Discussion of Free Will, then people greentexting >free will

Viani

I'm unfamiliar with this phenomenon. I remember Longfellow or Funnyguts talking about how Free Will didn't exist or whatever, but I wanted somebody who knew more about it to expand on it more.

What is free will, and does it exist?

Justice4243

Sort of hard to say if it exist "for reals". Someone can have a worldview that dose or doesn't leave room for free 

I find the idea that there is no free will pretty troublesome though. If one is taking the position that their is no free will, any idea they submit to defend this position is something they had no choice about. Seems weird to have a position about something you have no choice but to have the position you have because you have no choice about it, etc...

Gelzo

I'm of the opinion that a person's actions- or anything really- are predictable given enough information. Some people are disturbed by this for some reason and think it precludes their notion of free will. I figure it's still useful to consider someone as having some form of... volition if they demonstrate a capability to do the things that they want, as opposed to having some compulsion or mental block that prevents them from that.

In any case, we don't have enough information about people to make them easily predictable, so it's more or less an irrelevant question unless we're talking about the ethics of punishing people for their actions. I think it's pretty obvious that when an action is punished, that results in fewer people performing that action, so in cases where punishment prevents harm, it should be justified.

Odradek

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=interview_strawson

millercross

Free will is the ability of a human being to make decisions without any interference or constraints.

Its existence is...well, difficult to prove. It's kinda like believing in God in that you can argue all you want about it, bring theories, theorems, thought experiments and so on, but you can't actually prove its existence.

Personally, I believe in that we can make decisions free from any interference or constraints, but that we don't make those as often as we think we do.

Gelzo

>without any interference or constraints

You know this is very open-ended? It's difficult for me to consider something as basic as the instinct for survival to not be a major interference in decision-making.

millercross

I dunno, I just lifted the definition from a dictionary. 

I'd argue that's just something that ends up in the big calculation that leads to a decision, anyway

Justice4243

There's definitely environmental factors, elements that have lead up to any particular decision point being made, etc...

And to that extent, I think Strawson is straw-manning humanity a bit in his opening answer in that interview.

"I mean what nearly everyone means. Almost all human beings believe that they are free to choose what to do in such a way that they can be truly, genuinely responsible for their actions in the strongest possible sense—responsible period, responsible without any qualification, responsible sans phrase, responsible tout court, absolutely, radically, buck-stoppingly responsible; ultimately responsible, in a word—and so ultimately morally responsible when moral matters are at issue."

If this was true, courts wouldn't consider things like events the lead up to the event being debated in court as those things would have no bearing on any decisions. Obviously, Judges and Juries, even if they agree a crime is committed, will decide punishment based on HOW much control someone had over the situation.

Anyhow, Stawson is basically just suggesting that "Determinism is TRUE, and also Compatibilism is FALSE!" and is just pontificating about it for a long ass time as philosophers are won't to do. I'm not coming up with any convincing argument here except, "We SHOULD be able to prove this." Which is only as convincing as one is willing to entertain the notion. 

Gelzo

^^Then I guess along that definition you might say that whether someone has free will to make a decision in a given instance depends on how aware they are of where their motivations come from, since I imagine most people are so used to the idea of trying to survive that not trying to live doesn't usually come up as an option.

Justice4243

Compatibilism!

Gelzo

I just skimmed the Wikipedia article, and I guess that more or less explains how I think about it.

millercross

^^Then I guess along that definition you might say that whether someone has free will to make a decision in a given instance depends on how aware they are of where their motivations come from, since I imagine most people are so used to the idea of trying to survive that not trying to live doesn't usually come up as an option.

Pretty much what I was going for, yeah

Odradek

Also, before anyone says anything about it  Kant's idea of noumenal causality is supposed to be regulative rather than constitutive. This means that we must think of ourselves as if we are a kind of supplementary causal input into the chain of causes that constitutes nature, in order to be able to engage in practical reasoning, not that we actually possess a different kind of causality.

I say this, because I know that Viani was about to cite Philosophical Investigations Into The Essence of Human Freedom but shame on her, because Schelling misunderstood Kant on freedom. And Schelling's best work was First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature anyway.

Justice4243

WERE YOU GOING TO CITE "Philosophical Investigations Into The Essence of Human Freedom", VIANI?!

WERE YOU?!

millercross

>Where instead of were

Obā-san

I don't think whether free will exists or not matters.

Viani

If Free Will doesn't exist, then how to people choose to like Ponies, and not Mathematics?

Ace Rimmer

Because they were fated to like Ponies

Misery

Ponies? What the hell you talking about?!

It's the spirits that control all of us!

Justice4243

The spirits must like ponies.

Gelzo

I suppose you could say cartoon ponies are our destiny in a very real and literal way.

Justice4243

If Strawson's argument included references to ponies, I might be more inclined to agree with it.

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The user and all related content has been deleted.

Justice4243

Speaking of Ponies in the context of Free Will.

Was there someone on the fora who didn't like "Feeling Pinkie Keen" because it implied that the Pony world is deterministic? 

Haven

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I can see the question of free will as really meaning anything outside of an experiential context. In which case, it's pretty simple: if you feel like you have free will, you do. (Not to be one of those people who are all "oh, look at me dismissing thousands of years of thinking about a central question of human existence in a single sentence", but at this point I have a hard time seeing any other qualification as really relevant.)

^ But she wouldn't have been able to get out of the way of that falling pot if her pinkie sense meant she couldn't change what was going to happen.

Justice4243

Unless it was DESTINED to happen!

But it's a fair point, regardless. Just because Pinkie's Pinkie sense goes off doesn't necessarily  mean stuff like where she goes and how she and others react are constrained.

And I supposed assuming Pinkie sense preordains some vaguely defined things means those things where always going to happen commits the same modal fallacy the Argument from Freewill does.  

Sorry if I screwed up on this post. One hand is tending to a baby.

PlutoniumFist

Sorry if I screwed up on this post. One hand is tending to a baby.

This is, perhaps, the ultimate excuse.

Justice4243

You could always add more babies, but if BOTH of my hands where tending to a baby and I somehow typed that post up, I think medals would be in order.

Maybe that's incentive to have another child. So I can try to revolutionize a way of typing with my non-hands while one's hands are busy. 

Oh man...I wonder if I can fart with enough pressure  to type a sentence and move a mouse... I bet I'd get at least one Nobel prize for figuring that out.

I'm not sure if I have any choice but to do this now, this idea is so awesome. Maybe freewill doesn't exist!

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The user and all related content has been deleted.

millercross

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I can see the question of free will as really meaning anything outside of an experiential context. In which case, it's pretty simple: if you fee

l like you have free will, you do. (Not to be one of those people who are all "oh, look at me dismissing thousands of years of thinking about a central question of human existence in a single sentence", but at this point I have a hard time seeing any other qualification as really relevant.)

It matters just as much as any of the other big questions that we ask ourselves and for which we find different answers that suit and actually make our worldview.