Freewill exists

Every ‘Will’ is free. They just don’t know how or why. This is why Philosophy exists in the first place.

Humans don’t realize they have choices. They only know their Needs, like basic animals. A person feels hungry, thirsty, tired, etc. A person feels pain and suffers. These are animal traits. Humans, supposedly, have evolved ‘above’ other Mammals, but in threads like this, it is hard to see how or believe as such, when most have a seeming desire to return to their animal, devolved-state.

Freedom is not in the Necessity of the instinct/reflex, but the reaction to it.

Most of humanity, I’d guess 99.5%, are not cognizant, simply oblivious, to their unconscious and subconscious desires. They manifest later on, and then humans become aware after-the-fact. This is why I call Silhouette’s position backward. Because he, and many in this thread, are also looking backward. You can’t start from the End, the “Choices”, and work your way back, and call your position on Free-Will or Determinism accurate, because it’s not.

What is the basis of Desire, except Need? And so what is the reaction to need, except Desire? Humans have an evolved trait of cognition and intelligence. Again, most don’t know how or why they are creative in their problem-solving methods to handle basic needs, and then later on, advanced and evolved desires (like Fine Art). But the “Causes” can be traced to the Need. And from the Need, you need to then address how individual or groups of humans, react to such desires.

Why is one human a genius, but others are not? Why is one human creative, but others are not? Why is one human Superior, Excellent, Noble, Gifted, Intelligent, Admirable, but others are not?

It’s easy to give up, and stop thinking. Those that do so, should call themselves “Determinists” because you basically admit giving up looking for Causes, Clues, and Mysteries, in your declaration.

Anti-Philosophical

I won’t make a habit out of agreeing with Prometheus. But he’s right on that one.

You could tell that I’ve not read Spinoza because I called you out for committing logical fallacies?

I’m gonna go ahead and wait for you to say something that makes sense before I get on board with your insistence of superiority based on reading some books I didn’t.

And another logical fallacy to add to the list! “Guilt by Association”.

It’s really not looking good for you, man. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt because I’ve not reached these philosophical heights of which you speak that mean you can just go ahead and assume what you like on barely any evidence, and unrelated evidence at that. Be patient with me, oh high lord of fallacies and contradictory claims.

An experiential component can be much more powerful than words, for sure. So relatively speaking, words don’t do much good - but you hear all the time people changing their minds after reading books, e.g. by the “New Atheists” helping Americans in particular break out of the overwhelming influence of Christianity, especially in southern/central states. You might argue that these people were already disposed to doubt, but just needed the justification provided by educated and insightful writers. It seems like Ecmandu has refined his stance on Free Will with his explicit rejection of it in his latest post. Perhaps it was independent of the debate that’s occurred here, perhaps it was all he meant to communicate all along, perhaps things like these would be his explanations even if this debate had actually had some influence unbeknownst to him. To his credit he did concede to a tautology I pointed out in a couple of particular phrasings relating to his consent thing on another thread. This is why I’ve taken to putting such emphasis on logic and fallacies lately - because everybody wants to be able to see themselves as logical. In line with this, put argument in a form that can’t be denied and you make them think at the very least.

I would not say proof by action is necessarily superior to proof in words, as the former has its own barriers. For example, you can conduct as many successful tests of UBI as you like, but as soon as it gains enough attention to be tried on a wider scale, it can easily be slammed by the media, or simply run badly and reported to be a failure in itself rather than the management of it being the only failing component. I believe this actually happened in the UK not so long ago. You can conduct experiments of successful non-Capitalistic society, and either it’ll be criticised as only working at small scales and not in the wider real world, or the funder will be branded a Champagne Socialist and a hypocrite for only becoming successful enough to fund something anti-Capitalist by means of the Capitalist system etc.
tl;dr “The Problem of Induction”. At least with words you can deduce necessity through the use of logic, which leaves much less open to doubt - but the problem of a biased audience who may be unable/unwilling to accept this goes for either approach.

No disagreement there.

Perhaps you would allow the argument that said people are not actually smart, as evidenced by their inability to adapt and overcome subbornness? For sure they are able to form more complex mazes for you to navigate to get to the bottom of their argument, but if you’re genuinely smart enough even greater obstacles such as these can be overcome.
I actually have personal experience of actively trying to get into unpopular mindsets that don’t come to me naturally, and suffering tangible degrees of social admonishment as a result.
The tendency of people to attribute reason to the foundations of their conclusions more than intuition sounds like some kind of psychological “Attribution Bias” - it probably applies to less smart people as well as smarter people.

Yeah, I’ve seen this as well, though I’m not actually that familiar at all with Iamb - I’ve seen his name around the place for very many years, but never actually engaged him properly if I remember correctly.

But in all good stories, characters overcome and transcend their former vices :wink: I guess it’s not a coincidence that clear protagonist/antagonist storylines have the most mass appeal - they’re probably intended to cement moral tropes in kiddy stories to teach young ones right from wrong, but to adults its to allow the viewer to identify with a hero in order to make themselves feel better about themselves. It’s encouraging that morally grey and complex entertainment like “Game of Thrones” and even Marvel’s “The Avengers” with Thanos has caused such a ripple in the face of 1-dimensional Hollywood-style mediocrity, but even GoT was dilluted to clear good versus evil tropes by the end. Depending on the complexity in personality of this forum’s readers, they may simply be looking to box you either as “ally” or “enemy” - this is unfortunately true. You’ve witnessed me being well-and-truly boxed in this way yourself on another thread - it takes me a long time to give up on someone, but I did get round to it eventually in that guy’s case.

Silhouette!

I didn’t concede the consent tautology!!

I’ve already told you twice that redundancy changes meaning and context, I even took the time to write out the truth tables to prove it to you!!

It’s false? Or it’s false that it’s false?

See?!?!?!

From everything we know, neurons are ordering neurons how to be neurons.

If we suck at doing this, we’ll eventually build tools with neurons that make neurons do what we want neurons to do.

That’s very sophisticated self referential behavior for beings that have no self will whatsoever.

It’s interesting, that science calls something the particle / wave DUALITY, when actually, it’s a monism.

But then we’re always banging our heads against language

Edit: it’s not a particle OR a wave (duality) it’s a particle AND a wave (the monad)!

I’m referring to this post:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194893#p2725877

I still think the whole consent argument falls to what I was saying and not just the certain phrasing that you abandoned, but obviously you don’t agree.

I remember reading the words to the effect of “redundancy changes meaning and context” from before, but I don’t remember you showing more specifically what you meant by that + exactly what it applied to. Maybe it was on another thread that I hadn’t seen.

This is what you were saying on page 14 - “self-referential” in the sense that the neurons would be both determiner and determined, right?

This sounds like a similar argument to something like self-moving billiard balls, when really it’s just one ball moving a different ball rather than each ball moving itself: each neuron that’s determining another would be different from the neuron it is determining at any one time, even if the determining neuron was itself being determined by yet another neuron at the same time.

It’s not self-referential as soon as you start distinguishing between tokens instead of just types (deja vu).

And about it being sophisticated - again you’re suggesting that complexity yields freedom when it does not.

It is “banging our heads against language” in this case, because by “Wave-Particle Duality” it’s just that you need both models to explain certain phenomena at the quantum scale.

You might say that “what is being described” is like a monad, I guess, but the “duality” referred to in the terminology is just a throwback to times when we thought it was either one or the other - rather than reality literally being dualistic in substance type because both particle and wave models are needed for complete understanding.

Sure, this sounds fine.

What’s true for optical illusions and many other things doesn’t mean it also has to be true for other things, such as Free Will and/or Determinism. The analogy you use is fine for illustrative purposes, but analogy does not prove your point for Compatibilism: that “you just have to be able to appreciate both”. This is what Artimas was saying earlier in the thread. I dismissed it as an “Argument to Moderation”.

In some cases, there is a clear winner and we don’t have to get politically inclusive.

Still nobody has gotten past my 3 arguments from earlier - still Free Will is non-existent.

The people insisting it exists are simply defining “free” incompletely, such as “a higher quantity of known and possible options = more freedom”, when either way it’s all just as subject to physics - including the decision making process itself. Therefore “free” is the wrong word, no matter how valid it is to say that some things have more choices than others.

You’re talking about billiard balls as neurons. Nobody considers billiard balls to be sentient.

The truth is, no matter how you look at it, we are using neurons to decide how we want neurons to fire.

You think that photons are certain type of beings in existence which makes no sense at all
Because they are not aware of what they do but just do it according to the laws of physics

You can’t know from the outside what isn’t conscious. Problem of other minds and all that. Everything follows the laws of physics, except when the laws change, which they have done in different periods of time (and for all we know space) so it might be better to call them patterns or habits (leaving open room to change). We don’t know what causes consciousness, though there are some common assumptions which make those with those (various) assumptions confident.

There is no evidence that anything other than biological organisms are capable of consciousness
Inanimate objects have no neurological system or mind so cannot be conscious in any real sense
Panpsychism has no evidence to support it and is just a pseudo scientific belief and nothing else

Which does not constitute evidence that it is not possible. You stated that it was not the case.

  1. we do not know if neurological systems are necessary for consciousness. Plants are now being regarded by many scientists as conscious, but do not have nervous systems. Most importantly, we can only test for functions - memory, response, etc. - function and consciousness may not be dependent on each other. IOW there may be bare awareness without functions we associate with consciousness. Note: we have had a long bias: and this has been embarrassingly true within science, of not granting consciousness to animals. In fact it would damage one’s career to even mention consciousness, desire, intention, etc. in relation to animals. That bias towards waht is like us gets granted consciousness, and even then reluctantly, continues today. And imagine who stupid those scientists looked to pet owners, animal trainers, indigenous people and so on, babbling on about no evidence.

There is evidence, but it is not accepted in the mainstream of science yet. Just as animal consciousness and then more recently plant consciousness met with incredible resistence. Certain people set the default at consciousness is a radical exception and they have looked down for hundreds of years on people who had nearly the opposite default. That default had no evidence. And I notice that the advocates of that consciousness is the radical exception bias 1) never notice a distinction between function and consciousness in this discussion 2) never remember the embarassing history of their punishing even their own, up to the 60s and 70s even, for granting animals consciousness.

The bias is strong.

The people who just noticed awareness where scientists could not found them amazingly strange.

Consciousness should be defined as the ability to understand complexity.

The animals/plants should be defined as subconscious, the ability to possess knowledge, (awareness and instinct but not aware of those instincts, not understanding without a direct experience/result, very basic.).

The things like basic matter that isn’t aware, should be defined as unconscious, (instinctive only.)

Instinct is the basic premise or foundation of consciousness so yes, everything is technically alive… Just not with the ability to understand consciously.

Instinct should be defined as the conscious or non-conscious action of reacting with something else or a pursuit in reaction, embedded pursuit of change by reacting to other stimuli. Which change is inevitable…

There are steps.

Consciousness is another way of saying experiencing. Animals experience. They are aware of things, for example, in their visual field. They are not just subconsciously aware, they are consciously aware. You are mixing a bunch of different kinds of ideas. And please, let’s not get into a discussion of whether they are ‘as’ conscious as us. That is a whole, different discussion. They have consciousness, the experience, they are aware of things. Yes, they have unconscious processes and arguments that these exert more control over their actions and choices can be quite strong arguments. But that is another issue. They are aware, they experience, they have consciousness. And we do not know what does not have consciousness.

It’s only because animals and plants too are moving up while we do. Monkeys/apes are in the stone age.

Everything is on a different level of consciousness. That’s the point I am making. But we should fix the semantics. Instead of just saying “oh hey, that stone is conscious” the point of philosophy is for us to understand each other and isolate these terms so we can create better differentiation for complex things to be understood easier, especially when we die and are no longer present to defend those positions.

Consciousness implies too much by context, what is behind the word is too complex and doesn’t show a differentiation when there clearly is one or multiple.

We need to be clear, like a chameleon on a window.

I accept that animals and plants and maybe even bacteria have consciousness because they are all biological organisms
I would even accept that it could also exist elsewhere but not until any empirical evidence actually demonstrates this

Sometimes language can be confusing in relation to this :

Physicists talk about stars dying when they can no longer convert hydrogen into helium
The implication here is that while they are capable of doing this they are actually alive

They may very well be so but is this actually the exact same type of alive that animals are ?
Stars are very dynamic and energetic but they are not actually conscious as we are are they ?

The same language is used about the Universe in relation to heat death
Again the implication is that before that happens it is very much alive

I am alive because I am conscious but is there a cut off point where I am not alive ?
Are the hydrogen and carbon atoms that I am made of also alive or are they dead ?

Where exactly does something become alive - the sub atomic level - atomic level - molecular level - cell level - protein level ?
Is this even a valid question to be asking or is it as equally unanswerable as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin ?

And what about machines of the future that will be able to pass a Turing Test - will they be conscious ?
I do think it is inevitable that artificial intelligence will be regarded as such at some point in the future

But do we think there is consciousness and non consciousness simply because we like to put all of our definitions into nice neat little boxes ?
For do we not understand by now that our mapping of reality is not the same as actual reality but instead is merely an approximation of it ?

I made a mistake in this post because I was too lazy to deal with the fallout. For a shaman, there is no problem talking about the “billiard ball spirit”; that they communicate with this.

Let me ask you a question to this regard, how do you know that the billiard balls are not controlling US! To be moved to where they want to be moved to?

And again! We know for a scientific fact, that we are using neurons to decide how we want neurons fire.

What’s interesting about this exchange is that I dropped a good 5 arguments or so in this thread to move to this one, but silhouette considers this defeat, no! I can still defend those arguments with more content, I just decided to move on.

Hold this thread in it’s entirety in your head and ask yourself if silhouette demolished it.

Because like any classical object they move according to Newtons Three Laws Of Motion
And they have to obey these laws as they cannot just move anywhere that they want to

We are not really conscious of neurons when we are doing any deep thinking though
We focus on what it is we are thinking about not the mechanics behind that process

buzzer sounds

Wrong answer surreptitious75!

Next contestant please!

You have ZERO way of knowing that!

They may not be able to move in a way the WE think of as independent, BUT! As a different species, the only way they can move is to control us!

And our thinking outside the mechanics of it solves as the same, we are using our will to determine our will.

Now we have the tools to say that even at the mechanical level, we are using neurons to determine how we want neurons to function.

Billiard balls are inanimate objects not a different species [ whatever that means ]
So stop attributing mental capabilities to things that have no capacity for free will