RE: Free Will: Fact or Fiction
October 2, 2012 at 9:09 am
(This post was last modified: October 2, 2012 at 9:44 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(October 1, 2012 at 4:21 pm)Tino Wrote: I will attempt to suggest a test if you can tell me what your proposed "no-free-will" is. What controls the will if it is not free? If it is deterministic, then determined by who or what?
And if you think there is no practical value to either side of the issue, what is the point of the non-free-willers bringing it up? Is it just navel gazing?
Do your own work. The point is challenging assumptions, I suppose. In your responses and questions it becomes very obvious that you begin with the assumption of free will, but lacking any explanation as to why this is so it seems a strange assumption, to me. Especially considering our inability to find anything free of determinism anywhere we care (or dont care) to look. The billions made annually on exploiting just how easily coerced our "wills" -whatever they are- can be in a pleasant little industry called "advertising" is another very obvious example of this. Something as minor as buying a tube of toothpaste is, in all likelihood, very much an issue of determinism. So, love, hate, buying toothpaste......I'm just looking for a single case of free will so we can attempt to explain whats going down when it's leveraged.
(October 2, 2012 at 8:36 am)pocaracas Wrote: If there were no rules punishing bad behavior, it would run rampart.It does, because there aren't. No one gets punished for doing anything, you get punished for getting caught.
Quote:The brain wouldn't have the mechanism in place to prevent this bad behavior.It doesn't, if it did we wouldn't have mountains of "incentives" and external sources of conditioning...there would be no need.
Quote: This is visible in kids born in the "I never lay a hand on my child" societies. Kids never learn the rules, hence they think they are free to do whatever their brains conjure up.I'm assuming you're referencing crime, which has gotten lower and lower in those "i never lay a hand on my child" societies, reliably. It's almost as though a large group of social animals is slowly being conditioning to be more conducive to social interaction by some mysterious force that we have no name for..........
You know, it occurs to me, if we weren't so goddamned pleasant about "bad behavior" we'd probably be even more pleasant than we are...eventually...lol. Sure, greater levels of cooperation lead to greater amounts of success, but what if the price for uncooperative behavior was the ultimate penalty, -no success- biologically speaking. How many assholes would be left in the world? Is the asshole an expression of genetics or an emergent property of consciousness, a ghost in the machine..hehehe
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