RE: Is free will real?
December 22, 2014 at 11:06 am
(This post was last modified: December 22, 2014 at 11:27 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(December 22, 2014 at 9:09 am)bennyboy Wrote: My "Mom" is real-- as a comfort-giver, as a loving supporter, etc. But you'll find no comfort or loving support anywhere in the subatomic world, and you won't even find "Mom-ness" in the arrangement of the brain and other organs. They are qualities that exist only in the context of our waking human lives.Then they exist within the subatomic world - as demonstrably as you found comfort and loving support in the collection of stuff you call mom.
Quote:"Free will" is no less real than ideas about Mom. In our human experience, free will is incontrovertible.Agreed, but that doesn't make our ideas (or experiences) any more real. Many of our experiences are demonstrably -not real-...many of our ideas are hilarious bullshit. I distinctly remember being a pillowy fog last night. This dreaming business is also incontrovertible in human experience. A metal pole is colder than the air, on a chilly day - also incontrovertible in human experience. Are these two just as real as free will, and for the same reasons? How real is that...then?
Quote: We exercise it constantly, every day, by thinking about our desires and making conscious decisions. That you can't find free will in the (supposedly) deterministic processes of a functioning brain means little to me, because that is not the context in which free will means anything.Bit of begging. We experience it, but whether or not we actually exercise it will be difficult to pin down - and is a point of contention. I experienced being a fog. Did I exercise my fogginess? I don't know whether or not we haven't "found free will" (the frontal lobe and primary motor cortex seem to be doing the lions share of the free willing™ whenever we happen to look).....but if we find that the brain isn't actually doing anything we would describe as free will and yet we have the experience..that wouldn't surprise me. It would mean a lot, but it would have little effect, I suppose.
Quote:This is a mistake people make-- trying to fit the context of waking life into the context of atomic or subatomic structures. Their order in the chain of supervenience has nothing to do with their meaning in their OWN contexts.Waking life occurs within and by the "context of atomic and subatomic structures" - so I don't see the problem. Non-waking life happens there (and by the same) as well. We understand that our experiences aren't always indicative of reality, and we have no trouble distinguishing between the illusion of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat - and a man actually pulling rabbits out of hats - even though the experience is identical. Having an experience is not, by brute force, any indication of the accuracy of it's contents. It's not the existence of the free will experience that I doubt (so no amount of "you use it every day" will alter my view of it) - it's the veracity of that experience. Am I actually doing what I think I'm doing...can it be done, and if so, how?
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