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Free Will
To what extent do we choose?

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Free Will

litkey
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Posted 04/18/08 - 06:32 AM:	#26
Reformed Nihilist wrote: I always wondered why people bother to call it free will. If one has will, isn't it always free? Isn't the term redundant? No, it could be the will of the Gods.
_____________________ Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. - The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. -Henry Miller

litkey
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Posted 04/18/08 - 06:36 AM:	#27
What the hell is going on here? People can't make up definitions! We need to adhere to the socially accepted definition. We all know that statistics should be discarded as rubbish, as should statisticians... 78% of people know this to be true.
_____________________ Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. - The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. -Henry Miller

Benkei
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Posted 04/19/08 - 09:49 AM:	#28
Machiveli wrote: I just meant: "defend the principles of self determination and personal responsibility" Sorry for my bad grammar. No problem. Thanks for clarifying. Personal responsibility I find trickier. Some research points to the fact that certain people simply lose it when they perceive an injustice against them and that they are entirely uncapable of not reacting violently to it. So they have no choice in the matter. But it only proves that for extreme behaviour there is no free will. I am thinking of a way around this but by the life of me I cannot put it into words without it sounding moronic. I have to sleep a few nights on this and will get back to it.
_____________________ We all warm ourselves on fires we did not kindle. We all drink from wells we did not dig. - ancient Celtic saying

Makarismos
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Posted 04/24/08 - 01:17 PM:	#29
Glypt wrote: To what extent can we be sure that our beliefs and desires are autonomous? It rather depends upon what you are referring to when you refer to yourself, or ourselves, or me. Is a person separate from their reality, their body, their history, or are they a part of the whole? I rather think that determinism is hard and fast rule of the universe, however I don’t really see this as a problem for 'free will'. Let me offer a dilemma which might shed some light on the importance of determinism:- We have two mutually exclusive choices with regard to the observed universe; either determinism always holds in all circumstances, or else it is usually true but occasionally an uncaused event will occur. I reason so because in the majority of cases it is possible to show that things are caused by something. It does not seem possible, given our experience for the universe, for events to be entirely uncaused with no events following from other events in the past. It does not seem that the universe could be anything other than either entirely, or else partly deterministic. Call this premise (1) if you like. If determinism is true, and every event is caused by a preceding event, then it seems that all of our 'choices' are made before we are born. If this were the case then most people would draw the conclusion that 'free will' is an impossibility. Premise (2) . If determinism is true most of the time, but some events are uncaused, does this add to our freedom? Imagine an electron decaying at an uncaused chaotic moment, causing some chemical imbalance in your brain, which made you act differently to how determinism would have had you act: was this action your own choice in any real sense? It seems to me that this was no choice, rather an uncaused event: which is by definition not chosen by anyone. *If determinism not always true, then our choices are not our* own.** So, if determinism is true, then what we refer to as 'free will' cannot exist, and if it is false, the same follows. I have already shown that no other options are available, and so I draw the conclusion that 'free will' is not a coherent notion. This solution leaves us all with a meaningless notion of something which we believe should possess, and yet cannot logically have... I do however have a personal solution to this problem. I will note here that I see no reason to deny determinism, because I have realised that its denial doesn’t help us answer the question of ‘free will’. As I said at the beginning, the question of our own autonomy depends largely upon what 'we' are. If we are not simply a mind, not simply a body, but rather a combination of both mind and body, and society, and of all the effects which have caused that body and mind to become what it is - then in a sense we can have free choice. As we are a combination of every event which has caused us, when we act in any way we, are expressing those causes as effects. We are a knot of causes which extends back as far as we could imagine, and all we do is our own doing. If we have a soul, then this is another cause which will affect us, if god changes our mind directly, another cause, if we kill someone in our sleep – another cause. As I said, really the question isn’t “do we have free will” but rather “what are we referring to when we say ‘do we have...’”. Looking at it this way, I don’t think most of the questions people pose about free will are coherent.

unrealist42
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Posted 04/24/08 - 03:57 PM:	#30
So, it becomes a matter of the nature of the human mind. Is the mind just an accumulated state of being acting in a determinate fashion or is it something else and if so what would this something else be? Is it possible that this accumulated state of being is not constrained by its past or determined already in its future but just sort of aimed in a certain direction by these? That the mind is like a million boxes containing a million of Shroedinger's cats and that the result of every decision is indeterminate until each box is opened in turn and every proceeding decision is predicated on the unpredictable result of every previous decision? Each person, while suffering some initial constraint from the past present and future follows an ultimately random and unknowable life path. I don't know if this is free will but it certainly does not seem to be determinism. Call it indeterminism.

Makarismos
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Posted 04/26/08 - 07:30 AM:	#31
unrealist42 wrote: So, it becomes a matter of the nature of the human mind. Is the mind just an accumulated state of being acting in a determinate fashion or is it something else and if so what would this something else be? Is it possible that this accumulated state of being is not constrained by its past or determined already in its future but just sort of aimed in a certain direction by these? That the mind is like a million boxes containing a million of Shroedinger's cats and that the result of every decision is indeterminate until each box is opened in turn and every proceeding decision is predicated on the unpredictable result of every previous decision? Each person, while suffering some initial constraint from the past present and future follows an ultimately random and unknowable life path. I don't know if this is free will but it certainly does not seem to be determinism. Call it indeterminism. The point is, that if the actions of a thing are not constrained by that things past, then that thing has not caused them. If you will something, then you would like to think that there is something within which caused this - not that you happened to will something by chance. If it is not determined, then it is spontaneous and relied upon nothing which exists in order to happen - and therefore was willed by nothing and no one. I agree that our life path is unknown, but this is rather because the universe cannot (I believe) be completely modelled from within the universe: the future is unknown, and for this reason we may well chose our own part in it, never worrying that it has been mapped out for us already.

Machiveli
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Posted 04/26/08 - 04:51 PM:	#32
to reiterate.. how can we stop the philosophical idea that free will is an illusion leading necesarrily(politicaly speaking) to a minority report style situation?
_____________________ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident" -Sartre

unrealist42
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Posted 04/26/08 - 06:35 PM:	#33
Machiveli wrote: to reiterate.. how can we stop the philosophical idea that free will is an illusion leading necesarrily(politicaly speaking) to a minority report style situation? Put simply, we cannot. There will always be people who believe in determinism and will act on that belief. The best we can do is to keep them from positions of power.

Makarismos
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Posted 04/30/08 - 12:58 PM:	#34
unrealist42 wrote: Put simply, we cannot. There will always be people who believe in determinism and will act on that belief. The best we can do is to keep them from positions of power. Determinism has nothing to do with free will: if it exists/is true, then 'free will' is still impossible, if it does not 'free will' is meaningless. Indeterminism adds nothing to the debate, it makes the will less free than determinism: the will cannot exist without determinism. Un-determinism is simply chaos, and you and I have never seen anything like it. Determinism is irrelevant when speaking about freedom.

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