Can atheists belive in free will?

But people keep saying no free will doesn't exist and yet these threads keep coming back

I don't believe that science has or can answer the question about free will. I think that when I die I will meet my maker but until then it's not my place to know these things

And you'll never 'know' in the likely situation nothing happens when you die

no but in that case at least I won't be in hell

Atleast in hell you'll continue to exist and you'd get used to it after a while, better option than disappearing

>what is principle of sufficient reason

only because for some fucking reason they do feel free

Rather not lad I know what hell is like

>living in eternal suffering is better than just disappearing and not feeling anything
???

>all these baby's first science threads

You can tell school just started

No you don't, even if it did exist which wouldn't even make sense as part of Christianity you'd have no way of observing it without again going against Christianity as it requires faith rather than direct knowledge, it would be stacking the game in your favour, I hope you didn't have some 'experience' as that shit needs to go to /x/

It's like this on every board

As long as I exist, even in eternal torment you have the slightest smallest possible chance of hope that things can change, if you're gone forever then there's literally no hope

Who said I was Christian? Who said I claimed I had an experience? Why shouldn't I hedge my bets against my lack of attainable knowledge of certain things?

I don't think you know what "eternal" means.

Apples and oranges user. If I pass into non existence why would I care? If I know I have one chance of proving myself to the creator why would it matter if free will was real? We treat ourselves and each other like it is real regardless of whether or not it is.

You said you know what hell is like yet you don't have experience so in fact you don't know you're just guessing

Eternity is a long time and it's impossible to say what will happen in that time, and even then who's to say it is eternal except for humans who wouldn't even know

Everyone knows what hell is who understands concepts of time and pain

/psi/ - Pseudophilosophy

I don't disagree to be honest might as well act like it's real even though it isn't

You understand the concept of hell, what you've been told anyway even though the information on the subject is sparse, but you don't know what it's like

Didn't realize I was talking to an authority. Similar to the idea of the total unimportance of free will what does it matter what sort of hell I conceive if the reality can only be worse?

How do you know it will be worse? You could just end up in some buerocratic office job for a few decades then go back to earth online to heaven, its a punishment you don't know and neither do I and that's the point, where as I am leveraging on that unknown that it could be worse but it could also be better than what we believe, personally I find eternal torment to be a somewhat overly harsh punishment for a few decades of life especially from a being who created you with the personality you have just to test you

By definition it will be worse. I am a monotheist who doesn't believe in reincarnation same as most people in the planet.

The definition of which is given by people who don't know, but I'm an atheist so it's mostly irrelevant to me as I don't expect to see anything

it seem the discussion has shifted and is know a fight about wich is worse eternal pain or non existance.

Two concept that have not been experienced by anyone and that we dont even know if they are possible or if they can both exist.

Even if you take away the pain from hell. there would still be a dilema on witch to chose non existance or eternal existance.

How else could it be tho? If my reward for living here could be as good and better than what I expect why shouldn't the other pole be alike in its extremity?

I was an atheist through high school and college. Can't find any value in that belief anymore tho

Why does it need to be a reward or punishment, why can't it be an experiment, and I didn't say it would be as good or better but why does a punishment have to be eternal or based on pain rather than service, the definition of it sounds just like it's meant to invoke fear rather than what an apparently benevolent deity would even do

>Pascal's wager
Gtfo

Love is a sublimation of animal desire to conform with social norms.

That's not the reason I believe in God the discussion was derailed. I just wanted to make a point about the uselessness of questioning free will since everyone acts like it exists even if it doesn't. MAYBE God knows the answer and we'll have to wait and see to find out. I don't take a very hard stance on the afterlife but I'm sure that's the only place if any that I would ever know whether or not my free will was an illusion.

Don't worry you'll probably get the answer in your own lifetime

>just the result of millions of variable and are basicaly
>just chemical reactions in your brain
>just

No. Quantum Mechanics debunked determinism.

That's a statement of pure faith user. Science does not give us answers to any questions about God or the nature of existence it's just a context.

But you're making the assumption that free will had anything to do with the nature of God and existence, if you can learn exactly how conciousness is formed and manipulate it the it answers the question

I'm an atheist

It seems that my actions are a result of will. I will myself to do something, and so it is done. Do I exercise control over this will? It seems that I do, although all evidence points to this perception of control being illusory.

Humans seem to behave in fairly predictable ways on both an individual interpersonal level and on a macroscopic scale. There is nothing that would indicate free will to an outside observer.

How exactly is consciousness formed? If you're trying to give me some shit about how I'm in control of my life don't bother

Why do you care if there is free will or not? It shouldn't affect the decisions you choose to make or not.

Like, either way you're going to spend the rest of your day masturbating in front of your computer. Does it really matter if you "chose" to do it or if it is just chemicals?

What? I have no idea what you're referring to I'm simply stating that what we consider to be conciousness or thought, we may understand exactly how this is formed one day to the point it can be replicated or manipulated

If there is a god there is no free will or freedom of choice. Your "soul" is created by it to be good, bad or anything, thus there is no free will. If a god make souls to be blank slates, but punishes choice that is not of its will, but we can deviate from its will, then its a douchey god, so existent or not, we shouldn't care, because there is no point in this kind of "free" will. If we are nurtured by our parents or by our genes to be "good" or "bad" no choice there either.
Well, I don't care, as I like being "good", because it makes humanity move forward and I hope to see it create and achieve magnificent things in my lifetime.
"Good" is not a matter of choice, reward after death or avoiding punishment. It's the natural evolution of mankind, as "good" would lead it to survival, evolution and achievment. And no, when I say "good" I don't mean following gods or religions.

care to explain how exactly?

>Every decision you make is just the result of millions of variable and are basicaly just chemical reactions in your brain
Yes, this is true. But I don't see how that conflicts with the notion of free will. Maybe you have a fucked up understanding of what free will is?

Because the physical component means you are going to make the same decision regardless, if you have a different physical makeup then you make a different decision, your 'decisions' are limited by your biology and that doesn't sound free to me

We may but we don't. I would be willing to stake my life that I won't know during my life. It doesn't matter in order for me to make decisions

Describing the entire informational content of your brain as "just biology" is dishonest as fuck.
It's like taking a book about quantum field theory and saying it's '"just papermaking" since the book is made of paper.

Are you suggesting there's a quantum component to conciousness?

Not even slightly.

Then what other aspect is there?

I'm telling you're erroneously conflating the content of a book with the paper it's written on.

But that's irrevant, a book is still a book it can't change what is written inside no matter how complex

Yes, but the content of a book about QFT is limited by our knowledge of QFT. Nobody would say that the content of the book is limited by the chemical nature of the paper that it's made of, what a meaningless statement.
And that's exactly what you're doing with your emotional appeal to "limitations of biology".

The results of a measurement are fundamentally probabilistic. Schrodinger's equation only tells you how probabilities evolve with time, and Born's rules let you calculate the probability of obtaining certain results when you perform a measurement on a system. There is no way you can predict with 100% accuracy, even in principle, about what result your measurement would give beforehand (which was possible in classical mechanics).

That hardly solve the problem at hand though, instead of basing our decisions on hard determinism, it bases them on random dice rolls.

When people ask about "MUH FREE WILL" they might thing they ask about determinism, but what they really ask is "I want my spirit to be a magical think outside of this world"

>Because the physical component means you are going to make the same decision regardless, if you have a different physical makeup then you make a different decision,
So the same me in the same situation is going to make the same decision; whereas a different me might make a different decision. I don't see anything un-free about this. Indeed, this sounds exactly like how free will is supposed to work.

If the same me in the same situation could reach a different decision, then clearly the decision is NOT based on the state of my mind; it is NOT made by the things that make up "me". That sounds like the opposite of free will to me.

Well, I was only talking about determinism and not free will.

>I want my spirit to be a magical think outside of this world
If you expect it to be outside this world, why do you think the laws of this world (physics) would be able to explain it. I believe such questions cannot be answered by science.

Found the christcuck

Back to your containment board.

Oh fuck off, I don't even live a christian country.

we're not making measurements though

>can athiests believe in free will

Theists cannot believe in free will. God's plan is predetermined, since god is omniscient and omnipotent, he knows the future.

Consciousness is the emergence of a system, within a deterministic Universe, that can escape the inevitability of its parent-system.

Thanks, I'll show myself out now.

Your argument is basically assuming mind-body duality. You are saying that the body, a collection of matter and chemical reactions, is somehow independent of the mind. But, why can't the mind BE the chemical reactions? You are making debunked assumptions. Determinism and free will are not only compatible, but equivalent.

The brain created self-awareness as a means to cope with its own existence.

Fact: The vast majority of our bodily functions are completely automated and decided long before we even think about doing them.

We're not making decisions. We're more or less just here for the ride. We are our brain's co-pilot.

How does a person without free will behave differently than a person with it?

>Love is the work of a higher power
I don't think anyone believes that.

I don't know if there is a theory to explain free will, if so I haven't heard of it yet. I lean towards this: We have free will to an extent because our brains and in extension our thoughts are complex enough that we can chose what we want to do with ourselves. These choices are effected by our ingrown instincts, our culture, our parenting, and a multitude of other factors, however I believe that a choice made freely is greater than the sum of all of the events/social expectations/etc that led up to that choice.

In short, I don't think its a simple black or white answer, I think that in part we are driven by a relatively simple set of instinctual guidelines carried out by an extremely complex system, and in part we are a conscious entity capable of ignoring its programming or learning new programming or modifying its existing programming by an exertion of willpower.

No one can believe in free will because it's a logically absurd idea. Read Derk Pereboom.

>every atheist is an eliminative materialist

Free will is an incoherent concept.

Whether it exists for an atheists is not exactly relevant to their daily lives, however for theist babbies their entire worldview rests on this incoherent concept being true.

They can't acknowledge that people are the sum of their history and environmental influences or that would mean that their all-powerful all-knowing skydaddy made them just to fuck with them );