Cite?
Huh? That doesn’t answer the ontological vs. epistemological debate.
Free will certainly does not exist.
That seems to be the consensus around here (although I argued on the previous page that even a community which denies free will will have to have some concept sufficiently analogous to free will that you might as well call it that. **SentientMeat ** seemed to be the only person particularly sympathetic to that line of reasoning, though).
Well, I said :
Short of somehow achieving total self awareness I think we’re stuck with treating free will as if it’s real, whether or not it is real. That sounds fairly close to what you said.
If we don’t indeed have free will, then we aren’t “functioning” at all, just appearing to. There’s no ‘agency’ in our hands to be hampered by the lack of illusion.
Lack of free means lack of free will; it doesn’t mean we don’t exist. We most certainly “function”; we walk, we talk, we build things and argue about free will on the internet.
Reread my post again. I haven’t claimed we don’t exist.
If I may ask, what is your understanding of what the EPR experiments involving Bell’s Inequality shows us? The physicist’s consensus is that they clearly demonstrate that it is not just a deficiency in “human knowledge” (ie. that the variables are somehow hidden from us) but that the uncertainty is as fundamental as anything can be.
Or, even more simply, how do you explain the results of the two slit experiment?
We really do make choices, they really do have consequences. There’s no need to swallow any metaphysical nonsense in order to live life.
My question to you, is how would one ever ascertain that the uncertainty is fundamental to the universe? We understand the universe solely through the knowledge we acquire. And I thought only local hidden variables were ruled out.
[quote=Gyan]
My question to you, is how would one ever ascertain that the uncertainty is fundamental to the universe?[/qupte]Whoa - I asked you first. How does one ascertain that anything is “fundamental”, if EPR is not one such example?
Well, what is the difference, in your opinion, between a non-local universe and one in which uncertainty was as fundamental as something could be?
Good question. How does one?
I asked you first. What do the EPR experiments show if not that uncertainty is as fundamental as anything can be?
They show a counterintuitive result & which our reasoning within a ‘realist’/local framework, leads to contradictions. The only fundamental thing I can say is I am conscious.
The counterintuitive result being that uncertainty is not merely a temporary deficiency in human knowledge (ie. in which variables are hidden), but that uncertainty is … ?
fundamental. But you have consistently missed the point.
Fundamental to what:
1)human’s ability to achieve knowledge, only?
2)nature of the universe?
A simple thought experiment that appropriates Einstein’s sentiment: You & I, seated opposite to each other, are playing some dice-based game. I interrupt our game & pick up a (regular) dice and palm it, so that I’m hiding its view from you. I juggle it a bit, and then ask you to tell me which face is on top, then immediately juggle it again. You can NEVER know which face was on top. You can’t rely on my answers; I might be lying. As is recently publicized in political rhetoric, torture might not work either. But could you conclude that the uncertainty is fundamental to Being? Was no face on top? Were all six faces on top??? Assume I wasn’t looking at the dice. So how does EPR prove that uncertainty is fundamental to the universe rather than a fundamental limit to our knowledge of it?
The consensus of physicists is the former rather than the latter: that the dice is uncertain when you do not look at it. The point of the EPR experiment is that the universe is wise to the tricks you might employ to sneak some kind of peek at the dice face - if it were merely a limit to human knowledge, then such a limit could not act retroactivley as it clearly does in the experiment (imagine the detectors being light years apart and the choice of measurement axis being made while the particles were in mid flight!).
And human knowledge is certain on this inference?