Free will is one's imagination of possible outcomes and actions...

Free will is one's imagination of possible outcomes and actions. These actions might not be logical or might not be possible physically but one can still imagine oneself doing them or attempting to do them.
Even If im in a cell and its locked i can still imagine myself breaking the bars and escaping but when i physically try i might not succeeed.

Now, One's personal experience is not reducible to neuroscience and the physical workings of the human brain as percieved externally nor can it be fully simulated.
A full simulation is exactly the full experiece of yours as you experiece it yourself in real time.
No matter how powerful a lab or how skilled the scientists your personal inner world cannot be scientifically understood, your will, as the simulation and de facto your existence as a self experiecing individual can never be fully simulated.
Free will as described above, is exactly this full self experience, free will as imagination. It is a result of the personal self examination of an experiencing entity as it exists in time not and can never be an external simulation or examination through the specific methodologies of the scientific method.

While I agree, if free will doesn't exist (I believe it does), one can still say your imagination of possible outcomes was determined.

Who controls this will? Some magical soul?

Thanks theists.

In what way? you cannot know a person, you cannot get intside his head and be him which is the only full determining simulation. It determines itself it is expereincing in time.
You can determine how its neurons are firing but not the experience as the experience itself is the determination.
Nor is it determined anymore than you trying to determine your next actions. It is its own determinator.

>Free will as described above, is exactly this full self experience, free will as imagination. It is a result of the personal self examination of an experiencing entity as it exists in time not and can never be an external simulation or examination through the specific methodologies of the scientific method.
I find that defining free will as the perception of having alternatives or non-perception of coercion is most useful, from a jurist's standpoint. Determinism, indeterminism or notions of some magical substance apart from causality or chance - none of that matters much the way I see it.

it is its own determinator. do not think of it as you watch a ball colliding into another seting it in motion. Such causal relations are the nature and predesposition of our perception of the world. It is part of our simulation of the world not it itself. our simulation is self determinning.

Sure, and if you want to predict what ANOTHER person does as a ball is flung at him what is important is prior observations of said person.
But what im talking about is the decoupling of one's actions from causal relations that we OBSERVE of the outside including when we observe ourselves.

I got you. Makes sense. These are my views on free will - we are the very thing being "determined"

Nice buzzwords.

Think of it as us looking at an ape. We can predict what it does and what it will do as it operates on reality and as we observe its body and brain operating through our machines, but only it itself to itself through the process of its own full existence is able to understand itself. Its own operation on the level of full self existence. Being itself is its full "simulation" and only on this fully immersed level does it have free will.

i get that "no one can understand me as well as i understand me", but what point are you trying to make? that free will is simply one's imagination? the matrix can't exist? how does this affect me and what are the implications?

It is the nature of the scientific method to view things as causal as the scientific methods of exploration are our created extensions of the way we percieve.
Percieving and methods of analysing perception are causal but percieving causally the external is only part of our full existence. At the top level, meaning the most complex level, the level which is all that we are, there is no causality as again, causality is simply a result of the way we percieve the world through the senses.
The "trick" is in the fact that sense peception and causal analysis is an inherent result of a subsystem of our full self which cannot be examined scinetifically or examined externally as it is not external.
external in the sense of not being part of your existense as you experience yourself.

The point is that we are not causal machines, only our operation in reality as it is observed is causal.
You have free will in the most free sense, as you feel it.
Do you feel you have free will to do as you please? Can you imagine yourself doing whatever you want to do? no matter how bizzare or crazy or "out there"? Well this is exactly how free you are.
It cannot be reduced to scientific determinism. You are not the neurons firing in your brain as seen through an MRI or any other tool.
Free will can only be discussed on the level of our emotions and thoughts and experienced.

Thanks for articulating my view of free will. I could understand it intuitivvely but it was really hard to put into words - something like even if the universe is totally determined, we are so "embedded" in its system that there is nothing "behind me controlling my actions, we are that very determination for ourselves. I am what determines me.

Really hard to articulate like I said.

Good stuff.

Free will can be seen in art and in human endevours and creations as we experience them, but cannot be reduced to physical interactions of parts.
The fact the earth moves around the sun regularly and according to rules and an electron moves around a proton does not make us bound by physical causality. Our expressions of emotion, in literature, fiction, art is where our free will and imagination gives the most expression to itself as that is usually art's intention and goal and it is exactly there to express the things we cannot do or experience in the observed physical reality. it is the purest manifestation of our free will and imagination.

In systems of art creation there us usually the least amount of limitation. They are exactly constructed and maintained to limit the imagination as little as possible.
In them almost anything you can imagine can happen.

This is not proof of free will. It's just proof that each human brain interprets things in a slightly different manner.
"You" are a product of your brain's functions and the same goes for all of "your" thoughts.

Read about the demon of Laplace and shut up

Brain functions are simply the way we externally percieve reality and of course our brain and body.
But we ourselves are not just our sense perception. We are the sum total of all our experience. D you percieve yourself as causal? your thoughts as causal? By what means can you percieve yourself as such? Observing a brain functioning causally is a result of our inherent causal perception. but observing something external is not obviously the same as expericing yourself. Do you not agree? do you experiece yourself as you experience your sensual perception of reality? No.
There is no proper comparison because we only feel ourselves by the very nature that we are ourselves. We cannot experience with our senses and thus scientifcally our own experince of existence.
It cannot be reduced to extenral perception.

Maybe first read what i wrote and think about it since Laplace's demon does not address what i wrote about but only our intuitions as based on sense perception of the world not our whole self which is moe than just sense perception.
Do you percive yourself causally? your thoughts? In what manner? you only percieve the outside world causaly. as in the world that is seen and heard and touched but not your feeling of existing as a whole.

It's all causal. Your inability to perceive this does not make a difference. You might not be aware of the fact that a certain stimuli has caused your brain to released stress hormones, but that's still why you feel the way you do about an upsetting situation.

Wait minute, are you saying, the evidence for the existence of Free Will is being able to express yourself?

I think you're arguing from a Anti-Authoritarian stand point. Saying that there is no one able of determining my thought and who i am.

Sorry to inform you but.........no shit

I think we can all agree on that fact that no one can prevent your imagination from happening.
And even if they were able to figure out who you are and you're imagination. Free will would still exist in that universe

Knowledge of someone's actions doesn't cause there actions

The problem comes here. Your imagination is made up of knowledge and ideas you have acquired over the years. Your "new" ideas had to be based of a previous notion, hence the question "What made you think of that". Still with me? Ok, so all your choices are based on your knowledge, how are you going to do something that you don't even KNOW how to do.In order for you to do that said thing you have to LEARN it first.

Long story short, your imagination is limited, limited to knowledge you've only perceived.

The only reason you did this is because of this, a domino effect modeled your life and existence.

Sure, you're free to choose what you want to do, but you're choices are limited to what you think you can do.

Knowledge makes us who we are

>Do you percieve yourself as causal? your thoughts as causal?

Yes? Of course I perceive myself as causal, it's really easy too because I'm able to trace my train of thought, and pinpoint where certain knowledge and thought patterns that I have come from.

>do you experiece yourself as you experience your sensual perception of reality?

I'm not sure what kind of question is this. Without sensual perception of reality I wouldn't be able to experience myself, I would just be a system stalling with no input.

You are thinking about the description of the body and its physiology as seen by science which is correct. It is causal because science presupposes causality as its methods were created and are created by us based on our perception of external reality.
An hormone that works on us is not our full self. You are simplifying humans into their parts but our experience of ourselves is not as different parts but as a whole.
Your full operation, your full you is the full experience of the self you have.
It is not reducible to parts much like a society is not reduced to the working of its individuals. It is qualitativly different and the way a social entity interacts is described and IS different to the way individuals within it interact.
We are more than the sum of our parts.
Our full selse that we experience is only that, the full unreducible self. Only you as you experience yourself can have uncausal freedom.

>It is not reducible to parts much like a society is not reduced to the working of its individuals
Both can be reduced to individual parts.

>We are more than the sum of our parts.
Incorrect. The brain is a computer and nothing more. The brain processes incoming data and spits out a response. The self is an illusion.

Yes, I aquired ideas and knowledge and percieved the world and am limited by what I percieved and what i didnt but none the less my free will is not limited and i am not causal.
Past experience is the sum total from which I am constructed but i nor you construct ourselves causally. the one does not interfere with the other. My experience of myself still cannot be causal because The experience of me as myself is not scientifically "observable". Causal relations are a language of the way we sense the external reality but our whole experiecne of ourselves is not and cannot b defined by causal relations because we are more than how we percieve reality.
Do not think of yourself in scientific terms. Think of yourself as you feel yourself and percieve yourself. This is you. Not how you look but how you feel yourself from the "inside".

Complexity arises out of interaction of basic components. Your entire body is composed of trillions of cells interacting with each other to sustain themselves, the majority of which are not even of human origin. It is possible to reduce your experience because your experience is a combination of interacting components.
Your full experience is 'you', but it is made up of what you're seeing through your eyes, what you're feeling through your nerves, what you're thinking through the neural structures which slowly developed in your brain tissue. We can analyze these components discretely to understand how they interact with each other to produce the complexity which you perceive as just 'you'

>We are more than the sum of our parts.
I don't know how you can just make such a claim. Is a train more than the sum of it's metallic components? It is a very complex machine and we can think of it abstractly as a tool of transportation. We can even talk about how it 'decides' to move based on how the tracks shape it's path, but it is still just a variety of more basic components interacting together.


And I'm even more confused about how you think that a holistic experience produces uncausal freedom. You're saying that on a more basic level things are causal, but once we go high up enough in complexity they no longer are? If you follow this logic then you can postulate that any machinery can have uncausal freedom if it is complex enough

>Do not think of yourself in scientific terms. Think of yourself as you feel yourself and percieve yourself.
Feels vs Reals

There is nothing I can point to to express non causality except to the self. This is the uniqueness of us as ourselves because we are inside ourselves. The only referance to non causality is this internal sensing and existing. the experiecne of existing.

No, systmes are not reducible to their parts. you can talk explain how an atom works but the rules of the operation of an atom are not the rules of the operation of a cell made of atoms.
A cell has its own rules. it is a different entity, much like an ant hive operates according to its own rules. You can simulate a cell by simulating every atom that comprises it but the rules of the operation of an atom will not be the ones according to whcih the cell operates.
when you talk of a cell you do not care how an atom works, it is superflous information, redundant and unhelpful. As you construct you cell further and further the rules change form the rules of a single atom to a group of two three 10, 20. thousands and millions and these rules are different, the tern into trends and flows of big groups of atoms until these groups become a cell's structure and we call the rules the rules of the cell.
And we call them differently because they are different.

But doesn't matter,you are seen things from your individual perception,but that is the problem,everything its connected,you are just a bunch of particules interacting,and your tought,your imagination ,even what you are about to respond can be cuantificated and a hipotetical demon that knows every single atom on the universe would know how you feel,what you are thinking in this precise moment and what you will do.For what you "percibe" as your self its merely an ilussion in comparison of the machinary of the reality.

Now, it is imagining your brain as it looks on an xtray and how you experience your thoughts.

They are qualitatively different.

I didn't say systems are reducible to their parts, just that they can be understood as the interaction of their parts, which seems to be what you are saying anyways.

I agree with the way you're describing the difference the 'rules' of a component and the 'rules' of it's own sub-components, but how does the notion of uncausal free will flow from this?

The small components are functioning in a causal manner, they make up a more complex component which functions by the interactions of those smaller components, but it is still doing so in a causal way. At what point of complexity do you decide that you've switched from causal process to uncausal ones?

Also just for the sake of the thread, can you tell me if you think a computer can have free will? If you agree that it can then we have a similar understanding, just using different semantics

I dont decide that certain complexity there are no casual interactions.
I am saying that one's own experience of oneself is fundamentally different from the way one perceives reality with the senses, lets call it external reality.
We indeed do percieve reality as causal, nobody disputes this.
If we look at a brain we can see neurons firing according to certain causal rules.
The thing is that the fundamentally different way in which we perceive ourselves in not causal. Our perception of ourselves is unique and encompasses both how we percieve external reality in a causal way and how we experience ourselves as ourselves which is not causal.
Perceiving ourselves is how we know we are ourselves, our feeling of ourselves which is not causal. I dont know how to describe it but it is fundamentally different to how we perceive an object outside of ourselves.
These two together form our whole selves. Causal external perception and our different perception of existing.

>I dont know how to describe it
Do you sense? The invisible force behind the actions of "yourself"?

Because if you do, you should know that the exact same force is within everything, but your body is only sensitive enough to detect it within itself.

>and how we experience ourselves as ourselves which is not causal.

how is self experience not causal? All of your thoughts come from compilation of previous experience. Just because an outside observer with current technology is not privy to the stream of your consciousness does not mean that if there was such an ability to observe your consciousness and your thoughts coupled with observation of your physical experiences within what you call "external reality," that your thoughts would not be predictable as they are based only on previous experiences.

How the hell can you show it is causal? How do you show what caused what or demonstrate causality in your experience at all?
What is causal is images of neurons firing in your brain.

That's the point. You cant observe "consciousness" internally. You can only observe someone internally by being him in the full sense of the world.
You cant partially be someone, you are only someone fully.

because we for ourselves know that "chain reactions" have occurred between events

"one thing leads to another".....no?

Oh my god. Your proof for Free will is a subjective reality.......................you have got to be fucking kidding me.

First Point: Yes, we have subjective realities

"There is no reality, only perspective."

I think we all get that. Here is the problem, since you view life subjectively you perceive knowledge subjective. Which means your reality is limited. You can't think of outside of what you haven't know. You can't come up with something new out that is out your own perspective. I don't even think God can do that. Even if you were to do that, you could even perceive the "new idea". It would just remand "unreal" to you.


You are determined to think of what you think, because of what you perceive.

So called free will is only a perception of the internal processes by which the brain eliminates possibilities and reaches the one inevitable conclusion set before it. Just like a stone rolls down a hill, so too does the brain set its course, pulled along by a myriad of forces a bit more complex than gravity.

Neither you or I can do this, neither you or I have an inner world, an inner experience to be simulated. We certainly act as if that's the case, but in the end, that's all it is: an act. All that we are are hollow puppets, filling the air with hollow words destined for hollow minds.

There is only one perceiver-self, waiting at the end of time, looking back to observe every human mind at once, seeing every outcome at every time. It is in that moment and in that moment that we have a will at all, where the means by which we put on this grotesque mimery will be seen and understood for what it was.

It is in that mind that we reside, to that mind that I address these words, the only mind that is. I see you, God. You see yourself. Here you are. Until the day we reunite.

...

Is this thread, by any chance, a circle-jerk thread?