Free Will is an illusion...
- Thread starter Angelus
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I believe up to the moment you choose to act you have a choice, else why would you have the thoughts that give an option to pick from choices?
Should you choose one over the other then the train of events will take their course of action. You have the choice to stay home from work and not go. The events that follow are a direct result of that. You will have to prove your claim of predetermined fate before I could grasp that it is even a possibility...
Should you choose one over the other then the train of events will take their course of action. You have the choice to stay home from work and not go. The events that follow are a direct result of that. You will have to prove your claim of predetermined fate before I could grasp that it is even a possibility...
It's really just the outcome of following cause and effect to it's ultimate logical conclusion. What made you decide to stay home from work? There must be a cause, and that cause is the effect of some other cause, etc. etc. With enough data and processing power you can calculate the effect of every cause and that effects effects on others, ad infinitum.
mathematically speaking, Hobbes, thats rather improbable.
Personally, i tend not to believe in either free will OR fate. Environmental influence, certainly. Biological influence, yes. cultural influence, definately. There's three factors which almost ensure every human being will be different. "Free Will" is an belief embraced only by those who can't accept the alternative... that we are slaves to circumstance. "Fate" is a belief embraced by those who can't even accept THAT much.
Its not "mathematically improbable"
Its like a orange is both 100% a fruit and 100% edible.
Its called not mutually exclusive.
We have 100% free choice and 100%controlled by our environment.
Our environment controls what choices we make but we are still making those choices.
With a few exceptions like if you were a slave or something. Free choice would then be limited. But even then choices come into play.
Its like a orange is both 100% a fruit and 100% edible.
Its called not mutually exclusive.
We have 100% free choice and 100%controlled by our environment.
Our environment controls what choices we make but we are still making those choices.
With a few exceptions like if you were a slave or something. Free choice would then be limited. But even then choices come into play.
Re: Of course Free Will is an illusion
Originally posted by tiassa
There's at least one thing missing from that statement.
• If the mind is simply an input/output device and ...
• If we should pretend that psychology has accounted for all the factors of a human mind.
Not all the factors must be known to get reliable results but I do see your point. I would also add that the volatility of the mind may cause what is actually a deterministic system to be so reactive that one cannot investigate it without changing the outcome of what one is investigating. Much as quantum physics has shown us in the subatomic realm.
Still in 100 years of psychology have we really advanced any further in the understanding of the mind or how it works? Granted, we have gained some insight into the physical-chemical processes of the brain and have had some success with pharmacology. But these tools are rather like fixing a clock with a hammer in regards to the subtlety of the mind.
What I'm aiming for is to put people in the frame of mind to consider the Universe itself as a single event. The events we mark--starbirth, galactic formation, &c.--are mere facets of the greater process of that Universal firecracker flash.
And in the end, in the field, given the conditions, given all the relevant factors, it is fair to say that the firecracker flash result, whether it matches the predictions or not, occurred in the only way it possibly could.
But to perceive the Universe as such you must go outside of time, in which case the Universe is static.
By the time you recognize the result of a moment, that result is history, and it could not have been any different without changing the factors that led to it.
Again, this depends on your temporal frame of reference. What if it were possible to travel backwards in time and affect the past. Ignore for a moment the causal paradoxes this creates in our everyday perception of causality. Eventually, we need to deal with some of these paradoxes either in regards to our causal/temporal perception or in regards to relativity/non-locality.
As with the determinist Universe: sure, we pretend we have free will, but if I'm right and the Universe is determined, it's quite obvious that nobody noticed the difference, so I'm not sure it matters whether the Universe is determinist.
I agree with you here. The truth of the answer does not really matter.
I'll also add a third option, just for fun. Consider that any infinite random series (say of numbers, for example) contains any (and in fact, every) finite ordered set. It is possible then, that we and what we "observe" as the Universe are simply ordered sets within infinite chaos. In which case there is neither free-will nor determinism simply an accident of infinite chaos.
~Raithere
Originally posted by tiassa
There's at least one thing missing from that statement.
• If the mind is simply an input/output device and ...
• If we should pretend that psychology has accounted for all the factors of a human mind.
Not all the factors must be known to get reliable results but I do see your point. I would also add that the volatility of the mind may cause what is actually a deterministic system to be so reactive that one cannot investigate it without changing the outcome of what one is investigating. Much as quantum physics has shown us in the subatomic realm.
Still in 100 years of psychology have we really advanced any further in the understanding of the mind or how it works? Granted, we have gained some insight into the physical-chemical processes of the brain and have had some success with pharmacology. But these tools are rather like fixing a clock with a hammer in regards to the subtlety of the mind.
What I'm aiming for is to put people in the frame of mind to consider the Universe itself as a single event. The events we mark--starbirth, galactic formation, &c.--are mere facets of the greater process of that Universal firecracker flash.
And in the end, in the field, given the conditions, given all the relevant factors, it is fair to say that the firecracker flash result, whether it matches the predictions or not, occurred in the only way it possibly could.
But to perceive the Universe as such you must go outside of time, in which case the Universe is static.
By the time you recognize the result of a moment, that result is history, and it could not have been any different without changing the factors that led to it.
Again, this depends on your temporal frame of reference. What if it were possible to travel backwards in time and affect the past. Ignore for a moment the causal paradoxes this creates in our everyday perception of causality. Eventually, we need to deal with some of these paradoxes either in regards to our causal/temporal perception or in regards to relativity/non-locality.
As with the determinist Universe: sure, we pretend we have free will, but if I'm right and the Universe is determined, it's quite obvious that nobody noticed the difference, so I'm not sure it matters whether the Universe is determinist.
I agree with you here. The truth of the answer does not really matter.
I'll also add a third option, just for fun. Consider that any infinite random series (say of numbers, for example) contains any (and in fact, every) finite ordered set. It is possible then, that we and what we "observe" as the Universe are simply ordered sets within infinite chaos. In which case there is neither free-will nor determinism simply an accident of infinite chaos.
~Raithere