• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Science and free will

UndercoverElephant said:
I'm not going to try to define "soul", no. It's a bit like trying to define "God."
Click to expand...
But you have already provided an implicit definition of "soul" - you have defined it as something that is capable of complex behaviour without any underlying mechanism whatsoever.
 
Robin said:
...you have defined it as something that is capable of complex behaviour without any underlying mechanism whatsoever.
Click to expand...

Complex behavior... no underlying mechanism... irreducibly complex behavior?

Or soul reducible to complex + behavior?

Irred... wait...

Irreducible complexity?

By golly, I think we're on to something here!
:p
 
Beth said:
You believe in destiny then? That our fates are as fixed as the orbits of the planets?
Click to expand...

I don’t ‘believe’ anything. As I’ve said, the question is fundamentally undecidable. But…

Whatever else I am, I’m a medium sized object, consisting of a bounded set of complex physical processes. All of the other objects of this sort I know about (clouds, weather systems, brewing vats, trees) obey physical laws – in complex, formally chaotic and fundamentally unpredictable ways, granted – but nobody claims that this amounts to free will.

Now there are ways in which I’m different from a cloud or a brewing vat – I’m the only kind of object I know about that’s definitely aware of its own surroundings (although I’m surrounded by objects similar to me that appear to be), and I’m one of a tiny class of objects that can actively affect their own environment based on the stimuli that they recieve. None of those reasons, though, seem to lead in any obvious way to ‘free will’, however you choose to define it.

When we get right down to my cellular chemistry it’s all about confined diffusion, electrostatic attraction, the arrangement of hydrophobic and hydrophilic regions of enzymes to catalyse the shuffling of molecular groups about. Nothing seems at that level to be ‘deciding’ to do anything, and there is as yet no evidence that anything out of the ordinary is happening at some lower level than that.

So I suppose, on balance and in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary I have to say that it doesn’t seem likely that I ‘could have acted’ in any way other than I did, or do. ‘Destiny’, though, is a bit of a loaded and overdramatic word. You could say that when I drop a ball its ‘destiny’ is to hit the ground, but you’d be overdignifying a perfectly ordinary phenomenon.
 
rocketdodger said:
There must be an isomorphism between the thoughts of a conscious entity and the underlying physical substrate those thoughts are expressed on.

In other words, every thought we have is isomorphic to some behavior of the systems particles our brains are made of.
Click to expand...

Why? As far as anyone knows you aren’t materially different from that of the chair you’re sitting in. If you got together X grams of carbon, Y grams of nitrogen, Z grams of oxygen etc. etc. until we’ve covered all the elements you’re made of and stuck it on that chair (imagine the room’s chilled so it’s all solid), what is the difference in that heap’s ‘physical substrate’ and your own?

The obvious answer is that the matter is arranged in a more complicated way, but what is it about the organisation process that uniquely gives the particular arrangement of the atoms that occupy the chair at the moment access to some sort of magical process that allows it to escape the physical laws that appear to govern the behaviour of everything else at that scale?
 
Robin said:
But you have already provided an implicit definition of "soul" - you have defined it as something that is capable of complex behaviour without any underlying mechanism whatsoever.
Click to expand...

I did not say that. I don't believe in a complex soul.
 
Matt the Poet said:
The obvious answer is that the matter is arranged in a more complicated way, but what is it about the organisation process that uniquely gives the particular arrangement of the atoms that occupy the chair at the moment access to some sort of magical process that allows it to escape the physical laws that appear to govern the behaviour of everything else at that scale?
Click to expand...
What physical laws?
 
cyborg said:
Without a program how can a decision be rightfully called a decision?
Click to expand...
Free will proponents seem to believe that a free will decision is excempt from things like causality and therefore a "program" is not involved in that decision.
 
Last edited:
PixyMisa said:
What physical laws?
Click to expand...

Fair enough then, I mean some self-consistent set of rules of the sort that at least appears to completely determine the behaviour of all objects above a certain scale in the physical world.

The point(s) being that a) however you arrange it, any given heap of stuff appears to have exactly the same relationship to the stochastic processes of quantum physics which supply the only physically plausible source of ‘free will’ as any other and b) there is (as yet) no mechanism by which anything, including my brain can influence those processes.

I can’t change the half-life of the Carbon-14 in my body, so what makes you think I can decide what to have for lunch?
 
paximperium said:
Free will proponents seem to believe that a free will decision is excempt from things like causality and therefore a "program" is not involved in that decision.
Click to expand...

And all I want to know is then what *is* involved and how does it work...
 
paximperium said:
Free will proponents seem to believe that a free will decision is excempt from things like causality and therefore a "program" is not involved in that decision.
Click to expand...

There can be a program involved. It just can't be the whole story if we are talking about libertarian free will.
 
paximperium said:
You just seem to believe in an undefined soul that must be involved with free will.
Click to expand...

The word "soul" is loaded with various meanings I don't want to imply. For example, I'm not implying that each of us has one of these things and that it goes to heaven when we die. All I am saying is that if libertarian free will exists then there must be something more than just brain activity - some additional component of the explanation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom