Do you believe in free will?

[genkaus]

1- Not a substance separate from reality, but becomes the reality of the viewer, as he deems his hallucinations as real. Reality = perception (within the4 mind) of reality. Unless we’re defining some absolute value for reality. Many people have false memories of things that never really happened due to reconstructive properties of memory. That doesn’t negate the real implications of what really happened with who they are, or lessen the affects of what they perceived happening 20 years later on their decision process.

You are confusing perception with projection. Perception, by definition, cannot be of anything other than the external reality. False or apparent perception - also called projection, is the conscious or unconscious effect on perception. That is a result of a person's mind. Neither are independent of or separate from the physical reality.

3- OK let’s say that we took a guy, knocked him into a coma for a few months while we augmented and messed with how he thinks chemically and physically. Then he wakes up and goes about his life acting as a completely different person none the wiser, but he is the same person. Which is the real him the one caused up to that point or the one we caused while he was in the coma? What happens when he starts realizing his memories aren’t his and never really happened? None of what we did interrupted the causal chain. What we did do was affect why he makes decisions, not how he makes them. At no time could (while he’s conscious) we reduce what he define’s as who he is (or his agent) to not functioning. Whether he’s aware or unaware of the tampering of his mental self, there is an irreducible “I” and the ability to introspect

Why would he be the same person? The same body - perhaps. If the very agency by which the decision is made is changed, then the agent is changed as well. There may be an "I" - but that "I" is separate in both cases.

OK, we’ll roll with this:
1. There are two separate components of reality - physical and non-physical (which could be alternatively referred to as mental). Ok fine I agree that that is my position.

2. The mental component is not only separate from, but independent of the physical component. I don’t believe it’s completely independent of causation, as everything we are comes from before. I don’t believe though that it falls in an unalterable causal change.

3. I do believe in a reality beyond the physical reality but not that this reality to holds primacy. Maybe if you better define this primacy then I could take a closer look at it.

Justify your second premise. Causation is applicable to the physical reality because of its feature of being temporal. The non-physical reality can either be temporal or be non-temporal, but not both. If its not, then it would be independent of causation. If it is, then it would fall under unalterable causal change.

As to your third - primacy means when the laws of two reality are in apparent conflict - which one would you consider as applicable. An action being the result of causation and it being independent of causation are contradictory and cannot be true at the same time. Here you have two realities - one where causation is undoubtedly applicable, the other where it is somehow both applicable and inapplicable. But, for some reason, in a conflict between free-will and causation, you choose a less applicable one.

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I think I get it, but as was pointed out, if your nature is all that makes your capability to choose then it’s not free, unless you can exceed who you are.

The very definition you present here requires violation of law of identity. You can only be who you are - neither less nor more. Any requirement of negating this premise takes away any ground for a logical discourse.

[NoMoreFaith]

1- Not a substance separate from reality, but becomes the reality of the viewer, as he deems his hallucinations as real. Reality = perception (within the4 mind) of reality. Unless we’re defining some absolute value for reality. Many people have false memories of things that never really happened due to reconstructive properties of memory. That doesn’t negate the real implications of what really happened with who they are, or lessen the affects of what they perceived happening 20 years later on their decision process.

Such is the case with free will. It is the reality of all of us, none of us feel constrained to act. In this, it is no different to hallucination. This has been my position all along. The illusion of free will makes it real to us, and we can feel the effects of the illusion, but it, like the hallucination, is only real to the observer, i.e. you.
To equate the hallucination with the illusion of free will, consider an optical illusion. We are aware of the brains mechanisms(or at least a very good theory) for creating the illusion, and the causation of why your eyes and mind interpret it in a certain way.
We are not defining the appearance of grey dots between areas of high contrast squares as reality, however the brain certainly perceives them as real, as per the hallucination. So the question is, do we consider the illusion of free will, as being equivalent to being real.
I consider free will to be the grey dots of the optical illusion, real to the observer, but no more than the interactions of the brain and the method in which it perceives.

2- I thought we were leaving God out of it, but I’ll go along with the thought process. You say we lack the ability to change the future, yet isn’t that the core of determinism? Everything you do and what you perceive yourself doing causes a change in the course of causality around you in your environment. I think the problem lies with premise 2. Changing the fundamental laws of HOW the universe works is not the same as not changing the COURSE of the universe through free will.

It is a thought experiment, God was the most economical way of introducing the pausing of time concept.
To clarify, the presumption we can 'change' the future is based upon a presumption that events would occur differently in which has been altered through the application of this concept of free will.
My argument is that free will itself is part of the causal chain, and cannot induce change at all, nor be modified beyond truly random factors (if they exist).
There are no crossroads of choice between alternatives, it would require an force capable of changing a fundamental property of the universe, for instance how the electric pulse routes its way through your mind. That pulse was always going to fire the same way if you replay that same instant a hundred times unless a force exists to change a fundamental property which affects how your brain reacts. Otherwise, we are all just reacting in a unchangeable chain.

In the example of pausing time, you can affect change to this causal timeline if you were to change how the electric pulses in the mind are about to fire to divert them to another course.
In another words, I do not believe that your free will can change things, which begs the question, how is it possible to have acted differently at all. Of this question, I have not seen an answer. If it can be shown than a variable in choice can be MADE to act differently given identical circumstances, then I am completely wrong. However, we have covered the fundamental unfalsifiable nature of this question, so it remains a idea, and untestable hypothesis.

3- OK let’s say that we took a guy, knocked him into a coma for a few months while we augmented and messed with how he thinks chemically and physically. Then he wakes up and goes about his life acting as a completely different person none the wiser, but he is the same person. Which is the real him the one caused up to that point or the one we caused while he was in the coma? What happens when he starts realizing his memories aren’t his and never really happened? None of what we did interrupted the causal chain. What we did do was affect why he makes decisions, not how he makes them. At no time could (while he’s conscious) we reduce what he define’s as who he is (or his agent) to not functioning. Whether he’s aware or unaware of the tampering of his mental self, there is an irreducible “I” and the ability to introspect

There is a presupposition that there IS a real him and a real you. The "I" is a product of the variables leading up to any instant. This concept of the reality of self is nothing more than the sum of all variables leading up to the instant you consider the self.
Your actions are a causal variable in that makeup, at the end of the day, were you ever capable of not knocking him out and changing his memories in this hypothetical. My proposition is that you were never capable of the choice any more than I have the choice to reply. The reasons I do so are the inevitable result of the self in this instant.
This is exactly the point, nothing you did interrupted the causal chain. It was always going down like that.
Am I the same person I was 10 years ago, no. Am I the same person I was 5 seconds ago, no. I am merely the sum of my parts up to this point, and do not exceed it.

[Perhaps]

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-a...0257_n.jpg

Found this on Facebook, thought it was a good interpretation while also being funny.

[Whateverist]

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-a...0257_n.jpg

Found this on Facebook, thought it was a good interpretation while also being funny.

You see .. and this is all I'm claiming about free will. I can damn well go to the slaughter house through the left or the right door as I please. There is no amount of environmental conditioning or DNA determined proclivity to guarantee which entrance I take. Thank you.

It is the determinists in their fuzzy minded belief that they are carried along inevitably through the left or right hand door that have the explaining to do.

This cartoon does nothing if not make clear just how much is riding on our decisions.

[genkaus]

You see .. and this is all I'm claiming about free will. I can damn well go to the slaughter house through the left or the right door as I please. There is no amount of environmental conditioning or DNA determined proclivity to guarantee which entrance I take. Thank you.

It is the determinists in their fuzzy minded belief that they are carried along inevitably through the left or right hand door that have the explaining to do.

This cartoon does nothing if not make clear just how much is riding on our decisions.

And what about the ass? Buridan's ass?

[Whateverist]

You see .. and this is all I'm claiming about free will. I can damn well go to the slaughter house through the left or the right door as I please. There is no amount of environmental conditioning or DNA determined proclivity to guarantee which entrance I take. Thank you.

It is the determinists in their fuzzy minded belief that they are carried along inevitably through the left or right hand door that have the explaining to do.

This cartoon does nothing if not make clear just how much is riding on our decisions.

And what about the ass? Buridan's ass?

I suppose he escapes the slaughter house altogether, lucky irrational ass. Of course his failure to make the decision won't confer immortality on him. We expect to come back and find his rotting dead ass lying precisely between the openings.

I hadn't heard this one before. How absurd. To imagine that every choice was an exercise in rationality where one always chooses correctly. There are plenty of times when we choose and then change our mind. We don't always know what will please and that is no indication of malfunction.

What is really odd about this and the whole inclination toward determinism is the idea of creatures such as our selves purposefully trying to understand ourselves as simplistically mechanistic.

[NoMoreFaith]

What is really odd about this and the whole inclination toward determinism is the idea of creatures such as our selves purposefully trying to understand ourselves as simplistically mechanistic.

I find it more interesting that we commit conceptual and linguistic backflips in order to show that we are more than that.

[The Grand Nudger]

The inclination towards determinism is one of evidence. Has nothing to do with us trying to understand ourselves as anything. It's just that everywhere we look, we see it. Even in the whole QM bit that people like to trot out as an argument against hard determinism. It's an inclination towards expressing caution at viewing ourselves as the exception to the rule, since evidence has shown us that this is also a mistake.

We are exceedignly difficult to predict, sometime we have trouble predicting what we ourselves might do. This was similarly true of the weather once (and to some extent still is). Now, clouds and people are different in many ways, but it would be carelessness not to even allow that we may be making a similar mistake for similar reasons.

[Angrboda]

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Otherwise, I define free will as the freedom to act without certain types of constraint. My argument is that the constraints are complete and total.
Every natural system, ever investigated, whether weather systems, or the nervous system, to our concept of self, has always been proven to be determined and it is egotistical to believe we have a special ability to remove ourselves from the standard causal chain by which the universe moves from one instant to another.
Changing the future in the quoted argument of mine, is a little inaccurate, as has been pointed out, but rather we are not free to exempt ourselves from the natural progression of universal causation.
What we believe to be free will is the conscious justification for our decisions that are already made by the combination of a million factors.
Rather unkindly, Free Will is the name we give to our inability to comprehend even a hundredth part of the factors behind each and every decision, right down to a facial tick.
Thats more or less my position.

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3- OK let’s say that we took a guy, knocked him into a coma for a few months while we augmented and messed with how he thinks chemically and physically. Then he wakes up and goes about his life acting as a completely different person none the wiser, but he is the same person. Which is the real him the one caused up to that point or the one we caused while he was in the coma? What happens when he starts realizing his memories aren’t his and never really happened? None of what we did interrupted the causal chain. What we did do was affect why he makes decisions, not how he makes them. At no time could (while he’s conscious) we reduce what he define’s as who he is (or his agent) to not functioning. Whether he’s aware or unaware of the tampering of his mental self, there is an irreducible “I” and the ability to introspect

(emphasis added)

This view of self leads inexorably to what is known as the ship of Theseus paradox.

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, or various variants ... is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all its wooden parts remained the same ship. The paradox had been discussed by more ancient philosophers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato prior to Plutarch's writings; and more recently by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. This problem is "a model for the philosophers"; some say "it remained the same, some saying it did not remain the same".

This paradox crops up repeatedly in philosophy of mind, and that problem is referenced in some of the cognitive science that Rhythm and I referenced. Moreover, that same research also suggests that your "irreducible 'I'" is not as irreducible as you maintain. (I would maintain a different concept for "I" is needed to resolve the paradox, but that's a digression I won't entertain.)

Anytime you change what events would have transpired absent your interference then you are interrupting the causal chain. I don't see how you think what you're hypothesizing is outside the causal chain — quite the opposite, you're interrupting the causal chain by adding another cause, that of the interloper. This was the exact lesson of Phineas Gage, who, thanks to a railroad spike shot through his temporal lobe left him forever after altered in mind and self.

[Whateverist]

What is really odd about this and the whole inclination toward determinism is the idea of creatures such as our selves purposefully trying to understand ourselves as simplistically mechanistic.

I find it more interesting that we commit conceptual and linguistic backflips in order to show that we are more than that.

Well no one works at arguing that we're more than a simple machine until someone comes along and implants the notion that we are. We all start off life naively believing we are critters with choices to make until they pick up a philosophy book and become convinced that those choices have been making us all along. If you never buy in to the determinism vortex you tend not to work so hard at getting back out. I'm not a very determined spokesperson for free willing because it seems so silly to me. As far as I'm concerned you are free to imagine you a simple machine if that be your will. I'm just going to smell these flowers over here. Is that my idea, the flower's idea, by environment's idea? I don't really care.