Thread: Free will and determinism

You are the one who keep ignoring all my points, and havn't even attempted to address them yet. Like I said many times, if things happened exactly the same, then yes things would repeat. However, that has nothing to do with proving or disproving free will.

Free will is not the ability to choose RANDOMLY! If a choice was truly random then that would mean you have no free will. You wouldn't actually be thinking and coming to a conclusion, but just picking randomly.

I am not sure what is so hard to understand about this. You keep saying that determinism says that there could be no random events, while free will says that there are no random events either. They do not disagree. If it is random then that applies you have no free will, because you are doing it randomly. However if you have free will it is not random, your will is the causing factor.

When you decide to do something, you are the cause of your action. Where is the cause? You are the cause. Determinism still applies because something is causing you to do something, you are causing it. It is an internal force.

Now how about you stop repeating the same thing over and over, about how everything have causes, and everything is determined and answer the real question. Why do you say its impossible for the cause of something to be intentional. Why is it impossible for the brain to be a self contained system, that is able to to decided things based on its own will? To take outside factors into account but then come to its own conclusion then make its own choice?

You make the claim that it is impossible for a person to make a choice based on the majority of factors being internal yet you have yet to support this claim in any way at all. Of course there are causes, the problem is when you claim they can't be internal when they appear to be internal.

I have another important thing to say.

(Note: My word of "you" is general, it is not personal)

How can you ever get out of the box, when you define everything to be the box! Everything else than the box must be delusional! Do you not see the self-limitless of belief! Whether it's personal belief, cultural belief or scientific belief! What you so dear criticize, those religious nuts with all their dogma and belief. Don't you see the same threads of dogma and belief run through the western scientific establishment!

You will never get out of that box without a conceptual breakthrough. It can and it will happen, but there is no reason for the unnecessary delay!

How can free will exist where there are laws?

Originally Posted by Alric

Free will is not the ability to choose RANDOMLY! If a choice was truly random then that would mean you have no free will. You wouldn't actually be thinking and coming to a conclusion, but just picking randomly.

If it's not random, then it's deterministic. There isn't a third option.

Originally Posted by Scatterbrain

If it's not random, then it's deterministic. There isn't a third option.

Which is why I said you can have both at the same time. Free will and determinism.

When you're arguing for free will and determinism, there's a lot of factors at play that are accountable as support for both sides. Keeping anything paranormal outside of this such as precognitions and foresight, there's a few things that come into question.

When you're talking about free will, what exactly defines free will? You may conceive of the fact that you are choosing where you go or what you do every day, yes, but what happens on a day that you decide to walk a different route for no reason, and you end up bumping into a new person or old friend that becomes a significant aspect of your life. Was that pure chance or a planned event?

There are points in our life where we can say we have the free will to choose anything, but there are also times when we look back and say "Why the HELL did I do that?" We all have those moments, and sometimes they were mistakes. Perhaps we were determined to make that mistake to learn from it? Or perhaps we were too ignorant to know better and did it anyway?

If we look into the subconscious mind, for instance, you can send a message directly to it (if done appropriately) and it will affect you. If it's programmed into your subconscious to be a worka-holic, then that's what you'll be. If you're subconscious is recognized as being lazy, you will be lazy. What if the subconscious mind also had data we are not aware of yet that is linked between other individual minds which grants a sense of order to things. Technically, we can change anything we want about our subconscious, but we don't know always know what's going on in the mind itself.

Honestly, it's difficult to say if free will or determinism exists. I've had dreams that I dreamt about six months or years prior of the event happening that I remember upon the event itself. Others are symbolic in nature and tend to guide me to what is going to happen in my life. It's strange. I don't like the fact of absolute determinism, but I believe in determined causality from what I've experienced. If free will was all that existed, there would be chaos. There has to be a line somewhere which order stands in. Because if we do exist before these physical bodies, then there must be a sort of pre-set plan for us to follow. We may stray from it, but the plan is still there AND we can change it.

It's a hot topic for debate. I'm kind of unbiased in the argument. I'd like to think... both? =)

Free will just means complex determinism. You make your choices based on your own personality, knowledge, emotional state, etc. That's what we define as being free willed and it's also what we define as a deterministic process, the choices are determined by the past events that shaped you.

Saying free will isn't deterministic is saying it is random, and randomness is certainly not freedom.

Specialis, the Heisenberg Principle is retarded. Its conclusion about human uncertainty is correct, but its conclusion from there about actual indefinance concerning the laws of physics themselves is crazy.

Alric, I think you need to refer again to the definitions of free will I posted. They imply random events. I know you don't, but the meaning of free will does. There is no debate about whether or not people make decisions. Philosophers would not have wasted their time creating such a controversial term over something so agreed upon.

I never said causes can't be internal. I said the internal is programmed by the external. The brain does not come to "its own" conclusion. It comes to the conclusion it is programmed to make. The conclusion is dictated by many factors, including genes, a long past that existed before the brain did, a long history of extermal stimuli, immediate external stimuli, and the laws of physics.

No definition of free will implies randomness. If you had true randomness then you wouldn't actually be deciding anything would you? You would just be doing random things without any thought.

Human Brain [Random Action (No Cause)] - > External Action

That is what free will implies. Action without cause is random. This is what Free Will calls for, determinism says "No Fuck you that's wrong, everything has a cause" and therefore free will in that sense (I.e. The big, main one used by everybody) is dis-proven.

/thread

Doing a random action isn't free will. Doing an action you want to do is free will. If you want to do it, then you are the cause of it. Which implies there is always a cause, but the cause is you.

...Which is a pretty arbitrary term, but nonetheless still has a cause, which has a cause. Free will is creating an event without a cause, which is true randomness.

Originally Posted by Scatterbrain

Free will just means complex determinism. You make your choices based on your own personality, knowledge, emotional state, etc. That's what we define as being free willed and it's also what we define as a deterministic process, the choices are determined by the past events that shaped you.

Saying free will isn't deterministic is saying it is random, and randomness is certainly not freedom.

Exactly.

Nobody has answered the question that I posed in the OP about how free will could even exist without a deterministic universe.

And again, we're just arguing over the definition.

Furthermore, I didn't respond to it because he said he wasn't coming back, but DuB's refutation of my thought experiment was silly. Suppose we decide that the girl will choose the latter option with probability .9999... for some number, n, of nines. You can always make it more accurate by adding one more nine to the end. That means it's 1, as I claimed.

As I said before, this experiment assumes that even if we assume the kind of free will in the conventional definition, we can still cook up a situation where the behavior is known in advance, just like in deterministic free will. So it's silly to say that something being determined in advance ruins free will. The whole argument just falls on its face.

Everything that you can do with your definition of free will, you can do with mine. It's just that mine doesn't depend on some stupid idea that doesn't exist. I don't understand what the problem is.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

Specialis, the Heisenberg Principle is retarded. Its conclusion about human uncertainty is correct, but its conclusion from there about actual indefinance concerning the laws of physics themselves is crazy.

How can you sway a well-known established scientific theory away like that. It doesn't fit your world view and then it becomes crazy and retarded?

It nullifies the purpose of science..

Post #78 is just about that.

Look up "The measurement problem".

Originally Posted by Specialis Sapientia

It nullifies the purpose of science..

It most surely does not do that. It makes it a little bit more interesting. Quantum physics does just fine. And the correspondence principle means that it doesn't apply at the classical level anyway.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned

It most surely does not do that. It makes it a little bit more interesting. Quantum physics does just fine. And the correspondence principle means that it doesn't apply at the classical level anyway.

Yes it does. When it becomes dogmatic and pick-and-choose.

When science offers explanation and one rejects it, because of some world view or belief, while holding science so dear.. it is self-contradicting.

Originally Posted by Specialis Sapientia

Yes it does. When it becomes dogmatic and pick-and-choose.

When science offers explanation and one rejects it, because of some world view or belief, while holding science so dear.. it is self-contradicting.

Give an example of that happening.

Let's say I know everything about you: biological make-up, chemical reactions in your brain, thought processes, experiences, psychological reactions to stimuli, etc. Now let's say I put you in a controlled environment, where I know everything about every variable, element, and stimulus present. Let's say I generate a scenario (that I am fully aware of everything about), where I, based on the knowledge about you, the environment, and the scenario, expect you to react in a specific way. Do you think my expectations will be fulfilled? If so, why? If not, why not?

If so, then this means that I can predict every action you will make, given all the knowledge about you and the things you will come in contact with. It's just a question of what free will really is. Is it just the ability to make decisions? If so, think about the very nature of decision-making. You don't act without motivation, or let alone stimulation (truly present or illusory). Muscles do not contract without electrical signals from the brain, the brain does not send electrical signals to the muscles without there being a certain stimulus present for such signals to actually be sent down to the muscle itself.

When I make a decision, something has to happen beforehand for me to actually make the decision. Hell, even acting spontaneously really isn't what is claims to be: there are things that happen (or don't happen) that motivate you or influence you to act in a non-organized manner (from the perspective of yourself or others). True, I make the decision, but that sort of mentality is an oversimplifcation of a handful of scientific fields as well as philosophical theories.

Why do I make the decision? Because I am a collection of particles that act together as chemicals, and react together to internal and external stimuli? Or just because? There is no room for such limited ways of thought as the latter answer in any debate, or else we'd be seeing people throwing the "just because" excuse in virtually every argument. If you break things down and look at them realistically and empircally, and look for the sources of events, everything usually traces back to a cause. The only exception is when you can't see far back enough in time. But does that mean events happened without cause, or you just can't see the cause?

Occam's razor tells me to prefer the second answer.

In the end, your brain really does send out electrical signals to cause you to act in a certain way. It is not voluntary, because you are determined to act a certain way regardless of the way you feel about it. It is only through awareness of a behavior that you can decide to prevent it from happening, but in the end there was an involuntary reaction from you to cause that to be. You are determined to be how you are, even if you try to change it. Free will is an illusion created by the brain becoming aware of its own actions.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned

Exactly.

Nobody has answered the question that I posed in the OP about how free will could even exist without a deterministic universe.

And again, we're just arguing over the definition.

Furthermore, I didn't respond to it because he said he wasn't coming back, but DuB's refutation of my thought experiment was silly. Suppose we decide that the girl will choose the latter option with probability .9999... for some number, n, of nines. You can always make it more accurate by adding one more nine to the end. That means it's 1, as I claimed.

As I said before, this experiment assumes that even if we assume the kind of free will in the conventional definition, we can still cook up a situation where the behavior is known in advance, just like in deterministic free will. So it's silly to say that something being determined in advance ruins free will. The whole argument just falls on its face.

Everything that you can do with your definition of free will, you can do with mine. It's just that mine doesn't depend on some stupid idea that doesn't exist. I don't understand what the problem is.

So you identify the differences between adding two numbers at a time, and adding 500 together? That's crazy and pointless and is exactly what you are doing here.

The common term 'Free Will' defines human thought as an independent action in its own right with NO cause. That is wrong. Whatever craziness you decide
to stick under the umbrella of 'free will' is something noöne else is talking about, because it is redundant.

Originally Posted by A Roxxor

So you identify the differences between adding two numbers at a time, and adding 500 together? That's crazy and pointless and is exactly what you are doing here.

No. I'm saying that if I have a number of the form .99999 and I know that I can always add one more 9 to the end of it, then it's equal to .9999~ infinitely repeating which is equal to one, by definition.

Originally Posted by A Roxxor

The common term 'Free Will' defines human thought as an independent action in its own right with NO cause. That is wrong. Whatever craziness you decide
to stick under the umbrella of 'free will' is something noöne else is talking about, because it is redundant.

You still haven't answered my question. How is free will (taken as the ability to make decisions) even possible in a non-deterministic universe?

Actions are independent of causes and therefore random. It is not possible. That's my point. What you are calling free will is just a whole lot of deterministic events occurring that you have arbitrarily grouped together in your mind to make the universe easier to understand for you.

No one else on the planet would say that Free Will is determined; that defeats the point of free will, which is that the human mind is independent of the universe and can create actions without causes. That's random. That's not possible.

Free will implies a choice from the desires of the individual, so it is deterministic. It's just that people often mistake it as something that is neither deterministic nor random, which is impossible.

Originally Posted by A Roxxor

Actions are independent of causes and therefore random. It is not possible. That's my point. What you are calling free will is just a whole lot of deterministic events occurring that you have arbitrarily grouped together in your mind to make the universe easier to understand for you.

No one else on the planet would say that Free Will is determined; that defeats the point of free will, which is that the human mind is independent of the universe and can create actions without causes. That's random. That's not possible.

Wouldn't the action be caused by the persons desire? With the persons desire caused by their personality? So the standard definition of free will boils down to a persons personality not being determined, i.e. random. It's a stupid definition that is self contradictory.

Can somebody tell me how free will can exist in a non-deterministic universe?

EDIT: And I'm not randomly grouping together a set of causes. I'm saying that if you choose to do so in recognizing individuals, then free will is a necessary part of that. Otherwise your having it both ways: Your on the one hand saying this is a separate and largely independent entity and on the other hand saying that it's not. Do you see my problem with that? An individual (which is an illusory concept in the grand scheme of things) carries with it free will (which is also an illusory concept in the grand scheme of things).

Free will is as real as the individual that it belongs too.

Originally Posted by Daniel Danciu

Let's say I know everything about you: biological make-up, chemical reactions in your brain, thought processes, experiences, psychological reactions to stimuli, etc.

That is my entire point right there. If you know the persons thought processes and everything else, then yea you can predict what they will do. If your thought processes is the main contributor to the cause of an action, you have free will.

Free will is not random people. Free will is you choosing to do something, and if you choose to do something, you are the cause. That is the entire point, you are causing something without outside forces making you do it.