Free Will, true or false?

[apotheosis]

Don't give me the bs answer, "that depends on your definition of free will." I mean a truly free will independent of material causes.

[End Master]

Sure, there is no plan to life or order to it besides the small versions of what we attempt to set up for ourselves and others. So free will exists.

We can chose to impose order, embrace chaos or somewhere in between. The means of how we go about such things are all on us as well. (The whole good and evil thing)

I’m sort of surprised you don’t believe in free will Apoth considering you’re an atheist. I would’ve thought without God/gods/powerful space aliens/etc determining or manipulating your destiny there would be nothing but free will. This would be your only life after all so it would be up to you to make the most of it by whatever means you chose.

EDIT: I had that as an answer until I realized you might be asking Free Will in a different contex of what I thought you meant, so I'll answer that too.

My answer is still the same, you still got free will. Here's why.

You technically don't have to be a "slave to the system" it's just easier to be one. The system provides so much after all. You got three ways to beat it though.

You could drop out of the system and live as some Mountain Man in your own shack and hunt for your own food and not really answer to anyone. You're your own person and just depending on mother nature to provide which is just pure survival not a lack of free will.

OR

You could stay within the system claw your way to the top and also never answer to anyone. In this case the more power you have, the more free will you have.

OR

You could chose to rebel against the system and not answer to anyone since you're probably a criminal at this point, though even rebels have hierarchies so again you'd either have to be a lone criminal (Survival)...or you're the top criminal (Power).

In any case you still got free will of choice.

[Usoki]

Well, on some basic level, it's human nature to want to claim no credit for anything I do, or that happens to me, if it goes wrong. So it's very easy to blame fate. On the other hand, I like taking credit for anything that goes well. So, here's my thought- fate and free will coexist.

Fate is like a teacher handing out art assignments, and free will is how you choose to complete them. Therefore, if you do positvie artwork in a particularly awesome way- you are totally responsible for it. You made the artwork, after all. Even if it's just mediocre art, you had to make it positive- it was your assignment. And if you have to do negative artwork- well, it was fate. Maybe it's just mild (out of the good cookies in the cafeteria), or severe (car wreck)...but either way- hey, it was your assignment. It had to happen. You had no choice in the matter.

You have a concrete, set fate- a series of events that will happen. Free will means you get to choose how they will happen, and under what conditions.

[Vesnic]

I certainly believe in free will, but I think we kid ourselves about how much of a difference this actually makes. What ultimately comes to pass often seems arbitrary and disconnected from what we tried to do to shape that particular event. However, we are still perfectly free to react in whatever way we choose and to try to redecorate the stage set of our lives so that things may happen differently in the future. Still, though, our free will does not guarantee anything. The only act of free will sure to garner the permanent results that you are striving for is suicide, which has the caveat of effectively ending your free-will career. In short, I think that freewill exists, but it is of limited relevance.

[End Master]

"Computer, end program."


Nothing happened.

[apotheosis]

If all atomic motion is caused by prior events, (or randomness, depending on which school of thought in physics you follow) then that means that since human beings are made of matter, all of our actions are either controlled by a series of events starting at the big bang or completely random. Either way, we have absolutely no "free will" unless there is a part of our body that is not made of matter or energy that we somehow control "magically."

Believing in free will means that you are accepting something supernatural. From the looks of it, I'm swimming in a pool of non-naturalists here. Icky.

[Vesnic]

Shut the fuck up and eat some turkey. :p

[End Master]

You could've explained your position from the beginning. That would've made things clearer.

Even if free will is merely illusion, I still can't know what the hell the universe has in store for my prewritten life since I'm not some omnipotent being, so I'll just keep believing that I have free will since I have nothing better to do with my time on Earth. Plus I'm magical.

But weren't there already a bunch of physicists actually arguing over this debate recently and couldn't agree on it? (Or something like that)

[Leblanc4prez]

Shippo: Only if the duck wears a fedora!

[apotheosis]

Well physicists have it boiled down to two possibilities, either A its all predetermined due to causality or B its all pretty much random. Either way, there is no free will.

[xnull]

I really have no free will to be writing this. I am either randomly writing this or I was "meant" to write this because of the series of events that led up to me clicking the add message button.

From a completely deductive standpoint, there is no free will no matter how you look at it. Unfortunately when I tried explaining this to bigblotbob he told me I was being too deductive and that it doesn't make sense to look at things on that low a level. If anyone sees rationale in that, let them speak now.

I believe the illusion of free will is caused by feedback. While we cannot truly control anything, we get to interpret it and make an action which gives more results. This creates a connection between the outside layer and ourselves. So the easy conclusion to jump to in the way the mind is set up is that we influence our surroundings. However, there is no feedback from the chemicals from our brain. Not in the way that the external world does. Never does your mind process "I just got a neuron fired here and a chemical imbalance here". It's an abstraction layer set up by nature and excuse the analogy but it is much like a web browser in that respect. A normal user who does not get HTTP headers and TCP traces and DNS responses assumes A implies B, their web browser knows google.com and knows what it looks like and if they type in dog then they get dog results. If there were no abstraction layer, your feedback for searching job would include the results of the background processes and suddenly searching dog doesn't have the same meaning.

If you didn't get that (not as good as I thought) analogy, it means this: because your brain does not process its own way of processing information, it doesn't take into account that there is that layer. It isn't part of the input, so the conclusion based on the input is free will.

A lot of people who I have tried explaining this to have claimed, "You just don't want to take responsibility for your actions. You want to be able to kill people and not go to jail because you didn't have the free will to decide to do the killing". This is a retarded dodge of the intellect behind the idea. Even if that were the reasoning, the jury and judge do not have the free will to say yes, he is innocent and therefore I would go to jail.

[End Master]

Yeah, but since the universe already “wrote” what the free will supporters were going to say, is it really still retarded? After all they’re just doing what was already determined.

If the universe has already determined whether you’re going to accept the idea of free will or not there’s little point in arguing about it. However the universe has written some to be argumentative, so…the arguing is continued anyway.

I can see a predetermined universe working like this, but doesn’t a random universe really allow for all sorts of crazy variables? If it’s really random and chaotic, it seems like there would be the opportunity of “free will on accident”. (Though very rare)

Also, what happens if magic or the supernatural exist even to the smallest degree, doesn’t this all go flying out the window since they don’t follow the laws of physics?

EDIT: I knew I was reading about this topic elsewhere before.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html?ei=5090&en=7d5a587f6083384d&ex=1325394000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

[xnull]

Basically what I was saying with the "I'd still go to jail" bit is that nothing actually changes if this is true. There is still a point in arguing it in my mind (even though to best of my knowledge I didn't come to that conclusion out of free will).

If this were to become an accepted thought in 100% of the people in the world, they still aren't getting the feedback from neurons. They are just aware that the layer exists, which is what was predetermined or randomly come to. Being aware that the layer exists may change things as it could be part of the input, but not in the way that would induce the abstraction layer to become part of input.

The randomness comes in with the idea of the chaos theory (which I think is a way for them to avoid having to figure out the math behind it), where particles are not reliably going to act in any set way. So, can randomness create free will... awesomely interesting question.

I'm thinking about it and I don't have a full answer for this. I believe because the effects of the randomness are still ruled by the laws of physics there would still be no free will. Unless the randomness can create something beyond the laws of physics, no free will could be made. We don't know every law of physics, though. We just know what we have experienced. I can't rule it out completely.

If magic or the supernatural existed then of course there could be free will. There would have to be something beyond the physical world to allow the us to make decisions regardless of the state of our brain. Unfortunately you can see with medicine and strokes and head injuries that the state of the brain has a severe amount to do with thought process. This implies that there is no magic behind it, unless the magic for whatever reason is effected by the laws of physics, which would bring us back to the supernatural being effected by the state of the world. In this case, because the supernatural is effected, but not ruled by physical environment, there could still be limited free will.

The only way to prove/disprove this is to get two brains exactly alike down to the positions of the electrons in orbit and feed them both the exact same data at the exact same time.

[Locke]

I don't believe in true randomness. I do believe in free will.

[ChubbyTeletubby]

I believe that our brains, though a wonder of nature, are severely limited.

Before we try and delve into metaphysics, let's try to understand just how horribly inadequate we are at understanding things of this scope.

Because the real answer is both yes AND no. It may seem contradictory, but it isn't. The spark of the divine is something that can't really fit into a mathematical equation.

For all our great accomplishments, we are still just glorified apes.

The more you learn, the more you realize just how ignorant you truly are.

And ignorance is bliss. At least for now.

[xnull]

Locke, could you please add some detail? I'm in full support of all of your opinions. I wonder what you think behind them.

Chubby, while I agree that we are glorified apes, I don't get the rest of your post. I want to know what you mean by we do have free will and we do not. And I want to hear more about this divine spark.

[apotheosis]

The way I see it, believing in free will is believing in the supernatural. Simple as that, because for will to be free it would have to be supernatural because no material construct could create something outside or "free" of the laws that created it.

[Vesnic]

No material construct that we KNOW of, anyway. I think what Chubby is getting at, and I'm inclined to agree, is that our knowledge of physics is still severely limited and there is much, in all branches of learning, that we do not understand fully. We cannot make claims as extraordinary as saying that there is no free will because we would be making faulty assumptions by doing so.

[End Master]

See the only problem I have with total lack of free will is I'm more inclined to believe in a Chaotic Universe rather than a predetermined one. Usually everything eventually decays/breaks down and becomes more disorderly. Something can keep on trying to impose order and do a really good job at it, but ultimately it's doomed to failure.

I can see there being "Bastions of Order" within it where everything is more or less going to play itself out as written, however due to the nature of a chaotic universe there is always going to be an unknown variable that's going to allow something weird like "free will" to pop up every now and then.

[apotheosis]

Oh and, as a side note, the whole universe is going to die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

[End Master]

This would be very alarming if I was actually going to live to see it. As it stands right now, I won’t even get to see our sun die.

Might get to see Earth die, but that mostly depends on the political climate.

[xnull]

That global warming scam is a crock of shit. Really. It's all based on fear and pseudoscience. Most of public science today seems to be the same thing. It's either something that "may end up saving us all from man-made this" or it's "Unless everyone reverts to the middle ages, our children will have nothing but crewtons to eat".

I watched a documentary, an anti-thesis to the pseudoscience that was An Inconvenient Truth... it layed things out pretty well. In any case, you should always see both sides of an argument.

I think it's funny that the big doomsday scare in 1970's was global cooling.

[Vesnic]

I always kind of liked the Star Trek vision of the future of life on Earth. People dress simply and don't feel the need to own lots of material things because they have "evolved" beyond consumerism. This is not to say that they live in the Stone Ages, however. They've still got their replicators to make them cheese fondue at the drop of a hat and various other awesome technologies that allow them to kick back, relax, and devote themselves to expanding their intellectual horizons. They live in a perfect Socialist society where no one is poor and everyone is free to live out their own potential in the best way they see fit. The capital of the Federation is San Francisco. I say that's sublime.

[xnull]

My vision of the future is that human will continue on this path for some time. Each generation will grow with the technology of that era and we will keep naming ages. I think the next age will be the handheld age. Because times are changing rapidly due to technology and are bound to accelerate, I predict an ever widening gap between generations.

At some point, the gap becomes too much. The newest generation wants to mechanize everything. The older generation is the last thing clinging on to old traditions and the values 400 BCE men came up with. There will be a war, political (because both generations [generations for America are current defined as every 25.2 years] are young [especially compared to the ever-widening human life expectancy] neither will be in control of government) and physically using deadly technology. The generations before, so lost in the old ways will mainly keep out of the newer generations business.

One of these new generations will win and raise their young to follow the same ideology. The old will die off and the world will be (basically) uniform in thought, either they must cut off technological advances for fear technology beats defeats values that "make us human" and fear of another generation war. Because the technology available will be good enough, humans will live on a perfectly stable planet or expand to no more than the solar system.

The other will put technology at the forefront, before human life. We will see working nanotechnology and reanimation of the dead and a fountain of youth. Humanity will become obsessed with seeing everything that is and travel in space. Humankind will split off and break away from itself, caring more about what there is to see and what its like to fly through a nebula than about maintaining contact with everyone else.

[End Master]

Where was I talking about global warming? I said political climate, meaning whether or not the world leaders decide to nuke each others' countries to shit. Which is probably far more likely than dying of global warming.

As for global warming, meh. I won't rule out something like that happening, but I'm going to go with it being a natural occurrence rather than anything we're doing.

And if we are doing it, oh well. Can't worry about it, and me going "green" isn't really going to stop the Chinese or India from their increased industrializing.

[xnull]

"Might get to see Earth die, but that mostly depends on the political climate."
I figured you meant global warming, the political climate deciding whether or not we are forced to do anything about it.
Sorry for the misinterpretation, but it started interesting dialog. What is your fantasy future scenario?

[Locke]

I'll get in on the serious discussion in several days. Finals week has been absolutely driving me into the ground.

[End Master]

You folks are a lot more optimistic than I am, since I don’t see much of a future for humanity. At least not a positive one. Even with Xnull’s scenario with all the strife is ultimately an upbeat one. It assumes that the newer generations will be smarter and more likely to change things for the better, but so far what I’m seeing is the same idiocy that infects the old generations. It’s just in different ways. If anything people seem to be getting dumber in general.

War, Plague, Famine, Death. That’s the past, that’s the present, and that’s the future.

Barring a natural disaster like a comet/meteor I doubt if we’ll completely wipe ourselves out right away though. If we actually make it to colonizing other planets, I’m sure we’ll just take those 4 things with us and apply them to those planets and/or other lifeforms.

However I figure since I’m not going to live another 100 years to see the beginnings of a utopia (ha ha) or really bad distopia, it really isn’t going to matter in the scheme of things anyway.


Sheesh, I’ve been looking at my posts in this thread and another one, and I’ve been sounding like a real nihilist lately.

Okay, happy friendly time!

A human society something like Star Trek where you had replicators to provide basic necessities would be good.

The Federation is in pretty good shape, so I’ll go with that type of society, though I don’t understand why we have alien presidents on Earth. I understand the Fed is supposed to be the “UN” but come on, Terra for Terrans at least. So I’d prefer a human centric Federation with a little more emphasis on the military ala the Klingons and Romulans.

Oh well, guess I failed at happy friendly time!

[ChubbyTeletubby]

I think you're the ultimate realist, End. That's all. Don't be too hard on yourself. You always seem to be in the middle, which is really a level headed way of looking at things.

You're like our resident Vulcan.

[Vesnic]

Vulcans are hot. How many fantasies did I have about curling myself around Mr. Spock's big pointy ears...

[ChubbyTeletubby]

Ya, and don't forget that 'mind meld' trick of theirs.

I'm more of a Cardasian man, myself.

[xnull]

Vesnic, are you horny? I swear your last 5 posts have been about sex or penises.

If the world were ending and you were the last woman alive and he was the last man alive but he had a vasectomy, and there was a sperm bank behind him about to close forever (electronically), and the man with the vasectomy was going to die at any moment because the electronic locks are going to send a signal to his pacemaker and kill him.

Are you going to get some whoopie or continue the human race. If this story turns you on, don't answer the question.

[End Master]

I would like to point out that if she made herself pregnant she could potentially have sex with whatever she gives birth to, not to mention she can "condition" it right from the start and have a longer term sex partner than the pacemaker guy who'll die soon.

Though if she has a streak of morality she'll at least wait 18 years before reaping the benefits of motherhood.

Meh, 16 years, nobody's around anymore.

[ChubbyTeletubby]

A healthy sex drive is never a bad thing.

You're just applying the classic double standard to her, xnull. I talk about sex and penises all the time too, no one ever gives ME a hard time.

[Vesnic]

And I was so late to reply to this post because I have been furiously pleasuring myself for the last four hours. I am still not satisfied.

As for the sperm bank scenario, I would just ravish the pacemaker man for all he's worth until the machine "shuts him off". Then I would probably get a few more hours out of his cadaver, since word on the street is that an erection can still be maintained for several hours after death, and as I specified back during that questionnaire that scared the hell out of everyone, I am only against necrophilia because it doesn't tend to favor women. As for the human race, fuck the human race. I'll leave everything intact so the aliens can pick up our Complete Works of Shakespeare before they get nuked into the stratosphere. It is true my insatiable sex drive will still be a problem, but I suppose I'll just content myself living the life of a recluse, picking various varieties of magical mushrooms and maintaining a field of poppies.

I will pretend I didn't even read End Master's post :p