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Do you have Free Will?
- Thread starter Awoon
- Start date
This would be a false dichotomy. Self-determination is cause for reflect.
We've discussed this before, but my issues with determinism are basically that it depends on the assumption that consciousness isn't itself a cause, and the assumption that there is some unbroken chain of cause and effect that must result in a single outcome. I don't think either have been substantiated.
Skwim
Veteran Member
Are you saying that self determination is uncaused? It arises randomly or ?????? If ??????, then what is the mechanism?
Consciousness is merely one stage in the chain of cause/effect operations.Falvlun said:
I don't see it any other way, except, perhaps, if a truly random event was to interfere.
For me it's a matter of options, or lack thereof. Cause/effect or randomness.
If an event arises I see only two possible reasons: It arose absolutely randomly or it was caused. If it was absolutely random then "freewill" plays no part. If it was caused then, again, "freewill" plays no part.
Why need I pick? How do you define randomness and how does this relate to the various measures of randomness that exist?
Skwim
Veteran Member
You don't. I don't hold anyone's feet to the fire. However, if one is going to go along with the notion that there's a reason we do things and wants to identify that reason, then I can only see the two possibilities I've mentioned, or a combination of them.
The appearance of an event that is absolutely without cause.
I haven't the slightest idea.
But now we have two more problems. Let's stick with one. You know I believe of the nonlocal correlation experiments that have been going on since Aspect's work in the early 80s. For him (and Gisin, I think) it was paired photons, but let's just say particles. Two particles are separated by an arbitrary difference but the behavior of each is correlated with the other instantaneously. At this point any hope of explaining the correlations via something like measurement failure or inadequate methods or anything but what was predicted in the 30s by Einstein and colleagues, formulated into a proof usable for experimentation by Bell, and finally carried out over and over again since Aspect's 82 & 83 studies.
Correlation, though, is not causation. It can be explained 3 ways: A causes B, B causes A, or C causes both. Here, if either of the first two are the answer, then these are non-random events (as they are predictable; so predictable that 50 years before we could do the experiments to show this it was known). However, to say that one causes the other is to say that causality doesn't hold. There is no possible way for the behavior of one photon to cause the behavior of another miles away instantaneously (not in classical causality at any rate). So we can try to exclude those. But then we are left with C, the cause for both. Only there is none. So we have a completely predictable result without a cause.
Thank goodness. I thought it was just me.
I agree... time travel is theoretically possible, meaning the fabric of time and space moves in all directions relatively speaking.
Looping back on itself to create eternities, perhaps. Infinities, ect...
I did hear one person mention this place was the only place of existence which grants the illusion of free will.
So good to hear the wormhole people are interested in destroying that for everyone.
Anyways, whether space is truly infinite, sure I personally lack proof, or evidence. Whether time is maneuverable and whether predictions are possible, is where more lack of proof exists.
However, philosophy and science, their fundamental teachings already prove the ideas through sheer odds.
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Randomness is not an alternative to causation--it is not uncaused.
Who can say what the mechanism is? What is the mechanism of causation?
I.S.L.A.M617
Illuminatus
^This.
^Logic, joining point A and B...
So... the safest bet is probably suggesting that point B may lead point A.
Perhaps linear time forward is illusory, and science algorithms predicting a time and place in which an object will be, is proof enough of determinism.
Want more? Well... the unseen forces in nature make predictability and causation nothing more than a myth.
Skwim
Veteran Member
Thanks.
