/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.11411790]

Why won't physicists abandon their misguided belief in free will and just accept determinism?
Is it really that much easier to believe in magic particles moving as literal probability clouds, or in multiverses, than just accepting the truth?

[Anonymous No.11411795]

>>11411790
>Why won't physicists abandon their misguided belief in free will and just accept determinism?
Why won't brainlets abandon their misguided belief that free will and determinism are mutually exclusive?

[Anonymous No.11411805]

>>11411795
>bro we can't ever know the minutia of every event, just hope free will fits in somewhere
compatibilism is the ultimate cope, god of the gaps tier

[Anonymous No.11411918]

>>11411790

What are your criteria for establishing that free will exists? How do you define free will? Most people who make these stupid posts define free will as randomness or absence of physical laws in the mind somewhere.

Randomness might be there, to some very small degree. But how does randomness make decisions free and not just random? And even if randomness = freedom, is there really something truly random? If reality is self-contained, that it contains everything that is real, then all impulses (to do anything physical) must originate within reality itself. Something must have caused that which you don't know how or cannot predict.

How could minds not follow physical laws? Of course, they do. We're made of physical stuff, after all. Unless you believe in the supernatural, then you can already rule out this possibility.

[Anonymous No.11411938]

>>11411918

My point is that the common Sam Harris retard's definition of free will is stupid. It's not a scientific concept. It's unintelligible. Free will must be defined in a way measurable by the brain sciences for it to be scientific. But you cannot by test if there is non-physical processes in the brain. You leave the realm of science and enter religion/metaphysics/spiritualism/supernaturalism.

[Anonymous No.11411945]

>>11411918
could any counterfactual, have been?
or is the counterfactual "if I ate bacon this morning..." no more or less in disagreement with reality than "if electrons had twice their charge..."
and if there is a hierarchy between those two counterfactuals, how? what is it? does the counterfactual "if cause and effect wasn't real..." exist above that?

Could things be different, is there any meaningful difference between the whats in what could have been?

[Anonymous No.11411981]

>>11411945

Thinking about alternatives for what one could have had for breakfast is only meaningful in terms of future choices of breakfast.

Wondering "what if cause and effect weren't real" doesn't have any real psychological purpose I can think of. Unless its to write a paper in metaphysics or something to that effect.

[Anonymous No.11412002]

>>11411981
I don't think that response is even attempting to engage the conversation.
Most people have a drive towards truth. Most people would consider there to be a meaningful distinction between having a wife who has loved them for the past 20 years, versus a wife who has successfully pretended to love them for 20 years. Utility is a poor frame of mind for any discussion on truth.

[Anonymous No.11412007]

>>11411805
>bro we can't ever know the minutia of every event, just hope free will fits in somewhere
this is the "quantum randomness gives us free will" argument, not compatibilism which isn't god of the gaps tier at all. compatibilists aren't threatened by there being causal explanation for everything or our decisions being explainable.

the main difference between compatibilists and hard determinists is that the latter are more prone to using more fatalist language and being drama queens about us not having something they trivially defined out of existence - by not accepting either partially indeterministic or completely deterministic choice as sufficient. Then doh, of course we don't have this stupid thing you are talking about. nobody cares, everything one could possibly care about agency, moral responsibility, freedom, our everyday sense of free will and choice, our talk of possibilities and what one could have done - all of this can be made sense in a deterministic universe and why it is also rational to think in these terms.

[Anonymous No.11412035]

>>11412002

Well, since we cannot change the past, thoughts are only scientifically/physically meaningful with regard to the future. So you can ask what-if questions about the past all you like, but that doesn't matter since time only moves in one direction.

Asking questions like "what if cause and effect weren't real" is pretty incomprehensible. I would think that most people take cause and effect axiomatically, as a fundamental and necessary concept in science. Without assuming cause and effect to be real, making scientific theories would be impossible. All scientific theories would be false by default.