Thread: Do we really have a free will?

Originally Posted by tommo

You didn't care to refute my argument though, I notice
If you can come up with something that has never been imagined, just simply a creature which has nothing to do with something we already know about, I will buy DV Executive Plus membership for you.

Okay Tommo, you can rest smugly in your moment of victory. Yes, you have indeed created an irrefutable argument (more in a sec) to which I chose not to give a second glance, much less refute. Indeed, I had hoped you might have been kidding. Apparently not.

So, given your incredibly narrow view if what a new idea is, your complete disinterest in hearing what a new idea may be or that things never seen before could indeed simply be the final step along a long incremental path, and that your "test" is unanswerable, I suppose victory is yours.

Why is your test unanswerable? Because even if I thought of a thing that in no way exists in this reality, a) I would not be able to describe it due to its transcendental nature and b) In your current state of mind, you would surely find some excuse to say it was sourced in this reality. So, though your test is logically sound (in a simplistic high-school textbook sort of way), it is also intrinsically absurd, because an answer is impossible for reasons other than you give... which is why I didn't bother answering.

So you win. I'm sure everyone is deeply impressed.

Also, on the contrary, I think the evidence for what I was saying outweighs the evidence against it. In
fact I can't think of evidence against it.

I don't even know what that means. You offered no evidence, save the absurd test.

It is quite a shallow analysis to say "look at all the cool stuff we have now". If you actually research about what lead to that discovery or invention, you will realise it was very, very slow incremental advancements. And every advancement is only based on previous knowledge we have.

No, it is a deeply short-sighted "analysis" to determine that previous knowledge cannot be used as fuel for new knowledge. And though "look at all the cool stuff we have now (which I never said BTW)," is not an analysis, but in fact was the evidence you demanded, I don't think listing a tiny portion of things that were new throughout history is very shallow. That you think so is, well, quite telling.

We can put things we know together to come up with a hybrid, but we cannot just create something new.

Why? Must a new idea be so simplistic? When humans make a leap based on existing technology that produces something the world has never seen before, why does the source of the idea invalidate its novelty? Your definition of a new idea is remarkably narrow, I think, and really serves no purpose other than form the foundation for your absurd challenge.

And I don't find it depressing or chilling at all. It's fascinating, because when you think about that, you can only ever learn anything based off things you already know!

No, what you've said is that you can never learn anything, period, because that learning would imply the invention of something new. Very chilling.

How does this apply to the first person in an aboriginal people discovering/inventing a basic principle such as irrigation or the wedge? Obviously some person at some point put such things together that no one before had seen.

Not even gonna bother with your post sageous, when you start to get pissy, you already know I am right.

Originally Posted by sivason

How does this apply to the first person in an aboriginal people discovering/inventing a basic principle such as irrigation or the wedge? Obviously some person at some point put such things together that no one before had seen.

Irrigation? It's just a river. They just re-routed the river. "Water is going there, we need it here, lets dig the river over here". Not really and original idea.
Wedge? Depends what you're talking about.

I'm not saying people haven't put something together that's never been seen. Obviously they have. But that thing is always a mesh of two or more different things.
Or just taken directly from nature and synthesised in a more controlled way.

Originally Posted by tommo

Not even gonna bother with your post sageous, when you start to get pissy, you already know I'm right.

No, tommo, I do not know you're right, and I have no idea why you assume that. I'm not pissy, either; more just amused that you think schoolyard nonsense like "You already know I'm right" actually works.

I guess this was all drifting way off topic anyway, so never mind!

I agree with tommo. Every single invention ever thought of has been based of previous knowledge, it's quite a simple principle considering that every single action or thought we have is based on previous experience. Can anyone give an example of an idea, even in physics that was completely original and spontaneous and in no way based on the education of the inventor? I don't think so. The way we formulate ideas and inventions is by using the knowledge we already have.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

I agree with tommo. Every single invention ever thought of has been based of previous knowledge, it's quite a simple principle considering that every single action or thought we have is based on previous experience. Can anyone give an example of an idea, even in physics that was completely original and spontaneous and in no way based on the education of the inventor? I don't think so. The way we formulate ideas and inventions is by using the knowledge we already have.

Actually, you're also agreeing with me (and Darkmatters, I believe). I never said that perfectly novel concepts fly spontaneously out of an inventor's head. I also did effectively agree with Tommo that his challenge to share a thought or image that is completely alien to all human experience was probably impossible to meet. What I did say was that there is nothing wrong with an idea brewing for generations among many minds, until it culminates in something that never existed before.. I even offered a list as evidence. I don't understand the difficulty with this concept.

To limit an idea to one individual doesn't make sense, and to demand that nothing is new unless it springs spontaneously from one's head with zero previous influence is absurd. Humans are a herding animal; we work together. That goes for ideas as well. Of course we use the knowledge we already had; why is that such a bad thing?

That said, aside from banging my head against a wall with Tommo, I think I can believe that we do have the potential for mostly spontaneous idea generation, though its incidence is extremely rare. At the moment, the only example I can think of are Newton and Leibniz' simultaneous (but separate) invention of Calculus, which no one had thought of before (though it did still use numbers and a couple of math staples like addition & subtraction, you really cannot call it a hybrid of what already existed). There are likely other examples, and they ought to stand out historically, but my mind's a blank right now ... anyone else have any? Or should this even be discussed, because the novelty of ideas seems to be having less and less to do with free will...

Yeah, I'm not sure why absolute originality is necessary in order for people to have the ability to freely choose among options.

That argument seems to be saying "if originality or the ability to make choices isn't absolute then it doesn't exist at all".

I don't get it. That's like saying "Because there's a practical limit to how fast cars gan go, cars don't move at all".

Obviously a person who's free to choose between 5 options has more freedom than a person limited to only 2 options, or only 1.

And about this whole idea that our influences make the choices for us - Well, aside from the fact that many of those influences are actually a part of the person and therefore can't in any meaningful way be called external influences, there's also a lot of randomness in exactly HOW they influence us. If you imagine a tree of influences, or rather a forest of influence trees that kick in each time a person is deciding something, there must be thousands of factors involved. There's no telling on a given day which ones will get made faster and therefore randomly take precedence over others that might have influenced it, plus some of them are so balanced out they sort of cancel each other or force the person to decide. To say we'd always make exactly the same choice given the same circumstances is ridiculous.

But this whole discussion is pointless. Even if it was possible for everyone to agree, the answer would be meaningless because it doesn't apply to any real-word situation.

Discussing some of these things seems pointless. What the heck aare they trying to say anyways? It seems likee a couple of the points so far are impossablly silly. This stuff about truely original thought makes no valid point. If we follow the logic, then the point is 'pointless.' What is really being said? It sounds like, 'you can not have an effect without a cause.' Well now, really, let's go back and forth about non-sense.
Really how could the point be debated if we get all silly about it. The first person ever to try and do something,, is not original because he was just responding to 'sensory input'??? Well, what the heck is the point? You can say because someone experienced cold any action they take to change that was 'influenced' by that exposure. True, perhaps, but what is the point. It seems like the same weird reason that 'free will' supposedly does not exist,,, those damb molecules and sensory inputs.

Originally Posted by tommo

Not even gonna bother with your post sageous, when you start to get pissy, you already know I am right.

He's not being pissy within his posts, the fact that you're contradicting things with how we presumably never learn from something we already knew, and yet stated there's wonder and joy that we can find something from what we know = contradicting and impossible to discuss about. It's just that when you haven't even come to terms that what you stated was just implausible, that is why there are points he doesn't want to cover.

It's not that you won or that he gave up, your concepts (parts of them) aren't enticing enough for him to invest time into. It's not his fault, it's just you presuming everything he doesn't respond to you is him being a defeatist. If it keeps ending up like this with you having some cognitive bias on what he's trying to do when discussing with you, you should expect an apathetic response (or no response) in return.

Originally Posted by sivason

How does this apply to the first person in an aboriginal people discovering/inventing a basic principle such as irrigation or the wedge? Obviously some person at some point put such things together that no one before had seen.

Looking at it at face value, it does make sense that we can't just pull things out of nowhere and expect something great or new to happen. To me personally, it feels almost tedious to just view things in an observational reality where one just sees a group of people putting two and two together to make faster and more efficient results with a conflict or making a tool. And I feel that it's almost natural for me to have a tendency to shift that habits or memories could tie into genetics or just how people respond to a solution and it becomes ingrained into their psyche for the next generation. And a question such as yours seems fitting to just use something like Natural Selection to give implications of discovery.

So if you were to apply the question with Darwinian Theory (evolution by natural selection):

• Like Sageous mentioned with herding and humans collaborating (but I won't be directing this towards him), it seems practical that on a biological scale, people offering their experiences (when trying to solve a problem like Irrigation or The Wedge example you mentioned Sivason) will increase their chances of surviving and being able to create offspring (I know that's obvious, but Biological standards has restrictions in going further than that). But digging deeper into that, applying something Social to just Biological standards is tedious, so how people try to make presumption on how people make discoveries, it's a mix of them trying to define it in biological terms and social terms. So when trying to answer a question like this biologically, it can only be used as a basis to shift into other theories. And because of our limitation of how aboriginal people worked exactly to discover and design things, we're forced to create models of realities based on the evidence.

So if you were to apply the question with something like Social Exchange Theory:

-

• It seems that collaboration amongst peers is a necessity in discovering anything new or what people lost sight of the opportunity to realize. There are going to be those few group of individuals that have better cognitive attributes that allows them to process and collect the experiences of others and make a discovery of design such as the Irrigation and the Wedge, but either way, these are the type of people that can just let other people mine and experiment, come back in a group, and then they make a solution. These same people still rely on the experiences of others, and it's something like this where even fathoming something like Free-Will (when trying to be at their time full of uncertainty and not ours that's has more to work around with ) doesn't make sense to me. Because if people, who have their own psyche and state of consciousness, if we're attempting to collect information from them to add on to our own, we are relying on an external source: the people around us that we collaborate with.
  
  If that's not a means of external source, then the individual is seeing things with a Solipsistic mindset.
  
  But right now in this day and age, we don't really have to rely on face-to-face discussion with people, we can just use something like the Internet, or just Books with people's own mindsets and predispositions about things to add on to what we know. So it's easy for people to presume they have free-will because the external factors like actually having that face-to-face discussion isn't needed, instead, it's just based on the Individual's ability to use retrospect, hindsight, and just basic experimentation to discover things themselves. But 100,000 years or more before that, I doubt those same aboriginal people would think they had Free-will without relying on each other; they would have to balance on giving and taking in order to make ends meet and survive. Whether it's them making markings on caves on ways to prevent other generations from making the same mistakes (like avoiding panthers, jaguars, etc.), or just having some medium to write on, we still rely on other people's insights; give and take, give and take, and add on to make things easier.
  
  And even if someone who's more intelligent and competent in learning about their existence, they are limited by what their mind filters and accepts, so the idea of Free-will seems implausible because of the fact that if we naturally are gregarious beings, we rely on others, which are an external source. It depends on how people look at it though. And trying to see things in an objective view (which is difficult) with our minds having its own stabilization aspects, Free-will doesn't seem to be the right word to use, so instead, it feels practical to just see it as the "Originality" that I believe Darkmatters mentioned (if I remember correctly).

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Just one more thing to mention, like the people in this thread talked about with Originality getting more difficult or almost impossible to have, it just means that you have think about how it would be to be an Aboriginal person that has to Scavenge and Take risks to find new solutions. People who say it's impossible for people to make new inventions and such is a clear reflection that they don't want to venture further, or what they would think would be "over-analyzing" the situation with topics like this.


Anyway, that's just my input for that question Sivason.

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EDIT:

I agree with Darkmatters that the discussion is pointless in a way because honestly, these are all just "if" and implications. And people who read someone' interpretation, they'll just naturally predict and get the core idea. And with others who have to spend their time clarifying things on the "tone" and such of a person's post, discussion gets nowhere. And even what I stated, I already know people already get the idea, but hey, at least we're trying.

However, for discussions to be aimed where people generally agree doesn't make for practical discussion. It's just more of "Oh, okay, so that's how you see it." It's just to have some insight in our minds, but we don't really have to live by it.

Okay, forgive me gentlemen: Free Will does require sensory input. Without sensory input you have nothing to base a decision on, therefore no decision can be made. The entire idea that Free Will can not exist because we have sensory input into our mental computers to base our decisions on is irrelivant. Go live in a sensory deprivation chamber.
Sorry boys, this discussion seems completely devoid of intelectual understanding.
Sivason, It is time to take your wife to breakfast before she starts munching people.

Interesting points Link. I suppose the back and forth here shows we are all a little bored, and not many other threads are going around at the moment.

Originally Posted by BlueBenuofIsis

Okay, forgive me gentlemen: Free Will does require sensory input. Without sensory input you have nothing to base a decision on, therefore no decision can be made. The entire idea that Free Will can not exist because we have sensory input into our mental computers to base our decisions on is irrelivant. Go live in a sensory deprivation chamber.
Sorry boys, this discussion seems completely devoid of intelectual understanding.
Sivason, It is time to take your wife to breakfast before she starts munching people.

You don't have to forgive anyone, what you stated is practical, by no means you have to apologize for interrupting. And like you stated with people's preconceptions that we can learn things just from what our minds collects without us actually having to rely on other people, it depends on who's more absolute and who's more liberal. For those who state that sensory input isn't needed, they themselves are just not having a tangible grip on reality here.

Those who state that it's just sensory input and only that, and that any other means of how to experience reality is just that, they're also a bit intolerable as well. However, I don't know who you're aiming for about people who state we just have mental computers that doesn't need much input from others. Either way, if there's people that are like that, I feel sorry for them, but it seems you're creating people from Sivason's set question, or you glanced through and was just late in responding. Most of the responses I made right now is just aimed towards Sivason's questions (and just a few snippets of the arguments people stated).

But presuming you're aiming it on me, I'm not aiming to disprove Free-Will whatsoever, in fact, if I did that, that would be contradicting to the principles I have in just being an individual that scavenges for information and doesn't want to surrender himself to emotional gluing of concepts that seem good enough to not explore even more. It's just that with Free-Will, and using examples of how it's hard to conceptualize as irrefutable truth, it seems impractical. Presuming people are just focusing that being devoid of external sources and influences for "Free-Will," it usually just puts them back into muddy waters all over again, because it's bound for them to respond with a slightly or overly Solipsistic mindset.

So for people who aren't trying to be Solipsistic (to some extent), it doesn't mean everyone has intolerance for the probability of there being a Transcendentalist, Spiritual, or Mystical Vibe. It's there for good measure, but just something to add on, and not something to fully live by. For me, I don't think it's just 100% sensory input/chemicals/molecules flying about...it's that along with many, many, many, many things.

But if your post wasn't reflected at me personally, or me part of whatever group you're mentioning, I apologize, and just ignore what I said.
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Originally Posted by Sageous

Actually, you're also agreeing with me (and Darkmatters, I believe). I never said that perfectly novel concepts fly spontaneously out of an inventor's head. I also did effectively agree with Tommo that his challenge to share a thought or image that is completely alien to all human experience was probably impossible to meet. What I did say was that there is nothing wrong with an idea brewing for generations among many minds, until it culminates in something that never existed before.. I even offered a list as evidence. I don't understand the difficulty with this concept.

To limit an idea to one individual doesn't make sense, and to demand that nothing is new unless it springs spontaneously from one's head with zero previous influence is absurd. Humans are a herding animal; we work together. That goes for ideas as well. Of course we use the knowledge we already had; why is that such a bad thing?

That said, aside from banging my head against a wall with Tommo, I think I can believe that we do have the potential for mostly spontaneous idea generation, though its incidence is extremely rare. At the moment, the only example I can think of are Newton and Leibniz' simultaneous (but separate) invention of Calculus, which no one had thought of before (though it did still use numbers and a couple of math staples like addition & subtraction, you really cannot call it a hybrid of what already existed). There are likely other examples, and they ought to stand out historically, but my mind's a blank right now ... anyone else have any? Or should this even be discussed, because the novelty of ideas seems to be having less and less to do with free will...

It seems I misunderstood the argument in that case. I think it's because some replies seem to be missing from the previous page.
I completely agree with everything you said, I don't think I have much to add.

Originally Posted by Linkzelda

You don't have to forgive anyone, what you stated is practical, by no means you have to apologize for interrupting. And like you stated with people's preconceptions that we can learn things just from what our minds collects without us actually having to rely on other people, it depends on who's more absolute and who's more liberal. For those who state that sensory input isn't needed, they themselves are just not having a tangible grip on reality here.

Those who state that it's just sensory input and only that, and that any other means of how to experience reality is just that, they're also a bit intolerable as well. However, I don't know who you're aiming for about people who state we just have mental computers that doesn't need much input from others. Either way, if there's people that are like that, I feel sorry for them, but it seems you're creating people from Sivason's set question, or you glanced through and was just late in responding. Most of the responses I made right now is just aimed towards Sivason's questions (and just a few snippets of the arguments people stated).

But presuming you're aiming it on me, I'm not aiming to disprove Free-Will whatsoever, in fact, if I did that, that would be contradicting to the principles I have in just being an individual that scavenges for information and doesn't want to surrender himself to emotional gluing of concepts that seem good enough to not explore even more. It's just that with Free-Will, and using examples of how it's hard to conceptualize as irrefutable truth, it seems impractical. Presuming people are just focusing that being devoid of external sources and influences for "Free-Will," it usually just puts them back into muddy waters all over again, because it's bound for them to respond with a slightly or overly Solipsistic mindset.

So for people who aren't trying to be Solipsistic (to some extent), it doesn't mean everyone has intolerance for the probability of there being a Transcendentalist, Spiritual, or Mystical Vibe. It's there for good measure, but just something to add on, and not something to fully live by. For me, I don't think it's just 100% sensory input/chemicals/molecules flying about...it's that along with many, many, many, many things.

But if your post wasn't reflected at me personally, or me part of whatever group you're mentioning, I apologize, and just ignore what I said.
---

Mostly she was just hungry.
I think she is saying the whole premiss has so little to do with reality, that it is not worth talking about, even more so when she is hungry.

Originally Posted by BlueBenuofIsis

Sorry boys, this discussion seems completely devoid of intelectual understanding.

I don't think it's fair to say there's no intellectual understanding here - it's more that the way the term free will is defined it makes no sense in any meaningful way, so some people (like me, Sageous and Sivason and you) are saying "We need to re-define it to something that actually fits with reality", while some people are saying "The definition is what it is - therefore obviously free will can't exist".

The funny thing is - we're all right. As defined, free will is impossible and the whole idea actually makes no sense. So as has been said a few times already - we're all just talking past each other.

But you are forgiven, seeing as it was a pre-breakfast comment.

Originally Posted by sivason

Mostly she was just hungry.
I think she is saying the whole premiss has so little to do with reality, that it is not worth talking about, even more so when she is hungry.

Oh...woah...just realized she's your wife *facepalm*. I am really sorry to both you and her, I thought she was just a member who lurked and thought the conversation was devoid of intellectual understanding. Sure hope you filled her up though. Forgive me BlueBenuofIsis!

I guess it's true that when a Woman has to eat, she's gotta eat, or else!

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I don't think it's fair to say there's no intellectual understanding here - it's more that the way the term free will is defined it makes no sense in any meaningful way, so some people (like me, Sageous and Sivason and you) are saying "We need to re-define it to something that actually fits with reality", while some people are saying "The definition is what it is - therefore obviously free will can't exist".

The funny thing is - we're all right. As defined, free will is impossible and the whole idea actually makes no sense. So as has been said a few times already - we're all just talking past each other.

But you are forgiven, seeing as it was a pre-breakfast comment.

Actually, what you stated just now, when people have to make their own definition, I feel that itself is the practical way in this reality to define Free will.

I'll state really quick why I think Free-Will is impractical. Because of the hardcore definitions, or the generic textbook definitions that was established based on the thoughts of others, the parameters and limits on what the general definition of it makes it impossible to live by. With our sense of self; our self-concept about things, whether it's Sivason who has to deal with his wife and making sure she gets something to eat, or you being an amazing artist with his own set of wisdom over the years, or just me being a 19 year old kid, we do have to find meaning on our own.

The reason why I stated Free Will is impossible is because I was focusing on the parameters on it's hardcore definition, or just people who focus that you are "devoid of external factors" if you are to have free will. But that didn't mean I didn't have my own definition of what I think Free-will is. Based on those parameters and limits the general definition imposed, I tried to give scenarios on trying to apply the logic, but ultimately, like you clearly saw from the start, it's self-contradicting. That was merely me trying to apply the logic as if I were to believe Free-will was the hardcore definition.


But for me, and the definition to me is always going to be open to be re-defined and updated as much as possible:

I see Free-Will as in not adding the "having to be devoid from external factors," but rather "being able to increase the chances of protecting yourself from them, but at the same time, knowing the probability of external factors affecting your opportunity is there." Also, with that said, being able to acknowledge our guidance system (or just our ability to learn, experiment, analyze, etc.), and striving myself to focus wholly on a desire/task/goal/dream, as long as I know that I have factors of my own that can protect me from practical external factors, then I have Free-Will. From those parameters alone, that's how I feel that I have free-will.

But when I tried to apply the hardcore definition instead and not my own, it ends up being self-contradicting. At most, I had to go with "I just have more choices and awareness to go by" since the textbook definition is honestly begging for improvement. I just wanted to clarify that I believe in Free-will if the parameters itself can fit into this reality. We can't be devoid of all external factors, and to me, as long as I don't attempt to cop-out from that, it's Free-Will to me personally.

And as for people not having discussion, the funny thing is, Sivason is providing good questions, and the lack of responses towards that is a reflection that the reason there isn't discussion is people who are probably having his set of questions in mind aren't capable enough of finding the right words to attempt to explain in. And even when they do explain their answer, ultimately, we have to keep asking more questions. Dig deeper, dig for unique questions (like Sivason is doing), and keep finding how people of various upbringings apply their logic/schema of reality into those questions. If people see that we all have a sense of self, that we have flaws in our beliefs at times, but are at least attempting to ask others on what they see, this is how we can get a discussion. A question like Free-Will itself is going to have A LOT questions. If we attempt to just answer them one step at a time, even though we can't answer all, we have something to consider and potentially add on to our own schemata of things.

So I admit it's my fault for not stating my own definition of free-will from the start, I was focused on implying the other way (textbook definition) I felt was impractical instead.

Personally I think we CHOOSE our actions, but I think those actions we chose, we would have always chose, and will always choose. I believe if you could comprehend every thing that has ever happened up to this point at the same time, and found a way to predict the random probability of where every particle was to show up (sure probably not possible), than I think you could make an accurate assumption as to what was going to happen next.

For me free will is the capacity to choose our subjective experience of reality. I guess the key word here is choice-and uh-subjective reality. If there isn't anything to choose from then there isn't a need for free will to make those choices. External and internal factors are those things we choose from.

I understand that thoughts and emotions feel like something we have no control over. And I guess thats why a lot of people feel 'well if i cant control my thoughts or emotions then i really dont have free will'. Whats making all of this a huge confusing mess is that were getting emotions and thoughts confused with our conscious self.

Lets say you have a thought. You don't know where this thought came from. You don't know why it suddenly popped in your mind. And its not shutting up. On one hand you can say you don't have free will over this thought.

On the other hand you can still consciously choose to agree with the thought. To disagree with it. To enjoy it. To not enjoy it. To observe it. Or be obsessed with it. And how you consciously choose to react to your thoughts will either feed them or starve them.

You can also choose your thoughts and emotions - and I know people suffering from depression will roll their eyes at me - but you really can. You experience bliss, absolute joy, whatever. Your choice, you got it. Its just not necessarily easy!

The road block is our brain operates on different brain waves. Each brain wave has a different function and role. If you're trying to rewrite your subjective experience, then you want the hypnotic state of mind. Its in the hypnotic state that a person can literally re-write their brain, including what they think and how they feel on a day to day basis. Its much more powerful than a dream!

In a dream we still experience doubt. The hypnotic state is practically doubtless. Its so doubtless, that whatever it is you choose to experience also effects your body, not just your mind. I've only had one full blown hypnotic experience. Just one! But it really did change what I wanted to change! (seriously, its the holy grail! I think everyone should learn more about the hypnotic state and learn how they can use it to change thought and emotional patterns)


And i just wanted to say that, lets not get free will confused with freedom. Free will for me has always been this internal thing within. Freedom is when we get to express our free will as an action. Unfortunately, we dont always have that freedom. But we at least can have a free mind, it just takes a lot of work!