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InvisibleConfucian
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I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means
    #22131020 - 08/23/15 01:52 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

I really didn't understand when scientists and philosophers discussed free will being an illusion.

I watched a video on it and I think I get it now though, let me know if this is correct.

Basically, the brain is a very advanced and mysterious organ. There are all these inputs that go into it based on experience, environment, DNA, etc.

IF we had the technology and a better understanding of the inner workings of the brain we could predict other people's choices before the person was even conscious of making their choice.

Take a simple example, picking out an item to eat on the menu. If you had your scientific tools connected to a person's brain, and understood the brain fully, the scientist looking at the data in the person's brain would be able to predict said person's food choice before they were aware of making their own decision.

Is this basically what is meant by not having free will even when it comes to a simple choice, A or B or C?


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InvisibleLunarEclipse
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: Confucian]
    #22131102 - 08/23/15 02:18 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

You can not measure something without changing it.  Coring into someones skull would normally affect their food choice simply from the drilling, let alone the hooking up of electrodes.  Sure, in the movie Hannabil, he was able to do it to Ray Liatto with the assistance of drugs, but there again, he changed things.


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InvisibleOrgoneConclusion
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: LunarEclipse]
    #22131114 - 08/23/15 02:21 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Creepiest movie scene ever!


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InvisibleLunarEclipse
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: OrgoneConclusion]
    #22131129 - 08/23/15 02:25 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

OrgoneConclusion said:
Creepiest movie scene ever!




Was not.  Watch the movie Seven, then come back and we'll talk more.


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InvisibleOrgoneConclusion
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: LunarEclipse]
    #22131134 - 08/23/15 02:26 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

How many times do I have to watch it? :confused:


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InvisibleLunarEclipse
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: OrgoneConclusion]
    #22131159 - 08/23/15 02:34 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

OrgoneConclusion said:
How many times do I have to watch it? :confused:




49.  In the year of 2015, the Shemitah of Shemitahs.


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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: Confucian] * 1
    #22131288 - 08/23/15 03:08 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Your argument would hold water if we lived in a Cartesian universe.  Both Relativity theory and Quantum theory showed conclusively that we do not live in a Cartesian universe, around the beginning of the last century.  Therefore, things are not as simple as 'billiard-balls' clunking around, and any argument that consciousness cannot (or does not) have causal efficacy in some sense would need to be orchestrated in a more sophisticated way.  Culture at large has not caught up with this basic fact, over a hundred years later.


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Invisiblequinn
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #22131447 - 08/23/15 03:46 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

how does relativity or quantum change the question of free will?.. or i mean how does it relate to the op's hypothetical about predicting people's behaviour :confused2:


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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: quinn]
    #22131590 - 08/23/15 04:12 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

quinn said:
how does relativity or quantum change the question of free will?.. or i mean how does it relate to the op's hypothetical about predicting people's behaviour :confused2:




Briefly, the Cartesian worldview, which has held sway in Western civilization from the 1600s through the present, stipulates that we live in a deterministic universe governed by absolute space and absolute time, with the speed of light being infinite.  Essentially, the notion is that if one has enough information about the initial conditions of the universe, one can predict its course exactly.  This means really that causality is like a bunch of billiard-balls, all bouncing in perfectly deterministic lockstep, and free-will has no place at all.  In the Cartesian worldview, we must be mechanistic automatons

Around 1905, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity proved that we do not have absolute space or time, and the speed of light is finite.  Therefore, space and time are not continuous across some perfect reference frame, and Cartesian absolutism is dealt its first blow.

Quantum theory further indicated that causality is more complex than just vanilla billiard-balls.  We find that the observer has an intimate connection with what he is observing, and that we cannot say we are independently observing a static reality.  You can see how this would throw a monkey-wrench into the static Cartesian picture.  Not only that, but now, nature seems to be governed, not by determined events, but by statistical, acausal ones.  God is playing dice, after all.  And not only that, but we are finding now that particles have discontinuous histories -- they travel from one place to another without going through the intervening space.

These are all strictly NON-Cartesian phenomena.  So when someone presents a theory that looks like billiard-balls, by all means, throw it out.


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InvisibleConfucian
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #22131634 - 08/23/15 04:19 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

This is the video I was referring to, that helped me understand why nearly EVERY CREDIBLE SCIENTIST AND PHILOSOPHER believes free will does not exist.

He also touches on how quantum mechanics does not prove that free will doesn't exist.



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InvisibleLunarEclipse
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #22131677 - 08/23/15 04:27 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Why do I have a sudden urge to go play 8 ball?


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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: Confucian]
    #22131682 - 08/23/15 04:28 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Dude, it's fine not to believe in free will, and I never claimed quantum theory proves it exists, I only suggested it makes the picture more complicated.  I personally do not believe in the notion of free will as it is commonly set forth, either.  But there are plenty of credible scientists who do believe in it, I can think of five or six off the top of my head, including Einstein.


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InvisibleKurt
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: quinn] * 1
    #22131746 - 08/23/15 04:40 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

As I understand DQ may be saying something at least in part, in terms of epistemelogical bases of thinking. Ie. Cartesianism is not a science but a conventional attitude which has tended to lay bear the possibility of what we call reality as given, mechanistically.

So I take it DQ is speaking to sciences per se, wherein observances, have seemed in ways to imply a different epistemological background. We are grappling with it. Cartesianism could be described as a way of thinking that was being vested in, and I think historically speaking, the absolute principle of it was for a long time confirmed, but has finally been loosened up, by scientific discovery.

That relation (epistemology to science) is significant and interesting, to say the least. I would say, I think the philosophical principle in mind was probably "loosened up" rather than overthrown or broken considering how much thinking today still remains decisively Cartesian in general.

For instance, probably in these new sciences, we still view the "extention" (res extensa) of the world as Descartes put it; ie. what is found in dimensions, which Kant later established more intuitively as space and time.

The principles of a sufficient reason, or the prior intuition of a phenomenon, or then again, finally something quite less intuitive, will probably lie in such a notion of "dimension", but perhaps in a much more open contingence basis than we actually are able to intuitively comprehend, being biological creatures with certain formal capacities. I'd say in reflection of this our world calls for completely new ways of thinking and meditating on physical nature.

To the topic, I'd say determinism is a kind of a modern idea of fate. It is a notional (metaphysical) projection for a kind of people, who like to know ie. "determine" things. Hopefully the modern world moves a little way away from that Baconian obsession with levers and pullies, the projectional conduct of force, and more towards letting nature be in itself, or as something to meditate on in new ways. I for one am sick of the mechanical project.


Edited by Kurt (08/23/15 06:07 PM)


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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: Kurt]
    #22131760 - 08/23/15 04:45 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Very well said, Kurt. :thumbup:  I would also point out that in modern Quantum theory, the notion of dimension is even being overthrown.  I.e., as pertains to quantum entanglement and nonlocality -- still a very new and vexing subject.


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InvisibleConfucian
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #22131797 - 08/23/15 04:51 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

DividedQuantum said:
But there are plenty of credible scientists who do believe in it, I can think of five or six off the top of my head, including Einstein.




“If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”

Albert Einstein; Non-believer in free will


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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: Confucian]
    #22131810 - 08/23/15 04:54 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

I stand corrected. :thumbup:


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OfflineJaegar
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: Confucian]
    #22133327 - 08/23/15 11:15 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Thx for the video fellow meat machine.


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Invisiblequinn
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #22134605 - 08/24/15 09:13 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

i still dont see why throwing randomness into the billiard ball model would suggest something was or wasnt free will.. to me it seems things could be just as deterministic and mechanistic with random elements thrown in.

imo free will is about human subjects and i would argue that the correct framing of the question is not between a quantum and cartesian model but between a marxist and cartesian model.

in the sense that where descarte saw human subjects as self contained experiencing subjects, marx saw the human subject as a construct of intersubjective relationships within human society and so imo the question of whether a human has free will or not only becomes relevant in the governance of human subjects within society (i.e. free will is relevant between self and society (law), self and partner (marriage) and so on..)  :twocents:


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Offlinecircastes
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: quinn] * 1
    #22134953 - 08/24/15 10:47 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Most of the quantum physicists were mystics, in that they had a religious temperament and were interested in the unity of things. See that moron Ken Wilber's book "Quantum Questions" (he's okay he just writes like a moron)

HEY KIDDOS WANNA STUDY SOME QUANTUM PHYSICIST'S MYSTIC ESSAYS? WA-HEY! HEEEEERREEEE WE GO!!!


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Offlinecircastes
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Re: I Think I Finally Understand What Not Having Free Will Means [Re: circastes] * 1
    #22134961 - 08/24/15 10:49 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

By the way if need philosophy, logic or physics to determine if you have free will or not, you need to a) get out more or b) become less of a victim of abstraction or c) both a) and b).

:cheers:


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