/lit/ - Literature

A water bottle is not the water inside it. A=A, B=B - A=/= B. Consciousness cannot be reduced to chemicals.

>>22873154
Free will needs enough determinism to make possible your ability to do some planning, scheduling and transform your decision into meaningful acts. And indeterminism, if that exists, would not enlarge free will, it would just add noise. But free will is related to a degree of self-indeterminism. We cannot know ourselves so well as to be able to predict our future choices, for logical reasons (indeed you would be able to contradict yourself easily). So, from your own point of view, you do have some high level decision-power, even if some God can (in principle) determine your acts in advance.

>>22873154
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer both had good analyses of why people believe in free will. It is the disconnect between the actual causation of your choices and your experience of your choices which is only the effect and not the cause.

Question for free will defenders that I would genuinely like answered so I can understand better:

>What is the definition of free will and by what mechanism does it work?

Also here is an “argument” I have long held against free will that I would be pleased to have some counters to.

1. Actions are either caused or uncaused.
2. If actions are caused, it is clear from this that they necessarily follow from their causes or prior states of the mind. Therefore, determinism.
3. If human actions are uncaused they do not follow necessarily from prior states of the mind or causes. This would mean they are unconnected to previous thoughts.
4. Being unconnected to prior thoughts, they would be incoherent and irrational. If I asked you why you freely chose something, you could only answer “I have no idea, there was no cause or reason for my action.”
5. Therefore actions are either determined through causal chains and therefore rational, or they are incoherent, irrational, and “random” if not caused. Either way, you do not “choose” your actions.

Thoughts? To clarify: this argument is not a materialist argument, I am speaking of the causal chains in your own thought.

>>22873154
They don’t. Hard determinism is the default position for most academic bugmen

>>22873185
Aren’t most philosophers self-polled as being compatibalists, which is basically still free will?

>>22873154
>. I just can't wrap my head around free will. Our brains are made up of chemical pathways, so all of our decisions/thoughts/behavior must be determined by biochemistry

Can you wrap your head around the theory of evolution? Isn't that "just biochemistry" as well?

>>22873154
A good deal of philosophers, physicists, chemists, and biologists reject reductionism and smallism. They do not believe that all facts about large things can be completely decomposed into facts about smaller parts.

Such smallism is incompatible with many popular ideas in physics, e.g. pancomputationalism, or process metaphysics in general.

The argument from smallism generally runs like this:
>All facts about minds are reducible to facts about atoms.
>Atoms lack purpose or intentionality.
>Therefore free will is illusory and cognition can have absolutely no causal efficacy. People don't eat because they are hungry, they eat because of the way atoms are interacting, etc.

The problem with smallism is that there is no good reason to think it is true. It became popular because it's neat and tidy, and really it's a recycled form of an idea going back millennia, repopularized in the early modern period as corpusclarism/mechanism, and then resurrected again in the late 19th century. There are very many phenomena that appear to show strong emergence, from quantum scale phenomena, to molecular structure, to the obvious example of conciousness.

If conciousness is the result of strong emergence, then it has causal efficacy. This means that our thoughts and decisions can determine our actions. Obviously, not person is completely self-determining. We are always influenced by things outside our awareness, but we can clearly be more or less self-determining. Drawing a hard dividing line at the brain is also a reductionist mistake because we can shape our enviornment to shape our actions, like when we write a reminder note to ourselves and it causes us to act a certain way.

Most modern philosophers are compatibalists. They believe determinism is compatible with free will, and often that determinism is a prerequisite for free will. After all, if our actions weren't determined by ANYTHING that came before our deciding, then they would have nothing to do with us, our memories, our preferences, etc. Action "determined by nothing," would be necessarily random. We preexist our choices and to be free we need to understand why we are acting and our choices need to be based on who we are.

Determinism in no way precludes self determination. Think of the self as a system, a subprocess in the larger process of the universe. A process can be more or less determined by its enviornment. Some physical systems are quite isolated and self determining.

To be free(r) means to have more of your actions and thoughts determined by your conscious volitions. That's all. That isn't precluded by determinism. Only reductionism and smallism precludes and effective free will.

People also increasingly dismiss the causal closure principle as incoherent, or superveniance. Jaegeon Kim decisively showed that strong emergence is impossible in substance metaphysics, which is a pretty good reason to switch to a process view since, unless you want to embrace panpsychism...

>>22873206
...the idea that rocks and atoms have experienced, then conciousness seems like an awfully good candidate for strong emergence. Strong emergence works fine in process metaphysics, and physics itself has abandoned the idea of sui generis substances for the most part anyhow, replacing them with fields and process, so there is even more reason to make this switch.

>>22873177
You seem to be assuming that there is either libertarian acausal free will or there is no free will. But most philosophers embracing free will would say this is simply a false dichotomy.

Determinism is a prerequisite for free will, both so that our choices are determined by our prior thoughts and our identity, which exists prior to choices, and so that our actions can have determinant effects we can predict. Freedom is about how much our actions are determined by our concious awareness, our goals and preferences, on the one hand, and on the other how well the "rational part of the soul," can unify the person. The latter is important because the big risk to freedom, per the ancient philosophers and Patristics, is being ruled over by desire and instinct. When this happens, we become divided, at war with ourselves.

Shaping ones enviornment is a huge part of freedom. Just consider how our mastery of technology, techne, enhances our causal powers. We weren't free to cross the planet in a day until we invented jets, etc.

There are plenty of good arguments why rationality is the place to look for self determination, but they are fairly complex so I will just leave pic related here, which isn't so much about "mysticism" as it is about Plato and Hegel's definition of reflexive freedom .

>>22873206
BTW, aside from in no way being empirically supported to any great degree, smallism seems prima facie unreasonable. If our experience of the world has absolutely zero effect on our actions, why would natural selection appear to have it synch up so well with our actions? There would be absolutely no utility in our feelin pain from an evolutionary standpoint, as our discomfort has absolutely zero causal effect on us taking our hand off a hot stove. Likewise, there would be no reason for us to desire sex, since our having sex or not having sex has no correlation with what actions our bodies take.

Epiphenomenalism only makes sense if you've dogmatically subscribed to smallism already and need a way out for explaining conciousness. The other options are panpsychism, everything experiences (but this effects the world not one iota) or eliminitivism, the idea that we actually aren't conscious.

That reductionism forces people into these positions is also a knock against it IMO.

Most people accept reductionism because it is still the received wisdom of the laity, even though it is a minority opinion in physics now. Indeed, I'd say with high confidence that far more neuroscientists think reductionism is true than physicists or chemists. This is a case of silos, where people working on consciousness simply don't keep abreast of changes in physics (fair enough, they have plenty to deal with).

But it's an idea that largely comes from 19th century science. It's not an idea that became popular because of huge empirical evidence, most reductions have never panned out. Rather, it's an idea that is philosophically enticing because it does a few things:

A. It unifies all the sciences in a simple and intuitive way.
B. It says that nothing is really anyone's fault and that morality is just illusory. This is enticing for some people.
C. It makes the word absurd, which is nice for existentialists since once can only be an overcomer roaring into the abyss of there is an abyss.

>>22873154
>I just can't wrap my head around free will. Our brains are made up of chemical pathways, so all of our decisions/thoughts/behavior must be determined by biochemistry and genetics.

Consider that all written words are made up of only single sounds, which don't contain any concepts on their own. If letters individually don't convey meaning, how can a collection of letters convey meaning?

The key term here would be emergence. Plenty of scientists, probably a majority by this point, don't think complex phenomena can be reduced to anything like "little balls of stuff working according to strictly the rules dictating how a handful of type of balls interact when they touch."

Determinism is besides the point here, as others have noted. The problem you are struggling with is thinking things are decomposable, that wholes are defined entirely by their parts, not vice versa. Probably the opposite is more true. In QFT, part(icles)s are not fundemental. Fields spanning the entire universe are. Parts are only definable in terms of the field, not vice versa.

some of the highest metaphysics states that there is no free will, but they identify the true self with God so it doesn’t matter anyway. the illusion of free will is what is important.
practically speaking, there is no way to take a deterministic viewpoint, unless you think you’re capable of analyzing every single cause and effect into what would amount to an infinite regression very quickly.
the biological determinism argument is somewhat true if you consider lower life forms like insects acting on pure instinct, but in the human free will can certainly be nurtured and developed

>>22873154
Because one can commit wilful suicide.

>>22873154

>>22873177
You only believe in determinism because you can approximate the probability of a choice a person will make at any certain time, which will always technically and practically be 50/50 chance. When in reality outcome is always sporadic and mutable. There very fact there is a possibility of divergence in outcomes implies incalculable variables. Free will arguments are always poor in nature from a fundamental misunderstanding of influence versus control. Influence is measurable, to some extent, What we define as "control" is not, and therefore the conclusion will never be found, at least in this point of neural analytics. In theory for theists, it makes complete sense that free will is based in the spirit, metaphysics, and not the material body, but that takes the dialectic to an increasingly complex realm of factorability.

>>22873360
freewill IS our mark of divinity, its exactly what makes us in the image of God, this of course is not empirical and therefore inconclusive, that is why it must be believed in faith, since it transcends the minds ability to comprehend, in the same way there is no rational explanation as to how why God has all his attributes

>>22874728
based

>>22874728
>let me explain what God is as long as we agree what God is
Tf

>>22873360
>but in the human free will can certainly be nurtured and developed

i think it can be very hard to predict conscious human behavior let alone animals

>>22875029
>i think it can be very hard to predict conscious human behavior let alone animals
NTA, but let me say I agree with you this, however, I am curious to know if you think if we had the technology and knowledge to account for enough variables in any given moment (both external and internal to the human), could we THEN predict their behavior, assuming this will ever be possible (which for the record, I hope it won't because it sounds very dystopian and easily abused)? Obviously, it's not possible with our present state of technological development, but I'm asking if you think it ever would be.

>>22875054
>if we had the technology and knowledge to account for enough variables in any given moment

That's very hard

>could we THEN predict their behavior

No, this simulation is more complicated than you think

>>22875061
I am the God of my own universe and you are in my dream.

>>22875066
you are in a scientific illusion that is well made because it's of Jehovah, don't get so excited mortal

>>22873154
Not an expert on debating this position, but to an extent the more animalistic and ancient parts of your mind react to stimuli and give you impulses outside of your control, but you have the free will to assent or dissent to these impulses and change your mode of thought and long term outcome. basically the higher faculties of your mind allow to you to escape the enslavement of concupiscence through reason, speech, logical planning, prayer, meditation, self-reflection, etc.
of course the reality may be more complicated this and go beyond human reason and language.

>>22875076
That face doesn't look real senpai

>>22873154
You're generally correct about determinism, but the explanation you provide is very materialistic so it's easy for people to object.

The real justification for determinism is the omnipresent nature of Being. Reality is a perfectly complete whole, therefore actual change is impossible. There can't be any genuinely new things coming to be, no old things passing away, so future events cannot truly be considered indeterminate. After all, the possibilities are all present in the fullness of time/perfection of Being.

This basis for upholding determinism is absolutely unassailable. Whether people wish to describe reality or the mind as chemical pathways, magical forms, whatever, it doesn't matter. All those explanations are in the context of Being, which is the perfect and steadfast truth.

Very few people realise this, desu. As a result, almost all discussions of determinism/indeterminism are worthless. Much like most of the metaphysics out there is worthless; people fail to honour Being and therefore their account devolves into gibberish.

>>22875085
it doesn't look real but the character is real

>>22873154
Funny ears gestures
SHALOM RABBIONI

>>22875087
>There can't be any genuinely new things coming to be

i think there can be news things to come naturally, what do you really mean by this ?

>>22875092
Given that Being is perfectly complete, it subsumes whatever you mention. Tomorrow exists just as much as the rest of the chronology, therefore all this is possible is necessary.

If you want to say that one moment or thing has a certain relationship to another, that's fine, you can make these relative observations while remaining coherent. The issue is if we try to speak of change or "new moments" in an absolute sense, because it will involve the contradiction of saying that what is not is, and what is is not.

We're looking at Total Eleatic Victory; almost all philosophers have recoiled in horror from this realization and as a result their work is just so much straw. Read my book, it's all in there.

>>22875105
*all that is possible is necessary

But yeah by my book I promise it doesn't have lots of typos

>>22873177
bruh, even Nietzsche alluded to free will being a possibility in his later works by suggesting that it is the choice between choosing which voice in your head to listen to is where free will comes from or rather, that's what it is.

>>22875131
Ok mom I mean Master.

>>22875131
You don't quite understand where I come from. If you did maybe then you wouldn't have said that. It's okay nobody knows anything about me. That's ok, I just don't get a chance to describe the awesome life I live. It's ok I just play video games and enjoy hearing other people dance.

>>22873154
Let us imagine incompatibilism to be true. How would a conception of free will look like, presupposing indeterminism? It can't be determined by my personal biological and social history, so - as even a "ghost in the machine's" will mustn't be determined by this personal for indeterminism and free will to be true - it would have to be totally random. But if we talk about will, we don't mean rolling a magical dice but about persons choosing, probably based on their preferences which are determined by their personal history. While compatibilism offers a concept of free will (people choosing consciously and uncoerced), incompatibilism can offer no such concept of free will even if, or rather, even more so if indeterminism would be true.

>>22875061
Yeah no no I think you're right. Simply too many moving parts and too many things to account for. Also, the idea of emergence is not really accounted for in this scenario either because the assumption is "if I account for every single little variable, they will all add up to a sum of variables with a knowable outcome, and the human being will then make a predictable decision".

>>22875085
Good, that means the effect of the film is working. The unrealness is intentional, since Patrick Bateman is a psychopath trying desperately to appear human and warm. Watch American Psycho. It's a good film, and actually really funny too.

>>22875087
>future events cannot truly be considered indeterminate. After all, the possibilities are all present in the fullness of time/perfection of Being.
Do you mean here that, if we were to take on a God's eye view/the perspective of Being, we would see that all time, from "beginning" to "end" is one solid block of every possible moment, "frozen" in time? And that we only experience this "frozen" eternity linearly due to our subjective and mortal nature? If so, it certainly makes a lot of sense, although it really is quite unsettling to consider for too long.

>>22873166
Yes it can

>>22873192
I’m mostly talking about living figures

>>22873192
Also true metaphysical libertarians are rare

>>22875293
God bless for this founding

>>22873154
because it's true

>>22873154
Nice intergalactic leaps in logic there, pal.

>>22873154

>>22873154
.I've been a hard deterministic for my entire life. I just can't wrap my head around free will. Our brains are made up of chemical pathways, so all of our decisions/thoughts/behavior must be determined by biochemistry and genetics.

there is consciousness and free choice we are not just some chemicals in brain

>>22873154
Some ways it might be possible for free will to exist scientifically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8EkwRgG4OE

>>22873154

>>22873154
A majority of philosophers think we have free will, though that position itself is bifurcated between compatibilitist and libertarian free will, which are quite different. Which isn’t to say that means it’s definitely correct, as a small but significant portion think we don’t have free will.

But regarding Harris’s position specifically, saying that those actions are already decided for us by our brains seems like a category error, as we are our brains (or at least minds if you’re a dualist, I think the point holds regardless). Charitably he means that our unconscious mind makes the decision before our conscious mind is aware, but more work is needed to show that a) that is actually the case and b) that means we don’t have free will in the relevant sense

>>22875087
This Parmenidean slop is more grounded in Greek grammar then this philosophy. Substance metaphysics is the cancer born from this sort of thinking.

In reality, change and process are fundemental. Everything flows into everything else, there are no perfectly distinct substances. Heraclitus won this debate in physics and philosophy is just slow to catch up.

You can absolutely have indeterminate processes, indeterminate computation, quantum computing, etc. In fact, all you have is word games for your assertion while there is excellent empirical evidence that indeterminism and change is fundemental. Apparent substance is just stability in process. Even "fundemental" particles are now known to have beginnings and ends in time.

>>22875105
This is retarded. The four dimensional space time manifold becomes incoherent if you start somehow claiming that "all things exist at all times."

No they don't. Gödel showed how this is just trading or bad misinterpretations or SR/GR and the twin "paradox." The time dimension in the fourth dimension of the manifold IS WHAT TELLS YOU WHERE IN TIME THINGS OCCUR. THAT DIMENSION BECOMES FUCKING MEANINGLESS IF YOU WANT TO SAY THINGS OCCUR AT ALL TIMES.

Eternalism is one of the dumbest things to become popular in pop science and it relies on hardly any empirical data, just bad philosophy that has been BTFO again and again. Plus it is generally paired with claims that physics is time reversible. It isn't. This was actually shown fairly decisively back around the discovery of the Highs and got overshadowed, and in any even globally it isn't at all reversible due to the Second Law.

Events occur at the point in space time they occur. Nowhere else. All times don't exist at once, they exist when they exist. Time is a dimension for placing events.

Relativity tells us becoming is local. If anything, it makes eternalism more incoherent, not likely.

>>22875815
You seem like a big brain nigga. Give me a book recommendation about something you find interesting.

>>22873154
The question of what if everything is deterministic is a red herring. People use the term 'determinism' as if material is being bossed around by something else. I'd like to suggest the idea that if absolutely all of creation has to conspire together to produce you and your decisions (whatever 'you' are), then what you are does not stop at the epidermis or the brain or thought or any specific arrangement of happenstance, but 'you' are in fact animating not only a body as we know it but the entirety of the universe because the entire universe is required to make this work. Even the word universe translates to 'one metric'.

>>22875612
Good pathway to utter nihilism but you do you.

>>22873154
because they are stupid copeatilists

>>22875837
Interesting af

>>22875293
Yes, Being is complete, therefore everything about it is complete. Including time. I wouldn't assign god(s) any special, metaphysical status, though. To the extent there are such things, they're here with us in this metaphysical context.

>>22875815
>>22875821
So much seething here. Yet, at no point did you actually offer any account of creation or destruction, or any other process by which you can resolve an indeterminate to a determinate. No doubt because you can't; the core eleatic teaching "is" leaves you unable to rely on an "is not" from which to generate new states or results.

You can't offer a coherent definition of "indeterminate" once you get into the specifics, so you shouldn't use the term at all. It's all complete bunk, what you're doing isn't philosophy so much as an elaborate form of coping.

>>22873154
>OP believes it wasn’t his choice to become 300 pounds and take a dildo up the ass

>>22876372
Eleatic teaching entirely rests on the hinge proposition that stability, substance , is fundemental. It's simply begging the question to say: "accept the foundational premise of the Eleatic metaphysics and then debunk it in the context in which it's conclusions are already assumed to be true from the outset."

The question is, why shouldn't flux and process be considered fundemental from the very outset?

And indeed, there are very good empirical grounds for rejecting substance metaphysics. First, consider that most people agree that Jaegeon Kim decisively showed that strong emergence is impossible in that framework. Then consider that we have many excellent candidates for strong emergence on empirical grounds: molecular structure, conciousness, etc.

Also consider how science has been largely the story of the replacement with posits of sui generis substances to explain things with process. E.g., heat is now understood in terms of movement, not as some sort of substance, even fundemental particles are now seen as long term stabilities in the continuous flux of fields.

Of course, there is nothing that "is not." Void has shown itself to be a seething sea of virtual particles. But void is also not changeless, it is in continual flux, always.

Plus, Zeno's paradoxes have been successfully town apart. The Paradox of the Arrow for example is simply a fallacy of composition. Of course the arrow isn't moving in any "frozen instant." Time is the dimension across which change occurs. Asking to find change after abstracting away the time dimension is just incoherent.

We could also consider the incoherence of denying change on a solely phenomenalogical analysis. Or, in a different vein, we can consider Hegel's thought experiment of conceiving of sheer, indeterminate being without presuppositions, and how this ineluctably leads to the procession of a veritable pleroma of concepts — dialectical process at the center of both phenomenology and ontology.

>>22875834
My favorite accessible science book recently has been "The Ascent of Information." It has a lot of cool theory. "Complexity: A Guided Tour," is good too, but a little drier. Or for something more philosophical, "The Rigor of Angles: Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg and the Ultimate Nature of Reality," is neat, although I don't really agree with its more Kantian conclusions.

>>22876583
After hearing the arguments against the reality of change and motion Diogenes famously simply stood up and walked away.

>>22873154
Read John Locke's essays on the understanding, and specifically his essay on the power of the will and desire, and it will become clear to you.

>>22875023
>me
i didn't decide on the concept of a perfect being, it was discovered or revealed by the being itself, regardless, are you implying a perfect being is created and rationally able to exist?

>>22876583
There is one core Eleatic teaching: “is”. When you assign them the “hinge proposition” that “stability, substance is fundamental”, you’re just highlighting a necessary result of that core teaching. Stability, completeness, omnipresence, all of these are necessary conclusions given the core teaching, and the core teaching is absolute certain. Philosophy lives and dies insofar as it aligns with the core teaching, because anything else just devolves into an incoherent string of words upon examination.

So when you say, “the question is, why shouldn’t flux and process be considered fundamental from the outset”, it’s a non-starter. You can’t define “flux” coherently, so the question itself is meaningless gibberish. Why so? Because of the core teaching, there just “is”. The whole notion of “becoming”, in terms of metaphysics, is a non-starter because there is no other thing for what-is to become.

The rest of your post is similarly irrelevant because you do not address the core teaching and do not understand its inescapable ramifications. You show some awareness of it, though, when you write “Of course, there is nothing that “is not”.” Here, you admit the omnipresence of “is”, so it appears you do not challenge the core teaching and are therefore just confused about how to walk the path of truth.

Similarly, in claiming that Zeno was “town apart”, you reveal that you are again confused. The “answer” to Zeno is to agree with Eleatic philosophy, that there “is”, and it is a perfectly complete whole. Only then can claims of “motion” and the like be rendered coherent. As you said, “time is the dimension across which change occurs”: you are taking all the moments of the arrow together as a perfect whole and describing the relative distance between points, rather than generating new moments and destroying old ones, or any other error that Zeno overturned. Far from you overthrowing Zeno, he has instead managed to partially educate you.

>>22876842
"Is" applies to everything and is thus a completely contentless term. If you ignore any and all differentiation than a sheer "is" is devoid of any cognitive content and collapses into nothing.

This is precisely how Hegel arrives at becoming.

But let's not ignore the elephant in the room, that claiming change doesn't exist is patently retarded and that no one who claims to believe this actually acts like it is remotely true.

>>22873177
I think you want free will to be what humans aren't capable of having. A lot of medieval thinkers view God as being the only thing that can truly hold those abilities you describe.

>>22877119
Given that "is" applies to everything, it is literally the most content-full term of all, lmao. Reality is one perfect whole, and positing anything else (that which is not?) would be contradictory nonsense, as admitted by the anon (you?) above.

You needn't talk about "becoming" because, again, you haven't given that term any metaphysically significant meaning. Indeed, you can't, because what else is there that what-is might "become"? You can also stop looking to magical germans like Hegel to help you. How embarrassing for those people, thousands of pages of dense germanic musings, all revealed to be utter nonsense because they failed to grasp that there is what there is.

As for the "elephant in the room", it's much different than you suppose. Like when we talked about Zeno, the challenge for philosophy is to describe everything in a way that complies with the nature of Being. If you want to posit a series of events, like an arrow flying through the air, that's fine, but you need to describe it in a coherent fashion. In that example, you might do so by describing an eternalist model of time and saying that the observation of change is relative between two or more inviolable moment that exist together in the Whole.

>>22873154
>Our brains are made up of chemical pathways, so all of our decisions/thoughts/behavior must be determined by biochemistry and genetics. Or they are determined by environment.
this is pretty much the argument as to why free will HAS to be metaphysical, or has to come from God, and could never exist if the world is indeed purely material or atheist
Do you think a metaphysical origin of the universe is reasonable to assess? If not, could you argue why?

>>22875837
>>22875788
>>22875612
As far as I’m concerned it does not matter whether we have free will or not. We act as if we make decisions. We still act as if we are in charge of our lives; we cannot live any other way. I’m It doesn’t matter either way since our subjective experience of the world wouldn’t change if our choices were deterministic or due to free will.

>>22873154
I think free will is real just based on numbers. If you say something to me, it will change how I think and I say something different. What you say to me could change depending on if you happen to catch my shoes in your sight before you do my shirt. You can take this principle and apply it to every single person, every single persons thoughts, and every single way a thought can form in a persons mind.To say all of that is predetermined chemically or atomically or whatever the fuck is peak philosophical brainrot, you're inventing non existent things to discuss, these concepts don't exist in reality

>>22873177
do you want to die right now if it was called for or are you wanting to prolong it as long as possible to enjoy the randomness

High quality discussion on /lit/ - what a surprise!

>>22873168
>We cannot know ourselves so well as to be able to predict our future choices, for logical reasons
I think this is what it comes down to honestly. Until this becomes remotely possible, determinism will just be a metaphysical conjecture

>>22875105
Didn't aristotle refute Basedmenides?

>>22877451
Well if Aristotle said so...

>>22877321
People can't find an answer to the question of free will because I don't think they understand what they're asking. Whenever I get into it, people struggle to define what they mean by 'will' or 'I'. The most succinct answer I ever got a sort of acting and existing independent of everything else, but we run into dualism with this idea because we as we know ourselves only exist /in relation/ to everything else! There's no such thing as partially being exerted upon any more than you can partially exist. So you're right insofar we act a certain way regardless of the way things are, because the way we act are a component of the way things are. But nobody wants to know how things are they want to know how to get one up on how things are -- if that makes any sense?

>>22873154
This topic is a great way to distinguish humans with souls from intelligent automatons. If you ask a real human if they have free will, they will answer, "Yes, of course". There is no complex thought or philosophy necessary; they intuitively understand that they possess free will by the sheer act of having exercised it their entire lives.

Ask an intelligent automaton (aka a npc) if they have a soul and they will answer, "No, I'm a determinist", and they will provide elaborate logical proofs to support their position: >>22873177. And they are absolutely correct. These "people" possess neither souls nor free will.

>>22874728
that’s basically what I was getting at, although saying it outright tends to attract narcissistic new age grifters
>>22875029
you can predict animal behavior quite well with simple observation…to use the crudest example possible, a horsefly is pretty much helpless to not land on a pile of shit. the human is obviously infinitely more complex, but our macro behavior has been predicted and manipulated quite well by our evil overlords, which is why I agree with biological determinism somewhat. I’m not going so far as to say that we can predict your every behavior every moment, but certain outcomes are obvious for certain people in a given environment

>>22875837
This take is the most interesting in the thread. Does this kind of idea have a name and where can I read more about it?

>>22877532
Check out "embodied conciousness."

The idea that minds can't be simply defined as brains is pretty common in philosophy. After all, a dead body doesn't have a mind but its matter can be essentially identical. At the same time, we tend to think we have the same mind we had a year ago, even though the overwhelming number of atoms in our body have been replaced.

Further, brains don't create consciousness in a vacuum. Throw a body in a vacuum and you get a corpse, not conciousness. Bodies only produce conciousness in an extremely narrow range of enviornments. Make the atmosphere too different from a small range and conciousness can stop almost instantly. Throw a body into a star or gas giant and you get nothing.

Further, minds shape their enviornment, so you can't separate brain/enviornment easily into neat causal spheres when talking about the mind. Our enviornment, diet, drugs we take, etc. all have a huge shape on behavior, and yet behavior also shapes these.

A process view is generally popular. Minds emerge from process and such a process is not easily defined in any simple superveniance relation on some given configuration of matter.

>>22877240
So there is no difference in this whole? It's all one completely decomposable entity?

>>22877626
I don't know what you mean by "decomposable entity". You can analogise it to a painting, though. Being would be the painting, and just as we can describe the figured depicted in a painting, so we can describe all the detail or meaningfulness of Being.

>>22877488
>But nobody wants to know how things are they want to know how to get one up on how things are -- if that makes any sense?
NTA and yes it does, most people don't necessarily want to know about the Absolute, about Objective Reality, they want to know how to make up their own rules about Reality that they can decide and play by. Most people don't like feeling like slaves, and I think to be subject to the Absolute/Reality/Objectivity/God is to, in a way, be a slave, a slave of the most abject and submissive sort, because you have literally no choice but to play by the Master's rules. Every move you can make: already accounted for
Every choice, every thought: all in the plan
You want to escape? You just go to another room in the Master's house.
I can certainly understand the terror of this position, and I think it's only human nature, the nature of Subjectivity, to not accept this.

>>22877492
Interesting position
also,
> "No, I'm a determinist"
should be "No, I'm a communist". I fixed that for you, brother.

>>22877532
Some kind of Idealism? Maybe something like monist-idealism? Panpsychism?

>>22873154
We live really as if we are free, freedom really does ascribe to something in our lives, the struggle is to understand what that is (and how).

>>22877719
Sounds closer to non-dualism to me. All things are one mind that that all things have a mind.

>>22877730
Sorry, I'm not familiar with non-dualism. I'm still learning about all of these metaphysical/ontological positions.

>>22877492
>mom, mom look! I called the people I don't like NPCs, and myself a human which means I'm special!

>>22877532
What he's saying is basically Mahayana Buddhism.

>>22873154
determinism is the belief of free will, you're a fatalist. I guess you were fated to make this gay thread since time immemorial

>>22877698
mirin the transparency

>>22877788
I stay transparent, bro.

>>22877492
Extreme levels of cringe emanating from this post. May you find a way to stop feeling inferior to others.

>>22875754
This seems like the most plausible science-based explanation for the phenomenon that people call the "law of attraction". I can attest that the things / people / situations that I focus on have a way of manifesting in my life, and I have some non-trivial examples, such as spontaneously being invited to make an appearance on my favorite television show, getting selected to receive three full-ride scholarships, getting to live in my favorite city, etc.

When I adopted a deterministic world view it lead to the worst years of my life, and it was only by taking a leap of faith and believing in my own agency that I was able to improve my situation.

It is possible that my arrival at this current belief about free will was purely deterministic (i.e., I read or heard something to change my mind in a moment of susceptibility) and that this belief is improving my life in a purely deterministic way by causing a shift in life priorities.

However, as others in this thread have noted, if we are just biological machines reacting to stimuli, then why would we experience consciousness at all? What function would it serve?

What a great thread. I read all the posts that had 2 replies or more and I was immensly satisfied.

>>22873154
>I've been a hard deterministic for my entire life
So you don't look before crossing the street?

>>22878536
Based. Me too anon. I would say it's a Christmas miracle, but every so often /lit/ just has a quality thread.

>>22878551
kek so many comedies could be written as characters that devoutly live philosophies to an absurd degree

>>22877492
Topkek

>>22875837
It is true that determinism cuts both ways, i.e., the state you're currently in determines your past and future and your environment. However, I don't think that alone establishes free will, because not every case of your determining something is a choice. For example, my asking a doctor to treat my broken leg determines that my leg has indeed been broken (assuming I would make that request if and only if my leg was broken), but that doesn't mean that by making the request I freely chose to have broken my leg.

>>22878551
I get that this is a joke, but I do just want to say nonetheless that a real determinist would of course look both ways, they would just say, however, that "whatever happened, whether I get hit or don't get hit was already going to happen, although I will experience it as an emergent, linear sequence of events so it will feel like I have free will and control". I think.

>>22873154
If you don't believe true thought is even possible then why bother engaging in philosophy?

>>22873154
Because we obviously have it and it's retarded to think that we don't

>>22879074
>Obviously
It feels obvious, doesn't it? Our intuition tells us our conscious mind is not making pre-determined/unwilled choices, doesn't it? And, ultimately, it doesn't REALLY matter if we do have free will or not, at a cosmic/atomic scale, because we'll always live feeling like we do, and we'll probably never know anyway.
But, anon, can you prove it?
From the perspective of my own selfhood, my reality as a subject, I want it to be real very badly, but from the perspective of my faith in a higher lifeforce/God, I'm kind of ambivalent about it.

>>22873177
A lot of wordy answers here.
Free will is the action of ignoring your animal instincts and instead choosing to act reasonably.

I can expand if you'd like...

>>22879497
Free will is a lot of things

>>22879502
there is also recognition, self restraint , and ironically eugenics, but the overall "goal" of creating such a concept is to encourage men that they truly can : "ascend above the beast"

>>22879502

>>22879497
That's free will at a genetic/conscious level, but there's also free will at a cosmic/atomic/quantum level, which is arguably a more disturbing, fundamental, and even fascinating question, although it's a lot less likely to be answered and probably has less effect on our day-to-day lives. Nonetheless, the cosmic question of free will is still something to think about.
Like this anon >>22877240 said:
>As for the "elephant in the room", it's much different than you suppose. Like when we talked about Zeno, the challenge for philosophy is to describe everything in a way that complies with the nature of Being. If you want to posit a series of events, like an arrow flying through the air, that's fine, but you need to describe it in a coherent fashion. In that example, you might do so by describing an eternalist model of time and saying that the observation of change is relative between two or more inviolable moment that exist together in the Whole.

>>22879525
>quantum level free will....
two things we don't understand used together. No, you sound like capeslop.

What even is that ? chaos within the very rules of physics ?

>>22879545
>What even is that ? chaos within the very rules of physics ?
Quantum level free will, in my mind, exists if there is no such thing as the eternal present. If time is a physical thing like space, then I think it's likely we do not have free will and all life is akin to something like "puppets", since we exist within that space. If time is not a physical thing, then I think it's more likely we do have free will.

>>22879558
wut ?

>>22877240
The Roman Empire no longer exists. Henry VIII no longer exists. There was a time before they existed. There is a time after they exist.

No amount of language games will change this fact. You're literally falling for an ancient troll who was using language to troll and probably didn't even take what they were saying literally.

>>22878787
What I am trying to get at when I say the question is a red herring, is that neither determinism nor free will are any sort of competing political power over circumstance like decreeing 'no broke leg'. Personally I think existence is more akin to a play and what people are really asking is if they are getting too lost in the character rather than not liking the play's director. The question is a red herring because there is no cosmic director to the play, but there are actors and a stage. The stage is real, but what happens on it isn't. If that makes any sense.