I don’t think I choose to be health conscious. I think I’m health conscious the same way that I’m introverted and quiet. It’s a part of my make-up.
I’m not always health conscious. But when I eat a Big Mac, it’s not that I’m choosing to NOT be health conscious. It’s just that at that moment, a Big Mac is more desirable to me than the feeling of virtue I get when I’m eating nuts and berries. And why is the Big Mac more desirable? I don’t know. But it’s not because I want it to be more desirable. It just is.
It is possible for me to take one bit of the Big Mac and walk away from it, virtue intact. But I have to be compelled to do this by something. If the something is external (a loaded gun pointed at me), then this is outside of my control and doesn’t represent my will. If the something is internal (a mental image of me gaining a bunch of weight), then subconscious processes are responsible. Not my conscious mind.
I was compelled to read that book because I kept reading threads like this one and felt like I was missing out. I’m an intellectually curious person, particularly when it comes to subjects that weave together science and morality. But I do not choose to be this type of person. I was shaped by my genes and my environment to be this type of person.
That is certainly a morally sustainable position and what empirical research points to. Free Will is merely a social construct with no meaning in the Natural World.
But that does not rely on free will, it relies on the learning ability of the chastised. Free will is not necessary to the chastiser nor the chastised.
There is no empirical evidence to back up your Statement. What is true is that only Humans (and maybe some higher animals) can believe anything at all in a conscious manner (‘belief’ may exist unconsciously in humans and in other animals), but only humans have the ability to reflect in detail on the possibility of free will. There is one train of thought that I am attracted to that suggests that until Human culture had reached a certain level of complexity, Humans possessed no sense of Free Will. Julian Jaynes suggest that this break point may be as late as about 1000 bce.
My take on the matter. A Computer program differs in two ways from a Modern Human.
A Modern Human is an evolutionary outcome of a process that has created self-replicating organisms that through some freak of nature at some point in that process became able to perceive very simple experiences- pain, heat and so on in a more than factual manner. A computer has knowledge but it lacks feeling. Evolution is a whore- it will go with any small trait that is useful for survival and given time and enough organisms will magnify any slight advantage. this is how eyes developed from simple very slightly light sensitive skin patches. If such an emotional experience was a possibility in the natural world, even in its most attenuated form, evolutionary processes are highly likely to have amplified such advantages. Such base level experience would increase in complexity and by a process like metaphor would gradually become more complex and able to feel and even know real things about the external world in a way that a mere calculator would not.
So a computer lacks a substrate of feeling and cannot apparently turn knowledge into experience- facts into meaning.
Many people don’t like the outcomes of epirical science. The Cathlic Church was not keen on geocentrism, many people still do not believe in Evolution.
Can you think of anything you have ever done consciously that couldn’t be traced to a specific motivation?
You may do something you don’t want to do. Like clean the toliet or walk the dog in the pouring rain. But you’re still motivated to do these things because of the consequences of NOT doing them.
If we only do things that we are compelled to do, then already our freedom is limited. But the fact that we do not dictate what we are and aren’t compelled to do is an even bigger constraint on our “freedoms”.
So the way you’ve worded the question misses my point. It’s not that the “compelling feeling takes away my free will”. It’s that will and compulsion are one in the same. If a person doesn’t determine what compels them (and I assert that they don’t), then they don’t determine their will. It’s as simple as that.
no, we just view the same event in different ways. it is indeed an act of will to avoid corn chips or a big mac. if it was simple aversion and desire there would be no - decision - involved. but i just now made a conscious decision to avoid corn chips (i was just at the store). if it were nothing but competing desires, then what of my conscious decision?
yes! shaped by but not determined by. why do you think shaped by = predetermined. and if you don’t think shped by = pre detemined how can you say there is no free will?
a human has one thing a computer doesn’t, aside from emotion. the ability to override it’s own programming.
I don’t think you understand. Apart from gut feeling (which gave us gods, geocentrism and creationism) there is no indication that human action is caused other than by natural physical processes. The only difference between us and animals is that we are able to believe that we have free will, not that we actually have it.
If you disagree, what is your evidence that free will exists?
You experience a feeling of deliberation which you believe you are in control of. You have no more evidence for that being true than a committed Christian has for the existence of God. It is a belief without proof.
You experience a feeling which you perceive as not being in control. You have no more evidence for that being true than a committed Christian has for the existence of God. It is a belief without proof.
I assume nothing. I am saying that there is no proof that there exists something such as human agency. I am not saying that human agency does not exist, just that there is no evidence that it does.
Human Agency is in the class of entities such as Gods, unicorns, leprechauns, El Dorado, Atlantis, the lodestone, etc. These are entities that may be brought before human awareness but have no empirical proof.
Note that I am not denying the possibility that someday someone may prove human agency to be true, but so far no one has done so.
If it happens then that will be an event as momentous as Quantum theory, Relativity and other major paradigm shifts. On the other hand it may go the way of the planetary model of atoms, the anther, phlogiston or eland vital.
It is up to the person suggesting that Agency exists in the universe to prove it, not for sceptics to disprove an unsupported belief.
I do experience being in control. I reject the experience in the same way I reject other beliefs that I experience that have no empirical evidence to support them.
There is nothing fundamental about the ability to “assemble data”; given suitable inputs, computers can do it a lot better than we can. Our brains have a physical existence and are machines like any other. To believe otherwise one has to appeal to either magic or some indefinable notion of spirituality.
Only the level of complexity. Just like the apparent vast difference between an electronic desk calculator that just adds numbers and a machine that can play chess at a grandmaster level or carry on a reasonably intelligent conversation is a difference of complexity. The calculator and the AI machine might even be made from the same basic components, but the AI machine has far more of them and vastly more interconnections and information content. This yields qualitatively different attributes, but the fundamental underlying processes and the deterministic nature of both are the same.
My answer to the “free will because we have choice” argument is simple. Consider for the sake of argument – just to see where it leads us – the hypothesis that the universe is completely deterministic and its entire future is predetermined. So that theoretically if we had sufficiently detailed information about its state, we could predict the future with any desired level of accuracy, including the future behavior of these deterministic machines we call humans, whose behavior is exactly predictable based on the neural state of their brains and predictable external events. Just a hypothesis, but think it through for a moment.
If that were really the true nature of the universe, how could you possibly distinguish it from any other? How could you distinguish it from one which was not predetermined and in which you really did have free will? You could not.
So whether one believes in “free will” or not, it’s pretty futile to try to argue or “prove” that we have it in any falsifiable objective sense. It’s intrinsically a subjective concept. Our apparent freedom to make choices is entirely premised on our perception that we’re making them freely.