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Free Will?

i'll try one more time; i don't think i'll be getting it any clearer then this, so:

you are looking at your room. at a certain point you become aware that you are looking at your room. you become aware of, you know of, a you and the fact that it is looking at your room. you know that you are looking at your room. this meta-perspective is the transcending of the subject-object relation, and is what i call 'self-awareness'. it is a sort of observing of the observer himself. that escapes both the object itself, as well as the perciever. it is the awareness of your perspective. but what is this meta-observer? its impossible to say. it is both you and it is not you. it is you looking at yourself. this is a fundamental 'freedom' you have from yourself, characterized by a sort of 'non-being'. you take a distance, a step back from yourself. but into what exactly? a sort of 'nothingness'. this is your freedom, and this is what self-awareness fundamentally is. awareness of yourself as an agent. this self-awareness can be reduced to a simple observer, an agent without any real power of intervention. that is what hard determinists do. its observing itself is just that, observing. it cannot do anything from that position. the incompatibilist determinist denies the existence of free will. not of freedom. this freedom may be limited to awareness of perspective. but to deny this 'freedom' would be preposterous, for it is to deny the very awareness that comes to positing this position. without it, you couldn't say "im a determinist" for you cannot be aware of this fact. ie.: object: "determinist", subject: "i", transcendence of object-subject: "i am determinist."
 
If mind is reducible to the physical, then it is determined by the laws of nature just as all other matter is. If mind is not physical, there is no way it can affect objects in the physical world (unless we get rid of the principle of conservation of momentum). Either way, no free will.
Also, sentences concerning the future have a truth value in the here and now. If I say "tomorrow at 4 I will be eating eggs", that sentence is either true or false now, and there is nothing anyone can do to make a true statement false or vice versa.
 
i'll try one more time; i don't think i'll be getting it any clearer then this, so:

you are looking at your room. at a certain point you become aware that you are looking at your room. you become aware of, you know of, a you and the fact that it is looking at your room. you know that you are looking at your room. this meta-perspective is the transcending of the subject-object relation, and is what i call 'self-awareness'. it is a sort of observing of the observer himself. that escapes both the object itself, as well as the perciever. it is the awareness of your perspective. but what is this meta-observer? its impossible to say. it is both you and it is not you. it is you looking at yourself. this is a fundamental 'freedom' you have from yourself, characterized by a sort of 'non-being'. you take a distance, a step back from yourself. but into what exactly? a sort of 'nothingness'. this is your freedom, and this is what self-awareness fundamentally is. awareness of yourself as an agent. this self-awareness can be reduced to a simple observer, an agent without any real power of intervention. that is what hard determinists do. its observing itself is just that, observing. it cannot do anything from that position. the incompatibilist determinist denies the existence of free will. not of freedom. this freedom may be limited to awareness of perspective. but to deny this 'freedom' would be preposterous, for it is to deny the very awareness that comes to positing this position. without it, you couldn't say "im a determinist" for you cannot be aware of this fact. ie.: object: "determinist", subject: "i", transcendence of object-subject: "i am determinist."

I don't know where you're going with any of this. The incompatibilist hard determinist takes upon the position that determinism cannot coexist with freewill and freedom doesn't exist whatsoever. There is a paradox in this in that their position would obviously suggest that determinism has caused them to be an incompatiblist hard determinist, negating any freedom or choice to believe. You seem to be implying that freewill exists because we are conscious and self-aware, which is a weak argument. I don't know why you're relating any of this to solipsism.
 
^I don't see how it's paradoxical that the belief in determinism is not chosen freely; where's the problem there?
 
nonono, again freedom and free will are not the same thing. the freedom that is self-awareness has nothing to do with intentional free will. you can be determined to be free, yet this freedom is only a freedom from the object. unless you want to argue that a human is an object with no awareness, this cannot be denied. this freedom is simply self-awareness itself, as free from the object. it is the fact that we are a subject. there is no intentional will or anything here, no influence on the material world, no conscious non-deterministic choice. just the presence of 'the observer' means the freedom from being a non-aware object. it is what makes us different from say a chair or a completely automated body that is not aware of itself. hard determinism comes very close to solipsism, since it posits that we are automatons. consequently, it can only be aware of one self-awareness, namely its own. the fact that the other bodies are anything more then mindless automatons, is completely unaccessable, given that the self-awareness has no influence on this automated universe. how can you infer that it is there then, in other human bodies? you can only posit that by a belief (that is why i say close). but there is no real, logical way to infer that. without the fact that this self-awareness has any influence on the world, it cannot be retraced to through that will/expression of itself. it does not reveal itself in any way to the deterministic world. the only thing you can know, is that you yourself are self-aware, because you experience that. in others, the difference between the automated body and its (completely passive, reactive) mind (as it has no will of its own) cannot be discerned, therefor, the existence of this other mind cannot be inferred, only posited through a belief.

again, an incompatibilist determinist does not say freedom as such does not exist. he says free will is incompatible with determinism, and that he believes all of the universe is determinist. he says free will does not exist. freedom (from free-domain) is the mind itself; the mind-space. in the sense of a powerless observer, experiencer in the deterministic worldview. his free-dom does not consist of anything more than that, having an a-temporal, non-spacial domain. 'free domain from object'. free will would be a 'will', an influencial power coming from/out of this free-domain

actually, when i look at it, these last four lines might be the core of the confusion
come to think of it, its actually rather ironic to see you determinists identify the 'freedom that is 'mind'' automatically with 'free will'. i guess it shows how deeply ingrained the idea of the free will of the mind on the world really is; given that the terms are identical for most people, apparently.
 
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I'm no longer sure what you are arguing against azzazza (or if you are, indeed, arguing against anything).

I understand this concept that mind space is a 'freedom', I'm not sure how it relates to a rejection of determinism?

I don't buy the idea that this mind space, or awareness must exist outside of a closed system (transcend the subject-object relationship), self-awareness could just as well reside in a section of the brain separate to the areas that process sensory information, or could be some kind of self analysing meta routine.

I can appreciate the notion of awareness as transcendence of the subject-object relationship as a concept, but I don't find it to be an obvious, or necessarily true state of affairs.

And with regards to the other problem of the subject-object relationship - what I can know (which is where solipsism came in) - yes, I have long come to terms with not truly being able to know anything, which includes whether other humans experience the freedom of self awareness. As you say, this is close to solipsism (well, at first you originally said nearly identical to), but, as I wrote many posts back, though I can not know that other people are aware - I can not infer it, or deduce it logically - I believe that it is the case, because it's all I've got to go on, and it fits in with the model of reality that my brain has constructed - a model which appears to me to be self-consistent. That said I concede that I may well be being deceived by Descartes demon.

Anyway, what about my thought experiment from earlier in the thread? It seems to me that this is close to Yerg's point about the truth or otherwise of statements about the future.

And what about Yerg's other point, which was (I think?) essentially an argument against "the Ghost in the Machine"?
 
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^I don't see how it's paradoxical that the belief in determinism is not chosen freely; where's the problem there?

Paradox might be the wrong word. What I mean is that it is self-refuting for one to say they believe in determinism on their own accord.
 
I don't think any determinist would claim that they came to determinism as a result of free will, that is obviously self-refuting. But I don't see how a belief being arrived at through deterministic processes reduces its epistemic weight at all. The fact that my belief in determinism is itself the result of cause and effect has no bearing on the truth of that belief.
 
@wobble:
ah but im not refuting determinism at all. what i am arguing for is the development of your position. im trying to show you what the philosophically maintainable position looks like. pointing out distinctions that should not be overlooked. when one overlooks those, you can make a position intuitionally more acceptable then it really is, because you don't really bone out what it means. as such, you may support yourself on and revert to intuitions your position does not allow for, and your position becomes inviable. philosophy is not about answers, it about developing ones questions and sharpening ones distinctions. there are no answers. its about castle-building :)

yergs other point is the mind-brain problem, which as to this day, still stands. there is not much one can say about it. one way could be to argue with Spinoza's parallelism. mind you, the problem goes the other way around as well, how can the body/brain influence the mind? reducing the mind completely to the physical? can be done as a position. trouble here comes from the point that 'mental objects' (as opposed to physical objects) have no spatiotemporal properties. a 'thought' itself does not extend into space-time.
another way is to reject the physicalism of his position and revert to pure forms of idealism and reject the physical as 'real'. the unmoved mover and such things.
or you can take a middle road (though in this debate, the middle-road positions on either side tend to slippery slope themselves to either one of the extremes); as philocybin has already pointed to with QM: 'soft-determinism' not all physical manifestations may require such direct interaction. there may very well be ways by which non-material properties influence material ones. energy-waves or whatnot. our physicalistic understanding of the universe is far from complete you know.

concerning his second point. its a circular argument really. his determinism is presupposed in his conception of time. his timeline is one of linearity. there are myriads of arguments against that, even very physicalist ones at that; Einstein for starters.
 
I don't think my argument is circular or as metaphysically laden as you suggest. The "logical fatalist" position doesn't concern the nature of time so much as it does the nature of truth. Regardless of whether time is linear or not the point stands that truth is (intuitively at least) transcendent of time.
As for the issue of non-physical entities having an effect on physical ones, I accept that it is possible, but I'm sure you'll agree that it would necessitate some pretty radical revisions of current paradigms.
 
Mr. Wobble and other determinists, to further refute determinism and defend volition think about how every atom making up the body is ostensibly moving in a seemingly determined manner. Yet many physicists suggest there is a fundamental indeterminism at play at a much deeper level (like I mentioned about the potentiality of a neuron). However, like I said before, by the time one gets to blobs of atoms on up the variations smooth out to leave a net determinism behind, one of which can be calculated/predicted with great precision (how this suggests indeterminism is a separate topic).

However, volition exists, and its existence is therefore necessarily saying that there's something directing the movement of atoms within human brains, other than the more obviously known forces of nature and the prior energy states of those atoms. The mystics may claim this something else to be some esoteric supernatural element, but that should automatically be ruled out legitimately as an explanation.

The bottom line is, we do not as of yet have a sodding clue why free-will exists, nor do we know how to connect it w/ what we currently know of the natural forces. I hold the idea that volition today is in the same position as gravity was in during the time of Newton, something that was also deemed as supernatural at the time. There were those who rejected it because they rejected the supernatural, and there were those who accepted it again because they accepted the supernatural. Likewise with volition, where pretty much nobody but ourselves thinks volition can be something entirely this-worldly and doesn't need a supernatural explanation.

I have lots more to say, particularly about Godel's theorem of incompleteness, but I have to run off.
 
I don't think any determinist would claim that they came to determinism as a result of free will, that is obviously self-refuting. But I don't see how a belief being arrived at through deterministic processes reduces its epistemic weight at all. The fact that my belief in determinism is itself the result of cause and effect has no bearing on the truth of that belief.

I wasn't implying it negates the belief.
 
^If what you're talking about with the "fundamental indeterminism at play at a deeper level" is the uncertainty on a quantum level, you have an attack on determinism but not really a defence of free will. Free will is just as impossible in a universe of random chance as it is in a physically determined one.
 
The bottom line is, we do not as of yet have a sodding clue why free-will exists

But my bottom line is that I do not believe that free will exists! In fact, I have yet to hear a satisfactory definition of what is even meant by 'free will'. The only definition I have found - 'free will is agency that is neither deterministic nor random' - seems to me to be paradoxical.
 
I dont beleive in free will.

I beleive that God is Soverign and does what he wants to do.


If man has free will than how come drug addicts cant stop using drugs when they want to??
 
Free-will is the ability to act (think, behave, learn, etc.) through one's own accord, discretion, volition, etc.
 
Okay, what does it mean to 'act through one's own accord'? When a person acts upon their discretion is the outcome of a 'choice' predetermined by a chain of cause and effect (determinism) - if so, surely, this is not Free Will?
 
So what's your point? I understand that you as a determinist do not believe in volition of any nature, but that doesn't refute the definition of free-will I simply gave (the ability to act on ones own accord or discretion). To do so would inadvertently refute the definition of determinism.
 
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