the computer that predicts your choices: The entire universe. It would take a parallel identical isolated universe to predict anyone’s choice on anything. And that assumes that one is a bit ahead of the one we want to predict, of course! An in-universe computer would, as many have suggested, interfere with the results.
Illogical choices: they are only illogical to a failed predictor. A person who has always ordered chocolate and then asks strawberry could have just reached the point where he is sick of chocolate, or ready to take a risk, or whatever. We do not know it, but the process is there.
They have to be? Says who? Looks like a bald, unsupported assertion to me. I may not understand your argument, I’ll admit. Are you willing to consider an example from my life?
I play lead guitar in a rock band. In some of the songs we play, I improvise a guitar solo. I make it up on the spot. These solos have some constraints. I attempt to conform to the style of the song, so I don’t break into a flamenco run in the middle of a blues song. I attempt to stay within the key of the song. I usually use licks and phrases that are already part of my playing “vocabulary”, although sometimes I play a phrase I’ve never played or heard before. Sometimes I attempt things that don’t work out so well, either because I fail to execute something properly or because I successfully execute a bad idea. I have recordings of my band that demonstrate to me that these solos vary considerably from gig to gig, and I believe that the solos are the result of a bunch of free will choices I make.
Please help me to understand your point of view by fitting improvisational playing into your viewpoint. Thanks.
***Your initial premise is that there’s no free will. ***You might as well say, “That cause has to be either random or determined or the result of free will.” The only question is: which of us is begging the question?
And by the way, if we have no free will, then no position in any debate, including this one, has any validity whatsoever.
No, it’s simple physics. Every effect has to be caused. If you’re going to claim that human actions can be uncaused, then I don’t know what to tell you. Waht i’m saying is that “free will” is not logically coherent as a hypothetical cause for human decsions. You can’t choose what your 'will" is unless you’re willing to create an infinite regression of “wills.”
As it happens, I’m a guitar player too and I have lots of experience improvising solos on stage.
The reason that every improvisational excursion is always different is because the variables – the “causes” – are always different. The choices you feel like you’re making as you play are informed by all kinds of variables and all those variables affect your “will” to pick one note over another, or to go to the whammy bar or to try out that tapping lick you came up with last week.
I’m not saying people can’t DO what they want, I’m saying they can’t CHOOSE what they want.
If it takes a computer the size of the universe to predict whether I will choose chocolate or strawberry today, kind of makes the point moot, doesn’t it? because you will never be able to build a computer that sophisticated.
To put it another way, the Bishops used to argue over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer was that we would have to know the unknowable. (Since angels aren’t restricted to physical form, and seem to be able to bend natural laws when it suites them, we have to know enough about the universe to build our own. The difference is, your religion is pure logic, Mr. Spock.
That would be you. “Free will” is not answer to the question. Waht determines the will?
What do you mean by “validity?” You might argue that it’s not valid to give an individual any credit for being “right,” but that doesn’t mean the position itself is not valid (i.e. correct).
At levels you are not aware of, your brain is “creating” this solo based on all the rules of music you have burned in through training and practice. At a further deeper level, it is all electrons and atoms in there behaving as per the laws of physics require they do.
Here’s one for you, Dio (and other determinism folks): let’s say you’re right, and there is no free will - there isn’t really an ‘I’ that’s making ‘decisions’ but just a complex chemical construct that lumbers its way through life, doing what it is programmed by its genes and environment to do. ‘I’ am told by the determinists that ‘I’ think there is free will because ‘I’ dislike believing that ‘I’ and my actions are just the function of some program ‘I’ can’t understand.
‘My’ query: how did ‘I’ get programmed to be bothered by the belief that ‘I’ have no free will? Why should this bother ‘me’ any more than gravity does, if being part of a deterministic system is just as fundamental a part of ‘my’ existence as gravity is?
I don’t know. It doesn’t bother me at all, so I guess I can’t relate. People are bothered by their own mortality too. That doesn’t mean they won’t die. Why should an organism be expected to like everything about its own existence?
I apologize for restating a question so soon, but I believe this is a basic starting question.
That without FW this discussion is pointless is a cop out (my electrons made me say that, sorry if I offend). We are here in a condition to discuss so we can discuss it. It doesn’t matter if it is our wills or our electrons talking.
Yep, that’s fair. If this is going to be a “then why should we punish people?” point, i’d suggest that punishment is still reasonable in a non-free will world, and especially in a non-free will world where we have the illusion of free will.
Well, there is no “I” to be bothered. You didn’t “get programmed” either. That would assume a conscious creation of the construct that is “I” by someone with an intention.
Is a dog existentially bothered by its circumstances? A fruit fly? A medusa?
Even your being bothered is just “how the cookie crumbles”. A consequence of the physical processes that lead to you just as they could have led to anything else.
That would depend on whether there are truly random processes or not. But randomness does not make Free Will, anyways. So that would be out of the scope of this argument.
I believe in effective Free Will because I believe a lot of the deterministic processes happen in the mental subconscious, in a “Black Box of the Brain” that has only inputs and outputs, but is otherwise inaccessible to our conscious thought. Being thus opaque to us, yet still an internal process, while to a hypothetical outside omnipotent observer, the process is transparent, to us, as conscious beings, there’s a part of our reasoning that we can’t unpack. It’s definitely *not *random, but isn’t open to our scrutiny. Thus providing us (as external actors) with the illusion of free will. We can never break our own thoughts down to the purely deterministic because we are all two people, interacting. I believe that interaction leads to the emergent behaviour that is your public persona, and that public persona can behave in unpredictable ways. But it’s a non-random unpredictability.
Punishment, in the sense of providing an example to act as a deterrent and to attempt to modify the behavioral programming of offenders is. Retribution and moral judgements are not. We cannot blame the criminal for his actions, he’s no more responsible for them than a collapsing building or a flood is. We can only try to prevent future crimes.
