Even assuming that’s true, it still doesn’t answer the point. What’s so great about knowing the difference between pleasure and pain that it justifies the fantastic amount of suffering on the planet? Of course, it isn’t true; actually it works the other way around. No one is ever satisfied. Those who are truly in dire straits know it, but those who aren’t can always find something to be unhappy about.
–Cliffy
P.S. It’s your job to prove that free will exists, not mine to disprove it. It’s an amazing, fantastic concept and human behavior is much easier to explain without it. This qualifies it as an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Free will can never be proven. To be proven, something has to be testable. IANA Scientist, but I don’t think there exists a quantifiable test to determine who’s “really pulling the strings”.
I don’t pretend to be able to prove the existence of “free will.” I accept it as fact, just as I accept the fact that I exist, (although that is unprovable, as well), or that you exist.
I ask you. If human beings aren’t responsible for their actions, who is?
That’s the same as asking who is responsible when a dog barks or when an apple falls from a tree or when a piece of bread lands buttered-side down. Nobody. It just happens.
I’m perfectly happy to agree that free will cannot be proven. But why should that let you off the hook? My postscript stated that, as the person advocating the more fantastic claim, you’ve got to be the one to produce evidence. In the absence of evidence either way, we need to assume that there is no free will. (Occam’s Razor.) Now, I’m willing to concede for the sake of argument that God is no more fantastic an explanation for the creation of the Universe than random chance is (I don’t believe that, BTW) so I’m not applying the Razor to God. But the Razor does apply to free will. When you concede you can’t prove it exists, then I win.
Cliffy, WHY is free will a more fantastic claim than lack of free will?
It looks like you’re asserting that free will is the more outlandish claim, and since it’s not proven, it can assumed to be false. I don’t even agree with your original assertion that it’s a stronger assertion than determinism, and until you’ve established that much, you haven’t established the rest of your argument.
The oversimple answer to the question is that we know that clocks work. Therefore, we know that machines can go from state A to state B in a given amount of time through their mechanism. If I posit that that is how humans work, it’s just an increase in complexity, not a change in kind. Free will is something we don’t have any evidence of except that we think we’re making decisions, but that is equally good evidence of determinism.
An omnipotent god could have designed a perfect system without regard to economy or any other limitations. A god with limitations, or for whatever reason sought to impose limitations on his creations, would probably have regard to economy, and so created an imperfect system, which includes suffering (hunger, pain etc.).
Of course, I’m not a god, and His motivation can be completely unknown to me, but an all-powerful all-benevolent od wouldn’t allow suffering through sheer force of will, wouldn’t he?
Senor Beef says:
Speak for yourself.
[Cliffy converted me to existential atheism elsewhere through the force of his argument]
How is the ability of humans to make decisions evidence of determinism? It seems to me that if we appear to be able to choose either to do A or to do B, there are two obvious possibilities. Either we CAN in fact choose to do the one or the other, or we can’t but things are set up so that we still THINK we can. Is not the latter postulating a more complicated explanation than the former? And heck, when we really get right down to it, nature itself is not deterministic but probablistic; why should people then be any different?
Basically, I read one side as saying “look, it appears that I have the freedom to make any decision I wish to, therefore I postulate free will because the simplest explanation of this observation is that I CAN make any decision I wish to.” The other side says “well, nature follows natural laws, these laws are basically deterministic, and people are a part of nature; ergo free will is an illusion.” To my mind, neither has been remotely adequately demonstrated, and I don’t begin to see how one could apply Occam’s Razor to a situation in which there is no evidence whatsoever either way. I can’t simply assert that I’m right because my explanation is simpler, because you don’t agree that it IS simpler. Likewise, you can’t simply assert that you’re right because your explanation is simpler, because I disagree with THAT premise.
Of course, this is WAYYYY of topic, so perhaps we should just agree to disagree? I’d be interested in continuing this, but perhaps this isn’t the appropriate thread.
g8rguy, I agree this is off-topic and would be better treated elsewhere, but I’m too busy at work right now to start a whole new thread. The gist of the argument is that our feelings of free will are exactly what you’d expect a conscious automaton to experience (becasue the automationthru which he acts is: Choice AB is posed to automaton, and through his decision-generating matrix, he “chooses” A instead of B; each step is a thought in his head, but each thought is determined from those that came before). Therefore, IMO, the feeling of free will is equally a feature of a free willed being and a determined one.
Returning to the original question, if I might: By who’s standard do we determine that biological life is sub optimal? I’m not arguing in favor of intelligent design, mind you, but IF the premise is that intelligent design did occur and that it was a “super intelligence” that did the designing, we would have to know all of the microevolutionary steps of all living organisms and all the intermediate environments before we could assess the optimal or sub optimal nature of said design.
Vestigial features, junk DNA, etc. that seem pointless to we mere mortals might have once been critical cogs in the great watchwork we call life…
Then again, maybe life’s a big crap shoot. How are we to know?