What are the arguments for Free Will? What are the arguments for Determinism?

>sentient

You mean sapient.

But controlling your mind is itself an act of the mind.

That's probably right, OP.

The idea of a soul, a non-material presence animating bodies is a practical idea that serves many psychological purposes. I think our species just isn't suited to figuring out it is a machine. What is funny though, is that our reaction to the discovery of determinism is also determined.

I was trying to find a word that defines the ability to be self-aware but sentient was the only thing that came to mind

current scientific model of the universe doesn't support determinism

The word is "sapient". Plants are sentient (they grow towards sunlight).

It does support determinism in the sense it is used in discussions of free will.

Both the randomness of quantum mechanics and the predictability of Newtonian mechanics are incompatible with free will.

If you decided to do something because of some microscopic dice roll or because of Newtonian clockwork, either way YOU had no choice.

What a stupid clown you are. Point me to a theory in modern science that is NOT deterministic.

maybe i did have no choice, it doesn't mean that my brain is determined though.
no free will =/= determinism
quantum mechanics

>quantum mechanics

HAHAHAHAHA

"No". Thanks for outing yourself as a moron with zero knowledge of what you're talking about.

not really an argument
but then i guess you didn't want to make one anyway

Freedom can exist in determinism, so I don't see why our will can't be free considering all that. It depends on what it's supposed to be free from. It can be free from our animal side, impulses, emotion. It can be free from a lot of things. Free from deterministic process? I don't think so.

What more do I need to say? You're wrong, QM is fully deterministic. But since you're too stupid to be able to manage basic English grammar, it doesn't surprise me that you're the kind of moron who makes fact claims about things he doesn't understand. Google "Duning-Kruger".

If you have no control over how your brain works, it does not make a difference if its some microscopic dice-roll in your head, or if its perfectly predictable chemistry. Either way, you had no say in the matter, and so you did not have free will.

We can't even find anyone willing to argue against it.

If there is someone who's sure free will exists, I want them to show me the biological mechanism that allows it to occur. Or even the physical mechanism. I guess we've pretty much covered this already though.

>QM is fully deterministic.
but it's not

Great argument moron. Care to provide some evidence for this?

It's too poorly defined. I mean... we act based upon external stimuli but we have a limited choice. For example I can choose to write pinkpuff instead of glcloyd just because I want to.

Free will is the will to act as one wills freely. What someone wills might be affected by all sorts of things but if we're talking about the inside of someones brain, in the end it is still that person's will. Now if God were to intervene and make it so you aren't able to will with whatever process your brain goes through to determine what that will is, in my book that's when free will ceases to exist.

>For example I can choose to write pinkpuff instead of glcloyd just because I want to.
But "wanting to" is a physical process that happens in your brain.

Ask anyone who argues for determinism why they're arguing for determinism.

And it's free to happen!

Really not a difficult task. Free will is the ability to independently choose from among your apparently viable options in a given circumstance.

quantum indeterminacy implies the possibility of no determinism in nature

There's no contradiction there you dense faggot. "I do what I was predetermined to do" is a completely coherent statement.

>independently
Independent from what?

No you can't. That's the point.

No, it doesn't. Like I said you have no clue what you're talking about. Indeterminacy is a measurement problem, it says nothing about reality itself being indeterminable.

Then arguing for it is idiotic, is it not?

Arguing to change someone's mind? About something neither of you have control over?

No, it's just a childish fantasy to avoid personal responsibility. That's all it is.

Perhaps "personally" would have been a better word.

This is a stupid understanding. Life is all about ensuring DNA is carried on. Humans have evolved to a higher understanding of consequences via choices. With these 2 principles in mind, our lives are deterministic as we are bound by our DNA and our inherent nature. However, our understanding of cause and effect has led us to help apply the best choices for ourselves, our community, and people we hold dear to ensure survival. Free will exists but is bound by certain laws beyond our control.

What a truly moronic faggot you are. If you have free will, then YOU'RE the one acting irrationally by trying to convince people who know better to accept your idiotic doctrine.

>childish fantasy to avoid personal responsibility.

Determinism doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions, why should it? In my experience it's the retards who support MUH FREE WILL who avoid personal responsibility, because they're typically Christians who hold the vile doctrine of "forgiveness of sin".

Please explain how free will can exist in a deterministic universe.

What is Heisenberg princicple?

indeterminacy is not the same as free will

You guys are missing the point. I know what free will is, but what physical biological mechanism in your brain can allow this to happen? At some point in the decision making process, some group of neurons in your brain has to take external input and return something that is more than just stimulus-response. And it has to do more than that; it can't just return a random result either.

In order for free will to exist, it must be derived from some mechanism acting at the absolute lowest level of functionality. Some individual neuron has to receive a signal, and somehow non-deterministically decide to send it left or right. It's almost an impossibility.

That just suggests that the way we percieve our decision-making mechanism is flawed, not that a decision wasn't made in the first place. In order to definitively prove free will non-existent, you would need to have a statistical machine that is capable of predicting human behavior with 100% accuracy.

>But "wanting to" is a physical process that happens in your brain.
So? Why exactly isn't this physical process free will?

But thats under the assumption that the universe is deterministic?

That is one of the dumbest things i read today

A measurement problem. Try again, mongoloid.

Ok.

Free will tends to mean you are able to make decisions with no forces influencing them.

I'd say that the chemistry of your brain is a force you have no control over, and so is an influencing force.

>assumption

Nope, try "conclusion". Literally everything we have learned from sciences has shown the Universe to be 100% deterministic. If you want to claim that it isn't, you're the one who needs to provide evidence.

>Free will tends to mean you are able to make decisions with no forces influencing them.
No it doesn't. Free will just means making decisions. Plus if you are your mind I still fail to see how the fact a physical process in your mind dictates what decisions you make takes away from it.

I'm You didn't understand the point of what I said otherwise you wouldn't be asking me again for such a mechanism.

It's like you're thinking will is what doesn't exist, not just free will. I think you're too fixated on the meaning of free will as established by religious people.

I've gone through a development on this.
First I was a Harrisite free will skeptic, then I became a compatibilist, then I was too confused to make my mind up, but then this occurred to me:
The philosophers who think the issue of freedom only concerns freedom of action and not freedom of the will (because it makes no sense to think of the will as free or not free) are wrong.
My will as a human is undeniably much freer than the will of any other animal. I can change my mind in more ways and for more kinds of reasons, evaluate my reasons and motives in more kinds of ways, discipline myself, resist temptation, reorder my priorities, reshape my character, and so on and so on.
This might boil down to some high capacity for self-awareness, rationality, conscience, and intelligence, but in any case it obviously concerns my will, it is obviously a set of freedoms, and it completely outstrips anything that even a chimpanzee or a dolphin could do.
Why should this superior level of freedom that my will enjoys (or that I enjoy in willing) not be sufficient to justify the proposition "I have free will"?
This also implies that more advanced beings, like aliens (or angels or God), could have freer wills than we do, but that doesn't mean we're below the cutoff point for that proposition to be true of us.

The brain is deterministic, explain how it can give rise to a non-deterministic effect. I'll give you a clue: You can't because it can't.

Self awareness makes biological determinism less concrete than with other animals. The fact that we can be conscious of our 'standard' chemical/instinctive response and choose to do otherwise as a conscious choice speaks to that.

Of course if you reduce it all to "but that's also a chemical process!" then yes, all our actions are determined by these chemical processes. Those processes, however, are what give us the consciousness / sapience to make judgements that can contradict a biological imperative.

But its not a conclusion, and we can't predict everything though. We have developed empirical and theoretical equations to help us predict an outcome but its not law. The outcome is something we can never determine.

That's where you're 100% wrong kiddo, All processes are on a small enough scale completely random, most easy to understand and most obvious is radioactive decay, a radioactive particle decays at a random time (not deterministic at all). Also more exotic properties of the universe like particles popping in and out of existance, the spin of electrons, the position of particles on a very small scale etc. Are all non determistic. Tldr: einstein was wrong, god does play dice

>and we can't predict everything though.

On the contrary you wouldn't be able to predict anything if the Universe WEREN'T deterministic.

I didn't say the freedom your brain has is non-deterministic, actually. I just said it has freedom to go through the processes that are needed to determine what its will is.

You have no clue what you're talking about. Stop wasting my time with your stupidity.

quantum mechanics proves free will, superstitious religious people believe in determinism because they want the comfort of believing in fate/destiny etcetera..

Check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

Don't listen to either the determinism spergs or the "quantum mechanics proves muh freedom" dudes. Both are autistic assholes and any genuine folk understanding of freedom will show you that freedom and determination are not opposites.

This is kinda what I was trying to say, but QM guy has twisted philosophy and physics together.
Bruh, we can determine a general outcome but can never determine am exact outcome.

Thanks

>Physics and chemistry follows on deterministic processes.
>The human brain controls the human body
the first of these is actually unproven and extremely difficult to argue for
the second is probably just false
it's bad mereology to say that the brain controls the body, just like it's bad mereology to say that your eyes see or your hands throw
you throw with your hands, you see with your eyes, and you control your body using your brain (and your nerves, etc.)
it's not like you yourself are just completely out of control and helplessly at the mercy of the actions of your brain -- that's mereological nonsense; your brain is just a part of you, not a separate thing controlling you

>No coherent definition = nonsense concept.
an incoherent definition is a self-contradictory one
you just mean there is no satisfactory definition, which shouldn't be surprising since definitions are extremely difficult to come by in general
throwing out a concept because it's hard to define is ridiculous and would lead to throwing out most concepts
you need some argument that a definition of free will is impossible to find and an argument why this disqualifies the concept

why are you pretending this is a settled issue in the interpretation of QM?

>Determinism doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions, why should it?
how can you be responsible for your actions if you don't have free will?

What is Quality Assurance?

Just like a criminal didn't have the "free will" to not do the crime, everyone else lacks the "free will" to not get upset about it and punish the criminal

Determinism is only incompatible with free will if you define free will in a way that has no bearing in day to day life and is an entirely impossible concept ANYWAYS.

The obvious solution to this is to change how free will is being defined or realize that, as defined, it's absurd and has no value.

I agree and post this to show my support to your idea.

The question of free will is entirely uninteresting.

The information that we do not have free will is entirely useless information, because a being without free will can't use information anyways, only react to stimulus, and even if it were proven that we do not have it beyond a shadow of a doubt, each and every person would continue operating as if they did every single day.

what are you saying responsibility for an action is? just a tendency to be punished for it?

Honestly OP, you have to define what you mean by free will before this discussion can be useful.

If you mean free will as in "The human agent can create uncaused actions and then proceed to do those actions" I agree with you that it's not compatible with a deterministic universe.

However, the moral angle is to me more relevant.

I could for example, claim that every murder committed is a consequence of the brain chemistry of the murderer at the time the murder took place, but even if that is true, does it absolve the murderer of his actions?

Nietzche writes in the Genealogy of Morality that the concept of "free will" was invented entirely because it was useful for enforcing morality. The goal of it is to make people feel guilt and thus control them into doing or not doing certain things. He is not saying the concept is bad, just that it's the best method for controlling society, a certain amount of social control is nessiary for sucess.

The ancient philosophers long ago realized that since everything has a cause than everything is already set in stone. Even the Greek religion, with it's emphasis on fate, aknowledges that the outcome has long been decided.

The reason our society is so attached to the concept of free-will is a side of effect of thousands of years of Jewish/Christian culture. Without free will there can be no concept of sin. For contrast non-moralizing religions did not need their punishments to be 'just' or 'fair'.

>If you mean free will as in "The human agent can create uncaused actions and then proceed to do those actions" I agree with you that it's not compatible with a deterministic universe.
uncaused actions are only incompatible with determinism if the determinism is causal and you add a principle of universal causation
there are three claims involved here:
>(1): At any given moment, all future facts are determined [Minimal determinism aka logical determinism]
>(2): All causes fully determine their effects [Causal determinism]
>(3): Everything has a cause [Principle of universal causation]
2+3 implies 1, but without either 2 or 3, you can have uncaused actions no problem

>because a being without free will can't use information anyways, only react to stimulus
Are you serious? What do you think information is, but stimulus? Maybe it doesn't MATTER, but that doesn't make it uninteresting at all.

Not at all. Killing people is not in the best interest of society, so a person with the capacity to kill like that is a 'bad person' and we'll remove them from society to prevent any more damage.

These are useful posts.

I of course agree with you, what I meant by that statement is whether what you mean by free will is that the conscious agent can be that source of an action without previous causation.

Which I think personally is ridiculous because we are of course material beings subject to the physical laws of the universe just like rocks are.

The question is whether the determinism implicit in the physical laws themselves means that we should not hold people responsible for their actions.

>what I meant by that statement is whether what you mean by free will is that the conscious agent can be that source of an action without previous causation.
well I think the "previous causation" that bothers people here is the idea that either neurophysiological events or mental events like desires and motives are the efficient causes of our actions
but I think you can motivate a naturalist theory where actions do not have efficient causes but Aristotelian final-style or intentionalistic causes
William Charlton has a version of that; he believes in supernatural agents like God but says that natural agents exist (us) and their actions aren't explained by causes (in the modern, Cartesian, narrowly efficient-causal sense)
he points out that pure efficientism (or the idea that all explanation should be physical-causal) is based on two assumptions:
(A) that physical bodies only move (or stop moving) when their parts are acted upon or not acted upon by something else
(B) that all motion is a continuation of past motion
against A he says that if we think bodies have in them a source of acting when their parts are acted upon or not, we can believe also that they have a source of acting independently of being acted upon (e.g. for purposes)
against B he says that the belief that the motion of anything must be explained as a mere continuation of the motion of something else is basically just the ancient religious belief that "there is nothing new under the sun" and not a solid philosophical (much less scientific) axiom; and anyway the idea that any motion could necessitate some further motion falsely presumes that it is a necessary fact that the universe should continue to exist
(this is from page 126 of his "The physical, the natural, and the supernatural" which you can probably find on google books)

If someone has a set of options before them and make a decision, would you say that person didn't make a decision at all and just did what was inevitable, since the big bang (or even before it)? I don't think so, I mean, its easy to yell 'fate' after the fact, but if you go back in time, would that person always make the same decision?

Also, we don't really know how consciousness works, different parts of the brain are involved in different things, but we really don't know much more than that. People assume the brain is like a computer and are consciousness is housed on that computer, but if the brain is more like a radio that sends info back and forth from an outside source, then that is actually also a very real possibility, because that's how little we actually know about our consciousnesses.

>and that's just assuming you all are aware too, and its not just me that's alive.
>do I exist?

But there you're just changing the scope of freedom, no being (or their will for that matter) is free from determinism anf what you consider freer is just making a comparation with arbitrary values

are you your brain, or are whatever it is that thinks it has a brain

you're the observer, not the oberved (brain)

it sounds like you're giving two answers to my question
>Why should this superior level of freedom that my will enjoys (or that I enjoy in willing) not be sufficient to justify the proposition "I have free will"?
one is that this level of free will isn't enough to escape determinism, but I would just ask why that should be the standard
the other is that it's only a high level of freedom of the will compared to an arbitrary value, but I don't see why the levels of freedom of will that literally all other creatures we know of have should be called "arbitrary"

>but if you go back in time, would that person always make the same decision?

Yes, that's what people mean by a deterministic universe.

>but if the brain is more like a radio that sends info back and forth from an outside source

We generally assume that's not the case, given the lack of any evidence for it whatsoever.

This. More decisions means more variety, not more freedom.

It sounds like Charlton needs to take a class in physics. Conservation of energy is indeed a solid scientific axiom and the foundation of a good chunk of our physical knowledge. I don't see what the problem is with assuming the universe will continue to exist. Most people assume that's the case.

>Conservation of energy is indeed a solid scientific axiom and the foundation of a good chunk of our physical knowledge.
it's not clear that Charlton's suggestion violates that, since obviously he could just insist that this body that "acts from a source of acting independently of being acted upon" only so acts insofar as it has the energy to
>I don't see what the problem is with assuming the universe will continue to exist. Most people assume that's the case.
but we're talking about causal determinism, which is a necessitarianism
the impossibility of a past motion necessitating its future continuation would contravene that, regardless of how well justified we are in expecting the universe to continue to exist

>We generally assume that's not the case, given the lack of any evidence for it whatsoever.

Well as I said, we don't know how consciousness works, so its hard to find evidence for anything. Other than it relates to the brain.

I think the current argument against free will is not "are we just animals, completely controlled by our environment and hormones vs. having the freedom of choice", it's "is the universe deterministic and proceeding in a perfectly predictable fashion that precludes the possibility of free will"

Comparing us to animals doesn't have anything to do with it.

That's true. I guess I would say that we do not have to think bodies have in them a source of acting in order to believe (A). Why couldn't the source be the other object, influencing the current body through the mechanical, chemical, thermal, gravitational, electromagnetic etc. forces? Because something is capable of movement does not mean we are able to believe it's independently capable.
To the second point, why not just say that an eternal universe is therefore a conclusion of determinism and leave it at that?

Yes, the brain could be magic. To the best of our knowledge however, the brain operates through electrical interactions of neurons. We have no reason to reject the null hypothesis.
You're right that there is no proof for determinism; that's why people are still having this argument. But if the opposing argument is "well we don't know for sure" then that's not very convincing.

Information isn't the keyword there m8, it's USE.

If it doesn't matter, why is it interesting?

I do have free will, and urge people not to fall for the inane trap of determinism, which is a hopeless, nihilistic fantasy designed to avoid personal responsibility.

So if you set an alarm clock to go off at 6:00 a.m., and it went off at 6:00 a.m., you would beat it to death?

You're an idiot dude.

We do know how consciousness works, it's just the answer isn't one that philosophers accept. Consciousness is an illusion, your brain is mostly governed by unconscious processes and what you think of as "you" "deciding" something is in fact the part of your brain that governs your narrative memories telling itself a confabulated story to explain what your unconscious brain has decided to do.

But even if we assume we don't know what we do, the evidence against the "radio" theory of the brain is absolutely overwhelming. For example: If you suffer brain damage, you lose brain function. So far this is compatible with the radio theory, BUT, if you lose brain functions early in life, your brain will recover and regain the lost ability. What it WON'T regain is the lost memories, which makes no sense according to the radio theory but is easily explained by the "consciousness is what brains do" theory.

>Yes, the brain could be magic.
The brain is magic.

>We do know how consciousness works, it's just the answer isn't one that philosophers accept. Consciousness is an illusion

Way to contradict yourself in one easy line.

Yeah I shouldn't have called it arbitrary but I do think that you're using the word free to describe two different things, in the determinist sense you use free to say that something or someone is capable of behaving a certian way without being restricted by the laws of the universe (without taking into account its desires), we both agree that this kind of freedom doesn't exist but when you start making the freer distinctions you're focusing in something that makes the will more able of archieving what it wants, there I would change the word free with capable but if I had to agree with your choice of words I would have to say that free will is determined.

You haven't even the slightest bit of curiosity?

That's one way to avoid thinking about it.

I didn't set the alarm clock. If it goes off at 6:00 a.m. on my day off then I and other alarm clocks will destroy it as a warning and deterrent to alarm clocks everywhere.

"confabulated" always sounds like a made-up word to me.

Weird. I guess I don't really know how to factor in this information without knowing what an electroencephalogram is.

Before you respond to the alarm clock analogy, consider that I know how alarm clocks think, and there is a very clear correlation between seeing a fellow alarm clock torn to pieces before your eyes and realizing that it is not in your self-interest to go off at 6 a.m.

Try reading to the end of the line next time, it MIGHT make you seem less of a fool (but I doubt it).