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Free will vs. Determinism

thenightwatch said:
agreed on the atheism thing

i don't have a problem with all atheism, but there are atheists out there that try to force their views on others... which IMO is just as bad as the Bible slingers that do the same.
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do atheists in general try to force their lack of belief down peoples throats on any scale that actually compares to say, the catholic church, or is it just those annoying weird nerd warriors of atheism sect that equates to more, just...a facepalm? atheists with no sense of humor who seem to think they have big news to tell everyone are annoying, but i also come from a background where my best friend was raised by a cult, and everything is awash with needing to go to church and what is okay and not okay with "jesus" this and that and sexism and weirdness and it fucks the kids up. fucks them up. lookatme. i dunno. geographical and social circumstance. environmental stuff. like what are the atheists...organizationally...?...doing? "har you are stupid because you believe this, sad people" is not a great sentiment but i don't think this is taken very seriously? and it isn't...organized? it's like a lack of a thing with some douchebags using it for douchebaggery, like they wanna do with everything? i'd be as embarrassed to call myself part of an "aethiest community" as part of a "white community" but i can kind of see where (esp. younger) kids immersed in weird ass religious life would feel the need for support. or even just venting anger...they probably don't have any real role models around to tell them they aren't totally out there or rebellious for being sensible.

i like to play around with philosophies too, although i wouldn't like to bring the word God into it, semantics etc etc.
 
mmm. maybe i'm just trying to look after the special children, in a motherly way.

i was treated all kinds of ridic and bad for "coming out" as not wanting to be a part of the catholic church as a kid and i probably handled it better than the super tards. well, yeah, i did., i just had like a few slightly homicidal moments but mostly it was just...ignore the ridic. ignore the ridic. do not become assimilated into the ridic
 
extreme atheism and extreme religion are both bad IMO, for sure.

there are some atheists that actually take an offensive against religion, and Richard Dawkins is the biggest example of it. i've read parts of his book The God Delusion (couldn't stand to read the whole thing).... in that book he compares any form of teaching religion to children as being a form of mental abuse. that's just absurd.



back on topic:

could Free Will exist in a purely scientific universe? is the universe just a chemical chain reaction that follows set, unchangeable rules?

if we don't have free will then why not just give up on life completely?
 
Because we can't make the decision to give up, otherwise we'd have free will.

ebola? said:
I would define freewill as the ability of the conscious mind to causally affect behavior, driven solely by its internal structure and characteristics. Since the "unconscious mind"* (it's been established that the brain processes a lot of information outside of our awareness) shapes what desires, whims, urges, and thoughts pop into the conscious mind, and this is all causally effected by the state of the organism and environment, we don't have free will in the sense I described.
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This.

Where do people think free will stops? Human beings? Apes? Dogs? Snakes? Ants? Ringworm? Amoeba?
 
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rickolasnice said:
Because we can't make the decision to give up, otherwise we'd have free will.
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Interesting. I never thought about it that way. Can you explain this a bit more?

The only absolute form of giving up I can think of is suicide, but that very act places you outside of the question we're discussing.
 
I'm not sure I follow foreigner :\

It was more of a joke.. But it's true. thenightwatch asked if we don't have free will then why not give up completely. If we don't have free will we can't make that decision. I'd say I'd sway more to the belief that determinism is probably true.. i see no logical reason why it wouldn't be. But that doesn't make me unhappy or pessimistic as nothing has really changed. It's like getting diagnosed for a mental illness (which upsets most people i have spoken to) but the way i see it is nothing has changed.. You may have been told you are what you are but you were exactly the same before they did and will continue to be exactly the same afterwards.

I will continue to think, feel, experience, etc regardless of whether or not I think I have any control over it because, basically, I have no control over it ;)
 
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i have a similar joke i've used here for a few years. it goes something like:

one day i will have free will, i'm so determined nothing can stop me.
 
TNW said:
could Free Will exist in a purely scientific universe? is the universe just a chemical chain reaction that follows set, unchangeable rules?
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Perhaps, if you're open to compatibilist interpretations of 'exercising free-will': it could be that certain chemical reactions produce conscious experience as an 'emergent' layer of analysis (not only epistemologically but also ontologically), and the internal dynamics of this experience are intelligible in some framework that includes the exercise of willing. Here, free will would have to be defined as influence over behavior intelligibly determined via characteristics internal to the 'self'. We can't stipulate freedom to take actions incongruent with physiological conditions though.


if we don't have free will then why not just give up on life completely?
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Whether or not we possess free-will, we experience the feeling of exercising such, a feeling we can't just abandon...'at will'. ;)

ebola
 
Why is it free will vs determinism? I believe it could be both.

I know that my will is free because I can do what I want, for or against my better judgement. I can push myself through every little muscular contraction, every word, every thought, i can even choose what i want to perceive, i will it all.

It's possible that determinism does exist in the form of my every willful action of mine being accounted for. However by your definition of determinism if I did not have free will, if I couldn't control anything then my species would not have evolved to be a thinking thing, the functions of consciousness would not have been necessary for survival if my body could act on it's own.
 
rickolasnice said:
How do you explain the fact that you make decisions before you are conscious of them, believers of freewill?
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That website does not have a great reputation and that article is pure speculation. Even with the most advanced super computers there is no way for an fMRI to decipher how a portion of the brain firing translates into subjective experience(ex: it can't tell the difference between if the brain is making a decision, making a judgement about the color of the said button, considering some other unrelated matter or misfiring -> because those are all stimuli that could potentially make the frontal lobe fire).
 
Did you watch the video?

It's the last bit of a BBC Documentary exploring what consciousness is.. Test subjects were having their brain scanned while deciding whether to press a button in their right hand or their left.. There was a part of the brain that would show more activity 6 seconds before the conscious decision was made.. A portion of that region would show more activity if he was going to decide to press the left one and another portion would show more activity if he was going to press the right. The researcher could have literally predicted what button he was going to press before he had made the conscious decision to press it with 100% accuracy.

What website would you prefer?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision
http://www.newscientist.com/article...-spots-our-abstract-choices-before-we-do.html

It isn't a claim by a website it's an article based on a scientific study.
 
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i'd imagine that it would be much more difficult to predict non-arbitrary decisions that actually require some logic. "left or right" is pretty simplistic.

much more difficult is not equal to impossible, though. you're definitely making me think rickolas. (or are you?)
 
Lost Ego said:
(ex: it can't tell the difference between if the brain is making a decision, making a judgement about the color of the said button, considering some other unrelated matter or misfiring -> because those are all stimuli that could potentially make the frontal lobe fire).
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Wha?

Brain scans can and do show that activity in the brain in certain regions is the cause of subjective experience.. You can induce fear, happiness, euphoria, etc from activating certain cells / a certain brain region.. Granted it's a lot harder to actually decode the brains signalling when it comes to thought.. but it's possible.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-reading-technology-speeds-ahead/

The brain is the most complex thing known to man.. we are working it out bit by bit but it's going to take a loooong time before it is fully understood. We can decode brain scans to work out what a person is looking at, thinking about, feeling, doing and even what they are going to do.

How does quantum entanglement work? We don't know yet.. therefore God.
What happens at the point of singularity? We don't know.. therefore immaterial, metaphysical, magicness.

When you can know what a person is thinking, feeling, seeing, etc when looking at their brain activity i think it's safe to say that consciousness is a product of the brain.

If you looked at the code for the game grand theft auto, you would not see a simulated city, voices, cars, weather, artificial intelligence, etc and it would be hard (or impossible) to fathom how a code could end up becoming these things.

IMO there is sufficient evidence that brain produces consciousness.

I suggest these two documentaries (one about the brain and how damage to certain networks can cause really strange changes and the other purely about consciousness (albeit from a materialist perspective (but at least it has evidence to back it up))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DAgFwn4-w4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIu4ESYUdsk
 
That is the reason why brain is powerful than in any human parts of body. Because, the command comes into our brain. The brain itself dictates what our human body should do or act or pain.
 
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Theory based on?

So you are trying to tell me that a metaphysical consciousness or soul or whatever dictates to our brain what to do?

Come on.
 
We can see that neurons firing is connected to the functions of the mind. The thing we can't see is how. I refuse to close myself off to the idea that souls in other dimensions are Somehow tied to our physical brains and causing it to fire.
 
rickolasnice said:
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Theory based on?

So you are trying to tell me that a metaphysical consciousness or soul or whatever dictates to our brain what to do?

Come on.
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It depends on how you interpret soul, and/or metaphysical consciousness.

I might not call it dictation, but it "might as well be".
That's a shot.

That is, if we could read things better, we might see with a much greater degree of predictability, what's coming. It would seem dictated, and perhaps there would be no error if we could see it perfectly... So, we might say that a "soul" exists.
 
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rickolasnice said:
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Theory based on?

So you are trying to tell me that a metaphysical consciousness or soul or whatever dictates to our brain what to do?

Come on.
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The study of memory is really fascinating. A long time ago I watched a documentary on an experimental PTSD therapy in Montreal. The doctor would have patients recall their traumatic memories after being given a dose of a drug that dampens neural connections from re-forming easily. (I forget the name of this drug.) The show talked about how memory recall works, all the while leading to a very philosophical path of discussion without even knowing it.

See... our memories are not just static neural clusters, and there no fixed memory coordinates in the brain. What happens is, when you try to recall something, nerve fibers stretch and stretch to connect to one another. Sometimes we take forever to remember something because those neurons are trying to form. Essentially, there is nothing there, and then when you try to recall a memory, neurons come together and the memory is produced. The drug the doctor used in the PTSD research prevented the neurons from re-connecting, which made the memory become more and more dull with successive sessions.

The show didn't touch on the greater implications of this. If the neurons come together in vacuo to re-create the memory, then what is the underlying process which guides the structure to form? Is there some quantum level phenomenon happening which contains the actual memory, and then the neurons connect to make it physically possible to express?

I find this really fascinating. It implies that there is some kind of other foundation beyond neurology, which guides neural formation. The theory of memory engrams is false... our memories don't have specific coordinates, they are re-created neurally when consciousness attempts to recall it. My personal belief is that consciousness is a field and neurology simply responds to changing field dynamics. How else can memory be explained? Or consciousness? It doesn't seem like consciousness is in the brain, and many of the higher functions we would ascribe to the brain don't seem to have static physical manifestations. In the case of memory, the neurons seem to recreate the memory via the guidance of some unseen hand.

I mention all this because the unseen hand may be what people refer to as a soul... a field or non-material phenomenon which interacts with the physical body, but isn't in of itself the body.
 
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