Our mind is literally determinism plus a sprinkle of quantum randomness

Our mind is literally determinism plus a sprinkle of quantum randomness.

Free will is such an absurd idea.
How can anyone believe in it?

...

define free will

>free will thread nr. googol + 1

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You are determined by experience. Its everything you stored and interpreted during your lifetime + genetics. That being said there may be a mechanism for choosing based on this experience. We need to find out more about the brain first though. I believe the answer will be found in what we call unconscious mind which is not opposite of free will. I have no problem calling free will unconscious choices made conscious if there is some conscious mechanism for choosing or at least directing our unconsciousness.

Also please stop trolling. Its neither funny nor annoying anymore. Its just taking space and everyones time.

OP here, not trolling at all. I'm genuinely bewildered by people, whom I meet in real life, who believe in free will, even more by the fact that many of them are offended by merely questioning their belief.

I concur with your rationalization. "Free will" is just an extreme simplification for the vast, nearly unimaginable parallel processes occurring in our brain that lead to a "conclusion".

Still, it's puzzling why ordinary people are so easily offended by the idea.

If I write a computer program, its outputs are entirely determined by its internal logic and its inputs (plus some pseudo-randomness) but it seems utterly absurd to claim that the program therefore isn't in any meaningful sense doing anything to generate those outputs.

Determinism doesn't mean your decisions are already written down in a list your brain is reading off of. It just means that, for each specific set of circumstances, you would make a particular decision.

I have precisely no problem with the idea that I will make a particular decision in particular circumstances, and even make similar decisions in similar circumstances; all that means is that I'm consistent.

It's a fundamentally indeterministic world but there is no free will. It's not like you are in control of quantum randomness.

>>Free will is such an absurd idea.
>How can anyone believe in it?

Because they choose to believe it.

#
>Still, it's puzzling why ordinary people are so easily offended by the idea

Because they hear

>"there is no such thing as free will"

as you saying:

>"The idea that your consciousness has any input into your actions is wholly illusory; there is literally no sense in which your internal experience of 'making choices' has any correspondence to anything going on in your brain, and your belief that you do is a delusion."

This sounds both a lot like philosophical edginess wank, and fairly insulting, as well as being deeply uncomfortable if seriously thought about. Plus, it's almost certainly false.

It may not be what you meant, but it's what "there is no free will" sounds like it means, and indeed is often what people actually do mean by saying that.

Words in philosophy have a zillion different implications and everyone uses them differently. You should not be surprised that you miscommunicate when you make statements commonly associated with provocative positions.

>tfw I'm a fat friendless virgin NEET living at his parents' basement but it's ok because there is no free will
Thanks OP.

I'm sure you're just an asshole about it and they're just offended by your presence.

I think there is a problem with terminology which creates this. We simply do not know enough to give a certain answer. We know that we are determined because we can predict peoples behavior even if its just in probability for now (psychology is studying this mostly). There may or may not be our own self regulation. There also may be a very small window of self regulating some limited processes in our organism. There might be a few paths our conscious mind can direct attention to and our unconscious processes do that. But you are right that there is no free will in a sense that most people believe in. Its more of illusion.

It is still gray area in science and also in philosophy. Even if we would be 100% unconsciously regulated (which we are not sure) there would be a philosphical problem: can we call free will if it is unconscious? because organisms still choose but unconsciously. It is probably better to find out if we choose, if there is a choosing process but then we can see that organisms have tension and cant choose in some scenarios if they dont ponder about it or rationalize it and it clearly takes them time to do so. The outcome is still varied. The same guy may choose or just stop trying based on criteria like given time for thinking and such.

Im not a neuroscientist or a psychologist though so I cant answer this. For now I simply think we are mostly determined unconsciously but I dont know about the conscious part or the free will problem.

+ then again I know people can actively change some physiological processes by directing their conscious attention to them. They are basically regulating themselves to a degree. I know this because cognitive behavioral therapy uses biofeedback which is just a tool for measuring physiological phenomena like electrodermal activity or heat and such. We can change our heat and even our brain waves by directing our consciousness or attention if you prefer to the graphs and images we see on the display of PC. We dont even know how we do it so our unconscious is probably regulating it but we have to use consciousness for it to even register what we need to do otherwise our organism will not understand. This is interesting to me as it does not rule the determinism but it still shows that our consciousness plays a part in giving information to unconsciousness to regulate our physiological processes based. All this is based is our psyche. Its a psychic regulation.

The unconcious part of your brain decided for you to focus on a certain thing.

If we abandon the idea of free will, our whole legal system falls apart.

>free will is such an absurd idea
>'quantum randomness'

what's wrong with that?

Why? When we put someone in Jail, we could do no other.

nonsense
it still discourages people from doing wrong
literally nothing changes

Yes but you need consciousness for that. Without counsciousness it is not possible so it plays a role in it.