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Posts by Obbe
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2017-06-16 at 6:08 PM UTC in Determinism
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2017-06-11 at 11:05 PM UTC in DeterminismFreewill is an illusion and so is the self.
By free will I mean the libertarian concept of free will,the idea that our choices are free from the determination or constraints of human nature and free from any predetermination.
Captain falcon says a puppet can be free as long as it loves it's strings, or rather, the strings are an extension of the puppets sense of "self". But as explained above, the self is an illusion. -
2017-06-11 at 10:27 PM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by Captain Falcon that's the point. Again, what is "our"? do you consider your identity to be in a vaccum, like you're some sort of godly black box outside of the universe?
How is that a problem? There's no condition that what happens inside of your skin is what constitutes free will. You're setting up a straw man to knock down. There is some qualitative content to your experience and this is what the concept of free will is tied to. If that exists for other elements of your body, then that would apply to them too. It might! But we don't know if it does.
Let me put it another way; you cannot consciously decide what thoughts you have. These seemingly just emerge from the mists of your mind. but whatever box of scraps rattles that thought around and spits out an outcome, if what is considered to be "you". The key difference between this and some other system that spits out an output for an input is your ability, seemingly, to process 2nd and 3rd order reasoning with some qualitative content to your 2nd and 3rd (or higher) order considerations. We can' quantify these qualia but that's fine, we know it exists because we have it (what is blue? The colour you see, not what the wavelength of light).
that's what your will is; whatever you are predisposed to decide, that's YOUR predisposition, and it comes from that weird black box in your head and not because some other black box is forcing you to, then it's your free will.
Again, define free will. You're constantly trying to dismiss things as being not free will, but yet you refuse to define it. this conversation is useless unless you actually commit to a position.
I swear, this is the weasliest discussion on this site.
Another problem I see with the compatibilist point of view is that it rests solely on the concept of the "self" and how you define yourself, which is actually an illusion. You see, one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness objectively is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. If there's an experiential, internal qualitative dimension to any physical system, then that is consciousness, and we can't really reduce the experiential part of this to only talk about information processing and neurotransmitters. For example, by looking at different states of the brain, all we can do is correlate experiential with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become, you can't just throw out the actual experiential side of consciousness. That would be analogous to saying if you just flipped a coin long enough, you would realize it only had one side. It's true that you can become committed to only talking about one side, you can say that heads being up is only a case of tails being down, but that doesn't actually reduce one side of reality to the other.
To give a more precise example, we have very strong third-person "objective measures" of things like anxiety and fear. Your bring someone to the lab, they say they're feeling fear, you can scan their brain with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened, you can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there is an increased galvanic skin response, you can check their blood cortisol and see that it is spiking. So these now are considered objective third-person measures of fear, but if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear yet showed none of these signs, and said they were completely calm when their cortisol began to spike and their palms began to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value in the change in physiology is still a change in the first-person, conscious, subjective side of things. We are inevitably going to rely on peoples subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language is a false one. We have to understand both sides of it, subjective and objective.
I'm not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain, or that it floats free of the brain after death. I'm not making any spooky claims about the metaphysics of consciousness. What I am saying is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads, as a kind of passenger in a vehicle of the body. That's where most people start when they think about any of these sorts of questions. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies, they feel like they have bodies, like they're inside the body, and most people feel like they're inside their heads.
Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuo-anatomical sense. There is no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you experience - your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior - all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain, they can be independently erupted, we have a changing system. We are a process and there is not one unitary "self" that is carried through from one moment to the next unchanging, and yet we feel that we have this self that's just the center of experience.
Now it's possible, I claim, and people have been claiming for thousands of years, to lose this feeling, to actually have the "center" drop out of the experience, so that rather than feeling like experiences are happening to you, you identify with/feel identical to the sphere of experience that is all the colour and light and feeling and energy of consciousness, with no sense of center. This is classically described as self-transcendence or ego transcendence in spiritual, mystical, new-age literature. It is the baby in the bathwater religious people are afraid to throw out. If you were to seriously take on the project of being like Jesus or Buddha, whatever your favorite contemplative is, self-transcendence really is at the core of the phenomenology being described there. And what I'm saying is that's a real experience.
It's clearly an experience that people can have. It tells you nothing about the cosmos or what happened before the Big Bang, nothing about teh divine origin of certain books, it doesn't make religious dogmas anymore plausible. But it tells you something about the nature of human consciousness. And it just so happens that this experience of self-transcendence does link up with what we know about the mind through neuroscience, to form a plausible connection between science and spirituality. If you lose that sense of a unitary self, if you lose your sense that there's a permanent, unchanging center to consciousness, your experience of the world actually becomes more faithful to the facts. It's not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain, it actually brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are. -
2017-06-10 at 7:58 PM UTC in Determinism
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2017-06-10 at 4:44 PM UTC in Determinism
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2017-06-10 at 4:26 PM UTC in Determinism
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2017-06-10 at 4:18 PM UTC in DeterminismYes.
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2017-06-10 at 4:01 PM UTC in DeterminismNo.
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2017-06-10 at 3:52 PM UTC in DeterminismI wasn't trolling or fronting. I read his book, posted his video, and posted his argument in response to CF. Never claimed those were my words. I don't think it matters.
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2017-06-10 at 3:46 PM UTC in Determinism
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2017-06-09 at 10:06 PM UTC in Going to the moon tonight, boys.Have a good time.
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2017-06-09 at 9:23 PM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by Captain Falcon But you are! It's just that "you" isn't some black box that exists outside of time and space. Literally novody believes that.
Some compatibilists insist that even if our thoughts and actions are the product of unconscious causes, they are still our thoughts and actions. That our unconscious neurophysiology is just as much "us" as our conscious thoughts are.
But I think these compatibilists change the subject. They trade a psychological fact - the subjective experience of being a conscious agent - for a conceptual understanding of ourselves as persons. This is a bait and switch. The psychological truth is that people feel identical to a certain channel of information in their conscious minds. This is like saying we are made of stardust - which we are. But we don't feel like stardust.
At this moment you are making countless unconscious "decisions" with organs other than your brain - but these are not events for which you feel responsible. Are "you" producing red blood cells at this moment? Your body is doing this, of course, but if it "decided" to do otherwise you would consider yourself to be the victim of these changes rather than their cause. To say that you are responsible for everything that goes on inside your skin because it is all "you" is to make a claim that bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings of agency and moral responsibility that have made the idea of freewill an enduring problem for philosophy.
There are more bacteria in your body than human cells. Many of these organisms perform necessary functions - they are "you" in some wider sense. Do you feel identical to them? If they misbehave, are you morally responsible? This is the trouble with compatibilism. It solves the problem of "freewill" by ignoring it.
How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't. To say that "my brain" decided to think or act in a particular way, consciously or not, and that this is the basis for my freedom is to ignore the very source of our belief in freewill: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of freewill worth talking about.
Post last edited by Open Your Mind at 2017-06-09T22:10:13.127849+00:00 -
2017-06-09 at 4:16 PM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by Captain Falcon Yes, but if you say quantum indeterminism doesn't imply freedom, then you must have some definition of freedom in mind which makes it so that quantum indeterminism does not imply it.
Secondly, I absolutely disagree; the compatibilist definition stands whether or not there is quantum indeterminism. It is the only definition that I've seen so far that makes sense, and it makes plenty of sense; you, as an individual, deterministic or indeterministic entity, are an agent of free will, and can exercise your free will as long as you are not externally restricted from exercising it.
That seems pretty intuitive; "you" (whatever your theory on identity is) are that system that gives outputs to a given input. Whatever that black box is, is making its decisions freely unless it's being restricted. That works regardless of free will or compatibilism.
I don't really have a problem with how compatibilism defines freewill. It is basically how freewill is defined in a court of law. However I think it is important to distinguish that from the common sense of freewill people experience in their daily lives, the libertarian sense of freewill, that you are the absolute cause of your actions. Because obviously you are not. -
2017-06-09 at 11:46 AM UTC in Forum Entropy is a terrible topic title
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2017-06-09 at 10:47 AM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by Dargo Wrong. Even if you put a gun to my head and say, "Choose Option A," I can override my will to live and choose Option B if I so desire.
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. In other words, you can choose option B over option A if you so desire, but you can't choose to desire it or not. Where is the freedom in that?
Freewill is not conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes (desires) and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
The popular conception of freewill rests on two assumptions: that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions. Both of these assumptions are false.
There is no way I can influence my own desires - for what tools of influence would I use? Other desires? To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say I would have lived in another universe had I been in a different universe. Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings." -
2017-06-09 at 3:38 AM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by Sophie I am a human being, i can see the future by thinking about it and adjust my actions accordingly. Free will.
Imagine there is something you really want to do, but you know you would get in a lot of trouble for doing it. You don't do the crime. You seem to think this would demonstrate free will. In reality, the part of your brain that is influenced by the crime you want to commit just isn't as strong as the part of your brain that is influenced by the punishment you would receive. On this occasion.
On another occasion, your behavior might be driven to a different outcome. You might commit the crime one day. Either way, there is no freedom in the decison. Your mind just does what it does, just like every other physical system. There is no magical "seat of consciousness" where turn the knobs and dials. Your thoughts and behaviors are driven. You are not the author of your own thoughts any more than you are the author of the words I am typing into this post. -
2017-06-09 at 3:11 AM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by mmQ Because I could not jump also.
Right, except you did jump. Either you did so randomly, in which case you demonstrate no freewill or control over the decision, or something drove you to jump or caused you to jump, again demonstrating no freewill. Where do you see the freewill? -
2017-06-09 at 3 AM UTC in Determinism
Free will= I can swan dive off my balcony, as stated.
Ok, why do you believe jumping off of something demonstrated free will? -
2017-06-09 at 2:58 AM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by Sophie It doesn't matter if the Universe is deterministic. I can be happy or sad, it literally doesn't matter because everything has been determined already.
Also saying "free will is not possible" is teh same as me just saying "determinism is not possible", that's not a logical argument.
"It doesn't matter what you do you have no free will anyway"
Yes that is just defining what determinism is and again not an argument. And i know you don't like the "meme-like" nature of saying "not an argument" but it's true in this case.
Do you believe in physics? Do you believe the past is unaffected by the present? If you answered yes to these questions, it should follow that free will is impossible. You are not some magical entity that exists outside of the realm of cause and effect. -
2017-06-09 at 2:52 AM UTC in Determinism
Originally posted by Dargo I know we can predict some behavior. Don't selectively edit my posts you cunt.
Tell me, if a scientist can accurately predict the outcome of a decision you are about to make before you are consciously aware that you have actually made a choice, where is the freedom in this decision?
What degree of human behavior prediction would satisfy you? I mean, if the weatherman could only accurately predict the weather 50% of the time, would you believe the weather has freewill?Then what do you do with people who are not perpetually violent? If a man murders his wife, chances are actually rather low he will go out and murder someone else. So, for one-time crimes, what should we do? Just have a restorative chat? They couldn't help themselves in that instance after all, and won't become repeat offenders.
I don't know, I don't agree with you that anything would have to change at all. We are obviously subject to influences, detriments to crimes like murdering your wife would influence reasonable, sane people to not commit these crimes.
Regardless, freewill is impossible. You are driven by various forces beyond your control. You are not even the author of your own thoughts. I mean, you don't think about what you're going to think about it before you think it. Thoughts just arise in the mind.
If you really believe freewill exists, give me an example of freewill.
