See Alot Of Different Stuff Here So...

yes. some things happen more often then others.
some things happen more often when other things happen first.
that is how it works.

 

That cannot be though. on a infinite line there are no high or low points. Infinity is without boundaries

 

i don't know where you get that idea. nor are we talking about a line, but an n-space. a very lumpy n-space, bubling with probability clusters, without which suns and planets would not exist.
whoever told you existence is a one dimentional line, was probably trying to get his at least two dimensional hands in your pocket.

 

I take it you don't find the big bang theory and an expanding universe very legit then?

 

No I do. However I don't consider that to be the true origin. I believe that there have been and will be an infinite number of big bangs. Also nothing can involve a line. It would be more like a higher dimensioned infinite sphere.

 

this i consider a reasonable possibility. though not one humans of earth have currently any means of verifying. not that we entirely have of any other either.
word usage though; "higher dimensioned" is a syntactic omlet. i sort of think i have an idea what is intended by it, but no logical parsing of it leads anywhere defined.

 

not all of them. only the honest ones.
the ego wants to pretend to know everything.
it doesn't.

 

The question of whether or not there is free will seems to be to be a question of whether our consciousness determines or is determined by physical reality. It's really easy to say there is a set of things that precedes one's consciousness. Really easy. The more difficult question is "What is consciousness?" How do you know that it even exists in the same realm of timespace in which cause and effect apply to it? For all we know, it is the cause of all things and isn't predetermined at all, because it exists in all places and in all times. Is something which exists outside of timespace determining what my body does? Does that make my will free?

Well my question is, free from what? You could get real paradoxical here and say your will is technically free from having the capability of making a choice, right? You're always free from something. You're always "enslaved" to something. Even if we are a consciousness that exists independently of time and space, it evidently can't choose between which realities it creates. You are always enslaved to whatever reality there is, and you're always free from whatever reality there isn't.

 

We have no reason to believe that what we call our consciousness and what we call our physical reality are different. It's a chicken and egg situation; we are brains inside universes experiencing the universe inside our brains, our insides outside and our outsides inside.

This is why ideas of free will make no sense, they introduce an inequality into this balance, a third force which works autonomously "against" the entire fabric of reality.

 

How so does it work "against" the fabric of reality? Or why would the human will be an inequality into that balance if it could work freely?

 

because humans and the cosmos are one; to imagine that inside humans is a "special thing" that can "do what it wants", outside of causality, is to invoke something for which we have no evidence.

 

I think our inability to locate our consciousness in the matter of our brains is good reason to suspect consciousness might be something that exists independently of ordinary matter. I agree our outside is inside and inside is outside, but where are we, really? To say we're everywhere is pretty much the same thing as saying we're nowhere. I don't know how we can really be located, and if we can't be located, ;how can you say we're part of a deterministic, physical system?

Well that's why I bring this up, just to clarify that we are discussing whether or not such a third force can exist. It seems like so far in the conversation it's been taken for granted that it cannot exist. I am just conjecturing that maybe consciousness is something that doesn't comply to the rules of the universe. Maybe consciousness simply haunts the universe, tricking it into moving in directions other than what previous events would otherwise dictate.

I really don't see how you would tell whether your actions are dictated by past events, or if the present now is a special situation, via its conscious aspect, able to completely subjugate the physical universe to its whim. Does consciousness create a special situation whereby past events can be overridden, as far as the deterministic laws of the universe go? So it all comes down to where consciousness is located, which is and always will be a mystery. I think it's possible that it could be something located nowhere in particular that has the ability to physically interact with the material world, in which case our will would be free somewhat from previous events. I mean it would still have to interact only with past events, but cause and effect wouldn't physically apply to it.

 

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There is also no evidence that a human being is simply a physical system.

 

There's nothing ordinary about matter (see physics/chem), and we are still struggling to understand it, including the matter which comprises the vast majority of the universe.

Now you're getting it. This is also what introspection will reveal.

Because there is no "I" to be a part of a system; there is only the system. There is no piece of the puzzle we have to squish into the deterministic universe; we are that very universe, part and parcel, as much as the clouds of hydrogen; we are complicated weather patterns.

I think that in the dialogue at large it is taken for granted that free will does exist, and the reasoning behind that is usually a kind of ipso facto or a language game; ie, "I make choices, therefore free will exists", never mind that "choice" is just a kind of noun/verb spawn from the "free will" concept.

You can conjecture what you like but this path does not lead to knowledge. It can help imagine things and maybe point in the right direction, but we cannot take conjectures with no evidence to be a basis for any kind of knowledge. If you conjecture this, why not just conjecture that we have free will because Yaweh gave it to us, breathed it into our nostrils when we were clay; at least then you have the backing of "scripture" and a lot of the world would agree with you.

This is also a conjecture. Be extremely suspicious of statements defining boundaries to knowledge; think back to older times and all the things that we could surely never know.

The words in this sentence all make sense individually but put together they are incoherent. To interact with the past is to take part in causality de facto.

This is an often touted statement which is actually a very nuanced philosophical point. The truth is that absence of evidence is quite literally evidence of absence in an infinite set of phenomena. We make use of this logic almost daily in our lives.

Imagine you suddenly smell smoke from your kitchen, and think there is a fire downstairs. You rush down, but realize it was coming from your window, from a neighbours BBQ. You have not in any way conclusively proved that there is not a fire in your kitchen, and yet you aren't dialing 911 anymore. The absence of evidence is enough to convince you of the evidence of absence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence

In some circumstances it can be safely assumed that if a certain event had occurred, evidence of it could be discovered by qualified investigators. In such circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof of its occurrence as positive proof of its non-occurrence.
— Copi, Introduction to Logic (1953), p. 95

I don't know what you mean by "simply"; maybe you are stuck on a "tinkertot" view of what "physicality" means, or what matter is. I don't see anything "simply" about the human nervous system, or the geological movements of the earth's tectonic plates, or the way that neutrinos careen through the cosmos at almost the speed of light and fly through you every moment in stupendous numbers. I don't see how one could prove that anything is "simply a physical system", given that I'm not aware of an alternative system in which something could be.

Do you have another kind of system that we can test to see whether human beings are a part of it? If not, then we have no need for that.

 

Prove it?

No, that's not conjecture, that's a fact. I explained to you in another thread why it's impossible to deduce that the brain accurately represents itself within the brain. There's simply no way to accurately envision the thing. There's no way to locate consciousness within physical reality.

No, not if the past isn't culminating in what it would in the absence of an outside force, consciousness. Cause and effect would lead the universe one way; consciousness steps in and directs it in another way.

Me being convinced of something doesn't make it true.

No, but you don't have a rock solid system that we are a part of. You believe in one very strongly, but I can plant a seed of doubt. There is no reason to suspect that the way we view the universe is how it is at all. It could be something completely different, outside of our heads, or there could be factors that make what we see a completely different thing. So when I say "simply a physical system" I mean taking for granted that what we see is what is there, when there's fundamentally no way of knowing if its even close to what is actually there, or if the chemicals in the brain are really bad at putting the world together as it truly is. You're just coming from the standpoint that these chemicals are really good chemicals, I guess because you respect your brain. You think your brain gives you everything, so the chemicals therein must be really good ones. What if they're just stupid nonsense ones that happen to function in a stupid, nonsense world? You see the whole thing implodes on itself in one big catastrophe of mystery. We can't tell what we are, where we are, or what we're made out of. This isn't conjecture, as I see it, it is a fact.

 

Asking me to prove that we are like weather patterns is like asking me to prove that weather patterns are like weather patterns. Look. What is the difference? Or, from a different angle, has it in fact been discovered that we do have a soul and we do have free will from that causal agent? Because that is the very debate, right. So we know from the get go that this is not a fact. So if we are not a special little agent package, then we must be like the universe we come out of. Certainly every single facet of us matches this. Show me a single datum which shows that you as a human are inherently different from cloud formations.

That you know of. You're still making a bold, absolute epistemic claim, one for which you have no evidence, and one which could be proven wrong today. Heck, perhaps it was already proven wrong thousands of years ago by some sage in a cave. Perhaps it will take a new kind of cyclotron, or a new kind of telescope, or MRI, or something we can't imagine yet. The point is that you are making an absolute claim about the limits of knowledge and those claims have a habit of being embarassed. I am simply urging caution in saying "never". Keep an open mind.

Now you've slipped with your language; we weren't talking about consciousness and whether it exists or not; we're talking about "free will". Of course consciousness exists; it is primary. I think, therefore I am. The order is important! Or not, who knows.

I think you are confused because you cannot conceive of consciousness without free will, but that's like being unable to conceive of a hurricane without free will. Simply don't imagine anything that's not there, and you've got the idea

I don't know what it would mean for "consciousness to step in and direct the universe in a different way", because that consciousness was begat by that universe (as far as we know) and every event in that consciousness arises in much the same fashion as physical events; dictated by the flow of time and events.

No, and hopefully you are only convinced by true things. One such true thing, is that we have no reason to suspect that consciousness is inherently separate from the rest of the universe.

You can wield your conceptual blade and slice the universe in twine, but the onus is on you to explain your actions. If consciousness is so fundamentally different from the cosmos, and is outside of causality, why? how do you know? how can we test this?

With every aware breath I know that the universe is a mystery beyond mysteries and that all our ideas are a cosmic joke. Don't mistake me for an ideologue. I am a utilitarian. Physics is true because physics works. You can offer a different system, say Norse Mythology, but does it work? Does it survive tests?

I don't believe in this system; I work with it based on its proven record of appearing to correctly represent reality. These are models; I'm not confused about that. Here's the part I wonder if you forget though: even though these are "just models", it matters which one we chose if we care about modeling correctly. My position is that models with "free will" in them have that as a flaw, because we have not arrived at that idea from observing it in the universe, we have arrived at it through assumption.

We know 100% that this is the case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

This is exactly why the concept of free will makes no sense.

Agreed 100%. You can go down the rabbit hole if you like, and conclude "Therefore I want to believe that actually I do have free will!" but then you might as well think "Therefore I want to believe actually Mohammad DID ascend to heaven on a winged horse!".

Increasing the amount of skepticism only weakens the case for free will

There is a dance, but not even, there is an experience of a dance. buddhists talk about the 5 aggregates of what constitutes a sentient being. there have been good efforts to get back to the roots of knowledge.

 

I don't know what the universe is like, exactly, to be able to meaningfully say that we are like it. Don't get me wrong: I like the idea that we can't be distinguished from the universe. But if that's really true, I still don't see how our will isn't free. Because then we're just imagining ourselves to be individuals whose will is separate from the universe. In reality our will is just more cause and effect. So if we're to define cause and effect as "will", I don't see why you should say any cause and effect is more or less free than any other cause and effect. I see this natural order of cause and effect more as being "free" than I see it as being subjugated to cause and effect or anything else. To me it would seem to be spinning out of control, which I would call absolute freedom in a sense.

Fair enough, though it's as self-evident as anything else I know to be true. To turn things around, I could accuse you of saying I can't possibly have the knowledge that the universe is essentially mysterious. So who is really saying never?

No, I didn't slip. I tried to make it clear that I was referring to consciousness as an outside force. Maybe I did not succeed.

If I don't imagine anything that I can't be certain of, then I am dead and everything ceases to exist.

I hope you don't think that I am deeply impassioned about consciousness being something separate from the universe. I really don't care if it is or isn't. It's just that no one really knows what consciousness is or where it is. Nobody is on solid footing in this area. One man's opinion is as good as the next.

I don't have twenty-one minutes to watch the video you posted. Could you summarize why everything we see must be as it is?

I can't imagine how one could prove that the chemicals in our brains don't simply cause the hallucination that everything is as it is. After all, if they did, everything would seem exactly as it is, and it doesn't seem, to me, like the chemicals in my brain don't cause a hallucination that seems exactly like reality. Is there a good reason why they shouldn't?

I don't particularly want to believe in free will. I don't really want to be higher than the universe in such a way. I don't feel that need to be "in command" or anything. Still, I don't believe that our will is "not free" per se. I tend to think of it as free more so than I think of it as enslaved, even if it is a part of the cause and effect. To say that it isn't free seems to have the same failing of saying that our will is something different from the universe as those who say our souls are something different from the universe. I really think it's a matter of opinion whether you see this whole thing and the laws that govern it as being free or as being enslaved to the only way things can possibly be. I totally see it more as being one big freefall, though.

 

If experience were to conflict with evidence, on a personal level, where would you go Mr. Writer? Just out of curiosity.

Non drug induced btw. I'm aware of your psychedelic explorations.

 

in a statistical universe, that we live in, every individual element can go in whatever direction it feels like, or is its nature to, and still you have a probability curve, for the direction in which the whole thing moves if even one or two move more in one direction then another.

venting gas from a pressure vessel for example. every molecule isn't trying to escape. they're all just moving in every random direction. but because they're moving in every random direction, sooner or later, most of them, at some point, move toward the exit.

so really, nothing is contradicted by individuals having free will at all.

 

Experience can be evidence. It can also be inadmissable as evidence; the details matter. I follow the evidence, period. I know that my experiences can be a result of a hilarious neurology so I always keep in mind that I am at every moment of life poised to be shamefully mislead by what I experience and believe. That's why science is so good, and useful; it brings us all out of our solipsistic "true for me" lala land and asks us to look at aggregates and what we call objective proof.

Your analogy doesn't work; the individual molecules aren't going where they "feel" like. they move deterministically. the system as a whole works deterministically, even if in a different manner (your view changes with different magnification). i don't see the parallel with free will. In free will, the molecules would be able to "ignore" causality, "ignore" the forces of physics which define their very existence in that moment and all moments, and somehow "will" an event which is outside of causality.

This is frankly a description of magic. This is a description of movie magic, of imagination. We do not find this behavior in the universe. We find gas clouds, and human clouds.