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Why Free Will does not Exist
- Thread starter Skwim
- Start date
For the sake of argument, let's pretend we have no free will and everything is predetermined, predestined. And???
This just means most of the current 7 Billion people have a good chance of Heaven in the hereafter, whilst others are destined for another place. The ONE who gave us life tells us, remember Him, do good works, treat others well and success will be ours on our return. People can tell themselves, no they don't wish to remember Him and live their lives accordingly; who cares?
This just means most of the current 7 Billion people have a good chance of Heaven in the hereafter, whilst others are destined for another place. The ONE who gave us life tells us, remember Him, do good works, treat others well and success will be ours on our return. People can tell themselves, no they don't wish to remember Him and live their lives accordingly; who cares?
Muslim-UK..... Or, it means you have assumed a god exists without any proof. An undetermined will would be chaos, but science tells us everything is connected in the physical world, and that is the way the world works. It's called cause and effect. Religions dislike cause and effect because there is no place for their gods and goddesses, who must act spontaneously. May I ask what is the Being of your god? It is certainly not flesh and blood and protons and electrons is it? No, the religions don't allow teaching science or evolution to children, because they begin religious training at birth, and do not permit reality entrance until they have your mind enslaved to dogma of this or that religion. And so the religions fight each other over whose imaginary god is the 'real' god. And we call ourselves civilized...... See Guide to the Gods by Marjorie Leach, for a listing of over 2000 gods and goddesses men have created. Yes, those were all prior to your current god, whom I believe claims to be the only real god....... Right........
Thanks for the video. It's well done and makes its points clearly.
I'm familiar with all those points and I agree with the presenter.
How could any decision be made by a sentient being, whether a squirrel, a human or a god, other than as the result of the interplay of complex chains of cause&effect, diluted perhaps (we have no demonstration of such a dilution, but the possibility remains) by random quantum events disrupting the purity of the chains?
I'm familiar with all those points and I agree with the presenter.
How could any decision be made by a sentient being, whether a squirrel, a human or a god, other than as the result of the interplay of complex chains of cause&effect, diluted perhaps (we have no demonstration of such a dilution, but the possibility remains) by random quantum events disrupting the purity of the chains?
True, the notion of free will is a mind bender. We act and think as if we are free, but there are reasons to think we do not have free will. Consider, if we do have free will, how would it work? How would we ever make a decision or come to a conclusion? Free will sounds like it would be chaos, but we think of it as natural. Another of life's mysteries....... It has been said that reality is 'contingent', meaning that every bit of matter is adjacent to another, and so on, that every event has an antecedent cause. Marvin Minsky, who wrote 'The Society of Mind' is of this persuasion. He says "Everything, including what happens in our brains, depends upon these and only these: A set of fixed deterministic laws, and/or a purely random set of accidents. There is no room on either side for any third alternative. Whatever actions we may 'choose', they cannot make the slightest change in what might otherwise have been -- because those rigid, natural laws already caused the states of mind that caused us to decide that way. And if that choice was in part made by chance -- it still leaves nothing for us to decide."
Minsk readily admits that we are forced to maintain the myth of freewill, because as a society we use the idea of freedom of will to justify our judgements about good and evil.
Yes, it seems like I have a free will, but maybe i don't...........
Minsk readily admits that we are forced to maintain the myth of freewill, because as a society we use the idea of freedom of will to justify our judgements about good and evil.
Yes, it seems like I have a free will, but maybe i don't...........
The narrator makes the additional excellent point that even if our will comes into being uncaused due to indeterministic quantum events, it's still not free will in the sense that the self chose to have this desire,
And suppose that we were the authors of what we desire, which is obviously not the case when we feel thirst, for example, and desire a drink. That message came from the hypothalamus' osmoreceptors. Suppose instead, that I could will to never desire to drink again. What would cause me to make that choice? Whatever that is, it yet another idea generated in neural circuits not visible to the conscious except as their output delivered to the theater of the mind.
There really doesn't seem to be a place for free will anywhere in this analysis.
In the fifth minute, the narrator says, "We’ve been defining free will incorrectly. For Hume, free will doesn’t mean doing something that isn’t caused in any way. It just means doing what you want to do."
I find that second definition to be trivial and irrelevant. It is consistent with the will being generated outside of consciousness and delivered to it in a setting in which there is no barrier to carrying out the desire placed before the self. The self is informed of a desire and executes it. Such a process could be entirely deterministic.
Because many (myself included) posit that life is more than physical matter. Personally, I believe we have a soul that is not bound by the workings of the physical plane. As for support, I believe a mountain of paranormal evidence exists that can not be understood in the materialist framework used to make the 'no free will' argument.
Just answering your 'how could' question and presenting the other school of thought.
It's not that qm says things are random, that impossible with causality, more specifically all things happen and we literally are one of several variations within a "fixed" quantum state. Just because we find ourselves at one particular time and space downer mean that's all there is.
So, you're saying that you came across this video, you watched it, and you had a feeling that, despite all the previous discussions on free will here at RF, it would be worthwhile for other people at RF to watch . . then, somehow, magically, that exact video is linked to in your post!
How do you account for those events? First you had that feeling about that video, then the video shows up in your post.
Why would anyone believe that series of events is just a big coincidence?
Why would anyone believe that that series of events--in which you first had a feeling that that video would be worthwhile for others at RF to watch, then the video is linked to in your post--is something other than the product of your voluntary bodily movements?
BTW, I haven't watched the video. Apparently it says something about quantum mechanics. QM does not in any way imply that persons do not or cannot have voluntary bodily movements. Indeed, the measurement process in QM requires that the experimenter make the "Heisenberg choice" (the choice of basis--i.e., whether to observe particle-like or wave-like phenomena), then nature makes the probabilistic "Dirac choice". It's delightfully explained here: The Observer in the Quantum Experiment
So you didn't decide or choose the content of your post? That's rather self-stultifying, is it? Like Epiphenomenalism, Denial of Free Will is Self-Stultifying Your post has no truth-value if it was something that wasn't reflected on, and was merely something you couldn't avoid doing--in the same way that the sound of a car engine when the engine is running has no truth-value; it's just sound that the car could not avoid makeing.
From what I can find, the question has still not be proven with definitive research. There are clearly some situations where there is an illusion of free will as the first reference below illustrates. But the second reference makes a good argument that free will does in fact exist in some situations. I await further research results.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-neuroscience-says-about-free-will/
Free Will Is Not an Illusion
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-neuroscience-says-about-free-will/
Free Will Is Not an Illusion
So you also didn't choose or decide what the content of your post would be? It's amazing, then, that your post mentions Marvin Minsky and a particular book he wrote. It sounds like the content of your post was rather purposeful.
But you're saying it was all just a big coincidence that your post mentions Minsky and his book on this thread about free will?
The number of inexplicable coincidences on this single thread are just mind-boggling. Eventually someone may try to explain them.
So the video says that we can choose to do (or not do) what we want to do (or do not want to do)? How does that happen?
I don't think that's Free Will in any sense. Like other mental faculties, "will" is an abstract, it is, "The faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action." (Oxford dictionary)
Free Will is not an absence of cause, but is a different type of cause (to paraphrase Hume).
We don't choose desires, we don't choose any mental entities or faculties. They are not distinct from us, rather they are us, the "self," causing actions.
Not in that analysis, no, but ordinarily people don't think of themselves in terms of their hypothalamus, they just think of themselves in terms of themselves. The model engenders its usefulness.
It's not trivial in light of what it stood in contrast to: abandoning moral responsibility to a "god."
There is no barrier between self and desire where "self" is one's mental entities and faculties at work.
Causality is not a problem for free will. You make a choice based on what you want to accomplish. Your choices are caused by whatever the current state of affairs are in the world. The question is whether you can make a choice amongst the available choices that exist?
Determinism says you can only react in a necessary way. So all the forces acting upon you, the current state of the universe, your own wants/desires. Do these necessitate your actions, or can you make choice between alternative actions caused by these forces.
Determinism see human action in the same light as a cue ball hitting the 8 ball. The 8 ball has no choice except to react as necessitated by the forces acting on it.
Does a human being have the ability to resist the "natural" forces acting upon them?
If you are hungry, can you resist that urge and choose not to eat? If you are sleepy, can you resist the urge to sleep. This ability to resist the natural forces acting on it is something the 8 ball does not possess.
This ability to resist natural forces certainly makes it feel like we have a choice whether to react to them or not.
Nor in any theology that includes an omnipotent, omniscient being, since it will be impossible for any person to do even the most trivial act that the being had not exactly foreseen before the universe was made.
And as we all agree, no one has said HOW a 'free' decision could be formed, other than by cause&effect or randomness, both of which trivialize any result.
Is it? Or does Hume just mean that if we're thirsty we can get a drink; and when we get a drink we can choose water, coffee, lemonade or beer? That there's a large class of desires where for most of us nothing stops us from making the choices we please relevant to those desires, regardless of whether either strict determinism, or quantum-fuzzied determinism, generates our desire and our choice? As the presenter in the video mentions in the Hume section.
Noted. Thanks for your input.
So something "causes" you to become angry. You have no choice then except to react to that anger. Will the anger you feel cause your actions? Or can you decide not to let the anger cause your actions? Can you resist the urge to act on your anger?
I did in the Humean sense, but determinism, whether strict or quantum-fuzzied, still applied.
I don't regard 'stultifying' as the test.
I have indeed reflected on such matters. Determinism is no bar to reflection.
As for truth-value, that's part of our worldview as humans, and if it's a mirage, it's a useful one, since insight into the actual processes of determinism is inaccessible to us anyway, hence can't aid our understanding of the present or the future. No surprise, then, if we've evolved other ways to respond to the various challenges of reality.