Sorry, I latched onto the predestination part of the post rather than the determinism part of the post. If you’re looking for books, there are a couple that I’ve heard good things about, though I haven’t read them: How Free Are You and The Illusion of Conscious Will. The second one is probably closer to what you’re looking for. Look at Paul Henri Thirty, baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature for a classic account of determinism. I looked but I can’t seem to find a text online that has the relevant material.
Is this thread going to turn into a debate, or are we staying in the recommend a text mode?
Again, that doesn’t answer the question. What justification do you have for getting upset at someone, if that person has no free will in such matters.
Indeed, if there is no free will, then you shouldn’t get upset if I choose to make denigrating remarks about your mother’s sexuality. After all, in the absence of free will, I might be hopelessly compelled to make such remarks. One does not cast moral blame on a tree if it happens to fall upon one’s car; after all, it was merely acting in accordance with the laws of physics. By the same token, one should not cast blame on other human beings for ANYTHING, no matter how reprehensible those actions may be. After all, without free will, they have no choice but to act as they do. None whatsoever.
I do agree with you. Realistically we have no right to be angry at a being that acts only as it can. But i guess we operate on the same level, and if it seems like something that is detrimental to our own existence, it will create negative feelings. Its just one of those things you have to accept will happen, whether or not the reasoning behind it is sound.
I don’t know that it’s exactly what you want, but Dennett’s Freedom Evolves covers the breadth of the free will vs. determinism arguement. I’m actually reading it right now (started it over a year ago, got four chapters in, then dropped it) and if I had to sum his argument up in one sentence, it would be something like “We have free will because our mental processes are sufficiently complex to give us the illusion of free will.” In other words, at some point the system becomes so complex that no individual impetus is sufficient to direct it in deterministic terms, even though the system behaviors, ex post facto, follow a more-or-less logical system of behavior.
As you can imagine, a lot of the actual arguments are somewhat tautological in nature, and I don’t know that it really supports your hypothesis that “free will is an illusion” but it does start from an assumption of a purely deterministic universe (no Og-like influences), but it does make for interesting, if somewhat enigmatical reading.
this is very good, and certainly it concerns me. i do not go through daily life thinking about derterminism, it seems impossible to do so. is this a limitation of the theory or of myself though?
another thought is that the philposophy of ethics is much more muddled then the philophy of determinism, and if one of them has to go the choice is obvious
but honestly your post concerns me deeply and is quite troubling. though i don’t see how bringing up morality can prove a theory about the physical universe wrong or right
man this is one of those strange moments when I look inside for something to say, and its all blank, literally there is nothing there, i don’t know, i don’t know, i don’t know, that is all I hear! strange feeling
listening to some dope experimental techno by Richard Devine though! and its giving me the chills!
so for what it’s worth, i totally do not understand this universe, it’s f-d up man!
I completely agree with this recommendation. Most of the ideas on determinism were difficult for me to grasp at first, but once I wrapped my mind around them, my entire outlook changed. I didn’t recommend it because it deals with compatibilism, rather than the hard determinist view that 2 click twiddle flare is looking for.
As Gyan says, JT, those same prior inputs also explain your becoming upset, which itself acts as an input into future calculations (if cut into traffic then possible inconvenient expression of upset by other driver).
I don’t understand your point either; it’s as if you’re saying that we can’t make choices because of the actions determined by our brains, as if ‘we’ and ‘our brains’ are two totally separate things. They are not - the choices that ‘our brains’ make are the result of a huge network of vastly interacting electrochemical variables, which in turn are linked conditionally to a large array of sense data and memory - ‘we’ are the result of all that mess of variables; when ‘our brains’ make a choice, ‘we’ make a choice.
Assume that, given a set of circumstances and the state of a human brain at that precise moment, then the decision to act is fixed. If so, then we don’t have free will, we just obey chemical impulses.
However physics currently states that we can never have complete information about particles. (Even the act of observing them can change their state.)
Therefore there is essentially a state of randomness, which means behaviour is unpredictable. Therefore do we really have free will after all.
I think you underestimate the difficulties of this discussion, especially as we don’t have facts on how we make decisions.
Does that sound like ‘will’ to you? It sounds more like the dice to me - we certainly wouldn’t say that the dice shows the face it shows because of its free will.
Neither can we predict the weather, and yet we would all agree that the future weather is ultimately caused by prior inputs: The completely deterministic is not necessarily completely determinable.
Also, barring the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of QM, there’s no would-have-been - I chose porridge for breakfast this morning; there’s no reality* in which I chose scrambled eggs or skipped breakfast; I had porridge; it’s what happened and it only appears inevitable in retrospect; if I’d chosen the eggs, we would be looking back at that choice as being every bit as inevitable.
*Unless of course the many worlds thing is correct, in which case there is no choice at all, anywhere, as all the particles in all the worlds are just following their own variation of the script.
Your premises, even if true, lead to a non-sequitur. Like SentientMeat said, undeterminable by us does not imply indeterminism in essence.
Although, in the end, I agree with Liberal. The concept of free will is like the concept of a personal god. You can always reinterpret current data and knowledge to render them compatible with the concepts. With the nature of knowledge, proof and induction being what they are, these concepts are not falsifiable.
Um, you’re conflating the tenants of quantum mechanics (indeterminancy) with network complexity. The brain works as electrochemical operations that are, as far as we are able to observe, fully explainable without any influence on the quantum level; no transistors, quantum random number generators, or so forth.
Behavior, at least in a general sense, clearly isn’t unpredictable; we can anticipate a standard range of responses given some input, even if we can’t predict the particular response for every given case or trace out the exact neural pathways that will lead to a certain result. It’s relatively easy to build a network of action-response controls in which there is sufficient variability (any input has a multivariant outputs) such that it is impossible, or at least computationally prohibitive, to determine a result, but which you can step backwards through and see each operation as being deterministic.
Part of the problem as I see it, in talking about “free will”, is that there is a wide variability in the semantics of the term. Does free will mean the ability to make decisions and be held accountable, and to what extent? Clearly much of our behavior is, if not instinctual, at least automatic. I may have free will about what kind of bagel I’ll select in the morning, but the truth is that I’ll order the sesame bagel with salmon shmear (yes, toasted, thank you) without actually going through a conscious reasoning process. I have choice but do not (from a conceptual standpoint) exert volition.
Here are some views on destiny and conditionality from a Chan Buddhist (Chinese) point of view.
(These are PDF documents) The Buddhist Perspective on Life and Destiny Conditionality: The Law of Cause and Effect Twiddle, I think these offer some unique insight and a lucid and simple perspective on free will and might help you pronounce your thoughts about the subject.
When trying to explain your position, it is quite a leap for most people that have not thought about this stuff to suddenly picture and understand in it’s entirety what you are trying to say and why the conclusion is logical.
I would recommend starting with a smaller example, like the movement of balls on a pool table and how their position can be predicted at some later time if you know the mass/velocity/direction (etc.) of each of the balls at the starting point.
Then, once they understand that, move up to more complex examples, like the brain/body explaining that the same principles apply but on a much larger scale.
, guess its a touchy subject though :smack: