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I think the whole reason the existence of free will is disputed is because you can choose NOT to pick the option you think is best. The computer model isn’t quite right, because consciousness is something more than just the parts of the body. Everyone has a concept of “self” that computers don’t have.</p>
<p>This is the dumbest thread ever</p>
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<p>How the hell is this not free will? If it isn’t free will, then what is? How is choosing from a specific set of criteria, not free will???</p>
<p>God I want to smack whoever asked this question.</p>
<p>To say that free will is an illusion is saying that our bodies are doing their own thing and we just think we are in control. Everyone agrees with that, right?</p>
<p>Then how would you explain “accidents”? An accident would be when our intention was to do one thing but our bodies did something else.</p>
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<p>Your logic is flawed… most things are random. Derive an equation that defines the universe… it cannot be done. Even with computers, there are things called “unexpected protocol”. Computers can preform non-linearly, just as humans can.</p>
<p>^ Hm, not trying to detract from your argument or anything, but computers only perform unexpectedly due to either unexpected input or poor engineering. Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, not what you mean it to do, and nothing more, provided your requests are within its parameters. I’d go as far to say that all problems are essentially based on human error, and not on random stochastic processes. But this is straying from the point of the thread.</p>
<p>I brought up the issue of free will and deterministic physics while debating on the nature of time in the HSL forum. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/high-school-life/898095-time-travel-into-far-future-past-possibility-3.html#post1064516215[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/high-school-life/898095-time-travel-into-far-future-past-possibility-3.html#post1064516215</a>
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<p>tl;dr: If the past, present, and future exist simultaneously (based on the idea that time dilation alters time “frames” over vast distances and some velocity, not to be confused with affects of limits on the speed of light for far-away observable objects), then absolute free will cannot possibly exist because our futures already exist. </p>
<p>There is also an interesting rebuttal in the form of a paper linked in the post following mine, which I suggest you also read.</p>
<p>I personally don’t have an opinion on the matter (though I’m more inclined to accept scientific evidence to logic-based pseudo-proofs).</p>
<p>@ gotakun
I understood that was his definition. I posted post 25, he posted post 26. Before he posted post 27, I started doing my new post, so by the time he posted his post 27, mine came later. I didn’t miss his definition he gave on post 28. Then the dude chill was in reply to the whole dick section.</p>
<p>ok this is getting a little out of hand. First of all there is no such thing as space time (it’s a fancy word like “global warming” or “war on terror” or “change we can believe in”). And secondly, we have free will whether you like it or not. No, my raging testosterone is not telling me to write this post, I’m writing it out of my free-willed nature. </p>
<p>It’s what I like to call, the zero phenomenon. There is no such thing as the number zero (or fractions for that matter). Because we have never witnessed there be “absolutely nothing”, only the absence of something (ie. relative to 1, so 0 should be in it’s own category). </p>
<p>We like to find reasons for things, but if you keep finding reasons you’ll run into a wall. There is no reason for the universe existing, there is no reason for people existing, etc.</p>
<p>If you try to find a reason or formula for the way people act you’ll just approach zero, simple as that.</p>
<p>Seriously…</p>
<p>Consider this. You get a parasite that only needs one thing to survive- a droplet of water. You place six separate (but equal!) droplets of water at equal distances from each other and to the parasite. There is no sunlight or any of that crap. Can you determine where it will go? Will it just sit there though? OF COURSE IT WONT. </p>
<p>Someone will say “OH BUT GOD KNEW WHERE IT WAS GONNA GO” NO YOU IDIOT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GOD STOP BEING A TOOL.</p>
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<p>Your free-willed “nature”? Oh, the irony of it all. I don’t suppose you ever thought about how you never had a choice regarding what kind of “nature” you have,</p>
<p>Does there exist a function for every person such that, when given all the external forces acting on that person (genetics, time, education, cirumstance, etc), will always output correctly that person’s actions?</p>
<p>Or:</p>
<p>Suppose life is like a videotape. We rewind it back to the beginning, and watch until point a. We rewatch again, and again. If every thing we see, in every viewing, up until point a are always the same. Suppose a person makes a decision at point a. If the past is kept constant, will the person’s choice in that point ever diverge? That is, if the past is kept constant, will a person always make the same choice?</p>
<p>At best, I think humans are limited to a limited distribution of choices… which isn’t free, either, as it’s governed more by a probability distribution than an actual choice. Much more likely is that people have zero free will. It’s all external circumstance.</p>
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<p>And the result of a coin toss is governed by probability. uh, how about no?</p>
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<p>I never had a choice to be born either. What does that have to do with inherent qualities?</p>
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<p>Well, life is not a videotape. Life is more like a dvd that you can’t fast forward or rewind.</p>
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<p>No, there doesn’t. </p>
<p>Think of it like this. We are all programmed as animals to do certain things. 1. Survive 2. Reproduce 3. 4. whatever blablabla.</p>
<p>When we see certain things, we might feel a certain way (going on an airplane, sight of a pretty girl, pain of a shot, etc.). It makes us want to act a certain way. These are all programmed.</p>
<p>But we can make the choice to not act on those feelings. We prolong the feeling, for whatever reason.</p>
<p>Why are we still even talking about this though? It’s like trying to figure out if we really exist or not (we do), or if religion is real (it’s not).</p>
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<p>uhhhh yeah there is. the term is important because according to the theory of special relativity, time and space are coupled. so there aren’t two separate things ‘space’ and ‘time’, there is one thing–spacetime. </p>
<p>one of the articles tried to use this theory to argue against free will. so invoking this term makes sense.</p>
<p>@ Schaden
“Consider this. You get a parasite that only needs one thing to survive- a droplet of water. You place six separate (but equal!) droplets of water at equal distances from each other and to the parasite. There is no sunlight or any of that crap. Can you determine where it will go? Will it just sit there though? OF COURSE IT WONT.”</p>
<p>Determinism doesn’t claim the ability to predict actions. The argument is that actions and nature is governed by cause and effect principles.</p>
<p>“Think of it like this. We are all programmed as animals to do certain things. 1. Survive 2. Reproduce 3. 4. whatever blablabla.” </p>
<p>Saying that you are programmed is admitting determinism. And following that…
you say “But we can make the choice to not act on those feelings. We prolong the feeling, for whatever reason.”</p>
<p>This is true. However, it is not because there is free will. You “choose” not to act on these feelings for a reason, and a reason is always some sort of cause, be it teleologically or temporally.</p>
<p>By temporally, I mean to say that in nature, things are always governed by some sort of efficient cause. Rain causes plants to grow, for example. </p>
<p>Teleologically, is to say that an action is for the sake of something. Say for example that you want cake and you don’t have it at home. You go to the store for the sake of buying cake. Your desire for cake is causing you to go to the store. Moreover your mental state, even likely your current situation, is causing you to want cake. Someone just talked to you about cake, and that triggers you into wanting it.</p>
<p>Saying that “I have a choice to go to the store to get cake or not get cake” is not sufficient grounds for free will. Rationality, maybe. If you decided “hey, you know what, I wont go to the store and get cake, because I am trying to watch my wait”, you made a choice contrary to the original temptation of going to get cake, but the reason why you made that choice is because the the reason for not getting cake was ultimately a stronger cause. Maybe you realized you could just eat some fruit, or maybe you are trying to watch your weight, but in both cases you choose not to get cake simply because either eating some fruit or your motivation for watching your weight causes you to not go and get cake. By reasoning of a sort, and choosing not to go buy cake, you have successfully rationalized possible options and chosen one. But the one which was chosen was chosen for a reason, and the other were not chosen for a reason. So in choosing one option, you have owned up to the choice and made it meaningful, but you still were not free in choosing. You reacted to the strongest stimulus/stimuli (more than one thing pretty much always causes every volitional action e.g. state of mind, situation, presentation of other options, weighing the value of each etc.). </p>
<p>Choosing and free will are not to be equated. </p>
<p>I just want to clarify for the sake of this topic, what the thesis of determinism is not, as it seems a lot of people on this board are arguing for free will based off of some misinformed view of determinism.
DETERMINISM does not argue for predictability of animal/human behavior. Nor do deterministic theses argue that determinism functions with patterns. Rather determinism is an argument that all cognitive behavior is governed by principles of cause and effect. </p>
<p>You just can’t say something like “determinism is wrong, because it expects the same choices to be taken in every situation”. It will NEVER say something like “well since your genetics makes you the kind of person that prefers chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream, you will never choose vanilla over chocolate”. A true deterministic argument would not care about your preferences. They function under metaphysical principles of cause and effect that are applicable to all human interactions. A determinist wouldn’t say “since you like chocolate better you would always choose it over vanilla”. They would say only this, “When you have the option of vanilla or chocolate, you will always choose one or the other for one reason or another”. I personally like chocolate better, but there’s times when I choose vanilla instead because something causes me to. Like maybe I’ve just had too much chocolate recently and am tired of it. Or maybe the last time I had chocolate ice cream it fell on my shirt and am superstitious that it will happen again if I choose chocolate. But no matter the case, I choose whichever one I choose on account of some state of mind, circumstances, or what not that has me ultimately choose one over the other.</p>
<p>@ silence kit</p>
<p>"uhhhh yeah there is. the term is important because according to the theory of special relativity, time and space are coupled. so there aren’t two separate things ‘space’ and ‘time’, there is one thing–spacetime.</p>
<p>one of the articles tried to use this theory to argue against determinism. so invoking this term makes sense."</p>
<p>Sorta yes sorta no.</p>
<p>Just remember that special relativity is not a law its a theorem. Einstein propose both general and special relativity to deal with many physical problems which science was greatly troubled with at the time (and still today), and it seems to have helped answer a lot of them. However, the truth hood or completeness of the theorem is still greatly disputed today. I actually have a really interesting article related to physics, regarding a very (I mean very) modern, new model that hopes to answer questions that general and special relativity answer and more. If I can only find it…I think it’s somewhere in my email inbox from a few months back. I’ll find it and send it if you’de like.</p>
<p>my point was that spacetime isn’t an artificial term. schaden was misinformed. it’s an important word because it emphasizes the coupling of space & time in the theory of special relativity. whether special relativity is ‘true’ or not is irrelevant to my point.</p>
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<p>Oh, so we’re arguing on a “because I told you so” basis now?</p>
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<p>Decision theory? Mixed Nash equilibrium? There is a couple of decades’ worth of work in quantifying decision-making in terms of a probability distribution, kiddo.</p>
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<p>The fact that your choices are guided by a nature that you never had a choice in choosing? I suppose a robot has free will since it’s making a choice base on pre-determined programming, as well.</p>
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<p>… way to totally miss the point.</p>
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<p>And what makes you think your “choice” on acting on those feelings isn’t programmed by external forces?</p>
<p>You keep assuming that if you make some sort of a decision based on some sort of “emotional” input, then it’s free will. Guess what, that is what robots/Artificial agents do. They take in input (can be sensory in nature), analyze the input (Which can give equivalents of “dread”, “happy”, “acceptable” and other feelings), and make a decision based on inputs (maybe randomized, maybe deterministic). Is that free will? You have not made a single worthwhile arguments to show that your decision-making process is not determined by external forces.</p>
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<p>Because your ability to reason about this makes it all so entertaining.</p>
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<p>Reason is derived from cause and effect though, is it not? If we could not observe sustained patterns over time then wouldn’t reason not exist? If there were no patterns, in other words things could not be predicted, then there would not be reason, and not be cause and effect.</p>
<p>Are you saying that reason is derived by observing cause and effect? If so, you only speak part of the truth. Human reasoning is something internal to them by nature. While observing cause and effect, we use a posteriori reasoning. However, much of reasoning is not cause and effect based in our learning, hence it’s a priori. Patterns are understandable due to a posteriori reasoning, but that does not mean all cause and effect is patterned.</p>
<p>If nature is governed by cause and effect principles, cause and effect uses posterion reasoning, and determinism uses cause and effect as it’s argument, then that’s saying determinism can predict anything?</p>
<p>schaden your syllogisms are so persuasive!</p>
<p>This is my personal view on the lack of existence of free will. The decisions you make are either governed by your experiences (nurture) or your genes (nature), neither of which you have control over. </p>
<ol>
<li>If a person makes a decision, then he/she thinks about the decision either conciously on unconciously.
2.If he/she thinks about the decision conciously, then he’she thinks about all known outcomes. </li>
<li>If he/she thinks about it unconciously, then he/she thinks about all known outcomes. </li>
<li>If a person makes a decision, then he/she thinks about all known outcomes.
5.If he/she thinks about all known outcomes, then he/she assigns utilities to all known outcomes. </li>
<li>If a person assigns utilities to all known outcomes, then he/she assigns utilities based on either his/her emotions or his/ her knowledge.
7.If the utilities are assigned based on his/her emotions, then the decision is made by either nature or nurture. </li>
<li>If the utilities are assigned based on knowlegde, the decision is made by nurture. </li>
<li>If a person makes a decision, then he/she makes it by either nature or nurture. </li>
<li>If a decision is made by nature, then the decision is predetermined by the person’s DNA. </li>
<li>If a person’s decision is made by nurture, then it is predetermined by the person’s past experiences and perceptions. </li>
<li>If a person makes a decision, then the decision is predetermined. </li>
<li>A person makes a decision. </li>
<li>The decision is predetermined. </li>
<li>If free will exists, then it is the ability to make an unpredetermined decision. </li>
<li>Free will does not exist.</li>
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