(May 17, 2025 at 10:35 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Tell me more about the vast sea of unfreedom.

Gladly, the strawman is almost exclusively made regarding inputs, not outputs. They'll argue that unless you're free to choose when impulses arise, like hunger or thirst, then you're not free at all. But what's almost always ignored is the vast amounts of freedom that's exist in the outputs. Even under a deterministic framework humans are able to conquer the planet, go to the moon, adapt to any environment, and build tools to expand our capabilities further than nature itself allows. Humans are free to do almost unlimited amounts of things all the while it is argued we have no freedom at all. So even if free will is limited to nothing more than a binary go/no-go system whenever impulse arises, that is more than enough to do just about anything.

Correct, determinism does not rule out the sort of freedom™ you think is involved in our will anymore than fatalism does. We see, now, that a meaningful unfreedom actually does fit with the structure of reality. Where was that sage observation moments ago?

Meanwhile, the silly god in magic book won't let me jump to the moon...so if that were a sin we'd all be spotless, but it will let us shake our pecker one too many times or get the sexy feels about the wrong kind of person and that, my friend...is a one way ticket to terror town that makes us very bad free willers. To put it bluntly. Christian free will is nothing more than an excuse for hate crime.

...and a desire to hate crime the shit out of someone certainly causes at least some people to believe in their Christ. You know the types. EIB Jesus. The border guards god. The type of ghost that appeals to bathroom panty sniffers.

(May 17, 2025 at 11:10 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: ...but it will let us shake our pecker one too many times...

This is why I rarely respond to you. It doesn't matter what the topic is, you always manage to go on unpredictable tangents that leave me blindsided. I'm sure you have good points to make, I just don't have the patience to go find them.

If christians had more patience there'd be fewer christians. Yet another reason that people believe in their christs.

(May 17, 2025 at 11:41 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 17, 2025 at 11:10 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: ...but it will let us shake our pecker one too many times...

This is why I rarely respond to you. It doesn't matter what the topic is, you always manage to go on unpredictable tangents that leave me blindsided. I'm sure you have good points to make, I just don't have the patience to go find them.

 [Unshun] This is literally how everyone views you [Reshun]

(May 16, 2025 at 11:54 pm)emjay Wrote: But what I've personally always meant by free will, the altogether more reductionistic view, is that ultimately both the bottom up and the top down functions in the brain are enacted via the same physical mechanisms, eg neurons. 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 don't think we have to appeal to quantum mechanics to acknowledge free will in human brains, just to the processing of information. We generate our own information, and respond to it just as readily, if not more so, than to any external stimuli. We are, in fact, constantly talking to ourselves: describing realities, abstracting ideas, modeling possible responses, and assessing outcomes. Somehow that is all done within the laws of physics, but I can only think it is because new properties operating by new rules emerged as life evolved.

(May 17, 2025 at 12:55 am)The Grand Nudger 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.

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.  Consider a menu made almost entirely of things you hate, with one item you enjoy.  Did you freely choose that one thing, or were you compelled?

Well yes, if you could still get up and leave the restaurant.

Another way of looking at this problem is that our body has certain needs we are determined to fulfill, but that our brains allow us to choose between multiple means to those ends, depending on how we assess our circumstances and the possibilities they present. That was the way William James framed the problem of free will at the beginning of Principles of Psychology. After all, consciousness was evolved to serve the needs of its body, and what better way than by giving it flexibility?

John wrote something quite similar above, at #1121.

(May 17, 2025 at 6:49 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: 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

I think truly chance occurrences are necessary in our universe not only for life to self-organize and evolve but for consciousness to emerge. What you said above may be something similar, as far as I can understand you.

(May 17, 2025 at 12:48 pm)Alan V Wrote: I don't think we have to appeal to quantum mechanics to acknowledge free will in human brains, just to the processing of information.

This is where I take off my psychology hat and step into physics and philosophy, which I know close to nothing about. But it seems to me that people draw the wrong conclusions from quantum mechanics. People like Sam Harris want to treat the randomness of the quantum world as causal in the brain in order to argue the same thing, that whether the causes are random or not they're still not free.

But I see the randomness that exists at the quantum level, as giving us an ontological insight into the nature of the universe. A universe in which the location of electrons can be entirely indeterministic and self-generated, is also a universe in which behavior can be indeterministic and self-generated. I would even go so far as to argue this is the reason why both quantum mechanics and the behavioral sciences are governed by probability.

A quantum wooster. In for a penny, in for a pound. We can imagine that our brains are quantum computers or something like it all we like, but that won't tell us whether or not we have free wills..nor, truthfully, is christian free will such a complex proposition that you need to know anything...about anything....to immediately rule out as farcical.

You guys always want your ghost stories attached to something that even you, apparently, think is more credible.