I was going to get up and do my grocery shopping before another hard night shift on the stop-go signs, but I decided to stay in bed and have a fiddle with myself. I didn’t end up getting out of bed until a half hour before my shift.
Decided. Did I decide it at all? Was it my will to do or not do the shopping? Or was it inevitable that I was to stay in bed like I did, whether I liked it or not?
There is no such thing as free will. It’s another invention like religion to make us feel good about ourselves. We are all alone and need to face that fact. Nothing you do is based on rational thought, everything is based on current “in the moment” need. You are destined to do what you will do before you were born and have no choice. You just think you have.
Talking to himself in the middle of the night.
That view would say that we are powerless to temptation which is not true for everyone.
Before I was born? I’d have thought that it was a long time before that @anon7035031 . If we define a decision to be no more than a set of physical occurances (ie neurons firing in a certain pattern), obeying physical laws, then those occurances are caused, and so my “decision” was simply a physical occurance which was in turn a result of another occurance, which was a result of… all the way back to my birth, and before that even. In fact, all occurances are caused until we get back to the beginning of time itself, where there was an original state and every event since has been another lunk on the cause-and-effect chain. No random occurances intervened (“God does not play dice”), every particle in the universe is simply going through its motions. Every occurance since the Big Bang has been caused. And the state of everything at the Big Bang predetermined everything that has happened since, including my decision to stay in bed.
Is this what you are saying?
But how then do you deal with moral responsibility? What if my next decision was to murder someone?
I think he has got this one wrong… There’s no way my descision to go for egg-mayo and onion in my hot chicken roll yesterday was decided long before I was born. I think we are created with a blank slate but from our development from the third trimester on, and particularly our mental development in our first few years, it is here where we are trapped by our experiences for the rest of our life. It’s our experiences as a nipper that will determine all our descisions for the rest of life and the illusion of free will is exactly that…essentially, you’ve already made your descisions before you are even faced with the question.
Hi @ChocolateMice ChocolateMice, thanks for weighing in.
There is contradiction in what you’re saying here. If you’re saying all our decisions are determined by our development and experiences in youth, then so was your decision to go for egg-mayo and onion, no? And development and experiences are but a series of events, which were all caused by some other events prior, which then brings you into agreement with [what I think is the opinion of] @anon7035031.
The insignificance or the small scale of the decision does not matter. There are not one set of laws for important stuff like our career choice and another for choice of a sandwich. Big decisions are just collections of smaller decisions.
And in any case, all we are is an arrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons and some other bits n’ bobs, which are all governed by laws of physics. “Thoughts” are just electricity and little molecular changes. They are no more random than say a lightening strike. Extremely difficult if not impossible to practically measure or predict, but theoretically pre-determined nonetheless. The idea is that the actions of our particles are all caused by some prior action which was caused by another prior action, all the way back to the beginning of time.
No…the egg-mayo and onion was certainly a response to my personal experiences not as a cause of the big bang. I see how they are related, but why doesn’t everyone then go for egg-mayo and onion on their chicken baguette? I’d certainly lean towards psychologica variablesl being the cause of our determinism rather than physiological.
Very interesting pal. Have a similar enough set of views / beliefs (if you could call it that).
No, it means there are people who can resist temptation and people who can’t resist temptation. There are even people who change from one mode to the other due to changes in brain chemistry (medication or a brain injury for example). Doesn’t say anything about free will, its an illusion (although a persistent one), and we are best served as individuals and societies pretending we have free will. The whole justice system is based on that assumption, even though it is obvious most criminals have no ability to be anything other than criminals. We have to treat them as if they had control over themselves, to protect ourselves and our societies.
Well that says a lot about you seeing as the post was made by badly scrambled neurons 
I think the honest answer is we don’t really know, although any empirical evidence (and we don’t have much) suggests no free will. Its one of those questions not worth spending much time thinking about though.
What you have described is determinism, another of those questions there is no consensus on. Is the universe or nature fundamentally deterministic or probabilistic? We don’t know and we have very contradictory evidence to form opinions on. No question the classical world we perceive is deterministic and Newton is as valid today as the 19th century, but fuck knows how that relates to what is actually out there or whatever fundamental reality is. Physicists disagree on whether fields or particles are fundamental, or whether there is even such a thing as a particle (in terms of our billiard ball thinking). QED theory sys everything is fields, and particles are just perturbations in fields. Einstein was wrong on QM, Bell and experiments since Bell’s theorem have demonstrated that nature is “not just stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine”. So, I think we have to be careful with worldviews that are based on a fixed materialistic view (comment not aimed at you), when we simply don’t know enough and probably never will due to limitations of our primate brains. As for free will I think we have to live our lives assuming we have it and others have it, with no evidence to support that view.
Yes, determinism. So are you in this camp?
If so, again, how do you handle moral responsibility? Determinism would say that there is none, our very existence is merely travelling along a trajectory that was set in place since the big bang. We always were going to do what we do.
We do not know. And what’s worse, the only thing we do about it, so far, know is that we have no way of knowing. Which IMO makes it the perfect item for discussion.
Ok I’ll straighten a few things out here:
Decisions are thoughts, and thoughts at their basic level are just particles undergoing actions that obey rules of physics just like any and every other particle*. They are not anything more “special” than this. Whether we understand exactly how these rules work (we don’t) doesn’t matter. All that matters is if it were to be figured out, there can only be two outcomes:
They rules are set and events are deterministic: They are definite, all actions are causal, meaning every event has been predetermined, including every decision you make. We are following a path of cause and effect through reality which is definite and predictable.
The rules are random, or at best probabilistic: Truly random events intervene and alter the course of reality, which is fundamentally uncertain. We meander through the uncertainty waiting to see how it will play out.
Which school do you prescribe to, and how do you deal with moral responsibility of your actions given your belief?
*Yes, when I say rules/particles I am referring to the nature of QM (which is poorly understood so far), though the topic does not need to discuss this.
I am in neither camp, although everything we experience seems deterministic (but is it?), everything I have read on the subject just ends with a headache so not worth it ultimately. Are our minds deterministic or probabilistic, I would learn towards probabilistic as in some kind of biological quantum computer, but there’s not a whole lot of evidence to support that. Nor a whole lot of evidence to explain how mind emerges from matter, although admittedly a very complex configuration of matter. Its easy to say neurons firing and neurotransmitters, but we have scant idea of the actual mechanisms. I try and avoid drawing conclusions (although one could argue the no free will argument is a conclusion, although tentative), especially without evidence. I think there’s a lot to be learned from Einstein’s experience, brilliant as he was he couldn’t accept QM as it conflicted with his view of the world. He was the last great classical scientist.
The morality question is a big one and one I will have to tackle at another time due to time constraints. In general what I would say is what people think they should do, or even know they should do, and what they actually do are completely different.
This is about the best explanation of Einstein’s dilemma I have read.
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/quantum_casino_less_zero_chance-95615
I will have to get back to this later, but I would question the assertion that thoughts are “particles undergoing actions that obey the rules of physics” (keeping in mind there are no particles as we think of them classically at least). I don’t think we know enough to say that, what you are describing is the materialist reductionism position on the mind-body question, which is a philosophical one. It isn’t a scientific position as we have no way of measuring thoughts directly, and drawing conclusions from indirect studies can be problematic.
By particles I mean stuff. What stuff is either certain or uncertain. The intent of the footnote was to steer the conversation away from one of QM. Whether stuff is just a load of little dots, or just a series of holographic representations made from the different speeds that big stretchy sheets wobble at, or indeed something else entirely, doesn’t matter There is no need to go there. For the purpose of this discussion, which yes, is entirely philosophical, let’s set the science aside.
My assertion is that thoughts are still just physical events. Whether the nature of this physics is certain or uncertain remains unknown, and (as far as we know) unknowable. But the answer is still either that it is either certain, or it is of an infinite number of arrangements, none of which are certain. Certain, or uncertain.
So depending on which you think it is, how do you deal with moral responsibility?
Free will is too subjective to analyse lads.
Luck and opportunity are the main factors.
