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Author Topic: Free Will
mr_porteiro_head
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Many times I've seen expressed the basic idea of "Even if free will doesn't exist, it's important that we act as though it does."

For those of you that agree with this statement, could you please explain to me what it means?

To me, it doesn't make any sense to talk about someone without free will deciding how to act, nor does it make sense to talk about how somebody should act if they aren't able to choose how to act.

I'm guessing that there's something I'm missing, quite possibly a definition that isn't shared.

I'm not wanting to get into a debate about whether or not we actually have free will -- I'm just trying to understand a viewpoint that I currently don't.

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pooka
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If we don't have free will, a lot of us would be in despair. It would mean that any abuse we've suffered or bad things we've done were appointed by God and there's nothing we can do about them.

Being able to do something about problems is essential to the way a lot of people operate psychologically -- even if the only choice we have is how to feel about something.

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mr_porteiro_head
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Yeah, that doesn't answer my question. If you don't have free will, how can you possibly choose how to feel about it? If you can choose, what does it mean to say that you don't have free will?
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Achilles
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I'm with Porter on this one. I don't understand it either, Dude.

Please enlighten us?

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mr_porteiro_head
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I'm hoping that Tom will chime in, since I know for a fact that he's expressed such an idea before.
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TomDavidson
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quote:
For those of you that agree with this statement, could you please explain to me what it means?
It means that people need to believe that their lives are personally meaningful and that their decisions have consequences in order for them to be aware of themselves as conscious entities; self-awareness is predicated upon the possibility of conscious thought, and conscious thought is by its very nature aware of the possibility of alternative action. It also means that society has to behave as if a given individual's actions are the result of that individual's decisions to maintain order, if not "justice."

For this reason, even if it turns out that everything you do has been predetermined by your environment, your genetics, or God, society still has to behave as if "you" chose to do those things. Moreover, your awareness of your self as a conscious entity is dependent upon the fiction that you are a conscious entity.

We construct our image of the will out of our image of the self -- and, importantly, vice versa. Whether we truly have free will or not, whether everything we do IS predetermined or not, it is essential to our image of ourselves to behave otherwise.

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adfectio
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I think it's one of those circular logic things. Or it just isn't logical at all. I think you understand all the arguments, you just can't make it fit in your head.

If we don't have free will how can we freely decide to act like we do? We can't. But maybe we're made to think that we do choose it.

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Javert
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The way I've heard it explained is that, when it comes down to it, we don't have free will. We act based on our genes, which we have no control over, and the sum of our experiences.

So, if we were able to look at all those factors and understand them, it would appear as though there is no free will. People just do what the genes and experiences say they're going to do.

But since we can't possibly have all of that information, and even if we did it would be incredibly hard to view it objectively, we don't know what we're 'supposed to do'.

And thus, we act as though we have free will.

Hopefully that made some sense.

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MattP
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quote:
If we don't have free will, a lot of us would be in despair.
I think what you're trying to say would be more accurately stated as "If we didn't believe we had free will, a lot of us would be in despair." That's really a separate issue from whether we actually have free will or not.

I think it's likely that we live in an entirely deterministic universe, but that there are so many variables at play so as to make it impossible to distinguish from true free will.

I also think it's impossible to act as if you don't have free will unless you actually do have free will. [Smile]

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Lisa
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From my point of view, it means that we have absolutely no way to know whether or not we have free will. It sure feels like we do, no? I mean, I'm choosing to type this.

If we don't have free will, it's not something we can ever really know. It's just theoretical. It may be true and it may not be. That being the case, acting as though we don't have free will (which is stupid, because doing so is itself a choice) is morally lazy and an excuse for doing whatever we want.

Since we can't know for sure one way or the other, it's incumbant upon us to take responsibility for our choices and our actions.

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The Pixiest
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You can "choose" all you like. However, whatever you choose will be due to Causation. Something CAUSED you to choose that. Your biology combined with your environment will dictate whatever you do.

Just because we don't have the ability to measure every little variable... The bit of cosmic radiation that bounced a neuron a nanometer to the left and inspired your greatest creative thought... The hormone that your body released that made you eat the ENTIRE pizza... The traumatic childhood experience that has instilled a livelong terror of Shrimp... doesn't mean we have free will.

We are a biological machine reacting to the world around us.

However, removing the pretense of free will changes the environment in an unpleasant way. Can you suddenly beg mercy for your sins/crimes/rudeness because you had no free will? After all, how can you be guilty of something when you had no choice?

So we act as if we have free will. People are held accountable for their actions. And a (comparatively) polite environment is maintained.

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mr_porteiro_head
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*frustrated*

None of this addresses the crux of why I can't wrap my head around this idea.

quote:
Whether we truly have free will or not, whether everything we do IS predetermined or not, it is essential to our image of ourselves to behave otherwise.
I don't understand how it makes any sense to talk of something without free will "behaving", any more than it makes sense to talk of a stone misbehaving.

Of course, a stone isn't self aware, which is where I think the disconnect might be. What does it mean for someone to be self-aware but not to have free will?

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pooka
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quote:
"If we didn't believe we had free will, a lot of us would be in despair."
Yeah, whatever. I thought Porter had clarified that we were discussing the belief in Free Will and not Free Will.

I have this calvinist friend and his interpretation of predestination makes sense, it's just not anything I would describe as predestination.

I'm still somewhat of a taoist, I think which means we do have free will in some things but not in others. But even in the non free will things, we have a choice about how we will feel about those things, and if we see them truthfully, we are less likely to be depressed. We gain more and more free will. Whoa. I don't think you can ever gain all or infinite free will, though. Even God's intentions are subject to our free will.

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TomDavidson
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quote:
I don't understand how it makes any sense to talk of something without free will "behaving", any more than it makes sense to talk of a stone misbehaving.
Why not? You can ask how water "behaves" on a slope, or how gas "behaves" in a closed system. Behavior does not necessarily imply choice.

quote:
What does it mean for someone to be self-aware but not to have free will?
Remember how I spent a while trying to answer this one for myself, and then settled on "contexts" to cover it? The idea is that someone's self-awareness operates on the internal context; you -- that is, the bundle of things that make up your sense of self -- are aware of yourself by virtue of being your sense of self. You can make decisions that appear to be generated purely from within your consciousness, but your consciousness is merely another product of your internal context -- and your internal context is, first and foremost, a product of other contexts. This produces a closed system within which your "free will" can occur; you may be able to "freely" choose between a variety of options, but since all inputs into and methods of the closed system are controlled by other contexts, it should be theoretically possible for an external observer to perfectly predict your choice provided he or she knows all the variables (which is a pretty big "provided," mind you, and not one I think we'll achieve in a dozen lifetimes.)

I'm verging on making a programming analogy, here. Don't make me. [Smile]

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pooka
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Your mother is a programming analogy.
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Dagonee
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quote:
Why not? You can ask how water "behaves" on a slope, or how gas "behaves" in a closed system. Behavior does not necessarily imply choice.
But you wouldn't say it was important for water to flow down a slope, even though it might be important to know that water on a slope will flow down.
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orlox
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It is argued that free will is a post hoc rationalization. That is to say it is a narrative that explains what already happened in a way that mistakenly seems like we are active agents.

Most of this comes out of Libet experiments:
http://www.consciousentities.com/libet.htm
http://www.consciousentities.com/experiments.htm#decisions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

Relativity also implies this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_time

edit typo

[ March 31, 2008, 02:19 PM: Message edited by: orlox ]

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mr_porteiro_head
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:
I don't understand how it makes any sense to talk of something without free will "behaving", any more than it makes sense to talk of a stone misbehaving.
Why not? You can ask how water "behaves" on a slope, or how gas "behaves" in a closed system. Behavior does not necessarily imply choice.
Good point.

quote:
Originally posted by Dagonee:
[QB]
quote:
Why not? You can ask how water "behaves" on a slope, or how gas "behaves" in a closed system. Behavior does not necessarily imply choice.
But you wouldn't say it was important for water to flow down a slope, even though it might be important to know that water on a slope will flow down.

Also a good point.
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scifibum
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My take on it is that the concept of free will goes hand in hand with the concept of rewards and punishments for behavior. And that concept is integral to civilization, which in turn is integral to the success/survival of our species on the current (or any large) scale.

You can take free will out of that, by the way, and it all still works, it's just that we seem to be mired in patterns of speech and thought that make free will a useful concept. Acting as if free will exists may have the same meaning/result as "acting out genetic imperatives that result in the encouragement of beneficial behavior and the discouragement/prevention of harmful behavior."

For me, personally, choice is a useful concept whether my choices are deterministic or by some nebulous definition "free." In fact, I haven't encountered a useful definition of free will that is qualitatively distinguishable from "deterministic but currently not well understood."

Why is free will important? What is different about reality, for you, if you don't have free will? More importantly, what would be different about humanity if free will didn't exist?

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TomDavidson
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quote:
But you wouldn't say it was important for water to flow down a slope, even though it might be important to know that water on a slope will flow down.
It may be important to the water to flow down a slope. I don't think the water is capable of perceiving this value, since I don't think it's got anything capable of coming up with an awareness of "purpose," but I could be wrong.

It's important for us -- insofar as we consider ourselves self-aware, free-willed entities -- to behave as if we are self-aware, free-willed entities. If we could remove the "free-willed" fiction without also removing the "self-aware" fiction, that might be okay -- but I suspect it's impossible. More pointedly, I suspect it's academic; we're not going to stop acting like we're free-willed just because it's theoretically possible that we aren't.

I suppose a useful question is this: if someone gives you a potent drug without your knowledge, and after falling victim to it you "choose" to rape and kill someone, are you to blame? If not, who is?

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MrSquicky
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For some systems lacking free will, a person's behavior is determined in lage part by their environment. In these systems, having the concept of free will and its attendent ideas (such as justifiable punishment and personal responsibility) are important because, even though they would be false, they would lead to better outcomes than if the true state were believed.

What people believe are part of the deterministic inputs and believing that they had no free will would lead to more negative consequences than believing that they do.

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scifibum
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MrSquicky, I doubt that the belief in free will is important to the system. What's important is the subjective perception of benefit or harm, and anticipation of consequences. I think these can exist without belief in free will.

The perception of choice & self awareness may be more interdependent.

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pooka
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In what systems do people believe they lack free will, and what can be learned from them?
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MrSquicky
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scifi,
I'm not sure you got my point. I was showing why some people believe that (in their system) the illusion of free will is important to maintain.

Also, what I think you're proposing (simplistic behaviorism) doesn't work when we're talking about real world people. It doesn't work for high order animals, as the learned helplessness experiments with dogs demonstrate. To date, any system that has done away with mental states has utterly failed to describe or predict human behavior outside of trivial cases.

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Dagonee
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Squicky and Tom are nibbling away at the problem area, but I'm still not sure I understand how "important" is used here. Tom's qualified "important" by defining the subject (whom it is important to - the self-aware system). Squicky's qualified "important" as to the object (what it is important for - better outcomes).

Both clarifications help me to understand what is meant by the statement at issue here, but I still don't understand how an outcome is determined to be better to a self-aware system that has no free will.

Despite this, you've both narrowed the area of confusion by quite a bit, so please continue nibbling at it. [Smile]

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scifibum
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quote:
Originally posted by MrSquicky:
scifi,
I'm not sure you got my point. I was showing why some people believe that (in their system) the illusion of free will is important to maintain.

Also, what I think you're proposing (simplistic behaviorism) doesn't work when we're talking about real world people. It doesn't work for high order animals, as the learned helplessness experiments with dogs demonstrate. To date, any system that has done away with mental states has utterly failed to describe or predict human behavior outside of trivial cases.

I did miss your point. Your post makes sense as a rationalization for believing that believing in free will is important.

I'll respond on your second paragraph then I'm leaving the discussion for a while: I don't think I was proposing what you think I was proposing. I was arguing that I think you can take the belief in free will away, and people will largely behave the same way. They will still perceive making choices, and will make similar choices for similar reasons. This is because society won't change how we react to people's choices simply because individuals don't believe in free will.

Getting back to the statement at the beginning of the thread:

"Even if free will doesn't exist, it's important that we act as though it does."

I'd actually say "even if free will doesn't exist, it's inevitable that we act as though it does."

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Xavier
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Everything I've ever done, or ever will do, was determined by my genes and by my environment. I recognize this, and don't lose any sleep at night. This conclusion is almost inescapable once you determine that having a "soul" is improbable.

However, by admitting that this is the case of all humans, we would have a very difficult time punishing individuals for committing crimes in our society.

So we pretend that individuals have free will, at the same time acknowledging that they probably don't. It's a contradiction that's a frequent source of drama on Law and Order [Smile] .

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MrSquicky
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scifi,
Ahhh...I get what you were saying. The reason why is would potentially exist is that this belief itself affects how people behave.

Consider the stress that surrounds the idea that people get punished for things that they ultimately were not responsible for. If you take away the belief in free will, no one is responsible for anything. We'd have to move completely away from earning and deserving what happens to you. That'd be an enormous societal change.

You'd have no grounds to ever be angry or proud or touched by something that another person did. It's all just people following their programming. These emotional states 1) rely on congitive justifications and 2) have real measurable effects on the state of one's body and one's actions. There be a big effect if they were either known to be unjustifiable (which would cause cognitive conflict, which also has very real effects) or if people stopped feeling them.

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
More pointedly, I suspect it's academic; we're not going to stop acting like we're free-willed just because it's theoretically possible that we aren't.

Simple question (I think): I'm not entirely getting this discussion as well, though it sounds interesting.
This might clear up my confusion.

How would you suspect that people would behave if they behaved like they did not have free-will and knew it as well?
i.e. If we assume that we're not free willed and we start acting that way, what would the difference be? How would we behave differently from we do now?

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Nighthawk
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I had free will... once. Then I got married.
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MightyCow
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I would look at it this way:

Obviously you have free will, it's self-evident. You feel like you have free will. You choose to do what you do. You make choices, and it's obvious that you could have taken any number of those different possible choices.

So don't act like you don't have free will just because someone tried to make you think you don't. Act as though you do have free will, because you do.

Even if you didn't have free will, you'd still be acting as though you have free will (since you are), so it wouldn't matter.

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orlox
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Exactly. If we have no free will, there is no REAL difference between acting as if we do or acting as if we don't, obviously.

I think the essentially political position that we should act AS IF we do is a tacit admission that the idea (that we have no free will) is nonsense.

It is comparable to the proposition that we are a 'brain in a vat' or the solipsist masturbation that only I exist and 'others' are only artificial inputs to solicit a desired response. Or that the world was just created two seconds ago complete with your mistaken belief that you have been alive all these years.

There is no way to positively disprove those assertions but they are so ridiculous that you are wise to act as if reality is as it appears to be.

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Saephon
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At first, I was also having trouble to wrap my head around the expression, but now I think I get it.

Even if free will doesn't exist, it's important that we act as though it does....

The rest of the statement, in my opinion, goes: ....because regardless of whether we actually are choosing to act that way, we will think we are. It's not about truth. It's about convincing yourself that your preferred outcome is the reality. Yes, if you could step back and know the truth and see that there is no free will, all this talk of "pretending that there is" would be laughable and impossible because we can't choose anything. But as far as I know, most people do not claim to have done that and discovered this undeniable truth. So we have a choice. Suppose that there isn't free will, and despair (or just do whatever you want I guess).....or you can suppose there is free will, either because you think so, or because you believe you're choosing to. If you somehow come up with the answer that you're genuinely undecided on the matter, my bet is that 9 times out of 10 that person will continue to act as if he has free will anyway. So it kind of doesn't matter.

Do not underestimate one's concept of self and his beliefs. It is provably possible that some things reality cannot touch inside a person.

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MrSquicky
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quote:
If we have no free will, there is no REAL difference between acting as if we do or acting as if we don't, obviously.
That's not actually true though. The belief that we do or do not can and likely will have an effect on how people behave. Not having free will doesn't mean that you stop believing in things or that the things you believe stop influencing your actions. It just means that you aren't free to choose what to believe or how to act

As I've pointed out, believing in free will lets you justify feeling ways about people or treating people certain ways because "they deserve it". If you believe that there is no free will, you can't justify things like that, so you are either left with cognitive conflict or stopping this behavior.

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pooka
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But you can still justify punishing people, because if their deterministic program has brought them to the point of harming others, their program should be culled from society. They do not continue to harm others. Their program has run to its terminus, where the consequence of their act was to bring about punishment.

I've always thought the "deterrent" argument for capital punishment was not very ethical anyway.
quote:
I think the essentially political position that we should act AS IF we do is a tacit admission that the idea (that we have no free will) is nonsense.
Huh? Anyway, I don't think this is a principally political discussion. I believe it's philosophical. Are you saying that because something is adopted as "political" it automatically becomes a sham?

A question for the materialists, what of the quantum mechanics level? It seems human behavior is both too consistent and too uncertain to have a foundation in quantum events.

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Shigosei
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"Even if free will doesn't exist, it's important that we act as though it does."

I'm not taking sides on the question of free will or not, but I suppose you could say that we feel compelled to explain why we continue to act as if we have free will.

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twinky
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This discussion reminds me of an amusing quote that summarizes the "no free will" position for me: "Consciousness is just the brain's way of estimating what it thinks it did."

Myself, I like to think that we do have free will, though I don't have any strong evidence to support that view. The brain does appear to be capable of stimulating itself, however.

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MrSquicky
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quote:
But you can still justify punishing people, because if their deterministic program has brought them to the point of harming others, their program should be culled from society.
Of course you could, but that would be a new type of justification and would not allow anger. It also invalidates most people's idea of justice, so that woud have to be thrown out too.

The way most people in western society are built right now, punishing someone for something that wasn't their fault but was instead was completely due to outside factors would cause a great deal of psychological trauma. It might be possible to drastically rebuild society and social conceptions so that they would no longer have a problem it, but that would be a massive undertaking.

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MrSquicky
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twinky,
Consciousness and its contents have a definite, often objectively observable role in behavior and body state. By current understanding, it can not just be an epiphenomenom.

quote:
The brain does appear to be capable of stimulating itself, however.
I don't know how you would determine spontaneous brain arousal from the influence of an outside non-deterministic entity.
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TomDavidson
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quote:
How would you suspect that people would behave if they behaved like they did not have free-will and knew it as well?
It depends. Are we talking about localized free will, the ability to make an illusory or artificial "choice" within your internal context, or true free will, the ability to make a choice independent of the manipulation of other contexts? I think Xavier is a good example of someone who's perfectly aware that he has only localized free will, and it doesn't affect him much.

I think someone who doesn't even believe in localized free will is someone who has rejected the belief that his self-image is important even to himself. As such, I think such a person is at best insane, and at worst actually non-sentient.

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scifibum
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MrSquicky, I think if people's cognition drastically changes, their behavior likely will too. That seems to be your current argument.

However, I don't believe that a belief in free will actually has that much to do with our normal thought processes. I think anger and gratitude and awe and various other states of mind can certainly coexist with a theoretical notion that people's behavior is deterministic. They do in my mind, after all! And I haven't changed my behavior in any significant way since I decided that I don't have free will.

Honestly, I don't see a gap between how we would react to people's actions if we thought they were deterministic vs. how we would react if felt they were freely willed. Either way I think responses are largely either arbitrary or based on some value system that actually exists outside the question of free will. (It doesn't matter if I think Timmy freely chose to steal that car, I'm still going to put him in prison. My reasons for putting him in prison are still valid.)

And, like Tom (I think; it's hard to know if I understand his concept of contexts) I think every normal person continues to perceive making choices, regardless of what they believe regarding the ultimate mechanism of those choices.

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twinky
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quote:
Originally posted by MrSquicky:
twinky,
Consciousness and its contents have a definite, often objectively observable role in behavior and body state. By current understanding, it can not just be an epiphenomenom.

OM NOM NOM NOM! I eat cookies, therefore I have free will?

(Sorry, amusing typo. [Big Grin] )

quote:
Originally posted by MrSquicky:
quote:
The brain does appear to be capable of stimulating itself, however.
I don't know how you would determine spontaneous brain arousal from the influence of an outside non-deterministic entity.
Maybe I just didn't get enough sleep last night, but I can't seem to parse this sentence. Do you meane "separate" by "determine?"
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MrSquicky
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scifi,
As I've been pointing out, people feel a need to justify what people get. This goes so far as to be a congitive error, that has been called the just world hypothesis, which involves believing that people who have good or bad things happen to them deserve these things and manufacturing things that constitute deserving them if they don't exist.

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scifibum
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I guess I don't know why you think that believing in deterministic behavior invalidates or prevents that.
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MrSquicky
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quote:
Maybe I just didn't get enough sleep last night, but I can't seem to parse this sentence. Do you meane "separate" by "determine?"
Yeah, that's what I meant. The word I meant to write was distinguish.
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mr_porteiro_head
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Tom, would you elaborate on what you mean by "localized free will", and how it applies to Xavier?
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Mucus
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TomDavidson:

I'm not sure, I never thought about breaking it down like that.
As for the first scenario, based on just my interpretation of what Xavier said, I think I agree with the idea that my thoughts, actions, etc. are all deterministic to a major extent.

The problem is I'm trying to imagine (in both your cases) what would happen if someone behaved as though they did not have free will and I'm not coming up with a lot unless someone tries to "game the system" and break it. (i.e. trying to make all decisions hooked up to a truly random number generator)

I mean, when I think about making a decision, really roughly I would weigh the pros and cons, then try to choose something appropriate. At no juncture do I really think "hey since I have free will, I should do this" or alternatively "I don't want to do this, but since I have no free will I have to." Whether I have free will or not doesn't seem to affect my decisions.

So I'm just not seeing that it makes a difference to how people behave either way (although maybe I'm generalising too much, maybe some people do make decisions based on whether they think they have free will?)... hence a great deal of confusion with this conversation.

Edit to add:
Perhaps an example.
If we look at predestination paradoxes in science fiction, let's pick an example where the "cycle" holds.
(e.g. The Twilight Zone: No Time Like the Past" where the main character tries to go back in time to change stuff and in every case either cannot change anything or actually causes what he is trying to prevent)

Under that kind of situation, a person is aware that no matter what they do they cannot change "what is supposed to happen" but can still "try" from their perspective. So I guess under your breakdown, they would have localised free will but not true free will. Is this correct?

A person that does not have localised free will would be one step futher, knowing that they cannot change "what is supposed to happen," they do not "try"? They try to figure out for every decision what they should do and then do it? Is that an example?

[ March 31, 2008, 05:30 PM: Message edited by: Mucus ]

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scifibum
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I suspect - but don't know for sure - that "localized free will" as Tom used it is something similar to "perception of making choices." (Obviously these choices would only be cognitive, as any number of things can limit the expression of our choices in what actually happens.)

In your time traveler example, both scenarios involve perception of choice. Lack of perception of choice combined with self-awareness is something I don't think we can experience, except perhaps in a dream state.

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Launchywiggin
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I like Tom's posts. His interpretation makes the most sense to me.
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orlox
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quote:
Originally posted by pooka:
Huh? Anyway, I don't think this is a principally political discussion. I believe it's philosophical. Are you saying that because something is adopted as "political" it automatically becomes a sham?

A question for the materialists, what of the quantum mechanics level? It seems human behavior is both too consistent and too uncertain to have a foundation in quantum events. [/QB]

I am not saying it is a sham. I am saying that it is extra, and does not follow, from argumentation that we do not have free will.

Quantum mechanics is the elephant in the room. If it doesn't seem that macro events have a quantum foundation that is entirely our problem. Reality does have a quantum foundation. How do we get from there to here and how much of it matters are open questions.

And it speaks to the other elephant which is two different conceptions of determinism. Absolute determinism and probabilistic determinism. Of course, we haven't really even defined free will either. [Big Grin]

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