Determinism v Free-will

if determinism could be proved it would shit on christianity

Determinism seems intuitive to me.

No real arguments. But I think the quantum physics view that determinism is somehow dead is illusory.

>To believe in determinism you'd have to except an omnipotent god
Not really. I believe in no such thing.

Deterministic Solipsism. I am nondeterministic and everybody else is not. This is because I could not predict my own actions because that is computationally impossible but I could predict other people's actions.

Brainlet here, isn't christianity inherently deterministic? God already knows what the future has in store for us.

>But we can't decide what are soul is, can we?
>being this ass-backwards

>can't prove quantum phenomenon follow deterministic principles
Heh.

Also free will is creating a stable deterministic metastructure that is free to follow deterministic behaviors over the chaos of random fluctuations of quantum phenomenon.

I always hate this comparison.
If there is free will, obviously you can't have have a deterministic world. But it's also possible the world is non-deterministic but still without free will.
If the world is completely causal, free will cannot exist and it would be deterministic. But nowadays we understand that with quantum physics our universe is not completely causal.
So knowing that we can imagine a world that still has no free will since it's just another mechanism we don't have any control over, yet it would also not be deterministic.

If you wanna argue for determinism you're gonna have to show that there are non-local hidden variables. It's possible they exist, but nobody has found any so far.

Free will is impossible as everything is subject to cause and effect.

Determinism is real, but the idea of free will is useful in a deterministic mindset because its existence enables people to be more open to new ideas and act differently.

It's clear that most of the people that are deep into a deterministic mindset tend to stagnate, or become nihilistic. The idea of free will gets people moving and places us back at the control of our lives, which is a great boost to self-esteem.

There is no such thing as free will. People are ultimately automatons.

Important is not "what gets people moving" important is what is actually true.

>important is what is actually true
False. People ultimately want their well being, and if an idea (free will) is a major part in guaranteeing acts that promote their well being, even if it's shady, people will believe it.

Life's too short to adventure oneself too much into ideas that can promote nihilism, depression, purposelessness and so on. Only a tiny minority of people see some duty in doing so actually.

All my decisions are the product of my self/character and the experiences and circumstances that surround it.
Every atom and molecule follows certain scientific laws, nothing is random but it's only the logical conclusion of previous actions, no matter how small.

This is the Logos of the universe, and you aren't free of it because you are a part of it.

This. If free will exists, it's necessarely divine

but does that really mean we have no choice? Or does he just know what choice we're going to make like the way your mum knows where you are when you've snuck out of the house?

then where do your predetermined actions come from?

Compatibilism is the right answer.

Can you choose to lift your arm right now and beat your wife with it? Yes you can.

Does the fact that it was "meant to be" from a cosmically deterministic perspective actually matter? No. What matters is that you consciously chose to do it.

Nothing has ever come from a man who doesn't believe he has choice

Again: important is not what hurts your special snowflake feelings, important is what is true.

You can put platitudes like that in fortune cookies.

I can only repeat: it is completely unimportant whether the idea of not having free will hurts your feelings. What is important is whether free will exists or not.

Not to mention: even if we don't have free will (and we most probably don't), it doesn't change the fact that the human brain is fairly good at creating an illusion of it, so acknowledging that you don't have free will doesn't affect that you perceive it as if you did.

what if i don't have a wife ?

Depends on what you mean by free will.
Obviously the universe is deterministic at least on the scale we exist in.

That doesn't means that the human meaning of freedom doesn't matters.

Darwinian evolution works because it satisfies the minimal requirements for a creative system: variation, selection, and synthesis/reproduction. The creative processes of the mind are the same, we create a variety possible future states or choices, and select between them to act to make it a reality.

Western philosophy is obsessed with the mechanisms of conscious selection and action, but that which creates variation is a ghost realm, attributed to the "magic of inspiration," intuition, or some self-referential loop. What creates variety in the process of choice is that which requests the variety: questions or queries. We change our inputs by questioning them. Asking questions is a learned skill, and the better you are the more free you are, within limits of course because it's impossible to ask every possible question. "Free will" is incoherent but the concept of free inquiry shows where freedom of choice lies, and how to foster it. Teach people to question themselves and their world to improve the quality of their choices, imagine that.

Free will exists in the illusion of choice. The summary of all previous events directly determines all coming events. Despite this, our notion of free will has arisen seemingly only from our own consciousness.

If the concept of free will then only can be established within the parameters of what has been and will be, it can be said that free will exists in the illusion of it self. I.e, because we think we have a choice, we do. That is the limit within which we have defined it.

Expanding on what free will means, one could also say it merely implies the possibility for us to act according to desire. No matter how ridiculous this desire is, we retain the freedom to follow or not follow the desire. Once we act, however, we also surrender this freedom to the previous causes which came before it. This means, again, that free will exists until it is made into an act. Therefore free will exists in the thought and is rendered null and void in the act.

Both coexist
Freewill = realise the present moment and harness the power of creativity

Both

...

See laplaces deamon.

Some say it had been disproved by quantum mechanics. I disagree. Quantum mechanics will be disproved by it.

"God does not play dice"

-Albert Einstein

As are all problems when discussed between symbolically manifesting entities.

>then where do your predetermined actions come from?
Particles in motion, so to speak.

...

Good post

The more knowledge you have, the more freewill you have

christianity (at least the way I was taught it) says that everyone has free will, and god, while having a plan for us and knowing our potential, does not have ultimate power over us and our actions can be influenced for good or evil. Also, I was told the reason for this is that god needs someone to love him, but it's no fun being loved by someone if you're forcing them to do it.

Is that the response of a subhuman who just got told?

But if god is all-knowing, and therefore already knows what people are going to do, it would contradict free-will.

But he's right, something is not true or fake just because of how we feel about it.
I'm not saying we have to go all "FREE WILL IS NOT REAL SO NOTHING MATTERS!" but a lot of people can talk about philosophy without getting depressed, you are just projecting.

Free will is just a glorified coin flip.

Determinism is secularized fate.

this

But, I consider:

1. How is the human being separate from the world itself? I.e. if being is by necessity reliant on a perceived separation of subject and object/s, how is the decision making apparatus et al separate from influence which itself dictates what the subject does; for otherwise, being could not come into being.

2. Even without materialist reductionist; the ''will'' is still subject to the conditions of our capacities, e.g. memory/recall. There seems to be nothing being suppressed or directed, but only the direction and influence itself. To illustrate: Can you feel fear, without the stimulus which produces it in you?

>Can you choose to lift your arm right now and beat your wife with it? Yes you can.

I don't think I could. Not just out of the blue. The circumstances would have to put me up to it.

I think a much better example is beliefs. If we have free will, we should be able to change them whenever we want.
So I tell you; assuming you don't already, choose to believe an invisible pink unicorn exists right now. Is your free will letting you do that?

>Can you choose to lift your arm right now and beat your wife with it? Yes you can.
>consciously chose to do it.

Like ^ points out, the conditions are simply not in place for this to occur. This makes the ''choice'' as probabilistic AND determined as the movements of a billiard ball.

Compatibility is an odd position, it can not reconcile free will with causality without these absurd word-games.

Nice definition

Or how about none? And reality being probabilistic in its ontology, so all things including our actions arise from events which are inherently probabilistic in nature. Like part way between determinism and stochastic system. (we can predict probabilities, but we don't know exactly what will be the absolute outcome of events because of the probabilities).

This nig know what's up. It's one of the very few questions within metaphysics I consider bullshit because it ends up with semantics.

Man in his emergent consciousness weighs that which weighs upon his soul, thus he chooses for things beyond material.
Determinism is thus refuted.
>Fedoras
>rational thought
no, Calvinism =/ Christianity
seeDeterminism would probably be more in Christianity's favor. With it God knows all, without it we have the mystery of knowledge about potential events which occur without occuring.

>so all things including our actions arise from events which are inherently probabilistic in nature
W R O N G
You assume this. You have no basis for believing this.
our actions arise from thoughts which arise from an emergence separate from material.
Just like the economy is emergent from the marketplace yet separate from it as well.

Your mind is computed by your brain (specifically ions in the brain), and these computations are complex and probabilistic in nature. So, your thoughts are these computations themselves. You would have to come up with a more abstract version of the mind to rule this model out.

>The concept of Determinism relies upon the idea that every choice we make was/is shaped by previous experiences. Question is, are there any innate feelings and thoughts within people? This would mean that some things are not a result of the actions of others but they would instead have an origin in the human soul.
Have you not heard of fucking genetics or something? All humans inherit a basic "skeleton" of the mind from our neurology which is adaptable to our circumstances and need to learn. That's why 99% of us generally have the same basic senses, emotions, and a capacity to learn language. This is just as nonsensical as positing that humans have no inherent musculature or motor coordination and that all physical actions sprout from some supernatural non-concept with zero explanatory or predictive value.

This is arguably still deterministic if the probabilities are deterministic. And we have no way of knowing whether such probabilities are metaphysical or just epistemological uncertainty.

There is currently no proof that the human brain is computable. It's not a hard drive.

By probabilistic, I mean ontological probabilistic and not just in terms of epistemology. Like reality being based inherently on a bounded randomness of outcomes (but only the outcomes in the distribution are possible, however which of the listed outcome happens is essentially random). So, think of an event with 3 only possible outcomes, outcome A at 50% likelihood, outcome B at 30% likelihood and outcome C at a 20% likelihood. If the event unfolds, then you can at the very most attach probabilities to the outcomes. Now imagine if you could reset time and do the event again, and again and again. If you keep doing it over and over and list out the distribution of the outcomes, then outcome A would have in happened 50% of the trials, outcome B would have in happened 30% of the trails and outcome C would have happened in 20% of the trials. You would get no outcomes except for these listed ones. So it is kind of deterministic in the sense that things are absolutely random and unexpected outcomes don't happen, but then again things aren't truly deterministic because of the way probability would work ontologically (getting different outcomes from the same event). OR Alternatively, all of these outcomes happen in a constantly diverging Everett multiverse (in which case, things become truly deterministic).

Also, I didn't say that the brain is a hard drive, more like a very, very, very complex processor system which runs many probabilistic tasks at the same time (with memory storage distributed over many parts of the nervous system).

>Man in his emergent consciousness weighs that which weighs upon his soul, thus he chooses for things beyond material.
>Determinism is thus refuted.

This statement does not make much sense, could you clear it up, maybe be define things better?

free will is utter crap.
>come up with new color, what does it look like?
You can't. There are limits to our imagination, therefore it is not free.
Limitation contradicts free.

Determinism vs Free will is a debate of physics, not ethics.

>our actions arise from thoughts which arise from an emergence separate from material.

Your thoughts depend and are caused by your perception and interaction with phenomena in synthesis with your condition which allows you to perceive them. Also, what about unconscious reactions such as blind-sight, and sleep-walking?

>Just like the economy is emergent from the marketplace yet separate from it as well.

This is an odd abstraction which serves no purpose to explain these ontological questions.

If there's no free will, every decision you have and will ever make could be calculated from the beginning of the world because physics don't change and consciousness is just chemical reactions in brain.

How did all this happen though? Who put that stuff there that would determine all our decisions? Where did that stuff come from?

It obviously has profound ethical implications

No.

So your own capacity as a human to "shift particles" into a desired arrangement is not free will? Is it just an illusion of choice?

But you don't have such abilities.
Your choices don't shift particules at all. The "shifting of particules" ie chemical reactions determine your choices. It works this way and not any other, the chemical reactions exist before your choice does.

Thread theme:

youtube.com/watch?v=OnxkfLe4G74

Neat thread btw.

>"shift particles"
i wish i was Aang the airbender too

>every decision you have and will ever make could be calculated from the beginning of the world because physics don't change and consciousness is just chemical reactions in brain.
Well, in the smaller scale of things, events are probabilistic and not predetermined, so stuff that is happening now wasn't necessarily bound to happen, rather it is one of the myriad of outcomes that could have happened.

>Free will is impossible as everything is subject to cause and effect.
Cause and effect doesn't exist, user

do you believe in luck? Chances are a simplified tool not science. Physics don't have probabilities. If there's some in your physics book it only means they haven't discovered the real reason yet and simulate it with probability.

>Cause and effect doesn't exist, user
How come?

>inb4 some Butchered Kant interpretation.

well i certainly just witnessed you having a cause for writing this post and the effect of it. Don't listen the fools bro.
t. not samefag

Thats what QM is all about though. From a Determinist's point of view, the probability is epistemological and there is a set reality, but based on what we see, it would be perfectly reasonable to say that reality is inherently probabilistic in nature. However, either way, it won't allow for free will under the classical definition of free will. If reality is truly probabilistic, then its all a bunch of random incidents happening and we don't have any extra-causal control over any of it.

Argument has been solved. Its a non-issue due to science.

Determinism is a fact of science. Free Will enthusiasts are just stupid anti-science religious people. Compatiblism is for the weak willed.

>Now imagine if you could reset time and do the event again, and again and again. If you keep doing it over and over and list out the distribution of the outcomes, then outcome A would have in happened 50% of the trials, outcome B would have in happened 30% of the trails and outcome C would have happened in 20% of the trials.

We only put probability on things when we cannot completely understand all the variables involved. Like flipping a coin. The probabilities would seem 50% only because of all the variables involved. How hard you flip it, the wind blowing against it, how high you flip it, how sweaty we get in anticipation, the dirt that builds up after picking up the coin so many times, the metal that chips of after every fall, etc.
So when we try to repeat the same action these variables change each time, resulting in a 50% chance of either heads or tails.
However, if we were able to replay a single moment in time over and over again, the variables would be the same each time. So the probability then would be 100% of whatever result we got the first time.

>Thats what QM is all about though.

Not necessarily. Granted, most physicists don't like hidden variable models of quantum mechanics. But that might be explained to the fact that most people don't like the idea of giving up their perceived free will to begin with. Free will is just simply assumed.

I'm not an expert on the subject whatsoever, but seeing that the opinions on QM are so varied even among the people who work in the field and that there are still experts who argue for superdeterminism (nobel prize winner Gerard 't Hooft comes to mind), it's completely illogical for anyone who isn't an expert to give up classical models of causality. We would need a much more unambiguous experiment for that.

Determinism but believe in the self-determination of the our brain.

Objectively speaking, since all phenomena must have underlaying causes, in that an event cannot take place if it didn't have a determinate cause, free will must not exist. Subjectively speaking though, because we, as humans, only have access to the world of phenomena (i.e. we are limited in our perceptions/understanding/knowledge), we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of free will. So practically speaking, is it better to believe in or reject the concept of free will? I think it's better to believe in it, just for the sake of retaining a sense of agency. Without moral agency society falls apart, and humans fall back into the state of nature aka barbarism.

The question of determinism vs free-will really has no consequence because even if determinism is correct (which i believe is) humans are still going to act as if they do have free-will because there is literally no other way to behave in reality.

>Without moral agency society falls apart, and humans fall back into the state of nature aka barbarism.

I'm not so sure about that. Learning about determinism definitely caused me to go into a quite depressing nihilistic phase for a while, but in the long run I feel it helped me look more objectively at my own behaviors and behaviors of humanity in general. Since it is not me acting out of free will I started exploring and trying to understand the mechanisms behind my behaviors instead.
And since humans like to put themselves in a sort of special snowflake position compared to other animals this tends to lead to denial of our animal impulses.
So determinism can actually and ironically be a good tool to facilitate understanding of our nature so we can see our limitations. Helping us to become the special snowflakes we desire to be.

>Your thoughts depend and are caused by your perception and interaction with phenomena in synthesis with your condition which allows you to perceive them.
post hoc fallacy.
You misunderstand what consciousness is, it is a point by which value is assigned to phenomena and then weighed and decided upon.
The phenomena is causal only like a criminal is causal in being put into prison.

>This is an odd abstraction which serves no purpose to explain these ontological questions.

>explaining what consciousness is, is irrelevant
user, I...

>So your own capacity as a human to "shift particles" into a desired arrangement is not free will?
I would say that the decisions you make are illusory, yes.

>Is it just an illusion of choice?
Essentially, yes. Consider easy "decisions", like someone asking you to do something you very much don't want to do. Your chemical makeup (which is the sum of all your experiences, as well as biological "pre-programming") essentially makes the decision a non-decision. I would extend that to decisions that seem more difficult, only that it's more difficult to tease out how those are also non-decisions because the don't seem so. But if they were not non-decisions, then why can fMRI reveal the result of decisions before the decision is perceived?

This is all conjecture on my part. I can't prove or disprove any of it. And I'm not a physicist, so I've yet to learn how QM necessarily disproves it. So far as I can tell, QM ideas that people suggest as disproving determinism simply reveal a lack of information. QM admits that we can't have perfect information, so it seems to support determinism to me.

then shouldn't human actions conform to a degree of predictability based on their chemical needs as organisms?
for example why would a bhuddist monk light themselves on fire? that's a decision that is inherently counterproductive to all biological requirements of any creature, yet a human with a higher capacity to reason can take the action that harms them for a perceivable greater good
of course, I'm not really talking about the action, more the monks ability to make a choice to light himself on fire, despite it being counterproductive on all biological chemical levels

Correct.

Wrong.

>QM admits that we can't have perfect information, so it seems to support determinism to me
but if thats the case does it imply that there is more pretedetermined info for us to learn, or that the factors that determine their operations CAN'T be known because they operate with a degree of variability that we might call "choice"

obviously I am not a physicist and I am also conjecturing, but yeah, that's what gets my noodle going

>does it imply that there is more pretedetermined info for us to learn
Yes.

>or that the factors that determine their operations CAN'T be known because they operate with a degree of variability that we might call "choice"
I think they can't be known because the variables are practically infinite. I would say choice is just a very complex set of variables. Maybe if we were in a simulation where the system has all the variables and is able to calculate outcomes.

>obviously I am not a physicist
Me neither. My undergrad was Comp Sci with a minor in biology. Started on a masters in bioinformatics, but essentially gave up (due to time/money, not difficulty... it was actually quite easy, as was my undergrad).

so essentially 'choice is the fabrication of mind that simply can't perceive the actual working of the universe'
fair enough
and yeah I just finished doing all my GE in community college so I can save money, shit aint cheap

What a pointless fucking waste of time.

Sure, lets use that definition.
The value assigned will be dependent on the conditions of the one assigning it. E.g. your point of reference and thus value assignment process is much different from any other person and any other form of life. What makes you assume that you decide upon this segregation of phenomena, rather than ''it'' assigning your behavior?

Furthermore, you avoid answering the examples of unconscious behavior which I have described.

>blind-sight, and sleep-walking?

We do not even have to take it to those extremes. Consider your emotions. Do you choose to have them, or do they happen to you? And do they only happen when the stimulus necessary to evoke them is present in your conditions which allow them to be expressed under the experience of the phenomena which causes it?

>explaining what consciousness is, is irrelevant
I have never stated or implied this. My point is, what you stated is a bad analogy which does not aid in these inquiries.

>our actions arise from thoughts which arise from an emergence separate from material.

Look at any object around you, that very material will evoke from you a certain response, associations thoughts, etc... Where are ''you'' in this, where is your will? Is it you, playing around with the objects in your thought-stream, or are they being played?

Like another user said, you can ''choose'' o go and beat your wife, but you WONT. The thoughts can arise, but you simply wont do it, the causes needed for this to happen, simply are not there.

Free will is an essential aspect of Catholic (and I presume, Christianity at large) doctrine. Hard determinism is incompatible with it as no one would truly be culpable for their sins.

free-hoholminism
hohol mafia

The metaphysical concept of free will is incoherent. You can't give me a description of free will that is complete (that is, a description of its ontological features/properties) and non-contradictory. Therefore it doesn't exist.

why wouldn't a murderer be responsible for his actions even if there is no such thing as free will? We do not punish the choise, we punish the act. Why wouldn't god punish the act? I think you give yourself too much value in the universe. It probably wouldn't be different from picking out the bad apples from a basket.

Most people trundle about in deterministic lives, asleep and unaware.

Enlightenment is to be free.

Cognitive Compatibilism?

The soul is deterministic too.