(July 26, 2016 at 1:20 pm)bennyboy Wrote:

(July 26, 2016 at 1:08 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: You can't claim to "be" anything more than your conscious experience of reality, not in the sense we're talking about here. So don't give me that bullshit about your being your brain. You are most definitely not your brain. Your brain is yours, but you are not it.

Really?  Who/what am I?  You seem to be talking about a spirit or something.

Quote: You don't control your heart beat, your brain does. You don't control your metabolism. Your brain does. You don't control the movement of your muscles. Your brain does. You can only experience things. That is you. The experiencer. You are not in charge of anything, and you can't claim to be anything that controls you.

The problem is that the experiencer experiences freely buying ice cream.  The experiencer is whatever it is, including brain function.  It is not from this that the experiencer should be expected to be free in any sensible definition of free will.

Quote:Your worldview means shit if your brain suddenly "decides" to paralyze your body and make you unconscious. You would have no idea why it just did that. You enjoy your "freedom" while it lasts, but simply the fact that you have no control over your life and are bound by reality is what disproves this notion of freedom completely.

If my brain malfunctions and I cannot experience anything, then I will have neither a will, nor by extension a free will.

Quote:Now let's look at the ice cream example. First of all, your "choosing" to eat that ice cream for whatever reason had fuck all to do with why you actually ate that ice cream. You didn't control how hungry you were going to be at that moment, or indeed whether you'd like an ice cream or not. That's simply ridiculous to think that you did. Your body did, you didn't. No, you are not your body, as I just said, anymore than you "are" your atoms. You didn't choose the presence of the ice cream either.

Eh?  You keep on saying "you, you" and telling me all the things I am not.  What, exactly, do you think I AM?

Like I said, "you" are your conscious experience of reality. You do experience reality, don't you? That is you. The experiencer of your thoughts and senses. There's no other "you" beyond that.

Yes, the experiencer experiences freedom, especially if he is still under the illusion of free will, like you are. I said as much, so what's your point? There is no "sensible definition of free will", ok? They're all irrational by default. Go open a dictionary and read them carefully. They all imply some sort of escaping causality, which simply isn't possible. That's the moment where a word stops being useful and you exchange it for other words. The idea of free will carries a lot of baggage. If you want to talk about your subjective experience of reality, be my guest, but be literate about it or I'm going to criticise you for basically denying causality.


So you're saying, if you lose your free will you won't have any free will? That's tautological. There is no such thing as free will. Your life is going to be like whatever your genes coupled with your environment make it be. Genes and environment. Focus on that for a second. Genes and environment. There's isn't a third factor here. These are the only things that make up who you are. And you have no control over any of them.

(July 26, 2016 at 12:46 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: [edit]

You are coerced by environmental factors. You can't escape them. And no matter how much you rationalize your decisions after the fact, it's been proven beyond a doubt that most of the time people have no idea why they do what they do. They come up with reasons if asked, and they truly believe those reasons, but they turn out to be wrong more often than not. Because you see, you are only conscious about so much that goes on in your brain and gives rise to your consciousness and subsequently to your decisions. But you don't control any of it. It controls you. You only experience control, but it isn't really there at all.

[edit]

Sounds like the non existence of free will because of the presence of an omniscient god. It's only an illusion. Good one!

(July 26, 2016 at 1:34 pm)mh.brewer Wrote:

(July 26, 2016 at 12:46 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: [edit]

You are coerced by environmental factors. You can't escape them. And no matter how much you rationalize your decisions after the fact, it's been proven beyond a doubt that most of the time people have no idea why they do what they do. They come up with reasons if asked, and they truly believe those reasons, but they turn out to be wrong more often than not. Because you see, you are only conscious about so much that goes on in your brain and gives rise to your consciousness and subsequently to your decisions. But you don't control any of it. It controls you. You only experience control, but it isn't really there at all.

[edit]

Sounds like the non existence of free will because of the presence of an omniscient god. It's only an illusion. Good one!

Replace god with universe, and that's exactly what it is.

(July 26, 2016 at 1:20 pm)bennyboy Wrote:

(July 26, 2016 at 1:08 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: You can't claim to "be" anything more than your conscious experience of reality, not in the sense we're talking about here. So don't give me that bullshit about your being your brain. You are most definitely not your brain. Your brain is yours, but you are not it.

Really?  Who/what am I?  You seem to be talking about a spirit or something.

Quote: You don't control your heart beat, your brain does. You don't control your metabolism. Your brain does. You don't control the movement of your muscles. Your brain does. You can only experience things. That is you. The experiencer. You are not in charge of anything, and you can't claim to be anything that controls you.

The problem is that the experiencer experiences freely buying ice cream.  The experiencer is whatever it is, including brain function.  It is not from this that the experiencer should be expected to be free in any sensible definition of free will.  Are you sure that the sense of agency and self aren't as illusory as free will?  And if so, then who's this "you" to whom you keep referring, as though it were not an illusion?

A boy has no name.

Quote:Your worldview means shit if your brain suddenly "decides" to paralyze your body and make you unconscious. You would have no idea why it just did that. You enjoy your "freedom" while it lasts, but simply the fact that you have no control over your life and are bound by reality is what disproves this notion of freedom completely.

If my brain malfunctions and I cannot experience anything, then I will have neither a will, nor by extension a free will.

Quote:Now let's look at the ice cream example. First of all, your "choosing" to eat that ice cream for whatever reason had fuck all to do with why you actually ate that ice cream. You didn't control how hungry you were going to be at that moment, or indeed whether you'd like an ice cream or not. That's simply ridiculous to think that you did. Your body did, you didn't. No, you are not your body, as I just said, anymore than you "are" your atoms. You didn't choose the presence of the ice cream either.

Eh?  You keep on saying "you, you" and telling me all the things I am not.  What, exactly, do you think I AM?

I'll tell you what I am: I'm my ideas, my beliefs, my experiences, my sensation, and my feelings.  I'm not controlled BY my hunger, I AM, at least in part, the experience of hunger.  And when I eat, it's a natural expression of that aspect of my personhood at that moment in time.  You want to separate the agency into an abstract concept, and all the mechanisms of agency into the category "environment," to show that I am compelled by my environment.  This view isn't a good one, in my opinion: ALL the things you keep saying I'm not are exactly what I am.

I can say I'm a chair as well, that doesn't make it true, no matter how strongly I believe it. Just as I can't move the chair with my mind simply for identifying with it, you can't control your hunger, your personality, your experience of hunger, and whatever else you feel like you have control over. You only think you can, whereas you don't think you can control a chair. That is the only difference between the chair and all those parts of yourself that you directly experience. The degree to which you feel like you can control them, precisely because of your varying experience of them.

You only experience the world, you don't control it. The world here being everything that is outside of your conscience at any given moment.

Do you control whatever is within your conscience, you might ask? No, you don't control that either, you are subject to causality at all times and causality doesn't allow for any control. That is all. Your life is written in the stars, in a sense, since the beggining of time. Everything that happened since then led up to this moment, and there's nothing anyone could've done any different about it.

(July 26, 2016 at 1:44 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: I can say I'm a chair as well, that doesn't make it true, no matter how strongly I believe it. Just as I can't move the chair with my mind simply for identifying with it, you can't control your hunger, your personality, your experience of hunger, and whatever else you feel like you have control over. You only think you can, whereas you don't think you can control a chair. That is the only difference between the chair and all those parts of yourself that you directly experience. The degree to which you feel like you can control them, precisely because of your varying experience of them.

Who says you can control all aspects of the self? Nobody, ever, has said that. Sometimes my leg is asleep. But it's still MY leg. When people refer to it, they say, "That's BEN'S leg."

Quote:You only experience the world, you don't control it. The world here being everything that is outside of your conscience at any given moment.

I control some of it, and one of the main points of life seems to be to expand how much of it I can control.

Quote:Do you control whatever is within your conscience, you might ask? No, you don't control that either, you are subject to causality at all times and causality doesn't allow for any control.

Consciousness, you mean? Yes, I have some control over my consciousness. I can decide, for example, to change what I'm thinking about. And, in fact, such an act meets my definition of will: I intend to change what I'm thinking about, and it happens. I do not need to be aware of the mechanism in order to bring the intent to fruition.

It doesn't matter whether there's a deterministic mechanism under the hood. WHATEVER I am, that is me. Whatever I am, will is the process by which I express intent as behavior. And whatever I am, free will is the ability to form intent according to my world view or my personhood, and to express that intent without external obstruction or compulsion.

Saying things like "Your hormones affect your behavior. Your instincts are beyond your control. Your feelings compel you," etc. doesn't make sense. These are all aspects of the personhood, and they are all part of the process of either forming or executing intent. They aren't external to the self.

Quote: That is all. Your life is written in the stars, in a sense, since the beggining of time. Everything that happened since then led up to this moment, and there's nothing anyone could've done any different about it.

Eh? This appears to be an argument from ignorance. Would you care to demonstrate the truth of this statement? As far as I understand it, which isn't very far, there's cause to believe that due to real randomness at the QM level, things COULD turn out differently if you rewound the universe and pressed the "Play" button.

(July 26, 2016 at 6:57 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I control some of it, and one of the main points of life seems to be to expand how much of it I can control.

Unfortunately, the question is "do you control the controller" not whether or not you control some, or even -all- of the functions of which you are aware. Unless you control that..it hardly matters what it controls.

(July 26, 2016 at 7:55 pm)Rhythm Wrote:

(July 26, 2016 at 6:57 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I control some of it, and one of the main points of life seems to be to expand how much of it I can control.

Unfortunately, the question is "do you control the controller" not whether or not you control some, or even -all- of the functions of which you are aware.  Unless you control that..it hardly matters what it controls.

I've defined my terms, though it's probably a page ago, now.  You are treating the "you" and the "controller" as different entities, and demanding that the you be able to control the controller, or drop the idea of free will.  But the "you" includes the controller, and all the systems connected to it.

(July 26, 2016 at 6:57 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Who says you can control all aspects of the self?  Nobody, ever, has said that.  

I control some of it, and one of the main points of life seems to be to expand how much of it I can control.

Do you?  I don't know about you but I sure wasn't granted the free volition to refuse my existence, that is, the capacity to freely refuse the very existential will you assert as being free. 

Can a forced adaption of will be considered free?

(July 27, 2016 at 4:14 am)quip Wrote: Do you?  I don't know about you but I sure wasn't granted the free volition to refuse my existence, that is, the capacity to freely refuse the very existential will you assert as being free. 

Can a forced adaption of will be considered free?

I know all the words in your post, but I don't have a clear picture of what you're trying to express with them. Could you clarify a little?

Personally, I don't think there's enough.
I might need to go start up another free will thread.
It'll be called, 'If you believe in free will, you won't be able to resist this!'
Then, once you click in it'll just say, 'you came here, you got no free will.'
Hahaha......cough......hahahahaha. :-)