Free Will and the Soul/Spirit.

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I may be throwing the word "breakthrough" out to hastily but do you not consider the recent knowledge about alcohol dependence as somewhat relevant?

I don't, and I also learned about what you post as an undergrad. It's not new. Are we influenced by everything from being human to "peer-pressure"? Of course. Are our choices wholly determined? No. We have the ability to make choices that we could have made differently had we wished to. Even Libet, Harris' go-to source for "neuroscience" research, admits this.

Would you not consider this a sort of progression of some sort or do you just like opposing anything stated for the fun of it

That's not an "or" question, my friend (or at least, it's an inclusive "or", not an exclusive one). As I said, we're influenced by lots of things. As for my compulsion to disagree, that has more to do with the fact that I don't talk about things I don't know about (or think I know about) and am content to read most threads. I jump in when I disagree. This and massively long, tedious posts are my calling card. Somebody already called The Joker.

Free will is something I've been debating since my beginnings here, though. I even started a thread on it: How Free Will Works- An account without a model or free will

But again, perhaps I am being over dramatic in my speech.

Over dramatic? No such thing. I myself am learn'd in many techniques of the "drama queen" from my brother and am receiving a master's level course from my 2-year-old niece, so I should know.

 

[Slapstick]

Over dramatic? No such thing. I myself am a learned many techniques of the "drama queen" from my brother and am receiving a master's level course from my 2-year-old niece, so I should know.

What does a drama queen sound like?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

What does a drama queen sound like?

Most of it is nonverbal, conveyed by gestures and facial expressions. One can convey whole worlds of a tragic "why me?" without saying a word, or sentence one to death with a glance.

 

[Sha'irullah]

I don't, and I also learned about what you post as an undergrad. It's not new. Are we influenced by everything from being human to "peer-pressure"? Of course. Are our choices wholly determined? No. We have the ability to make choices that we could have made differently had we wished to. Even Libet, Harris' go-to source for "neuroscience" research, admits this.

That's not an "or" question, my friend (or at least, it's an inclusive "or", not an exclusive one). As I said, we're influenced by lots of things. As for my compulsion to disagree, that has more to do with the fact that I don't talk about things I don't know about (or think I know about) and am content to read most threads. I jump in when I disagree. This and massively long, tedious posts are my calling card. Somebody already called The Joker.

Free will is something I've been debating since my beginnings here, though. I even started a thread on it: How Free Will Works- An account without a model or free will

Over dramatic? No such thing. I myself am learn'd in many techniques of the "drama queen" from my brother and am receiving a master's level course from my 2-year-old niece, so I should know.

Your entire argument is pretty much flawed. You are denying almost all recent claims about the human brain especially for that of profiling.

I heavily encourage you to read about James Fallon.

Also you keep tossing out the fact that we are not responsible for the events that shape us in our lives. We do not chose to be born in the environments we are born into nor how others treat us. We do not even choose the inability or capability of our brain's functions. I know this all to well first hand.
I myself have particular psychological issues which I for some reason cannot help. They affect every little detail about me and it took over a decade for me to notice.

You are essentially tossing all claims in sociology and neuroscience right out the window as of now. I heavily doubt you are what you claim and your consistent mentioning of it is not helping if you are going to persistently ignore basics.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I heavily encourage you to read about James Fallon.

I have. He's not really much of a neuroscientist. He's a psychiatrist who's background and focus is largely clinical, not cognitive. There's a world of difference, and consciousness is a cognitive process, not a clinical one. It's our consciousness that even famed neuroscientists like Libet agree is behind our "free will":

you can start with Libet himself: "What we are sure of is the ability of the conscious will to block or veto the volitional process and prevent the appearance of any motor act. In other words, conscious free will could control the outcome of an unconsciously initiated process. Whether it has an additional role in enabling a nonvetoed act to proceed to consummation is not presently established experimentally"

But Libet's view is still too problematic as our volitional capacity, our free will, is greater than he allows thanks to problems with his methods:

"These experiments have been criticized many times, and some of my own objections to this interpretation of Libet’s work have appeared in print elsewhere (Donald, 2001). I have suggested that Libet’s paradigm overemphasizes the sensorimotor interface and ignores the slower time range within which human conscious awareness matters most, within which executive and supervisory operations such as planning, metacognitive oversight, and social communication take place. I have also suggested that we do not yet know enough about the slower-acting brain mechanisms that mediate such operations (Donald, 2008) to make pronouncements about the neural basis of consciousness. I will not repeat these points at length here.
However, there is another, more fundamental criticism of Libet’s movement paradigm. In it, subjects are sitting in a room with their hands on a platform, and the only thing they have to do is move a finger, without moving anything else (not easy). For subjects trapped in such a situation, this decision to move becomes the sole focus of attention. It is an excruciatingly boring task, and it is not easy to sustain interest in it; as a result, there is much subjective anticipation of each decision to move." pp. 11-12 of
Donald, M. (2004). Consciousness and the freedom to act. in R. F. Baumeister, A. R. Mele, & K. D. Vohs (Eds.) Free Will and Consciousness: How they Might work (Oxford university Press).

Also you keep tossing out the fact that we are not responsible for the events that shape us in our lives.

Are we influenced by everything from being human to "peer-pressure"? Of course.

We do not even choose the inability or capability of our brain's functions.

We do, albeit not completely by any stretch of the imagination. Mental illnesses can be overcome, memory improved, etc. However, I know of precious few instances of schizophrenia and similar disorders being overcome, none of autism spectrum disorders, and there is evidence to suggest that most neurological disorders are permanent (the brain is quite plastic, but lesions or damage large enough to show up in brain imagining are too large).
Free will doesn't mean we have absolute control over our destiny. It doesn't even mean that we have complete control over every choice we make. Clearly, if someone yells my name, I will likely instinctively turn (my brain receives the auditory input and unconsciously a motor program runs and my head turns without me "willing" it). That does not mean that if I choose to opt for candy instead of fruit for a snack, I couldn't have done other than that which I did. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and plenty of reasons to believe otherwise.

I myself have particular psychological issues which I for some reason cannot help.

I have a very hard time recognizing faces. Actually, I have a hard time telling people apart, noticing people, basically noticing a lot of things. I can watch (and have watched) a show or movie in which e.g., the same character is replaced by a different actor/actress and I don't notice, yet in the same shows and movies I notice equations on blackboards or whether a German font supposed to date from a specific period actually could date from this period. I have spent years trying to figure out how this works for me (among other things about me I try to figure out) and have become better informed and have used strategies to improve. It takes work, and a lot of it. What comes easily to me doesn't necessarily come easier to others, and what comes so easily to almost everyone requires intense concentration and focus for me. It is possible to help psychological issues (I have 0 idea whether this is true in your case; I'm speaking in generalities). That's why people have been successful in therapy. If it were impossible, we wouldn't have therapy, because therapy is about changing the way one thinks and, by extension, the way one's brain functions.

You are essentially tossing all claims in sociology and neuroscience right out the window as of now.

"One thing we worry about is that most people who read in newspapers or hear on DVDs that scientists have shown that free will is a myth might understand the expression ‘‘free will’’ very differently than those scientists do."
Baumeister, R., Mele, A., & Vohs, K. (Eds.). (2010). Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? Oxford University Press.

"the naturalist who denies free will is likely to argue, in a behaviorist vein, that the brain is the slave of its environment, so it cannot help making the decisions it makes: all of these would be stimulus-bound. This is what classical neuroscience and behaviorist (or stimulus-response) psychology used to teach. But we have known for a while that this view is wrong: that the brain is active all the time, even during sleep, and that most of its activities are spontaneous or self-generated rather than responses to external stimuli. We conjecture this because the brain applies only a tiny percentage of its energy budget to its transactions with the external world.
We also know that self-control, which is a necessary condition for free will, is a learnable function of the prefrontal cortex, the philogenetically newest area of the brain. So much so, that people with serious damage to that brain region lack free will: they are swayed by the stimuli impinging on them. Thus, the removal or disconnection of significant portions of nervous tissue in the prefrontal cortex causes “environmental dependency syndrome” – an irreversible disorder. However, self-determination is not the prerogative of the prefrontal cortex: it is a property of matter on all levels: recall the cases of inertia, self-organization, and spontaneous light emission and radioactivity."
(emphasis added)
Bunge, M. (2010). Matter and mind: A philosophical inquiry (Vol. 287). Springer.

I heavily doubt you are what you claim and your consistent mentioning of it is not helping if you are going to persistently ignore basics.

This is my field. If you doubt that, I can email you from my university email which has the building I work in as part of the address. Undergrads can't have that email and the building itself gives away what I do. So what "basics" am I ignoring?
"This seems to indicate that, although the action was not initiated consciously, it could be controlled consciously. Such a finding is somewhat parallel to other well-known actions, such as a desire to eat, over which we have little control when we are hungry although it is still possible for us to make the conscious decision to eat or not to eat. Certainly some of our actions are simply instinctive. Libet shows that some are initiated unconsciously, with decisions made only later, which can seem reasonable for phenomena like hunger and eating. Are all our actions of this type? Libet’s experimental observations maybe correct, but the actions he observed are still rather simplistic, and perhaps the results do not characterize behaviors that are complex and more important. Even if they do, the observations can allow us free will, but without free initiation. Furthermore, if directions toward any action are multiple and randomly initiated, and we can make a choice whether to proceed, we thus at least have a variety of possible free choices."
C. H. Townes. (2009). Can we understand free will? in Pollack (Ed.), Neurosciences and Free Will. Columbia University

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

No we don't. We don't have particular characteristics because of what we perceive to be the truth, but because of what they happen to be. Although it appears we have a free will and even operate as if we do, the fact is, we don't have any such thing. You couldn't have done differently than you did.

So if I couldn't have done it differently than I did, and I decide to get in my vehicle and start running people over... why should I be held morally accountable if I couldn't have dont it differently?

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

I have made a selection based upon my ability to reason. Reasoning skills are limitations we all have and we reason the best we can.

This is not free will. The only way it is free will if if you perceive it as a linguistics issue.

Our ability to make decisions does not imply free will. Does a toaster have decisions? Yes it does. It can be on or off, toasting or roasting. But it does not initiate it's own decisions. The user does.

The same way our instinctive and habitual nature determines our actions.

If I asked you why you chose a certain pair of shoes you would most likely say "because they looked nice". This is a lack of free will in itself and on top of it it only goes further to display that the shoes appeal is subjective implying further lack of free will.

I am not denying there is free will. I do not deny many things actually. But I see the evidence for the lack of utter free will greater than the ability for it.

 

[Willamena]

Hence why I believe it's perpetuated. We have free will because we believe we have it. As such we act within the confines if the only reality we have...our own.

Where "our own" is the only reality, again there is no difference.

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

Where "our own" is the only reality, again there is no difference.

Yeah, that's the point.

It's not really an answerable question, whether it exists or not doens't matter, because we assume that it does, and as such we act like it does.

Now if there is a diety, or we are in some computer program (then there is another reality, to which we can then compare that question to), but since we don't know of any, we simply have to accept that we have free will, or not accept it.

 

[Sha'irullah]

Just because you do not understand does not mean it can be refuted yet alone dismissed.

You are basing your predestined answer on circular logic. If there was no free will it would either prove your religion false or make your god cruel.

So your immediate assumption is that there must be free will or else the Bible is false. This is circular reasoning

 

[Willamena]

Yeah, that's the point.

It's not really an answerable question, whether it exists or not doens't matter, because we assume that it does, and as such we act like it does.

Now if there is a diety, or we are in some computer program (then there is another reality, to which we can then compare that question to), but since we don't know of any, we simply have to accept that we have free will, or not accept it.

But it is answerable. If there is no other option than what's in front of your face, there's no reason to propose an option.

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

But it is answerable. If there is no other option than what's in front of your face, there's no reason to propose an option.

Lol The perception of Free will allows you to propose the question.

By believing we have free will (be it that we are programmed to or not), we express the possibility that we might not (because we have been programmed to).

 

[Willamena]

Lol The perception of Free will allows you to propose the question.

By believing we have free will (be it that we are programmed to or not), we express the possibility that we might not (because we have been programmed to).

We believe in it because it has the appearance "true." If there's no way to say if it's not true, there's no reason to propose that it's not true.

There really is no teapot orbiting Mars.

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

We believe in it because it has the appearance "true." If there's no way to say if it's not true, there's no reason to propose that it's not true.

There really is no teapot orbiting Mars.

Except we do propose it is not, don't we? Only because some believe that the reality that we see isn't the only reality there is.

I don't think there is an answer, because it's not a question of right or wrong in my view.

 

[Willamena]

Except we do propose it is not, don't we? Only because some believe that the reality that we see isn't the only reality there is.

Just so. But then, they also do not propose that there's no way to say that it doesn't exist. They say there's this whole reality that isn't the only reality...

I don't think there is an answer, because it's not a question of right or wrong in my view.

What is a question of?

 

[Skwim]

So if I couldn't have done it differently than I did, and I decide to get in my vehicle and start running people over... why should I be held morally accountable if I couldn't have dont it differently?

You shouldn't.
However, as it turns out, because almost everyone buys into the notion of freewill, then that's what we do. We treat almost every human act as if it was one of two or more options we had to choose from at the moment. In actuality, there was no choosing involved at all. We do what we do because we can do no differently.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

You shouldn't.
However, as it turns out, because almost everyone buys into the notion of freewill, then that's what we do. We treat almost every human act as if it was one of two or more options we had to choose from at the moment. In actuality, there was no choosing involved at all. We do what we do because we can do no differently.

So if drunk driver runs out down you don't think he is wrong and should be held accountable...gotcha.

 

[Willamena]

So if drunk driver runs out down you don't think he is wrong and should be held accountable...gotcha.

Just so. That he's held to be in the wrong clearly suggests there was a right way of doing things that he could have, and should have, done.

 

[Sha'irullah]

Just so. That he's held to be in the wrong clearly suggests there was a right way of doing things that he could have, and should have, done.

Bazinga to this reply

So if drunk driver runs out down you don't think he is wrong and should be held accountable...gotcha.

No it means he should be held accountable for his actions. You are using word play here since our consciousness is our identity along with our actions.

A toaster does not have free will but when it pops do you not think to yourself "the toast is done toasting my bread". You imply that the toaster is responsible for doing the action desired.

Our will power is separate from our identity but not our existence.

Same for a drunk driver.

And gosh I just love these toaster analogies!

 

[Skwim]

So if drunk driver runs out down you don't think he is wrong and should be held accountable...gotcha.

"Gotcha"?

In any case I assume you meant to say,

"So if drunk driver runs you down you don't think he is wrong and should be held accountable...."
​

Of course I think he was wrong, I don't think running anyone down, me or the schmoe who lives across the street, is generally the right thing to do. As for being held accountable, I would have to know what manner such accountability would take. Are you using "accountable" in the sense of establishing,

A Confession?
  Get him to admit, "Yes! yes! yes! I did it."
Responsibility?
  That he rather than someone else.
Liability?
  He must pay for my injuries.
Penalization?
  He should suffer for his deed.
Something else?
  ___________fill in the blank___________ .