Ellos I’ve just spent a good hour reading opinions on a number of subjects and would like to give this one a shot since I’ve been thinking of this one and haven’t had the chance to find a similarly named topic. Given my background in several socities of varying religious belief, I’ve come to question the principle of “good” and “bad” in relation to free will. Are we mere results of genetic deficiencies and societal ‘predeterminism’ or is there any such thing as something that is consciously performed in relation to absolutely nothing and performed for a simple self serving purpose? Is it possible to perform an act completely devoid of reason and instinct? If I move my hand in random motion for no apparent purpose, but to prove that free will exists, am I exercising free will or is this simply one in a series of acts that are a result of my inherent qualities and societal influences? Is the uniqueness and unpredictability of the individual testament to his free will or to the broad range of influential occurrences?
Now in the modern context, is the man who is a “bad” atheist and a sinner (not as a result of atheism) and the man who is devout and “good” the way he is because he has free will and one chose to exercise it in relation to his ego and the other in relation to his conscience or are they both simply the way they are because of influences they had no control over? In one scenario, heaven & hell and religion are valid but if we are to believe that we are simply products of our surroundings, then belief in religion or the lack of it will both be void. Any thoughts?
A logical chain of thoughts instead of unwarranted one liners, although inconclusive, would be much appreciated. A copy paste would do as well as I understand this is an infinitely debated topic that’s probably had its fair share of posts.
The very concept I am trying to debate is that randomness, a conscious choice to do something irrelevant to nothing else and sparked only by the individual’s mind, is free will at its best since it is not triggered by neither Necessity nor Pleasure, 2 concepts which can limit a person’s free will; pleasure also being a softened form of necessity. It is also probable that randomness is a result of exterior influences but that’s as close as I can come to imagining free will within a subjective and fragile existence. What I am trying to understand is if a person who makes the choice not to indulge in pleasure, and another person who does, do they do so due to their understanding and exercise of free will or do they do so as a result of predetermined inclinations and preset paths? Is a decadent man in a self-indulgent society any different from the devout man in a religious environment? Are they both not simply following the paths presented to them? Again, if you will spend the time to reply, I would be very thankful but I would prefer a discussion or explanation instead of a one-liner noting a fundamental flaw in theory.
a person chooses not to indulge and doesn’t.
a person chooses to indulge and does so.
the reasoning for each may have been influenced by prior choices… one has chosen to live a life of abstinence, the other has chosen a life of debauchery…
each has freely chosen because at the ultimate moment of indulgence, they chose to indulge/abstain respectively
one chooses to walk the path with each step.
-Imp
i cherish my lack of understanding tortoise and I’m certain you’re too adept at the matter to spend time reading the posts of and educating someone as inept as me but I’m hoping for some input from somebody apart from myself. If I were to define free will, I’d define it as the conscious ability to exercise one’s objective logic and knowledge in any given context. When necessity and subjectivity also become factors, it seems impossible to me that a person would be able to exercise their free will effectively. For example, if one is given the choice between being burnt alive or being bitten, the individual will probably choose being bitten; in this context, one chooses the best of two evils, but being given a choice of only two things and choosing one due to the instinctive desire to avoid unnecessary pain, one’s free will is essentially taken away by his instinct. Arguing in that sense, I would say god is the only entity who can objectively exercise free will due to his absence of desire and need. That is my view as it is being developed. I’m simply interested in others’ perspective of the subject.
Actually I posted my previous post before I saw that due to the quick succession of posts in the past 15-20minutes 
But then I would assume that you’re saying there is no free will as everything is a result of something else, and since ‘god’ is the ultimate cause, by your argument, he would be the only ‘creature’ that could exercise his freedom without causality.
I should note that I’m not a religious person but I do find it to be the most stimulating widely used but widely misunderstood concept. Its immortality in relation to human thought, as was most clearly portrayed by Voltaire’s “In a hundred years, the Bible will be a forgotten book, found only in museums”, is one thing that’s made it interesting to me, noting the recent re-emergence of religious fervor.
I understood that you don’t believe in god, I was trying to develop a chain of thought based on what you said, which as I reasoned, would imply that god being some entity that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, and for whom the concept of time is absent, is the only concept or entity (depending on your belief in the matter) capable of free will. If the cause of all effects and the creator of the created itself is subject to causality, then there must be some misunderstanding in defining god rather than god itself I would presume. How do you reason that ‘god’, in a non-religious way and strictly for ease of definition, would be under causality?
Well I suppose the discussion will not get any further because I don’t believe that randomness really exists, but it would be as close as I would get to an unbiased choice based on my conscious desire to make an unbiased choice. I would have to argue that as a student studying engineering, I am a strong supporter of physics and math and believe their underlying concepts can be used to define a great number of things, if not all things, when put in the correct context and scale. As such, I don’t believe that anything is truly random and that nothing changes its path unless some force is exerted upon it. Although an electron’s movement is unpredictable and about as random as anything can get, its inherent quality to be random makes electrons as a whole predictable, hence the possibility of electron clouds. Although the individual is always unique, the group is generally predictable.
The probability of existence and non-existence is, if my knowledge of particles and antiparticles isn’t too dated, the same and we are actually not aware of why it was that existence came to, if only marginally, outnumber its opposite. Referring to god in a non-religious manner, as the creator and the driving force behind existence and the absence of it, I can find an answer for ‘why’. Atheism is often said to be warranted because atheists say that they believe it because religion is too supernatural and unexplainable; whereas if put in the right context and free of religion, the concept of some higher entity as the beginning and cause still persists and atheism cannot give science as its reason, but rather as its excuse. This is just an outpouring of thought and opinion. I digress.
Any other views? Explanations and reasoning?
My definition of free will would be the absence of physical and mental instincts, and bodily needs into what basically becomes the perfect stoic and also the absence of any outside influences (the most notable being for example, a child that grows up in a certain culture automatically absorbs some or many aspects of that culture into his own behavior). If one could be that, if one could be free of all external and internal limits to his mental potential, that would be free will.
By that, I believe that an entity free of input and output, self-created and self-sustaining is the only creature that can be truly free.
What’s your definition of free will?
Then all of existence must be random as there is no such thing as going before the big bang if we take that as our reference point for the start of time therefore there couldn’t have been any input before the big bang. Do you believe that the order resulting from the big bang was a matter of probability and the probability of existence in face of its opposite was a matter of randomness? I’ve explained before that due to the order of the world we live in, I don’t believe in randomness and you don’t present any proof apart from your belief. If you would like to elaborate on anything, I’d be happy to read what proof you may have for what you believe in, unless you believe without proof which is in practice the natural method of belief anyways. And also, your definition of free will would help me gain more perspective.
The first uses of the idea of freewill must have occurred in decently sized social systems, something a bit larger than a tribe and with an economic system of production and trade in effect. I suppose that a sense of “selfhood” cannot fully develop outside of a organized civilized context. This is why I say the idea is contingent to the quality of the social context and scenario.
First the citizen was conditioned to see himself as an individual in a class, with specific privileges, rights, and duties. The specific style of life established the identity within the mass of society at large. Each class or group bearing unique characteristics.
The government would have contractual agreements to represent the people, in exchange for obedience to “laws”. Once the identity is established in the class, the “individual” is charged with responsibility to act according to his station.
The sense of “freewill”, at this crude point, is what this is. It is not yet a metaphysical concept. One conceives of “freewill” as having the capacity to do and not do certain things, within the field of possible acts. This is really only a name for the sense of responsibility to the government…the contractual agreement between it and the individual. Not yet does the idea of “freewill” involve metaphysical and religious overtones.
Religion, what Dionysus put so well earlier: “plato for the masses”, or something like that, is historically necessary in this ironic sense: it was necessary to the extent that metaphysical philosophy, mysticism, and mythology was due to appear shortly after industrial civilization had been achieved, which resulted in the great scientific and economic advances that attract and breed philosophers.
In smaller words; one should expect “religious jargon” to evolve when language paradigms are developing at astonishing rates. The fifty years before the scientific enlightenment of europe, the Lockean empiricism that radically changed ideas in philosophy, was laden with metaphysical “try-outs” by several philosophers…each trying to refurbish platonism in his own way and get his name in the weekly journal.
What is unfortunate is that even in these relatively modern times, metaphysics was still alive and well in world literature and academia.
Here is a good rule of thumb: philosophers are failed physicists and the religious are failed philosophers.
The differences are entirely in language and method. Religious propositions pay absolutely no attention to even the most basic formal fallacies, while scientific knowledge can be represented in propositions which are consistent. Doesn’t mean that they are “all” that is true at any given time, but it does mean that they are true so far.
Freewill doesn’t exist in the sense that people think it does, and worse, it isn’t even what people think it is in the first place. They are asking if an impossible thing could exist, and for the wrong reasons.
But that initial choice could not have come from nothing. That first decision still must either be based upon determined or random factors, neither of which are free.
Randomness is not a well defined concept, so I don’t think its admissable.
It’s basically saying “things we can’t predict” which is another form of “things we can’t know for certain”… i.e. undefined
It’s Undefined!! (random)
Which is a intelligable non-statement in logic.
Self recursion, or telic recursion, the ability to reprogram yourself outside of pure deterministic laws.
the initial choice came freely from the chooser
factors that influence are irrelevant…
ultimately, the chooser had it within his power to choose either…
-Imp
Glad to have some more insight from others! Well my main driving point here is to see if it be possible to distinguish between “good” and “bad”. regarding what imp said, "each has freely chosen because at the ultimate moment of indulgence, they chose to indulge/abstain respectively ", I must disagree because the way I see the average human being is like a boulder that when placed on a given hill, will inevitably roll down the hill. Using that to prove what I’m trying to debate, is a future alcoholic born of alcoholic parents in the west any different from the future zealot born of religious parents in the east? Or is the conservative born of liberal parents in the west any different than the liberal born of conservative parents in the east? My opinion is that the extent of their free will is not limited to the chioce of indulging or not, but rather to the following of the path they’ve been led to take; rather than one they naturally chose of their own absolute free will.
As for epoche75, I’m trying to define free will beyond laws and rules and the whole “red light in the middle of nowhere” idea, but rather to the very basics of what causes the red light dillema which I reason to be our limitations within our instinctive being. I think absolute free will in relation to laws is chaos rather than the idealistic anarchy, but absolute free will in relation to knowledge and logic (a free will, ‘free’ of instincts) would be free will in its absolute sense.
In a more practical sense, however, do you think it’d be possible to prove that somebody who ‘chooses’ the path he chooses does so because of innate inclinations (conformity to societal pressures being the most notable mental instinct or inclination) or because he is ‘free’ and able to consciously and objectively or at least in relation only to himself choose between good and evil?
Here is a fun hypothetical to consider. What if God was malevolent and there was no freewill? It is just as likely that the universe is fatalistic, immanent, and entirely determined in the causal sense…as it is that the universe is transcendent to heaven, God exists there, and we have freewill, a strange thing which is supposed to work to get us into heaven if we make the right choices, etc., etc.
The measure of good and pain is determined by the degree to which a thing evokes pleasure or pain in the person who decides it and makes the judgment. Because there is no “outside” meter to say what degree is what, of pain, the value of “good” and “bad” must be intimately linked to our appetites and tolerances for pleasure and pain. These are subjective. But in the same sense, in a Spinozean sense which I am trying to get here, is that the understanding of our pleasures and pains is the higher order of virtue than the pursuit of pleasure or pain. Our ethics should be influenced by our rational capacities for pleasure and pain and our agreements on universal, more or less, rules for moral activity which would prevent certain acts from occurring while promoting others. This is how rational knowledge is possible for moral objectivity; it is the ends in common with all other language speakers. Generally, those who understand you share some kind of mutual ethical “right” to be effected and affect your knowledge of it.
A pure immanent material relationship completely determined and necessary. That this has the attribute of “mind” and we are “aware” does not mean that anything else has changed- only something new has been added. The mind is another manifestation of material, an epiphenomena, which is very real and seemingly “separate” from the world…as if it were transcendent and “in” reality…here in life and experience. This cannot be because there can be only one kind of infinite substance, one reducible thing with which all particular things share the same attribute- the materiality of the being and the existence of the attribute is the same that constitutes all other attributes of this one substance. The “idea” is one of these possible attributes or extensions of substance…it isn’t from without substance.
If all events are causal, the event of the “mind” is as well, and although it cannot be effected by objects, it is affected by ideas in a circularity in language. The epiphenomenal feature of consciousness is the fact that it emerges from the body but does not get affected by it or affect it in return. Knowledge, which is first an idea and then a concept about the body, is in the forms of language and thought, so its possibilities are always determined by the terms and the meanings of the language…but never directly by the event.
The body is affected by the world and in turn affects the mind as it mediates itself in language, in consciousness, which is what awareness must be- the self reflectivity of language. But the thoughts and the sense made in thinking is determined by the meanings produced in language, not the body. The body is only a body of data, material data, which is meaningless.
This is the dualistic characteristic of immanent materialism. The acceptance that the mind and the body are of the same substance but in experience seem to run “parallel”, so to speak, and produce the peculiar experience of being aware…knowing that you know you are knowing.
But freewill cannot really be possible. What we cause “choice” is really just the result of very many mental events that preceded it. Simple electro-chemical reactions count for most of them. Most brain activity is in its simplest form charged particles crossing membranes, and the electrical impulses produced.
I’m aware of the physical aspect of being, but yes that seems to be my dillema. The way I reason, free will as I define it in its pure form is impossible for any human because we are too dependent on our physical side and emerge from it. The human is first an instinctive creature, and then an intellectual one.
Good and bad are very broad terms and as you mentioned, are unquestionably subjective and reliant on the person’s conscience and ability and methodology of processing what he experiences.
There is an idea that I’ve been entertaining for a while; that heaven and hell are subjective terms and perhaps ‘heaven’ isn’t a universal place but rather a place subjective to the ability and opportunity of the individual. Assuming there is no free will, I would believe heaven as default. Quoting a religion here, “ignorance is the cause of all sin”; why if free will is limited to one’s reasoning in response to instinct and external/internal influences and heaven a subjective term, why then should the individual that is ignorant on matters on which he has no need for or a method of knowing about, be subjected to the same laws that allow for the entrance of those who were brought up in a way to become pious?
I suppose I would need the arguments of a religious man instead of a nihilist or atheist but any further discussions and definitions for free will would still be appreciated and provide much needed perspective and understanding (if given with reasoning)!
Free will is not random. If it were, its effects could not be predicted, even by the one exercising it. You wouldn’t feel in control of your actions; you would feel out of control, as if some other force were controlling you.
The best treatment I’ve come across on this subject is the one offered by Hameroff and Penrose. They have a theory on free will that takes advantage of the non-determinism of quantum phenomena. They say that inside our neurons are structures called microtubules, and these exhibit “quantum effects” - i.e. that their behavior is non-deterministic and virtually random. As a result, the firing of a neuron becomes non-deterministic, and as a result of that, human behavior is non-deterministic. Essentially, they say that you can account for the non-determinism of quantum phenomena by positing free will therein, and that microtubules are “free will amplifiers”. This position is highly debated and far from universally accepted.
My belief is that we are not completely controlled by heredity and environment, or even by cause and effect. It’s a big factor with many aspects (genes, subconscious, force of habit, action and reaction, predictability, fear, psychology…), but it’s like a game of cards. You don’t have control over your hand but you do over what you do with it, though sometimes you may not realize you do. Maybe it’s this bounding to action and reaction, cause and effect, fear and karma, that makes experience as we know it possible. If there is such a thing as blame, condemnation, etc., it seems impossible to say when to blame and condemn someone and when to forgive them for being the product of action and reaction. Both are simultaneously true (maybe to inverse degrees, maybe not), and each person’s path is unique. I believe everybody should be treated as a being of love, some of them perhaps banged up by life… although to be honest i’m very judgmental about some things, things i would never do. cruelty, spinelessness/hypocrisy, manipulation, etc.
But I don’t think heaven and hell depend on whether people are to blame and condemn for what they do or not. Heaven and hell exist as a matter of karma and cause and effect. It just happens. it’s not god’s retribution if you go to hell as a result of your decisions and actions, it’s the physics of the cosmos. Although I don’t believe the things that will send you to heaven or hell are the things such as “believing in Jesus Christ” or coveting your neighbor’s wife.
As for whether an action can be absolutely perfectly 100% free, for beings who aren’t god, i don’t know.
“free will”?well we can say it exists, since humans each possess their own brain. 
it’s too general a topic but my opinion is that actions are the result of biological impulses i’m not bothered to study extensively, which are produced as a stimulus to the environment. if someone disagrees please say so, coz i’ll get more ideas and interest in this topic if someone starts a discussion with me. and it’d be great if you could simplify your words because most of the stuff you’re saying doesn’t really make a point and are just “decorative” words that seem to have been fished out of a “introduction to Philosophy” handbook