Free Will

[dsalvato]

I see the concept “I” being thrown around quite a bit here. Before you guys get into free-will you ought to first figure out exactly who you are. That will answer the question of free-will. I promise.

[jjg]

The freedom of will is proved 1) through the consciousness man has of freedom of his actions. That unconscious, therefore unknown influences can direct the will(Leibniz, Wundt, Freud) is not denied, because the will stays above the motives and chooses among them (Lindworsky).

The free action has as such no physical causes, but has the will itself as a cause. The will determines itself by the light of reason.

2. through the moral nature of man, so that every will’s act has for the subject the aspect of obligation and responsibility.

3. through the metaphysical consideration that the reason reaches the concept of the absolute good. This absolute good is however not in this world, so that it is not able to determine completely the will of man, so that man always is before a choice.

The modern anthropological and psychological theories avoid the formal philisophical question and state the experience of freedom in regard to the causes of this freedom is thereby diminished and one considers the freedom as a task which man has to fullfill.

[someoneisatthedoor]

@jjg

The freedom of will is proved 1) through the consciousness man has of freedom of his actions.

I am free because I think I am free. I think I am free therefore I am free. Interesting argument (Cartesian), but the one notion (I think I am free) need have nothing to with the other (I am free)

That unconscious, therefore unknown influences can direct the will(Leibniz, Wundt, Freud) is not denied, because the will stays above the motives and chooses among them (Lindworsky).

The will to deny other will is a will just the same as the rest. - Nietzsche

You can pretend to be ranking your true, free, one desire over the rest but in truth you have the same ‘contrary and not merely contrary drives and values’ as anyone else.

The free action has as such no physical causes, but has the will itself as a cause. The will determines itself by the light of reason.

Causa sui (of the will, the self, the I) is nonsense:

Beyond Good and Evil, 1st section, passage 21

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui; and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness. If any one should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of “free will” and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of "free will ": I mean “non-free will,” which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly materialise “cause” and “effect,” as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them naturalise in thinking at present), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it “effects” its end; one should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure conceptions, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding, - not for explanation. In “being-in-itself” there is nothing of “causal-connection,” of “necessity!” or of “psychological non-freedom” there the effect does not follow the cause, there “law” does not obtain. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as “being in itself,” with things, we act once more as we have always acted - mythologically. The “non-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills. - It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every “causal-connection” and “psychological necessity,” manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings - the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the “non-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their “responsibility,” their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this class); others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to get out of the business, no matter how. The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favourite disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as “la religion de la souffrrance humaine”; that is its “good taste.”

2. through the moral nature of man, so that every will’s act has for the subject the aspect of obligation and responsibility.

I agree with ‘man is only morally responsible for actions he freely chose’ or whatever similarly Kantian notion you like but this isn’t itself an argument for why we have free will, it is simply a description of our moral state if we were to have free will.

3. through the metaphysical consideration that the reason reaches the concept of the absolute good.

Which is?

This absolute good is however not in this world,

So no doubt you won’t be able to demonstrate it for us or describe it satisfactorily. Basing your argument on things not in evidence (via whatever means are appropriate to the argument) makes the argument weak if not utterly incorrect.

so that it is not able to determine completely the will of man, so that man always is before a choice.

So you invoke something not of this world (and therefore which you cannot demonstrate) in order to deny its role in determining man’s capacity to choose for himself (or herself) so that you can argue for free will? No offence, but this argument is utterly ludicrous and not in the least bit philosophical. Why invoke something just to deny it’s power? Why invoke something you cannot demonstrate at all?

The modern anthropological and psychological theories avoid the formal philisophical question and state the experience of freedom in regard to the causes of this freedom is thereby diminished and one considers the freedom as a task which man has to fullfill.

This is all irrelevant to the question of demonstrating free will. A different writer on this forum recently said that he found the interpretation of the world whereby people are capable of determining their own future (to some extent or other) to be more compelling. Thus he’s not positing it as a truth, simply as a preference which requires no logical justification. You, on the other hand, are claiming we do have free will, but you’ve offered a series of flawed arguments.

I think you need to think again on this.

[celox]

@dsalvato

I see the concept “I” being thrown around quite a bit here. Before you guys get into free-will you ought to first figure out exactly who you are. That will answer the question of free-will. I promise.

I agree completely. I have concluded that I don’t even have a will, so how can I have a free will? But it all depends on definitions really, as one could certainly define “I” and “free will” in ways that would make the sentence “I have free will” true. So the first step in the debate should be to see if we can come up with a common set of definitions:

1. What are you? Your body, your brain, your consciousness? What is consciousness?
2. What would the mind be free from? The external world, causality, something else?

[dsalvato]

hahaha yes. Celox you’re on the right track. But you see those questions you suggested us defining before moving on? Those are the questions of the universe and when you figure them out you will understand and you’re gonna laugh. They’re not real hard to figure out but we’ve built up such defenses that we’re sort of stuck in a box and it’s very very difficult to think outside of it, in the same way that if we look up at the clouds we may recognize familiar shapes, shapes which we associate with something in reality, and the rest of the shapes that we do not recognize as something we will totally ignore. That doesn’t mean those other shapes aren’t something, just something we haven’t seen yet.

Let me just post this that I wrote last night. It’s long and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to, that’s fine, but consider it. Kelsey is my wonderful lady by the way.

The other night Kelsey and I were in the video store and we were talking about some things. She said that here we have a movie store, but inside it are different movies. I said, theres no ‘but’, the movie store is the variety and without it there is no movie store. Not one that has any hope of being successful in the least. This set me up for the perfect introduction to what I am going to talk about and that is the interconnectedness of everything.

Imagine total space, essentially nothing. Just open space. What is it? It’s nothing, absolutely nothing and in this scenario where we are the observers imagining this emptiness I have created to include the listener, but in complete space we have no observers.

Now imagine as the hypothetical observer you are, that everything is solid. Just one infinite mass of solid. What is it? Once again it is nothing. It’s the same thing as complete absence of matter but it’s complete absence of absence. In both cases there is nothing.

In order to have something we need both emptiness and solid. One does not exist without the other. There is actually not one and the other; I just use ideas like that to efficiantly represent an idea, to give you something you can imagine. Words aren’t real, they are just notations used to managably understand and express an idea or a feeling, but never are they that idea or feeling. Anyway space and emptiness are the same. They are as the saying goes seemingly poles apart, opposites. But if you have a pole you have two ends, and you can cut one end but you are still left with two ends. Cut it again and once again, you have both ends connected as the same pole. If you keep cutting you will see the two ends merge. Now you are left with many parts of a pole with two ends, but one end never exists independantly from the other. They go hand in hand like up and down or left and right.

Now in that vaccum what if we have one object floating around. Eternally floating for it is the only thing within this vast emptiness. What do we have here? Nothing. And why is this? This is because it has nothing to interact with. Back to the movie store analogy, it would be the equivalent of selling only one movie. There will simply be no business, no demand, it will be void of any activity.

Now give space another rock. Let’s even throw in some elemental particles that if get going good enough will stir up a nice little cloud. Let’s say those two rocks collide, BOOM! Now we have something. The two rocks created two more rocks from the hit and now we have some activity. The rock won’t complain because it only understands its existence through the information it received when it smashed the other rock. It had something to exist in relation to.

Now these are hypothetical examples where a rock is existing alone in space. The fact is that the rock could not exist without some other interaction to form a rock. So interaction and diversity which enables interaction is what allows anything to be. It is everything, it is the essence of being. When I say it allows something to be that’s incorrect and misleading, it doesn’t allow something, it is that something.

Now imagine in absolute space there exists only one human being and that is you. You exist alone and there is absolutely nothing else. Who are you? You can imagine that you would get pretty bored, in fact, you may not even know what boredom is because you have nothing to know boredom by. But if you could because you were extracted from this reality and placed into this vast emptiness then you would. You’d be bored. Imagine hundreds of years went by and there you are still existing within the emptiness. Then a hundred more go by and you’re at the point where your memories of your life are beginning to fade. Your mind is still fine but time has passed by.

First of all how would you know how much time has passed? The moment is eternal, it’s infinite and without anything to measure time with the very concept also fades from your mind. How tall are you? How large are you? What is your personality like? Are you good or bad, kind or rude? What is anything? Because you have nothing to exist in relation to but space you know nothing eventually but one thing. You are solid and without emptiness you would not exist. Without solid emptiness would not exist. How is this so? You are perceiving this emptiness and understanding it as void because you have ‘solid’ you to compare it to. You are interpreting the emptiness as well as yourself with your perception, therefore everything exists within your own mind. Without you to perceive it, there would be nothing.

You know the question ‘what would it feel like to go to sleep and never wake up again’? What would it feel like? Think about it and you will know, you’ve experienced something very similar. ‘What is it like to wake up having never gone to sleep’? That’s the moment you were born.

So emptiness exists in your mind, and you exist inside the emptiness. You are one in the same and one does not exist without the other.

Which way is left and which is right? Where is North, East, South, and West? What is up and what is down? All of these concepts we take for granted dissapear. We soon come to realize that the interrelatedness of the diverse Universe is what is anything and everything. How can we know happiness without ever knowing sadness? We can’t. Just as we cannot know North without South. We cannot know who we like without knowing who we don’t like.

And oh it hits you. It hits you and it’s just hillarious. We know ourselves by everything else around us. “I” is defined by “you”. Universe is created by consciousness and consciousness is created by universe. It’s the same thing. Consciousness is Universe. hahahaha. It is perfect.

Now suppose you could get rid of yourself and have two beings. Someone to interact with in this emptiness. I don’t care how much that person sucks, you are something because of them. If they suck then you don’t. But you can’t not suck without someone to suck.

Do you see this?

In the video on Quantum mechanics the scientist says, we’ve looked into the brain, we’ve looked into parts of the brain and we dissected it and scrutinized it and still we can find no one behind the wheel, no one is home, there is no observer. And the reason no one seems to be home is because this body is not this seperate entity which exists independantly of the world. If you want to find the driver, you’d better trace every aspect of that being back. Eventually you arrive at the very beginning, the BIG BANG if that is the case, and you see that this being is everything. We are not affected by the past, we are the past. We are not slaves to our will, we are our will and our will is the universe and the universe is this one system of interconnectedness.

Alright that’s it. Maybe you get it, maybe you don’t. Either way it’s ok. We will eventually come to understand this like we understand the Earth is round. We’ll feel it and our whole way of communicating, and interacting will adjust accordingly, and we will look back on ourselves and just laugh. Look back on our hating of certain groups and laugh harder than we’ve ever laughed. It’s funny. And we’re all the universe whether we like it or not, and believe me you like it. It’s perfect.

[jjg]

Someone, your comments are not even refutations of what I have argued.

You seem to be devoted to Nietzche’s philosophy and you throw his quotes in haphazardly and don’t even address the subject.

Your very first statement seems to read something like how do you know you are free just because you think you are free.

Truth by definition has a subjective side to it. It is what we subjectively conceiving complimenting objective reality.

[someoneisatthedoor]

@jjg

Someone, your comments are not even refutations of what I have argued.

We’re back to ‘I’m right because I think I’m right’ are we?

You seem to be devoted to Nietzche’s philosophy

Not exclusively, but his comments regarding the absurdity of the notion of self-determination (which was central to your argument) seemed appropriate. Perhaps you missed that. Maybe you’d like to read the citation from Nietzshce once more.

If you I could argue against the notion of free will from a Derridan perspective, demonstrating how the particular, singular influence of one person on a sea of text that is forever deconstructing itself is impossible to determine.

and you throw his quotes in haphazardly and don’t even address the subject.

Let’s go back to what was said, shall we?

You said on the 25th

The free action has as such no physical causes, but has the will itself as a cause. The will determines itself by the light of reason.

You claimed the will determines itself, I cited a passage from Nietzsche showing how the notion of self-determination (in precisely the way you use it) is absurd. This isn’t haphazard in the slightest, it’s a direct refutation of your argument.

Your very first statement seems to read something like how do you know you are free just because you think you are free.

Yes, given Descartes couldn’t even prove his own existence, he couldn’t even validate I think therefore I am, or more precisely I think I am therefore I am (Nietzsche demonstrates some of the rash assumptions of the Cogito in BGE, first section). Therefore for you to just leap in with

The freedom of will is proved 1) through the consciousness man has of freedom of his actions.

seems somewhat hasty.

Truth by definition has a subjective side to it.

What do you mean by the spatial metaphor ‘side’? Why not just say ‘truth is subjective’?

It is what we subjectively conceiving complimenting objective reality.

So you are trying to defend ‘I think I am free, therefore I must be free’ with ‘truth is subjective’? If truth is subjective then your believing you are free is no more or less valid that my belief that you are not free. If truth is subjective then the claim that truth is subjective is, itself, subjective. If that claim is subjective I can refute it simply by choosing not to believe it.

Your argument descends into absurding, and you haven’t responded to the charge that your argument invokes something simply to deny it in favour of free will, which isn’t a valid argument by any stretch of the imagination.

[K9sphericals]

Most have things set differently to how I see it. Free will is a matter of the soul! We then filter all experience (good or bad) through the mind which then places it within the realm of right/wrong. (Which are only a concept of the human experince anyhow). We all then have free will. On how we act or behave? - that action is influenced by our own experince (the filter). So our soul has ‘Free Will’ it just depends on how much we let the Mind affect (filter) that desision. So you see we all have Free Will it is just a matter which part of our exsistance we “listen” to when we decide to act. (The mind, soul or body).

[jjg]

Someone, when I say subjective, I mean something dependant on the mind to make relationships.

Objective is something independant of the mind.

[jjg]

I reread that Nietzche quote and can only decipher rantings about people shouldn’t be responsible for their actions.

It wasn’t much of a refutation against free-will.

[someoneisatthedoor]

@jjg

Someone, when I say subjective, I mean something dependant on the mind to make relationships.

Yes, I’m familiar with the term ‘subjectivism’.

Objective is something independant of the mind.

Congratulations Bertrand Russell, throw this man a fish!

I reread that Nietzche quote and can only decipher rantings about people shouldn’t be responsible for their actions.

It wasn’t much of a refutation against free-will.

Try again, it was a refutation of self determination, which is central to the justification you gave for free will.

You might (only ‘might’) want to learn something about this topic before you comment further.

[jjg]

Someone, you being nothing but sarcastic which just proves to me that you are not sure if you understand the topic.

If you know Nietzche’s refutation so well, why don’t you explain it in your own words. I’d rather you do that than the cut and paste polka of somebody else’s
ideas.

[someoneisatthedoor]

@jjg

Someone, you being nothing but sarcastic which just proves to me that you are not sure if you understand the topic.

My being sarcastic has everything to do with my race (the British are congenitally sarcastic) and nothing to do with my understanding of this topic.

If you were offended, I apologise.

If you know Nietzche’s refutation so well, why don’t you explain it in your own words. I’d rather you do that than the cut and paste polka of somebody else’s
ideas.

If someone else has said it better than I ever could why waste my breath?

But since you requested it, and I’m full of apple juice, I’ll comply

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived,- self explanatory it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly.Despite it being illogical, mans pride has led to this idea perpetuating. Like the Christians, Nietzsche saw pride as decadent.The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui;Self-determination is at the heart of the half-baked notion of free will which grants us absolute moral responsibility but absolves us of any responsibility to God, tradition, society, prevailing winds and so forth. and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.we seek to found our understanding of our existence, of Being, in this half-baked notion of free willIf any one should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of “free will” and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of "free will ":self-explanatory I mean “non-free will,” which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly materialise “cause” and “effect,” as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them naturalise in thinking at present), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it “effects” its end;the natural philosophers’ understanding of cause and effect is of a cause perpetuating and exhausting itself only when the effect is brought about. I think Nietzsche is implying that cause and effect is simply a habitual description, and is useful as such, but amounts to an error when stated as part of some natural mechanism. one should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure conceptions, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding, - not for explanation.This would appear to validate what I just said In “being-in-itself” there is nothing of “causal-connection,” of “necessity!” or of “psychological non-freedom” there the effect does not follow the cause, there “law” does not obtain.He doesn’t say it explicitly here but this is one of Nietzsche’s various attacks on the notion of being-in-itself, a notion he supplants with pure Becoming, which needs not this naturalised framework of causal connections, of the necessary connection between events. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as “being in itself,” with things, we act once more as we have always acted - mythologically.When we attempt to naturalise these notions of causal connection and free will with being-in-itself we are simply conforming to a classical myth, we aren’t perceiving any necessary truth. The “non-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills. Life is the interplay of opposing forces, the Heraclitean notion of everything being born of flux and returning to flux, no free will, only riding the crest of a never-to-be-repeated wave- It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every “causal-connection” and “psychological necessity,” manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings - the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the “non-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their “responsibility,” their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this class);One reason for the perpetuation of the notion of free will - it flatters the vanity of the weak willed others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to get out of the business, no matter how.How the weak willed also seek a certain fatalism, a certain non-freedom of the will The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favourite disguise.Interestingly this approach has even been taken toward suicide bombers. Fucking bleeding heart liberals who want to hen-peck the terrorists as they reach for the detonator… And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as “la religion souffrrance humaine”; that is its “good taste.”

Nietzsche is now trying to sell his notion of the non-freedom of the will to the weak-willed, playing the salesman. The passage sort of loses its momentum toward the end as Nietzsche never bothers to explicitly state how self-determination is a logical error other than to state how the notions of necessity and causal connections which are necessary for self-determination are simply a habitual description rather than an inherent part of the mechanism of being in itself, or whatever you want to call it. Then he starts rather comically peddling this notion of the non-freedom of the will.