Illusion of free-will?

[joedirt]

When studying free will in university it's impossible to discuss the topic without first discussing Aristotle and Aquinas.

That is a shame, if i was a lecturer at college, i would ask my students what they thought free will was before introducing them to the works of others and then see where the discussion goes.

So, I'm not sure how you come to a definition of free will without first discussing the work done before you.

Why not? I have come to a definition of free will without discussing the work done before me and, according to some of the links you posted, some of my arguments echo these works. Whether my definitions are right or wrong is a different kettle of fish but if i just go "Aristotle said that" or "Descartes said this" then the conclusions that i have come to in regard to free will are not really my own.

Just because the material is dense does not mean its regurgitating concepts.

I have no problem reading the thoughts of philosophers, no matter how dense, but i also think that it is healthy to think about philosophical concepts from an individual perspective using knowledge and experience that one has gained through life. Isn"t part of the beauty of philosophy that anyone can have a crack at it, no matter how well educated or uneducated they happen to be.No one was telling Socrates "Nope you can"t define such and such without reading so and so"....(please don"t read that last sentence as me comparing myself to Socrates)

Hugs you can chalk this up to TWICE now that you and I are in total agreement.

BTW a1pha nothing wrong with studying those before you, but personally I alway's think it's better to use your own imagination and creativity first before you bias your conclusions in a specific direction from the thoughts of another..

In fact my grad school advisor used to tell me that it was better to work on a problem before reading the literature. He said if you read the works of others before you explore the problem yourself you are more likey to get tapped in local thought minima.... Basically translating to your thinking has been biased by the thoughts of another which makes it harder, though not impossible, to break out of the mold and challenge the status quo.

Ever wonder why it's typically young people that invent the most disruptive technologies and or device the breath taking new solutions that radically change a paradigm? It's because they don't have years of bias like old academics do. Example James Watson devised the solution to the structure of DNA in his early 20's. Jimi Hendrix died at 27. Duanne Allman completely reinvented what it means to play slide guitar..dead at 24... etc... Yeah sure old people do good things to, but paradigms are broken by the young and naive that haven't spent a life time studying those that came before them.

 

[joedirt]

@ Hug

It is incredibly beneficial (and painful ) once your personal philosophy is rock solid, to digest the thought logic of the great minds. I think you will find a multitude of parallels and associations that further strengthen your view. Who knows, you could find a revolutionary pattern that has remained hidden for centuries.

^This. Key in on the "once your personal philosophy is rock solid"... maybe not even rock solid, but at least well formed enough that you have formed an understanding.

 

[hug46]

Hugs you can chalk this up to TWICE now that you and I are in total agreement.

Joe, if you count us agreeing about Alan Watts being an alki not detracting from his words of wisdom that makes it 3 times. We have disagreed, astounded, nearly offended, laughed and agreed over the last 10 pages. All we need to do now is cry and then fall in love and we will have run the whole gamut of human emotions that are required for a fulfilling existence.

@ Hug

It is incredibly beneficial (and painful ) once your personal philosophy is rock solid, to digest the thought logic of the great minds. I think you will find a multitude of parallels and associations that further strengthen your view. Who knows, you could find a revolutionary pattern that has remained hidden for centuries.

^This. Key in on the "once your personal philosophy is rock solid"... maybe not even rock solid, but at least well formed enough that you have formed an understanding.

I do agree with this guys but please do not think that i have an aversion to reading up on the thoughts of philosophers. I can just about deal with the dense philosophical stuff. I simply did not have the time to give them the attention that they warranted.

Imagine a multi-verse which includes every possible you. Which “you” has free will?

I thought about this again. If there is every possible me (and presuming that there are an infinite number of universes in this multiverse) then everything that possibly can come to pass, will come to pass. Everything is predetermined, so as far as me having free will goes, i"m buggered. The best i can hope for is choosing which predetermined path to take. My answer works on the assumption that the definition of free will is that someone is able to steer and change their fate.

 

[Koornut]

@ Hug

It is incredibly beneficial (and painful ) once your personal philosophy is rock solid, to digest the thought logic of the great minds. I think you will find a multitude of parallels and associations that further strengthen your view. Who knows, you could find a revolutionary pattern that has remained hidden for centuries.

^This. Key in on the "once your personal philosophy is rock solid"... maybe not even rock solid, but at least well formed enough that you have formed an understanding.

I do agree with this guys but please do not think that i have an aversion to reading up on the thoughts of philosophers. I can just about deal with the dense philosophical stuff. I simply did not have the time to give them the attention that they warranted.

Not the time to give then the attention they warranted....
YES!!
Time is the variable escaping us, as we move through the greater pool of knowledge that is always expanding.
Although it feels like it is escaping away from us throughout our lives it might actually be the chain that is binding us to the shallow end of the pool.
To see free will one must be aware of all[\] variables that are pertinent to the situation, anything less is not free will.

 

[Rising Spirit]

Imagine a multi-verse which includes every possible you. Which “you” has free will?

Exactly!!! Who are we, really? Just where are we, existentially? If we believe that we are the collective ego-self composed of: physical body/ individual mind/ personal feelings/ seemingly random dream sequences/ discovery of soul-consciousness/ bubble of cosmic being/ the Godhead blinking.... then, just where do we collectively determine is in fact, the exact location of said "Self" or "Atman"? Everywhere, nowhere or an ineffable multidimensional space/ non-space, simultaneously. And one that cannot be described in words nor reduced to order & abstraction, by formulaic humanoid thinking. :?

No wonder Sakyamuni raised the poignant idea of the inherent emptiness of Anatman (no-self or the filmiest of echoes, themselves erased by sheer attunement to the emptiness of no-mind)! So, how can the whole be anything distinct from the parts of the sum total collective, itself born of the realm of relative impermanence? The Presence is everywhere but contained by naught. It's a completely game of smoke and mirrors, folks.

The atoms making up our little toe are unaware of our personal drama in the world of human interrelationships and our core sense of self and it's implied journey through the time-space-continuum or simply, our individual destiny. Likewise, we are unaware of the atoms making up our little toe.

So where in specific is the "real" self in all of this dreamscape sequencing fluttering by the witness of the I Am Principle, incarnated as the individual self becoming aware that it is here now? When we claim to know, we are surely deluded, for who and where is the I that believes itself to exist? Does the microscopic have free will or is the macroscopic truly free? The question is essentially an endless riddle for the mind.

As a parable, where does the differentiation between the divided series separate aspects of a tree arise? Is it the diminutive cause, the initial seed, the sprouting leaves, sampling, the dancing leaves, the reaching branches and deeply burrowed roots and the fundamental IDEA itself of Tree-ness, as a catalyst for such a sequential unfolding... where in frozen time does it fundamentally exist? Perhaps within our own observations alone or might it dwell within a realm of certain, factual laws of reality?

Can we catch this miracle in motion by thought or classification? It must be all phases and perhaps none isolated by itself alone, right? Hence, the notion of Oneness arise. Likewise, can there be a static beginning or a finite ending to anything existent, when the process is as limitlessness as the vastness of the potentiality reflected within the endless flow of multiplicities, themselves born of any given paradigmatic state of possibility? Ergo, how can there be "free will" apart from the human mind? Sigh... thus we dream on and on and on... ad infinitum.

I only know that i know nothing. My knowledge comes from an unknowing.

Wise ole Socrates was definitely onto something most profound, eh? 8)

 

[jamie]

free will is a human idea..it exists only in the realm of platonic idealism. The truth outside of that realm is that the question of free will is likely to be meaningless.

 

[joedirt]

free will is a human idea..it exists only in the realm of platonic idealism. The truth outside of that realm is that the question of free will is likely to be meaningless.

True, but then so is every idea you have ever had. Same with every idea I have ever had... And likewise for every other human that has ever lived or will ever come to be.

This why something like Nirvana can't be spoken of.
It can only be spoken of via negation and then even those negations are just fingers pointing at the moon...

There is no freedom when there is will.

Peace

 

[durr7]

I like to look at this question macroscopically.

With physics we try to observe, describe, and predict the behavior of the universe. There are lots of theories. With classical mechanics, we can approximate where an object will be after 'x' time. With quantum mechanics, we can guess where to find an atoms electron(s). With special relativity, we see that light is always traveling the same speed regardless of who's looking at it. There's a lot more to these theories, and many (very many) more theories as well. None of them are perfect though, and none of them apply to the whole universe, and we have a long time (perhaps an eternity) before we reach that point.

The perfect theory would give us the perfect equation, which would allow us to describe the entire universe. This equation would tell you every aspect of the universe at any given moment, perhaps with time as input. That means we could put t+10 into the equation (where t is the present) to see the exact state the universe is in (on a microscopic level, energy, particles, atoms, molecules, etc.. on a macroscopic level, planets, people, living things..) in 10 units of time after the present.

This equation would imply that everything is already determined. The past, the present, the future. Our thoughts, choices, actions.. We have no say in it, since we're all apart of the same equation.

So yes, I do believe that freewill is an illusion. Everything is already predetermined.

But honestly, I prefer that it stays an illusion.

 

[primordium]

In fact my grad school advisor used to tell me that it was better to work on a problem before reading the literature. He said if you read the works of others before you explore the problem yourself you are more likey to get tapped in local thought minima.... Basically translating to your thinking has been biased by the thoughts of another which makes it harder, though not impossible, to break out of the mold and challenge the status quo.

Without foundationally grounding ourselves in the well-argued thoughts and techniques of human civilization, we are most likely spinning wheels or enthusiastically running in the wrong direction. By dipping into the stream of thousands of intellectuals who have argued about topics like free will, we develop new thoughts and scrutinize our own. The best painters today must still learn from the Masters.

Ever wonder why it's typically young people that invent the most disruptive technologies and or device the breath taking new solutions that radically change a paradigm? It's because they don't have years of bias like old academics do. Example James Watson devised the solution to the structure of DNA in his early 20's. Jimi Hendrix died at 27. Duanne Allman completely reinvented what it means to play slide guitar..dead at 24... etc... Yeah sure old people do good things to, but paradigms are broken by the young and naive that haven't spent a life time studying those that came before them.

I personally advocate abandoning infants onto deserted islands so that they build us 22nd-century technologies.

Go ask random 21-year olds what breakthrough technologies they are working on. Your anecdotes completely ignore the millions of people who are innovating around us without celebrity fanfare--many, if not most, of these people are in their thirties and beyond.

 

[primordium]

Just out of curiosity do you think the current growth of our species is sustainable to the planet?

It seems completely obvious to me that anyone up on current environmental disasters could easily understand how halving the human population would be an immense boon to life on the planet and thus our species by extension in a given time frame.

People are the ultimate resource.

During the last two centuries, both population and prosperity exploded. Maybe the world just enjoyed incredibly good luck, but it makes you wonder: Could rising population be a cause of rising prosperity?

Yes. Economists’ central discovery about economic growth is that new ideas are more important than labor or capital.[7] The main reason we’re richer than we used to be is that we know more than we used to know. We know how one man can grow food for hundreds. We know how to build flying machines. We know how to build iPhones. Best of all: Once one person discovers a new idea, billions can cheaply adopt it.

Once you recognize the power of ideas, the value of population comes into focus.[8] People—especially smart, creative people—are the source of new ideas. Imagine deleting half the names in your music collection—or half the visionaries in the computer industry. Think how much poorer the world would be. But population doesn’t merely increase the supply of new ideas. It increases the demand as well. Suppose an idea is worth $1 per person, but takes a decade to develop. On an island with a hundred inhabitants, the idea would remain undiscovered; inventors are better off picking coconuts. But in a world with seven billion customers, inventors scramble to bring the new idea to market.

Consider languages. There are far more books, movies, and television shows in English than in Romanian. Supply is one reason: Far more writers and directors speak English than Romanian. But demand is also crucial: English-speaking customers are far more numerous. Michael Kremer’s celebrated “Population Growth and Technological Change: 1,000,000 B.C. to 1990” generalizes this insight to all of human history.[9] Small, isolated populations in places like Tasmania stagnate or regress.[10] Large, connected populations in places like Eurasia progress—and the pace of progress quickens as their populations multiply.

Population also enriches us in a more immediate way. Despite constant complaints about cities’ crowds and congestion, city folk gladly pay higher urban rents. Even introverts and outright misanthropes shell out massive premiums to live near millions of strangers. What are they after? The obvious answer is choices—choices about where to work, what to buy, how to play, and who to meet. These choices, like ideas, come from people—suppliers who offer them, and demanders who sustain them. When population goes up, everyone gets extra choices.

The population-choice connection is most visible in a city. But physical proximity is not essential. Thanks to modern communications and transport, people in the middle of nowhere still belong to a global civilization. Whether we’re urban, suburban, or rural, we all enjoy a vast menu of occupations, lifestyles, hobbies, cultures, and social networks thanks to the billions of strangers who share the planet.

After two centuries of rising population and rising prosperity, attempts to blame low living standards on overpopulation have worn thin. The most popular anti-population arguments now come from environmentalists. But their case is surprisingly weak. We’re not “running out” of food, fuel, or minerals. Despite occasional price spikes, real commodity prices have fallen about 1% per year for over a century.[11] Air and water quality in the First World have been improving for decades despite rising population.[12] Genuine problems remain, but limiting population to counter environmental problems is using a sword to kill a mosquito. Pollution taxes and congestion prices are far cheaper and more humane remedies.[13]