Gotlucky, you’re right, I wanted to share a thought I had which wasn’t syllogistic, but more colloquial. I was just pointing out that if there is no free will, laws against individuals would be unjust and the system would break down. I like the last sentence you wrote, too; kudos.
I want to point out, however, that to say “we all make choices” (with the conventional definitions understood) and then to say that it is possible that there is no free will is like arguing against the existence of air - we must use air in order to speak in an argument.
Also, in what way are we positing that “free will” exists? Is it as an organ exists within us, able to be removed? I think free will exists in the same way that our preferences exist - in the mental sphere: unmeasurable, undetectable except through symptoms, etc.
Great response, my friend. I find it similar to proving the color yellow. There is no way for us to know something is yellow other than to experience it. There is no mathematical proof of yellow, and nothing circumstantial perhaps aside from actually measuring the energy on a scale of some kind. But try to prove yellow to someone who sees orange, red or a different color, and it’s impossible. It’s the same with free will.
The mere mention of a debate between free will and determinism, for instance, begs the ontological reality of free will existing. I choose to write these words, and nothing in my environment is causing me to write them. I am writing them from my own volition. Perhaps free will has no physiological substratum that can be measured; I think you’re right. I don’t think any amount of surgery would somehow compartmentalize and take free will out of a person. You can end the brain, but that doesn’t prove much other than that all physiological functions have neurology as their impetus.
Free will can only be measured by its effects. The class debate continued when we talked about punishment, why punish anybody when they can’t be held responsible for their actions, but you brought up a good point as did someone else: in a deterministic scenario, even the punishers don’t have a say in punishing!
It’s a pathetic circle. One peer was saying, “Well, we punish behavior to enforce rules.” So I asked who creates the rules, and he said, “Society does.” That makes no more sense than saying that roads exist because they have always existed. Society can be broken up into individuals, and somewhere along the way one individual had to have the idea of creating a rule to live by, so on and so forth.
What does it mean to choose “individualistically?” How else can one choose?
Other courses of action that he/she is aware of at the time or all other possible courses of actions including the ones that he/she may not be aware of at the time?
To choose individualistically is to choose an action on an individual basis. It is, perhaps, a redundancy as you’re implying.
Only ones that the individual is aware of, I suppose. Perhaps an example of an effect caused by will power could be unintention, like speeding down a road and not seeing a possum crossing the street and hitting him. The individual would have caused the accident by his own free will, just not intentionally.
Ok this is getting tedious. I guess I need to load Fire Fox.
In response to your initial question, to choose individualistically is probably a redundant way of saying it. I just meant choosing something on an individual basis in order to make a distinction between the group think crap that a lot of libs talk about.
Here you have admitted that internal constraints exist when one forms a choice. You have said that people can only act based on the information they currently have. Therefore knowledge or the lack thereof can itself be a internal constraint upon choice.
But you have also said that an accidental action is the same as a deliberate one insofar as both are a consequence of my free will.
But can my actions be of my own free will if they were accidental rather than intentional? If I did not know that a possum was in the street, can I really be said to have chosen to hit it? Isn’t this just another example of an internal constraint caused by imperfect knowledge?
I think that the idea of “free will” posits that one act according to his or her will. As redundant as this sounds, I think it is important:
Sequence is a key factor in the car accident scenario: at one point in time, I did not want to hit a possum. At another point in time, a possum ran in front of my car (moving 80 mph), and I decided that if I swerved out of the way, my life would be in danger, as opposed to running over the critter and sustaining minor car damage. At the point that I decide to hit the possum, my free will is exercised for the first time in this sequence with respect to the possum.
Unintended consequences, I believe, have no place in a discussion of free will. The will to complete an action is the motivation to attain a certain goal (deterministic in nature). Freedom implies an absence of external constraint. If an accident occurs, without my or another’s thinking about it, then no one’s free will was exercised. An accident simply occurs if no one decided that it was better to be in the accident than it was to avoid it.
I think it is interesting to note that we can never know if we have free will, because as someone else said, we have constraints on the latitude and depth of our knowledge of the world. Perhaps 99% of the evidence in the universe points to our having zed free will; maybe not. Perhaps our free will is just a way of saying that we work and act within a sphere of influences outside of our control.
This discussion, then, has no conclusion - it becomes a relativistic argument.
If there were no free will, why would laws against individuals be unjust? That’s the non sequitur.
In regards to making choices, the point about a lack of free will is to say that we don’t really get to choose, it just appears that way. We are a slave to the chemicals that rule us, so we don’t really get to choose. The chemicals are what choose.
For the record, I do believe in free will. I am just pointing out an argument against it. As far as I’m concerned, as long as I am able to weigh the pros and cons of any given choice, and then I select the option that is best for me (gasp is this human action?), then I consider that I have free will.
Well, there is consequentialism (believing that actions are more important than intentions when judging the behavior of an individual) and non-consequentialism (believing that intentions are more important than actions when judging the behavior of an individual). Neither of these, though, have anything to do with the root of free will; only the consequences as they pertain to the rest of society.
Taking the possum example, it’s rather simple: the possum died by the effects of my free will regardless of my intentions. Whether or not it can be classified as resulting from free will is futile. We know the cause of it was my action, as for my intention, it is unimportant unless judging the action. So in answer to your query, will power is the impetus for all his actions outside of involuntary reflexes, and if his actions spawned an effect he had no intention of enacting, I don’t think he should be blamed for it unless he had prior understanding of where the effects of his actions would manifest.
There’s actually a whole causal chain of actions that lead to that dead opossum. The question here is can we regress all those actions to their source and if so, what is it?
I would say that it’s the human brain. So not only do internal constraints exist in terms of the amount of information one has at any given time, but also in terms of how the brain arrives at decisions in the first place. Interestingly enough this is not a process ‘you’ are in conscious control of either.
Unfortunately this is where I have to bow out of the conversation as I still don’t understand the science well enough to explain it satisfactorily. Suffice it to say there’s quite a strong argument out there against what we might call “free will” and I encourage you to seek it out.
Yeah, that was something I was also talking about with jdkdsgn. But I also said that as long as I am able to weigh the pros and cons of choices, I can say that I have free will. Obviously, changes in someone’s brain can actually change their personality drastically, but I think that the statement still holds; just what they consider pros and cons are different.
Someone might say that this is not free will, but I don’t think it really matters at that point. We make choices, and that’s certainly enough for me.
Science has become more faith than fact lately, and the last I’d heard about free will was one of my pro-government professors telling me that free will doesn’t exist and science proved it. He said that decisions are made before we perform the actions, that they located the portion of the brain which shows stimulation of the body before the decision portion is stimulated. I can’t say I can refute the science because I don’t have the technology to see what happens when inside the brain, but I do know one thing: if I want something done, I do it. Seems to me I can say that I have epistemological certainty that I rule myself and thus hold will power.
As for a root to free will, finding its physical property if there is any, I have no idea; but I must stand by the notion that just because someone cannot explain something doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t exist.
I think this is a good point to come in to the discussion.
I see the notion of free will as being intrinsically bound up with the notion of choice. Both of these notions, in turn, are bound up with the intrinsic uncertainty of the future. From a strictly deterministic standpoint, choice does not exist, and therefore free will does not exist. Everything next thing we do (ultimately, the next state of every fundamental particle of the universe) is determined by what’s happened before. So in that sense, we can no more choose to do the things we do than a planet can choose whether to continue orbiting around a star.
However, our awareness doesn’t operate anywhere near the fundamental level of the universe. It operates at a much higher (and necessarily emergent) level. This is why the future is uncertain for us - we lack the vast majority of information needed to actually predict (i.e. calculate) it. That includes the future actions of ourselves as well as others. Given this perceptual uncertainty of the future, we perceive ourselves and others as making choices from one moment to the next - that, from one moment to the next, each of us chooses to perform one action from a set of multiple actions that (perceptually speaking) he could perform.
In other words, free will and choice don’t exist as separate fundamental aspects of the universe. They’re emergent, perceptual phenomena. But if you ask me, that hardly makes them useless.
I believe there is no way to predict free will with any certainty. Past behavior of individuals making choices does not guarantee predictability of future behavior, so I agree with you there.
So do you believe free will = choice?
Also, do you think there is a way to quantify free will by means of identifying its physical properties?
I don’t really like the term “free will”, but there is actually something to your intuition
The Austrian school, as the name indicates is heavy on Teutonic thought.
Some analogies for illustration can be drawn
we are:
Freud vs behaviorism
Nietzsche vs Russell
Stirner vs Marx
Weber vs Comte
Kant vs Hume
Husserl / Heidegger vs Carnap / Reichenbach
Wittgenstein vs Popper
Dionysus vs Apollo
This is the scientism of “the will” , "der wille zur macht" and der einzige and not the typical mainstream scientism of things we claim can’t exist.
This puts us at odds methodologicaly, epistemologically, and ontologically with just about every “mainstream” idea out there; as we claim all their claims are inferior and subservient to us and their conclusions only work as an unlear “mimic” to the correct imperatives of action.
We perceive free will precisely because we can’t predict future action with certainty.
Yes, I consider free will and choice to be one and the same. But I don’t think they exist as fundamental features of the universe, which is what the question of free will in metaphysics seems to be all about (it’s essentially the same as the question of whether man has a soul). Free will is an emergent, perceptual phenomenon given three things: intersubjectivity, the complexity of the human organism, and the uncertainty of the future.
I may be misunderstanding you, but am I right to understand that you mean free will is merely our definition of choices that occur without our prior knowledge of their occuring? Put another way, do you believe that spark of choice, so-to-speak, originates with the human mind, or do you believe it is physiological? Unless, of course, you think the mind is physiological, which would make our willpower, imagination, emotions and anything else subjective due to evolved physiology and, to reference one of your previous points, that eventually we may be able to “predict” one’s choices (being that it is physiological, like predicting the planets is merely a matter of knowing a cause to an effect), thereby not making it “free will” but simply “currently unpredictable will,” which–along with all the rest of phenomena in the universe–will eventually be able to be explained?
I won’t claim to know if there is any physiological property to willpower, but I don’t believe there is. I suppose it is the same as believing in a soul, as you put it, or perhaps believing that imagination is somehow metaphysical . . . but I consider willpower to be a metaphysical “property” in that it cannot be bound, cannot be located and cannot be predicted.
Yes, I believe the mind is physiological. But I don’t think one’s choices could be predicted (i.e. calculated) without an enormous amount of additional knowledge. Every part of the universe could have an effect on every other part, however small. In that case, if every part of the universe isn’t taken into account, then there’s still some margin of error, which means there’s no certainty in our hypothetical calculations. But I think it’s possible in theory to calculate the future state of the universe, and therefore the future state of a human being.
I think imagination is entirely physiological. There are feedback loops between areas like the prefrontal cortex (which controls decision making), the hippocampus (which provides working memory), and sensory areas like the visual cortex. I think those feedback loops provide the perceptual phenomenon of the “mind’s eye”.
Willpower can be readily bound and located - it comes from, and is therefore bound up with, the central nervous system.