evidence supporting free will?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

i know ive heard of it…

im a good, nice person. i would never hurt anybody, not my most annoying enemy. i dont really have any enemies who have hurt me though. but generally i am faced with pretty trivial opportunities to be selfish and i virtually always choose not to be selfish so that somebody else can be a little happier. i try to make sure they dont know, i try to understate and rationalize the act when it is discovered for the sole purpose of not letting people think they are inferior to me. i do the same with my intelligence (not on ILP, stupid, in person), i often try to hide it so that people dont realize how stupid they are.

im not proud of these nice characteristics because i had absolutely no part in creating them. i have nice loving parents with more than enough money. im smart enough to understand everything thats ever happened to me. nobody who i really care about has ever died or gotten into a huge painful fight with me. my life is so EASY and it would absolutely amaze me if someone in my situation felt the need to be selfish. ever.

compare that to an ‘evil person’ whos first memory was crackmommy kicking him for no apparent reason and yelling something he didnt understand. and throughout his life, everything bad happened, and nothing good. and then he is faced with the opportunity to rob somebody who earned a lot of money through the lucky fact that they were born smart in the neighborhood that has the good schools.

the evil guys life sucks, and he knows that the rich guys life is awesome (whether or not its true, the evil guy still ‘knows’ it). so the evil guy can really feel justified taking his piece of karma back from the universe in the form of that guys money. not only will he make his own life better by getting money, but he will simply be reharmonizing the karma of the universe. and that rich guy can make that money back just fine. its not hard to imagine this kind of rationalization, you just have to imagine what its like to have a life that totally sucks in every way. you have to imagine what its like to be sure that you can stand in front of god and tell him, ‘hey man, you started it’

so you can be shaped by experience into being selfish. if you need to be selfish in order to live the life that you think you deserve, and you dont think youll be hurting your victim more than you would be hurt by not hurting him, then you arent even decreasing average world happiness by robbing him. its so easy to rationalize.

but what about things that cant be explained by experience? theres rich people who are selfish and theres serial killers and pedophiles and stuff. i think they are in the same category. their brain is literally broken. i mean if you think they have a normal brain exactly like yours, and they are capable of those things, you need to ask yourself just how normal your brain is.

if they are capable of doing something that you cannot even come close to imagining, what makes you think you know why they think that way? and if you dont know why they think that way, how can you possibly judge them as ‘evil’ instead of broken? i mean, the only case thats kind of close to actually being evil would be the rich selfish guys, because i can sort of understand that. but i can only imagine their behavior is possible if they havent realized the joy of helping strangers, and that if they did, they would change, and if they dont, they are broken.

how can their free will make a decision that you wouldnt even come close to considering if they have the EXACT SAME free will mechanism that you do? and if they dont have the EXACT SAME machine in there, shouldnt you be blaming whatever it is that created his machine instead of some other, eternal soul of ambiguous origin? what the heck are you talking about?!

you either believe in religion and that god is capable of creating broken souls and then sending them to hell, or that morality is determined by the brains and how broken they are, and they should be fixed or at most, quarantined. i fail to see how it makes sense that i find decisions unfathomable, and somebody with THE SAME EXACT decision making machinery can think entirely differently. it doesnt make sense. its obviously not exactly the same machinery by the definition of the word same.

2

The key for me is a criterion by which one could distinguish freely chosen acts from predetermined acts. I’ve never been told of such a criterion, though I’ve posed the question enough times…

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Although the personality of the person making the decision is determined by various factors outside themselves, their identity cannot be divorced from that personality. The person is responsible to the degree that the personality is responsible, regardless of how that personality came about.

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i dont see what those posts have to do with what im saying

how is an act freely chosen if the brain is determined entirely by experience? if the brain is not determined entirely by experience, what determined it? magic soul? siatd i dont think your criterion exists because there is no freely chosen.

what does freely chosen mean, what does identity mean? i know what they are supposed to mean, but im asking what do those words represent in the real world? predetermination is represented by the memory section of your brain and the genetically determined decision making processes next to the memory. what we know about the brain tells us we are predetermined.

but, yes, i know that we know virtually nothing about the brain. but if it behaves like every single other macroscopic process in the universe, it can be predicted absolutely. and if it follows the supposedly non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics, then it is merely random, which i dont think anybody is going to argue.

however, there remains the possibility that those potentially eternally indeterminate quantum fluctuations are dictated by our magical, “free”, extra-universal, soul.

is this what people think? is this what religion says? does religion just ignore the issue? does ANY atheist believe in free will?

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i almost forgot to repeat myself again, how can you judge someone who is entirely unimaginably different from you and must obviously have a fundamentally different decision making process?

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Sorry to slap forth the determinist line when you are wanting a defence of free will. Feel free to ignore.

Judgement is not passed on particular actions, but on particular personalities which are the cause of the act. People want those bad personalities changed or removed from their environment.

Im a determinist, so i dont think free choice as you described it exists. However, we can have all the benefits of moral responsibility if we only stop imagining our personalities as seperate from ourselves.

The metaphysical term is “Could have done otherwise in the same circumstances.”

For a determinist, i would rehabilitate the term to the real world thus: “the personality and not the circumstances was the significant cause of the decision”.

Feeling of self. There’s no special metaphysical claim being made here, aside from not divorcing self from personality.

Yup. I see no problem in accepting this.

This doesnt avoid the problem. Either:
Actions are determined: thus intelligently effected by circumstances.
Actions are not determined: thus random (to some degree or other).

No matter what form this indeterminate factor takes, if it can ignore circumstances then it is still random.

Satre did.

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i agree that this is the sorry state of affairs and i say that we should switch the words ‘personalities’ and ‘act’ and it will make a lot more sense. “dont do that” instead of “dont be whatever crazy thing you are that i dont understand”

well, its magic, religious. it could be determined by a supersoul who we are a representation of, in this universe, and his predetermined personality is the extra, indeterminate factor that isnt random, yet isnt predetermined by our universe. does anybody believe that? thats the only possibly way i can imagine explaining it. and there is actually no reason to believe it.

how did sartre manage to believe in free will without magic?

8

By being deeply stupid in the way that only clever people can.

From what little i remember, he thought it was self evident. He proposed a few (superficial) problems for determinism though.

Like: “Anguish”, if determinism is true and the outcome of our decisions are determined, then why do we worry about them?
Of course, this fails to notice that worrying about a problem is part of our method of solving it. Its like asking a calculator to give you the answer without calculating it.

9

anguish? piece of cake, thank you steven pinker and how the mind works

one day, an alpha male subjugated his beta’s ruthlessly, and this pissed them off and they all independently tried to fight them. most of them lost, but he was so injured by the time he had to fight the fifth guy in the same day that he died. and his stupid arrogant, anguish-free selfishness was not rewarded anymore.

this behavior was somewhat prevalent at the time. one day, a kid was born with all of the alpha male characteristics except for a very specific gene caused him to think twice about hurting his neighbors. this gene caused him to be less aggressive towards the betas and perhaps even to let them have a fuck or two if they were very persistent. and this alpha survived more than the more ruthless of his contemporaries and he fucked more and had more children.

tada! thats why we feel guilt today. prove it wrong. this post took me less than one minute to write. thank you darwin.

actually i could be wrong and steven pinker is not to blame, he said nothing like this. but, natural selection is natural selection.

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nice post. the poor person with the crack mom isnt evil for stealing, it is kind of like re karmaizing, (kind of), however hes evil, if avter he has the money, he turns around and stabs trump in the nuts, yeah donald is in to many comercilals, but its still uncalled for. when it comes down to an evil twin and a good twin, its simple SOUL! when one gets past expierience they are simply a soal in a super computer, they use the computer to either look at flowers or blood. and the soal isnt created by god, you start out with a clean blank slate, and you paint yourself. yes, its hard to paint flowers when your mom stomps on them, and then says fuck you; suck my doobie. -but it is possible, matilda did it, so did james and the jiant peach. evidence of free wil : ballet .

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While I find the idea of free will dubious, I have found secular scientists describe it as an ‘emergent’ property of our neural network. While I’m too much of a reductionist to fully embrace his view, Kevin Kelly has some good points on the issue (kk.org/outofcontrol/).

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and if you tell me bellet is part of the equation, then you better tell me the equation was written by god., because beuitifull woman dont just float float around on ice skates, by chance. chances are everything is the way it is because thats the way every one wants it to be, otherwise you would see ballet dancers that realy wanted to be carpenters, and were pissed the whole time, and had swastikas on their tights, but you dont , you see them smiling and glowing, and you here them saying stuff like “grace is not an equation” also you never here balarinas saying “did you catch the apprentice last night”? i would like to freestyle rap battle darwin.

13

no fuck it, i would like to play him in lazer tag. me and the donald vrs. him and a robot, the robot would have to be fast too, because me and the donald are done fucking around.

14

How can you argue with future man? he has stephen colbert for a pic who is inarguably one of the funniest men on the planet (long live “the daily show”-despite its liberal bias).

15

Good old Daily Show. It’s not like it’s a pale imitation of a British comedic tradition that is 20 years old… Oh no…

Look up the work of Chris Morris - he blows the Daily Show out of the water…

16

newsflash

EVERYTHING originally started over in europe.

Except for women shaving their armpits.

Yeah, I went there.

17

Not everything started in Europe, but the genre of satire in which one puts the Daily Show is long established in Britain and, in my view, much more adeptly explored…

18

Somehow I think the mix of satire and politics has been around for quite a while :wink:

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I don’t mean ‘political satire’ as the genre, I mean a much more specific genre than that. Political satire is as old as satire itself…

20

Alright…

Let’s hear it, the special definition.