But unlike predestination, there can be some “intermediate level” of free will. Or perhaps a more correct term would be “limited will”. I may wish to do several things, but there are conflicting wills or circumstances that defeat my attempts to do some of them. It is not an all or nothing proposition.
That is, if it exists at all.
It’s not the belief in free will that makes it true. It’s that you chose to believe in free will. If you had chosen to believe in predestination instead that also would have proven you have free will.
I understand, but how could you know? You may think you choose to believe in free will. You may even think you’ve changed your mind from believing in predestination. But it may be that you were destined to change your mind and destined to start believing in free will, and destined to be convinced that you freely choose to believe in free will.
It’s the premise. “If you can choose to believe you have free will, doesn’t that mean you do?”
I saw the title and I seriously thought this was going to be a discussion of the merits of Calvin Klein versus Armani, and I couldn’t believe it was even up for debate.
But no.
Shoot me an email if this winds its way back to clothing.
D’oh!
Despite Calvinists’ predilection for referring to all non-Calvinists as “Arminians”, the term technically means a certain group of Dutch, IIRC, Anabaptists, who followed the beliefs of Jacobus Arminius. To use it more broadly than that is something of a solecism, like an Ulsterman asking the King of Siam if he is Orange or Green.
And not to be confused with Armenians, followers of the Germanic warrior Arminius, or the Arian heresy.
But of course, too, if you do not have free will, then you cannot choose to believe in it. But furthermore, you also cannot choose to believe in the lack of free will. You cannot think at all, unless the random conditions which bind you also happen, by chance, to line up with the facts at they are.
I believe we’re all Blue Pills in the Matrix and will wake tomorrow as if this thread was never posted and continue, automaton-like in our day-to-day mundanity.
I also believe Keanu is actually happy as a pig in slurry and merely pouts for cameras to garner sympathy.
I believe.
Incorrect. Deterministic reasoning or a mix of randomness and determinism can lead you to the facts with much better odds than chance. Nor does the lack of free will mean there’s no such thing as choice; it just means that choices are determined by some admixture of chance and deterministic processes; not some incoherent, impossible “free will”.
Nope.
Take the statement “Frylock posted in this thread in the past.” Is this statement true or false? If the past is not mutable, then I know it is true, because you did. But if the past is mutable, then the truth of the statement is not knowable, because even as I attempt to form the thought of it in my head the presence of your prior post could be changing out from under me.
The most culturally prominent example of this concept is Schroedinger’s cat. This cat supposedly died in the past - or didn’t. The past is (supposedly) not fixed in this case, which has the direct result of making knowledge about the cat’s state unknowable. If the past was knowable, then the cats state wouldn’t be in flux, and the past would no longer be mutable.
Right - I was responding to the idea that Jesus might have had to refrain from mentioning the Peter’s betrayals if mentioning them would have caused Peter to be more aware of his actions and consciously refrain (making Jesus incorrect). If Jesus had refrained from making the comment in that case, it would demonstrate that Jesus did have control of Peter’s actions; by not speaking he would have allowed Peter to betray him, and voicing the prediction would have (in that case) changed Peter’s actions in the future such that the prediction would then not come to pass.
Obviously, this is not what occured in the story; Peter disregarded the prediction and thus it came to pass - which on the face of it doesn’t show that Jesus had control of Peter, since Jesus’s comment doesn’t seem to have changed Peter’s actions one whit. Of course it also doesn’t show Peter to have had much control over Peter either, because he proceeded to shame himself by disregarding the explicit warning.
“Choose” doesn’t necessarily imply libertarian free will; it’s also a common term for purely unfree behaviors that partially rely on external stimuli and internal state, such a computer program might employ. Compatiblist free will is basically built around this idea - taking the terms that make people think libertarian free will and fitting them onto a purely deterministic framework. It works pretty good, since we’ve been using those terms in real life all along and in real life there is not, and cannot, be any such thing as libertarian free will (given that it isn’t a coherent concept).
Exactly. This is the point I was making.
If predestination is true then we don’t make choices (even if we might think we do). We’re just following our programing. If free will exists then we can make choices between different options.
So when I said “If you can choose to believe you have free will, doesn’t that mean you do?” I meant it as the equivalent of “If you can choose what to have for breakfast, doesn’t that mean you have free will?”
I’m more of a quasi-Pelagian, personally.
That makes no logical sense. If reasoning is deterministic, then the odds do not suggest it is determined by anything akin to actual facts. Likewise, a lack of free will inherently means a lack of actual choice: that is its definition. To claim that choice exists - but it’s wholly determined by random chance, does not in any way invalidate the fact that it would not in any sense be choice.
In order to have a choice, you must have the ability to choose. If not, what does it matter whether you think the universe is random or pre-determined. Indeed, the two would be essentially synonymous. As I said earlier, there will be a future: the past and present and future are matters of perspective. Once you get there, the only thing that can ultimately matter is what you chose. Everything else will be dust. If that choice does not exist, then neither really does anything.
Likewise, I would not be too keen on denying free will, since in doing so you’d only be denying your whole political platform.
I feel you’re conflating influence into control. If I post that I thought Iron Man 2 was a great movie, I might cause somebody to go see it. But I only influenced their decision, I didn’t control it.
In the same way, Jesus saying that Peter would denounce him might have caused Peter to avoid doing so. But that would have been Jesus influencing Peter’s actions not controlling them.
Define “choice”. No, seriously.
The usual claim is not that choice is wholly determined by chance; if there is any chance at all present, all it does is scramble your signals a bit. Choice as humans know it is based not on chance but on unfree things; specifially the set of thoughts you happened to have sitting in you head at the moment of choosing. These thoughts are, at that instant, fixed: you were thinking what you were thinking and not any thing else. And based on a presumably-extremely-complicated algorithm akin to a computer program, your brain cobbles together your knowledge and beliefs and opinions and emotions into some kind of coherent whole, and then acts based on that whole.
This is anything but random, as a general rule - you don’t love cherries one moment and then randomly start hating them the next. If chance plays any part it’s where the calculative parts of your mind are waffling between two equal options - that is to say, when you don’t care which choice you make. At that point there remains the possiblity that it picks one truly at random. Or maybe it always picks the ‘first’ one and chance plays no part at all - hard to say, because necessarily the two outcomes look pretty similar when we have know way of looking in the brain and seeing which option was ‘first’.
So yeah, wether the universe is random or pre-determined is essentially synonymous, but not for the reason you seem to think - we do not lack the ability to choose. We merely lack the ability to do so in a way that’s free of our own thoughts and preferences and moods and predelications. Which in my opinion is not all that big a loss - but then I’m not trying to use free will to absolve a god of responsibility for its creation.
But why would you imagine that a deterministic choice must have no correlation with reality?
I can write a computer program that is 100% deterministic, yet that computer program does not behave randomly. The program’s response to external events makes some sort of sense. That doesn’t mean that the program is infallible, since it should be pretty easy to find inputs that weren’t anticipated by me, and therefore the program will give outputs that don’t make sense.
But human beings make wrong choices all the time–see a mushroom, eat the mushroom, ooops, the mushroom was poisonous, but the human didn’t have a mechanism for detecting the poison, and therefore dies. And taken to extremes, some people have brains or bodies that are damaged so badly they can’t even pick up an object and put it in their mouth.
So a deterministic algorithm might very easily find itself in an environment where the inputs lead to wrong or random outputs, but that doesn’t mean the algorithm works randomly. Given the expected environment it can create perfectly sensible output.
And organisms were created by evolution, not to always create correct outputs regardless of the inputs, but to create correct output often enough that the organism manages to replicate itself at least as often as not. So organisms only create correct outputs when the inputs are constrained–plants assume sunlight, no sunlight and they die. No rain and they die. No nitrogen and they die. No CO2 and they die. Not too much acid and not too little, or they die. And on and on, there are innummerable environmental conditions that an organism is not able to sensibly respond to, and the result is that the organism might cease to exist as an organism.
And since human beings are organisms created by evolution, we’re the same way. Our responses aren’t random, because random outputs lead to death. But our outputs aren’t perfect either, and it’s very easy for humans to make mistakes that lead to death. But since there are 6 billion human beings on Earth right now, it seems that human beings are very often able to create sensible outputs, at least enough to replicate on average more than once. But given a change in the environment, or a mistaken response to the current environment, and our human brains will fail and maybe we’ll all die.
As said by others, if that was true we’d be dead, and deterministic systems like computers adhere to actual facts just fine.
If anything you are describing what free will supposedly is, since it supposedly isn’t determined by anything while at the same time somehow not being random. How exactly that or anything else about free will actually makes sense is something I’ve never seen adequately explained; I don’t consider it a concept well enough defined to mean anything.
Hardly. A purely deterministic machine can be spoken of as “making choices” and people will understand perfectly.
Determinism and random chance aren’t even close to the same thing.
That sounds like human egotism at its finest.
Nonsense, my platform doesn’t require free will, which is a good thing because free will doesn’t even make sense much less exist. Free will is too incoherent a concept to base anything useful on.
You’re not looking at this from the persepective of the precog.
One common way that precognitives in fiction have described their ability is to see a web of ever-increasing possibilities - that is, possible outcomes based on current events. The cause of these multiple possiblities is always choice - whenever anyone has a choice, there become two possible futures: one where they chose A, and one where they chose B. (And one where they chose C, and D, and E…) And each of these resulting possible futures itself splits into multiple possibilities each time the person or anyone else makes a choice after the first one. Given that there billions of people making decisions constantly, this means that bare seconds in the future there are umpty-kajillion possible futures that the psychic is surveying, all at the same time. Of course many of these futures will be very similar to one another, differing only by a few minor decisions with minor consequences, and in certain cases there may be ‘convergences’ - where a high proportion of outcomes lead to the same result. In some cases there might be perfect convergence, happening in all possible outcomes - but the thing to remember is that such events would by definition only be ones that would happen regardless of what anybody does, including if everyone in the universe spontaneously decided to try their hardest to prevent it.
It’s worth noting that that’s the inevitable situation a precog would be in in a universe with libertarian free will - faced with a near-infinity of possible futures and no way to choose between them. As should be obvious by the way we arrived at the conclusion that there would be so many possible futures, the only way to reduce the number of futures is to reduce the number of choices that people can make that cause the futures to diverge.
It gets odd if you try to say that only some choices a person makes can effect the future (which is to say, only some choices are libertarian, and some are predetermined). I mean, what makes the ‘real’ choices so special? Why does a person only sometimes get to effect the outcome of events, when they themselves don’t notice the difference? No, this doesn’t make much sense. The only logical approach is to say that any give person either has the ability to make real choices, or they don’t.
Of course, even if you reduce the number of ‘real’ deciders by orders of magnitudes, choices still add up quickly. So to keep things manageable you have to reduce things really far. The natural numbers of real deciders to look at are 1 and 0: the precog alone, or nobody. But for the sake of argument we’ll also look at 2 as well: Jesus, and Peter too.
If Peter has the ability to make real choices, then there are infinity-billion possible futures from him alone. Too many - let’s only look at two of them: the one where he denies Jesus for the third time, and the one where he changes his mind at the last minute and stops at two. If the latter future happens, then Jesus’s prediction is wrong - and presuming that these are the only two possible outcomes, then the prediction is only a 50/50 guess. Not very good certainty. (In actuality of course it would be much worse, as there are infinitely many prior choices that Peter could make which would avert the predicted outcome, such as just staying home, hiding in a hole, or killing himself. All such possibilities would have to count into the chance of Jesus being correct.)
So, if we presume that Jesus’s predictions are worth the papyrus they’re scrawled on, then clearly Peter isn’t one of those people with free will, or he’d have been very likely to act contrary to the predictions (especially after having been warned). So next question: does Jesus have free will?
If Jesus alone in the universe has free will, then he still can make many many choices, creating many many possible outcomes - but he’s still only one guy, and as you noted, he’s not Peter. Hit comments to Peter amount to mere suggestions - albeit ones from a guy Peter thinks is divine with knowledge and foresight. Jesus can command Peter to see Iron Man 2, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Peter will obey.
However, Jesus is still a precog, and can still see all the possible futures that may result from his own actions. Thus, he would know if Peter would act on his suggestions. He would even know how Peter would react to each different possible choice of words and intonation and emphasis that Jesus could choose - Jesus sees all of his own future actions and their outcomes laid out before him. The effect of this is that he can choose which of those futures he likes best, and act in precisely the way that would bring it about. This includes choosing which of Peter’s futre actions he likes best - from the limited set of possible futures that could be brought about by Jesus’s own behavior. In other words he probably couldn’t make Peter pat his head and rub his tummy if Peter didn’t want to, but he could make Peter betray him - assuming that that’s something that Peter would be predisposed to do in one of Jesus’s possible futures.
Of course, you wouldn’t think that warning Peter about his shame would be the best action Jesus could take to bring it about, but then again Jesus is the precog and not me, so he’d know better than I. And it did work after all! Who knows, maybe Jesus needed to plant the seed of the idea in Peter’s mind, or alternatively maybe Peter was just a moron or amnesiac who would go ahead and do his thing regardless of what people said to him. Hard to say; we weren’t there.
The third option, which is a bit more likely if your precog isn’t an extra-universal alien with different rules like Jesus was, is if the precog is bound by the same limitations as the rest of humanity. That is, if their own actions and decisions are predetermined as well. They can see their future and all their mistakes, and can do nothing about it. They must shoot their own foot knowingly. Yikes! Talk about depressing. If I could see all that I might try and get myself nailed to a tree too - though of course I could only do so if my future allowed it. And in that case, I couldn’t avoid. Seriously - living hell.