I am very surprised there was not one person, other than Only_Humean, who I respect highly, that would have any questions about the knowledge of determinism? I know some people have no idea what I’m talking about, but they will if they ask questions. I don’t force myself on anyone, but I believe that a lot of people have gotten the wrong impression about my insistence that man’s will is not free. The fact that I am dismissed so easily is because this thread is considered past new. The people here have concluded that this knowledge is passe, out of date, a done deal. But it is not a done deal at all, unless you take what the last person says as the final answer. But it is not the final answer because nothing has been proved wrong. So I’m asking people, once again, to rethink whether they want to hear this knowledge out or not. If they don’t want to hear anything more, that’s okay too. The only reason I’m doing this is because the book has not come out publicly, and because talking on these forums is better than doing nothing. Unfortunately, I believe the spreading of this knowledge will not come from people in philosophy, which is so sad to me because this knowledge was born out of philosophical thought.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=172811
You’re welcome to join in.
Well, this is definitely a subject that interests me even though it has been done to death on this forum. I’d be interested to hear what you have to say, but I’d need information before I can ask questions.
Care to give a brief synopsis or particular thesis I can chew on for a bit?
If you are insisting that man’s [sic] will is not free, why are you surprised by people’s behavior? They are simply doing what they are compelled to do. Did you expect logic or arguments to be the only causes in a determinist universe? And that yours would be the only effective causes in that group?
Well let’s take a close examination of the subject of free will. We usually or always believe we have free will because we believe we have any number of options in any given “choice situation” we’ll call it. So how do we come to have this belief. Does it vary from choice situation to the next or is this the case for some elements yet there is a similarity or such also involved between all or some choice situations.
If a man walks into a restaurant and sits at a table he looks at the menu and sees many options. One day he orders one thing and another day another. From this he develops he “sense” of free will will call it for now. Likewise if a man leaves he’s house in he’s car and drives down one road one day and another down another the same thing happens. The man only develops he’s sense of free will because because he cant see the “different” factors that lead to which food item he choose. Yet the man any man or woman knows they’ve done many things before they did that. They can even “identify” the different things they did before and more or less their order. However even though they can identify these things they do not see them as the direct causes of the choice. They are “cause mind vacant” we could call but sometimes we are not. For example an arsonist might know he chose to light a fire because he could, because he had a match so to speak. We could call this “cause mind holding”. Perhaps there are different categories of these two different mega categories. But we must see how they relate in any way to free will here anyway. If someone is “cause mind vacant” this might split into categories where the reason for that vacancy differs or perhaps where the cause in the choice differs and comes under different categories.
Free will DOES exist, insofar as it remains a percpetion. The reason free will FEELS so obviously real is because our consciousness cannot percieve that which occurs in the subconscious; it can only operate in a moment to moment manner (which is neccessary from an evolutionary perspective). Scientists have thouroughly documented the psychological phenomena called ‘readiness potential’. Basically this just means that the subconscious has been found to make decisions up to 7 seconds before we ‘feel’ we are making them. As such,when we ‘feel’ like we are making a decision, it is merely because our consciousness does not permit the sensation of when that decision (or the biochemical properties of that ‘decision’) was really generated. What is also interesting, is that people are more naturally inclined to dismiss determinism because people want to ‘feel’ in control of their lives. Well, lucky for some, even ‘scientists’ did suddenly reveal that yes,hard determinism is the case, then they would still feel in control (as our consciousness permits it). Whats more, all hell would break lose if such a scenario was to aventuate. As such, those with the power would most definitly prevent this information from circulation, as the ethical, social, political, economic (the list goes on) implications would lead to absolute chaos. What i find troubling is the likes of certain scientists who say “well we have scientifically found that some various molecular movements are unpredictable (i.e. they have no cause)” Such theories (and they are just theories) are the likes of heisenburgs uncertainty principle. The problem here is this- scientists with their ‘expert’ knowledge are often so self-absorbed and guilty of masaging their own ego’s (many are not), that they forget that it is not us that determines nature but nature determining us. I.e. just becasue we cannot measure both the location and velocity of an electron, does not mean that that electron does not have a location or velocity at a certain point in time. It just means we cannot measure it.
What i have real trouble understanding is why determinism exists. Please reply, i would love to hear other people’s opinions on what i have just said.
They would have been programmed (determined) to want to feel in control of their lives.
Not sure how that directly follows. Are you saying some or all would have been determined to prevent chaos? What is the basis for such an assertion.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is not simply about us being able to measure accurately or not. It applies to any conscious entity howsoever it perceives and applies to any pair of properties the product of whose units comes to the units of action (Energy-Time), not just position and momentum. Uncertainty principle itself cannot be proven. However, it has been verified to be true in all the instances tested. Einstein proposed a thought experiment involving an electron-positron pair, that would violate the uncertainty principle. However, when an actual experiment was conducted decades later, it turned out that the uncertainty principle is valid and a new effect was discovered called Quantum Entanglement that allowed instantaneous communication between the two particles. Recently (in 2004) Quantum Entanglement Effect was used for teleportation (not the Star-Trek version, they managed to teleport a photon).
I can readily understand why some subscribe to or pretend to subscribe to determinism, it relieves them of their responsibility for their actions. 
Ganapati, could you please tell me your position on the matter? and explain to me why you believe it?
I basically only posted what i did to provoke discussion.
Are you saying what you posted doesn’t state your position, but you were simply role palying?
As for my “position”, I don’t have one, in the sense of something that I like to sell/propogate/justify. I don’t believe in determinism. That doesn’t mean I have a logically consistent explanation for ‘free-will’ either. I act under the belief that we make constrained but non-predetermined and non-random choices and hence are accountable for our choices.
I think it’s hard to oppose the idea that human’s act based on an inherent desire to survive. For me then, claiming that we are accountable for our choice’s is simply an attempt to justify the imposition of conditions (laws) under which we can expect to live longer. (it is inherent that we will to survive as long as we can, as such, any conditions which are conducive to this inherent nature are likely to be sought or desirable to be found).
Basically what im trying to get at is that i think that this inherent desire obscures the impatiality we bring to the question of freewill vs. determinism.
Tell me what you think Ganapati?
I don’t see the physical laws or the biological urges as determining in our actions, I see them as constraints within which we operate.
The orthodox view of evolution (gene selection theory), which I find the most plausible, does not see each individual organism as being guided to maximise its own survival, but as being guided to maximise the presence of its genes in the gene pool. We seem to be a notorious exception to that. Attempting to maximise one’s own longevity is a difficult to apply motivator for people who choose high risk occupations, especially the military for societies engaged in conflicts. Of course, it is possible to explain such choices as the result of a deception (not a deliberate deception, but simply an evolutionarily stable strategy, ESS) practiced by the non-combatants (especially women and children) to maximise their own welfare by making others kill/die for them. That would explain why almost every society considers the killing of non-combatants especially women and children the most heinous act in a conflict. So it appears in our species genes that force the individual to attempt to maximise its survival have survived and are perhaps the majority in the gene pool. At the same time why we don’t strive to maximise our genetic descendents may be explained by our calculations for their potential for surviving. All exceptions can be explained away as genes that won’t find themselves in the future gene pool.
These are all nice sounding explanations. However, they don’t provide any factors to make decisions upon nor or they falsifiable. Whether all our actions/choices are predetrmined or not, we still have to make them. Sitting in a restaurant expecting the waiter to bring to you the item that you were predetermined to order doesn’t bring the food. You still have to order it before it can arrive. And when you do, you have to make a conscious choice. So belief in determinism (like belief in this whole thing being a simulation) has no practical difference from a belief in free-will and the theoretical differences can never be resolved by someone in the ‘system’. Only someone outside of and studying humanity will be able to say whether we possess free-will or not. Everyone acts like he/she had a free-will. Any other belief is not possible. Not for me and honestly, anyway.
However there is one possibility that I am seriously considering, that not all human beings have free-will. Some do and others don’t and each is generalising from the example of one, himself/herself.
Ganapati, you seem so well informed! What am i missing? - it seems to me that if the antecedent coinditions are such that they constrain you from ordering the meal, then it won’t be ordered. I don’t believe it is possible for something to be predetermined and then not to play out. I understand your point that we actually have to consciously act on a decision for it to play out, but i don’t necessarily agree with it. Its just, it seems to me that our subconscious’ are so present in our decisions yet so percievingly absent. So i’m not sure how we would know if the conscious decision to act was really conscious at all?
But as i say, you seem to know a heck of a lot more than i do regarding this. Why am i thinking along these lines?
- what do you think consciousness is?
- what sorts of things do you read?
- what is your reasoning re the possibility of both the presence and absence of freewill?
Of course, then that would be a contradiction. My point was that even if our actions are predetermined, we cannot but act as if they weren’t, since we do not know exactly what the predetermined action at a point of time is. So a belief in determinism or the lack of it (which too to a determinist should have been predetermined anyway ) makes no difference.
There is really no way of knowing whether we are making a conscious decision or the decision has already been made subconsciously or unconsciously and the conscious mind is simply relaying it. But conscious decision making doesn’t necessarily mean free-will. It simply means evaluating the inputs at a conscious level, while the optimising function and hence the result could still be predetermined. I am not out to prove determinism as false based purely on logic. Something can be logically consistent and yet inconsistent with reality, Causal determinism fails to explain reality at a subatomic level and several macroscopic effects like radioactivity too. Not sure why I would want to pick something to explain something as complex as human decision making process when it has been proved inadequate to explain as simple and controllable processes as radioactivity, especially since it does not also ‘feel’ right.
Consciousness is a primary constituent of the universe (like matter-energy) and is not an effect of electro-chemical processes in some lumps of matter called living beings. It is the cause and what we observe as electro-chemical processes are the effects. I have no “evidence” for this, so I won’t attempt to convicne anyone of it.
That is a difficult question to answer for me. The things that I read don’t seem to fit any pattern. But if you are looking for books on philosophy, I hardly do or did read any. I did an introductory course on philosophy during my bachelors a couple of decades ago which covered Western philosophers from Plato to Wittgenstein, read a couple of books authored by Bertrand Russel but wasn’t impressed with any of them (except a little of Wittgenstein) to pursue further. Most of my reading is restricted to fiction, literature, economics and science.
At the moment the only evidence anyone can have of ‘free-will’ is personal. In order to deny its existence truthfully a person must not have experienced it. Since I experence it and don’t want to call those who deny its existence dishonest, I surmise that amongst humans there must be these two categories. That doesn’t come as a great surprise since there is no reason to expect all huamn beings to be endowed with the same skills to the same degree and don’t see why ‘free-will’ should be an exception.
i have yet to understand the point of preaching determinism. seriously, physics is less baffling.
recognition of the idea is all one needs.
Forgive me if I’ve repeated users’ arguments; I’m new here, and this is one of my favorite philosophical topics.
Firstly, I’d like to mention compatibilism-- free will and determinism are not universally believed to be mutually exclusive. What are your thoughts on such a matter? It seems to me that one has to manipulate the system of determinism significantly to allow for free will, though I am not entirely well-acquainted with the principles of compatibilism.
As for free will, I am of the viewpoint of a neo-fatalist, with one exception: I do not agree that all events are entirely pre-destined, as per the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the like. Regardless, the universe as we observe it behaves in a predictable manner, abiding by certain laws. I am a part of the universe. Thus, I behave in a predictable manner and abide by certain laws (primarily, in this case, those of causality); I am nothing more than a product of my genetics and environment and act as such. I am subject entirely to my personality, the character traits that make up my ‘self.’ My personality, in turn, was formed due to internal and external factors: my good old deoxyribonucleic acid and people, events, and other stimuli, respectively. I express control over none of these factors. If there was to be some other influential factor, from whence would it arise? It would be a causeless cause, presumably-- a violator of Ex nihilo nihil fit-- and, more than likely, I would have no direct control over it.
In response to arguments involving the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and similar concepts, I propose the following two counter-arguments:
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String Theory. One proposed component of String Theory is the many-worlds interpretation; for every event for which there are multiple possible outcomes, the universe splits. The resulting parallel universes each contain a possible outcome. Granted that one has a ‘choice’ between multiple options, each possible option will be enacted in a parallel universe. Is the ‘you’ in this particular universe any less ‘you’ than the manifestation of yourself in another universe? Do you have any control over which universe you end up in? It appears that all these universes, compiled, are a massive input-output machine. Your actions are a randomized output, obtained from a highly complex set of inputs.
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A less nebulous and perhaps more compelling argument: random chance does not constitute as free will. A tossed coin does not ‘choose’ which side will face upwards. (Or if it will land on its edge, for all you Twilight Zone fans.)
On a side note, the one (possible) argument I have against neo-fatalism is that of the consciousness. If I play no role in governing my actions, why am I conscious? Consciousness, in the instance of determinism, is unnecessary; as science typically employs the simplest pathways, I presume it would seem illogical to an outside observer that beings as mechanical as ourselves possess consciousness. Of course, this can be dismissed as a mere anomaly; after all, there is no shortage of oddities running amok in the universe.
That is because you perhaps believe in free-will and assume such actions need to have a point. But for a determinist all actions happen because they were determined to happen, whether there is a “point” or not. So if you were programmed to preach determinism, you would 
I am not sure what this neo-fatalism is, but it appears according to you, ‘you’ have no control on what the future will be since your choices at this point are either completely determined or simply a random occurance. That looks me like simple fatalism.
Even if we don’t go as far back as the Big Bang to look for causeless causes, the universe seems to be full of causeless causes like radioactivity.
The mirror universe hypothesis will remain just that, a hypothesis. I haven’t seen any verifiable/falsifiable predictions made by the hypothesis. It appears to be a desperate attempt to avoid the role of consciousness in the collapse of the Schrodinger wave function.
Of course! But I doubt anyone is equating chance with ‘free-will’. In order to qualify as ‘free-will’ the determinant has to be outside the known causal elements.
Consciousness is unnecessary? Unnecessary for what? In a determined universe nothing is necessary, everything just is.
Just to clarify, I am not a determinist, but I acknowledge it is a logically consistent system of belief even if at variance with reality.
Neo-fatalism and fatalism are nearly synonymous, in my understanding. The former is simply more modernized.
I have found little to suggest radioactivity is causeless, but rather that it is random-- would you mind explaining further?
Are you familiar with the Double Slit experiment? This is one of the more prominent sources of evidence.
Heh, very true. What I mean to state is that the universe would proceed in entirely the same manner if consciousness were to be removed.
I’m very interested in your viewpoint; what causes you to reject determinism? I haven’t been exposed to many opposing arguments thus far.
In a determined universe everything necessarily is.