This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.
As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.
And if they can’t provide them, well, this will be a short thread.
So do phoodoo, mung, WJM et al care to provide your explanations of how decisions are actually made?
No we have not. We haven’t even heard what you (or any ‘immaterialist’ here) means by a person’s being free.
I thought FMM was a plain old Millian compatibalist like me, but after his last remark on the subject, I don’t know what his position is on freedom either.
I have no idea what any of your reply is supposed to mean.
First, when asked how a universe can come to be, without a God, you insist on knowing which God. The God that made the universe, that one! I could care less what you call them.
Next, you say you believe you are a mix of chemicals, which act according to physics. Then you want to know why you can’t do what you want. Well, I just answered that! If you are a mix of chemicals, and nothing more, chemicals don’t want, then simply do what physics makes them do.
But obviously no one lives their life as if they actually believe that. So you need an explanation for why you think you can want, or decide, or have meaning. THIS conundrum is the conundrum of the thinking man. THIS is why people over the ages have come to terms with accepting a spiritual possibility. Because just trying to gloss over the contradiction of a bag of chemicals suddenly wanting something, strikes many thinking people as being a rather foolish reality to ignore.
Talking about all this nonsense about this school of philosophy, and that is so pedantic, when the only important question is, do you really believe you are only a bag full of chemicals, that does what it does because that’s what chemicals do, or is there something more to it. Is there meaning, purpose, cause, for the thoughts in your head. All the other stuff you guys talk about is just horseshit in my opinion. The first and only question is, why do you think chemicals should be able to want.
I find the amateur philosophers here (and some who call themselves professionals) to be so amazingly incapable of real contemplation. You are like wine tasters trying to convince others about a grape’s structure and complexity, and boldness. Its so pretentious its comical.
All I know is that I am not prepared to read the 755 comments in this thread. In a system as complicated as our brain, there is absolutely no way to test for the existance of free will (or the ultimate cause of decisions). My life is too short to worry about it. That is the decision I have made. Or the chemicals in my brain have made.
Acartia,
Pragmatic!
Mung,
Yes, and design is a mechanism.
FMM,
Just a description will suffice. No need for step by step. That can come later, once that initial description is present.
phoodoo,
That’s for the other thread. This thread is for how non-biological robots like yourself make decisions.
You don’t seem to be able to understand this simple point.
You don’t have to. You have to think about your world and how you make decisions in it. But you seem incapable of that.
It’s almost as if you are following a program that you cannot deviate from!
Moved some posts to guano.
The guanoed comments can be found here.
phoodoo,
How about tackling the three questions I raise in this comment?
Should be a piece of cake for you, since you have your shit together and we physicalists don’t.
Keiths’s three questions can be found here.
Alan,
Why the extra link?
OK, so foreknowledge is incompatible with libertarian free will because LFW implies that decisions emanate from the mind without an external cause, right?
But what if God reveals to me what I’ll be choosing and I decide to do something else because I want to troll God? That would be a decision informed by an external cause, so no libertarian free will. Of course that doesn’t mean that foreknowledge is incompatible with non-libertarian free will, because the thought experiment would require revelation (a cause), but seems to me revelation can’t be reconciled with compatibilism.
keiths,
Exactly!
dazz,
You’ll need a lie-down in a darkened room, now.😊
keiths:
Alan:
The link I provided served an unmet purpose. Yours didn’t.
dazz,
Well, libertarian free will is incompatible with itself (i.e. incoherent), so it’s off the table for that reason already.
If you ignore that, though, then I think things are a bit more subtle. Thinking off the cuff, I would say that what God possesses isn’t really foreknowledge of your decision, but rather timeless knowledge of it, since God exists outside of time. I don’t see a conflict between timeless knowledge and libertarian free will.
Where things get hairy is if God somehow injects that knowledge back into the world at a time before you make your decision. If it’s already a truth within time that dazz will order pancakes, then the actual decision is constrained at the time of its occurrence, and the “could have done otherwise” nature of libertarian free will is violated.
So I guess I’d summarize my take as follows:
1) God’s timeless knowledge of our decisions doesn’t really count as foreknowledge;
2) If God allows that knowledge to become a truth within time, before the decision is made, then that decision can no longer be an exercise of libertarian free will.
dazz,
Logically it can’t happen, unless God is lying to you. If he actually knows what you’ll be choosing and truthfully reveals it to you, then your eventual choice is already a fixed truth which cannot change. You will choose what God says you’ll choose.
So somehow, in spite of yourself and your desire to troll God, you’ll end up making the decision he said you’d make. It sort of reminds me of the Appointment in Samarra:
keiths,
Where’s your sense of humour gone? 😆
Why is revelation not an acceptable answer? Revelation is precisely how one person communicates information to another. There is no other answer that will convey what is going on when a person imparts information. There is noting spooky or otherworldly about the term revelation.
If it would help leave God entirely out of the picture. Right now in this very comment you are attempting to reveal what you want in an explanation for decision. It’s the only way we can communicate.
A step by step description of what your are doing would include things like finger motions on a keyboard attached to a computer and the use of a mutually understood language. But all of that is irrelevant to what is going on.
You are revealing your wishes to me that is all.
By the use of his body and a brain
The mind and body are not separate entities but two necessary and integral parts of the same individual. Think irreducible complexity here if you like.
peace
How so? If it’s true that God knows what I’ll do “timelessly”, and what God knows must be true, then I have no choice but do what he knows timelessly.
See here, sounds convincing to me: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/#2.2
Actually all of theses things require a will and consciousness which is one thing that a purely materiel object like a computer does not have.
peace
So you are saying that whether determinism entails front-loading or not is dependent only on the question of if there is mind behind the universe.
To that piece of insight I will only say
exactly
and amen
and hell yeah
and now you finally understand!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The obvious followup question is
How would a person know if there is mind behind the universe?
peace
no, but you do choose whether to act on that hunger.
peace
The advocates of libertarian free will will probably point to Molinism as a solution to this problem.
Compatibilists like me will say your statement conveys a misunderstanding of what it means to choose
peace
Can you elaborate please?
To choose is simply to decide between options.
What God “knows” is not part of the definition at all.
I am faced with a dilemma should a grab a doughnut or a honey-bun.
If I pick the doughnut God knew I would pick the doughnut
on the other hand
If I pick the honey-bun God knew I would pick the honey-bun
That is all there is to it
peace
That seems irresponsive.
Perhaps for you this is a problem of perspectives from God’s perspective I have only one option so choosing makes no sense
The problem with that is the choice in made by me so my perspective is the one that counts
peace
When did I say that? I’m pretty sure I didn’t.
Yeah, that’s obvious. Probably should read it before commenting on it.
That’s also inaccurate. The way the discussion went was, you asked what people would count as evidence for god, and I asked you what qualities does something have to be to be god, as you understand it. You refused to answer, even though it’s pretty clear that Thor doesn’t have to have the same properties as Ganesh or Jesus.
Maybe you can fuck around with what other people post here and they’ll keep talking to you as if you’re an honest disscussant, but I’m pretty likely to stop, if that’s the kind of thing I can expect from you.
Then don’t use words like “revelation” which you know very well to have theistic implications, implications that you often depend upon. It’s just a trick of equivocation to use “revelation” to refer to everyday knowledge, get someone you’re discussing this with to say, “OK, then there’s revelation,” and then act like you’ve proved something about God. Like this: “See, you admit there’s revelation, but somehow manage to deny the existence of God. Boy the contradictions here abound!”
And frankly FMM, I could see you doing just that.
I agree with this. Fatalism is a fallacy.
ETA: When I say I agree with this, I hope it’s clear that I mean if you substitute “if an omniscient thing knew…” for “God knew.”
I think that the question, “do you think a human being is a bag of chemicals?” is the worst of strawman caricatures. Far from being the only important question, it’s the dumbest question. Y’all can discuss it if that tickles your fancies, but it’s not worth my time.
Kantian Naturalist,
Is a computer a bag of chemicals? How about a meal at the Ritz, a baseball game, a trip to Graceland, a dog, a perfect performance of Brahms, a pumpkin, an oscilloscope, a day at the beach, an ATM transaction? What about those KN? Are they all bags of chemicals?
Even when referring to libertarian free will? What do you make of this then, if I may ask?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/
How about a water balloon? Or a sack lunch? Or a shopping bag full of prescription drugs?
Glen Davidson
ID cuts to the chase.
Can you be included within the lowest common denominator I can think of? Ah ha, then how can you be anything but that lowest common denominator? UD at its finest.
Kind of leaves you materialists gasping, doesn’t it? Even if it’s the abject stupidity of it all that boggles the mind.
Glen Davidson
Yeah, I saw that post from WJM the other day. It’s horrific reasoning from beginning to end — strawman and false dichotomies as far as the eye can see — but they just can’t get enough. It’s like watching a Trump speech.
I’m kind of interested in why anyone would think that we can’t intelligibly be held morally responsible for their actions if there is neither divine reward or punishment after death nor completely causally unconstrained freedom.
There’s a deep-rooted anxiety about contingency and vulnerability here, and an ambivalence between total self-suffiency (I am not my body, not my desires, not my needs, not my environment, not my history — I’m completely separate from all that) and total dependence on God (who is absolute, necessary, all-powerful, etc.).
Big gods with eyes in the sky watching us. Now we have CCTV!
Hahaha. Yeah, KN–what about those!?
Well, like keiths, I can’t make much sense of libertarian free will, but with respect to that SEP entry, I’d just deny premise (9).
Incidentally, Fred Fredosso, who’s mentioned a couple of time in that article, was at Brown when I was.
The Trinity in my view is a metaphor for man’s relationship with God. The “Son” is the aspect of the personal god Christians want a relationship with; the “Father” is the Authority/Judgement aspect Christians want as a benevolent/malevolent ruler; and the Holy Spirit is the emotional or feelings aspect Christians want binding everything together. It’s the Christian model of of the perfect pantheon without the baggage of an actual hierarchy.
All of these arguments involve a concept of time that is no longer necessary in physics. Not that we understand time, but we have ways of describing time that make these discussions “mute”.
As a thought, it’s no weirder than wave/particle duality or the dual slit phenomenon.
I have no trouble with the concept of the trinity.
I have trouble with Joseph Smith and his 12 sworn witnesses, and all similar revelations.
All of what arguments? I haven’t mentioned or used time, I don’t think.
I haven’t analyzed your posts, but the arguments I’ve seen seem to involve causation, and causation implies a before and after. Unless I’m wrong about that.
Not sure what you’re saying here. Are you claiming that determinism must be false because it depends on causation, which, in turn, relies on the concepts of before and after that moden physics have shown to be confused? Or are you not making a claim about determinism at all?
I’m not making any claims about free will and determinism. I think they are archaic and useless concepts.
I personally find it useful to talk about responsibility. I could talk about responsibility in anything that learns, even home smart thermostats. One does not have to have a coherent metaphysics to talk about systems that learn. It’s a matter of pragmatism.
I don’t have a clear or coherent view of time or causation or freedom or determinism. I haven’t seen much evidence that anyone else does. What I have is the sense that any useful concepts will evolve out of physics.
I think the role of philosophy in this endeavor is more bullshit detector than originator of ideas. There’s plenty to detect.