That hypothetical example is incredibly morally ambiguous and is therefore probably not typical of most crimes that are committed
In most cases deontology is not going to be considered as the act will be regarded as simply being wrong [ both legally and morally ]
And in any case it is simply easier for juries to decide innocence or guilt based on what the law says rather than on what moral philosophy says
The ideal solution in the hypothetical example would be to find Joe guilty but due to the extenuating circumstances give him a lesser sentence
I tend to believe in freewill, but not moral absolutes.
Historically the two are linked, but not necessarily, in fact when you think about it, they’re quite contrary.
I see little point in having freewill if we should only ever do a, b and c with it and never x, y and z.
The probability you’ll get 50 heads and 50 tails is just under 8%. The change in probability to getting H51 and T49 or H49 and T51 is only about 2%. That is to say you’re nearly twice as likely to get either 49/51 or 51/49 as you are to get 50/50. The probability of exactly 50/50 decreases as you increase the number of coin flips, and interestingly the likelihood of something near to 50/50 increases as you increase the number of coin flips too.
What you end up with when you calculate all probabilities for all outcomes is a probability distribution - the most famous example of this being the “normal” or “Gaussian” distribution, (the “bell curve”). They signify that you’re far more likely to get a similar number of heads to tails than you are to get much more of one than the other, but they also signify that you’re actually likely to get more of one than the other a certain number of times on average i.e. the amount of times that you will get a significant amount more heads than tails is also calculable. There is even a mathematical way to detect fraud by the difference between what humans perceive as “looking random” and what random actually looks like, with far more edge cases than looks random to people.
So it’s neither random that you’ll get edge cases, nor is it the case that we ignore randomness - we actually have a whole science behind “randomness”, called Stochastics. Unless you mean the layman, in which case yes - they are very bad at detecting or replicating “randomness”, even ordering it to an extent to look “properly” random to themselves, and they don’t like things that don’t fit their expected patterns - an example of this being this thread. Few people here really seem to understand what randomness is, how much is known about it and what isn’t it, and that’s probably where a lot of the suspicion of Determinism comes from.
But the above isn’t even representative of the Natural Sciences - it’s Statistics. All science can be analysed statistically, but a main difference between the Natural Sciences and things like Social Sciences (where statistics are pretty much as far as you can go without Natural Science to support it), is the degree to which they study qualitative phenomena. In Physics, for example, you don’t need to worry about how a coin feels to work out its motion when subjected to whatever physical forces. If you calculate the force of the flip, the resulting angular momentum, the coin’s mass and spatial dimensions, air resistance, take into account the surface it’s landing on etc. you can work out if you’ll get heads or tails 100% of the time. At everyday scales, Newtonian Physics model what might as well be a deterministic world - even if it somehow turned out that Determinism was false, it still operates as though it is - and the Natural Sciences study this. You have to get to really extreme cases to find discrepancies with the Newtonian - like how Einstein fine-tuned things when you get close to the speed of light, or when you get all the way down to quantum scales. You don’t need to care whether Determinism is “true” or not - I don’t - but the quantitatively measurable world genuinely operates as though it does.
At everyday scales, you don’t get someone jumping into orbit “every so often” as a statistical anomaly. Whilst probabilistically, eventually you’ll get 1 million heads in a row, no number of jumps will get you into orbit.
This isn’t to say you can’t get into orbit by other means, nor that gravity ceases to affect you once you do. The hard part is achieving escape velocity, so you aren’t just taking a huge jump only to come back down again. Gravity will still be pulling you back down to earth - that’s why the moon keeps orbiting the earth. The effects of gravity even provably go interstellar, though they get weaker the further you go - the “special” guy who made this thread actually thinks astronauts “defy gravity” as though his “Free Will” overcame it, or as if he’s some sports commentator. The lack of education is just shameful. Satellites are “falling to earth” constantly, but moving sideways so fast that as soon as they fall far enough, they’re to the side of the planet and “missed it”, and continue missing it. This is where the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s joke comes from - about how to fly: “throw yourself to the ground and miss”.
So in short, “one instance of H2 and T0” is absolutely not “enough to prove the cosmos prefers H” to the determinist. It used to be fashionable to think the cosmos was 100% orderly, but now we know that science is an ongoing improvement to model reality “as though it was Deterministic”, which is not the same as “because it is Deterministic”.
The important thing to remember is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We appear to be able to improve our Deterministic models over and over, with less deterministically understood areas becoming more and more deterministically understood all the time. That’s not to say the trend will continue forever (the problem of induction) but nor is it to say that any slowing down or stopping is evidence of the absence of Determinism. Proof of Determinism requires that there are necessarily circumstances where it can be measured that no causation is occurring - that is how you falsify Determinism.
Saying “absence of evidence is evidence of absence, therefore Free Will” is just lazy “God of the Gaps” un-thinking - or “The Argument from Ignorance” fallacy. You don’t need to go there at all, except to understand properly why you don’t need to go there - which I highly support. It’s contradictory to be “both causatively influenced by the world in order to make an informed decision on how to causatively effect it, whilst simultaneously not being causatively influenced by it as a free agent” and you need to resolve the unresolvable mind-body problem, and to equate possibility with actuality - in order to justify Free Will.
It wouldn’t even matter if Determinism was proven false, because the above proves Free Will can not take its place. I keep coming across the False Dilemma fallacy when I’m asked to prove something about “Determinism existing in reality” (which isn’t even what I’m saying) in order to prove that if Determinism has a flaw (the Nirvana Fallacy) then Free Will must be valid (the False Dilemma fallacy). Free Will has an inherent contradiction, and insurmountable task and a conflation of different terms to overcome in order to be valid in the slightest - that ain’t gonna happen, sorry.
Free Will exists because Freedom is the inherent, primary quality of the Will.
It’s the reason Will(to Power) exists, so that Desire can free and unlock itself.
Repeating it a hundred or a thousand times, you still don’t get it though.
You’ll do anything to absolve yourself of the possibility of freedom. This ‘Victim’ culture is just too precious for you and the others to let go of. Obviously the protections and institutions of Human Civilization have corrupted the vast majority. Very few would be willing to give up these comforts and pleasures (Security) for Freedom. This is obvious. But that doesn’t mean you’re even close to a persuasive argument concerning the physics of a ‘Deterministic’ universe, where hypothetically, all things are knowable.
Although they clearly are not, and the universe is instead, Un-determined.
Culture has nothing to do with the fact that it’s contradictory to be “both causatively influenced by the world in order to make an informed decision on how to causatively effect it, whilst simultaneously not being causatively influenced by it as a free agent” and that you need to resolve the unresolvable mind-body problem, and to equate possibility with actuality - in order to justify Free Will.
Again with your “Intentionality fallacy”.
You can repeat that freedom is the inherent, primary quality of the Will and it still won’t make it true.
Yet again with your “Proof by Assertion” fallacy.
The fact that you aren’t persuaded by the universe empirically being consistently model-able by Determinism (regardless of whether or not Determinism is true in any absolute sense) doesn’t stop it from being true.
The same old “Argument from Incredulity” fallacy…
only someone who felt powerless would spend so much time and make so much noise trying to convince himself (and others) that he wasn’t a victim.
and always remember; not all victims are looking for sympathy. some are in fact proud of their suffering and become quite the braggart (i’m one such asshole). what you might interpret as complaining could in fact be showing-off.
suffering can be ennobling, can create distances and separations of rank. nobody likes this, because they’d not want to be thought of as small, ordinary and insignificant in the company of someone who has suffered more than them. more times than not, ‘stop playing the victim!’ really means ‘don’t think you’re better than me!’
we all secretly love to suffer and wear our trials and tribulations with pride. but we don’t like others to suffer more than we do. we’d not want them to get ahead of us.
here comes the metaphysical bewitchment of common metaphor. what is this ‘will’? show me an instance where i can see the will at work. an ambitious fellow is climbing a mountain and the sonofabitch won’t give up. look at that guy’s willpower! but what does this mean? what is the behavior that is described as ‘willful’ here? well, he keeps climbing. and he keeps climbing. is will then persistence? but persistence is simply the physical repetition of the climbers movements, no? and these movements, like anything else that moves in the universe, moves as it does, like it does, when it does, under the causative influence of the natural laws. or is it a personality thing? but that’s no different. dude’s got a strong will. this means; he keeps at it. this means; he keeps moving. and…? what am i missing?
okay maybe i’m not getting it. are you saying the will is an entity inside the body… like some kind of immaterial substance like a soul or spirit or something? you’d have to be, because any other such quality about a person explained as evidence for and an act of, the will, would be nothing more than a description of a behavior. i can think of several ways we use the word ‘will’ in language, and none of them (except in the mouths of philostophers) suggest or show that there is anything causally free about the things and processes which they describe.
The Will is the source of your desires and the real-life application of those desires. So it is both the “Thing” of an organism and its Actions-in-motion (Power). That is the meaning of Willpower and Will-To-Power. You can define and identify organisms by their Will(Power). Because every organism has different Values (Order by which Desires are fulfilled or ignored/suppressed). So the “Freeing of the Will”, Liberty and Liberation, refer to the moments in existence by which any organisms, especially Humans, use radical methods (displays of Genius/Genus), to achieve their Desires. This is most manifested and apparent in Art(ifice). Mankind has many artforms. All are expressions of His (Free)-Will.
Unlike the Modern-Post-Modern lingo, Man is not “Born Free” or born into a system of Rights. Rather, Freedom and Rights are matters of Becoming and Power, respectively. Obviously infants and children are powerless, un-free. So freedom and power, are both qualities of Maturation and development in life.
It’s already admitted that much/most of this revolves around Ability. A Free-Man simply has so much more ability than the common man, that it seems impossible.
Just like it seems impossible for most men, in their minds, to climb a jagged vertical cliff, and then to an inverted incline.
But a few men are free to do so, while most are not, proving them wrong.
I think you two, Sil and Prom, both need a serious re-evaluation of your Expectations, your Values. Freedom is merely a competition of these values and expectations. What you deem impossible, or could not imagine, is not necessarily so for others, especially all others, and especially for all existence.
And it’s a simple proposition, no “Assertion Fallacy” at all (ridiculous, by the way). All you need to do is imagine one single act of freedom in existence, and then freedom (and Free-Will) are both possible and evident. So what is one method or demonstration of freedom, opposed to not?
It’s as simple as being tied-up, caged, or not. So don’t pretend this is some “complex philosophical mumbo-jumbo”. The only mumbo-jumbo is denying the obvious (denying Free-Will).
What do I/we deem impossible, what can’t we imagine that is imaginable or possible for others?
What specifically?
That’s the whole problem: it’s oversimplified. I show its contradictions and you restate it regardless - this is the exact definition of committing the “Proof by Assertion” fallacy…
You keep asking to imagine one single act of freedom, which you say would show that freedom and Free Will are both possible and evident, and then when you’re not given one you keep taking this as criticism against opposing positions. So basically either we show that you’re right, or we’re wrong: “heads you win, tails we lose”. Rigged/invalid questioning.
This is where your Motte and Bailey comes into play. On one hand there’s the incomplete definition of freedom (quantity/quality of natural abilities, not being socially prevented by external or internal barriers), which nobody says doesn’t exist, and on the other hand there’s the complete definition of freedom that puts these things in terms of causation, which I say can be consistently done with overwhelming precision past/present/future, whether or not causation is a “thing that exists” in some absolute way - it’s “as though” it did.
So “on the first hand”, everyone agrees, and this has no bearing “on the other hand”. But “on the other hand” reveals that “freedom” is the wrong word for “on the first hand”.
This isn’t “complex philosophical mumbo-jumbo”, it’s precision, which a philosopher ought to care about if they want to get to the truth of things: if two things are similar in some ways but crutially different in others - do you attribute importance to the differences or not? Do you straighten things out or not? If your answer is no, you conflate terminology and leave yourself vulnerable to deriving false ideals and conclusions as a result. If your answer is yes then you understand the difference between the Motte and Bailey here, and you understand why “free” is the wrong word.
Example:
What is meant by “you are free to do so”?
Let’s say climbing a jagged vertical cliff to an inverted incline.
Impossible for most men to do and maybe even impossible in the minds of some men, sure. Some men are “free able to do so”, some are not. Does a Deterministic model say it’s impossible? You have to do the math on the specifics. But that doesn’t mean that changing up the approach won’t affect the specifics and therefore the outcome. Friction co-efficients don’t bend to the will of mental willpower. Change the friction co-efficients, and maybe something that Determinism would deem physically impossible before is now deemed by Determinism to be physically possible. You can only appreciate how ridiculously powerful the limits of science are if you know what they are and how they work. If you don’t know what an approach involves, you can’t say it can’t work.
Exactly right. The correct word for most of what you’re saying about freedom is “ability”. In your wording and in layman wording, freedom is synonymous with ability, but in my more specific and discretionary wording, ability was determined by prior causes, isn’t free from them, so “free” is the wrong word. The word “ability” is fine. Infants and children are much less able, of course. They have much less power, of course.
Feel “free” to read the Nietzsche quote I painstakingly typed out verbatim from “Beyond Good and Evil” (Chapter 1: On the Prejudices of Philosophers).
What is he saying?
He is saying that the concept of “will” is too often taken for granted by philosophers. It is easily insufficiently examined. It is a word that conflates a plurality of many different things. On one hand it is a “command” and the other it is “obedience”, and all within the same “self”.
If you command yourself to endure through “willpower”, you must also obey this command in order for such power to manifest itself in enduring action. So are you the free and powerful master or unfree and powerless slave? “Will” requires that you are simultaneously both, otherwise the command would not actually happen. So is the will “free”? In this sense, even if the contradictions I highlighted about Free Will could have a resolution - even then the will is both free and not free, and neither. It’s a bad term to gloss over complexities for the sake of simplicity.
You keep dropping Nietzschean maxims like his book title “Will to Power” but do you really even know what he said about will? What I quoted is just the start of it - he made several jabs at Schopenhauer’s “Will to life” over the course of his career, explaining why he made them with absolute mastery. He was in the business of specificity in wording and concepts - the business of the philosopher. Sam Harris performs the same merciless and highly trained eagle-eyed examination of things like “Will” in his works - it’s SO not so simple as you are making it out to be.
Some people are free from “Causality/Fate/God’s Will”, yes. Because you Sil have no authority to speak as-if you knew what Causes were/are, or especially General Causality. Quite frankly, you don’t know, and you don’t have a clue. Your “Causality” is a long series of guesses and sets of presumptions. You don’t know to any significant degree of certainty. And I think we all can further venture to guess too, that your ideal of “Causality” is deeply flawed and inaccurate. You’re no scientist.
So in your mind, you have this idea of rock-climbing and there is “no way” that a rock-climber is Free, even if he has the greatest ability in skill.
You’re wrong in two ways here.
The majority of humanity talk about and intuitively know, that Freedom is an abstraction from Ability. Some men are ‘free’ to do many things others cannot. And those who are bound, tied, jailed, etc. are in-general not free. So you’re wrong here. You’re wrong to abstract and pervert the notion of Freedom to “Existential Causality concerning Science and the Whole Universe”.
The second way you’re wrong is, you’re no Authority, to speak on behalf of Science, Existence, the Universe, or Causality. You have no saying-power. You don’t know the Causes which lead a rock-climber to Succeed or Fail, to Achieve or not. Furthermore, you don’t know the Causes which would lead the rock-climber to defy your own expectations. And because of this, your own ignorance, you are wrong a second time.
Because, for you, Causes revolve around your expectations, obviously you will never have a keen, or even common sense awareness of Freedom.
Cool. So enough about me, who has nothing to do with whether Determinism has any precedence at all, what about Determinism?
Science and scientists prove it’s as though causes were literally everywhere all day every day. Are you going to call all of the findings of science and how they can all extremely consistently be very accurately modelled by Determinism and how real technologies can be rountinely created and operational in line with their findings “no authority” too? You don’t seem to understand it’s not about any one person, or “just guesses”. “What works” is the only final arbiter, and science works. Astoundingly well.
There are plenty of ways a rock climber can be “able”, from extremely to hardly at all. They are “free” to try to achieve whatever bounds they wish, and Determinism sums up every single success and failure they manage every time. Does that mean they free… from causation? Your point is that the best of them have more power, and you’re right. You’re right that they’re very able and can achieve amazing things. And yet causation encompasses it all - whether or not it “exists”. They are not free from that, thus they are not free. Free is the wrong word.
I’m well aware of the casual way in which laymen speak. Are you trying to pull an Argumentum ad Populum on me here, with “the majority of humanity blah blah”? You know that’s not going to work by now, surely.
Some men are able to do many things others cannot. Those who are bound, tied, jailed etc. are all unable. You’re talking about ability. Not freedom.
You need to prove some way that freedom is identical to ability, here.
You’re throwing it around like it’s a given in the exact same way that my Nietzsche quote described, and not discerning one iota. Proof requires that freedom is always ability, and ability is always freedom, and that there can be no exceptions. Oh, and you have to actually try.
You will never get anywhere if all you’re trying to do is word in a different way what you want to be true. This is the definition of wishful thinking. Try and prove yourself WRONG. This will be your first step to becoming a philosopher. I’ve told you how to legitimately prove Determinism wrong. I want to be wrong. You want me to be wrong. You need to learn how to do this or we can never make you succeed, which is both of our goals. The whole point of science and philosophy is to find legitimate grounds to doubt something to inspire us to create new lines of thought to get around the flaw. That is genius!
Show something of this one key philosophical trait - show me you are “THE” philosopher.
You will now proceed to reiterate your same old points and not directly address anything I’m said, right? How about a change of subject to avoid it?
Relax your normal instincts. Nobody is here to hunt you. Calm.
Chill.
Take a deep breath and try to think of all reasons without any emotional dependence on any being right or wrong.
What could reality say from all possible sides?
You are not your thoughts, your theories, your ideologies.
Seek truth, not agenda.
If you understood all sides, the whole, right and wrong for all, just imagine what you could achieve…
Freedom is the picking of causation and effect and there being an infinite/abundance of scenarios, not about “escaping” it. Note how a lot of “free willists” can willingly admit determinism exists, so who do you really think is missing a part of the picture here?
Science is literally using cause and effect under controlled environments or experiments, utilizing it to learn what is and isn’t consistent…
So are we not free to do and use science? Or is that just an inevitability? So then why aren’t other animals using science? Is it inevitable for them as well?
Just another example of how mans will is free regarding more aspects of contextual situations than not.
Sil wrote
I don’t think you are comparing the same things in general or the same things that are evidenced. Sil, you seem to be referring to science using technology as your evidence rather than the outcomes of human beings choices whereas UrWrong is discussing biological beings that technology cannot predict the reactions of.
Freedom is the ability to think and feel then to act on those thoughts and feelings. I don’t think feats of ability are the only measure of freedom when people act by doing nothing, by refraining, or tempering their motivation, but I definitely see freedom as choices made as well. Freedom doesn’t guarantee successful outcomes though only the attempt to act.
You might get by saying causality chooses the number of choices available to you at each moment but it does not pre-choose your next action for you. If you view causality as an obstacle to overcome, to plan around and circumvent, you can choose to do that which you desire in an easier fashion.
Artimas.
Is agreeing with all parts of every picture always correct?
For example, given the set of all things right and wrong.
If I disagree with the wrong parts of this set, am I missing them?
“Will” is (dubiously as per the quote I wrote out) the picking of causation and effect, if anything - not freedom.
As Nietzsche and I covered, freedom has nothing consistent to do with it.
We are able to do and use science. Our models show it’s as determined for us to use it as for other animals to not use it.
Technology and science can predict the reactions of biological beings - that’s the thing. The overlap of reliable predictivity even in the biological world is growing scarily.
Everyone thinks and acts on thoughts and feelings - as you say - which is just as much a dependency on said thoughts and feelings as is being argued against by others here. Your thoughts and feelings determine your actions. Your thoughts and feelings are in turn determined by your experiences and preferences. You think and feel about things because of prior things. And in turn because of things prior to even that - all the way back to before you were born, or some other instance that clearly isn’t up to you. Any reasonable being knows their reasons are the things that determine their thoughts and feelings. Are you a reasonable being?
You’re exactly right that people act by doing nothing, by refraining, tempering their motivation etc. Their reasons for doing or not doing this are the things that determine both action and inaction. Logically the only thing you can be doing, if you’re not acting because of something that determines you to want to act that way, is to act randomly - which is not your will, nevermind a free will.
If you want to “get around” causality, you’ll be doing that/wanting to do that… for a reason. If there’s a reason determining this, or the want to do this, then Determinism. It’s literally inescapable.
Sil, so you are saying that everything about someone and who they are what they think comes from the past, but even eureka moments? Inspired ideas are causally born or are they random, infrequent events, spontaneity at its finest? Are they part of chaos that is brought to order?
We have a past but it is not shared so our reactions to limitless, varied stimuli would not be shared either. Scientific experiments are drawn in controlled environments which preclude “real” choices. I think science has dumbed down plausabilites and possibilities to such a degree that what they are predicting is not a valid sample.
Scientists who have integrity are not ones to claim knowledge where it is currently insufficient. I would suspect there is currently a lack of data on things like “eureka moments” because they are unreliable events and difficult to control for and define.
2 things about this example though:
-
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Given the trajectory of advances and successes in neuroscience, I would expect there to become a way to reliably study such phenomena even if I can’t say it’s going to be 100% deterministic for sure. There might be more known about such things than I’m aware of though. It would be great if there was instead a way to prove that things like “eureka moments” were necessarily not deterministic. But until people know either way, nobody should be saying they know.
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“Eureka” moments are certainly not “Free Will”. If anything it’s as though they choose you, as though they’re being done to you, whether or not they do so for a reason, or in a determined sense. In the same way that you can’t tickle yourself but you can “work through” a problem in your mind, “eureka” moments have the quality of being surprised - in the sense that Nietzsche breaks down the “will” into both commanding and obeying in one, it’s as though the commander wasn’t home and only the obeyer was around whenever you are hit by inspiration. It’s not the same as figuring something out with reason and logic, as anyone honest who experiences creativity will attest to.
In the search for indeterminacy, I think “Eureka moments” would be an interesting place to start - you make a good suggestion. Unfortunately for Free Will, though, even this suggestion is a non-starter.
Got it, so if somebody has a Eureka moment, or by God’s Divine Will, a free action and undetermined is possible, then Sil will have his Eureka moment.
Free-Will is the standard, not the exception.
The universe is un-determined.
Classic Urwrongx1000 determined to not read my words.
Read point 2 again: there can be no way in which any potential indetermined occurence such as “inspiration” is Free Will, because it’s not your will, it just happens independently of your will. Not by God - still desperate to force in that “Association Fallacy” I see - classic Urwrongx1000 strikes again.
My position has always been either free OR will, not both. Indetermined would be free, but not will, Determined could be will but not free.
I’m sure the Motte and Bailey is trying to creep back in here as well: arguing the indisputed incomplete usage of the word “free” as the Motte to defend the disputed complete usage of the word “free” as the Bailey, from which you can retreat back to the Motte over and over every time it’s felled… classic Urwrongx1000: Confirmation bias, and plural commitment of fallacies.