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Assuming you accept philosophical naturalism, a better question to ask would be: "what makes you think you have 'free will'?"Alan C. wrote:How can you doubt free will?Wrestler
I think I've always doubted free will.
this is a poor argument for free willMidnightandmorning wrote:If I did not have free will, I would not be a Humanist. I would instead be what my parents inculcated me to be: a fundamentalist Christian.
your own seems Wiki article citation seems to contradict what you say. And it's not clear what you mean by saying the Universe is an automaton, specially as you don't believe in a god which might have set it in motion. We assume that most things work by cause and effect, but this cannot be proved, and anyway, as the posts above have said, determinism is not actually inconsistent with free will; Alan and M&M are not mistaken when they say they were free to do the things they mention by any significant interpretation of the word "free".Radius wrote:this is a poor argument for free willMidnightandmorning wrote:If I did not have free will, I would not be a Humanist. I would instead be what my parents inculcated me to be: a fundamentalist Christian.
you are an automaton that evolved to a certain state because of internal constitution and environmental factors
see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
it has dissenting viewpointsanimist wrote:your own seems Wiki article citation seems to contradict what you say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physicsanimist wrote:And it's not clear what you mean by saying the Universe is an automaton, specially as you don't believe in a god which might have set it in motion.
I sort of agree with that, theoretically and logically, on a sub-microscopic level.Radius wrote:The Universe is an automaton. We are part of the Universe. Therefore, we have no free will.* End of story.
Don't you mean this the other way round? Are you really saying that the sub-atomic world is only probabilistic in our view, and not in reality?Radius wrote: I don't think, unlike some interpreters of QM, that there is really such a thing as aleatory probability though
only epistemic probability
I largely agree, as I think the denial of free will by Radius is almost meaningless - since what would it mean to have free will, if he denies that we cannot in principle have it? But one reason I chose my user name is that I think animals provide a useful corrective to your implied all-or-nothing alternatives. If you, Wilson, and I think others, think that we humans have free will, do you think this applies, say, to chimps and dogs, who have personality but do not reflect about things in the way that we do?Wilson wrote:I sort of agree with that, theoretically and logically, on a sub-microscopic level.Radius wrote:The Universe is an automaton. We are part of the Universe. Therefore, we have no free will.* End of story.
But you can choose chicken or steak for dinner. You can choose to hit your significant other or kiss him or her.
The real issue is whether we see ourselves as independent entities or not. If you think you have a self, then you have free will. Theoretically and logically, on a submicroscopic level, we aren't anything more than the particles that make us up. We are part of the universe, cause and effect, nothing else.
But if you think of yourself as a person, then you have free will. And I defy anyone to not think of himself as a person; that's built into our DNA. Either we are individuals with free will, or we are nothing but collections of particles and energy in a deterministic universe. Those are the only choices. I kind of believe in both.
yeahthundril wrote:Are you really saying that the sub-atomic world is only probabilistic in our view, and not in reality?
Yes. When dogs play, they can zig left or zag right. They make decisions all day long. They have free will in the same sense as we have it, that is, on a macro level. The more complex the brain of an animal, the less reliance on pure rote instinct. The thing that really sets us apart as humans is language. Without it, I don't think we'd be able to reflect on things in any detail, either. Even with simple decisions, like whether to turn right or left, I sometimes discuss it in words, in my mind. Without language, we'd still be making decisions constantly, but the process would lack subtlety. There would be no philosophy, no science. Personally I think that a lot of qualities we think of as exclusively human are actually present in less complex form in other animals - conscience, empathy, affection, playfulness, and so on.animist wrote: If you, Wilson, and I think others, think that we humans have free will, do you think this applies, say, to chimps and dogs, who have personality but do not reflect about things in the way that we do?
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To me they're the same. A dog chooses to go left or right, or makes the decision to go left or right, or decides to go left or right. Semantics, really. I do think of our brains as massively complex computers, so if you get down to quantum mechanical level, it all sort of runs by itself. So we can conclude that technically we don't have free will, because it's all cause and effect. And if you get down to that level, let's face facts: We're not anything more than colonies of cells or collections of particles and energy. But if you think of yourself as an independent being, a human person, then you have free will.thundril wrote:Dogs zig left or right. Ok. They make decisions. This is not (or is it?) the same as making choices. Computers make decisions all the time. I think it would be very strange to claim that computers make choices. Likewise, if other animals make decisions, (if a then zig left,; if not-a then zag right) this is not the same as making choices. Do we, humans, do something different?
1. There might be a property of the universe that we are not aware of yet. This needn't be at the quantum or atomic level, but it could be. This might be an emergent property of the universe that only appears at the macro level - it's 'injected at a higher level'. I'm not talking about properties like gravity which are present at an atomic level but too small to have any real effect. A really made up example (unrelated to free will) might be that arranging 500 atoms together gives the assembly a new force that is not a property of the individual elements. Free will might be something like this.Wilson wrote:So we can conclude that technically we don't have free will, because it's all cause and effect.
your biology is reducible to physics and physics is deterministicrobzed wrote:Here is my free will. I'm going to choose a letter.
Here is it. .... 'k'.
Show me how the universe made me do that.
You can act according to your desires. But if your desires are determined, and not freely chosen, then can the choices they lead to be said to be truly free?Wilson wrote:But you can choose chicken or steak for dinner. You can choose to hit your significant other or kiss him or her.
I talk and act as though I have a self, but I'm not convinced that I really have one. What I do have is a sense of self, which I suppose might be described as some kind of emergent property. And perhaps the same could be said of a sense of free will. But a sense of free will is surely not the same as free will as philosophers use the term (let alone as theologians use it).Wilson wrote:The real issue is whether we see ourselves as independent entities or not. If you think you have a self, then you have free will.
No: if you think of yourself as a person, then you think of yourself as having free will.Wilson wrote:Theoretically and logically, on a submicroscopic level, we aren't anything more than the particles that make us up. We are part of the universe, cause and effect, nothing else.
But if you think of yourself as a person, then you have free will.
I don't know whether it's built into our DNA, but it's certainly part of our language and culture. And they shape the way we think to a considerable extent.Wilson wrote:And I defy anyone to not think of himself as a person; that's built into our DNA.
Hmm. So it's not an either-or, then?Wilson wrote: Either we are individuals with free will, or we are nothing but collections of particles and energy in a deterministic universe. Those are the only choices. I kind of believe in both.
I think it's pretty clear that we're not "nothing but collections of particles and energy", whether the universe is truly deterministic or not. I assume that the way in which certain collections of particles and energy are ... um ... collected gives rise to certain emergent properties, like, maybe, consciousness, and a sense of self. So perhaps it's possible to think of free will as an emergent property of those emergent properties. But if we do that, I think we're watering down the idea of free will into something rather too subjective to have much philosophical heft.
