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I don't believe in free will because it doesn't make sense when you understand determinism. You cannot be free when every thought & action is the outcome of the

by sysbin 7y ago

I don't believe in free will because it doesn't make sense when you understand determinism. You cannot be free when every thought & action is the outcome of the past forces exerted upon you. My understanding of superdeterminism doesn't necessarily rule out the multiverse theory. Maybe my idea of the multiverse theory isn't traditional but I think the universe can very well identically repeat and or repeat but be somewhat different by how forces can be occurring at different intervals than the past cycle of the universe. edit: people downvote on this site because they don't like thinking of not having free will lol.

tsimionescu 7y ago
Your explanation of why you don't believe in free will is very philosophically unrefined, and your smug tone (implying people who do believe in free will must not understand determinism) is not helpful. The reality is that a great many philosophers believe that determinism and free will are perfectly compatible. There is also supernatural defense of free-will, as in many religions (where the physical universe may well be deterministic, except for interaction with a spiritual world of will, which may produce physical effects without a physical cause). Both of these ideas are example of people who believe in free will even if they do understand (physical) determimism. There are probably other groups as well.
- sysbin 7y ago
  > philosophically unrefined No. It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will. It would be only wishful thinking with ignoring logic to assume you can make a choice that's truly your own and not the outcome of the system we're in. Furthermore, neuroscience illustrates determinism (no free will) and physics has as well until people lost their minds with quantum physics that's grossly unfinished. please email me if you want to discuss in great detail.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    > It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will. And yet compatibilism is a common philosophical belief ever since ancient times, supported throughout history by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Thomas Aquinas, and Daniel Denett. The essential idea is that what we understand by free will can exist even in a purely deterministic naturalistic universe - mostly, free will should be understood as the ability of any agent to act based on its motivations. So, for example, an artificial neural net is in some important sense free to act as it 'wills' to solve a problem, even though it is following its programming.
    - sysbin 7y ago
      Compatibilism is defining free will differently than how most people think of free will. Free will is an illusion in the traditional sense and thinking of compatibilism changes everything but doesn't give free will in the traditional sense. The agent cannot make decisions free of what the system has influenced. So, it still is nonsensical to think a person has free will in the traditional sense. People are not making their own decisions when they couldn't have been different from the result of the system they reside in. I do consider Schopenhauer a great philosopher but what most people think of free will isn't a possibility. Compatibilism isn't even worthwhile because it doesn't make determinism & free will compatible but instead just redefines free will to delude people into thinking traditional free will is a real thing.
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        It might not bring back the magical kind of idea where we assert our will over the physical world, true. But if people really believed in that, they would also believe in actual magic, or telekinesis (of course, quite a few do, but there's really no arguing with some people). But the compatibilist free will has most of the characteristics that we associate with any kind of free will. For example, there is still value in arguments, as hearing one agent's argument can well be the cause of the other agent's change in behavior. By the same token, it still makes sense to hold agents responsible for their actions and punish them for their decisions, since the cause of their behavior is very much related to their 'person', the sum total of what they have experienced, learned, and have projected about the future through their own rationality. In fact, it's hard to find anything in the compatibilist free will that contradicts intuitive notions of free will, except for the most religious of intuitions, unless you push it to the brink and try to ask questions where we don't have good intuitions anyway, usually by asking counterfactuals, or moving to the relationship between free will and consciousness. There is also another kind of approach to this question, one I first heard from Noam Chomsky. His point was: if determinism were to contradict our most immediate experience (as discussed before, it may not), the one of deciding how to interact with the world, wouldn't it make more sense to say that we are missing something from our scientific understanding in this area, rather than insisting that the most common empirical observation we have is completely wrong?

by sysbin 7y ago

tsimionescu 7y ago

Your explanation of why you don't believe in free will is very philosophically unrefined, and your smug tone (implying people who do believe in free will must not understand determinism) is not helpful. The reality is that a great many philosophers believe that determinism and free will are perfectly compatible. There is also supernatural defense of free-will, as in many religions (where the physical universe may well be deterministic, except for interaction with a spiritual world of will, which may produce physical effects without a physical cause). Both of these ideas are example of people who believe in free will even if they do understand (physical) determimism. There are probably other groups as well.

sysbin 7y ago
> philosophically unrefined No. It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will. It would be only wishful thinking with ignoring logic to assume you can make a choice that's truly your own and not the outcome of the system we're in. Furthermore, neuroscience illustrates determinism (no free will) and physics has as well until people lost their minds with quantum physics that's grossly unfinished. please email me if you want to discuss in great detail.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  > It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will. And yet compatibilism is a common philosophical belief ever since ancient times, supported throughout history by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Thomas Aquinas, and Daniel Denett. The essential idea is that what we understand by free will can exist even in a purely deterministic naturalistic universe - mostly, free will should be understood as the ability of any agent to act based on its motivations. So, for example, an artificial neural net is in some important sense free to act as it 'wills' to solve a problem, even though it is following its programming.
  - sysbin 7y ago
    Compatibilism is defining free will differently than how most people think of free will. Free will is an illusion in the traditional sense and thinking of compatibilism changes everything but doesn't give free will in the traditional sense. The agent cannot make decisions free of what the system has influenced. So, it still is nonsensical to think a person has free will in the traditional sense. People are not making their own decisions when they couldn't have been different from the result of the system they reside in. I do consider Schopenhauer a great philosopher but what most people think of free will isn't a possibility. Compatibilism isn't even worthwhile because it doesn't make determinism & free will compatible but instead just redefines free will to delude people into thinking traditional free will is a real thing.
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      It might not bring back the magical kind of idea where we assert our will over the physical world, true. But if people really believed in that, they would also believe in actual magic, or telekinesis (of course, quite a few do, but there's really no arguing with some people). But the compatibilist free will has most of the characteristics that we associate with any kind of free will. For example, there is still value in arguments, as hearing one agent's argument can well be the cause of the other agent's change in behavior. By the same token, it still makes sense to hold agents responsible for their actions and punish them for their decisions, since the cause of their behavior is very much related to their 'person', the sum total of what they have experienced, learned, and have projected about the future through their own rationality. In fact, it's hard to find anything in the compatibilist free will that contradicts intuitive notions of free will, except for the most religious of intuitions, unless you push it to the brink and try to ask questions where we don't have good intuitions anyway, usually by asking counterfactuals, or moving to the relationship between free will and consciousness. There is also another kind of approach to this question, one I first heard from Noam Chomsky. His point was: if determinism were to contradict our most immediate experience (as discussed before, it may not), the one of deciding how to interact with the world, wouldn't it make more sense to say that we are missing something from our scientific understanding in this area, rather than insisting that the most common empirical observation we have is completely wrong?