What's the scientific consensus on free will?

It seems to me that the most logical point of view is not believing in free will until there is scientific proof. If you disagree, why?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb's_paradox
youtube.com/watch?v=hbQTVhJFEok
youtube.com/watch?v=Zw-j1E66e7c
youtube.com/watch?v=bhc7tXlgMvI
youtube.com/watch?v=MS590Xtq9M4
arxiv.org/pdf/1607.02076.pdf).
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

The proof is evident by our ability to store and replicate information despite limited lifespans. While yes, the heat death of this universe is assured, our race, arrogant in the face of this heavy pessimistic force has yet to discover its true potential. We are able to achieve wonders. This is only the beginning, while the old makes way for the new, the new must bring with it the old to survive and build upon. Something has halted us from oblivion. Something will push us beyond even death.

Sounds amazing, but that doesn't prove anything.
Do you believe in God? Why (not)?

>What's the scientific consensus on free will?
some of us have it, some of us don't

It does prove something. The micro. Us. Often reflect the macro. The cosmos.

If we can die and leave something verifiable behind, then something can be left behind in this universes conclusion.

As for God...
I believe in Multi-verse. He is a repeating component of universal laws.

Mathematically speaking a repeating base number from which all can be derived from.

Why?
I have seen things. Things that would have you second guessing what is reality and what is fiction. I have seen life breathed into lifeless corpses and brought back to the living world. I have seen levitation without a power source or a fixed point of contact. I have even seen fireballs juggled with bear hands yet not burn. Lightning thrown from fingertips. Cancers being singed away using energies more precise than radiotherapy. The only reason people still continue this charade of life, this anathema to the fullest grasp of understanding? Evil or God.

Is the alternative to free will determinism?
The future is all laid out and you've no choice?
_That's_ been pretty well scotched by quantum mechanics and chaos theory.

Having trouble deciding whether to major in A or B at college? Flip a coin! Or consult some random process like radioactive decay or amplified thermal noise.
It would be a stupid way to run your life, but it guarantees you're not "fated" to do such-and-such.

Could there be a Being which knows Everything and can perfectly predict your future actions? You can call it God or imagine a supercomputer which has extensively studied the structure of your brain. Even if you believe he's not perfect but is only right 99.999% of the time, you run into problems.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb's_paradox

Cool story.
>I have seen things.
Any scientific base or should this be considered anecdotal evidence, in which case, shouldn't you go back to /x/?

>Cancers being singed away using energies more precise than radiotherapy
>about to say you're a retard for using 'singed' in stead of 'sang'
>realized it had nothing to so with singing
>realized how stoned i a really am

Chaos systems are still deterministic. Just because small changes to initial conditions change the outcome does not mean that outcomes can't be predicted given exact initial conditions.
Even if determinism isn't exactly true, free will still doesn't exist, as agent-causation isn't real.

Much of what I allude to illusionary, clever tricks of science, slights of the oldest craft with some new methods. You forget the stories of Archimedes. In the days when it was art.

youtube.com/watch?v=hbQTVhJFEok

youtube.com/watch?v=Zw-j1E66e7c

youtube.com/watch?v=bhc7tXlgMvI

youtube.com/watch?v=MS590Xtq9M4

>Very strong magnets

>Fire Juggling
well meme'd, my friend

Which is why I said Chaos AND Quantum Mechanics.
Exact initial conditions can never be known.

The universal wave-function doesn't collapse though, and can be predicted through unitary time-evolution from the initial wave-function (arxiv.org/pdf/1607.02076.pdf). If we knew the initial wave-function (which we can't, but that's beside the point), we could find the future wavefunction of the universe at any time.

If the universe if proven to be deterministic and not random then there is essentially no free will. If you can gather enough data you would be able to predict anything

But is the universe deterministic?

im not telling you figure it out for yourself.

Answer is obviously no.
>Thoughts are based on neurons communicating
>Neurons communicate through action potentials through the release of neurotransmitters
>Neurotransmitters ultimately released based on external environment which you have no control over.
Even if you choose to do something and then choose against it before making your final decision you were predetermined to do so based on your brains circuit which determines your thoughts and actions.

How can molecules in motion choose where they are going?

The most logical point of view us the one from which you can respect that even though it may be true that we don't have free will it also doesn't really matter for our day to life and you can accept that and move forward. Maybe we will know for sure and have a more rigid understanding of free will in the future. Determinism seems correct to me, I don't know that it is.

>discussion board
>im not telling you figure it out for yourself.

There is no science pertaining to "free will". It's not a scientific concept.
>pic
Not going to check, but I'm guessing there's a 75% chance that video is about the button experiment, which is a retarded argument. Just because people can make trivial decisions subconsciously doesn't mean they make every decision subconsciously. And anyway, that experiment was by no means attempting to prove or disprove "free will."

Let's say there's 0 evidence that free will doesn't exist. There's also no evidende that proves free will DOES exist. Why would it make more sense to believe in a positive than in a negative?

...

Free will is outside the realm of science

>we can not claim that something exists unless science addresses it
ho boy

even if it isn't deterministic, the nondeterminate parts are probably just random noise and have nothing to do with decision-making anyway

it's impossible, completely impossible. There is no way that agency could exert itself. its a concept from a time before we understood thermodynamics user. Its just not tenable at all.

A) Determinism is true
A.1) I claim determinism is false -> I am incorrect, but I couldn't have typed anything else, so it doesn't matter
A.2) I claim determinism is true -> I am only coincidentally correct, because I couldn't have typed anything else, so it doesn't matter

B) Determinism is false
B.1) I claim determinism is false -> I am correct, and the topic of determinism doesn't matter anymore
B.2) I claim determinism is true -> I am incorrect, but I am willingly placing myself in the reference frame A of meaning, in which case even if determinism were true and my choice of reference frame A was relevant and correct, I would still only be coincidentally correct because, by my own chosen reference frame A, I couldn't have typed anything else, so it still doesn't matter

As such there is no significant meaning which can be extracted from thinking about the question of whether determinism is true. It is a worthless philosophical question arising only from human language itself as opposed to any real analysis of reality. So despite being regarded as one of the deeper questions in some philosophical modes of thinking, it actually isn't. This proof seems too simple and too good to be true but I've yet to see a reasonable refutation.

There will never be a train of thought resulting in catharsis regarding the question of determinism. There cannot be one.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
-Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Are you implying that it would be a fruitless endeavor to study the brain and figure out how it forms thoughts simply because of some quirky conclusions you have derived using syllogism?

I'm a philosophy major and even I don't think the question is meaningless. There's science to be done and experiments to be conducted to try and figure out how the brain works and whether we can define its mechanisms as "deterministic" or not. This is very important.

I never said any of those things, I said there is no such thing as a concept of "determinism vs. non-determinism" and it is completely a human language construct that has nothing to do with the universe. If you disagree, I would unironically love to see a refutation of my argument, but I've yet to see one.

>I said there is no such thing as a concept of "determinism vs. non-determinism" and it is completely a human language construct that has nothing to do with the universe.
If by this you mean that our concepts of determinism and free will and the debate that ensues has no relation to how the universe works, then you're wrong. That's not to say that I don't think that language might have framed things in a way where the debate has become bogged down with syllogism, but I do believe there is still an absolute answer. Our brains work in a certain way and as of today we haven't yet been able to figure it out, so we're only studying its philosophical implications for now. As soon as we do figure out exactly the way the brain works, science and philosophy will combine and we will be able to describe a very important aspect of how the universe works.

Okay, then define it in a clear and concise way which cannot be weaseled out of using unfalsifiable hypotheses

Define what?

Determinism and free will. What even are they? I say they are linguistic abstractions that don't actually map to anything in reality.

Determinism is usually framed in terms of physical phenomena instead of human psychology. Physical states of affairs in the past give rise to predictable states in the future.

Imagine someone dropping a ball off a roof. They'd be able to predict with a fair amount of accuracy how it will bounce and you'd certainly agree it could not have bounced in any other way after they dropped it.

The difficulty arises when you try to account for psychological states in terms of physical phenomena. You can make a fairly good case that chemistry collapses into physics but it is harder to explain biology in terms of chemistry or psychology in terms of biology. However just because we do not have evidence at the moment doesn't mean the higher strata of sciences are detatched from physical phenomena.

I personally think that less fundamental physical phenomena exist as proper subsets of more fundamental phenomena (see Jessica Wilson subset theory for more info). As such I cannot see how psychological states could meaningfully supervene onto physical states. If you make a choice you were fundamentally always going to make it unless your psychological state is somehow detatched from physics.

linguistic abstractions is a retarded way of saying concept. most concepts do not map on to anything in the physical world within which linguistic abstractors process. To say they thus refer to nothing meaningfully real and potentially consequential is an extreme metaphysical position not taken up by most metaphysics experts.