Debate 7 Discussion: On the existence of free will: Philosophy Forums

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Debate 7 Discussion: On the existence of free will

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Debate 7 Discussion: On the existence of free will

Socrastein
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Posted 07/14/05 - 11:43 AM:	#31
"If I make choice X due to impulse Y, I could never have possibly made choice A due to impulse B in the exact same situation". Why??? It is just not true. What do you mean why? Just after this you say you agree we are causally determined in our actions. If we are causally determined in our actions then there is only one possible outcome in any situation wherein I make a decision. Perhaps you are confused on exactly what causal determinism is, and what consequences arise from it? I disagree that "Every action we take is the result of an impulse" when we consider the impulse to be oneself. Note that if the impulse is oneself it will mean that we have free will. How can I be my own impulse? "I'm going to eat because Me". That makes no sense whatsoever. I am not an impulse. I am not a desire. You will tell me that the brain chemistry caused the idea to pop up in my mind, I can tell you that I caused the brain chemistries when the idea popped up or when I decide to analyse, make a mental effort about the new idea. I suggest you submit yourself to science for the betterment of mankind, because surely you are the only human being alive who can control the chemistry of your own brain. You're like that robot form "Short Circuit" that could reprogram itself at will. Tell me the trick, how do you do it? Do you just meditate deeply on the chemicals you want to excrete and what neurons you want to fire, and it all happens? Perhaps you plug a nintendo controller into your ear? "Random thoughts" aren't random at all, they come from the subconcious. Fractions of a second before people randomly decide to do something like raise their hand, or pick a number between one and ten, or something else that we call random, the impulse to do so is created in the subconcious, and from there translates into concious action. Even if it was truly random, that would not be free will, that would be nothing but an indeterministic event, a random action, a roll of the dice. Please explain the following: How you can accept determinism and not accept that our actions are causally determined. How you can possibly be an impulse for your actions, as if "Me" were a reason for doing something. How you can control your own brain chemistry, what if any meta-brains are required for this feat, how you got omnipotence over the laws of physics and chemistry, and what meta-rules under which you exercise this control are we talking about? If you can control your brain chemistry, then your brain chemistry isn't what causes you to think and act, so are we talking about souls here now? And how does that solve the problem I presented in my last post? It seems to just move it back a notch, and now you have to accept that your soul/meta-brain is governed by things you can't control, or you must infinitely regress with meta-souls and meta-meta-brains. Why we cannot act against our impulses? Can you provide also a specific example that we can work on? I have an impulse to eat some chocolate but somehow I resist and don't eat the chocolate. Was I compelled? I don't think so because I was free to decide. Some day, I will eat the chocolate some others I will not. The choice is mine and is free. You had a stronger competing desire, perhaps the desire to stay healthy or lose weight, that compelled you to resist the chocolate. You will always be compelled by your strongest impulse to act, by the very nature of the phrase "strongest impulse". And if you're saying that you could have chosen otherwise in the exact same situation, then you're not talking about determinism, you're talking about indeterminism and random actions, and you've just destroyed will entirely, not to even mention any freedom it might have. You've reduced your actions to random events, not choices or willed decisions at all.
"The time has come for people of reason to say enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's devisive, and it's dangerous." -Richard Dawkins

Jonesy
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Posted 08/26/05 - 01:34 PM:	#32
My position is we have free will to a degree. But we are all slaves to the structure of life and the universe. The only hope of escaping this slavery is through death. And even then, we may find ourselves in yet another form of slavery. There is no question we cannot easily break the laws of physics, life, our minds and the rest of the universe. While being bound by these laws, we have little more free will than an animal in a cage does. But, none of this is to say we have no free will at all, because within the boundaries of our cages, we can think and do whatever we want. Edited by Jonesy on 08/26/05 - 02:34 PM
Our minds may be the only place we are truly free.

exile
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Posted 03/23/06 - 02:30 PM:	#33
I'm on the determinist side in this debate. We certainly have a "will", that is we can influence the universe by taking decisions. However it is impossible to say that such decisions are not influenced by previous experiences, other people, the weather, the time of day, etc and prove it merely by contemplating our own thought processes. Ahah - you say - INFLUENCED! that's not DETERMINED! But doesn't the SUM of all things that influence your choice really determine your choice? Is there really a homunculus inside you that rolls a dice and decides whether to have tea rather than coffee? Having said that - for certain purposes (eg punishing criminals) we have to assume that we do have a choice - either to commit or not commit a crime, for example. At a certain level we certainly do have a choice. I am on a diet. Walking through a train station I notice a chocolate vending machine. I have the choice to buy a chocolate bar or not. Of course! But whether I do or not is, I submit, a product of the various influences that come to bear - the fact that I need to lose weight, my personality, my blood sugar level, how much money I have to spare, and so on. Is it really a FREE choice?

Cuthbert
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Posted 04/20/06 - 07:17 AM:	#34
I often act against my strongest impulses. It's circular to claim that someone must (logically) always act on their strongest impulse. It's to define what we do in terms of whatever we are most strongly impelled to do, and then to define what we are most strongly impelled to do in terms of whatever we end up doing. So it's a vacuous claim. It's not vacuous to say that people do as a matter of fact always act on their strongest impulse. But it happens to be false. If I didn't sometimes act against my strongest impulses, I'd be in jail by now.

Socrastein
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Posted 05/04/06 - 05:04 PM:	#35
It's circular to claim that someone must (logically) always act on their strongest impulse. It's to define what we do in terms of whatever we are most strongly impelled to do, and then to define what we are most strongly impelled to do in terms of whatever we end up doing. So it's a vacuous claim. Not circular, but rather true by definition. There is a subtle difference. It's more of a tautology than anything. My contention is, how could a weaker impulse or motivation overpower a stronger one? If the weaker one wins out, well then it wasn't really the weaker one afterall, was it? You do not act against your strongest impulses; whatever impulse made you overcome the temptation in question was obviously, by definition, the strongest impulse.
"The time has come for people of reason to say enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's devisive, and it's dangerous." -Richard Dawkins

To
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Posted 03/17/07 - 10:47 AM:	#36
For me, there was a problem with this debate in that the two adversaries, as I understand it, defined free will differently. An example of Paulâ€™s â€˜free willâ€™ might be: N enjoys tea but detests coffee. In an appropriate circumstance when offered a choice, she will always choose tea. That is her choice at that time. It is what she wants to do. It is made freely. She is exercising â€˜free willâ€™ If for some strange reason someone points a gun to her head and says â€˜drink the coffee, or dieâ€™, then she will under duress drink the coffee. She is doing this despite her desire to drink tea instead. In this case she has been deprived of her free will. In contrast, Socrastein would define â€˜free willâ€™ thus: N enjoys tea but detests coffee. In an appropriate circumstance she will always choose tea. She is not free to choose coffee because that is the way she is. She grew up that way, not liking coffee. There is nothing she can do about it. She is chained to her preferences. This extends to everything she does. Any decision she makes is forced upon her by the circumstances her priorities, her preferences and her decision making abilities. She can never make a decision other than the one she is destined to make therefore she does not have â€˜free willâ€™ The truth is,as I see it, she has Paulian free will, but does not have Socrasteinian free will! So to that extent I think both Paul and Socrastein are right. A problem I have with Paulâ€™s free will is that it apparently means that a search engine such as Google has free will. Or a rock rolling down a hillside, veering left, then right, as it encounters obstacles. Most people would not agree with that. Maybe the difference is that N has conscious intent to drink tea. Google doesn't have conscious intent to choose the most appropriate results that it can within a limited time ...perhaps!

KikoSanchez182
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Posted 04/04/07 - 08:45 PM:	#37
dagan wrote: I have an impulse to eat some chocolate but somehow I resist and don't eat the chocolate. Was I compelled? I don't think so because I was free to decide. Some day, I will eat the chocolate some others I will not. The choice is mine and is free. If you look at modern neurological research, it actually seems that there are independent parts of the brain which struggle against one another which produce a given action, but this is done subconsciously. Then, after the action has gone through or the 'choice' has been made, then we rationalize, through conscious thought, why we 'chose' what we did. This, I believe, gives a perfect account for why in many situations, we are unable to explain our own actions or seem to do regrettable things. Ergo, our illusion of free will continues...

Hand of God
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Posted 07/08/07 - 05:32 AM:	#38
God has no free will to exist, it cannot choose to exist, but it "just" exists, and as we are a outcome of this infinit essence, how can we choose or how can we have free will? for our actions are themselves an outcome of Gods infinit attributes, "we do what God is " as Benedictus Spinoza would have said if he was still alive.
"I do not seek joy, but I only seek the truth, from which joy automatically follows" "I Love thee, because I Love God" "We do what God is" "Good and Evil are but only two words for perfection" "I am who I am, you are who you are, and they are who they are, that is all and all is just"

Odin
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Posted 09/09/09 - 01:58 PM:	#39
Couldn't resist registering and commenting on this thread. I want to address Socrastein's initial argument: Premise 1: Choices are either caused or are uncaused (Law of excluded middle) Premise 2: An uncaused choice cannot be a choice (Definition of choice) Premise 3: If choices are caused, they are caused by motives (Which follows from the fact that the cause of a choice is defined as the motive) Deduction A: Choices must be caused (From 1 & 2) Deduction B: Choices are caused by motives (From 3 & A) Deduction C: We cannot choose our motives (From A & B) Conclusion: Our choices are dictated by motives over which we cannot have control. In other words, there is no free will. I agree with everything except the last line. Whether or not an action is voluntary says nothing about my free will to perform it. You defined the concept of will in Deduction B: "Choices are caused by motives." Free will, as I see it, is contingent on one more thing: "My choices are caused by my motives." Whether my motives are determined by my experiences doesn't matter. And of course they are. But whether or not my motives are caused by some external circumstances that give them to me doesn't mean that I am no longer "free" to act on them. Freedom (and free will) lies in the connection between having motives that are exclusive to me, and having the "choice" to act freely on those motives. Freedom is deprived from me in two ways: when I have no mind to have motivations exclusive to myself and be capable of rationally "choosing" which of them to act on, and second, when the means of translating my motives into my actions (by the freedom of my body, for instance) are denied to me.

asgebison
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Posted 09/11/09 - 12:49 PM:	#40
I am also jumping into this thread. I don't know if anybody is left, but if there is still someone, who is willing to discuss, then you are more then welcome. I agree with Odin's post on how we are our own impulses. When we make a decision, we each have our own wants and needs which define who we are. Sometimes we forget our place in the world and how the future is also dependent on our choices as well. In other words, we also affect the world in addition to being affected by it. There can definitely be an alternative, if you consider us as a different person with different motives. So saying that I am "forced" to act when my will is concerned is another way of saying that I could of done otherwise, but I just don't want to. There are alternatives in every choice such as whether to eat a pie or not. Because I love pie and am hungry, I would want to eat it. It is MY choice and I wanted it. Now whether or not you would is YOUR choice, and it is based on whether YOU wanted it or not.

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