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Is Jesus's "this generation will certainly not pass" valid grounds for scepticism?

Poem said:
What about Young's double slit experiment? The resulting pattern on the screen is different if we observe which slit the particle goes through - you don't get the interference pattern you get when not observing - you just get two strips of light.

That's mere observation altering a future outcome. And no one understands it.
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...is that a free will argument, or a Jesus one, or...?
 
The question of determinism vs free will never be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.

The argument for free will is only based on feelings, and as Darat has pointed out, feelings are not very good arguments.

The argument against is based on the lack of something that really needs to be explained, and the complete absence of a mechanism by which free will could operate, so it is the more parsimonious explanation, but not something that can constitute a definitive answer.

We do know that free will does not work in a number of situations, because our actions can often be influenced, or forced without us knowing it. We can be influenced by sounds, light, and smells. Pheromones can make us sexually interested in others, and they can make us buy stuff we wouldn’t otherwise buy. If the brain is damaged we may change behaviour, or even personality. These facts certainly do not work in favour of free will and spirits.

When our brains makes decisions, there millions of possible inputs. Not just the biology, the situation, and previous memories, but also random effects such as a stray cosmic ray that knocks an electron out of its path in the brain. All of which makes it impossible to ever accurately predict which decision a person will make, so instead we use the closest model of brain behaviour, which we call free will.

Free will works as a model, and we know that by free will we also include behaviours that are not exactly based on really free will, such as when people decide not to do something because of the consequences, or punishment it may provoke.

People that use determinism as excuse for their behaviour are just pathetic. It is ironic that precisely by claiming they don’t have free will, they think they can do whatever they want to do out of their free will.
 
steenkh said:
The question of determinism vs free will never be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.

The argument for free will is only based on feelings, and as Darat has pointed out, feelings are not very good arguments.
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Negative. There's no feelings involved in my steadfast experience of having hands. You can argue till you are blue in the face that "your hands are an illuuuuuuuusion, man" but until you come up with something better than you own feelings on how you think things should be, it's falling mighty flat.
steenkh said:
When our brains makes decisions, there millions of possible inputs. Not just the biology, the situation, and previous memories, but also random effects such as a stray cosmic ray that knocks an electron out of its path in the brain. All of which makes it impossible to ever accurately predict which decision a person will make, so instead we use the closest model of brain behaviour, which we call free will.
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There is no evidence whatsoever that an electron being knocked out of it's path in the brain affects the decision making process. It's an entirely imaginary explanation, and will remain so till the most elementary structure of decision making is at least broad brush understood.
steenkh said:
Free will works as a model, and we know that by free will we also include behaviours that are not exactly based on really free will, such as when people decide not to do something because of the consequences, or punishment it may provoke.
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That is what Libet accidentally rediscovered. Your subconscious makes inconsequential decisions for you literally all the time. We have known this for many generations. More recent studies have shown that for consequential decisions, higher executive functioning kicks in and those 'run up' decisions get vetoed. Some decisions get made for you, like which foot to put forward when walking. Higher functions, we don't understand how they exactly (or even approximately) are arrived at. Until that can be shown, I still have hands.
steenkh said:
People that use determinism as excuse for their behaviour are just pathetic. It is ironic that precisely by claiming they don’t have free will, they think they can do whatever they want to do out of their free will.
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Agreed, but I don't think many people actually do so.
 
Free will, and decisions in general, aren't physical phenomena, they're a feature of our mental (and written etc.) narratives about reality.

But so are lots of other things we talk about. For instance, problems, and solutions to problems. Nature reflects the attitude of the t-shirt saying: "Drinking problem? I drink, I get drunk, I fall down. No problem." Rising oxygen level poisons microbes? Asteroid wipes out entire ecosystem? Disease kills tribe? Wolf kills baby? No problem. Problems and solutions are fictional characters in our stories about nature and ourselves.

So in our narratives, we use a fictional thing (free will decision making) to do a fictional thing (avoid or resolve) to another fictional thing (problems).

Like Harry Potter using a magic sword to blind a basilisk, it's internally self-consistent, and underlying reality doesn't care.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
Do we need a new topic about "free will" ?
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That's a choice someone may need to make...
Manopolus said:
Just one final note: I'm not necessarily arguing against determinism. Free will and determinism can coexist. All you have to do is add in a multiverse and/or perhaps just a little randomness. Obviously, many effects have causes... won't deny that. Some things we can only calculate as probabilities, though... which isn't strictly deterministic in my book.

But yeah... I'm aware that we're on a derail. A thread on this question likely already exists that goes way back to the beginnings of the forum.
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My view is that we live in a universe/reality with an invariably strict casualty at the human scales, but I don't think it is a determinate reality because of the underlying randomness.

What that means in regards to free will is that we don't have it in the classical sense, every choice we make is almost the only possible. choice but because we have randomness in the foundations we are not in principle 100% predictable. But I chose not to call that free will.
 
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The “casualty” should of course been “causality”, the auto prediction decided incorrectly to insert the wrong word, bad decision.
 
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