Do You Believe In Free Will?

Discussion in 'Agnosticism and Atheism' started by TheSamantha, Jan 17, 2016.

  1. Emanresu

    Emanresu Member

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    Probably true. From my argument it is clear that at least I am not capable of solving such issues, my basic argument being that the concept is unintelligible to me. And I am willing to admit that perhaps I haven't really been arguing against free will, but rather arguing for my own ignorance.

    Probably why I jump into any thread on this tired old topic. And I am always genuinely waiting for someone to tear my arguments apart.

    Very interesting, I think I've heard of this before. It may be true, and it may be intimately tied with human creativity but (I hardly need to say it now) I don't see room for free will there.

    Also interesting and possibly true. This could very well help to explain how you can get so many different outcomes in a largely deterministic world but ...

    I often find in insoluble problems of philosophy that achieving clarity and arriving at the crux of the matter is both enjoyable and possibly the best that can be achieved. Okie I do so thoroughly enjoy our exchanges.
     
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  2. guerillabedlam

    guerillabedlam _|=|-|=|_

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    How so?
     
  3. Okiefreak

    Okiefreak Senior Member

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    I think Emanresu has explained that the concept suggests not just indeterminacy but that somehow our will is involved, for which we can be held accountable. Our choices are neither determined nor random.
     
  4. guerillabedlam

    guerillabedlam _|=|-|=|_

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    Hmm... The opposite of "free will" that comes to my mind is "determined choice" which seems much more the oxymoron. Is that fair to say?


    I'm lost as to what this other option Emanresu is insuinating could possibly be? (Enamanresu feel "free" to elaborate)

    I mean even if we are deliberating over choices in an autonomous manner, we are either doing so in a procedural algorhithmic manner which is either essentially determined by all the conditions that led up to the decision or we are reaching down into some aspect of our psychological/mental makeup that is not bound by the limitations of our environment and expressing our "will".
     
  5. Okiefreak

    Okiefreak Senior Member

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    Exactly. Free will is neither determined nor random. If it exists, it's something science doesn't quite have a model for.yet. But I think it's a function of our modularized brain presenting options to a central decision center which chooses. That center may make the ultimate choice in terms of predictable programs (determinism) or ones that involve some degree of freedom (as suggested by the various two-step models invovlng interaction between indeterminate and determinate factors. Hopefully, rational calculation gets in there somewhere as do emotions. The model emerging from neuroscience is not that different from that depicted in cartoons, with a guy in a white robe and wings on one shoulder and a guy in a red suit and horns on the other whispering conflicting messages: "You need to lose weight," "Aunt Mildred's pie looks really Yummie". How this gets resolved is the question. For me, Aunt Mildred's pie usually wins out, but occasionally a critical mass of guilt builds up and I go on a diet. Usually, this is triggered by some random stimulus like clothes that no longer fit, a glimpse fo myself in the mirror, a TY commercial, advice from my doctor or a friend, being turned down for a date, etc. But the struggle goes on! Curiously this pattern of decision making incorporating input from independent, often conflicting, advisers is considered so advantageous in identifying options that some artificial intelligence systems are trying to incorporate it into their robots.(David Eagleman, Incognito).
     
  6. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    This is why----as I wrote:

    I have done some pretty amazing things in my life, I’ve made it an adventure. I’ve had good times and bad times---if I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t change a thing. A good part of that was enabled by a good college education. But no matter what life has thrown at me, I have always known and believed that everything was based on my own choices. In the next sentence I defined free will as existential freedom. According to existential freedom, we always have a choice, the ultimate choice being one of suicide, for example. But the implication of this is that we are always responsible for our own choices. In my bit of satire, a 50 year old guy working at McDonald’s has a whole slew of life choices that put him into that position.

    Granted, the Industrial Age created a world where one could make good choices on good faith all his/her life, and still end up at McDonald’s in his/her mid-fifties. After all, you could have had a good career in Wall Street that would leave you unable to find work in your 50’s---you are too old and too overqualified, and your career history may very well not apply to most work on Main Street. (I can say this because my own lifelong career was in the stock market.) Nonetheless it is still your life choices that put you there.

    The point of my satire is that if there is no free will, then why would we ever need to take responsibility for our life choices. There are an awful lot of guys in this world that, even with a very nice job, would go to their bosses house for a party, and when his hot drunk wife comes onto him, would sneak into a bedroom or some dark corner, have sex with her, potentially getting her pregnant, and potentially getting caught and getting fired. The fact is he had the choice of whether or not to have sex with her. If we knew this person, and he complained to us, most of us would be thinking, ‘Why did you have sex with this guy’s wife in his own house? You’d still have a job if you wouldn’t have done that…’

    Free will gave this guy the choice to sleep with her or not. The excuse, “I didn’t have a choice because she was so hot,” would not be reasonable for any adult. The consequence of determining that there is no free will is to determine that we have no responsibility. We become nothing more than a pawn of the Gods.



    At the end of my post, after I fell asleep on my keyboard for the third time, I wrote:

    So have patience. I will explain myself. I could sit here and write it now---but I am going to exercise my free will and take off to enjoy the day with some friends in about half an hour.

    But let me just make a quick comment. Existentialism is a philosophy that peaked in popularity right after World War II. If any historical event in Modern Times would give us iconic questions to whether or not Free Will exists, World War II is just that event. You yourself bring up the question of a kamikaze pilot. Even more troubling to the argument of free will is the problem of the holocaust.

    But World War II, in many ways was like the logical end-conclusion of essentialism. All philosophy, from the very beginning all the way until existentialism, was essentialist. It was essentialist assumptions that enabled the Anti-Semitism, the devotion to an emperor, the Nationalism (that in truth, existed clear around the world---even here in the US in a masked form).

    The post-war popularity of existentialism was in very large part a reaction to the war. The war left Europe in existential crisis. The main guru, if you will, of post-war existentialism was Sartre----a philosopher that was captured by the Nazis, was released but refused to submit to the Nazi led Vichy government, and worked instead with the French Underground. His book, Being and Nothingness, was deemed the Bible of existentialism. But he repeated the call that began with Kierkegaard in the 1800’s that man always has a choice. The Kamikaze pilot had a choice. Even the Jewish victims within the internment camps had a choice. Viktor Frankl, for example, made one choice in the camps, while many more made a different choice and threw themselves onto electric fences where machine gun fire would achieve whatever the electric fence did not.

    On a side note----while the quantum world is assumed to be at a level of reality we can never experience----the very distribution of mass throughout the known universe fits the calculations of quantum randomness to a tee.



    That is an interesting point on determinism, and I believe I have a good response to that. Again, please be patient----I will try to respond tonight. I see now your argument.

    My own philosophy is, among other things, an existentialist essentialism. The problem with essentialism is that it traditionally makes the argument that the essence determines the existent. As Plato would have said, a table is a table because it has tableness. Unfortunately, this becomes an argument that a Jew is a money-grabbing greedy cheat, who is crafty and untrustworthy, a dangerous threat to anyone’s freedom and economic well-being, and a descendent of the killers of Jesus, simply because he is born of the essence of Jewry. Or that the Japanese Emperor is a direct descendent of the Gods, and that the Japanese people themselves are born of the very essence of those same Gods, and that it is therefore one’s Japanese duty to give allegiance to the God’s, the land, and the Emperor.

    I say no, our essence should liberate us, because it provides us with free will---an existential freedom.
     
  7. I find it very curious that there was something about the initial conditions of this world that determined that certain matter (us) would hang around in a sort of polite limbo relative to one another and construe the inevitable physics of the thing as morality. Why the hell does matter want to be good to other matter instead of smashing into other matter randomly? I'm not saying our will isn't determined, but it is weird. Dunno if we have free will but we have strange will.
     
  8. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    its not an absolute all or nothing. its always a matter of degree and that degree constantly and often unpredictably varying.

    but i will add this, everything that isn't, isn't because its cast in stone either.

    what isn't free will isn't fate or predestiny, its just how things work.

    everything functions in its own way, which has nothing to do with our choosing what we want to believe.
    even if there's a plan (which is by no mean certain), it works statistically without binding individuals absolutely.

    if it absolutely did not exist, would we even be discussing it?
    and what would keep god, supposing there is at least one of them, from getting completely bored, depressed, and killing itself?
     
  9. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    In my post Friday night, I left you with this:



    Before continuing, let me give you a little more background on my philosophy. Earlier yesterday I responded to Emanresu, and it should be obvious from that response that I am heavily influenced by existentialism. In fact, I use free will as existential freedom. I also wrote that my philosophy was, among other things, existentialist-essentialism.

    But my philosophy ties up many different philosophies. We are in the Age of Nihilism, and philosophy is in a state of crisis. Stephen Hawking and another author wrote a few years ago that philosophy is dead, and that we now turn to scientists to find the meaning of life. They added that philosophy hasn’t even kept up with science, which is very true, particularly in terms of Einstein’s theories and Quantum Mechanics. But science is on only one side of the chasm that Kant produced when he split up sciences of the mind and the spirit and physical science of the empirical world, in order to give new life to the Modern Age.

    You see, philosophy was also in a state of crisis when Kant came along. Without Kant, science would not have been freed from the fetters of religion, and the Modern Age would not have advanced as it has. He breathed new life into both philosophy and science. He did this by tying the loose ends of philosophy together, taking different schools and creating a new philosophical direction.

    I present my own philosophy as a response to the Post-Modern Crisis, and it too ties together various loose ends of philosophy. But it incorporates and builds upon Einstein’s Theories, Quantum Mechanics, and other recent advancements in science; not as a scientist would, but as a philosopher-----I mean, really, would you want a scientist to answer the question, “Is there free will?”

    I humbly posit that if my philosophy was not accepted as the response to this crisis, that it is, at least, an example of what is needed for mankind to move out of this modern state of nihilism, and once again find meaning, value, and truth in a new age of technology and globalism.

    In addition to existentionalist-essentialism, one could apply labels to it such as Neo-Kantian, Neo-Hegelian, and Phenomenology. It borrows from structuralism, but is more deconstructionalist. Many quickly see strains of Aristotle in it. It begins with Descartes’ First Principle, but then moves on to two more Principles that one could have imagined Descartes to have come up with, if his focus remained subjective rather than objective—therefore, in an objectivist sense, it is Anti-Cartesian. I place heavy emphasis on subjective reality, and if someone argued that my philosophy places us into a modernistic version of a hunter-gatherer zeitgeist, I would be impressed (and happy that they were not falling for the status quo prejudice that hunter-gatherers were mere primitive savages). My philosophy rebels against the late- and post-planter zeitgeist of group ethic, dualism, and objectivism that has shaped modern Industrialism. It is an ideal hippie philosophy by an old hippie. I call it Archephenomenalism.

    It is first and foremost, a philosophy of phenomenalism (not to be confused with phenomenology)—in other words, that all we really perceive of reality is phenomena. As I developed my philosophy, I realized that the Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics best fit together in a holographic model of the universe. More and more scientists are coming together in that same belief. The hologram is the present moment. The Second Principle of my philosophy is basically that the only physical reality that we can truly know to exist is the present moment. There is no physical future or past—only the present moment. The implication of this is that, as conscious beings, able to perceive an understanding of time, remember a past, and anticipate a future, we therefore at a conscious level transcend physical existence.

    Physical reality and concrete material existence as we experience it only truly exists for infinitesimally small moments of time—what I call the Quantum Now. The Quantum Now literally represents all simultaneous probability wave collapses through the universe---in other words the hologram of existence itself. It is the moment that super-positioned waves suddenly collapse into physical particles representing a single point in physical space-time, thereby producing the phenomena of reality. I therefore define particles as physical, and waves as non-physical. From a physical standpoint, there is no wave-particle duality, only particles. Probability waves, which we perceive as super-positioned across space and time, are only non-physical existents (for want of a better word) in the timeless fourth dimension (timeless, because time is our perception of the 4th dimension. Time does not exist at the speed of light, yet from our sub-light speed understanding of reality, time happens at the Universal Constant—the speed of light).

    In my response to Emanresu, I stated that,”… our essence should liberate us, because it provides us with free will---an existential freedom.” So what is this essence?

    Well, in a manner that is surprisingly similar to Aristotle’s hylomorphism where physical reality is composed of mass and form, one aspect of the essence is the probability wave. Our Quantum Mechanical understanding of the universe is that all quanta in the universe exist in a super-position, until and only while, they are collapsed into a single point of space-time. This is because the uncertainty principal only allows us to know either momentum or position, not both at the same time. Therefore an electron circling an atom is not a single point that is moving around it, unless we measure its position at which time we know it to be a physical particle having a single position, but can no longer know its velocity or momentum. If we only know its momentum, then we understand that it is super-positioned---simultaneously at all possible points around that atom and at any other possible point clear across the universe. It is only a probability that it would be at any given single position if we were to determine that position, and therefore its position, if determined, happens to be somewhere around that atom where the probabilities are the greatest. But even stranger is that because it exists as a wave we also know that it exists simultaneously clear across time, because a wave, from our perspective, is a dynamic of time with no beginning or end. But it is not only believed to be true for the electron, but also every other subatomic particle within what we perceive as the nucleus of that atom. (If you think this seems very strange from our Newtonian experience of the universe within the three physical dimensions, you are right, but science tries to tell us that this is how it is. But, consider for a moment, that it is not so strange if we think of it as part of a dimension greater than the 3 physical dimensions----a timeless 4th dimension. Trapped in our three physical dimensions, as we are in a physical sense, our only peek at this fourth dimension---if we wanted to consider where it is----is that very same infinitesimal moment of now.)

    The other side of essence is mind. In fact, I would call mind as pure essence, because it is the ‘arche,’ the First Cause. The connection to hylomorphism runs even deeper here because the Ancient Greek word for ‘form’ was eidos, which also means ‘idea.’ Hegel, for example, used the term idea in his Absolute Idealism in a way that crossed from the Platonic form and the Absolute to the ideas within the human mind. Therefore mind and probability waves are not that different from Aristotle’s form and mass. But then, my philosophy takes mind as pure essence, and using Hegel’s dialectic, demonstrates that even the probability wave is a form of differentiated mind---but such metaphysical notions are going too far from the subject of this thread. For now, we can just leave it that mind is essence, and that we as conscious beings transcend the physical now---that is, the manifestation of physical reality.

    And that is a nutshell description of my philosophy.

    IF we place the greatest emphasis on subjective reality---the individual---and consider that mind is essence, a mind that is free to choose through its own existential freedom, a mind that has the potential to create the reality around it, then this mind must have great potential to express free will.

    Our choices, of course, may likely be shaped by our history, and certainly our anticipation of the future. We can only understand our reality, and perceive it from an existential (human) perspective. Likewise, we experience life almost always from the control of the ego (which I use here in a Jungian sense), which has the purpose of maintaining a consistent personality and acts as a filter to filter out all non-essential phenomena. The purpose of the ego is to keep us focused on physical reality---and the objective world around us. Otherwise, if we were, for example, to understand our full potential, what real reason would we have to live life?

    These factors all relate to what I left you with Friday night: 1.) We have the ability to determine, change, or create our own reality. This is our true essence---a kamikaze pilot could choose to face the consequences of not flying to his death; a Jew could be very bad with money, and have no savings, and persistently spend recklessly in a life of paycheck to paycheck; A black man could be a hard working citizen who has never committed a crime (except one against humanity by giving up brain surgery and running for president (I’m joking! …kind of.)).

    Then there are such decoherent factors as the biochemical reactions within the body that stimulate choices physically made by automatic response. I refer to these as decoherent factors because they represent physical aspects of material reality. In fact, the ego itself, could fit, at least partially into this category if we can determine a physical structure to it. Here we are getting into number two of what I left you with last night: 2.) that the universe already moves on its own course of probabilities---the flow of nature, the flow of the Tao if you will----this is decoherence.

    So what is decoherence? We have already seen that probability wave collapses could occur because a conscious observer is aware of a reality—a photon is passing through a slit in the double slit experiment, for example, and the photon suddenly manifests as a physical particle. But consider, for example two probability waves in a table, say two electrons in what, at a larger, or Newtonian level of reality, we could explain as a carbon and a hydrogen atom, somewhere buried in a table in an empty and closed room. There is no conscious and sentient observer to determine that the table exists, yet these two electrons interact in a bonding sort of way that defines, for a brief moment, their mutual positions. If their positions are determined, then suddenly they exist in a single point in space-time in a physical manner—a probability wave collapse has occurred. Decoherence is therefore the interaction between two quanta wherein their mutual positions are defined and a probability wave collapse occurs.

    This is why we can perceive light as a wave in the double slit experiment (even though I say a wave is a non-physical existent of another dimension) because we perceive the interference pattern that is created when the waves of light strike the waves of the atoms within the screen, causing both the atoms and the photons to manifest in a physical sense through decoherence. When that same light is absorbed by an atom in a vision cell within our eye, it is again a matter of decoherence. At some point however, there is also a conscious awareness that the light is a wave; we perceive the phenomena, and thus it is so.



    This too would be a decoherent process.
    So now I will respond to one of the points of Emanresu:


    If free will, as existential freedom, means freedom of having a choice, then I would argue that an indeterministic world would still present a free will, it is just that it would be largely valueless or meaningless. Nonetheless, even in a indeterministic world, if you are free to choose your own path, freedom to follow your own will, there is free will.

    But where does determinism present itself? Obviously within the Other. Even Sartre said that we are completely free until faced with the Other. At one level the Other is both individuals and the bulk of humanity---observers who are individually and collectively shapers of reality as well-----hence racial stereotypes. If a sizeable group of people decide that a race fits a certain profile---then they may very well make that a reality. We don’t need to argue this on a metaphysical level to see it work. White people have very effectively repressed and oppressed darker skinned people into that profile without any question. When you are repressed socially and economically, and the cops are watching you at every turn, it is no surprise that your people would resort to a life of crime and fit other roles that society expects of you. (Free will however, enables you as an individual to rise up from that stereotype.)

    But the Other is also the universe itself—decoherence. The world happens based on existing trends and probabilities. It happens, if you will, at a subjective level well beyond human consciousness. Biochemical interactions within the physical body present automatic responses at a biological level. A tree branch falls making you late for work. Nazi SS soldiers show up and arrest you and you never show up at work… (…but you do have a choice---you could run and hopefully dodge the bullets, or meet an early death if you knew what was waiting for you, or you could submit. So does each of the soldiers----and I have heard of a case or two where a soldier knowingly looked away, while a Jew escaped to potential freedom…)

    Anyway----I have presented quite a bit here. I will leave it here until my next post

    Okifreak, by the way, posted an abstract of a paper by Stenger. Stenger would consider my philosophy as an example of such Quantum Myth. However, he hasn’t dealt properly with the problem of decoherence. In addition, the Zeno Effect was only proved last year. I believe that Stenger still lives about 10 or 15 minutes north of me. I have contemplated submitting a paper to him detailing my arguments in this regard.

    I have suggested that he would probably not be able to maintain his materialist views if he sat through a few Lakota yuwipi ceremonies. Even though the healings are very amazing, and involve seeing first hand supernatural phenomena that one cannot explain, it is easy for him to dismiss them as a placebo effect or some other natural healing mechanism of the body (and he would probably dismiss the supernatural phenomena as some kind of trick, even though clearly there could be no tricks). But there are other prayers answered too, prayers that are answered that would be much more difficult for him to dismiss-----for example, information given on the whereabouts of a lost plane and its occupants. Or the information on where to find the evidence of who killed an Indian girl. And so forth…

    I think Okiefreak knows that my own philosophical search for meaning was in part induced by experiencing so many things in indigenous ceremony that defy rational explanation. (Though ideally I try to shape my philosophy to embrace a multiplicity, so that all beliefs, even atheist beliefs are equally valid.)
     
  10. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    To begin with you are following the argument that reality at the quantum level is so different from the Newtonian reality that we understand as everyday existence, implying that the quantum world must somehow be disconnected from the world we live in. However it is the phenomena of all quanta that creates the world we live in. If our awareness (or as a Quantum Physicist would say, observation) of a given reality causes probability wave collapses to occur such that this reality is made to manifest, then we would have no reason to believe that this would happen amongst only a select few quanta, or a minute portion of our reality—it stands to reason that this happens in a large collective portion of the quanta we perceive, shaping the world we live in.

    From the standpoint of my phenomenalist philosophy, we live in a reality that is a hologram, no bigger than one Planck length, and lasting for one Planck time, in other words the Quantum Now. (Below one Planck length, science tells us, reality as we know it ceases to exist, and the difference between Quantum Mechanics and the Theories of Relativity conflict. Below One Planck time, the time it takes a photon to travel one Planck length, time ceases to make sense.) Anything we perceive as physical beyond this hologram, is illusion.

    Consider, for a moment, a single frame of a full feature length movie. It is probably one of hundreds of thousands of frames. It does not contain the whole movie within it, but simply one image, which lasts an imperceptibly short period of time within the movie. Nonetheless, when it goes through the projector we see the image of that frame. By itself it is just as significant as any other single frame within that movie. We will use this frame as a generalization of the Quantum Now. Remember that the Quantum Now represents the manifestation of physical reality, and therefore it represents all simultaneous probability wave collapses clear across the universe. In other words at any one-Planck-length-squared point in the universe, the Quantum Now represents a single quantum event. The Quantum Now is literally the quantum reality spread clear across the universe.

    Now let’s say that this movie (from which we are using a single frame) is an amazing movie in which the viewers can change the story line, or any other feature of that movie. The frame as it is, represents a decoherent reality. It represents an existing trend of reality—the original story line. Therefore, unchanged it represents a picture that is only slightly different from the frame before it, and in a sense it is a continuation of that frame and all the frames before that one. Likewise, all those after it are a continuation from this frame.

    Let’s say that someone is watching this movie and they make a change beginning with this frame. Most likely, because this single frame is displayed so quickly the change may be hardly noticeable. If we are to closely examine just this frame, it may very well take a while to find the change, kind of like a difficult picture puzzle where we try to find the difference between two pictures. But because there has been an alteration, the decoherent reality of all subsequent frames (the trend for each tiny piece of each frame) has been altered. Over a series of frames, the change could be very large and drastically change the whole story line. We could even have the main character actually move a cup on the table… (Ok, I’m joking…) We could even have a kamikaze pilot decide not to fly, saving hundreds of sailors on an Aircraft Carrier, one of whom gives birth to a son who grows up to inadvertently launch a nuclear missile by mistake on the Soviet Union, causing an all out war that leaves the world frozen and dead in a nuclear winter.

    Any change in reality must necessarily occur at the quantum level first.

    The next problem is whether or not changing quantum reality represents actual free will. It all boils down to will, i.e. intention, or volition. The scientific consensus on how a holographic universe would work is, similar to Kantian phenomenalism, in other words, that it is the human mind that gives it a 3-dimensional reality, and turns it into the physical reality we perceive. My own philosophy allows for a hologram to have 3 dimensional physicality and a certain level of material reality in and of itself. But the human mind is still a key part. The observer in quantum mechanics also plays a major role (depending on the interpretation) of how reality manifests. In each of these scenarios we are obviously not consciously aware of how we choose reality in this regard. We may be aware of this ability in a higher dimension, but consciously in our physical world, even if there was a sense of free will in action at this minute quantum level, it would be filtered out by our ego (I use a Jungian definition of the ego).

    But consider this----if the viewer in our movie decided to change the film so that the kamikaze pilot did not fly---the change would have to begin with a single frame. It may take us hundreds of frames to implement this change---to express our free will----because the frames speed by so quickly. Therefore in that first single frame, the initial change might be so small that it is hard to find.

    By the same token, it would be ignorant and dumb to assume that if you moved a cup, or a kamikaze pilot did not fly that this would have no effect on quantum reality too. In a similar manner, if we can change reality at a quantum level through mind, then it must also be that we can make conscious choices and change reality at a macro level as well. Evidence that we change quantum reality serves as a sign, or a clue, of each of our potential to alter reality as conscious beings.

    Is there any proof then that we can alter reality, through will, at a physical, empirical level of reality?

    As a matter of fact, there are the very well documented series of experiments by Doctor’s Tiller, Dibble and Kohane at MIT. In these experiments human intention was used to change such things as the coagulation of blood, the .ph of water, the development of insect larva, and other physical things. These experiments were so effective that they would bleed over into the control experiments, which then had to be shielded from the rest of the experiments to get truly verifiable results.

    Unbeknownst to us, we create our own reality at a quantum level, but consciously as an act of will, we create our reality at a Newtonian or macro level, beginning at the quantum level.

    In my next post, I will cover one last aspect of free will based on my philosophy.
     
  11. Mr.Writer

    Mr.Writer Senior Member

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    I don't have all the answers, nobody does. I agree first that we mostly likely lack the processing power to fully comprehend this situation as it seems to get right to the heart of the nature of reality itself. Perhaps it is forever unknowable, or perhaps minds other than ours will be lucky to understand it.

    I do not believe free will exists, primarily because it doesn't make any sense. For this discussion I'm going to assume we are talking about human macroscopic free will. Free Will being defined as the ability to enact an outcome such that had that outcome not been enacted by a human, a different outcome would have happened.

    Example: A cup falls off the table with no humans around. There is no free will here.

    A cup falls off the table and a person catches it; free will here is defined as the freedom inherent to the action of the human catching the cup; the cup could have hit the floor.

    This is how I imagine most people imagine free will.


    Yes. Free Will being conceived as an action done outside of the action-reaction relationship. A novel action; an action not bound by precedents somehow. This is nonsensical. If everything is subject to action-reaction, then so are human actions, therefore there is no free will, only action-reaction. If you catch the cup, it's because of a series of actions and reactions, and not because you could have acted otherwise but chose not too against the flow of actions-reactions.



    I used to think this was the case, but I no longer do. The construct of "you" is not a tangible entity, but rather a parliament of body organs, actions, life events, memories, sensoria, etc. There isn't really a "you" at the core of what looks like you, just more layers, as far as you care to peer. Even inside the thoughts of your brain, there is a great system of give and take and not a central locus of decisioning.

    Also even if there was a real Self, this wouldn't solve the problem, because the very process of "voting" would be subject to the ebb and flow of the universe; it may appear to you that you choose to cast your vote a certain way, but did you choose to choose it that way? We always peer behind the curtain to find only Universe.



    The ability to predict the outcomes of reality are beside the point of whether or not reality is determined. You say you freely acted because you weighed alternatives . . . did you have a choice in your alternatives? How about how you weighed them? How about how much you value exercise versus relaxing? Did you have a choice in how your choices played out?

    That deeper level which is irrelevant to you . . . that is the level this thread is in discussion about. It should matter to you, it should matter to anyone. The implications are staggering, especially for a Christian. What if Christ had no free will in dying on the cross? What if there's a god, and god had no free will in sending his only son to die, or in creating the universe? It's actually so staggeringly mind-boggling, the scale of the implications, that at first glance we wish to say "nothing changes!". It's like the zen saying,

    Before enlightenment, rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains.
    While struggling for enlightenment, rivers ceased being rivers and mountains were not mountains.
    Being enlightened, I see rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains.

    I think this thought points to the nonsensity of our common conception of free will; it's a state of mind which is stuck in that middle verse, that zone of misperception.



    You wouldn't have a choice in the matter. You either would take responsibility, or wouldn't; determined by the ebb and flow of actions-reactions leading up to that moment in your life. In aggregate, this is exactly the way society appears to us.
     
  12. Okiefreak

    Okiefreak Senior Member

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    I think most of the concern about free will has to do with the matter of responsibility: Can we be held responsible for our actions? If our actions are totally determined by nature and nurture reacting to environmental stimuli, probably not--unless we're willing to treat the idea of responsibility as another stimulus which, valid or not, can influence our actions through guilt and/or fear of punishment. I, for one, would hate to see that stimulus destroyed or blunted by over-analysis.

    The once-extravagant hopes for artificial intelligence have been tempered by the difficulty of solving the problem of integrating competing inputs from the unruly committee of modularized unit we call "us". Some scientists suspect that the problem lies with the reductionist, mechanistic paradigms we've been using. Complexity theorists like Kaufman think that emergent factors are being be ignored, Penrose thinks quantum phenomena are involved and Doyle thinks that a two-step model involving determinate and indeterminate factors is needed. Maybe when we reconsider our paradigms, we can find a solution to the conundrum.
     
  13. relaxxx

    relaxxx Senior Member

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    It seems to me that the trend is that theists believe in free will and the more agnostic or scientifically inclined do not believe in free will. I believe in free will and I definitely fall into the latter category. Free will is at least as real as the color blue or happiness or hunger. All of us live in an interpolated world inside of our heads, we all have our subjective realities correlating with an objective reality of which we have finite understandings. So what is real? That's a grey area but what we have is rationalizations of likelihoods and probabilities. I've explained before in other determinism threads that I believe determinism is a limited function. Firstly by our limits of observational accuracy, especially of the quantum world and also by the very likely nature of quantum space-time having a planck limit. Which means an intrinsic limit of spatial quantum accuracy, which means real random fluctuations in the quark gluon field. These fluctuations actually explain why anything exists at all but that's another subject.

    The human mind is the most complex thing we know exists. With over 1000 trillion trillion particles in our brain, random quark interactions are bound to add up to real physical changes rather quickly. We clearly live in an indeterminate world, our observational accuracy is much weaker than any theorized planck length. Our limited determinism or indeterminism says nothing about the high probability that there is a real degree of random behavior in quantum fields. Even an extremely tiny degree of spatial randomness, one random event out of a trillion trillion quantum interactions adds up in a complex organism very quickly.

    So what if someone argues that even spatial randomness beyond indeterminism does not mean free will? Well what is the implication of no free will? That we don't have a choice in our actions? It is true that there is a subconscious pipeline of informational decision making being processed in the brain before information reaches our consciousness. But the consciousness is a higher level of decision making as much as it is an emergent property of billions of cells in synchronous communications. If free will is an illusion, it's as real of an experience as anything else in your life. But again, I don't think it's an illusion. Decision making within complex minds is a clear evolutionary advantage to raw trial and error. We didn't get this far without free will, we didn't make art and music and love and science and comedy without really making deep emergent human decisions in our minds.
     
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  14. TheWriter

    TheWriter Banned

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    Yes. Free Will being conceived as an action done outside of the action-reaction relationship. A novel action; an action not bound by precedents somehow. This is nonsensical. If everything is subject to action-reaction, then so are human actions, therefore there is no free will, only action-reaction. If you catch the cup, it's because of a series of actions and reactions, and not because you could have acted otherwise but chose not too against the flow of actions-reactions.


    I used to think this was the case, but I no longer do. The construct of "you" is not a tangible entity, but rather a parliament of body organs, actions, life events, memories, sensoria, etc. There isn't really a "you" at the core of what looks like you, just more layers, as far as you care to peer. Even inside the thoughts of your brain, there is a great system of give and take and not a central locus of decisioning.

    Which is why it's really pointless to even debate whether you have free will or not. You either will or won't decide to catch the cup, despite this philosophical contemplation of whether you do or don't have free will. The question is how does it change anything whether you decide that you do or don't have free will? You are still going to catch the cup if you want to, or if you don't, then you won't. You still are deciding. Whether you are philosophically or not, manifestly you are.

    Insisting that there's nothing but action-reaction and therefore no free will is pointless. Choice is still there, whether it's "illusory" or not. If I decide to catch the cup, then I will attempt to do so. If I want to watch it fall or just don't feel like putting in the effort to catch it, then I will watch it fall. And that's it. Anything beyond this is nothing but a philosophical after-thought and examination that changes your decision in zero way.


    Also even if there was a real Self, this wouldn't solve the problem, because the very process of "voting" would be subject to the ebb and flow of the universe; it may appear to you that you choose to cast your vote a certain way, but did you choose to choose it that way? We always peer behind the curtain to find only Universe.

    The Self and the Universe are One and the same, so this would make sense. And again, whether your voting is subject to the ebb and flow of the universe or not, it's still your vote. Being subject to the ebb and flow of the Universe is natural, as it is all One anyway. But you still have choice nonetheless. Autonomy prevails.



     
  15. TheWriter

    TheWriter Banned

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    Let me help you a little with this.

    Before enlightenment, rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains.

    Translation: Before enlightenment, everything was seen as separate. I was me and you were you, and I was distinct from you. Rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains.

    While struggling for enlightenment, rivers ceased being rivers and mountains were not mountains.

    Translation: During the struggle for enlightenment, the Ego begins to break down and dissolve, which means that the sense of separation begins to break down and dissolve. Suddenly, you and I aren't as separate as I was once believed. Rivers and mountains have no distinct reality unto themselves. They are reliant on the sky and the roots beneath the Earth; and rivers and mountains are themselves reliant and coagulating amongst each other. There is no individual river that is complete unto itself. Everything is interconnected and One. You and me are reflections of One Consciousness, taking on different forms.

    "No man is an island entire of himself. Every man is a piece of the continent; a part of the main." -John Donne

    Being enlightened, I see rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains

    Translation: Despite the fact that I now see that all is One, you are still nonetheless you (with your own choices), and I am still me. The Mississippi River is still the Mississippi River, and the Smokey Mountains are still the Smokey Mountains.
     
  16. Mr.Writer

    Mr.Writer Senior Member

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    If you want to know the repercussions of humanity discovering there is no such thing as free will, study the criminal justice system and western theology. If something is illusory, then it is not real. You cannot drink an illusory glass of water. You cannot both not have real free will and also "manifestly" have free will. It is either true or an illusion. It would appear to be an illusion. This does not stop us from continuing to misperceive "free will" in our actions, the same way we continue to see the square inside the circles even after we're shown the square is not there. You can't put legs on that square and make a table; you can't make choices or have responsibility if there's no free will. That's the consequence of this discovery, a complete overhaul of our most basic assumptions about reality, especially human reality.

    Making multiple accounts is a bannable offence so consider that, china. putting your new account on my ignore list, cya.
     
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  17. TheWriter

    TheWriter Banned

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    So are you to mean that if I commit murder, then I shouldn't be thrown in jail? My choices are still my choices, whether they are considered illusory or not.

    What's illusory is the decision of whether grabbing a cup is a form of free will or not. What's real is me grabbing the cup, or not grabbing it. See how I can do that and not even say whether it's a form of free will or not?

    And not sure about this business of multiple accounts, but why would that be bannable? According to you, there would be no free will, and therefore, no responsibility in the matter.

    So you put people on ignore lists any time someone disagrees with you? Or do you just lack free will about any of it?
     
  18. TheWriter

    TheWriter Banned

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    Regarding the whole squares thing...you also can't grab the circles and throw them like frisbee discs either. Does that mean the circles aren't there either? And these aren't even circles according to your argument, since they're not in the shape of a circle, and the square is "illusory". They are more Pacman-like shapes. Not circles.

    You can't imply the circles' actual existence without also implying the square's actual existence. Or you could alternatively imply 4 triangles covering over the inside angles of all the four circles. Otherwise, the circles have no reality either if the triangles and/or square doesn't exist.

    Your argument is as redundant as saying that a pencil drawing of a square isn't actually a square; it's just an illusion of my mind when in actuality it's just four straight lines drawn by pencil and arranged in a specific way to make up what appears to be a square. And calling it a square is a complete hallucination on my part.

    If you decide that the circles arranged in that specific way make up what appears to be a square, and see the square and point to it and say "that's a square", then it is there. It's your choice.

    [​IMG] [​IMG]



     
  19. Emanresu

    Emanresu Member

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    I am glad to know that I am not the only one who thinks this, even if it turns out to be wrong (in addition to misery, ignorance enjoys company too).

    Based on posts in this thread by okiefreak and mountainvalleywolf I am coming to the conclusion that my profound inability to make sense of the concept of free will is very much because of my profound inability to make sense of personal identity. Emanresu is simply not sure what he means when he says "I".

    This is perhaps why I believe that if you could rewind the last ten minutes of my life and play it again I might chose coffee instead of tea, 1 sugar instead of 2, and that kamikaze pilot might chose dishonor over suicide, but to me that does not equate to free will. In other words then (and this is my paltry reply to mountainvalleywolf's long and interesting posts) I definitely believe that there are choices open to agents in the world, but I don't believe that equates to free will. There is will, to be sure, but the concept of free will escapes me.

    To me then the problem of free will is very much the problem of personal identity and, as okiefreak pointed out, the problem of responsibility.

    Well put. I like to be charitable and think that I should be more charitable, but I never chose to like being charitable, and I cannot take responsibility for possessing a character that strives to be more charitable.

    Yes, I am often struck by the predictability and uniformity of human choices. It strikes me too as being at odds with any sort of robust free will.
     
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  20. Emanresu

    Emanresu Member

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    I actually don't think that throwing out the concept of free will should have the massive effect on criminal justice as most others think it would (I say should have instead of would have because there is a difference, of course, between the logical conclusions of a position and the conclusions that people derive from a position). The typical argument goes like this: If we don't have free will then no one is morally responsible for their actions and therefor we can't put people in jail for murder. First I must say that this argument struck me as silly the first time I heard it and it is so far away from my views that I can hardly understand why anyone would draw that conclusion.

    My argument goes like this: A person who commits murder is a danger to other people, and those other people are perfectly justified in taking steps to reduce that danger (incarceration) regardless of whether the murderer is morally responsible for their acts. Consider a robot programmed to kill innocent people. Would anyone really attempt to say "You cannot incarcerate or destroy that robot because it is not its fault that it kills, it was programmed to do that."? Damaged goods are damaged goods and need to be dealt with, regardless of moral responsibility.

    I want to point out again that I am talking about logical conclusions and not how a society would actually react to abandoning the concept of free will.
     
    1 person likes this.

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