Free Will: Does it Exist?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
573

I already explained to you 3 times how it works.

The problem with your idea is that you have no functioning concept of subjectivity anymore, no logic with which to explain saying a painting is beautiful and such.

How it works is,

  1. decisions are spontaneous, meaning that a decision can turn out one way or another in the moment that the decision is made.

  2. The decision-maker is subjective, which means identified with a chosen opinion.

  3. The result of the decision is objective. As well as the organization of the decision-making processes, and the available possibilities are objective. Objective means that it is identified with a model of it.

From which you get creationism: What is subjective, creates what is objective, by decision. As for example, the baby (objective) was born from love (subjective), or God (subjective) created the earth (objective).

What you are doing with your idea of choosing, is to objectify the decision-maker, objectify emotions and personal character. You pretend that you can state as fact what the emotions and personal character of someone are, which is a category error. Because emotions and personal character essentially belong in the matter of opinion category, not the matter of fact category.

Logic dictates that anything that does the job of choosing, belongs in the matter of opinion category. And there is no other part of reality that is subjective except decision-makers. So you have annihilated the concept of subjectivity, which is making a conceptual mess, and not serious philosophy.

574

I have no idea what you’re talking about; it sounds bonkers.
And it’s hard for me to move on from your earlier suggestion that questioning free will was racist.

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575

Oh very convenient for you that you find it hard. It is no surprise to me that you find it hard to deal with your emotions, because you have no functioning concept of subejctivity at all.

Very obviously your ideas are suited for determinism, including especially biological determinism. That is just logic.

I see also that you just discard the entire question of how subjectivity works, and just call it all bonkers. How very convenient again!

I can make judgments on your personal character, because I have validated this concept of subjective judgments. You have not validated the logic of subjectivity at all.

You choose to write what you do, then I can choose a personal opinion that identifies your personal character, the personal character out of which you made your decisions.

See the logic of that? What is subjective chooses, and subjective means that it is identified with a chosen opinion.

And of course, then you can also choose a personal judgment on my personal charater, out of which personal character I chose my opinion.

576

I thought you were unimpressed by my hallucinations. Are you now encouraging me?

577

Not sequitur. It’s like saying that rust is free from the strict, physical, cause and effect nature of the laws of physics because our oxidation is due to chemistry.
I might agree that consciousness guides our will, but it in no way follows that consciousness or will is free from physical law any more than it follows that chemistry or rust is free from physical law. It’s just an assertion you’re adding on, but you’re fallaciously treating it like a conclusion.

Anyway, such dualistic assertions are common amongst the libertarians, but few go so far as to both assert and deny physical law, which makes your stance self contradictory.

Any assertion that non-physical entity (consciousness/will) causing a deliberate physical effect (making a cell phone) is a violation of physics, which may allow random uncaused effects, but physics does not allow deliberate ones. If it did, one could send messages faster than light.

Sure. If so many people (like Patterner above) have this hypothesis that life is special and uses different physics that does all other matter, that’s fine. But nobody looks for it. The biologists find nothing that violates physical law, but maybe they’re not looking. The only ones doing the hypothesizing are not funding any real research because they know exactly what such research will show, and they depend on their view to be unfalsified for it to work.

So sure, it’s possible that the last 120 years of science can be discarded, but nobody who knows their physics believes that.

More specifically, determination of each next state not only by the physics (which would select that next state uniquely, else according to a lawful distribution) but also the politics or morality or aesthetics of the current state?

Yea, what in all that list requires more than deterministic processes? That’s not been shown.

But would the new physics need to be, like the old one, restricted to a combination of stochastic and deterministic?

It wouldn’t be new then, would it? Human decision making seems to be entirely classical. I know of no biological construct that leverages indeterminacy rather than statistical determinacy. This goes for transistors as well.

Couldn’t it involve causal elements (the physicalist reduction of insights etc) occuring spontaneously (uncaused) but non-stochastically (with no objective probability)?

The new physics would need to do that, yes. It would mean that all of quantum theory is falsified, since it does not allow this. There is no information to be gleaned from random quantum events. Hence biology/evolution has never found a quantum amplifier to make a being more fit. It’s easy enough to do.

An example of a quantum amplifier is the thing in Schrodinger’s box that amplifies a particle decay into the breaking of a bottle.

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578

Correct. That does not follow. That came first. We already know there is something other than absolute adherence to the physical cause and effect interactions of the laws of physics. Unless, that is, the laws of physics imagine things that do not exist, wants them to exist, and goes about making them. If the laws of physics do not imagine and want, then something that is not part of the laws of physics does.

579

But your wording above (especially the bold) implies very much otherwise, which prompted my response.

‘We’ know no such thing. If you mean there can be uncaused effects, sure, there are interpretations that allow that. But since such effects cannot be deliberate, ‘free will’ cannot leverage such loopholes.

Laws don’t imagine anything. They’re not thinking entities.
Perhaps you mean humans imagining nonexistent things and invent laws about them. Falsification tests will show these imaginations to be false. If there is no such test, then one has no justification to assert the nonexistence of said ‘things’.

I’m doing my best to interpret your assertions, but it would really help if you produced examples of say these nonexistent things that the laws imagine.

Again, non sequitur, for the same reasons.
Again with the rust example: Your statement is equivalent to saying that if the laws don’t corrode metal, then corrosion is not part of the law. It’s oxygen that tends to corrode metal, and it has not been shown that oxygen is not supported by the laws of physics.

580

I have repeatedly said the laws do not imagine. Nor do they want. I have no idea why you are trying to claim that is my position. That is not my position. Quite the opposite. My position is that the laws do NOT imagine or want. We have both said this repeatedly, and we both agree with it.

581

I don’t claim it’s your position. But you keep bringing it up, like it’s the only alternative to whatever it is you are asserting, which is unclear.

So lets clarify you are saying: What do you mean by ‘not part of the laws of physics’? I’m taking those words to mean a process that is not governed by physical law, but that would be a violation of physics, which you deny, so you mean something else by those words. Kindly enlighten me.

I also notice that you’ve never engaged with my corrosion example. Had you done that, it would already probably be much more clear what you mean by the phrase above.

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582

You just did. You just said:

I have never said that the laws imagine nonexistent things. The laws do not imagine anything at all.

My overall point is that, since the laws of physics do not imagine, then, if there is any imagining taking place, it is being done by something other than the laws of physics.

Is that controversial?

I have seen so many conversations go in so many directions, because people try to move on to steps 2, 3, 4, 5…, all in one post, before agreeing on step 1. I would like to know if we agree on this first step before moving on. If you agree, what do you suggest should be step 2?

If you don’t agree with it, then I don’t know how any conversation on the subject is possible.

583

Not every action is a transaction, but it can certainly be said some some will isn’t free. However, there is a free kind of will, that which we are owed, for the sacrifices we make by living in these vessels, amongst nature that has been allotted to us.

We have an element of freedom, lots of our life is a risk, and through it we earn a nest in the selection of phenomena. We can take a lot, free, but there’s also things that cost.

Is Free Will, the same is Free-Action?

584

Great question.

Yes, because will is a kind of thought, which is a neurological kind of action?

Edit: replying to Garon.

585

It’s sort of an action in lapse, it is indirectly influencing action?

586

Larger, grosser actions, sure.

587

Yes actually. That’s correct. I will ponder this.

EDIT:

Is aggression our most willful?

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588

This is a new wording, and a pretty empty one.
Before you said (in short) if the laws don’t imagine, then imagining is ‘outside the laws’, and I asked you what you meant by that, and you’ve avoiding answering the question.

Now the wording is changed to a tautology: If the laws don’t imagine, then it isn’t the laws doing any
imagining, which is true, but about as empty as saying if X, then X.

We both seem to agree that laws don’t imagine. We seem stuck after that. You didn’t answer my question about your conclusion you draw from that.

In an effort to drive past the anthropocentrism that all your examples seem to presume, I asked about corrosion (instead of imagination) which the laws also do not do. I got no answer to the question if corrosion is also outside of physical law, but perhaps, lacking clarification of what you mean by something being outside of the laws of physics, it’s too early to ask.

All I get is repeated assertions without any clarifications. Of course the conversation is not making progress.

589

I’m saying, if not X, then Y.

The laws of physics are X. They do not imagine.

Humans are Y. We imagine.

Therefore, there is something about us other than the laws of physics.

It is not. There is nothing about rust that cannot be explained by the laws of physics. It is one of many thousands of known redox reactions.

590

But that is clearly invalid logic.
If swans are not green, then they’re yellow.

So at best, laws of physics don’t imagine. Humans imagine, therefore humans are not laws of physics. That’s valid logic, but nobody is claiming that humans are laws of physics, so it’s a pretty uninteresting conclusion.

If by this you mean that we’re not laws of physics, then I agree, but so what? If you’re concluding that humans operate in a way other than what the laws say they would, then your grasp on logic is so poor that I cannot go on.

You for the first time bring in ‘explained by’. Physics has no requirement that it is explained. That is an epistemic issue, and there is admittedly plenty that we don’t fully know how works, including simple stuff like protons.
If your claim is that we don’t fully understand how a human works, then I agree. But if you claim is that something in a human (acting to create a cell phone) is other than what the laws says the particles of a human would do, then where exactly? Incredulity is hardly evidence.

592

Sounds like a good plan.

593

Will ex nihilo is not useless if you’re “act in itself” like God is, it’s impossible to understand it fully with a human mind, but God isn’t caused by anything neither is His will. As for us who are subject to cause-effect free will doesn’t exist because the causes will have effected our will.