(May 17, 2025 at 5:03 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(May 17, 2025 at 4:14 am)Sheldon Wrote: On a more amusing note, why would a fatalist or determinist bother trying to find out, if nothing they do will change the result.

The same can be said of free will, I think, since even the perception of '...some autonomy of choice...' may be deterministic.

Boru

I look at the whole issue as a pragmatist.  Why define everything as black OR white when you can differentiate, through terminology, black, white, and all sorts of shades of gray?  I would enjoy discussions about the possible variations, if such conversations ever progressed beyond the words used.

However, the real bottom line for me is this: one reason at least some people stick with spiritualistic ideas, including Christianity, is that they think atheism necessarily implies materialistic determinism (or reductionism if you prefer), and determinism doesn't preserve appearances.  I think that assumption is mistaken because of what I have read about consciousness research by reputable scientists who embrace emergent materialism in their assessments.  That is a viable third alternative, and from what I have read to-date no one has excluded either determinism or emergent materialism as possible descriptions.  In fact, such terminology may be too limited to encompass the finer details of what scientists now understand about how consciousness works.

There are, of course, important problems with religious ideas about free will.  They too often assert that people can choose their sexual orientation for instance.  They also assert that belief is a matter of choice, as Grand Nudger pointed out.  In general, their idea of free will makes them susceptible to all sorts of word magic: the power of prayer, of affirmations, of commitments and so on.  Their belief in their version of free will is a big part of the reason why they can uphold beliefs which look impossible to others, through an act of will (or denial of our real limitations).  So to me it is no wonder they suffer from so much hypocrisy and rationalize so much. Much of the world really is determined.

(May 17, 2025 at 6:36 am)Alan V Wrote:

(May 17, 2025 at 5:03 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: The same can be said of free will, I think, since even the perception of '...some autonomy of choice...' may be deterministic.

Boru

I look at the whole issue as a pragmatist.  Why define everything as black OR white when you can differentiate, through terminology, black, white, and all sorts of shades of gray?  I would enjoy discussions about the possible variations, if such conversations ever progressed beyond the words used.

However, the real bottom line for me is this: one reason at least some people stick with spiritualistic ideas, including Christianity, is that they think atheism necessarily implies materialistic determinism (or reductionism if you prefer), and determinism doesn't preserve appearances.  I think that assumption is mistaken because of what I have read about consciousness research by reputable scientists who embrace emergent materialism in their assessments.  That is a viable third alternative, and from what I have read to-date no one has excluded either determinism or emergent materialism as possible descriptions.  In fact, such terminology may be too limited to encompass the finer details of what scientists now understand about how consciousness works.

There are, of course, important problems with religious ideas about free will.  They too often assert that people can choose their sexual orientation for instance.  They also assert that belief is a matter of choice, as Grand Nudger pointed out.  In general, their idea of free will makes them susceptible to all sorts of word magic: the power of prayer, of affirmations, of commitments and so on.  Their belief in their version of free will is a big part of the reason why they can uphold beliefs which look impossible to others, through an act of will (or denial of our real limitations).  So to me it is no wonder they suffer from so much hypocrisy and rationalize so much.  Much of the world really is determined.

It's been argued (reasonably, I think) that free will cannot exist in any framework that includes an omni-creative God, such as the Abrahamic one.

Essentially, the argument is that if God created the universe, he created every thing in it. If we include choices in the set of 'things', then God not only knows the choices we make, but he also created those choices as well as their outcomes. God not only knows that you're going to have eggs for brekkie, but he's also arranged things so that there is no possibility that you would have anything else.

I'm not convinced that this is a definitive argument, but it's not an unreasonable one.

Boru

(May 16, 2025 at 11:54 pm)emjay Wrote: Different areas of the brain may have different functions relative to each other, but they are all achieved through the same physical mechanisms, which follow the laws of physics and thus, barring quantum effects, are determined in my view, and thus cannot be considered 'free'.

I think you should explore this point further, because what matters isn't whether neurons obey physics (they do), but whether free will can emerge from the system as a whole. And you’ve already opened the door to this possibility by noting that the same neuron can contribute to vastly different functions. If one set of neurons allow you to see the world, and another set allows you to give a lecture, and still another allows you to do a backflip, then we're dealing with a wide, if not unlimited, palette of functions that can emerge from simple neurons obeying physics. And one such function, I would argue, is the ability to make choices.

Another aspect to consider is that free will seems inseparable, at least in humans, from consciousness itself. One only makes sense in the presence of the other. And consciousness doesn't seem to play nice with reductionist views. So, in my opinion you’d need to account for consciousness before you can dismiss free will.

(May 17, 2025 at 12:55 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Actually, yeah, that's a good boundary to set.  If all of our choices are actually more like a menu..where the options are constrained...and then within each of those possible choices we're strongly predisposed towards one or against another...the freedom of our will quickly becomes a term of art.

Here's a different perspective—you need limits to have free will. We see this all throughout the brain. You need selective attention in order to navigate a visual scene, because you cannot possibly attend to every aspect of a scene equally unless you have an unprecedented amount of computational power. There's a reason why individuals with attentional issues, meaning they attend to everything, have a lot of difficulty engaging in any task. Another example is with decision itself—the more options you give a person the worse off they are at making them.

In other words, given that you have limited resources, your brain optimizes for agency by limiting its scope. People's ability to choose falls apart in every situation where the constraints are lifted and options increased. That shouldn't be the case under a deterministic framework where every behavior is the result of a cascade of priors, because under such a framework the choice is already made, it's just a question of whether the right inputs are present.

(May 17, 2025 at 4:14 am)Sheldon Wrote:

(May 16, 2025 at 9:23 pm)Alan V Wrote: Not really.  We have free will even if we only have two bad choices.  Freedom only extends our possible uses for our abilities to assess and choose.

Every restaurant menu, with its limits, would negate our ability to choose by your argument.

Exactly, I hate the term free will, as it can never be entirely free, certainly we perceive some autonomy of choice, the question is whether that autonomy ends, in the same place as our perception. Or if it is all allusion, but as another poster has already pointed out, determinism and fatalism carry a burden of proof, and seem for now to be unfalsifiable ideas. 

On a more amusing note, why would a fatalist or determinist bother trying to find out, if nothing they do will change the result.

Determinism allows for change.  What most people are talking about...especially apologists, when they complain about determinism is actually fatalism, but, surprise, magic book says we live in a fatalist universe.

(May 17, 2025 at 9:21 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 17, 2025 at 12:55 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Actually, yeah, that's a good boundary to set.  If all of our choices are actually more like a menu..where the options are constrained...and then within each of those possible choices we're strongly predisposed towards one or against another...the freedom of our will quickly becomes a term of art.

Here's a different perspective—you need limits to have free will. We see this all throughout the brain. You need selective attention in order to navigate a visual scene, because you cannot possibly attend to every aspect of a scene equally unless you have an unprecedented amount of computational power. There's a reason why individuals with attentional issues, meaning they attend to everything, have a lot of difficulty engaging in any task. Another example is with decision itself—the more options you give a person the worse off they are at making them.

In other words, given that you have limited resources, your brain optimizes for agency by limiting its scope. People's ability to choose falls apart in every situation where the constraints are lifted and options increased. That shouldn't be the case under a deterministic framework where every behavior is the result of a cascade of priors, because under such a framework the choice is already made, it's just a question of whether the right inputs are present.

No, you don't. That's got to be the most facile attempt to propose an unfree freedom I've ever seen, and it entirely gives the game away.

...and you're bitching about fatalism, not determinism...but as I just finished telling another poster, good luck with that - magic book says we live in a fatalist universe, not a deterministic one.

(May 17, 2025 at 10:17 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: No, you don't. That's got to be the most facile attempt to propose an unfree freedom I've ever seen, and it entirely gives the game away.

Everything in the universe exists and is defined by it's limits and constraints. Life exists because it differentiates itself from the environment. Even games exist because of the rules that define it. The use of limitations as an argument against free will is both a strawman and incompatible with the structure of reality.

Tell me more about the vast sea of unfreedom.

(May 17, 2025 at 3:55 am)Sheldon Wrote:

(May 16, 2025 at 5:47 pm)Alan V Wrote: In this forum, John is largely playing the role of Christian apologist.

However, I do enjoy (and much prefer) him talking more about psychology.  I think of most of Christianity as being uninformed about psychology, so I am still looking forward to how he tries to reconcile them.

Whenever I have read any apologist trying to square free will (of any stripe), with an omniscient deity, it is usually a car crash of contradictions. The worst was an Islamic apologist who simply vacillated endlessly between two mutually exclusive claims. Usually (if they've thought it through) we get "omniscient lite".

-or freedom lite.  As we see in this thread.  That's compatibilism boiled down, whether it involves a god or not.  It begins with the acknowledgement that things are more or less exactly as their detractors say they are...and then insists that the sort of omniscience or freedom they're talking about, while not technically omniscient and/or free... is good enough for government work. This is how determinism fits with free will. By describing a freely willed choice as any one which suits our desires and motivations - even if we acknowledge that those are not parameters we freely set. Fatalism, otoh, doesn't give a shit whether our will is free or what that means. There is a plan, an outcome, a precognition. A fate. No matter what we do, that is what will happen. While fatalism can encompass the notion that things in the past are all set up to cause some particular future outcome, it also allows for the notion that we could do everything that might possibly cause an event not to happen, that all of the seeming preconditions for x could be absent...and it still will. Christian superstitions about free will are deeply tainted by their superstitions about fate. The fate of a person, the fate of man, the fate of the world. Gods grand plan and precognition.