Determinism vs. Freewill

[Freethinker]

It isn't necessary to plow through all the aspects of determinism to understand why it is a reality. If you understand the scientific method, then you already get it. Thought and anaysis are also helpful. I keep point out that no one can contradict it but so far no one seems to even want to try. That would be a first step. And it is the core of the scientific method.

Ah Linda, you are singing my song!

[Freethinker]

it is probably true that on the subatomic level, all seems deterministic.

Ah Tinny. I know how picked on you feel. And I hate to add to it. But you have this exactly backwards.

 

Uncertainty shows that at the SUBatomic level "we can not know".... Thus at the QM level (SUBatomic) it is NOT deterministic.

but reductionism does not always apply. Why? Consider this: sodium is an atom with certain characteristics such as melting points, reactive with water etc... chlorine is this greenish yellow substance. when the two are combined, they manifest totally different characteristics

1) Sodium ATOM, Chlorine ATOM. You are NOT talking SUBatomic

 

2) many molecules, if not all, have properties that are different from the individual atoms involved. And in a DETERMINISTIC fashion. They do what we would expect/ predict them to do.

Now, as the culmination arrives at DNA, possibilities are endless. It can reproduce! Wow! who would have thought that those silly ignorant subatomic molecules can work together to reproduce!

1) there is no such thing as "subatomic molecules". Molecules are by defnition "the smallest particle of a substance that retains all the properties of the substance and is composed of one or more atoms"

 

2) SUBatomic particles do NOT reproduce.

 

3) DNA does not "reproduce". Not in and of itself. The strands of DNA are copied and included in cells that reproduce.

And current studies in behavioral sciences indicate free will such as the link I put in my previous post about the Learning-based Personality Theory.

PHeww... so what do you think guys?

I think once more Tinny, you need to start finding VALID resources on the web. At least it wasn't that previous bogus one you always tried to post from. Hyrusomethingorother.

 

There is nothing in modern behavioral science that would promote Free Will. And one of the early clues RE the web site you included was it's attempt to claim the father of modern Bavioral Science, B.F. Skinner, would support such nonsense.

 

If ANYBODY in Behavioral Science was COMPLETELY behind a deterministic stance it was B.F. Skinner.

[Freethinker]

Im free because i'm not aware of the _existence_ of all the effecting factors. No-one is. It's not 'possible' to know. It's not even possible to know if it's possible (by our understanding at the moment). This equals freedom.

No, this equals IGNORANCE.

 

to be "not aware of the _existence_ of" is to be IGNORANT of.

 

It in no way supports free will. To KNOW you like chocolate, while being ignorant of all the well documented physiological reasons behind it, does not eleminate those physiological drives from being *THE* reason you like chocolate. And to state that you like Chocolate thru free will just because you are unaware of the well established physological resonses involved, does not make it free will. It makes it ignorance.

Can you imagine how fast the calculation would have to be made? How do you make a computer that could compute this, and what would it be like? Is this not science-fiction?

I don't understand what this has to do with it. What difference does it make as to how fast we can build a computer today? Was Free Will even more valid before transistors and Microprocessors? Will it be less valid as CPU's get more powerful?

ps. maybe my reasoning is unsound, is so please point it out for me.

I tried. Hope it helps.

[Freethinker]

what would be a true free will. humans are not perfect. they make mistakes. their actions cannot be purely free from external influences.

Whether humans are perfect or not is not relevant.

 

And admitting that we "cannot be purely free from external influences" is to assert that Free Will does not exist.

 

Now, as to Free Will itself.

 

In order for us to truly have Free Will we would have to be free of any constraints outside of perhaps physical abilities. e.g. even if we had free will, humans are not physically able to flly.

 

One thing that has been mentioned is access to options. As to how limited or unlimited our options are. To suggest that we might be limited in our options because of social convention is not to disprove free will. We could be free to intentionally violate social conventions.

 

But to have Free Will would require that humans would have no limit on which options are available to choose from. The only limits would be laws of physics and physiology. But we know we are limited to options that are already identified to us individually. No one has ever had a completely ORIGINAL idea. If we had Free WIll this would not be the case. Each person would be free to invent some completely unknown option. Yet this never happens. It is always incremental. New combinations, new expansions on existing knowledge.

 

The proof that we do not have Free Will is that we are not FREE to create options to which we have not had any previous exposure. Our options are always limited to the set of options to which we have been exposed, either thru nature or nurture.

[Freethinker]

still waiting

I can only respond to them as I get to them Tinny, sorry no ESP! :-)

[pgrmdave]

subatomic particles combine to produce atoms, those atoms open the door for a whole range of new possibilities. and their characteristics are more and more complex. that's the importand part - more complex. simple covalent and ionic molecules can combine to produce complex organic molecules and polymers and DNA. do see the pattern? Now, as the culmination arrives at DNA, possibilities are endless. It can reproduce! Wow! who would have thought that those silly ignorant subatomic molecules can work together to reproduce! So what do we get? Well, the simplest would be single-celled organisms.... in the end, whole systems such as respiration and blood circulation combined can produce organisms of such exceptional complexity. Now, it is possible that the whole culmination of progression in the end arrives at human beings which represents a quantum leap in complexity that it is not impossible that humans have free will.

 

This is an excellent point. Even when you simply add more of the same things to a system, it becomes much more complex. There are a lot of differences between studying one person and studying a large population. Or studying subatomic particles and studying oceans, even though that is all that the oceans are. The complexity may produce freewill on a level that we don't understand. It is similar to the differences between relativity and quantum physics, they are both contradictory but true, in part because they are on such different scales.

[geko]

You contradict yourself.

 

1) the choices are our own

 

contradicts

 

2) the choices are... because ... we've been influenced toward (them)

 

If they are our own, they are our own. Outside influence stops them from being "our own" and makes them group think.

 

Own implies an identity, and i was implying that our identity is nothing more than what we've been influenced toward. To say that this equates to the choices we make not being our own denies that we have individuality, and therefore our own identity. I contradicted nothing as far as i can see, i was explaining identity.

 

And on the computer idea i was saying how difficult it would be to monitor all of the causal relations, therefore to see/monitor/validate a direct determining factor is not possible at the moment. I wasnt using it as a validation for free will

 

 

Apart from that, i rest my case, it does seem to be a determined universe (which i never really denied in the first place, i was just providing a case for free will inside such a thing), but i shall continue to act as though i am free, im not denying i have influences though.

[pgrmdave]

And on the computer idea i was saying how difficult it would be to monitor all of the causal relations, therefore to see/monitor/validate a direct determining factor is not possible at the moment. I wasnt using it as a validation for free will

 

So, are you saying that whether or not we have free will couldn't be determined at the time because we couldn't detect all of the possible things that affect us, nor determine their effect?

[TINNY]

This is perhaps why you feel under attack here regularly. Again we are presented with some psudeo-scientific Islamic ramblings.

there's not a single mention of the word Islam. It was written by Dr. John C. Jenkins, formerly professor of psychology at SUNY stonybrook and Princeton University. And you know what, BF skinner regarded him as hs protege.

When you are unable to give valid refutations, or there is simply no refutation, all you can do is resort to ad hominems. Think about it.

This site is bogus. It completely denies any affect of the hardwiring we are born with. It blindly acccepts the "clean slate" myth.

if authority is what you want, BF Skinner is in complete agreement wiht the tabula rasa concept.

This quote from infidels.org best summarizes your inability to deal with the argument:

The straw man fallacy is when you misrepresent someone else's position so that it can be attacked more easily, knock down that misrepresented position, then conclude that the original position has been demolished. It's a fallacy because it fails to deal with the actual arguments that have been made.

Actually, there is no "blindly accepts the clean slate myth". and to add that, skinner was one of the most influential tabula rasa behaviorists.. This is what i got from the internet at this address: http://maxpages.com/thena/Piaget_and_Skinner

Piaget and the behaviorists thus concur on a number of conceptions about the initial state of the infant mind. The behaviorists saw the infant as a tabula rasa with no built-in knowledge...; Piaget's view of the young infant as assailed by 'undifferentiated and choatic' inputs is substantially the same.

and actually, there is no complete denial of genetic factors. Of course, genetic factors play a role. But imagine all the big muscular and athletic people in the whole world go through the same shaping process as Andre Agassi, the US tennis great, then i'm sure there are many more, perhaps thousands who can play tennis better than agassi because they have better physique and Agassi's rather small. You see, genetic factors are almost inconsequential in determining who the person becomes.

This page basically tries to reject/ ignore hardwired heredity and invent an "inner voice" spirituality while as is typical never providing ANY reason to accept the assertion.

We can't prove mathematically with observable scientific and accurate measurements of the behavior of someone such as the amount of anger etc. Human behavior are way too complex to be subject to analysis with current equipment. So we start with assumptions. And when that assumption is generally accurate, it is the best on offer

About inner speech, this is what Dennet says:

There must be a filter, and any such filter must amount to a sort of inner environment, in which tryouts can be safely executed - an inner something-or-other structured in such a way that the surrogate actions it favors are more often than not the very actions the real world would also bless, if they were actually performed. In short, the inner environment, whatever it is, must contain lots of information about the outer environment and its regularities. Nothing else (except magic) could provide preselection worth having.

what more can i say.

And to claim that prenatal sensory input is more effective in establishing thought process than post natal is absurd.

Of course, it is. Because later thoughts are influence by their previous learning history. And so that thought would be similar to the earlier influence. This influence gets stronger, and so, when new learning takes place, it might be insignificant compared to earlier influences.

[TINNY]

Uncertainty shows that at the SUBatomic level "we can not know".... Thus at the QM level (SUBatomic) it is NOT deterministic.

so you adhere to Penrose's postulations. It thought you'd agree with this part most and not agree with Penrose. This is what he says about quantum-uncertainty, which is basically a missing link in quantum physics that would also complete the unification of the existing laws about quantum mechanics, gravity and electro-magetism, ect.

However, if quantum collapse is the ultimate low-level expression of free will (and the resulting distributions are basically the results of "census" of population of particles), then it is not surprising that we cannot find anything better than questionable probabilistic models without taking this free will into account. And if quantum gravity and unified quantum field theory are supposed to constitute "the general theory of everything", they should include the theory of consciousness, because the consciousness is part of that "everything".

 

1) Sodium ATOM, Chlorine ATOM. You are NOT talking SUBatomic

of course. i am proposing something else as an example that when combined, manifest a whole set of new possibilities which is nothing close to resembling the basic units (atoms) that make it up.

 

2) many molecules, if not all, have properties that are different from the individual atoms involved. And in a DETERMINISTIC fashion. They do what we would expect/ predict them to do.

yes, VERY deterministic. that's the idea. at the low level, everything is deterministic.

 

1) there is no such thing as "subatomic molecules". Molecules are by defnition "the smallest particle of a substance that retains all the properties of the substance and is composed of one or more atoms"

ooops! i meant subatomic particles. :D

2) SUBatomic particles do NOT reproduce.

did I say it did?

 

3) DNA does not "reproduce". Not in and of itself. The strands of DNA are copied and included in cells that reproduce.

my mistake. i'm talking about replicator molecules.

I think once more Tinny, you need to start finding VALID resources on the web. At least it wasn't that previous bogus one you always tried to post from. Hyrusomethingorother.

Well, I try to improve myself and learn as I go along. It has been quite a while since those days. :D

 

There is nothing in modern behavioral science that would promote Free Will. And one of the early clues RE the web site you included was it's attempt to claim the father of modern Bavioral Science, B.F. Skinner, would support such nonsense.

 

If ANYBODY in Behavioral Science was COMPLETELY behind a deterministic stance it was B.F. Skinner.

Yes. Skinner's Black Box dogma prevents him to look into the psyche as modern cognitive psychology has, and that is where the fundamental difference lies. The inner speech would not be possible with Skinner's black box. Here's another excerpt about roger penrose and mishka on quantum consciousness and microtubules:

 

For example, the evolutionary argument that freedom of will is a real thing and not an "illusion" was discovered by many people independently (it is likely that William James was the first, and then Popper and Eccles did that independently, and so on). The idea is that if we postulate that the complex subjective experience is a result of evolution, it could only be so, if it were adaptive, and it could not be adaptive, if there were no way for the subjective experience to influence physical reality. Hence subjective experience is not an epiphenomenon, and freedom of will is not an illusion.

more at http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bukatin/reading_penrose.html

[TINNY]

*wiping sweat of my face*

[TINNY]

Whether humans are perfect or not is not relevant.

it is. if we're perfect, we would manifest complete free-will. no external influences would affect our behavior. as it is, our behavior is partly, ormostly perhaps, determined by previous experience.

 

And admitting that we "cannot be purely free from external influences" is to assert that Free Will does not exist.

no, it is to say that our actions have two basic influences. external and internal. that is why we have no pure will. but we are still free to choose.

 

In order for us to truly have Free Will we would have to be free of any constraints outside of perhaps physical abilities. e.g. even if we had free will, humans are not physically able to flly.

yes. technically, it is the freedom to choose our response to a stimulus.

 

One thing that has been mentioned is access to options. As to how limited or unlimited our options are. To suggest that we might be limited in our options because of social convention is not to disprove free will. We could be free to intentionally violate social conventions.

But to have Free Will would require that humans would have no limit on which options are available to choose from. The only limits would be laws of physics and physiology. But we know we are limited to options that are already identified to us individually. No one has ever had a completely ORIGINAL idea. If we had Free WIll this would not be the case. Each person would be free to invent some completely unknown option. Yet this never happens. It is always incremental. New combinations, new expansions on existing knowledge.

of course, everything we perceive goes into our total past learning history. so our responses come from that TPLH. but another influence also goes in. the inner speech. we can choose to strengthen the external influence or we can opt to override them.

 

The proof that we do not have Free Will is that we are not FREE to create options to which we have not had any previous exposure. Our options are always limited to the set of options to which we have been exposed, either thru nature or nurture.

our physical appearance is made of matter. and so we are influenced by it - both nature and nurture and its limitations. but we have a metaphyscal (read penrose's) too. that's the tough part... :D

[sanctus]

Just an argument to sustain some of yours and to destroy others. I already posted it elsewhere with not much result so I post it again.

In QM there is something called the EPR argument (where EPR stands for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen), which roughly states that there exist some variables we don't know which are the cause of the indeterminism of QM. This argument has been PROVEN wrong by the the experimental and theoretical violation of the Bell-inequalities.

So indeterministic nature of QM does not depend on our ignorance.

[sanctus]

This discussion has been thoroughly visited and there is a hypography on the topic. (Which I wrote a couple of years ago.) So far, no one has answered my outstanding question by giving me an example of free will. Until then, the theory of causal determinism stands.:D

 

There's no point in going over the same material. If you have an example of the "null hypothesis", then what iis it? Othewise you are just speculating and expressing unfounded opinions. This is a science forum, remember.

 

 

Linda, if you think there is no point then don't follow the discussion, I (and I guess some others as well) have never discussed about this so just let us do it. No need to get upset, there as well other ways of asking for one example of free will, which I agree with you is not likely to exist.

[TINNY]

Ok, I'm in. What's the context of the topic, though? Are you saying there is, or is not, Free will?

 

And if so, free will to do what, exactly?

Where are you?Busy with Christmas? Not seen you at the battlefield for quite a while

[TINNY]

nobody's responding. have we reached a consensus?

[Freethinker]

Apart from that, i rest my case, it does seem to be a determined universe (which i never really denied in the first place, i was just providing a case for free will inside such a thing), but i shall continue to act as though i am free, im not denying i have influences though.

I won't bother arguing the differences between "our own" choices and ones influenced by others. Not worth it.

 

But as a side note, Skinner promoted a similar idea to acting like we have free will, even though he was convinced of complete determinism. He said something about if you fall out of a boat, rather than spend time wondering about determinism, as to whether you are meant to drown, you should "decide" to swim back to the boat.

 

Does that mean you have a free will choice to swim back or intentionally drown? Proabably not. Which ever you "picked" would be the one that best fits the sum total of your nature/ nurture regardless.