Free will does not exist (Beware)

Burning ghost · Post by **Burning ghost** » January 29th, 2019, 8:52 am

RJG -

Says who? You miss the point. It is immoral, or rather you don’t believe in moral responsibility therefore you’re always correct and you can kill and maim people with a clear conscious because you make no “choices” because you don’t know what they are and think that is enough to say “I don’t know, therefore it’s a fallacy” rather than I could be wrong ... given that you’ve already declared “no choice” you cannot even do this therefore you’re a danger to the people around you.

You claim to follow “logic” so where does that little ditty fall down? Or do you make the non-choice and claim some hidden knowledge over everyone else?

RJG · Post by **RJG** » January 29th, 2019, 9:32 am

Burning ghost wrote:You miss the point. It is immoral, or rather you don’t believe in moral responsibility therefore you’re always correct and you can kill and maim people with a clear conscious because you make no “choices” because you don’t know what they are and think that is enough to say “I don’t know, therefore it’s a fallacy” rather than I could be wrong ... given that you’ve already declared “no choice” you cannot even do this therefore you’re a danger to the people around you.

So is it your point here that free-will is 'true' because otherwise it would be immoral???

Burning ghost · Post by **Burning ghost** » January 29th, 2019, 9:40 am

No. I am asking you if you could possibly be wrong. If you say no then I’d say that’s a very strange answer to give.

I never said anything about this or that being “true”.

RJG · Post by **RJG** » January 29th, 2019, 9:49 am

Yes, it is possible that I could be wrong.

Burning ghost · Post by **Burning ghost** » January 29th, 2019, 10:08 am

How possible?

RJG · Post by **RJG** » January 29th, 2019, 11:27 am

Well, if I had to take a 'guess', I would say definitely less than 0.01%

Burning ghost · Post by **Burning ghost** » January 29th, 2019, 11:40 am

I guess the bonus you have is not having to back up your claim because you didn’t make the “choice” in the first place. Convenient yet pointless in a debate.

Morally it simply doesn’t hold up as I’ve said before. You changed your position there at all?

Eduk · Post by **Eduk** » January 29th, 2019, 11:55 am

personal incredulity has a less than 0.01% failure rate.

Eduk · Post by **Eduk** » January 29th, 2019, 11:56 am

oh I mean greater, not less. If that wasn't obvious.

RJG · Post by **RJG** » January 29th, 2019, 2:29 pm

Burning ghost wrote:Morally it simply doesn’t hold up as I’ve said before.

You've got it backwards. Morality has nothing to do with the truth/falseness of free-will. Though, but without free-will, there can be no morality (moral responsibility).

Burning ghost · Post by **Burning ghost** » January 29th, 2019, 10:48 pm

RJG wrote: ↑January 29th, 2019, 2:29 pm
Burning ghost wrote:Morally it simply doesn’t hold up as I’ve said before.
You've got it backwards. Morality has nothing to do with the truth/falseness of free-will. Though, but without free-will, there can be no morality (moral responsibility).

Like I said, you can conveniently fall back on not having to be responsible for your actions. I never said morality dictates whether our choices ate illusionary or not only that if they’re not illusionary then insisting they are is immoral.

It is quite a simple logical sequence. If you’re wrong you’ve been a passenger to your own laziness. If I’m wrong it makes no difference. Morally speaking the logical way to live is as if you have free will.

Djacob7 · Post by **Djacob7** » January 29th, 2019, 11:15 pm

It's entirely possible that, even though free will doesn't exist, we can pretend that it does. That's what Yuval Harari calls "human stories." A murderer just has bad luck, just as a billionaire has just been lucky.

Burning ghost · Post by **Burning ghost** » January 30th, 2019, 3:26 am

Djacob7 wrote: ↑January 29th, 2019, 11:15 pm It's entirely possible that, even though free will doesn't exist, we can pretend that it does. That's what Yuval Harari calls "human stories." A murderer just has bad luck, just as a billionaire has just been lucky.

This is what gets me. It is the absolutism of the position. You cannot know that it doesn’t exist. If you hold to the idea that free will doesn’t exist (as in making choices in life) then it simply leaning toward fatalism of some kind, nihilism and shifting toward a life where what you do and say doesn’t matter or make a difference. It is vacuous to live such a life - or rather such a “life” is not a life at all, it is to live denying your own limit choices in your own life.

As a item of contemplation I have nothing against this. As a foundation for human meaning ... well, it is anti-human; at least in part. What seems to be truer is that we’re born making choices and doing this or that, having this or that thought, and that someone taking your kind of line of thinking is the one “pretending” not everyone else. This is not to say you’re correct or incorrect (because we don’t know), but it is apparent, to me at least, that morally speaking it is wrong to assume what you does has no effect on yourself or anyone else and that your life is preset. To add it’s also wrong to assume that everything you do and think has an effect on everyone and everything - both are the first steps to apathy, intolerance and eventually a nihilistic catatonia or violent anarchism unbound by any consequences of action (because one either gives up or stops caring about anything).

It is amazing that we exist. Nothing that we’ve learnt about nature points toward a clockwork universe and we’ve no idea if our consciously perceived choices are really fully dictated by conscious thought or not. We most certainly do know that we consciously feel authorship, and we also know that we can be fooled into feeling authorship for our choices when we’re actually not the origin but more of a consequence. Even so, consciousness exists and confused, puzzled or fooled as it often is or isn’t we are able to view consciousness in an “as if” sense and think and understand that we can feel one thing that contradicts the facts.

As a simple hypothetical take this one ... you can save a million children by assuming free will exists or let them die in agony. Or you can save a million children by assuming free will doesn’t exist or let them die in agony.

If you act like you have free will then the choice is easy in both cases. If you adhere to either one or the other dogmatically then you lack the ability to make any meaningful moral choice.

Post by **LuckyR** » January 30th, 2019, 3:40 am

Djacob7 wrote: ↑January 29th, 2019, 11:15 pm It's entirely possible that, even though free will doesn't exist, we can pretend that it does. That's what Yuval Harari calls "human stories." A murderer just has bad luck, just as a billionaire has just been lucky.

"entirely possible"? You've got several errors within your three sentences. Firstly, you overstate the certainty of the non-existence of free will. It may not exist, but everyone's personal experience is consistent with a universe where it does. Arguments against it are purely theoretical and unproven. IMO even if it doesn't exist, that "fact" will never be proven.

And since the observable universe of animal/human behavior acts as if free will exists, the level of luck vs choice in the murdrrer and billionaire should also be observed and commented upon from the perspective of within that universe.

Djacob7 · Post by **Djacob7** » January 30th, 2019, 4:16 am

Burning ghost said:
"If you hold to the idea that free will doesn’t exist (as in making choices in life) then it simply leaning toward fatalism of some kind, nihilism and shifting toward a life where what you do and say doesn’t matter or make a difference. It is vacuous to live such a life - or rather such a “life” is not a life at all, it is to live denying your own limit choices in your own life."

Choices are made, but they're made by incredible, unimaginably complex beings such as snails and humans, all functioning automatically, after millions of years of honing their perfections garnered by evolution.
To assume that only humans make choices is a bit anthropocentric because all creatures are constantly making choices as in fight or flight, which mate to pursue, etc.
You're right that it's impossible to prove free will doesn't exist, because one cannot prove a negative. You can't prove unicorns don't exist.
But it can be shown how the assumption of free will leads to ridiculous absurdities such as:
1) Only humans have free will.
2) At what age does free will show up?
3) What percentage of our waking hours are spent exercising our free will?
4) Does free will have degrees?
5) Do we relinquish our free will by choice?
6) Do we have free will over blinking and breathing?
These are only some of the questionable questions that arise at the moment, and many more could be brought up with careful thought.
The lack of free will doesn't of itself lead to nihilism and meaninglessness. On the contrary: It's totally amazing to witness ones own abilities and those of others.
Yes, life itself operates like a clock, but a magnificent one.