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Worthy of worship, free will?
#31
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
*biggest facepalm ever*

Is that seriously supposed to be taken seriously?

Libertarian Free will isn't even a coherent concept.

You chose the snickers bar for reasons you had. You had motives. And where did those motives come from? Perhaps more motives and reasons you had, but somewhere along the line the causes stretch back beyond your motives and reasons and the buck never stops. It goes back to the beginning of the universe the causal chain never ends until we reach the very beginning of time.

That's determinism for you.

As for indeterminism that adds a random element and rolling a bunch of dice doesn't get you free will either.

A combination of the two if that were possible? Ok so now you are ultimately caused by other things beyond your control but you also get to roll the dice to decide for you every so often? How does that help?

There is no escaping the trap of reality.

Libertarian free will is completely incoherent. Free will isn't even an illusion because if you pay attention to the "illusion" you're not even seeing or feeling the freedom you think you are. Libertarian free will is not only completely impossible but a universe can't even be described where it is possible.

To paraphrase Sam Harris, to say we could have done otherwise had we wanted to ultimately comes down to merely saying we could have lived in a different universe had we lived in a different universe.
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#32
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
There's a reason every grocery store in the USA (at least) has its Snickers bars in the "impulse buy" racks next to the checkout counter.
A Christian told me: if you were saved you cant lose your salvation. you're sealed with the Holy Ghost

I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.

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#33
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
Yeah beyond the reasons why free will is absurd the Snickers bar wasn't even a good example lol

A much better example would be a choice that seems to be free of external factors. Like the exercise Sam Harris gives - I want you to think of a country, any country in the world and to pick a city. If evidence of free will is anywhere it should be there because that's as free of a decision you're ever going to make. After you pick that city ... do you see any evidence for free will at all? Why did you not pick any other city? Because they didn't occur to you? Are you free to pick that which did not occur to you?
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#34
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
(October 12, 2015 at 7:11 am)Evie Wrote: *biggest facepalm ever*
I forgive you, since you had no choice in saying that, no matter how juvenile or trollish it was. I should add, however, that you forgot to include either the Star Wars or the kitten meme necessary to properly reinforce such a strong statement of contempt.

Quote:You chose the snickers bar for reasons you had. You had motives. And where did those motives come from? Perhaps more motives and reasons you had, but somewhere along the line the causes stretch back beyond your motives and reasons and the buck never stops. It goes back to the beginning of the universe the causal chain never ends until we reach the very beginning of time.
To identify with the self at all is delusional in this sense. Our ideas about self, about others, and about our relationships are almost entirely symbolic, and have relatively little to do with the physical realities of Mom or America, or that dick honking his horn for no reason, or whatever. It's not just free will that suffers from reductio ad absurdum: at the foundation, it's all just wave functions, isn't it? And under that. . . who even has an inkling?

But the problem with all your reduction boils down to a simple word: experience. You can talk about the meaningless of Mom in absolute terms, but your vision of Mom, positive or negative, is most likely one of the central points of your world view and what it's like to be you. To live in the "truth" of physical absolutism isn't so much to be a human free of delusion, but not to live as a human at all. I accept that experiences are self-validating: they have an intrinsic truth that cannot be assailed-- the "what it's like" to have them, aka qualia. However, to inferences and views derived from experiences I wouldn't extend this same status.


Quote:Libertarian free will is completely incoherent. Free will isn't even an illusion because if you pay attention to the "illusion" you're not even seeing or feeling the freedom you think you are. Libertarian free will is not only completely impossible but a universe can't even be described where it is possible.
Your problem is that you let ideas inferred FROM experience subsume the experience itself, which is an inversion. The fact is that whatever beauty is, it is-- and whatever free will is, it is. We can debate WHAT it is, but not so much WHETHER it is-- because Snickers Bar selection is not just a mechanical process but the expression of my humanity at my moment-- and if that isn't real, nothing else about my human experience is, either.

Including spending time typing to the imaginary friends who live inside my computer monitor. Big Grin
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#35
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
(October 12, 2015 at 7:19 am)Evie Wrote: Yeah beyond the reasons why free will is absurd the Snickers bar wasn't even a good example lol

A much better example would be a choice that seems to be free of external factors.

No.  I don't need to escape external factors.  My choice of a Snickers bar is the perfect and unimpeded expression of my humanity at that moment, in response to the environment with which it is interacting.  There's nothing more free than that.
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#36
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
Star Wars? Don't you mean Star Trek?

Yes the illusoriness of free will is analogous to the illusoriness of the self. That adds to my argument rather than detracing from it.

When you want to deal with my actual argument that attacks contra-causal Libertarian free will from both the perspective of determinism and indeterminism then feel free.

And no you're wrong I totally had a choice in facepalming it just was a choice that wasn't a contra-causal choice. I'm not a fatalist, our choices are part of the causal stream as much as anything else. They are still choices but they are still part of the causal stream.

You keep thinking that you are the ultimate cause to buy a snickers bar and that the environment merely effects you in the moment mate. Keep thinkjng that you can isolate any particular instant away from its larger context and that the buck stops when you conveniently want it to. Go ahead.
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#37
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
(October 12, 2015 at 9:35 am)Evie Wrote: Star Wars? Don't you mean Star Trek?

Yes the illusoriness of free will is analogous to the illusoriness of the self. That adds to my argument rather than detracing from it.
No it doesn't, and I'll tell you why: ultimate causality is unknowable. You therefore need to establish a context, and judge things to be valid or invalid in that context. In the context of QM, you'll not find numbers, let alone sweet ol' Aunt Em. You'll just find a bunch of wave functions at various densities doing their little magical dance. Nor will you find in them neurons, hormones, or (presumably) qualia.

So the self is illusory in that context, and so (probably) is determinism. And yet it's pretty hard to deny the self once one has had that first cup of coffee in the morning. That's because the human context is one of experience, not quantum mechanics or billiard balls, and in making decisions, we experience free will. Now, whether it is supervenient on mechanistic functions, or on fuzzy QM functions, or on the Word of God or the dust of faires, is irrelevant.


Quote:You keep thinking that you are the ultimate cause to buy a snickers bar and that the environment merely effects you in the moment mate. Keep thinkjng that you can isolate any particular instant away from its larger context and that the buck stops when you conveniently want it to. Go ahead.
What's this stuff about ultimate cause? We're not looking for God here, just the ability to interact with one's environment as one chooses. I have that capacity, and use it frequently every day. Complaining that there's a mechanism upon which that process supervenes is like complaining that I can't really drive to Disneyland because my car is the thing that is actually moving. Well, I'm not just coincidentally along for the ride, because I have my hands firmly planted on the steering wheel.

The car, it turns out, doesn't drive me after all.
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#38
RE: Worthy of worship, free will?
What the fuck has God got to do with an ultimate cause? lol.

No I just mean that the universe has causality and I am not talking about the quantum level I already explained how indeterminism doesn't give us free will any easier.

Because the ultimate cause is unknowable doesn't mean we have to completely abandon causality. Nor does QM give us any special magic to make free will exist.

You are talking about putting it "in context" but all you're doing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and ignoring the bigger picture simply because we cannot understand it 100%. The buck doesn't stop where you want it to stop it never stops. It doesn't stop just because you want it to, you don't get to select the context and define free will into existence without becoming a comptabilist and I'm not even attacking compatabilsit free will right now remember I am attacking contra-causal libertrian free will which is taken seriously by virtually no one in philosophy. The majority are compatabilists but I like Sam Harris see compatabilism as a cop-out so I am also an incompatabilist.

You on the other hand are defending my attack on contra-causal libertarian free will which isn't rationally defensible.
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