Nope, atheism is simply the disbelief in god or gods, anything else is down to the individual.
And these free will topics crack me up, you have the free will to decide whether to post the OP or not. ;-)
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Free will, determinism and absolute knowledge.
- Thread starter Dan From Smithville
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Nope, atheism is simply the disbelief in god or gods, anything else is down to the individual.
And these free will topics crack me up, you have the free will to decide whether to post the OP or not. ;-)
RedDragon94
Love everyone, meditate often
Basically the idea that all of life is natural and arises from things that are natural without divine guidance. In essence, everything is determined by nature and yet choice actually exists.
No. Philosophy rejects determinism and describes free will quite well.
PoetPhilosopher
Veteran Member
I don't know about that. That's actually really disputable if we picture this thread and everything leading up to it like these carrots:
I'm joking. But I do feel sometimes like determinism paints a pretty narrow picture compared to free will. Even though I'm skeptical even free will has every idea nailed down.
Go out your front door then decide which way to turn, left, right or go straight ahead. The choice is yours.
Or decide not to go out. Any decision is made using free will. It may of course have limited choices or logically you could narrow it down to one choice. But you use free will to arrive at the decision
We have to define what we mean by free will. Do we mean the experience of having a desire and being able to act accordingly, in which case that desire might be the product of deterministic processes occurring outside of consciousness that then deliver that will to the self-aware self for awareness and execution, or do we mean that the source of the will is that self-aware self without an external material mechanism telling it what to will?
If we mean the former, then we can call this the illusion of free will. I suspect that this is the case. As long as it feels like I'm the source of my will and I am free to exercise it, I would feel that I have free will despite being only an observer of deterministic processes being reported to consciousness.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Here's where natural law can be recognized--and help--100% of all justice and jurisprudence is predicated upon free will exercise. In other words, we exonerate someone who kills another if, for example, they were so badly abused by the person they struck down, they are considered to have had no free will choice in the matter... "she abused and abused and abused me, and one day, I snapped, and snapped back". In contrast, we incarcerate murderers who use their free will.
Put into other words, it is commonly accepted/natural law that all whole, well persons exercise free will and free will is only lost when one is mentally infirm/abused/a child not yet fully formed.
Here's a summary from a paper I wrote on the subject in 2017:
Summary
Arguably, all of jurisprudence holds individuals and groups responsible for a myriad of free will choices. Persons and juridical persons with legal capacity are held responsible for choosing to enter into contracts and agreements,[1] criminals and tortfeasors are held responsible for choosing unethical and/or unlawful behaviors. Yet in some cases, a soft determinism aka the theory of compatibilism (free will and determinism are compatible ideas), has been invoked by the courts. Actions caused by an addiction or compulsion have been construed as exonerating the accused and even to shift the responsibility for lawless acts to another party, one who manipulated the accused as their puppet agent.
In justice systems modern and ancient, the single-most important justification for correction or punishment is that degree of guilt hinges upon free will choices to act unlawfully or as a tortfeasor. Millennia of philosophical debates add to recent discoveries in the fields of genetics and human behavior, however, questioning man’s assumptions regarding the power (and even the existence) of human free will.[2]
[1] Emerson, Robert. Business Law. Barron’s, 2015, page 129.
[2] Jones, Matthew. Overcoming the Myth of Free Will in Criminal Law: The True Impact of the Genetic Revolution. Duke Law Journal, Vol. 52:1031, 2003, "Overcoming the Myth of Free Will in Criminal Law: The True Impact of t" by Matthew Jones. Accessed 29 March 2017.
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1187&context=dlj. Accessed 30 March 2017.
Studies of brain physiology point to all brain functions, including decision making, as the product of the interaction of complex chains of cause+effect. As far as I'm aware, whether these can be interrupted by random quantum events is yet to be shown, but it doesn't seem impossible. Even if we decide by tossing a coin, we've decided to decide by tossing a coin.
And if we don't make decisions in that fashion, by what process do we make decisions? Even God would have to do it that way.
But when we decide in that fashion, it's our brain, the same one that generates our sense of self, that does the work; and we generally have a strong and integrated feeling that the decision is ours, one we made, one we own. Or pwn, if you prefer.
Yes, you're right ─ no there isn't. Outside of this sentence there are no absolutes.
The real question is, why are you appealing to neuroscientists at all?
Skwim
Veteran Member
Skwim
Veteran Member
"The main argument against the quantum mind proposition is that quantum states in the brain would decohere before they reached a spatial or temporal scale at which they could be useful for neural processing. This argument was elaborated by the physicist, Max Tegmark. Based on his calculations, Tegmark concluded that quantum systems in the brain decohere quickly and cannot control brain function."
source: Wikipedia article
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source: Wikipedia article
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Freewill and predestination is an ancient argument among the 3 Jewish sects. The Essenes (similar to Calvinists) believe in absolute predestination but no freewill. The Sadducees believe in absolute freewill but no predestination. While the Pharisees stand in between.
The Christianity concept is delivered from Paul who is a Pharisee. Paul either introduced a Pharisaic concept, or it's about something else as a new revelation. Whatever it is doesn't affect Christianity's main message which is tied to human salvation.
That predestination is for God to lay a path for a human to go through such that a variety of choices are available for a human to choose from thus to show who himself is under open witnessing (say by the angels). It's necessary step to facilitate the final judgment for humans. To put it another way, God doesn't need to specially do anything for the unsaved as it's much easier for them to be proved to be the dead during the final judgment. However God may have to do a lot for those to be saved such that they can be proved to be the saved in the final judgment.
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Using the assumption of materialism/physicalism, there can be no such thing as free will. But because of the randomness introduced by quantum mechanics, I don't think you can say determinism is strictly true either.
In order to have free will, you have to have a spiritual aspect to reality, something living that can decide, a soul. This is, I think, where the answer to these questions are to be found.
This is a philosophical question. Ultimately, science depends on philosophy, specifically ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics. The scientific method is a philosophical construct; it is not made of matter and energy, nor is there a quantum field called "scientific method".
Thanks for that. I recall >an article from 2012< which claimed that certain birds navigate using quantum effects, though I haven't heard it mentioned since then.
Here I was considering quantum effects as possible random interruptors of the brain's chains of cause+effect. For instance, particles emitted in the course of radioactive decay can damage cells, so perhaps, a single such particle can interrupt / slightly alter a particular cause+effect 'flow' in a brain process without doing permanent damage.
In my opinion: science, archaeology, and philosophy demonstrate adequately that the claims of Christianity are false, and that the Bible is fiction.
Nimos
Well-Known Member
As many others this is a rough question and honestly not sure either, so will at least give my current view or thoughts about it. To me the most logic approach to this question is to go to the very beginning of our lives, when we are infants as that is when our experience of the world is the most limited. As far as I know there are some controversy about these studies, so you should obviously be careful how you approach them. But for instance a study have been made that seem to suggest that babies tend to choose good behavior vs bad.
You can watch a quick video about it here:
If we assume that this is correct, the question obviously become whether we are born with a desire for good, which is outside our control as it could suggest a benefit in survival for our species. But that this in certain cases can end up being ruined later in life as we start to experience more things. So if we don't really have a choice between whether we prefer good behavior over bad, do we then have free will?
In another thread also about free will which you might have read, a guy on youtube suggest that we have no free will and that this is purely based on our "wants", and since we can't really control what we want we don't have free will. Now I think a good counter argument to this is that we can only know what we want through our own senses and since these are part of us, its arguable that we do have free will regardless of us being unable to control them directly or not. They feed us information about the world and can be seen as neutral agents which only goal is to help us survive in the world in which we live.
Another example could be, if we imagine that you have never tasted or seen ice cream before and the only thing you have been told about it, is that you can eat it.
Now I place to identical bowls in front of you with identical ice cream in them, except the flavor, so lets say banana and coco. You can't smell or see any difference between them. So now I ask you to eat from one of them? If you have no free will, how will you decide which one to eat or not to eat any of them?
Where I think our free will might be limited is when we start to get experience, so if we continue the example and say the person ate the banana ice cream and didn't like it and were told that it were banana, there is a good chance that they would not choose it next time. But this is not really based on free will, as the taste of banana makes them prefer other tastes. So their former experience decide how they want to choose in the future and therefore their wants. So is it free will or is it not free will? Because I think it depends on whether you think the lack of control over your senses limit your free will or whether it doesn't. And im not really sure, but I tend to lean towards us having free will, as the senses are after all part of our body. But again do we have free will as a baby in choosing good over bad behavior or does it even have anything to do with free will, if this is about surviving as a species.
So again not sure
I cannot think of any either, but I do not know many. I would be surprised if there were not some.
Materialism as the idea that only that which is matter and energy and can be observed is real? The brain is a material object that would fit into that rudimentary definition if I am understanding you correctly. The mind or consciousness? I do not know. An emergent property of a specific type of matter.