Prove that we are capable of free will

Prove that we are capable of free will

Define free will

No

>QED

Excellent work.

suicide.

Hold on a second.
How can you prove we are capable of free will by "refusing" to prove that we are capable of free will?

Ex falso sequitur quodlibet!

Of if you want some more plain english: Epistemology (JTB)

We arent.

If human is made up of both his heredity and environmental factors then a large part of him is planned, and he can only do so much in terms of deviation from the norm, and his base instincts make said human naturally conform to social order

As well as the fact that most people are not capable of truly original thought and instead create ideas off of someone else

But at the same time we also have non conformist humans who do things for the sake of their own knowledge no matter how badly they might be viewed in the present time

And these same people can and probably do have thoughts that are not influenced by anyone else nor by their own environmental factors

So I'd say maybe 10% of all humans have truly free will about the same amount as Maslow viewed as self actualized
while the rest might as well be automatons

I decided not to post in this thread
Q.E.D.

I was about to, but decided against it.

Not possible because free will isn't real.

being influenced by those around you doesn't make you an automaton. it just means you used information from another source to make your choice.

An argument could also be made to say that those who are self actualized are likely the people who successfully gather information from those around them, and not those who ignore it in lieu of making their choices with only self contained knowledge.

An utter fool you show yourself to be.
>self contained knowledge
"Whence cometh this knowledge if not from another? Even your instincts are bequeathed from father or mother."
We are all slaves to causation. Everything ever done was the necessary result of a prior action, all the way to the origin.

I think we do have free will.

We make decisions don't we? Yes we're INFLUENCED, but we still make decisions.

Every decision we make is limited by the options that are available to us. BUT we still make decisions. When I go into Tesco, I can only choose a sandwich from what they have available. If they don't have any BLTs in stock, then I can't buy a BLT. But I can buy a chicken, bacon and lettuce sandwich, or an all day breakfast. If it's a Tesco Extra then the selection will be even wider, with exotic sandwiches like southern fried chicken and coleslaw (that's a great sandwich).

But anyway - I choose what sandwich to buy. And then when I eat that sandwich, it informs me with knowledge I didn't have before. I either think "that was a really tasty sandwich, I'll buy that again if they have it", or I'll think "yuck that was a shit sandwich, I'm never buying that again".

And if all these decisions ARE somehow cosmically predetermined - who the fuck cares? It's not like we can predict our decisions. We can't. People can be very unpredictable. Even if there is some equation which would predict a person's actions perfectly, we don't know those equations yet.

So who cares. It doesn't matter. Focus on taking control of your life and making decisions which benefit you.

We have the illusion of free will but true free will is not possible.

Prove it you fucking faggot.

You can't.

Computers can do that but they don't have free will, do they?

I can say the same to you, there is no evidence for free will, I personally believe that the universe is deterministic, and there is no way neurons firing in someone's head will change that

free willy

a better question is if free will can exist in aliens

very likely, yes

no, even in an alien or another species there are all reasons for everything, everything can be reduced down to simple factors (either form other events or the being themselves), this means no choice is made by free will even if you think it is

perhaps even free will can be explained by the randomness present in biological systems, like brownian motion, radiation, external factors, w/e

at least it's not pure determinism

you wont know until you put your brain in a vat

do it for science

Even if I did that the universe would still be deterministic

But we cant be sure until you do it.
So do do it please.

If I come up with a list of actions to follow and set up a machine that would generate an absolutely random number to decide which action I will take, would that count?

Obviously the absolute randomness is a huge problem here. I was thinking about some QM-shit, but honestly I don't have any real knowledge about that.

No because the list of actions you created are based off of your own pre-determined wants and needs that have been shaped ever since you were a babby

So no, That's still not technically free will
It's just adding another step to create an illusion of choice

In order for your theory to work you would need to supply a limitless number of possibilities into that machine that have absolute nothing to do with your own personal psyche

Every choice is initiated by an implicit or explicit question and thus dependent on them. It isn't a matter of freedom of choice, but freedom of questioning, which isn't absolute but a skill that can be trained and developed. The focus of moral teaching should thus be on teaching people to question better both abstractly and in regards to moral issues.

Unfortunately questioning is systematically discouraged in every way in our society, with religion and ideology being the biggest offenders. Questioning is the cornerstone of human self-awareness, as the spotlight of our awareness itself is a question, and self-awareness is this conscious querying of reality bent over on itself, so that it can ask questions of its own questions in order to self-improve.

if free will was explained by randomness then it would not be "free", but yes maybe you could construct a case against hard-line determinism

This is a pointless discussion because the answer is this: we don't know.

You know when people say like "we don't know whether male and female behavioural differences are due to biological or sociological reasons"? Or "we don't know what causes black people to commit more crime"?

Those are cases of people LYING. Because in both those cases, WE DO KNOW - or at least we have a pretty DAMN GOOD IDEA of what causes those things. It's not hard to study the biology of different sexes and races. People say "we don't know" because the answer is politically incorrect and they don't want to admit it.

But in the case of free will, WE REALLY DON'T KNOW - at least, currently. Until we can predict someone's decisions with 100% accuracy, we don't know whether everything is determined or not. It might be the case that there exists an element of randomness / uncertainty to human decision making, even if it is heavily influenced by many factors that we are able to recognise.