Dammit, I meant to add: Do my cats have free will? If not, why not?
You’re gonna get taken to the mat on this one, JThunder.
First off, the soul is a non-explanation. We can’t bloody observe and quantify it, so no comparing it to gravity.
Next off, people are a damn sight more complicated then falling trees.
(looks at watch)
Will adress this issue after my date. GottaGoBye!
JThunder:
You are defining free will as something that is both uncaused and not random. There is nothing that can possibly fit your description. It makes no sense. Free will is the ability to act according to the inclination of your will. Physical determinacy would therefore only preclude “freeness” if the will itself is not physical. If the will is physical, then free will is indeed determined physically. You have not given any reasons why you believe the will to be non-physical. You are just assuming that the will is non-physical, and using that to say that free will must also be non-physical.
I have no idea where you are getting this. If the will is physical, then free will is physical. People make choices, and of course they can be held accountable. What do you mean by “incapable of modifying behavior”? Are you saying that in order to be accountable for your actions you must be capable of acting differently? The ability to act differently implies randomness, not free will! If everything being equal, you could act in a different way, then you can hardly attribute your possible actions to your will, which is the same in both cases. Therefore what you are saying is that you can only be held accountable for actions which are the result of pure chance.
Saying that the will is non-physical doesn’t change the situation anyway. If the will is non-physical, then free will is also non-physical. But your actions are still determined by your will, just as they are if the will is physical. Your definition, in which actions are not determined by anything, including your own will, and are also not random, does not apply to any possible situation, even the one you are arguing for. Also, there is no need to assume a non-physical will, because if god exists, then he could transfer your physical will into a non-physical will when you die. There is no reason your will had to always be non-physical.
—If there’s no free will, then you shouldn’t get upset when someone throws a punch at your mother.—
Why not? I get upset when my mother gets punched. When someone puches my mother, I want to stop them. I want to change their behavior. Or at the very least get them away from my mother.
—After all, that person has no free will, and was thus compelled to violence by the laws of physics.—
Perhaps, but this certainly doesn’t stop anyone from blaming that person for doing the punching. They are the entity that is most immediately responsible, and most immediately correctable/stoppable.
—Ditto for the man who rapes your daughter, or the fellow who flies a passenger plane into the World Trade Center. None of them had any choice in the matter, having no free will to choose otherwise.—
But what does this change about how we react to them and think about them? Whether we ultimately blame other things for creating these sorts of people in the first place, it still makes just as much sense to throw them in prison, try to stop their acts, etc.
—It gets worse. Your own decision to reject free will, and my own decision to believe in it, are merely the outcomes of physical processes.—
Again, you seem to be missing a huge part of your arguement: why is this “worse”? For what?
—These were not decision in any meaningful sense, since we had no choice to believe otherwise. Even the logic (or illogic) that one uses to discern the presence/absence of free will would have merely been the outcome of those physical processes.—
You are comitting the genetic fallacy. Whether or not the use of logic was determined somehow, logic is still valid or invalid.
—Similarly, all this talk about casting blame on trees and other objects with no free will – give me a break! The very act of casting blame assumes that the object has some choice in the matter.—
No, it does not. Thats only ONE use of the term. Instead of addressing them, you have simply avoided all the points made about this line of argument.
But worse, you’ve stepped into a rather clever trap. Even if we are only talking about your very limited sense of “blame” (i.e. it is only meaningful to speak of it in terms of beings that can choose), then it cannot possibly be wrong to speak of blaming creatures like humans, who can choose. Regardless of whether the choices are determined by their nature or not, the fact remains that human beings can do a thing called choosing. They can make right choices, and they can make wrong choices. Choices do not have to be “free choices” (whatever THAT is) to be legitimately called choices.
—It is possible that there is some unknown, undiscovered property that the universe has, such that mere matter actually exhibits free will? If so, then this flies in defiance of everything that we know about the physical universe, and it throws centuries of physics out of whack. —
As has been pointed out to you time and time again, you simply cannot make this arguement unless you have some information on how free will “works.” If you cannot even begin to suggest how it works, then how can you argue that it can’t work using the laws of physics? Your argument is pure ad ignorantum, coupled with ignorance of what you are even trying to explain.
Worse still, your arguement relies upon greedy reductionism: you are treating all processes and entities as if they were simple: directly explicable by you straight from the interactions of atomic particles. But this is nonsense. The real world is rife with extremely complex processes and entities that would be unthinkable seen from an atomic scale. Plenty of things, from life to intelligence, are explicable appealing purely to natural laws. Very complex things can emerge from simple origins, and until we actually nailed down an examined these things themselves, we never would have been able to know beforehand whether, or how, they were possible to explain using only natural laws. The arguement that intelligence is possible likewise looks like it is pure nonsense, viewed straight from atoms. But look at the higher order, and you find that some complex things can be intelligent.
What you are essentially doing is saying “atoms, intelligent! no way!” But no one is asserting that atoms are intelligent. Only certain organizations of atoms produce intelligence, and choice.
Finally, you are still, without explanation or defense, using the flim-flam sham of “physical” to create an unexplained realm purely by negation: “non-physical.” I don’t care whether something is “physical” or not (whatever THAT means): I only care if we know that it exists, and how.
—One does not have to know how something functions in order to accept that it exists.—
I’ll repeat this again, until it sinks in. You DO have to know how a claimed something supposedly functions before you can declare that it is physically impossible! It is YOU who have the burden of proof of explaining what the functioning of free will is, and why this functioning is incompatible with the physical world.
—I already explained what free will is. It is, as I said earlier, the ability to freely make choices.—
Sorry, but this is only you defining what it ISN’T. Not what it is.
I understand how this could be confusing for you, because it certainly looks like a definition. But it is not. Saying that something is “free” is useful only for defining what constraints it lacks: not what it is.
And to that, you have failed utterly to describe what the thing “free will” itself is or does that contributes to the making of choices. Until you can explain what difference the prescence or abscence of free will makes, then you will continue to be supporting a non-cognitive idea.
Let’s try this again. WHAT is making choices? And if there is a what, doesn’t that destroy the “free” part. If there is no “what,” doesn’t that destroy the “will” part?
—How do we know that we have free will, you ask? Do you seriously suggest that we don’t?—
I cannot say that we do or don’t, because I have no idea what it is that you think we supposedly do or don’t have. I understand that you think you have hold of an idea: but I disagree: there is no idea there.
—If so, then it is irrational to blame anyone for anything, for those people are incapable of modifying their behavior in any way whatsoever.—
Of course they are capable of it, even if they are simply pre-determined line of processes. Again, you are letting greedy reductionism get the better of you.
—A person with no free will is incapable of making any decision with any sort of volition.—
Oh plesae, don’t ruin the word “volition” the way you are trying to ruin the word “will.” It is by MY volition that I type these words, whether my act is pre-determined or not. The being described by “me” is a being such that it has this volition. If you continue to dodge questions and spew nonsense, I may modify my behavior and just ignore you.
Whatever happened to Enola Straight, our OP? Is it possible he observed that this GD was determined to go GDing on the (entirely predictable) tangent “Prove that there’s a soul…free will…God…” rather than the somewhat less-aired question originally asked?
What if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that there IS such a thing as a soul, more-or-less as conceived in the Judeo-Christian tradition?
Now, given that assumption–what is to be said about the relation of such an entity to the developing human body in the womb? I’ve given one suggestion, way way up there. How about some others?
Enola Straight didn’t specify what “soul” was in question. I said (at 1:01 PM) that my probability marker was near zero for the presence of a “soul” at any time, fetal or otherwise. JThunder then asked (at 1:05 PM) how I accounted for “free will” which tied the two together and the discussion was off on that track. Enola Straight never has untied them or specified what he was talking about.
I don’t choose to assume that there is such a thing as a soul, as more or less conceived in the Judeo-Christian tradition. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that such a thing, if it can be called that, exists. I really don’t understand JThunder’s constant claim that either a “soul” is present or everything is deterministic. I also think that “free will,” as I said, is just an invention designed to get God of the hook for human evil.
I’m quite sure than the essence of ME is in the electrical activity in my brain and the patterns of memory and behavior that seem to be stored and maintained there by that electrical activity (dynamic RAM?). When I die, that electrical activity will cease and David Simmons will cease to exist except as a pattern of electrical activity in the brains of others.
I have no idea how that all happens but then those who keep talking about a “soul” seem to not know any specifics about that either, so we are at least even.
When the doctor reads my final EKG and says that all brain activity has ceased, it would be pedantic to refuse to admit that all that electrical activity might just possibly have been collected into a ball and shipped off to Hell. Just the same, I don’t see how electrical activity can have the nervous system needed to feel pain from the flames. Nor do I understand how the electrical activity can know that it is in Hell since it has no sensory receptors to gather information from outside. I guess you can see that, all things considered, I don’t worry about Hell all that much.
JThunder, I’d contend that “free will” HAS to be based in the physical and natural rather than in the non-physical and the supernatural. I only have to look at, say, people with Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s thought that people with this disorder have some sort of “abnormal metabolism of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin.” Because of this purely PHYSICAL cause, their free will is mitigated to a large extent. They simply cannot help from yelling out. (The page I linked to educated me insofar as it explained that Tourette’s Syndrome merely creates a very strong compulsion to act on a tic, rather than making such action involuntary. Still, the free will in question is abrogated by the chemical malfunction).
So, in JThunderland, you have to postulate that, for some reason, these individuals have defective “souls” and therefore the ability to exert free-will is negated, to an extent.
Before you accuse me of building a strawman out of your position, I’d like to hear more about the quality of the souls of people with Tourette’s Syndrome, autism, or other such PHYSICAL afflictions. Are these souls merely gimpy, and that’s why the ability to choose freely is messed up in these individuals?
Quix
Note to self: Dates are cool.
On the other hand, y’all handily pinned JThunder for me. Thanks.
Try this metaphor on for size: The reason we blame people for their actions is because we can find many people who underwent similar situations who changed themselves.
Drop a person off a cliff, and you can’t blame them for falling. But if you, say, take away their source of income, they will not automatically become a burgler to support themselves. Therefore, the problem lies with the individual impoverished burglers.
haha so true. everyone who believes in a soul believes it to be this self-contained entity, with a full array of senses.
obviously it’s nonsense, so that could be used as an argument against the existence of a soul.
about putting blame on people.
i believe in an objective world, and a subjective world.
see, nature is objective, and it doesn’t have human emotions or thoughts.
all of nature is governed by it’s own laws, or else there would be chaos. now, on this ‘level’, i guess humans can’t change, they don’t make their own decicions, it is rather a HUGE amount of processes in the brain, pre-determined in a sense, because a human can’t make a totally illogical choice, there is always an influence or several influences, from the history of the brain, and when the choice is made, one last influence, that HAS to be taken from the information history. consider this: if we had free will, how could the brain make any decision at all? it seems to me like a weight, with 1 pound on both sides, it needs something to tip over to the other side. this to me, seems like it’s predetermined.
ok, BUT, in the Subjective world, that is, our human world, with values, emotions and everything else human, we DO indeed need to blame these entities for what they’ve done.
in our dayly life, we do not know of, or care for, this objective world that governs everything we do.
we follow the patterns and customs made by our ancestors through experience, to create a world where everyone could live happily. we can’t base our lives on objective science, it just wouldn’t work, also, it seems to go against human nature and logic.
my 2 cents.
Woah, I was enjoying that tangent on free will.
ANYWAYS…
When I said “soul” I didn’t just mean what the Judeo-Christi-Islamic Faiths define a soul to be, but as a Pan-Theocratic/Pan-Religeous/Pan-Philosophical construct.
I personally believe that you dont have a soul until you are capable of reasoning wether or not you have one.
A soul is entirely made up by the person. If you never contemplate on it, how do you know it exists? You can test for conciousness, you cannot test for a soul. If you choose to believe you have one, then you have one. If not, then you don’t.
your soul dosent govern you, or your actions or thoughts. If anything, your thoughts and actions govern your soul.
That is, of course, if you choose to accept that you have one.