Mantus

To make things intresting

The obove illustrates physical bondage. Yet both men retain freedom of their conginitive process.

There are clearly various degrees of freedom. In the extreme, we will not be able to tell the diference between a person who is phisically free and one who is under total physical control. Same goes for the mind. Yet as we step away from total control signs of individual freedom show. It is admited by most that freedom is never total. We are always pushed this way and that. So the question is, how much/or little freedom is requred to say that a person is acting on freewill? Where do we draw the line between freedom and bondage, and can we?

As far as I know, no one thus far has ever acted differntly then they did. So both requisites are incoherent

1010011010

What are you referring to as "both requisites"?

No one has acted differently than they did. The way you acted is the reference for determining what is different. Different actions are, by definition, not the way you acted. That's why the second standard is incoherent.

"Could have acted differently" doesn't have that problem.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Francisco

Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press: "Free will, in philosophy, the doctrine that an individual, regardless of forces external to him, can and does choose at least some of his actions."

Can and does. Not could but didn't.

(But then philosophers in general do sometimes appear incoherent, especially to their fauxs, no pun intended.)

Zyr

"Could have acted differently" - No person would act any differently in the same situation, becuase whatever their reasons, they would be the same, and thus, the thought process that leads them to that decision will be the same.

Francisco: You seem to have interpreted my idea of running through the same situation many times, as being to run through the situation once, then go back and run through it again. I put "given the same conditions" there on purpose. I mean the same in all aspects, down to the knowledge that the person has. Given one set of variables, there will be one outcome. Sure, the variables are the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, but that doesn't matter.

With regards to the locked room, I would say that in terms of freedom, they are the same. They are both restrained from leaving. One by walls, one by his own desire.

__________________
"Oh, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83 when I was the only practitioner of it, and I stopped because I was tired of being stared at."

Omnia mutantu, nos et mutamur in illis.
All things change, and we change with them.
- Neil Gaiman, Marvel 1602

asaris

10100 etc: I agree with you to the extent that I think the ability to act otherwise is necessary for free will. But I don't think it's the essence of free will. I come to free will through morality. We tend to believe, and I think rightly, that we are morally responsible for some of our actions but not for others. So my most basic definition of free will is "whatever it is, the presence of which makes us responsible for some actions and the absence of which makes us not responsible for others". As a note, this is all I want to stipulate to when talking about free will. I claim to have arguments for the rest. Anyway, given this, it seems clear that the essence of free will must be that our actions are up to us.

Francisco: I mentioned that difference just to elucidate the necessity for a theoretical, rather than a fact based, approach to free will. The fact that the law, which of necessity uses the fact-based approach, is so clearly inadequate in discerning free will, is at least evidence that a fact-based approach would be inadequate.

You keep saying that you don't think we can argue about this, but I've in fact given arguments for my position which you've never adressed. Perhaps you should try arguing, and not asserting that it's impossible.

You seem to misunderstand the article. It's not saying that, at some point, we have to choose P and not-P. It's saying that, given that we chose P, we could have chosen not-P.

Zyr: you're begging the question. Your answer to the thought experiment presupposes we don't have free will. In any case, I want to maintain that even if we always do the same thing given the same set of circumstances, we can still be free. Remember that free will just means that something is up to us. It's hard to see without further argument, how just because we always do the same thing, that that's not up to us.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Francisco

Sorry if I've not addressed something that I could have or should have addressed. It wasn't out of any disrespect. But as to not trying arguing, I think you'll find that I have argued until I'm blue in the face, as the old saying goes. My assertion is not that it's impossible, but impossible to argue further with any expectation of a further meeting of the minds. We all pretty well know now what the other thinks, why he thinks it, how he goes about doing that thinking, or if he is thinking at all rather than just playing games for some juvenile or ultimately masochistic purpose.

Anyway, it seems we are now down to kicking the horse to see if it is dead. Unfortunately, the kicking itself has been the cause of its death.

pan6467

I believe we have free will, but because we are social animals and strive to be accepted we do not use it that often, for fear of being excluded. It's what we are taught from the second we start school throughout life, work, relationships and so on.

Those that can use their freewill are called ecentric and strange.

But this is common throughout history, people are taught, threatened and cajoled into following.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Francisco

Faced with your beauty, my free will would be severely compromised.

1010011010

I see you're still having trouble comprehending what you've read. It's equally important that the individual can choose, but does not choose, what he does not do. If an individual cannot choose anything other than the actions they actually do choose, they do not actually have a choice, because they could not have chosen to act differently.

So your observation that an indiviual can do actions and does do actions doesn't reveal anything about wether the individual is doing those actions by choice. Choice requires multiple actions that can be done, of which some are chosen not to be done. If you could not have actually done anything other than what you did do, you never had a choice.

Here, I'll try to make it easier.
I take no issue with the statement that a free individual can chose and does choose some of the ways he does act.
This is because it in no way contradicts the statement that a free individual can choose but does not choose some of the ways he does not act.

As a style tip, encyclopedia are not the best source for an appeal to authority-- especially general encyclopedia billed as authority on a specific subject.

Even if someone will make a given choice when presented with a given situation, the part that makes the choice a free one is that they could have chosen differently. They won't choose differently, but they can. The conflation of "would" and "could" is a significant error.

I'd agree with that, but "up to us" is too ambiguous for philosophical analysis.

__________________
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Zeraph

I believe I have free will because I'm either right, or if I'm wrong I'm forced to believe it anyway.

Francisco

Must be why 1010011010 believes what he writes is rational, and it's irrational to consider it gobbledygook.

He seems to believe an encyclopedia should look to him for authority rather than vice versa.

Here's a style tip: Boolean logic works best on computers, because computers don't actually think without assistance from a supreme being. But ask one if it has free will, and it will say it does, and will disavow it's creator. HEY, maybe 1010011010 IS a computer!

NO! WAIT! It's a computer controlled by the DEVIL!

Zeraph

Don't drag me into your argument.

Francisco

Sorry, I thought your participation in the thread was voluntary. Must have been one of those illusions I've been forced to believe.

1010011010

Considering your prior attempts, you really should stop making assertions about what other people believe.Encyclopedia are meant to give one a general overview. They are a starting point for familarization and for planning further research. They are not primary or authoritative sources by design.
In practice the content of an encyclopedia can be haphazard in quality an can vary greatly from article to article.Boolean algebra was invented/created/discovered in the mid-1800s. Its application to computers or mechanical systems really only got started with Shannon's work at Bell Labs in the 1940s and '50s.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Francisco

Yes, I know, you old nit-picking devil, you. I read Fortune's Formula too. (And Shannon was a friend of a friend at MIT.)

So what's your point? Statement too literal? Not literal enough?
Try to say something material or germane this time.

Mantus

Concepts can be accepted and even applied to the world around us without their actual existance. People simply have faith that freewill exists. Thus it allows us to judge people based on their choices. This is important because it absolves in administering a punishment/judgement. The concept of freewill allows us to become intruments of justice. Thus the guilty party is throwing themselves on the spear of justice by making a "choice" to act as they did.

The system works to a large degree. Yet whether we judge others based on morals, laws, cocial codes, etc. the existence of freewill is a faith based belief. So I have to say Asaris, that you will find no freewill in watever it is the "presence of which makes us responsible for some actions and the absence of which makes us not responsible for others". That presence might not even be there.

asaris

Sorry, I didn't explain well enough what I meant by "morally responsible": that we're actually responsible for some of our actions outside of any legal or societal system. I think that's enough to get me there? I'm not sure how to explain it better, though I might be able to tomorrow morning.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

1010011010

You have an obsession with sources... It would not have even occurred to me to think that someone might imagine that there was only one source, but you seem to have rattled one off with such conviction. Your guess is, true to form, incorrect.Irrelevant and misleading, mostly. Even if you honestly did think that Boolean algebra's only use was in constructing logic gates, maybe you'll check to see what happened in the 100 years between the two events.You're not even trying. Good day to you, sir, may you achieve mediocrity beyond your wildest dreams in your future ramblings.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

1010011010

If we do not have free will, that would also absolve us in administering punishment/justice. We would have no responsibility for our actions to punish a man not responsible for his crimes.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Francisco

As you know, and what has pissed you off like nothing else so far, is not any reference to its "only use," but reference to it's present use, and to the illusion you "seem" (conjecture, not assertion) to have that what you are doing in your gobbledygeek and remarkably Boolean-style rambling is actually thinking outside your own little matrix. Sort of a common delusion among you hacker types, and clearly a touchy subject.
Who was it that said: "Alchemy plus inscrutable laws of self-organization will ever remain alchemy." Or: "A computer model is a computer model is a computer model." Oh, it was Gertruce "The Beast" Steinlager in her Ode to Number 666.

As to Shannon, you dropped the name, I didn't. Was there some hint there that you and he had something in common, Brain-wise? You don't (confident assertion, not conjecture).

Zyr

I think we are arguing on different terms. I was (and I do mean was; see below) arguing on the basis that free will was to be able to choose differently in a situation, while many others were assuming that free will is being able to choose. Period. However, most of those on the other side to me, are saying that you can choose a different outcome to a situation. This is, as I've said, impossible. You will always choose the same. You can not do anything different.

Now the important thing, is that I'm willing to concide that this is not a restriction on your free will. The fact that you can choose, that you go through your own thought processes to reach a conclusion, without being guided in anyway by external forces other than your own observations and experiences, is what is important to free will. Sorry for the complete about face.

So back to the topic at hand. So far the best argument of omniscience vs free will, is the idea that to do something other than that which the omniscient being knows you will do, it would deny it's omniscience, thus you can not do this. However, you won't, so is it actually restricting you? It's stoping you doing something you can't do. Is it a restriction?

__________________
"Oh, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83 when I was the only practitioner of it, and I stopped because I was tired of being stared at."

Omnia mutantu, nos et mutamur in illis.
All things change, and we change with them.
- Neil Gaiman, Marvel 1602

Mantus

Zyr,

A "choice" is a mental process and thus an action. One cannot think differnt anymore then one can act differnt. Where is this ability to make a choice?

Francisco

Be careful of drifting into the kind of Boolean tautology that was posted by someone earlier: "If an individual cannot choose anything other than the actions they actually do choose, they do not actually have a choice, because they could not have chosen to act differently."
That way lies madness.

Mantus

This is true, but people believe they have freewill. The concept reinforces itself because we built a whole system on it.

Francisco

If you didn't have free will you wouldn't be absolved of anything because you wouldn't have been under any obligation, or have had any duty, to act to begin with.

Otherwise, Mantus, you are quite correct. Try deciding in the real world that you don't have free will, and therefore no responsibility, and see what happens.

Mantus

That's not really correct. One's responsibilities to society would remain. Moral and social delinquents would be treated as poor executions of our social program. So the obligations and duties to uphold morals, laws and social contracts would remain because the consequences haven't changed. One would still be held responsible, not because one made a choice but because one's actions still effect other people.

Francisco

You wouldn't be absolved, as it was otherwise claimed in the scenario presented by the other poster, because in that imaginary scenario you also wouldn't have had any obligations. That was my point, and you have agreed that you wouldn't be absolved.
My last point was exactly that in the real world, whether we believe in free will or not, we are still going to be held responsible. Which is essentially wnat you said as well.

I used "real world" because the hypothetical example had no correlation to any conceivable real world situation.

asaris

I have a slight disagreement with what you said, Mantus. I think that you would still be treated as responsible, because society has an interest in discouraging certain sorts of behavior. But that's not the same as saying that you would be responsible to society.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Francisco

Why can't you each be right as to why one would both feel responsible and be held responsible?

1010011010

How does knowledge of what you will choose stop you from choosing something else?
So far no one has been willing to explicitly state the jump from "You won't choose A." to "You can't choose A."

To do something other than what which the omniscient being knows you will do would deny its omniscience. To be able to do something other than that which the omniscient being knows you will do, but not do it, would not deny its omniscience.

__________________
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Francisco

This has never been about the mere ability to do something, but about the ability to choose to do what you were presumably able to do regardless of who or what chooses for you to then do it.

The omniscient being knows you won't choose A. That knowledge presupposes that you don't have a choice in the matter. You have not been stopped from choosing something else because you didn't have the option of making that choice to begin with. You won't choose A because you have no such option. You can't choose A because you have no such option. The key here is that in this imaginary scenario, it's the omniscient being that has the knowledge of what you will do, not you. Simple enough for you?

Mantus

Francisco,

So what you are saying is that the process is rigged. How does an omniscient being actually influence the process?

Yet one would go though the cognitive process of making a choice.

Yet one never has knowledge of what one will do until one makes a choice.

Francisco

IF there were an omniscient being, then the process would have been rigged. How it was rigged would depend on whether you believed in a creator, or in a more mechanical process, and of course most who believe in an omniscient being also believe this being was also the creator who rigged the process. Which would make it a lot easier to be omniscient. And some have argued that it eould be inaccurate to call this hypothetical being omniscient if it also influenced the process.

As to one going through the cognitive process of making a choice, we get back to the basic question of whether any of that process, if other than just putting a pre-programmed biological computer to work, involves freely made choices, or choices predetermined by an outside force or entity.
Exactly. We can predict from past experience what we will probably do, but won't be sure until we take the initial step to do it. Only the hypothetical omniscient being would have that prior knowledge, and what we're talking about here is of course a hypothetical situation or scenario. And we presumably are talking about it to see which, if any, of these various scenarios might explain what happens in the real world, what our purpose is in being here, etc. - rather than talking about it just out of curiousity or for purposes of winning an argument.

What's important is that we don't have to ultimately agree on any of these things, because I personally don't think such a thing is possible. No two people will ever have exactly the same point of view, nor should they. What's ultimatrely right for one may be ultimately disastrous for the other. But that's a subject for a whole other thread.

joe_eschaton

'Free will' indeed.

Spinoza says a tennis ball, if it could think, would believe itself to be moving of its own free will. Schopenhauer adds that the tennis ball would be right.

As usual with philosophy people ignore the question of what truly, and not allegedly, hangs on the answer; ie. what actual difference to anything does the answer make?

None.

People would still act like they do, for reasons that they do, and still be responsible.

The only problem case for us asises in law with the possibility of coercion, which may mitigate a person's free but unlawful action. But if the bank manager was forced to open the safe at gunpoint it was not as if he had no choice: he acted of his 'free will' all the same.

Nothing would be affected by introducing some metaphysical principle of free willing at all - it merely seems necessary to Theists to separate man's will from God's in the light of evil. It has no consequence for us who live life, as opposed to them denying it.

We are all of us affected by causes and motives - this is what it means to will something at all. And so long as that willing is unobstructed, it remains free.

Like a free-falling weight, or any freely standing beam. Free as the driven cockroach.

Francisco

Perhaps a little too much cannabis there, Joe, but you tend to prove my point about different points of view requiring different strategies.

joe_eschaton

Strategies for good or for ill though, my man, you neglect to say...

1010011010

The omniscient being is one who does have that knowledge, by definition.
Some have said, more or less, the omniscient being knows what you won't do because you can't do it.... if you can't do it, you can't choose it, thus you can't make a choice, thus no free will. So far the no one making this argument has explained the basis for the "won't because you can't" presupposition.

Is anyone going to step up to the plate and attempt to justify the assumption that knowledge that you won't do it requires that you can't do it?

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Francisco

Usually somewhere in between. Doing too much good can have the same consequences as doing too much bad. That's why you should never leave your daughter alone with the preacher.

braindamage351

I really don't want to read through all of those posts, so let's get out what we know:

- There are two possibilities: strict causality or randomness
- In randomness you have no control over what is going to happen, and so you do not have free will.
- In order to make a choice there must be multiple possible courses of action. In strict causality there is only one possible outcome, and so there is no choice.
- No choice = no free will

That's about as simple as it's going to get. Criticize from there if there are any faults.

Francisco

The old mix and mis-match false premise gambit. Read it backwards and it would make more sense - on the scale of "more or less" in any case.