Free Will

dlorde said:
It's a terrible dilemma - how to assess responsibility and culpability? If we know a certain genotype or upbringing predisposes to antisocial behaviour, are these mitigating circumstances? What are the lines (how should we draw them?) between abnormal behaviour, criminal behaviour, and mental illness?
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I think that for now, it is definitely best to have the majority of humans believe that they do have free will. Else we would have srs problems.
 
Well, we do have a choice. You could choose to give up your will to some sort of cult or other ideological group of some sort, if you wanted to.

So, therefore, I would argue:

We all have potential to act as though we have free will.
 
OK, after having lurked in plenty of the Free Will threads in the past, one thing that was never made quite clear to me is what exactly does eveyone mean by "will". Is it the ability to make a decision, the outcome of the decision, or something completely different? That word is used in enough different contexts that it is really meaningless in the statement as worded in the OP.

Meh, I thought I had the willpower to avoid this type of discussion for at least another couple of months.
 
Hokulele said:
OK, after having lurked in plenty of the Free Will threads in the past, one thing that was never made quite clear to me is what exactly does eveyone mean by "will". Is it the ability to make a decision, the outcome of the decision, or something completely different? That word is used in enough different contexts that it is really meaningless in the statement as worded in the OP.

Meh, I thought I had the willpower to avoid this type of discussion for at least another couple of months.
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I always thought it meant that "you" as a conscious rational entity, can determine the outcome of a "choice", without regard for causality(the outcome of the selection can not be calculable beforehand given unlimited computing power and full knowledge of the involved entry variables, and thought processing algorithms).

For all of you guys that do believe in free will, I would ask you the following:

What part of the human mind is immune to causality, and how does this translate into "you" being the decision maker?

I have already addressed the "randomness" bit satisfactorily(I think?), and shown why it would not amount to free will.

I would really love to believe that I do truly have free will. I was honestly quite upset to come to this conclusion years ago.
 
Oh, people were serious? I thought this was just another exercise in making unfalsifiable statements.
 
Mercutio said:
Oh, people were serious? I thought this was just another exercise in making unfalsifiable statements.
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I am not saying that this is some scientific viewpoint that I hold. I understand that this is philosophical.

I just do not think that the onus should be on me to prove that free will does not exist. Instead, those who do believe in free will, should be able to describe the mechanism behind it, and how the mind is able to violate rules that everything else in the universe seems bound by.

This debate is interesting, but I can agree that from a pragmatic standpoint, it is pretty useless.
 
Free will ? Nope.

My mom told me that according to Sylvia Browne our life pattern has already been determined before we are born.
 
Actually, Gate, that's why I started by asking "what do you mean by it?" To me "free will" merely means that nobody else takes the decisions for you, and their result is not pre-determined. You seem to think that if it's not a completely random thing, i.e., if you had any causes for that decision at all, then it wasn't free will.

My point is merely: is that causality _complete_? Was every single decision you ever took pre-determined by the data you have? I don't think anyone can make that kind of a claim yet.

Also it seems to me like you make a definitive claim that it doesn't exist and can't exist, so you do have a burden of proof in there. Just formulating the claim in the negative isn't a way out. E.g., if I claimed that aliens can't exist because they'd violate the laws of the universe, or that the sun doesn't exist and it's just an illusion, I'd still have a burden of proof even though it's in the negative.

The only position that really doesn't need defending is not making a claim at all. Basically, "I haven't seen any evidence to make me believe in X, so I see no reason to bother with that."
 
Also, just to make it clear: the reason why I introduced the randomness of the world in this discussion was to elliminate the possibility of a long-term deterministic world. I.e., predestination.

That, of course, doesn't preclude more immediate determinism, but it does put some limits on much grander claims than that.
 
dlorde said:
There are those who say that the world is either deterministic or not, and if it is not deterministic, there must be an element of randomness (probablility = biased randomness). But if deterministic, wherefore free will?
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Free will doesn't exist. Randomness isn't free will and determinism isn't, either. Unless someone can propose a mechanism by which one makes decisions not randomly AND not based on previous experiences, that horse is dead, dead, dead.
 
Belz... said:
Might've been thought-provoking before Socrates.
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So something is no longer thought-provoking if it has a long history? ISTM that some people won't have discussed it and some who have might want to revisit it. It's entirely optional...
 
Gate2501 said:
This debate is interesting, but I can agree that from a pragmatic standpoint, it is pretty useless.
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A reasonably enlightened society has to discriminate between physical responsibility and moral or social responsibility. With lawyers ever more keen to use "My <genes/medication/behavioural modifier of choice> made me do it" defences, the task is becomes more difficult.
 
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