Free will and determinism

Diamond7 said:

The question is how much does consciousness play a fundamental role in shaping reality. When I was doing construction work and we had to do the impossible. Or at least keep trying to do it. I was amazed at how much our mind can control the physical world that we work with.

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If two people were looking at the same obstacle say a hill to climb the person with a positive outlook will see the hill smaller than it is and the person with the negative outlook will think its bigger than it is. This can cause the people with negative outlooks to giveup or be effected much more, health wise and mentally.

This is a basic psychological trusim behind principles like "you are what you eat" or "you reap what you sow" and we have known this for a long time. It shows that we don't see reality as nuetral quantified objects in time and space but we see through 'meaning', attaching meaning to objects. Science seperates that meaning to quantify the world but I think that attached or entangled meaning or experience we have about the objective world is what we go by, how we actually live within the objective world and this feeds back and influences how we percieve things.

So in some ways we pocess natural teleology, we cannot help it and we have to make a concerted effort to rid ourselves of this. I find it hard to believe that such a person with these abilities to attach meaning including important meaning for the big questions in life would be a passive create in all this and unable to make meaningful free choices that can control and influence reality.

Bradskii said:

One of the 'must know how to play' if you have a 12 string. Plus a lot of Supertramp. Luckily I'm a big fan of both bands.

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Yeah Supertramp is recognisable for their 12 string sound. Also America, some of Led Zeplin and Eagles. The intro to Hotel California is great with Don Felder on 12 string is great especially live.

Bradskii said:

Good example with the vinyl. It's a physical process (the needle in the groove) that produces a physical event (sound waves) which in turn produces events within the brain which produces an emotion. Which then might determine an action. That we are unsure of where the emotion 'lives' doesn't exclude any of the process which determines the act.

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Except the experience itself cannot be reduced to the physical processes and event. Why should we experience 'what it is like to be something' in the first place. Why should a lump of grey jelly like matter produce this.

Its like the ghost in the machine where the wiring and electrical signals are producing consciousness. This would imply if we can map out the brain we can create a computer, a robot with consciousness.

Bradskii said:

A group response in lean times is even more efficient. And rich people rarely get rich on their own. But an interesting tread on socialism v capitalism as it relates to evolution might be worth looking at some time.

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Yeah its interesting. Its like there are two forces at work. The survival instinct which may potentially stop at nothing to survive. Then the moral and empathy side to us that moralises over these things like there is a greater good than just survival even if that means giving up our own survival for another. I think this goes much deeper than just an secondary consequence of biological evolution.

Bradskii said:

Those characteristics evolved because they were beneficial in forming groups. Which were more beneficial than going it alone. Not really relevant to this discussion. And I won't be commenting on transcendent or spiritual matters. For obvious reasons.

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In a way it is relevant. When I say a spiritual sense or a sense of some reality beyond the physical world such as consciousness I mean it as a sense of self beyond the physical world that is real in the world.

In that sense this relates to free will because if there is this sense of self beyond the physical world then this also implies that this sense is expressed in free will. We believe that our choices can make a difference and change reality and that we are not just passive players subject to deterministic processes.

Bradskii said:

And no. There is no evidence for this.

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First we have Wheelers delayed experiment on the quantum level. On the macro level I think we have lots of examples. For instance an individual that discovers something in their present which changes how they see their past. They never look at their past in the same way. That also changes their present for obvious reasons as its changed how they feel and percieve things. This will also change their future because their perception is what they base the future on.

This can happen on a collective level as well where complete paradigm shifts can happen in that reality itself is changed such as moving from the classical view of physics to the quantum one.

Bradskii said:

Again, we are talking about orders of magnitude a very long way beneath the level at which events occur and decisions are made. And even if it wasn't so far removed, introducing randomness into the process is hardly likely to convince anyone that free will exists. Quantum effects fail if they don't affect us. And fail if they do.

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But how do we know how the quantum world scales up to the macro. I don't think its severed and is obviously fundemental to everything. So iut has to filter up in some way and it seems that it is best understood through consciousness and mind. There is some connection between the quantum world and mind but we just don't understand it yet.

But we are sort of with experiments which is scaling up quantum effects tothe macro world.

Bradskii said:

That sounds like an appeal rather than a statement. Surely it must be more complex! Because...well, because we just know that we have free will!

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No just a recognition that we just don't know so its either more complex or is based on a completely different way of thinking that we don't even know what questions to ask at this time.

That and the fact that we have this persistent sense of self, a real self in the world, intuition that free will is a real thing and we can make a difference rather than being fooled and deluded into thinking that this is the case. That we actually experience that difference happening and it was us in the drivers seat at least sometimes, in important times and not as passengers. That we had real choices that made real differences.

stevevw said:

If two people were looking at the same obstacle say a hill to climb the person with a positive outlook will see the hill smaller than it is and the person with the negative outlook will think its bigger than it is. This can cause the people with negative outlooks to giveup or be effected much more, health wise and mentally.

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I was recently recovering from surgery and I found that a positive attitude is essential to regain good health. Of course eating proper food and exercise is essential also. Dr Ornish seems to have done the more research on that.

stevevw said:

America, some of Led Zeplin and Eagles. The intro to Hotel California

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I remember back in the late 60's when people were amazed at how well Morrison and others were able to play the electric guitar. We no longer needed the big band sound when 5 people were enough to make music. Even stick in the mud Lawrence welk had to promote the new artists.

Bradskii said:

Which, maybe you've honestly missed the whole idea of the thread ...

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I see clearly the whole idea of this thread. A man read a book, a man who had already escaped the authority of a transcendent Being now finds in the book a way to further escape the responsibility of his own free will. I guess we'll just have to wait for you to read another book.

Bradskii said:

I'd agree. This is what we do. I just take the word 'free' out of it.

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See I can't take free choice out because that entails that nothing I choose is above and beyond the deterministic physical processes I live in. That to me limits humans to one dimension of control. Whereas like I said we intuitively know that we are more than the sum of our physical systems. We know this through our own experiences in how we transcend the physical with our experiences.

I think its because we have this insight and knowledge that transcends the physical that we also have the insight to make some free choices. We gain knowledge of reality through experiences that the physical world cannot tell us and we intuit or sense our place within reality and not being seperated from it.

Thus giving us some control over the physical world through the choices we freely make because we can have knowledge beyond the physical world which does not bind us to deterministic physical processes that are assumed to control our choices by the physicalist view of reality. If we exist also in some form beyond the physical that implies we are not entirely subject and bound by the physical including our choices in some cases.

Diamond7 said:

I remember back in the late 60's when people were amazed at how well Morrison and others were able to play the electric guitar. We no longer needed the big band sound when 5 people were enough to make music. Even stick in the mud Lawrence welk had to promote the new artists.

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Well Muddy Waters initially came to Chicargo in the 50s with his home made electric guitar and blew people away when he was busking on the streets as they had never heard such music. The American early Blues guitarist were the pioneers of the guitar especially in rock, rythm and blues. Like Robert Johnson, Lead Belly and Elmore James. Later came B.B. King, Chuck Berry and Little Richard and that inspired the Beatles and Stones. The rest is history.

Bradskii said:

One of the 'must know how to play' if you have a 12 string. Plus a lot of Supertramp. Luckily I'm a big fan of both bands.
.....

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Interesting. I never knew there was 12 string all over Supertramp. Will have to pay attention.

Bradskii said:

....
6. We know the process whereby we make decisions and there is nowhere in that process to squeeze in a willful decision that is not free from antecedent conditions.
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I was hoping Omlly could rescue me from this bit of reasoning. But no.

I fall back on my assertion that we dont know the process of making decisions. We dont know it well enough anyway. Human consciousness is still somewhat mysterious to us.

So, I cant say with certainly we have free will, I also cant deny it with confidence.

Bradskii said:

Again, you are just denying what I am saying ...

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What is asserted gratuitously may just as easily be gratuitously dismissed. This is a debate forum, not an op-ed forum.

Bradskii said:

... but offering nothing to counter it except...it appears self evident.

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And that which is self-evident is more than sufficient to dismiss the claims of an extreme skeptic. The self-contradiction in your evolved dogmatic claim and an absolute failure of your assertion to pass a pragmatic test of its truth only adds to the truth of human free will.

1) We can dismiss you as an extreme skeptic whose own self-contradiction betrays himself: you report that you freely decided to deny free will.

2) An opinion passes the pragmatic test by working as we expect it to only if it corresponds with the way things are. It fails to work when it fails to correspond. The world of human action is so obviously free that it cannot fail to overcome your extreme dogmatism and labels you as an extreme skeptic.

Bradskii said:

All decisions we make are determined by existing and prior influences. There has been an effectively infinite chain of events which has resulted in me sitting here writing this sentence. They have all led to this point. From the major events - I was born at a specific time and place, to the minor ones - it's raining today, to the seemingly inconsequential - I broke a string on my guitar last night.

There is no way that existence cannot be described other than determined.

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Ah, this has a name actually when you think all physical reality (such as you also) operates only from past conditions in a fully deterministic way, and thus in principle would be fully predictable in a reasonably significant time frame (like 10 minutes, etc.) with sufficient information of a moment in time and sufficient computing power ...

When extended to it's full extent, this idea/theory is called 'super determinism' -- and we know in physics this theory isn't supported by any convincing unique evidence that would prove it over competing theories that paint an entirely different picture of reality like quantum randomness (which averages out, but also prevents prediction forward in time with perfect precision....)

SuperDeterminism (physics super determinism that is) is in fact just one of several competing theories where none has an outright convincing unique evidence to prove it's more likely.

As likely (or perhaps more it seems suggested by Bell Test Experiments over the decades) is that nature instead may be fundamentally probabilistic (Quantum Mechanics mainstream interpretation), and then typically in such a view only the evolution of probability is deterministic, so that specific actual outcomes might be truly non-deterministic....

See? Your idea of total determinism is only a mere theory and actually considered speculative in that it isn't proven and other theories explain just as well what we observe.

So, you only have a theory there in that premise, see...

Bradskii said:

All decisions we make are determined by existing and prior influences. There has been an effectively infinite chain of events which has resulted in me sitting here writing this sentence. They have all led to this point. From the major events - I was born at a specific time and place, to the minor ones - it's raining today, to the seemingly inconsequential - I broke a string on my guitar last night.

There is no way that existence cannot be described other than determined.

The question is then not whether we make decisions that affect the trajectory of future events - I obviously decided to do this rather than something else. But if free will is defined as the ability to make decisions that are not determined by prior events and we could rerun the last hour exactly as it happened and make a different decision, then something actually needs to be different. But rerunning it exactly as it happened means that nothing is different.

So free will cannot be compatible with determinism. And if existence is deterministic then free will is an illusion.

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Well, at least the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac has a secularized justification now. I guess Sapolsky's thesis on Determinism can be useful to Christians after all ...