experience is infact the "will" of the math, the way in wich mathematics "creates" order out of a huge amount of random processes. With different outcomes of the stochastic processes different orders will emerge.
For a specific outcome of the stochastic processes the order will be deterministic,from the same outcome of the stochastic processes the same order will always emerge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic#Statistics_is_indeterministic
I think we're hung up on semantics here-I don't actually disagree with anything you've said.
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On July 09 2013 02:00 wherebugsgo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2013 16:35 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 15:57 MiraMax wrote:On July 08 2013 11:52 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 11:23 wherebugsgo wrote:
Something being governed by a stochastic process does NOT mean that you cannot influence said process.
For you to show that free will must exist, you still need to show evidence that the brain does influence the process. A good example is artificial selection. You can influence the outcome of artificial selection despite not being in full control of it. It has random elements, but you can use constraints to force these random elements to take on certain values within a range that is predictable. This is precisely how farmers breed fatter animals and hardier crops, despite genetics being non-deterministic. In the case of quantum mechanics it generally means that when you observe something its probability function gets squished to a spike at the location it's most likely to be (because your observation affected the probability density) Your argument as far I can reason it:
The universe has probabilistic aspects.
The processes of the brain may be probabilistic.
We are able to affect some probabilistic processes.
<Insert logic gap here>
Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. There's no logic gap, because given our current evidence, processes of the brain ARE stochastic. The current prevailing ideas all support that. None of them suggest that the brain operates deterministically, and there are no prevailing physical theories that suggest the universe is deterministic, either. (if it were, then everything else would be deterministic too-but because it's not, nothing can be) The problem is when you say there is NO free will. When you say there is no free will, that means you accept that decision-making must be deterministic. Why? Because in the same definition you used for saying there is no free will, you said that given the same operating conditions, the same choice would result no matter what. No, I accept that it is stochastic, I was only using the deterministic approach before as a theory for why no-will "could" exist, because you are arguing that it "couldn't" and I find the deterministic argument simpler to explain and I haven't seen any evidence to show that it makes a difference, except that determinism means definitely no free will and stochastic means "maybe" free will. And yes there is a logic gap, because you still have not provided proof that our brain can affect the probability. You don't have a leg to stand on until you can fill that gap, and until then you must accept that your argument is not logically sound. The problem is that this is impossible with a stochastic process. By definition, you cannot know the result of a stochastic process until after it has been calculated (i.e. after its results have been observed). Thus, you can get the exact same conditions multiple times and get different results each time. All I'm doing is saying that by your own definition of what it means for there to be "no free will", the idea that there is "no free will" does not actually conform to physical reality as we know it. On July 08 2013 11:16 lebowskiguy wrote:On July 08 2013 11:09 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:36 wherebugsgo wrote:On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:
[quote]
Except, this is where it breaks.
This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result. Well I should have specified, if you believe it is deterministic then yes the same result would be expected, if you believe it is stochastic then there are multiple possibilities with the same conditions, (I don't fully understand the stochastic theory, but SergioCQH tried to explain it in the first few pages of the thread, where it's a matter of neurons firing and which happens to fire/arrive first, though he could not say with certainty if it is truly random, or if it just appears random because we don't have the technology to know any better) Nonetheless, assuming we believed in a deterministic or probabilistic approach, how does this break the idea? The only way for free will to exist if we believe in a probabilistic solution, is if we were somehow able to control the randomness. I am not suggesting that we can or we can't, but I don't see how you could say for sure that we can. The only evidence that you can really give is your own experience, but I would argue that if we don't have free choice, we still have the illusion of free choice, so your own experience does nothing to disprove the no free will argument. Well based on current understandings of the universe, probability has a huge part in physical reality. It's a key feature of quantum mechanics. If you subscribe to modern physics then you accept the idea that the universe is not governed by wholly deterministic phenomena. Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist. Probability leads to uncertainty, and the reason we view things deterministically is partly because the very act of observation affects results. You can influence probabilities (or randomness as you've said) pretty easily-people do it every day whether or not they realize it. In fact, people do it merely by existing. On July 08 2013 10:30 DoubleReed wrote:On July 08 2013 10:17 wherebugsgo wrote:
[quote]
Except, this is where it breaks.
This assumes your decision-making process is deterministic. If it's not (suppose it's probabilistic) then you can have exactly the same set of conditions twice (assuming that were possible) and two different choices as a result.
edit:
also, you have to clarify the bolded. If it wasn't you who chose for you, who did? Some supernatural force? If it was in your biology, then...it was you? I don't quite follow. Probabilistic doesn't really change the free will aspect of it, though. It's not as if there's different choices. That would just be random or probabilistic. There's still no choice involved. Changing deterministic to probabilistic doesn't really get you anything. Sure it does. When a process is not deterministic you have an element of uncertainty. If things were completely deterministic then of course there would be no free will. Given the evidence, though, there is no basis to believe that the universe is completely deterministic. On July 08 2013 10:36 Tarot wrote:On July 08 2013 10:23 wherebugsgo wrote:
[quote]
Right, so now we have a problem of where the inputs are coming from.
You're choosing what goes into the function.
e:
Imagine I do this.
Everyday suppose I have a choice to make, to go to a restaurant I like, X, or to a second restaurant, Y, that I haven't been to before.
The exact same day repeats itself over and over, and I have no memory of what I did the previous day-thus, the conditions for the decision making process are perfectly repeated every time.
My decision process works like this:
I flip a fair coin. If it lands heads, I pick one of the two restaurants. However I pick doesn't really matter-some days I may pick the restaurant I like, some days I might not.
If it lands tails, I flip it again to determine which restaurant I will go to-heads, I go to X. Tails, I go to Y.
I don't make the same choice every time. The input you receive from your eyes certainly wouldn't be the same. Sorry? I don't understand how you came to that conclusion or what relevance it has to the experiment. On July 08 2013 10:29 Myrddraal wrote:
Well I'm not trying to argue for my own belief, I am trying to argue for the concept of no free will in general. I think the most common answer would be a combination of biology and circumstance, (nature + nurture if you will). So yes it would be "you" essentially, as an entity, but not the conscious "you" that lives in the present. The definition of free will that seems most fitting to me, is one that means the conscious "you" is able to make decisions. You can subscribe to a different meaning of free will if you wish, and if yours does not allow for the concept of no free will to exist then that is fine too. But it doesn't make yours any more valid, or anyone else's any more ludicrous. Sure it does-if my concept is logically consistent, and the other concept is not, then of course one is more valid than the other. So far, based on the arguments in favor of no-will, it doesn't actually seem to be logically consistent. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Actually my argument is more logically consistant than yours, unless you can fill in the logic gap that allows our brain to control the probabilistic process. Your argument as far I can reason it: The universe has probabilistic aspects. The processes of the brain may be probabilistic. We are able to affect some probabilistic processes. <Insert logic gap here> Therefore we are able to affect probabilistic processes in our brain in the process of free will. So unless you can fill in that logic gap (with solid evidence), your point of view is the ludicrous one from my perspective. "Thus it's not a stretch to consider that free will can exist" - I may have made a mistake, from your posts on the last page, I thought you were arguing for why no-will is impossible, I was only trying to say that it is possible, I am not trying to argue against the possibility of free will, as I believe at this stage, that either is possible until we can some time in the future get enough information to figure out which is actually the case. you are not wrong on that last part, consider it a personal victory because shortly after you started posting he changed his defending position drastically :D Now he thinks it's not absurd to believe in free will because the universe is not fully deterministic. At first he thought even decisions couldn't be possible with no free will... Actually, I still think this. No one has yet been able to adequately explain how a world without free will is even possible. That logical hurdle has not been crossed yet.E: I should clarify that my definition of "decision" is significantly different from what I think your definition of "decision" is. Maybe that's why you think I've changed my position. This bolded part is important, because you dodged my question and you state this, so I will ask again. Can you point out where the logical inconsistency lies? So far all you have said is that, it breaks because there is randomness, at no point have you stated where randomness means that there can not be no-will, you have only stated why it means there can be free will. Dude...seriously. You are not convinced that there is enough evidence to say that the brain influences the decision process?! This was probably just a slip... What it comes down to is this: You, lebowskyguy and wherebugsgo seem to me in total agreement now on the relevant facts of decision making. You agree that it's people who make decisions by using external stimuli and internal faculties and that they can be dissuaded or motivated by arguments and they can then follow their formed intentions with actions. This is the definition of compatibilist free will. Thus wherebugsgo insists there is free will and finds your stance contradictory. Yet you two seem to think that there is still something missing for (libertarian) free will, like some mystical 'total control' of mind over matter or the transcendental ability not only to 'want something' but 'to want what to want'. All three of you agree that this is nonsense however. So your remaining disagreement on the free will issue seems semantic in nature that's why you will not make any progress. The substantial part of your disagreement is on whether compatibilist free will (or whatever you want to call it) is sufficient for moral responsibility. What I mean is specifically the stochastic (or random) part, in order to make it (that specific part of the process) not random, but instead controlled by the brain. I admit, I don't have the best understanding of the stochastic theory, but logic dictates that if these processes are random, and he is using their randomness is proof that we have free will then there needs to be some step that links these two together. I suppose you are essentially right, that my belief is that we have some form of compatibilist free will, though I can't speak for wherebugsgo because he seems specifically against determinism and stated the meaning of free will as: The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Which is much more vague in my opinion. However I want to clarify that I was not trying to argue for my belief in free-will or that free will is not possible, I was trying to argue that no-will is possible, though like you said it is semantic in that it depends on what definition you use for free will. As for the moral responsibility part, I agree that was the most interesting, though I was not particularly involved in that argument, as I was only participating in it to show how lack of (libertarian?) free will does not by definition mean lack of choice. You should study stochastic processes, or really just some basic neuroscience (I'm not a neuroscientist, but I do know the basic workings of neural networks and neurons because of my interests and work in AI) What you're saying is similar to the smear that creationists put on evolution, that natural selection is a "random" process because it has random elements. That's not true at all. Evolution is not directed but it's one of the furthest things from random. The human brain clearly does not function randomly. It is governed by stochastic processes as its inner workings, but to say that an individual is not "in control" of the decision-making process is pretty naive. There is no way to "control" the random element, just as in QM there is no way to simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle. This does NOT however mean that the process itself is uncontrollable or random. A small part of it may be random, and the rest of it can use that randomness in a (relatively) predictable way. Objectively, by the definition you are using, no-will is not possible. By definition it needs a deterministic decision process, which is clearly wrong for the same reason Newton was wrong about forces. At best, the brain is approximately deterministic on a macroscopic level, but "approximately" is not good enough if you want to eliminate uncertainty, which is what is necessary to support no-will. E: and to clarify, yes, I do support compatibilism. Determinism exists in the sense that everything that has already happened can be strung together as a chain of deterministic causes and effects. Even if a process is not deterministic, if it has already occurred, and its results are observable, then in hindsight you can trace its causes.
I still don't see how it is not possible, that definition was based on determinism, as in, if determinism were proven to be the case, this is how no-will would be possible. I was arguing under the assumption that pure determinism was a valid theory to show that no-will could be possible, since you have shown that you believe in stochastic processes then a different definition would have to be used, that agrees with your world view.
Again, I was not trying to say that the whole process is random, just that part of it is, and if part of it is random, then part of it is out of our control, even if it is predictable.
I agree that it is naive to say that an individual is not "in control" to some extent, but I would also say it's naive to say that the individual is in "total control". Regardless of whether you believe in hard determinism or stochastic processes, I think you would have to agree that neither case allows for total freedom, and that is I think where the semantic issue lies, in that some people hold the opinion that if an agent is not entirely free then it may as well not be free and some that if the agent has freedom to act within the conditions provided then that is enough to demonstrate free will.
I honestly feel that both are legitimate positions to hold, however I can understand that if you feel quite strongly about your side that you might not be willing to accept this definition of free though I would urge you to at least not dismiss it as ludicrous.
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The reason I dismiss it as ludicrous is precisely because no-will requires determinism. It even states so itself, that if the same conditions were to occur twice, the same choice would be made (thus we're not in control of our choices).
This clearly doesn't harmonize with reality. It's not a pure dichotomy, I don't think it's no-will or free will. There is definitely some gray area in between, but the only real way to semantically characterize that is with the idea of free-will (because no-will is objectively simply wrong). To say you have no control, none whatsoever, over your decision making process (because of no-will) is to state that you accept an idea that is incompatible with reality as we know it.
e: probably an additional problem with this discussion is that a lot of what I'm talking about with regards to causality is getting mixed up between the informal use of cause-and-effect and the use of causality in the realm of physics. They're not exactly the same and it's definitely my fault for not having been more clear about what I'm talking about.
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Wherebugsgo, am I mistaken or are you claiming to have proven:
1.the universe is not deterministic
2.we have free-will
???
I'm inclined to believe the opposite personally, I'd be interested if you'd explain why you believe each as concisely as possible.
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On July 09 2013 15:52 wherebugsgo wrote:
To say you have no control, none whatsoever, over your decision making process (because of no-will) is to state that you accept an idea that is incompatible with reality as we know it.
Why do you say that? I'd say its completely compatible with reality as we know it, since everything we know has a cause, it makes sense decisions will too. I mean... have you ever made a decision without any form of cause or reasoning?
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On July 09 2013 18:55 Reason wrote:
Wherebugsgo, am I mistaken or are you claiming to have proven:
1.the universe is not deterministic
2.we have free-will
???
I'm inclined to believe the opposite personally, I'd be interested if you'd explain why you believe each as concisely as possible.
he's not saying that. he's saying:
- if the universe is deterministic (not PREdetermined) then free will exists and that is it. all other future conclusions that could be drawn from that statement are based on your future standings/claims/opinions.
it's exactly what i said earlier in the thread.
in a nutshell: determinism is the 0 logic and free will is the 1 logic. you need both to write a code. one without the other is nonsense.
+ Show Spoiler +![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/LJcQIUm.jpg) from A to B you have determinism; from B to C you have free will; from C to D you have determinism and so on and so forth. evolution in digital ones and zeros
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I have a question to all those who claim that the mind is all physical.
What triggers this initial electrical and chemical impulses?
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On July 09 2013 23:03 googolplex wrote:
I have a question to all those who claim that the mind is all physical.
What triggers this initial electrical and chemical impulses?
You could ask the same question about a plant. A plant can turn to face the sun and other cool stuff, what did triggers those chemical impulses ?
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On July 10 2013 00:12 DertoQq wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2013 23:03 googolplex wrote:
I have a question to all those who claim that the mind is all physical.
What triggers this initial electrical and chemical impulses? You could ask the same question about a plant. A plant can turn to face the sun and other cool stuff, what did triggers those chemical impulses ?
Exactly. A neuroscientist or botanist could explain those specific examples in elaborate detail, but the broader story is that it is the result of millions of years of a long, slow evolution. Over vast lengths of time, organisms picked up these adaptations. Now our DNA contains code in it that constructs a brain including the structures required for the electrical and chemical impulses that allow it to function.
This sort of topic is really going to give you a gut-check on whether you both fully grasp and fully accept the implications of that theory. The human brain is the most complex thing that the biology on this planet has ever produced. It was not done in a single step, but rather the result of countless incremental iterations beginning with simple proteins that one might never have imagined would produce a structure with the apparent capacity to create and implement its own goals. Regardless of whether "free will" "really exists" or not, this is quite remarkable.
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On July 10 2013 00:29 Signet wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2013 00:12 DertoQq wrote:On July 09 2013 23:03 googolplex wrote:
I have a question to all those who claim that the mind is all physical.
What triggers this initial electrical and chemical impulses? You could ask the same question about a plant. A plant can turn to face the sun and other cool stuff, what did triggers those chemical impulses ? Exactly. A neuroscientist or botanist could explain those specific examples in elaborate detail, but the broader story is that it is the result of millions of years of a long, slow evolution. Over vast lengths of time, organisms picked up these adaptations. Now our DNA contains code in it that constructs a brain including the structures required for the electrical and chemical impulses that allow it to function. This sort of topic is really going to give you a gut-check on whether you both fully grasp and fully accept the implications of that theory. The human brain is the most complex thing that the biology on this planet has ever produced. It was not done in a single step, but rather the result of countless incremental iterations beginning with simple proteins that one might never have imagined would produce a structure with the apparent capacity to create and implement its own goals. Regardless of whether "free will" "really exists" or not, this is quite remarkable.
It should also be mentioned that brains are highly malleable, allowing creatures to adapt rapidly to new situations where they may normally perish. A brain is constantly taking in stimulus from other parts of the body, the outside world, and the brain itself, so "what starts the reaction?" is far more complicated a question than it initially sounds.
Edit: now that I think about it, this is getting into Inception territory....
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On July 09 2013 22:42 xM(Z wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2013 18:55 Reason wrote:
Wherebugsgo, am I mistaken or are you claiming to have proven:
1.the universe is not deterministic
2.we have free-will
???
I'm inclined to believe the opposite personally, I'd be interested if you'd explain why you believe each as concisely as possible. he's not saying that. he's saying: - if the universe is deterministic (not PREdetermined) then free will exists and that is it. all other future conclusions that could be drawn from that statement are based on your future standings/claims/opinions. it's exactly what i said earlier in the thread. in a nutshell: determinism is the 0 logic and free will is the 1 logic. you need both to write a code. one without the other is nonsense. + Show Spoiler +from A to B you have determinism; from B to C you have free will; from C to D you have determinism and so on and so forth. evolution in digital ones and zeros
There's literally no reason at all to feel this way. If determinism is the correct way to explain the universe, there's zero space for free will. Deterministic systems are defined by their way of producing the same output given an initial state, which denies the very "free" part of free will.
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On July 10 2013 01:10 DoubleReed wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2013 00:29 Signet wrote:On July 10 2013 00:12 DertoQq wrote:On July 09 2013 23:03 googolplex wrote:
I have a question to all those who claim that the mind is all physical.
What triggers this initial electrical and chemical impulses? You could ask the same question about a plant. A plant can turn to face the sun and other cool stuff, what did triggers those chemical impulses ? Exactly. A neuroscientist or botanist could explain those specific examples in elaborate detail, but the broader story is that it is the result of millions of years of a long, slow evolution. Over vast lengths of time, organisms picked up these adaptations. Now our DNA contains code in it that constructs a brain including the structures required for the electrical and chemical impulses that allow it to function. This sort of topic is really going to give you a gut-check on whether you both fully grasp and fully accept the implications of that theory. The human brain is the most complex thing that the biology on this planet has ever produced. It was not done in a single step, but rather the result of countless incremental iterations beginning with simple proteins that one might never have imagined would produce a structure with the apparent capacity to create and implement its own goals. Regardless of whether "free will" "really exists" or not, this is quite remarkable. It should also be mentioned that brains are highly malleable, allowing creatures to adapt rapidly to new situations where they may normally perish. A brain is constantly taking in stimulus from other parts of the body, the outside world, and the brain itself, so "what starts the reaction?" is far more complicated a question than it initially sounds. Edit: now that I think about it, this is getting into Inception territory....
I don't think it is THAT complicated. Signet summed it up pretty well. I just don't get where is the need to go into philosophical stuff, because if you just follow all the steps, it all seems very logical and natural to me.
I mean... yes, you could explain why an apple is red using metaphysical reasons and I couldn't prove that you are wrong, but do you really need to do that when you have a logical answer right in front of you ?
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If our brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldnt.
./thread
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EPT
