Moral Nihilism

[Edwardo Piet]

Mind if I ask why you don't believe in free will?

I'm not sure that I do because I know of no evidence of it. As in no evidence of 'how that would work'.

BUT - that depends on your definition of free will? I believe in evitability and freedom since they are very evident.

EvF

[Tiberius]

Free will is the ability to make conscious decisions without them being deterministic. In other words, some decisions we make are not based on instinct but on actual active decision making in the brain.

If we rewound time to before a previous decision, a person would free will could change their decision. A person without free will would not be able to.

Personally I think free will exists, because it causes too many problems if it doesn't. Information appears out of nowhere; mathematical formula, inventions, books, etc were all predetermined at the beginning of time. It simply makes no sense.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Why do they kill someone and eat him? What is the reason?

From the work of one of my Anthropology professors*,who did his field work work in Highland new Guinea.He wrote of this encounter with a local "Big Man" "

Prof: "Do you eat your enemies to gain their qualities,such as courage" ?

Big Man: (as if to a rather dim child); "If I eat a bird will I be able to fly? We ate our enemies because they taste really good"*

The "civilised explanation: Lack of protein in the diet. THE staple in Highland New Guinea is sago,with almost no protein. Pigs are so important that women commonly suckle piglets. As in many tribal societies,enemies are not considered "real people".It's therefore perfectly moral to kill and eat them.


*Source;Professor Tom Ernst,(unpublished) Phd Thesis "The Significance Of The Sago Grub Amongst The Onabosalu People Of Highland New Guinea"

[Edwardo Piet]

Free will is the ability to make conscious decisions without them being deterministic. In other words, some decisions we make are not based on instinct but on actual active decision making in the brain.

If we rewound time to before a previous decision, a person would free will could change their decision. A person without free will would not be able to.

Personally I think free will exists, because it causes too many problems if it doesn't. Information appears out of nowhere; mathematical formula, inventions, books, etc were all predetermined at the beginning of time. It simply makes no sense.

Hmmm, well I find the subject of free will incredibly interesting....

The way I seem to understand it (and I don't expect to be right because I don't know much on the subject really, but I am yet to understand it differently yet) is that determinism DOES imply NO free will...but INdeterminism doesn't necessarily imply free will.

If everything is determined there can be no choices.

If things aren't determined then it could all be a matter of quantum probability and physics - we don't necessarily choose what thoughts to have and how to effect stuff...it could just happen that way and then we BELIEVE that 'WE' are 'doing it' and take credit for it ourselves....

I mean thoughts happen in the brain. What you think about effects your decisions...but what about your thoughts? Did you 'choose' THEM? And if not, then how could you have really 'MADE' a decision with free will if the decisions come from thoughts that you had no 'power over' they just happened in your brain because of genetic and environmental reasons, etc?

If thoughts choose decisions and you can't choose thoughts, how can you choose? And if you DO choose thoughts...what with? More thoughts? In which case they're not choices because they all stem from some original thought(s) that you had no power in the matter or choice over..

Hmm.

EvF

[g-mark]

The being would probably come to all possible conclusions simultaneously. It would be able to see it from a human perspective, a perspective of indifference, and probably from many other perspectives at once, as it isn't bound to just one mode of thought. It's hard to imagine an omnipotent being having one single opinion of something and favouring it over all other possible opinions. With the power to ditch empathy and the power to use empathy, an omnipotent being would have a huge array of angles to look at it from. I couldn't possibly know which angle this being would prefer.

What would a being that could understand this statement think about the human species as a whole?

[Kyuuketsuki]

Mind if I ask why you don't believe in free will?

I'm not sure that I do because I know of no evidence of it. As in no evidence of 'how that would work'

I have to say Adrian that I agree with Ev ... I don't specifically believe in free will either.

As he says there is no specific evidence that it exists and we wouldn't know if it was a fake anyway. I just figure other things (random or at least unpredictable factors) control what happens and we just ride the wave (slave to whatever chemical reactions or quantum fluctuations occur) ... maybe we have free will, maybe we don't but even if we don't it's one helluva ride.

As Ev said to me on MSN ... believing you are making choices freely is not the same as having evidence you are making choices freely.

That we have free will is an assumption, nothing more.

Kyu

[infidel666]

I see it like this.

Each person is born with a genetic profile that causes a specific set of thousands of trace hormones to be manufactured in that person's brain.

These hormones define a set of proclivities that dictate certain CHANCES that the person will react in a finite number ways in response to given stimuli. The actual response chosen is RANDOM.

Each time the person reacts to a set of stimuli, feedback on the result stemming from that response is fed back into the brain, influencing development of physical, neural pathways that modify that person's behavior in response to those same stimuli.

As these pathways develop and the person's behavioral possibilities are modified, the illusion of choice appears. The person erroneously perceives that they have free will.

If the person went back in time, the dice wouldn't necessarily fall the same way, especially if that person "remembered" the future and had the feedback from the previous "choice" modifying their behavior.

But it's all kneejerk reactions. Each of us is a velvet tracing of Pavlov's dog. Human brains are just biological computers. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. The end.

[Tiberius]

When you put it like that, I would call it free will. You are making a decision, even if it is your subconscious mind doing most of the work. If we didn't have free will, we would do the exact same thing over and over again if we replayed time (assuming people don't remember).

You say it's all "kneejerk reactions", but it simply isn't. We think about our actions beforehand (most of the time anyway) which is why we don't do impulse things that often. With free will, a person might have a choice in which the outcome is always going to be the same (for instance when driving we all put seatbelts on, which is a choice but is so ingrained that we keep doing it without much thought. There are also going to be times when the choice is more vivid. Do we turn the TV on and waste half an hour or do we finish that work assignment?

By definition, the lack of free will means that the outcomes of these events will always be the same if we replayed time. Since you seem to disagree with this I find your position rather contradictory. You say there isn't free will when you freely admit there is!

[Edwardo Piet]

If the actions are the same even if time was replayed then that's determinism right?

And determinism would mean no free will, yes.

But with intedeterminism that simply means the future isn't determined.

We DO think about our actions before hand yes. It isn't all knee-jerk reactions. But who says that simply because we THINK them means those thoughts are ALSO thought out? GIGO; garbage in, garbage out - however thought out are thoughts are they are ultimately the product of thoughts and decisions and influences upon us before hand. And just because we BELIEVE that we control our own thoughts doesn't mean we do. I know of no evidence of this.

There is evidence that we actually make decisions yes, that's obvious - in the sense that people 'think things through' and 'make choices', yes.

But where is the evidence that we have any choice in the matter of making decisions? Whatever decisions we make, who says we have choice in them? Just because they're not determined and they could happen in a number of ways does not mean that when we DO make a decision that we made that decision itself HAPPEN.

As far as we know, all the thoughts we have, we just have right? We DO make decisions but they come from thoughts before and those come from thoughts before that. They just happen don't they? Where's the choice? We make decisions and they may go one way they may go another assuming this is an indeterministic universe - but where is the evidence that we choose our decisions? Decisions 'just happen' as far as I know, influenced by previous decisions and thoughts, which are in-turn influenced by ones before THEM; and so on.

If the universe is deterministic and there's just one big X that'll happen then that makes free will impossible, certainly.

But if the universe is INdeterministic, while that perhaps makes free will POSSIBLE because there are other options AVAILABLE. I have no reason to think it's any more probable other than the fact the mere possibility is open.

if instead of one big 'X' there is a possible A, B, C, D and so on adding as many thousands of characters as you like that could happen. How does that imply you can freely influence with choice and free will WHICH outcome will happen? Sure you have decisions. But you do in a DETERMINISTIC universe too. Only difference is in a deterministic universe, your decisions are determined. In an indetermined one, they are not. How does them simply not being determined mean you can choose your own decisions? They're still just influenced by the decisions before right? All I know is that with an indeterministic universe it means that your decisions could be different I know of no evidence that you can choose them.

If there's more possibility how does that imply you can choose WHICH possibility it will be, even in the sense of, choosing a decision?

And if you can't choose decisions and they 'just happen' where's the free will in that? It just means the universe is more random rather than completely determined! Still no more influence in a practical sense at least!

EvF

[infidel666]

What EVF said.

What we experience as thinking things through and making a choice is just the light show that accompanies the flippings of the coin that occurs when you have multiple impulses that conflict with one another until a resolution occurs. It's your awareness of what is going on as you traverse your neural network. In those moments of indecision, a coin is flipped, and one path is taken over another, leading to another conflict and another flipping of the coin.

As anyone who has studied neural networks is aware, the chances of outcomes at a node of the graph are not usually even. The chance of taking one path over another is dynamically weighted in response to feedback from previous outcomes. But that doesn't mean that we have control over the outcome. When we think back to our previous experiences and try to predict outcomes and evaluate the desirability of those outcomes with respect to previous experiences, etc., we are just retrieving and processing the information we need to formulate the weights to be applied in adjusting the chances for selecting different paths at nodes of the graph.

Those people who seem to have greater impulse control have developed pathways and/or weight formulation processes, by chance, genetics, and/or circumstance, that consistently lead to behaviors that conform to what we perceive as "asceticism" or "good judgement" or "character" or "lawfulness" or whatever.

Of course, being a nihilist, I don't literally BELIEVE any of the above. But I do find it more credible than the idea of a "soul" or anything like that.