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Free Will


romansh

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In August 2016 … we (my wife and I) had fortieth wedding anniversary. There were forty or so people outside for a barbeque. I must admit I was well oiled. I was sitting next to Ann (Madeleine's Buddhistically inclined octogenarian guru). She's a really nice lady. Joseph would get on well with her. She was talking to two ladies, I did not know well, and explaining to them how they need the ability to be able to forgive themselves. I think the ladies were of a Christian persuasion. 

Anyway the conversation died down, and I knew Ann also did not believe in free will. So I quietly said to her something like, "If we don't have free will, then there is nothing to forgive." She replied "Baby steps". 

 

Edited by romansh
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  • 2 months later...
8 minutes ago, thormas said:

Still, none can predict the future

This type of thing is often used in context of free will debate. OK here it is a little out of context. Nevertheless:
I make predictions all the time.
Some are more accurate than others fair enough. I predict the sun will 'rise' tomorrow in this part of the world, a near certainty and I will live to see it, a far less certain prediction, but not a bad one I hope.

So when someone says we can't predict the future that is a fallacy. At first glance it seems reasonable but prediction here gets confounded with absolute certainty. I don't think this is an intentional thing, but for one of those subliminal things. This is not so much for the benefit of thormas, but for others, just evaluate the language being used.

an example of a predictable chemical reaction

 

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3 minutes ago, romansh said:

This type of thing is often used in context of free will debate.

Actually I was using the line to comment on knowing the future not free will debate. 

Of course people make predictions and although I don't think of it as prediction, I get your example of the sun rising tomorrow. And you could probably extend that into 20 years from now (hopefully). Angelina Jolie, once she was tested, was able to make a prediction that she would probably get a certain form of cancer and took action. But did that precision rule out all forms of cancer? And is it a prediction if we have the results of a test? Could she still get skin cancer?

So, can you predict that you'll be around when the sun rises in 20 years or would that be a guess or even a hope. So too cancers and fires. You hopefully have a good handle on the safety of your electrical wiring but can you predict that someone won't set your house on fire - just cause they're a bit wacko? Or that you won't get a cancer as you age?

 

 

 

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2 minutes ago, thormas said:

Actually I was using the line to comment on knowing the future not free will. 

You must have missed:

5 minutes ago, romansh said:

OK here it is a little out of context.

 

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  • 10 months later...

I thought I'd give this a Bump ... oh yeah says Paul.

I notice Kellerman is a research scientist and I wondered what his thoughts are on free will, from a scientific point of view ... noting that determinism, indeterminism or some combination rules.

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On 04/02/2021 at 5:46 PM, romansh said:

I thought I'd give this a Bump ... oh yeah says Paul.

I notice Kellerman is a research scientist and I wondered what his thoughts are on free will, from a scientific point of view ... noting that determinism, indeterminism or some combination rules.

I was a research scientist, and then I was a doctor. 

Truthfully, I don't give it much thought because I don't see much utility in it. 

I've studied a few subject matters to the very extreme limit of understanding and learned that that's where everyone shrugs and says "we have no idea". 

So I have a rather different relationship with "evidence" than most do, and quite a bit more comfort in total cluelessness. 

I can't define God and I can't even begin to answer this question, and I feel absolutely no discomfort with either. 

I long ago stopped trying to psychologically control what I can't understand with information and education. 

Don't get me wrong, I still study constantly. I love knowledge and information, but I seek more to understand what is knowable, not navel gaze about what isn't. 

There's so much that is known and knowable in this world, and I spend a lot of time immersing myself in that. I find that more I understand, the more connected with the world and at ease with it I feel, but it does nothing to address what I can't know, and I'm okay with that. 

ETA: of course, when I say "known and knowable" I mean those things that are comprehensible within our existing construct, which is painfully limited. 

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  • 4 months later...
1 hour ago, Dan said:

The concept of free will begs the question, what is the nature of sentience?  A deep question indeed.  Is pain real?  Pleasure?  Compasion?  Hate?  Some of these questions cannot be addresses by the traditional scientific method.  I certainly think I feel these things, but the evidence is all internal.  I assert that the fact that we only have internal evidences for sentience does not make them any less real.  The issue is if we only accept the internal evidence for our own sentience without extrapolating sentience in other beings we end up with a society of sociopaths.  Lets just say that for me, the same dynamic that compels me to accept sentience in other humans without the same internal evidence compels me to accept divine sentience based on external evidence in the existing order without the internal witness that only God has.  

What?

Sentience while an interesting topic does not address whether our wills are free. 

Feelings of pain emotions etc, have little to do with: are we somehow free from antecedent causes. See here you  add another layer of complexity divinity in our sentience. What was potentially a difficult phenomenon to unravel, certainly beyond me, you add more obfuscation to the matter with divinity

You can assert facts all you like ...  but it does not make them so. eg:

These are reconstructed from fMRI relatively a crude. The point being science is beginning to build tools that can have insights into what we think of sentience (and consciousness)

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Let's examine this.  Apparently the choice is between free will and bound will.  What is the difference between bound will and determinism? Almost by definition a bound will cannot act outside it's predetermined (whether by design or input) course of action.  It is as predetermined as dropping a rock.  Free will implies something outside the realm of everyday physics that can influence an agents course of action taken, subject to the limits of power available to the agent.  The only thing I have ever experienced with this property is sentience.  If you are aware of something else with this property I would be interested to hear what it is.   My point is it is impossible to directly observe individual external evidences of sentience, any behavior can be attributed to some sort of conditioned response or inherited predisposition.  But speaking for myself, I do have internal evidence of sentience.  I am self aware, and I am aware of myself forming ideas and planning courses of action that are outside the realm of what can be accounted for by prior experience.  If you look at the history of mankind, you can also see collective evidence of sentience.  How do you account for the steady progression of the arts and sciences except by a free intellect observing the environment and forming testable theories of it's explanation?  If this is not evidence of an intellectually free sentience I don't know what is.  The point of my argument was that if I can sense sentience in myself it requires little external evidence to posit sentience in other people, and by extension it does not require a complete revelation of God's being or his handiwork for me to posit his existence and sentience.

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1 hour ago, Dan said:

If this is not evidence of an intellectually free sentience I don't know what is.

I disagree that this is evidence of free will. What would unfree sentience look like?  

Just because you are aware of pondering problems does not mean that your ponderings are free in anyway.

For clarification the universe does not have to be pre-determined, but just think is not our sentience and our awareness of it shaped by our previous experience, by chemistry. There is a wealth evidence to show that our sentience is a product or at least affected by our chemistries. Where does our sentience go when under anesthetic? 

Again sentience is irrelevant to the topic of free will.

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There is no such thing as unfree sentience, that is the thrust of my assertion.  Now if you believe in such a thing as unfree sentience then your position is correct, the two are entirely unrelated.  But I will repeat the challenge, how can an unfree sentience produce steady improvement in the sciences?  If there is such a thing as an unfree sentience does that imply that all our recent knowledge was preprogrammed into us and we are just regurgitating things we already knew from the beginning?  Is there a preordained limit on what we will discover?  Of course I accept that our sentience is profoundly affected by our biology and past experiences.  An artist studies the work of the masters and must work with his or her medium, but that doesn't mean that the art is not original or significant.  As far as where our sentience goes when we are under anesthetic, inactive does not imply non-existent.  A computer is capable of swapping out code and data it does not need while it is working on another problem or inactive, but the information is right there for it to recall when the situation demands it.

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I'll let you two discuss this issue in more depth, but for me our lack of free will is easily demonstrated.  Example: Try not to think about a pink elephant and tell me what appears in your mind.  Did you genuinely exercise free will and ensure you did not think of a pink elephant?  I doubt it.  Something beyond your control ensured a pink elephant popped into your head.  Perhaps a juvenile example but for me it just demonstrates that even when we think we have control of our minds, we don't necessarily.  If we can't 100% control our own thoughts at all times, we don't have 100% free will (if any). 

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I do not assert that our minds and our wills are at 100% liberty.  In fact that would be undesirable.  Our minds need the mitigating influence of prior experience to weed out the thoughts and actions that we know from instruction and experience are harmful.  What I do maintain is that our thoughts and actions are not 100% determined by our genetics and our past experience.  That too would be disadvantageous in that it would not allow for innovation.  That is, we could not acquire new knowledge unless it was already latent within us or had been promulgated by someone else in whom it was also latent.  

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31 minutes ago, Dan said:

I do not assert that our minds and our wills are at 100% liberty.  In fact that would be undesirable.  Our minds need the mitigating influence of prior experience to weed out the thoughts and actions that we know from instruction and experience are harmful.  What I do maintain is that our thoughts and actions are not 100% determined by our genetics and our past experience.  That too would be disadvantageous in that it would not allow for innovation.  That is, we could not acquire new knowledge unless it was already latent within us or had been promulgated by someone else in whom it was also latent.  

It is my experience that religion tends to 'judge' what thoughts are considered harmful.  For instance, if a person didn't have the 'free will' to refute their homosexuality, they were considered an abomination.  We now know that homosexuality has nothing to do with free will.  We are what we are.

It seems to me that the 'free will' argument is just religion's way of condemning those who don't exercise what said religion says is the 'right' will.

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Come now, even the atheist acknowledges that he or she is capable of thoughts or actions that are harmful to him or her self or others.  It doesn't take a religious authority to convince us that there is something amiss in our makeup that could be improved upon, hence the variety the mental health councilors and self help programs.  Christianity just acknowledges what an individual is going to be forced to admit eventually anyway, our wills are not powerful enough to significantly improve upon what we are.  This condition of man coupled with the love of an almighty God is what motivated Christ's ministry.  He uses the church to confirm the bad news about what we are, something the intellectually honest about us already suspected anyway, but then assures us, trust me, believe in my work, and I will carry you through this life and into another one where you will not be held accountable for what you were, but will be given new natures that are no longer capable of self or other hurt and will delight in my presence and the presence of each other.  The Church that stays true to this message will be used of God to comfort and transform even the vilest of sinners.

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11 hours ago, Dan said:

I do not assert that our minds and our wills are at 100% liberty.  In fact that would be undesirable.  Our minds need the mitigating influence of prior experience to weed out the thoughts and actions that we know from instruction and experience are harmful.  What I do maintain is that our thoughts and actions are not 100% determined by our genetics and our past experience.  That too would be disadvantageous in that it would not allow for innovation.  That is, we could not acquire new knowledge unless it was already latent within us or had been promulgated by someone else in whom it was also latent.  

That's not at all what scientists mean when they posit a lack of free will. 

And Romansh is entirely correct that sentience has nothing to do with free will. 

Theoretically, the concept goes that all thoughts that you have are reactions. All reactions have a basis, therefore if all factors influencing the reaction were knowable, then all reactions, and therefore all thoughts would be just a knowable product of the influencing factors. 

Basically *something* makes you think whatever it is that you think. 

I won't get further into it because I genuinely don't care, but I studied the brain and cognition specifically. 

I'm not at all arguing one way or another, because again, I so don't care, but your argument that sentience has anything to do with free will doesn't really hold up. 

I get why you're saying it, but it's really not what people are talking about when they argue this concept scientifically. 

Note, I am *not* saying anyone is correct, I couldn't care less about free will, just that the foundational assumptions you seem to be making about cognition aren't. 

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17 hours ago, Dan said:

There is no such thing as unfree sentience

What is the basis for your assertion? Your sentience is independent in some way of this universe? Your so called sentience is independent of the atoms/compounds that make up our bodies? Independent of all the experiences that have shaped you? Evolution has not shaped the way humans respond to certain inputs. You effectively are claiming to be a mini-god. A first cause generator for certain chains of events. 

3 hours ago, Dan said:

Come now, even the atheist acknowledges that he or she is capable of thoughts or actions that are harmful to him or her self or others.

Irrelevant to free will.

With respect to religious authority ... Calvinism has a more nuanced view as does Buddhism (dependent origination). And as you point out free will is essential to many interpretation of Christianity. 

You seem to think you are someway independent of the universe. Good luck with that. You are not a first cause generator. 

Quite often the metaphor of puppet/string/puppeteer is used ... quite incorrectly. There are no puppets, no puppeteer ... we and everything else is the string. This worldview leads us to a far more interesting place.

The bit of string that we describe as Kellerman does not care. The bit string described as rom finds it really interesting, but understands, ultimately it does not matter.

 

 

 

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