I don’t think we two are going to have a productive discussion, so I’m backing out of arguing with you.
I don’t disagree; I’m not trying to argue whether it does or doesn’t exist. Rather, it just seems to be that, because our experiences imply it’s existence, I would think the default position would be to accept free will, just as our experiences imply the physical universe exists, and so materialism is a default position.
And my point with non-determinism and non-causality is not that if we do live in a non-deterministic universe free will necessarily exists, but that if we can prove we live in a deterministic universe free will doesn’t exist (putting aside, for the sake of the point, the arguments I’ve seen for deterministc free will).
That said, I am aware of that research, and if one has read about it and then used it as a basis to for the opinion that free will doesn’t exist, that’s fine, but it doesn’t really speak to the point I was trying to make about my understanding of the spirit of that. That is as much the idea isn’t as much to assume something doesn’t exist until it is proven to exist, rather to accept the best scientific theory offered until a better one comes across. Otherwise, it would preclude plenty of other phenomena, like how black holes were for decades, or how the Higgs-Boson is currently.
Since I can hope to make an intelligent argument to you: a river is a river, but a river is not just the sum of its physical components. If only because its physical components changes drastically all the time. A “river” is a human abstraction describing something like “the general flow of water starting at point A, flowing following such and such a course to point B, and every more or less continuous state of that flow or river-bed until it dries out ‘for ever’ or ‘merges with another river’”.
The main problem here is one of “identity” over time; what allows us to say that the Rhyne on jan 1 2000 is the same thing as the the Rhyne on jan 1 2010. But identity seems to me to be an entirely artificial concept that even changes depending on the use its put to. In one usage, you are the same human as you were 20 years ago, but in some other usages, nobody would say you are the same person.
I think that most people who say they are materialists are really saying that they do not believe in supernatural things: that is to say, intelligent beings (intelligent in the sense that they have purposes of their own, and, generally, you can somehow communicate with them, through prayer, ritual, or whatever) that do not have material bodies, but can nevertheless affect material things (including, perhaps, human bodies).
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Naturalism* or physicalism are probably better words for this than materialism. Physicalism is the view that the only things that exist are those that are describable by the laws and principles of physics (presumably in some future, fully complete form). Naturalism is the more minimalist view that nothing supernatural exists: or perhaps it is better seen as the methodological principle that no acceptable explanation of any phenomenon should depend on appeal to supernatural entities.
In the old days, in the time of the ancient Greek atomists, who sought to explain everything in terms of little lumps of matter and their motions, materialism, physicalism and (strict) naturalism all came to pretty much the same thing, but these days, now that physics has gotten so complicated, that may longer be the case.
(Honestly, I am not sure whether energy, or forces, or photons, or “strings” or whatever count as material things or not, but they are certainly not supernatural. Nobody, not even religious or superstitious people, thinks that praying to them, or sacrificing to them, or whatever, will have the least chance of influencing their behavior, or that they “care” about what happens to anyone or anything, including themselves.)
But when you say “Something has to cause the will” aren’t you begging the question?
I think it’s very plausible that our intuitions about our minds may be wrong. I’m not saying it’s the default position; it’s just the position I find more intelligable given what I believe about people and biology etc at the moment.
Not really a problem for me; I don’t think we live in a completely deterministic universe anyway. Question is, of course; even if we did, what are the real consequences we should draw from that?
Black holes and Higgs-Bosons had and have at least some reasons to assume they should exist, given what we knew and know about the universe. What that means is that we can and should try and find out if we can test it. The problem with many “non-materialist” propositions is that they cannot ever be disproven or proven - which makes them pretty useless in a very practical sense. And not because that makes them “unscientific”, but because indisprovable “facts” have - by definition - no impact on our lives (unless we accept them).
Your citations do no such thing.
The timing of the brains activity to access memories, provide comparisons, wait for incongruities to emerge, resolve priorities, and consciously override actions has nothing to do with free will. It is the data put into that memory by choice not the processing time that determine if the resulting act is one made freely.
So if you think it so it shall be!.
That seems like poor logic to me. As I understand, pornographic material is often defined in a “you know it when you see”. To argue that we cannot get a good definition, therefore it doesn’t exist seems like intellectual sloth to me.
Either way, I’m not trying to sidetrack into a free will discussion, while the concept is an interest of mine, it doesn’t seem relevant here. Rather, I’m more interested in, what seems relevant to the OP, the idea of base assumptions. Free will comes up for me in this topic, because the idea that nothing exists until it is proven to exist doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
To try to carry what I’m saying about free will back to materialism, we can observe and experience the universe, but it too eventually leads to some sort of infinite regression just like free will does. So, what I’m failing to see is, what base assumption makes it valid to accept the physical universe but reject free will. The only bases I’m seeing right now seem to either accept or reject both.
I think I can put it quite simply, in a manner that will highlight the problems with the definition of “free will”: what’s the alternative to “caused will”?
Correct - if there is no such thing.
If you think your memories are determined by your own free choice, then it seems to me your memory works differently than mine.
Not at all. Saying it’s “free” begs the question.
Fair enough. I can appreciate that. Though, I got the impression from Diogenes that he was implying it is the default position, which is why I’m confused.
I’ve been under the impression that many (most?) who don’t believe in free will don’t precisely because they believe the universe is deterministic. If that’s not the case, I stand corrected.
And until relatively recent research into neurology, other than philosophical arguments, there really wasn’t any reason to believe free will didn’t exist, despite our experiences to the contrary, just as in before Einstein we didn’t have any reason to believe black holes existed or before Coppernicus we didn’t have any reason to believe the Earth wasn’t at the center of the universe.
The Higgs-Boson is particularly interesting in this sense, because the current theories predict it to exist, but it seems to be right on that cusp of “proven to exist” to me. That is, I can understand a skeptic perspective, like the one offered in the OP, that “they probably exist and there’s no reason to believe they don’t”, but to assert with certainty that they exist despite, to my knowledge, any physical observations, seems to violate that definition of materialism, whereas to reject that they exist because they haven’t been observed seems to violate the idea of common sense all together. In short, that such a degree of absolute certainty, as expressed by materialism, just doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.
There’s a distinction between the feeling of freedom and the concept of free will.
No-one disputes that people feel free. I can pick up a sheet of paper right now, and draw a picture, and that action, to me, feels like it was not derived from past experiences and my own physical makeup.
OTOH “free will”, is a rather poorly-defined concept. And there are reasons to suppose it may only have been proposed because it appeals to our sensibilities: the religious like the idea that god can judge, without any responsability, and we all like to judge others without causality headaches.
Nonsense. If anything it is more likely to led to a genuine connection to a “larger reality and other individuals” because you are actually paying attention to them, and not to something nonexistent like gods or souls or the afterlife. A materialist is going to be concerned about real actions affecting real people. A materialist is going to talk to real people, not pray to his imaginary friend.
No, materialism is just a view of the world. It has no “point” beyond being correct because it isn’t supposed to.
No, experiences are just as material as rocks. They are material things happening to material things recorded in the material medium of the brain.
No.
Of course; it’s called “organization”. I’m more complicated than a barrel full of goo that has the same elemental composition than I do. But there’s nothing non-material about that complexity, it’s still all just matter and energy.
Not the same thing. We can’t agree on the definition of pornography, but that’s not the same as being unable to coherently define it at all. “Pornography is any work primarily designed to sexually arouse people” might not be agreed to by everyone, but it is at least logically consistent and violates no laws of physics. Free will on the other hand is just nonsensical, and appears “defined” primarily by what it isn’t; it isn’t random, it isn’t deterministic, which leaves…what?
Sorry!
No not work differently, but maybe disciplined differently.
Both men and women conveniently forget and both men and women prejudice what they hear and thus both intentionally and automatically remember things how they want to or driven to. Both the intentional and automatic means to remember can be altered and changed conscientiously with free will.
Considering that free will is a philosophical claim in the first place, with no scientific support for it whatsoever, saying that “other than philosophical arguments” there wasn’t any reason to disbelieve in it is actually quite damning to the concept. That’s like saying “other than the fact that it bounces off armor there’s no reason to think our anti-tank missile won’t work!”
I can see where Dio is coming from, and I think he makes a fairly good case for it: regardless of how we feel, how would a “free will” work at all? I think he’s right in asserting that free will is a religious concept not just because historically, it unarguably is, but also because a genuine free will seems to require a dualistic/platonic perspective: that is, a “soul” or “spirit” that’s the “essence” of your “self” and not influenced by the body.
The deterministic objection to free will is fairly obvious. But even given a non-deterministic universe of quantum randomness, I don’t see how that makes us more “free to choose”. It’s just another factor that might (and probably does to some extent) influence our decisions but that doesn’t mean “we” can “choose”.
Free will is intimately tied to ideas of punishment, prevention of crime and justice. But in actual fact, you only really need “free will” as a concept if you think a Christian-style justice is important. The classical Greek concept of justice (as horrid as it is) for example is much more mechanistic and can easily do without that concept. But the real reason Christian theology came up with free will at all is that otherwise, all the evil in the world would be God’s fault.
I guess that this is more a case of genuine ignorance of the subject - at least it is for me. I would be surprised if many of the actual researchers don’t have fairly strong opinions on the existence of the Higgs boson - even if most of them would discard their beliefs if they can be shown some good evidence to the contrary.