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From your cite:
The bits I bolded contradict themselves. It doesn’t matter if it’s the particles which appear “out of nothing” or if it’s the fluctuations that cause them that do. At some point, there’s spontaneous action, even your own cite tacitly admits it. Shifting the uncaused action to the energy is just piling on more turtles…
Here is a recent thread we had debating whether an infinite regress is possible. It was about time, though, not causal chains, but relevant nonetheless. As you can see, it is definitely a debatable subject, and not necessarily illogical.
Stratocaster, do you believe ANY infinite regress is illogical, or only infinite chains of causes and movers?
OK, I slept on it, and I had a revealing dream: our world rests on a giant tortoise; I look beneath, and it’s turtles all the way down…
Sorry, not sure I have too much to elaborate. I’m concluding that it is simply axiomatic for me that a causal chain made up of entities, each of whom may not be its own cause, cannot regress infinitely; the nature of the chain’s components make that so. This is probably an element of my perspective as well: I find it difficult to believe that “infinity” can ever be anything but an abstract concept, that there is no such thing as an infinity in our reality. All things that actually occur can be measured, and infinity cannot. An infinity, whose distinct subsets each equal infinity, is an abstraction that can be accommodated only within abstract mathematics (e.g., cardinal arithmetic, surreal numbers), if infinities are allowed for. But it’s inconceivable, for me, in reality. I don’t see how reality could accommodate it. So, an infinite regress is a non-starter for that reason as well.
I’m back to trying to find the bottom turtle. 
Just saw this–as posted, I suppose I would say both are illogical in anything but the abstract.
I don’t object to people disagreeing with compatibilism (although I am myself sympathetic to compatibilism, and have defended it in print). But the idea that someone like E.O. Wilson could presume to write about free will without even engaging compatibilism (or even acknowledging its existence) is evidence that he is not qualified to enter the debate (at least not in print). That was my point (way back on page 2!) about doing philosophy without knowing any of the arguments: it’s one thing to disagree with a position; it’s another thing not to engage it because you don’t even know it exists.
Well, I guess this is at least in part addressed to me, so I guess it’s only fair if I should answer it in this thread, particularly because it’s already been hijacked all to hell and back anyway; however, if we want to get into a serious discussion of the issue, I suppose it’d be best to do so in a separate thread.
This is kinda what doesn’t sit quite right with me – if you merely define free will appropriately, i.e. in such a way that it corresponds to some property we have anyway, its existence is trivial, and that just doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a meaningful stance, to me.
Incidentally, I’m somewhat surprised that you label yourself a compatibilist – I would have thought that compatibilism is expressly a reaction to determinism, and thus not applicable in your case, since you reject determinism – as do I, by the way, on the same grounds as you, i.e. that it is in my opinion contradicted by physical reality. Actually, my views on the subject are almost altogether congruent with yours, since I similarly reject the notion of ‘total’ free will (for similar reasons, actually, that I reject a ‘first cause’-argument, since attributing to it the cause of my will, it raises the question of what wills my will, and so on in infinite regress), and am merely unwilling to try to save what can be saved by an appropriate redefinition.
Yep, and I agree. If yor paraphrasing is correct, E.O. Wilson’s opinion does not sound very informed.
I was primarily defending against the summary as given by erislover and Half Man Half Wit of Compatibilism. Their posts had implied that Compatibilists start with the premise “free will exists” and then find they have to redefine free will.
I was saying that in my case, and in most other Compatibilists I’ve read about, we believe a redefinition is necessary for its own sake because the popular definition is meaningless. Then conclusions follow from that.
Or, there is the alternate position defended by some compatibilists (including some old-school ones like Walter Stace) that the libertarians are the ones who have the definition of ‘freedom’ wrong; that the definition of ‘free will’ that is implicit in our ordinary usage is compatibilist. Ergo, no redefinition required. Not sure I buy it, but YMMV.
I do get that, however, it is simply not immediately clear to me that what is meant by the popular definition is not something worth talking about in its own right, even if the conclusion is that it doesn’t/can’t exist (as I would argue it is). By re-appropriating that concept’s name, you’re effectively pre-empting such discussion.
Well, yeah, I concede that there’s almost no point calling myself a compatibilist, because the existence or non-existence of a “sensible” free will is not a point of contention.
In my view, the traditional definition of free will is something religion demands; so that god can judge us and bear no responsibility himself. But the concept makes no sense.
Somehow though, the idea has become propogated that determinism is the only problem for “true” free will.
No, they do not. As I explicitly emphasized, the fact that these transitions occur spontaneously does not mean that they are uncaused. The necessary preconditions must still exist for these transitions to occur; it’s just that the timing and nature of these transitions still have an element of randomness to them.
Again, I took great pains to emphasize this distinction. You can’t argue against that by (in effect) saying “But the word ‘spontaneous’ is there!”
Mijin
At the moment, I consider myself a compatibilist, actually, inasmuch as I consider myself anything on the topic of the will (which is not much), but I believe it is fair to exclude compatibilism from most free will debates precisely because it is an equivocal use of “free will” for a compatibilist to say we have it, IMO. You disagree. I believe compatibilism should be mentioned in some kind of survey on issues of the will comma freedom of, but either it is honestly lumped in with determinism (from the perspective of the libertarian camp) or it is just some guy trolling a debate. “Hey, you’re all wrong, this is what freedom means.” Even if, as I believe, the compatibilist is right.
Yes you can, because “uncaused” is what “spontaneous” MEANS in this context. That’s what true “randomness” IS; something uncaused and therefore by-definition unpredictable.
And what “preconditions” are you talking about ? Quantum fluctuations permeate space and affect everything.
Psst, JThunder, take a peak at post #142.
Aquinas lived in a time where atoms, quarks etc. were unheard of. A prime mover would have to exist somewhere, where was it? If it is not physical is it like an atom or quark or are they considered physical?
If God is a supreme being then He would be an entity. If He is made of nothing then He doesn’t exist.
A mover is not necessarily a loving thing,a boat could start a wave but then the wave would continue on it’s own with out any further help from the boat.
I do not see Aquinas proving anything except that he believed that it was a supreme being who started everything.
No, it does not. “Spontaneous” and “uncaused” are not synonymous. “Spontaneous” means that it can occur at any time. It does not mean “uncaused”; in fact, the necessary preconditions must still occur in order for these events to occur.
The only justification for insisting that these two terms are equivalent would be a prior commitment to the notion that such quantum events are necessarily uncaused. There is simply no justification for insisting on their equivalency.
[url=define: spontaneous - Google Search]Definitions of spontaneous on the Web
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You’re the one who has to prove that quantum events are caused. They appear to be random. Prove that they’re not.
You also still need to be aware that the quantum field is not dependent on this universe to exist, so there’s no reason to think it requires a beginning.
And if I had claimed that they were not random, your objection would have some validity. I did not though; quite the contrary; in earlier postings, I emphasized that the outcome of quantum events ARE random. This is not equivalent to saying that they are uncaused.
Consider a superposition state, for example. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, when you take a measurement of a system in a superposition state, it will collapse into one of the component states. The exact state into which it collapses will be random. Is this transition uncaused, though? Obviously not, since it still requires prior events to occur – the establishment of the superposition state and the actual act of measurement.
To use a layman’s example, when you roll a die, you can consider the outcome to “random.” Does this mean that the outcome was uncaused, though? Obviously not, since something had to set the die roll in motion. (Again, this is an analogy – a simplification for laypeople. One might argue that it’s not strictly random, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. When drawing analogies between quantum events and classical mechanics, complete rigor is simply not possible, and so one must buy into the notion that the die roll is random in order to properly illustrate what happens at the quantum level.)
There is simply no justification for saying that a random event is inherently uncaused. There’s even less justification for accusing me of denying that quantum events are random, especially since I emphasized this distinction in prevoius postings.
Diogenes, you know better than that. Your Google search said that “spontaneous” means “without APPARENT cause.” It does not say that there was no cause whatsoever.
Consider a spontaneous abortion, for example. Do you really want to claim that absolutely nothing causes a spontaneous abortion (a miscarriage) to occur? Or that nothing causes something to burst into fire when spontaneous combustion takes place? Do you?
The reality is that people will describe such events as “spontaneous” even though they have a genuine cause. When a fire occurs, it’s because the right combination of temperature and materials combine to produce combustion. To an outsider, this may appear to be uncaused, but a scientist knows better.
So it is with claiming that particles appearing “spontaneously” are therefore uncaused. They are not.
Cite that they’re not?