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Yes, this is a thread on TL that involves religion, but I hate to think that our policy should be to blindly close every such thread. Sam Harris is a writer whose books are both insightful and have sparked many good discussions in the past and as long as the thread doesn't derail I'd like to leave it open. This should be the basic premise for every such thread, no matter how high the odds of it derailing. In that light, these posts that just predict the downfall of this thread (whether it be pre-determined or not) are 1) Not contributing to the discussion 2) Backseat moderating 3) Annoying 4) Actually contributing towards derailing it. I'll keep 2 daying people for this. |
On March 06 2012 08:18 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 07:51 [F_]aths wrote:On March 06 2012 07:36 Falling wrote:
I don't understand how people can say there is no free will and then proceed to argue about it. The very act of debating arguing requires free agency. I had a very similar discussion today with a colleague. This was one of his arguments. I still cannot see how it is a valid one. What is a free agency? What means free? Free from what? Free from physical laws? Hardly. The nerve cells in the brain don't know what they are thinking about, they just transmit signals. Where is the free agency which allows you to author your free will? The complexity of our brain allows us to appreciate art, a good Starcraft game, or discuss Sam Harris' latest book. I still fail to see how the philosophical concept of free will can define "free" in this sense. Influenced by Dan Dannett, I recently began to think about the concept of a concept. Our brain is able to use concepts as a description with shared properties. We could have a concept of free will while there is no free will. Like right now. You chose to respond to me. You chose to type certain words. Even if you were reacting to stimuli, there was nothing compelling you to 1) read 2) respond by typing 3) respond coherently. And furthermore respond to an argument about how the nature of the universe works. It's not a freedom from physical laws so much as there is a conscious will that is able to make decisions- and we can learn a lot about the brain from brain activity. We can tell that you are dreaming based on brain activity, we can tell that you are thinking. But we actually have to talk to you to find out what the dream was or what you were specifically thinking about. We react to stimuli, our body operates within physical laws, we have fight or flight responses. All true. But we also discover, create, theorize, choose to play a video game, choose to create a video game, choose to hack a video game, choose create art, choose to appreciate art, choose to critique art, or choose to vandalize art. If we have a concept of free will despite there being no free will than it is a very powerful delusion. It's impossible to even go to work without operating under the assumption of free will. When the alarm goes, will you hit snooze? Whe...................
Maybe all these decisions you mentioned, and the words I'm choosing for this reply, aren't decided with "free will" but instead are determined by your neuroanatomy (structure, state, memories, what other brain areas are currently doing, etc) and the environment (stimuli you're experiencing, associations, maybe even the position you're sitting in). I speculate that the brain has a way to compile various courses of action (or thoughts) and that one action eventually wins over, so even if you spent a lot of time remuminating about a decision, the choice that is made is determined by all the variables that are in play instead of a free will. It would be interesting to understand why it takes time to make a decision at times, what is actually going on in the brain during that time.
The artist has a very wide selection of media to use, a wide range of subjects to depict, and multiple choices to abandon the project or to cover over it. It becomes quite nonsensical to think that the forces of nature conspired to create the Mona Lisa or that the random firings of neurons with causation going back since... time immemorial ? Certainly there are outside influences- what if da Vinci's parents had been killed prior to his birth? Or even the artistic style of artists is often influenced by that of the past or their contemporaries. But at some point da Vinci had to sit down and create something and maybe even push the art into new territory.
But why couldn't every decision and thought of an artist be determined by everything that preceded it? It's not random firing, the brain is programmed and incredibly complex, it is capable to set goals and find the means to achieve them, and ultimately certain decisions physically win, and would've always won if all the circumstances were exactly the same. It does seem like we take conscious and deliberate decisions and IMO it is because we are aware of the other decisions that are or were available, but ultimately the action that was taken was determined and unescapable at that moment.
If everything is the effect of hidden processes and cause and effects (hidden by the facade of free will) then how does anyone break from of the deterministic processes in order to discover them? We* are still relying upon the deterministic processes to make our* discoveries. How do we get the view from the 'outside' as it were?
Why do we need to break from the deterministic processes in order to discover them?
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On March 06 2012 09:15 Holy_AT wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 08:45 Housemd wrote:I never believed in free will. Let us take a coin for example. If we flip the coin, it is a 50/50 guess on which side it would land. However, a person can accurately figure this out through careful calculations about the speed of the flip, position from which it was flipped, crosswind, etc. That can also apply to humans. The coin's fate is predetermined and so is the fate of humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predeterminism i reality, there are no nations, there are no borders, in reality there is no money and deep down you know its true or some of you may understand this on the surface but can not grasp the deeper meaning of it. Meditate about this and maybe you will get a small fraction of understanding what it really means.
in reality there are nations and borders and there is certainly money. just because these things only have the meaning we give them does not mean that they are not real.
Are there even laws ? Laws are a construct of the humans as they construct laws everywhere. They are an illusion. Maybe there are no laws but the laws that the humans have created.
again, just because they only have the meaning we give them does not mean that they don't exist. they absolutely exist, just as the words you are using exist. they would have no meaning if we didn't give them meaning, but since we do give them meaning they do have meaning. to say that the meaning we give them is an illusion is to say that you shouldn't be able to understand these words, but you do. you can't help but understand them now that you have learned them. the universe itself gives no meaning, only thinking beings can give meaning. a painting exists, even before it is painted, as long as it is conceived by the painter. it exists as an idea. to say that ideas don't exist in some form is simply wrong.
I do not know how to explain it to you, maybe you can get a glimmer or small grasp of it due to the limitiations that nearly all of the humans have.
i have noticed in my experience that things that are impossible to explain because of the listener's "limitations" are often just hard to explain because they have no real explanation.
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On March 06 2012 08:32 Anubis390 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 07:59 liberal wrote:On March 06 2012 07:36 Falling wrote:
I don't understand how people can say there is no free will and then proceed to argue about it. The very act of debating arguing requires free agency.
I strongly believe than any philosophical system needs to somehow account for consciousness and free will. Simply because we operate so extensively under the assumption of both of these (even the act of typing out these words) that to not have either would be such a strong delusion that one would have to entirely discount our very thoughts as being untrustworthy.
If our thoughts are so untrustworthy how can we trust how our thought processes that lead us to conclude that the universe is deterministic? We used free agency to even consider that the universe is deterministic. We used free agency to discover the laws that govern our universe and to discover how the neurons in our brain fire. Eliminating free will (and by extension consciousness) in its entirety undermines the very premise.
Certainly there are outside, external factors that our beyond our control and that to an extent limit our free will as it were. Depression, for instance, is not simply a matter of willing oneself to snap out of it. Bipolar II can be inherited and triggered. But to engage in any meaningful discussion with any person, we take for granted that we are not pre-determined firings of neurons and chemicals and being nothing more than a process of cause and effect started however many years ago.
Somehow the sum of our cells is more than simply the physical cause and effect, somehow there is a sort of free agency that can choose one choice or another. Whatever one might say as to the source (or lack thereof) of morality, we certainly have the capability of choosing from a variety of possible actions.
Else even participating in this debate is the very height of foolishness. An assortment of cells operating in such a way so as to create the illusion of debate. I feel like you have a very muddled idea what what people mean when they say free will. It has nothing to do with debate, or communication, or learning about the outside world... I could program a computer to do all of those things, and it wouldn't require volition. Our emotions are untrustworthy, but that doesn't mean that we can disregard all thought that humans experience. I often feel like I'm "choosing" my actions, but if I stop and think about it, I realize there are things in my past and things in my biology and things in my environment which actually determined what decision I was going to make. You can't draw some arbitrary line and say "well we have free will until we are insane, or until we suffer a head injury, or until we are conditioned by society, or until we discover a brain tumor, or until we ingest a drug..." Doing so is just avoiding the undeniable truth, that human behavior is DETERMINED by processes outside of our control, and therefore the illusion of control over our own behavior is false. The ONLY thing preventing absolutely everyone from rejecting the notion of free will is ignorance. We are ignorant of what is causing our own or others behavior, and so because we can't explain it we jump into simplistic metaphysical notions. In the past, our ignorance caused us to believe that mental illness was caused by demon possession, and that lightning was caused by a man in the sky throwing down bolts, and that the sun revolved around the earth. It is only a matter of time before neuroscience advances enough to reveal how absurd and childish our belief in free choice actually is. And honestly, I don't think it even requires scientific advancement. All it requires is a common sense understanding of the fact that there is no alternative to something being caused or uncaused in the universe. That's all it takes. Just try and imagine an alternative, it's not possible for the human mind to fathom such a thing. To the degree something is caused, it is determined, and therefore not choice. To the degree something is uncaused, it is arbitrary, and therefore not choice. People are going through all sorts of psychological tricks in order to ignore this fact which I consider undeniable. See thats the very problem. You say people believed that Zeus caused lightning, whereas today we think its electric charging or something. But there simply is no fundamental difference between both explanations, mb our explanation is more compatible and coherent with the rest of our world view and lets us make better predictions, but its far from beeing the absolute and only truth. I dont think science will ever be able to prove that free will doesnt exist, because scientist who try to are unreflected, reductive, don't consider philosophical and everyday knowledge and try to prove something thats impossible. We could discuss forever if numbers exist for example, there simply is nothing that could happen that would prove anything or even make a view on the (non-)existence of numbers change. Does big bang theory seem like a good explanation to you? Everything came out of a point with infinite(!) temperature and volumic mass?! You cant ask what happened before because its a singularity and time and space didnt exist before? To me thats the worst explanation and the most bullshit I have ever heard (even creation is better). Its just the limits of a world view that come to show here. Its the same with light beeing a wave or particle depending on what the observer wants to find. In early quantum physics people suggested to let go of the Law of excluded middle, because it didnt seem compatible with new experiences and it was really considered to do so. To me thats just the limits of a world view and we have many possibilities to include certain experiences in a coherent system. There is no truth to stand-alone sentences, only to complete views of the world and i dont think any world view could adequately grasp the world. There will always be limits to every world view or model or concept or anything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem–Quine_thesisAlso note that i edited the post above; of course free will is not a 100% metaphysically free will, but a certain part, of what we call free will, could be free in a metaphysical sense.
Just because the time and space starting at big bang show limits of our natural language and brain that evolved in macroscopic world where quantum and relativistic effects are not noticeable does not mean that just because you feel it is bullshit, because it feels uncomfortable, it actually is bullshit. Unlike you people proposing that have some rational arguments on their side. You just have :"I feel it is bullshit".
Also to show it even better : "light beeing a wave or particle depending on what the observer wants to find" is nonsense.
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On March 06 2012 08:47 mcc wrote:
That just leaves you open to a question : Why should we worship such a god that clearly does not share human moral values with us ? He is an evil entity from the point of view of our own values and saying that he is above that does not solve it as his moral values are of no concern to us. Our moral values are what matters to us. Of course you can always proclaim he is not able to prevent the disasters, but then it seems he is just a powerful, but not too much, entity.
My point is that preventing earthquakes and tsunamis is easily in his power and allowing them to happen he is violating human moral code on incredible scale, thus being evil. Whatever reasons he has for allowing them to happen (so we can help ourselves, so we can suffer, because he enjoys it) are not important, he is evil from a point of view of our morality and that is what is important for us humans.
There are ways you can argue out of it in some way, but free will argument is not an excuse. Free will is clearly compatible with the world without massive natural disasters.
I think the key issue in your statement is here:
On March 06 2012 08:47 mcc wrote:
My point is that preventing earthquakes and tsunamis is easily in his power and allowing them to happen he is violating human moral code on incredible scale, thus being evil.
I would argue that death as a consequence of natural events is not evil. I agree that we as human beings find natural disasters to be tragic, but tragedy and evil are not one and the same. I could (stand up and then) fall and break my leg right now. I'd like to think that most people would agree that it's a tragic thing, but I'm also alone in a room right now with nobody around me. I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would call that evil.
Is a god who allows his creation to die (or experience other tragedy, such as my imaginary broken leg) evil by definition? Your statement highlighted above hinges on that idea. And I would disagree with you.
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To the people arguing that if we don't have free will, then everything is fated: Think about how many macroscopic events that are random, and how heavily they influence our behaviour. The weather is an easy example, we have no control over the weather, you can never predict its patterns exactly, and so many of our daily decisions hinge on temperature, whether it rains or not and so on. There are more possible explanations than free will or fate, and both of those explanations don't make sense within our scientific understanding of the world.
Then, to the people talking about how science doesn't preach absolute truth: You don't understand what science is in the first place. Look up falsificationism and you'll get some idea; basically science is about making observations and through logical deductions try to make the best possible prediction about what mechanic is behind our observations. Can science ever prove something 100% correct this way? No, it can per definition NEVER be 100% correct. But neither can anything else.
-Physics student
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On March 06 2012 09:11 liberal wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 08:59 Falling wrote:
@liberal
I didn't mean to say there are no influencing factors. I kinda skimmed through it with my bipolar example, but humans don't exist in vacuum. We are influenced by a variety of things, genetics, automatic biological responses, medical condition, personal history, family history etc. Some of them can limit your range of choice, sometimes severely so. But despite all that we still have choice.
The artist has a very wide selection of media to use, a wide range of subjects to depict, and multiple choices to abandon the project or to cover over it. It becomes quite nonsensical to think that the forces of nature conspired to create the Mona Lisa or that the random firings of neurons with causation going back since... time immemorial ? Certainly there are outside influences- what if da Vinci's parents had been killed prior to his birth? Or even the artistic style of artists is often influenced by that of the past or their contemporaries. But at some point da Vinci had to sit down and create something and maybe even push the art into new territory.
And while there seems to be a compelling drive in humans to create- why that painting, why that woman, why those colours, why that texture, why that detailed, why that style, why that long (or short). I don't see how you're going to find all the hidden causes and effects that eradicates the volition of da Vinci the painter. It starts sounding like Freud's unconscious mind. If everything is the effect of hidden processes and cause and effects (hidden by the facade of free will) then how does anyone break from of the deterministic processes in order to discover them? We* are still relying upon the deterministic processes to make our* discoveries. How do we get the view from the 'outside' as it were?
*Although more accurately there would be no collective we- just atoms and cells working together to from the so-called 'I" amongst the 'others' Once again, you are using your own ignorance of why those colors were chosen, why that painting was chosen, as an argument that free will exists. That isn't valid, because ignorance of the causes does not mean causes don't exist. You cannot say that behavior is caused as far as our understanding can go, and then as soon as our understanding breaks down jump in the opposite direction and say "ok now we are choosing." That's exactly what you are doing when you say that there are SOME influences on behavior. If you accept that SOME behavior is determined, because you can clearly see instances when behavior was determined by environment or biology or whatever, then it's simply intellectually dishonest to say that in the cases where we don't understand the causes, we should assume that free will exists. That's classic "god of the gaps" type logic, where any gap in our scientific understanding is jumped on by religious people as proof that god exists. "Don't know what caused the big bang? Well then god did it." "Don't know why that painter chose that color? Well then it was free will." Ignorance of the causes is not evidence, it's just ignorance of the causes. The fact that you want to believe in some notion of uncontrolled beauty or creativity or whatever also isn't a valid argument against determinism. Truth isn't dictated by our romantic desires of the world. Mankind tried to make itself the center of the universe, and stifled evidence that came out to the contrary. We should not do the same thing with neuroscience.
Truth is and has always been dictated by our romantic desires of the world.  There are all kinds of questionable assumptions afoot. Truth sounds like it should be an objective affair, but how can a subject make objective claims? We can never get beyond ourselves; there is no view from nowhere. The best we can hope for is inter-subjective agreement, and how can that be truth? Even if there are truths out there, how can we know them? Doesn't knowing require certainty, and doesn't certainty appear quite impossible to have? How much sense does it make to say that "I know X, but I am not certain that X"? There's a whole literature on this, and at the end of the day it fails to provide a satisfactory answer. And don't get me started on science's claim on truth. Its epistemology is incredibly shaky. Scientists haven't even solved Hume's problem of induction, which was proposed hundreds of years ago to show that all generalizing laws of cause and effect based upon experience are deeply irrational. They can't even demonstrate that there are such things as causes and effects, as opposed to phenomena that appear together repeatedly!
If you define free will as the the ability to "have done otherwise", it's tough to reconcile with modern science, but that doesn't make it false. Personally I think it's a rather fruitless discussion, and one we'd be better off replacing with the question of the value of belief in free will, which such arguments strive to undermine.
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On March 06 2012 08:32 TotalBalanceSC2 wrote:
not to rub anyone the wrong way but this sounds like some way for people to justify why they did not end up where they wanted in life. "oh well its not fair to say im lazy and not a millionaire because the universe made it so" and also how does this even make sense, even if my choices are all predetermined I cant see the future to know what they are so they feel like i am the one choosing anyway, which kinda makes it still seem like free will?
That is because there is no mystical "I can choose whatever by magical means in whatever situation I am in"-free-will. There is on the other hand the free will you just described. Saying that choices are predetermined is not entirely correct. You are deterministic machine, but future is not yet happened and the environment is possibly not deterministic, so your future is not really predetermined, just in a sense.
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On March 06 2012 09:28 Tachyon wrote:
To the people arguing that if we don't have free will, then everything is fated: Think about how many macroscopic events that are random, and how heavily they influence our behaviour. The weather is an easy example, we have no control over the weather, you can never predict its patterns exactly, and so many of our daily decisions hinge on temperature, whether it rains or not and so on. There are more possible explanations than free will or fate, and both of those explanations don't make sense within our scientific understanding of the world.
Then, to the people talking about how science doesn't preach absolute truth: You don't understand what science is in the first place. Look up falsificationism and you'll get some idea; basically science is about making observations and through logical deductions try to make the best possible prediction about what mechanic is behind our observations. Can science ever prove something 100% correct this way? No, it can per definition NEVER be 100% correct. But neither can anything else.
-Physics student
Popper does not solve the problem of induction. Drawing conclusions from falsification is itself an inductive step, despite the introduction of a deductive component. Not only is it not 100% correct, it is 100% irrational if it is argued to provide us with a truth. If it is just pragmatically inspired that's a different matter entirely, but then it is unfit to partake in a debate as lofty as the one on free will.
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On March 06 2012 08:59 Falling wrote:
@liberal
I didn't mean to say there are no influencing factors. I kinda skimmed through it with my bipolar example, but humans don't exist in vacuum. We are influenced by a variety of things, genetics, automatic biological responses, medical condition, personal history, family history etc. Some of them can limit your range of choice, sometimes severely so. But despite all that we still have choice.
The artist has a very wide selection of media to use, a wide range of subjects to depict, and multiple choices to abandon the project or to cover over it. It becomes quite nonsensical to think that the forces of nature conspired to create the Mona Lisa or that the David statue was the result of random firings of neurons with causation going back since... time immemorial? Certainly there are outside influences- what if da Vinci's parents had been killed prior to his birth? Or even the artistic style of artists is often influenced by that of the past or their contemporaries. But at some point da Vinci had to sit down and create something and maybe even push the art into new territory.
And while there seems to be a compelling drive in humans to create- why that painting, why that woman, why those colours, why that texture, why that detailed, why that style, why that long (or short) to create. I don't see how you're going to find all the hidden causes and effects that eradicates the volition of da Vinci the painter. It starts sounding like Freud's unconscious mind. If everything is the effect of hidden processes and cause and effects (hidden by the facade of free will) then how does anyone break from of the deterministic processes in order to discover them? We* are still relying upon the deterministic processes to make our* discoveries. How do we get the view from the 'outside' as it were?
*Although more accurately there would be no collective we- just atoms and cells working together to from the so-called 'I" amongst the 'others'
I see no problem to get the view from the outside as you call it. Noone breaks the determinism, it just so happens that in this universe the laws are such that allow existence of such complex creatures that actually are able through "deterministic" behaviour discover that they are in fact deterministic. Determinism does not prevent complexity, probably quite the opposite actually.
I use "deterministic" to denote that I mean we as organism are deterministic machines, but that reality is not necessarily so.
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On March 06 2012 09:25 mcc wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 08:32 Anubis390 wrote:On March 06 2012 07:59 liberal wrote:On March 06 2012 07:36 Falling wrote:
I don't understand how people can say there is no free will and then proceed to argue about it. The very act of debating arguing requires free agency.
I strongly believe than any philosophical system needs to somehow account for consciousness and free will. Simply because we operate so extensively under the assumption of both of these (even the act of typing out these words) that to not have either would be such a strong delusion that one would have to entirely discount our very thoughts as being untrustworthy.
If our thoughts are so untrustworthy how can we trust how our thought processes that lead us to conclude that the universe is deterministic? We used free agency to even consider that the universe is deterministic. We used free agency to discover the laws that govern our universe and to discover how the neurons in our brain fire. Eliminating free will (and by extension consciousness) in its entirety undermines the very premise.
Certainly there are outside, external factors that our beyond our control and that to an extent limit our free will as it were. Depression, for instance, is not simply a matter of willing oneself to snap out of it. Bipolar II can be inherited and triggered. But to engage in any meaningful discussion with any person, we take for granted that we are not pre-determined firings of neurons and chemicals and being nothing more than a process of cause and effect started however many years ago.
Somehow the sum of our cells is more than simply the physical cause and effect, somehow there is a sort of free agency that can choose one choice or another. Whatever one might say as to the source (or lack thereof) of morality, we certainly have the capability of choosing from a variety of possible actions.
Else even participating in this debate is the very height of foolishness. An assortment of cells operating in such a way so as to create the illusion of debate. I feel like you have a very muddled idea what what people mean when they say free will. It has nothing to do with debate, or communication, or learning about the outside world... I could program a computer to do all of those things, and it wouldn't require volition. Our emotions are untrustworthy, but that doesn't mean that we can disregard all thought that humans experience. I often feel like I'm "choosing" my actions, but if I stop and think about it, I realize there are things in my past and things in my biology and things in my environment which actually determined what decision I was going to make. You can't draw some arbitrary line and say "well we have free will until we are insane, or until we suffer a head injury, or until we are conditioned by society, or until we discover a brain tumor, or until we ingest a drug..." Doing so is just avoiding the undeniable truth, that human behavior is DETERMINED by processes outside of our control, and therefore the illusion of control over our own behavior is false. The ONLY thing preventing absolutely everyone from rejecting the notion of free will is ignorance. We are ignorant of what is causing our own or others behavior, and so because we can't explain it we jump into simplistic metaphysical notions. In the past, our ignorance caused us to believe that mental illness was caused by demon possession, and that lightning was caused by a man in the sky throwing down bolts, and that the sun revolved around the earth. It is only a matter of time before neuroscience advances enough to reveal how absurd and childish our belief in free choice actually is. And honestly, I don't think it even requires scientific advancement. All it requires is a common sense understanding of the fact that there is no alternative to something being caused or uncaused in the universe. That's all it takes. Just try and imagine an alternative, it's not possible for the human mind to fathom such a thing. To the degree something is caused, it is determined, and therefore not choice. To the degree something is uncaused, it is arbitrary, and therefore not choice. People are going through all sorts of psychological tricks in order to ignore this fact which I consider undeniable. See thats the very problem. You say people believed that Zeus caused lightning, whereas today we think its electric charging or something. But there simply is no fundamental difference between both explanations, mb our explanation is more compatible and coherent with the rest of our world view and lets us make better predictions, but its far from beeing the absolute and only truth. I dont think science will ever be able to prove that free will doesnt exist, because scientist who try to are unreflected, reductive, don't consider philosophical and everyday knowledge and try to prove something thats impossible. We could discuss forever if numbers exist for example, there simply is nothing that could happen that would prove anything or even make a view on the (non-)existence of numbers change. Does big bang theory seem like a good explanation to you? Everything came out of a point with infinite(!) temperature and volumic mass?! You cant ask what happened before because its a singularity and time and space didnt exist before? To me thats the worst explanation and the most bullshit I have ever heard (even creation is better). Its just the limits of a world view that come to show here. Its the same with light beeing a wave or particle depending on what the observer wants to find. In early quantum physics people suggested to let go of the Law of excluded middle, because it didnt seem compatible with new experiences and it was really considered to do so. To me thats just the limits of a world view and we have many possibilities to include certain experiences in a coherent system. There is no truth to stand-alone sentences, only to complete views of the world and i dont think any world view could adequately grasp the world. There will always be limits to every world view or model or concept or anything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem–Quine_thesisAlso note that i edited the post above; of course free will is not a 100% metaphysically free will, but a certain part, of what we call free will, could be free in a metaphysical sense. Just because the time and space starting at big bang show limits of our natural language and brain that evolved in macroscopic world where quantum and relativistic effects are not noticeable does not mean that just because you feel it is bullshit, because it feels uncomfortable, it actually is bullshit. Unlike you people proposing that have some rational arguments on their side. You just have :"I feel it is bullshit". Also to show it even better : "light beeing a wave or particle depending on what the observer wants to find" is nonsense.
Another good post. I especially liked the first line, people often do not consider the consequences of evolution regarding how we are capable of viewing or understanding the world.
There is a real problem with people rejecting an idea simply because it doesn't "feel" right, because it makes them uncomfortable. Truth is not dictated by human desire. In fact, if anything, I would say the desire for something to be true could be an argument AGAINST it's being true. But that's a completely different issue...
Truth is also not dictated by tradition. Just because you've believed something your whole life, doesn't mean it is true. It is very hard to hear a radical idea and accept it with an open-mind, because we are very wary of change or radical ideas. You have to consciously guard against bias or prejudice towards an idea if you want to reach the truth.
You either strive to think scientifically or you don't. If you don't think scientifically, and don't have any desire to, then don't bother coming up with flimsy justifications or rationalizations for your beliefs. Just be honest and say "this set of beliefs helps me live my life, and I will embrace them."
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On March 06 2012 09:26 titanicnewbie wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 08:47 mcc wrote:
That just leaves you open to a question : Why should we worship such a god that clearly does not share human moral values with us ? He is an evil entity from the point of view of our own values and saying that he is above that does not solve it as his moral values are of no concern to us. Our moral values are what matters to us. Of course you can always proclaim he is not able to prevent the disasters, but then it seems he is just a powerful, but not too much, entity.
My point is that preventing earthquakes and tsunamis is easily in his power and allowing them to happen he is violating human moral code on incredible scale, thus being evil. Whatever reasons he has for allowing them to happen (so we can help ourselves, so we can suffer, because he enjoys it) are not important, he is evil from a point of view of our morality and that is what is important for us humans.
There are ways you can argue out of it in some way, but free will argument is not an excuse. Free will is clearly compatible with the world without massive natural disasters. I think the key issue in your statement is here: Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 08:47 mcc wrote:
My point is that preventing earthquakes and tsunamis is easily in his power and allowing them to happen he is violating human moral code on incredible scale, thus being evil. I would argue that death as a consequence of natural events is not evil. I agree that we as human beings find natural disasters to be tragic, but tragedy and evil are not one and the same. I could (stand up and then) fall and break my leg right now. I'd like to think that most people would agree that it's a tragic thing, but I'm also alone in a room right now with nobody around me. I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would call that evil. Is a god who allows his creation to die (or experience other tragedy, such as my imaginary broken leg) evil by definition? Your statement highlighted above hinges on that idea. And I would disagree with you.
To use your example if I could realistically prevent you breaking your leg I am morally obligated to do so. If I do not I am doing something immoral. Tragedies are tragedies, but when you can prevent them you are obligated to. Or would you consider seeing someone dying in unbearable pain and not felt obligated to help him if you could ? God is presumed to be omniscient and omnipotent. There is no such thing as being alone in the room for such a being. God that allows his creation to die is not evil, the one that allows them to suffer is.
EDIT: to clarify, allowing someone to die at 15 in a tsunami falls under suffering, dying of old age falls under the allowing to die.
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On March 06 2012 09:28 Tachyon wrote:
To the people arguing that if we don't have free will, then everything is fated: Think about how many macroscopic events that are random...
They. Aren't. Random.
And you claim to be a physics student? A physics student who believes in "random" macroscopic events???
I stopped reading here. I'm gonna bold and underline this so maybe more people will see it...
JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE IGNORANT OF THE CAUSES OF SOMETHING, DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NOT CAUSED.
This fallacy in thinking has been repeated over and over and over in this thread. It's really getting tiring.
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On March 06 2012 09:43 liberal wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 09:28 Tachyon wrote:
To the people arguing that if we don't have free will, then everything is fated: Think about how many macroscopic events that are random... They. Aren't. Random. And you claim to be a physics student? A physics student who believes in "random" macroscopic events??? I stopped reading here. I'm gonna bold and underline this so maybe more people will see it... JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE IGNORANT OF THE CAUSES OF SOMETHING, DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NOT CAUSED.This fallacy in thinking has been repeated over and over and over in this thread. It's really getting tiring.
So you think the weather is completely deterministic? Explain to me how quantum mechanics does not influence the macroscopic world at all.
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On March 06 2012 09:47 Tachyon wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 09:43 liberal wrote:On March 06 2012 09:28 Tachyon wrote:
To the people arguing that if we don't have free will, then everything is fated: Think about how many macroscopic events that are random... They. Aren't. Random. And you claim to be a physics student? A physics student who believes in "random" macroscopic events??? I stopped reading here. I'm gonna bold and underline this so maybe more people will see it... JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE IGNORANT OF THE CAUSES OF SOMETHING, DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NOT CAUSED.This fallacy in thinking has been repeated over and over and over in this thread. It's really getting tiring. So you think the weather is completely deterministic? Explain to me how quantum mechanics does not influence the macroscopic world at all.
Do you honestly believe that a thunderstorm is being determined according to random quantum behavior? Seriously?
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On March 06 2012 09:36 liberal wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 09:25 mcc wrote:On March 06 2012 08:32 Anubis390 wrote:On March 06 2012 07:59 liberal wrote:On March 06 2012 07:36 Falling wrote:
I don't understand how people can say there is no free will and then proceed to argue about it. The very act of debating arguing requires free agency.
I strongly believe than any philosophical system needs to somehow account for consciousness and free will. Simply because we operate so extensively under the assumption of both of these (even the act of typing out these words) that to not have either would be such a strong delusion that one would have to entirely discount our very thoughts as being untrustworthy.
If our thoughts are so untrustworthy how can we trust how our thought processes that lead us to conclude that the universe is deterministic? We used free agency to even consider that the universe is deterministic. We used free agency to discover the laws that govern our universe and to discover how the neurons in our brain fire. Eliminating free will (and by extension consciousness) in its entirety undermines the very premise.
Certainly there are outside, external factors that our beyond our control and that to an extent limit our free will as it were. Depression, for instance, is not simply a matter of willing oneself to snap out of it. Bipolar II can be inherited and triggered. But to engage in any meaningful discussion with any person, we take for granted that we are not pre-determined firings of neurons and chemicals and being nothing more than a process of cause and effect started however many years ago.
Somehow the sum of our cells is more than simply the physical cause and effect, somehow there is a sort of free agency that can choose one choice or another. Whatever one might say as to the source (or lack thereof) of morality, we certainly have the capability of choosing from a variety of possible actions.
Else even participating in this debate is the very height of foolishness. An assortment of cells operating in such a way so as to create the illusion of debate. I feel like you have a very muddled idea what what people mean when they say free will. It has nothing to do with debate, or communication, or learning about the outside world... I could program a computer to do all of those things, and it wouldn't require volition. Our emotions are untrustworthy, but that doesn't mean that we can disregard all thought that humans experience. I often feel like I'm "choosing" my actions, but if I stop and think about it, I realize there are things in my past and things in my biology and things in my environment which actually determined what decision I was going to make. You can't draw some arbitrary line and say "well we have free will until we are insane, or until we suffer a head injury, or until we are conditioned by society, or until we discover a brain tumor, or until we ingest a drug..." Doing so is just avoiding the undeniable truth, that human behavior is DETERMINED by processes outside of our control, and therefore the illusion of control over our own behavior is false. The ONLY thing preventing absolutely everyone from rejecting the notion of free will is ignorance. We are ignorant of what is causing our own or others behavior, and so because we can't explain it we jump into simplistic metaphysical notions. In the past, our ignorance caused us to believe that mental illness was caused by demon possession, and that lightning was caused by a man in the sky throwing down bolts, and that the sun revolved around the earth. It is only a matter of time before neuroscience advances enough to reveal how absurd and childish our belief in free choice actually is. And honestly, I don't think it even requires scientific advancement. All it requires is a common sense understanding of the fact that there is no alternative to something being caused or uncaused in the universe. That's all it takes. Just try and imagine an alternative, it's not possible for the human mind to fathom such a thing. To the degree something is caused, it is determined, and therefore not choice. To the degree something is uncaused, it is arbitrary, and therefore not choice. People are going through all sorts of psychological tricks in order to ignore this fact which I consider undeniable. See thats the very problem. You say people believed that Zeus caused lightning, whereas today we think its electric charging or something. But there simply is no fundamental difference between both explanations, mb our explanation is more compatible and coherent with the rest of our world view and lets us make better predictions, but its far from beeing the absolute and only truth. I dont think science will ever be able to prove that free will doesnt exist, because scientist who try to are unreflected, reductive, don't consider philosophical and everyday knowledge and try to prove something thats impossible. We could discuss forever if numbers exist for example, there simply is nothing that could happen that would prove anything or even make a view on the (non-)existence of numbers change. Does big bang theory seem like a good explanation to you? Everything came out of a point with infinite(!) temperature and volumic mass?! You cant ask what happened before because its a singularity and time and space didnt exist before? To me thats the worst explanation and the most bullshit I have ever heard (even creation is better). Its just the limits of a world view that come to show here. Its the same with light beeing a wave or particle depending on what the observer wants to find. In early quantum physics people suggested to let go of the Law of excluded middle, because it didnt seem compatible with new experiences and it was really considered to do so. To me thats just the limits of a world view and we have many possibilities to include certain experiences in a coherent system. There is no truth to stand-alone sentences, only to complete views of the world and i dont think any world view could adequately grasp the world. There will always be limits to every world view or model or concept or anything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem–Quine_thesisAlso note that i edited the post above; of course free will is not a 100% metaphysically free will, but a certain part, of what we call free will, could be free in a metaphysical sense. Just because the time and space starting at big bang show limits of our natural language and brain that evolved in macroscopic world where quantum and relativistic effects are not noticeable does not mean that just because you feel it is bullshit, because it feels uncomfortable, it actually is bullshit. Unlike you people proposing that have some rational arguments on their side. You just have :"I feel it is bullshit". Also to show it even better : "light beeing a wave or particle depending on what the observer wants to find" is nonsense. Another good post. I especially liked the first line, people often do not consider the consequences of evolution regarding how we are capable of viewing or understanding the world. There is a real problem with people rejecting an idea simply because it doesn't "feel" right, because it makes them uncomfortable. Truth is not dictated by human desire. In fact, if anything, I would say the desire for something to be true could be an argument AGAINST it's being true. But that's a completely different issue... Truth is also not dictated by tradition. Just because you've believed something your whole life, doesn't mean it is true. It is very hard to hear a radical idea and accept it with an open-mind, because we are very wary of change or radical ideas. You have to consciously guard against bias or prejudice towards an idea if you want to reach the truth. You either strive to think scientifically or you don't. If you don't think scientifically, and don't have any desire to, then don't bother coming up with flimsy justifications or rationalizations for your beliefs. Just be honest and say "this set of beliefs helps me live my life, and I will embrace them."
You speak of being open-minded and guarding against prejudice in some grand quest for truth, and then you equate truth to scientific conclusions in the very next paragraph. As a philosophy student I have found, quite ironically, that science students are among the most stubborn and least receptive when it comes to open-mindedness and openness to "radical ideas" that do not sit well with their scientific outlook. Did you ever open your mind enough to ask yourself what exactly you mean by truth, and how your scientific method could possibly get at it?
On March 06 2012 09:43 liberal wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 09:28 Tachyon wrote:
To the people arguing that if we don't have free will, then everything is fated: Think about how many macroscopic events that are random... They. Aren't. Random. And you claim to be a physics student? A physics student who believes in "random" macroscopic events??? I stopped reading here. I'm gonna bold and underline this so maybe more people will see it... JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE IGNORANT OF THE CAUSES OF SOMETHING, DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NOT CAUSED.This fallacy in thinking has been repeated over and over and over in this thread. It's really getting tiring.
And just because you conclude that there are cause-and-effect relationships, that doesn't mean there are. All you ever see are phenomena accompanied by other phenomena repeatedly. At no point do you perceive a connection between the two.
Furthermore, random events are actually suggested by quantum physics and it's considered a major problem for determinists. It's a pretty big topic in any university module on free will. Not because it suggests free will, but because it suggests indeterminism.
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I am not gonna read the thread right now because it's too long, but I would like to contribute a couple of my thoughts about free will (a topic I have thought about a ton).
1.) Realistically, free will is just a term that describes how we interpret things. Determinism doesn't stop free will from existing. What more could there possibly be than the experience of free will. We know of no transcendental phenomena that could explain free will, it's actually unfathomable. Something being predetermined has no bearing on whether or not you choose it, it's a fallacy to think it does.
2.) If for some reason free will must be some sort of transcendental thing for you then it could be explained by each of us (or at least me) having a personal universe that is created around the choices we make (which I believe physicists have talked about this a lot actually). The problem then is "what constitutes a choice" and "who is making the choices"[buddhism 101]. When you ask those questions the concept of free will falls apart again and I would suggest going back to #1
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On March 06 2012 03:48 zefreak wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 03:33 Anubis390 wrote:On March 05 2012 21:37 paralleluniverse wrote:Sam Harris is releasing an ebook on Free Will tomorrow. http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-illusion-of-free-willTo preempt that, I felt that I should write down my own thoughts on free will. I simply cannot see how free will can fit into what we know about the universe. The universe is governed by the laws of physics, therefore there is no scope for free will to exist. Everything in the universe, and hence every thought and action made by a human is simply the motion of particles obeying certain laws. Therefore, free will does not exist because we cannot choose how the particles that constitute our body move, they move in accordance with the laws of physics. Random or deterministic, it doesn't matter, because we cannot exert influence nor make choices independent of the motion of particles that are dictated by these laws in either case. As with everything in the universe, every thought and action made by a person is not a result of free will, it's a result of the laws of physics acting on particles. Not even the intrinsic randomness of Quantum Mechanics saves the free will hypothesis, as this would imply that your thoughts and actions are caused by fundamentally unpredictable random processes. If so, then they are the result of a universal RNG, thus they would still not be free. The only reason theologians and religious people latch on to the completely unscientific notion of free will is to "explain" why bad things happen. If God is good, then why did he let the genocide in Rwanda happen? Why does he not intervene in the the mass-murder being conducted by the Syrian government, as we speak? Why is there evil in the world. Because God gave us free will, allegedly. This is then neatly tied into the Original Sin myth, whereby Eve exerted free will and chose to eat from the Garden of Eden, and this frivolous reason somehow necessitated that Jesus die on the cross. Religions abuse this nonexistent notion of free will in an attempt to explain away the gaping flaws of the God hypothesis and the existence of evil. That is pretty unreflected stuff. I really recommend you to read Kants Critique of Pure Reason. Especially the antinomy chapter. It should enlighten you on what you think about free will. You can get a sneak peek on what its about here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AntinomyIm studying philosophy and free will has always been one of the topics im most interested in. I think there is free will in a certain sense. Its not a completely detached will, but its free in a sense thats its neither only determined by laws of physics, nor 'determined' by 'random' factors, but at least partly a result of a 'causality of freedom'. The law of causality is contradictory in itsself, because there could never be a first cause. Don't overstretch a law of a certain world view. Materialism is a very succesfull, but not the only world view and certainly has its problems, for example big bang theory and everyday life. On March 06 2012 02:13 liberal wrote:
I think people are really missing the very basic argument being presented here...
Human behavior is either determined or undetermined. There is no third possibility in existence. There is no third possibility that can even be logically understood or defined. What can it possibly mean for something to be neither determined nor undetermined? Some things really are black or white... You are relying on the law of causality when using such terms and definitions. Nothing is only black and white by itsself unless you make it that. The law you rely on is just a way to interpret the world, but its not proven to be true, nor can it ever be. David Hume wrote on a lot of interesting stuff on causality and such a law can never be proven by induction. I recommend reading less philosophy and more science. Or if you must stick with philosophy, read the good shit and not Kant/Aristotle/whoever happened to be historically important but full of confused ideas. BTW Hume is one of the most misunderstood philosophers of his time. The Problem of Induction says nothing about determinism. It has to do with Hume's epistemology, not ontology. Hume was a determinist, but a skeptic when it comes to epistemology. Anyone that studies philosophy but doesn't focus on contemporary work (formal epistemology, bayesian epistemology, etc) is a hack snake oil salesman who is less than worthless to our collective knowledge-base. Yes, I realize this accounts for 99% of philosophy graduates.
Where on earth did you get the impression that you know what's going on in contemporary philosophy? First of all, the majority of graduates of decent programs work in contemporary philosophy, not %1 (why would you think that?). Secondly, those that don't do contemporary work are not typically people defending the ideas of historical work, but rather studying their meaning as one might study literature without advocating the ideas therein. No snake oil involved.
On March 06 2012 05:06 zefreak wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 04:47 koreasilver wrote:
Minor flaws like how the entire movement collapsed upon itself, right? Not really true, more like moved on. It's not like everyone rescinded all of their initial beliefs and became rationalists. The group fell apart, the movement fell out of favor. Much of what was good in their philosophy was adopted by others who were not part of the movement. Ethical nonrealism, emotivism, the scope of philosophy, many of these positions are widely accepted and just because the group fell apart doesn't mean everything they stood for did as well. Like most things in this world, its just not that simple.
How do you exist? These are just sociological falsehoods. Emotivism hasn't been adopted by contemporary philosophy; the majority of contemporary philosophers consider it refuted by simple linguistic arguments. The broader ethical nonrealism is still a minority position. Extraordinarily few contemporary philosophers would agree with positivists on the scope of philosophy (I can't name a single one). You are simply wrong about all of this.
For that matter, positivism's "minor problems" include the incoherence of its central tenet (that the verification theory of meaning is meaningless by its own standards). This is part of the reason why philosophy has moved so far away from the things you think it has adopted.
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On March 06 2012 09:42 mcc wrote:
To use your example if I could realistically prevent you breaking your leg I am morally obligated to do so. If I do not I am doing something immoral. Tragedies are tragedies, but when you can prevent them you are obligated to. Or would you consider seeing someone dying in unbearable pain and not felt obligated to help him if you could ? God is presumed to be omniscient and omnipotent. There is no such thing as being alone in the room for such a being. God that allows his creation to die is not evil, the one that allows them to suffer is.
So you would be in favor of a god who coddled his creation, attended to their every need and prevented every injury before it even happened? A god like you describe would be obliged to expend effort constantly to maintain an idyllic universe.
I believe that you are correct in saying that human beings are morally obliged to help one another and ease suffering to the best of our ability. I think that the reason we have that obligation is because God is interested in allowing us to be moral agents. A universe in which God takes care of all evil or tragedy on our behalf denies us any opportunity to exercise moral choice. I might go so far as to say it denies us the ability to make any meaningful choices.
I think that God is deeply grieved by tragedy and death. But he is willing to permit tragedy and death such as natural disasters because doing so enables his creation to have a more meaningful existence. On the one hand, yes we do suffer, but what we as a species gain is, in my opinion, worth the pain.
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On March 06 2012 09:48 liberal wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 09:47 Tachyon wrote:On March 06 2012 09:43 liberal wrote:On March 06 2012 09:28 Tachyon wrote:
To the people arguing that if we don't have free will, then everything is fated: Think about how many macroscopic events that are random... They. Aren't. Random. And you claim to be a physics student? A physics student who believes in "random" macroscopic events??? I stopped reading here. I'm gonna bold and underline this so maybe more people will see it... JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE IGNORANT OF THE CAUSES OF SOMETHING, DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NOT CAUSED.This fallacy in thinking has been repeated over and over and over in this thread. It's really getting tiring. So you think the weather is completely deterministic? Explain to me how quantum mechanics does not influence the macroscopic world at all. Do you honestly believe that a thunderstorm is being determined according to random quantum behavior? Seriously?
Why are you so binary in your way of thinking? Quantum events contribute to events on the molecular level, and those in turn contribute to macroscopic events. This doesn't mean that ONE PARTICULAR QUANTUM EVENT caused a lightning storm, because there are so insanely many instances involved. Seperate stochastic events are magnified and sometimes cause significant differences on molecular levels. You can't argue that what is too small to see under a microscope can't influence events we can actually observe.
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EPT
