Was there ever a point in our history where some

>Trump impeachment

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Believing_in_free_will
>A recent 2009 survey has shown that compatibilism is quite a popular stance among those who specialize in philosophy (59%). Belief in libertarianism amounted to 14%.

>79 percent of evolutionary biologists said that they believe in free-will according to a survey conducted in 2007, only 14 percent chose no free will, and 7 percent did not answer the question.

Yes.
2016

How can you be here on Veeky Forums but not believe in free will?

So most evolutionary biologists are retarded? I can believe that.

>So most evolutionary biologists are retarded?
No, they just happen to actually be educated unlike yourself.

All living things has consciousness you brainlet.

>All living things has consciousness you brainlet.
By definition, someone in a coma doesn't have consciousness, you brainlet.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Believing_in_free_will
lol, you BTFO your own argument. Try reading the source of shit you post from wikipedia next time.
>79 percent of evolutionary biologists said that they believe in free-will according to a survey conducted in 2007, only 14 percent chose no free will, and 7 percent did not answer the question.[212]
>212. Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine, “Evolution, Religion, and Free Will,” American Scientist 95 (July–August 2007), 294–97; results of Cornell Evolution Project survey, faculty.bennington.edu/~sherman/Evolution in America/evol religion free will.pdf.
>We anticipated a much higher percentage for option B and a low percentage for A, but got just the opposite result. One of us (Provine) has been thinking about human free will for almost 40 years, has read most of the philosophical literature on the subject and polls his undergraduate evolution class (200-plus students) each year on belief in free will. Year after year, 90 percent or more favor the idea of human free will for a very specific reason: They think that if people make choices, they have free will. The professional debate about free will has moved far from this position, because what counts is whether the choice is free or determined, not whether human beings make choices. People and animals both certainly choose constantly.
>Comments from the evolutionists suggest that they were equating human choice and human free will. In other words, although eminent, our respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes. Evolutionary biology is increasingly applied to psychology. Belief in free will adds nothing to the science of human behavior.

>trumplets

>antifa

but does bacterias has it too?

lmao

Yeah the do plenty of people who wake up say theu where aware. Also brain scans then asking people to visualize a apple showed theu where aware

>lol, you BTFO your own argument. Try reading the source of shit you post from wikipedia next time.
Did you even read the PDF you linked? How exactly does it run against the facts I've posted?

Yeah.

>If you believe in free will, you may as well believe in magic, Jesus and/or scientology.
What a millennial thing to say.

But user, the nervous system is just a long wire that connects sensors with motors and its work is based on reflexes, which was scientifically proved long time ago.
Where the ""free"" will is happening in that process? What is the genesis of so called ""free"" will?

Friendly reminder that free will is an open scientific problem

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Scientific_approaches

Right now. Some humans are babies and-or sleeping

>Comments from the evolutionists suggest that they were equating human choice and human free will.
>In other words, although eminent, our respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes
lol.
Also, are you making the same mistake your source identified i.e. equating choice with free will? That's apparently why most people answer those surveys questioning free will in the affirmative.

There is an entire book basically about this idea.

Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

He probably bought into the meme that the scientific method doesn't work without free will.

>Also, are you making the same mistake your source identified i.e. equating choice with free will?
No, and if I was given the two options offered to the evolutionists I would use my free will to choose the same one that most of them did.

If you're one of the "people" who unfortunately lack free will then I send my regards.

>He probably bought into the meme that the scientific method doesn't work without free will.
I'm not a "he".

How is that relevant to anything? Male pronouns are just what you use by default. It's an anonymous image board, there isn't even a temporary ID tying together the different posts you're making in this thread so it's not like someone could use that information to start referring to you with female pronouns even if that were something that mattered in the first place.

Lol, nice job. These people are so stupid they cannot even know who you are.

Right now in the case of african blacks.

Clearly you're better off not asking Veeky Forums, or anywhere else on Veeky Forums, but I'll try for a non-total shitpost...

My take on it is that consciousness, or complex self awareness, with all its myriad of nuances, is not a natural state - not something, generally, instinctive, but learned. Should you ever get around to raising a child with a critical eye, you'll gather a not of anecdotal evidence to this effect.

You see this demonstrated most readily, and less anecdotally, in folks who grow to adulthood without language, and pick it up late in life. Usually this entails deaf individuals that did not have access to sign language in their youth, which isn't all that unusual in the developing world. They don't "think" in the way we do, and can't reason abstractly. Even after learning a sign language, while the improvement is dramatic, most still have the same sort of reasoning deficiencies that toddlers do - such as a lack of ability to compartmentalize character memory within a story, or to identify a location with a combination of spatial direction and visual recognition. There's also a lot of evidence to suggest that complexity of language is directly related to complexity of thought.

Thus, I suspect, consciousness did not come to humanity in a burst, but slowly developed over time, as did their culture and language. Certainly there's no shortage of tales of conflicts between groups of "savages" and "civilized" humans. The conflicts between these scattered isolated tribes, and the more advanced ones that formed cross-family nations, were likely common at one point as well.

Off the top of my head, I'd say it was the descendants of those humans who lived on the coast and subsisted on seafood. I remember reading somewhere that it was their diet that contributed to getting a complex enough brain for consciousness to emerge

but idk i'm just some asshole on the internet

>consciousness did not come to humanity in a burst, but slowly developed over time
This.

Consciousness is a spectrum just like free will.

It really depends on what you believe consciousness is. The way I see it, we use consciousness to describe the illusion of free will/self awareness that emerges due to the incredibly complex interactions between neurons in our brains. Fundamentally, there is nothing that separates us from an equivalent lump of pure elements other than how our atoms are arranged and interact with each other. Under the assumption that this view is correct, sapience and consciousness should be a spectrum, and there was no point at which some humans just became aware. Another user here said something along the lines of some humans being "more" conscious than others and I would tend to agree with him, even if we're taking about modern man.

>Was there ever a point in our history where some humans had developed a consciousness while at the same time some hadn't?

You mean now?

Worms already had consciousness.

Free will is no rocket science, only bluepilled normies don't have it, because they think and do what their masters tell them.

>No
>my free will to choose
What you meant to say is "Yes, I am conflating choice and free will." The other user is retarded for not expanding his point and just making a dumbshit analogue to religion, but your inability to read and think abstractly somehow made you look like more of an idiot in this exchange.

>What you meant to say is "Yes, I am conflating choice and free will."
No, I meant what I said.

Free will is impossible with random choices, brainlet, it would be below viruses.

>random choices
No such thing.

Jaynes thought about exactly this.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
It's a fascinating read.

If you're not up for a textbook, read Snow Crash.

those 'Random Choices' are animal instincts. You have the ability to overcome them, you just need to have strength of mind.

I think you're trying to make an argument against the fact free will and choice aren't the same thing.
Well randomness has nothing to do with that distinction. The paper isn't saying choice can be either random or deterministic.
It's saying:
1) Everyone agrees with the obvious reality that people make choices and
2) People who claim on these surveys to believe in free will are often found based on their comments to have answered in that way because they believe "people make choices" equates to free will.
The relevant alternative to people making choices and free will existing is people making choices and free will not existing. Randomness is a totally different topic.
The fact you went to randomness automatically as the alternative based on nothing suggests you're just like these pro- free will respondents and don't understand how choice can exist in a deterministic world. The reason why determinism doesn't mean "no choice" is because in a deterministic world you can still choose to leave for work fifteen minutes earlier tomorrow morning to try to avoid traffic, it's just that your choice to do so will be the end result of a series of physical cause and effect relationships and your choice was going to happen that way because of those physical causes. Determinism doesn't even conflict with the existence of a
"self" process that makes choices based on consciously evaluated reasons, it's just that however that "self" behaves will also be a deterministic product of physical cause and effect relationships.
By analogy, Lando chooses to betray Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back and chooses to redeem himself in Return of the Jedi. But those movies were already going to turn out that way before he made those choices.
I didn't make any posts about religion, please don't smear my pure quality posts with bad identity guesses.

i think that you are confusing the word "consciousness" with the word "reason". every single living being has a "consciousness" even if it's just reaction to stimuli, but the only animal capable of reason is the human

It's not confusion on OP's part, "consciousness" is a notoriously vague label that gets applied for many different ideas that would be better treated separately. In fact defining "consciousness" in a very specific way by ruling out everything you aren't using it to refer to is exactly what this book's first section is dedicated to:
And I think it's the best part of his book. The rest of it he gets super-speculative about the psychology of ancient people by reading into relatively sparse amounts of evidence like word choices in the Iliad or the appearance of ancient statues, but the first part is him doing a really great job differentiating in thorough detail all the distinct cognitive processes that get lumped in with "consciousness" and making the cases for why each of those different processes is not the one specific process he's defining as "consciousness" (e.g. "thinking" isn't what he's talking about).

Also you should read that book because the "every single living being has a 'consciousness' " idea is something he explicitly argues against. He started out believing in that idea himself but found when he tried to study organisms of increasing complexity that none of them were really "conscious" in the way he had in mind, which eventually led him to the radical conclusion on the other end of the topic's argument spectrum where he didn't even think "consciousness" was a trait of modern anatomical humans for much of ancient history. The claim is less weird once you get through that first part though because if you follow his arguments then by the time you hit the "ancient people weren't conscious" material you'll know he's talking about a very narrow / well defined sense of "consciousness" that even most of us today don't spend all that much time engaged in.
s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_Origin_of_Consciousness.pdf

Can anyone even define what "free will" is? Not only do I believe in its inexistence, I believe that it's an impossible concept.

>Not only do I believe in its inexistence, I believe that it's an impossible concept.
That's a good point. It doesn't even seem like a coherent idea when you try to think through how it would work.
I think everyone agrees it's not randomness since that wouldn't make you any more "free" than a slot machine or a random number generator.
And it's not the ability to make choices either because your behavior and physiology underlying choices are themselves still part of physical cause and effect relationships where inputs determine outputs.
What that leaves someone believing in free will is the claim that their behavior is not (at least not in its entirety) being determined by physical cause and effect relationships. Which raises questions about why physical brains even exist if they don't cause behavior. I guess that leads to a dualism position where your free will is like a magical ghost pilot for your body and the brain is its control room.
If you were to rewind time so that the same exact day you already lived through were to take place again, would you be able to choose to do something different (all conditions kept the same with no knowledge that this was the second time you were experiencing this day)? I don't see how you could unless your behavior is randomly generated, and that would reduce your "free will" to a coinflip.

holy shit you're a retard.

>And it's not the ability to make choices either because your behavior and physiology underlying choices are themselves still part of physical cause and effect relationships where inputs determine outputs.
So?

I mean, if it's not making decisions, then what is it?

Would history be different if you made different decisions, or hadn't been there to make them all? Yes, therefor your decisions have agency. They affect the past and the future.

Sure, those decisions are inevitable, but as general relativity dictates, so is everything else, quantum woo be damned.

Asking for anything beyond that is saying you don't have free will for the same reasons you can't shoot laser beams out of your eyes. An inability to defy the laws of physics and causality isn't an end to your participation in that equation.

>if it's not making decisions, then what is it?
An incoherent idea. That's the point.
>Sure, those decisions are inevitable
>An inability to defy the laws of physics and causality isn't an end to your participation in that equation
That means you're actually a determinist who just didn't realize it (which is apparently very common based on that paper posted earlier in this thread).
Everyone agrees choices exist, the argument for "free will" is that your choices aren't dictated by physical cause and effect relationships.

>An incoherent idea. That's the point.
Only if you re-define it as something beyond the ability to make decisions - then it becomes undefinable.

Determinism is the term that has been twisted into incoherence. The fact that the universe is ultimately deterministic doesn't have bearing on free will. You still make decisions that impact the timeline, however inevitable they are. As you aren't an omniscient being, you experience this as free will.

Though, I suppose, one could argue that you have no choice but to experience it as free will, so long as you're alive.

>Only if you re-define it as something beyond the ability to make decisions
No, "free will" not being the same as "choices exist" is the standard definition. See:
You're making the very common mistake that paper describes. Everyone believes in the existence of choices, that's not free will. Nobody denies that restaurant menus exist.

[citation needed]

Choices exist, you make them, this affects events that would not have happened if you had not made them. Yes, the menu exists, but the waiter brings what you order. Yes, this series of events is inevitable, but without your participation, they do not happen for you.

What more do you want? What is free will if not this? Who demands more and what do they demand?

>Can anyone even define what "free will" is?
There are plenty of definitions plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

>What is free will if not this?
Simple, get rid of this part:
>Yes, this series of events is inevitable
That's determinism. Both the determinist and the person arguing for free will always agree there are choices, the question is whether those choices are dictated by physical cause and effect relationships. If yes, then determinism. If no, then free will.

And to further clarify, this is exactly why the concept is called "free will" with the "free" modifier included in the phrase. Choices alone would just be "will."

ever been to Baltimore?

Wanted to respond to this sooner, but had to go out due to circumstances beyond my free will.

And yeah, that's a point, but it's still demanding that one must be able to break the laws of physics in order to have free will, and ignores the fact that, since you are not cognizant of all of spacetime, or even of many of the mechanisms of your own decision making process, you still experience said process as free will.

Being capable of making decisions with consequences, and experiencing that process as free will, should be enough for any individual to say, "I have free will". I mean, sure, you can trace all of reality and time to some quantum vacuum event before the dawn of time as prime mover of everything that ever has or ever will happen, but you're still an actor on that scripted stage, responsible for various consequences that would not have happened were you and your decisions not part of that temporal tapestry. We maybe following railroad tracks, but they are tracks of our own making, many of which would not exist without us.

As it's completely a factor of consciousness, much like imagination, it maybe something that does not ultimately exist outside of the mind, but like imagination, there's no denying it exists as part of the human experience, and that experience has consequences in the way we act in the world and arrange our societies.

Yes. It was before that strange obsidian block appeared floating in their bone yard, and taught one of them how to smash things with bones as clubs.

knowledge + ability + more = freewill spectrum

Several times I have had music appear in my head, completely novel - and absolutely amazing. If I could record the music heard it would be popular stuff. What is the cause? Creativity of course... what is the cause of creativity?

it is the opposite of entropy. the ability to adjust the flow of deterministic time.

Underrated

You're a determinist if you acknowledge your actions are determined physically. I agree the idea your will isn't subject to physical causality doesn't make sense, but I can assure you this is a view people actually believe in and argue for. Choice isn't free will, everyone agrees choices exist, they disagree on whether choices are bound by physical causality.

freewill and determinism coexist.the more you are able to realise the present moment the more freewill you will have from the current of determinism.

Fucking hell OP, we're still living it.

Nigga, like 75% of the population doesn't have consciousness on abstract level, so the point of history you're looking for is pretty much all of human history

clever girl

>they disagree on whether choices are bound by physical causality.
At that point it's a physics debate, rather than a philosophical one, but I've never heard a serious physicist argue otherwise, outside of some misinterpreted quantum woo, which doesn't ultimately escape the trap.

It seems, even in a physically bound universe, however, you're still stuck with experiencing choice making as free will. You can argue it's ultimately an illusion brought on by inevitable ignorance, but like the rest of human perception, it's a damned persistent illusion, to the point where denying free will's existence, if not the reasons behind it, is folly.

not as funny as the original

I like this post. Thanks.