I provided you an experiment that would provide you evidence of free will. How did that go?
Post #86
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Is Free Will Incompatible with Neuroscience?
- Thread starter Rational Agnostic
- Start date
I provided you an experiment that would provide you evidence of free will. How did that go?
Post #86
There seems a lot of similarities that can be made. I try to be cautious and open though as there is quite a difference in complexity.
This assumes that our brain and nervous system is entirely mechanist and deterministic, and that Free Will must be libertarian Free Will as you dscribe as the 'idea that we have control over actions.' Neither is in reality the case. Even though the nature of our physical existence is deterministic that does not translate into an entirely mechanistic world. Libertarian Free Will simply fails the evidence, because a great deal of our decision making process has been found conclusivly deterministic. Though it has not been determined whether a degree of Free Will exists or not.
There a numbere hpothesis proposed called Compatabilism where a degree of Free Will is compatable with a deterministic foundation of our physical world.
Mother Teresa would be Lizzy Borden, and Charles Mansion would be St. Francis.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
That is not evidence as per science, because it is not objective.
I subjectively experience that I have free will.
I subjectively experience that God talks to me.
Show me in the brain with science (you do know what science is, right) that there are free will and you have shown that free will is compatible with neuroscience. Until then, I treat free will like God. Some people believe in one and not the other, some believe in both and some don't believe in either of them.
You are doing philosophy as long as you can't show free will with science.
This simple experiment is far to subjective and anecdotal to be meaningful.
Not meaningful.
What would you see as meaningful?
What kind of meaningful "evidence" could be brought forth on how I defined free will?
If you haven't already replied, how would you go about limiting the subjectivity?
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Science requires that you do experimentation. To be objective requires more than one person to perform the experiment. I do it, you do it, we get the same results, it becomes less subjective. While you can't completely remove subjectivity, this consistency of results among, preferably a larger group of people is the closest we get.
By citing the research on human will and the decission making process. Also do some reading on the Compatabilist approach to human will.
The human will and decission making process is more complecated than demonstrating the nature of human will with one simple example. Current research has elliminated the extreme Libertarian Free Will and at presen there are too many unknowns to conclude hard determinism rule.
I may go into this further, but it pretty much accepted that from the perspective of the one making a choice cannot judge the degree of Free Will involved in making that choice. Also humans make decisions within a limited range of choices, and prior cause and effect events and choices narrow the limite ones possible alternatives of making the choice.
I am compatabilist in terms of the question of Free Will. I believe in what is called the potential fo Free Will, but by far most people do not exercise their possible options of what would be called potential Free Will.
I would agree especially with your last statement. I understand the need for evidence to support claims in this regard.
However, I was talking about the ability to do what you or someone wants to do. That's the definition of free will I am using. It seems fairly simple to show whether a person can do what they want to do. If we were using a different definition for free will it would be a very different conversation.
Your definition is too simplistic as cited, Actually it is not that simple as 'to show whether a person can do what they want to do.' . because in reality in the example you gave is insufficient to determine if the one making decision did so as a free will decision, or that decision was not predetermined by the series of cause and effect events and decisions, culture, and other factors over time.
Ok, but it is the definition we agreed to use. IMO being predetermined or not is not relevant to the concept, in this case.
I'm certainly happy to discuss other concepts of free will but none was offered.
Thisuse of the definition in this simplistic just simply cannot make the determination that the decision referenced was a 'Free Will.' decision.
I could not accept this simple definition without qualifications. One, of course, is that the definition cannot be used to determine if there is Free Will.
More to follow . . .
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I did not agree . . .
What is needed is more a discussion on the nature of what some claim as Free Will and alternative explanations of our decision making process. As follow from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
Free Will
First published Mon Jan 7, 2002; substantive revision Tue Aug 21, 2018
The term “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one’s actions. Questions concerning the nature and existence of this kind of control (e.g., does it require and do we have the freedom to do otherwise or the power of self-determination?), and what its true significance is (is it necessary for moral responsibility or human dignity?) have been taken up in every period of Western philosophy and by many of the most important philosophical figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. (We cannot undertake here a review of related discussions in other philosophical traditions. For a start, the reader may consult Marchal and Wenzel 2017 and Chakrabarti 2017 for overviews of thought on free will, broadly construed, in Chinese and Indian philosophical traditions, respectively.) In this way, it should be clear that disputes about free will ineluctably involve disputes about metaphysics and ethics. In ferreting out the kind of control involved in free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) causation, laws of nature, time, substance, ontological reduction vs emergence, the relationship of causal and reasons-based explanations, the nature of motivation and more generally of human persons. In assessing the significance of free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) rightness and wrongness, good and evil, virtue and vice, blame and praise, reward and punishment, and desert. The topic of free will also gives rise to purely empirical questions that are beginning to be explored in the human sciences: do we have it, and to what degree?
Here is an overview of what follows. In Section 1, we acquaint the reader with some central historical contributions to our understanding of free will. (As nearly every major and minor figure had something to say about it, we cannot begin to cover them all.) As with contributions to many other foundational topics, these ideas are not of ‘merely historical interest’: present-day philosophers continue to find themselves drawn back to certain thinkers as they freshly engage their contemporaries. In Section 2, we map the complex architecture of the contemporary discussion of the nature of free will by dividing it into five subtopics: its relation to moral responsibility; the proper analysis of the freedom to do otherwise; a powerful, recent argument that the freedom to do otherwise (at least in one important sense) is not necessary for moral responsibility; ‘compatibilist’ accounts of sourcehood or self-determination; and ‘incompatibilist’ or ‘libertarian’ accounts of source and self-determination. In Section 3, we consider arguments from experience, a priori reflection, and various scientific findings and theories for and against the thesis that human beings have free will, along with the related question of whether it is reasonable to believe that we have it. Finally, in Section 4, we survey the long-debated questions involving free will that arise in classical theistic metaphysics.
What is needed is more a discussion on the nature of what some claim as Free Will and alternative explanations of our decision making process. As follow from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
Free Will
First published Mon Jan 7, 2002; substantive revision Tue Aug 21, 2018
The term “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one’s actions. Questions concerning the nature and existence of this kind of control (e.g., does it require and do we have the freedom to do otherwise or the power of self-determination?), and what its true significance is (is it necessary for moral responsibility or human dignity?) have been taken up in every period of Western philosophy and by many of the most important philosophical figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. (We cannot undertake here a review of related discussions in other philosophical traditions. For a start, the reader may consult Marchal and Wenzel 2017 and Chakrabarti 2017 for overviews of thought on free will, broadly construed, in Chinese and Indian philosophical traditions, respectively.) In this way, it should be clear that disputes about free will ineluctably involve disputes about metaphysics and ethics. In ferreting out the kind of control involved in free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) causation, laws of nature, time, substance, ontological reduction vs emergence, the relationship of causal and reasons-based explanations, the nature of motivation and more generally of human persons. In assessing the significance of free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) rightness and wrongness, good and evil, virtue and vice, blame and praise, reward and punishment, and desert. The topic of free will also gives rise to purely empirical questions that are beginning to be explored in the human sciences: do we have it, and to what degree?
Here is an overview of what follows. In Section 1, we acquaint the reader with some central historical contributions to our understanding of free will. (As nearly every major and minor figure had something to say about it, we cannot begin to cover them all.) As with contributions to many other foundational topics, these ideas are not of ‘merely historical interest’: present-day philosophers continue to find themselves drawn back to certain thinkers as they freshly engage their contemporaries. In Section 2, we map the complex architecture of the contemporary discussion of the nature of free will by dividing it into five subtopics: its relation to moral responsibility; the proper analysis of the freedom to do otherwise; a powerful, recent argument that the freedom to do otherwise (at least in one important sense) is not necessary for moral responsibility; ‘compatibilist’ accounts of sourcehood or self-determination; and ‘incompatibilist’ or ‘libertarian’ accounts of source and self-determination. In Section 3, we consider arguments from experience, a priori reflection, and various scientific findings and theories for and against the thesis that human beings have free will, along with the related question of whether it is reasonable to believe that we have it. Finally, in Section 4, we survey the long-debated questions involving free will that arise in classical theistic metaphysics.
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Ok, but FYI in case it was not obvious, I was referring to Mikkel who agree to using this definition. Any comments I made after that point would have had this definition in mind.
The link you provided for the most part concerns itself with tying concepts of free will either to God, or to some moral standard. Being an atheist and moral nihilist, my views are tied to neither.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Yeah, your view is tied to the belief in an "I" that is un-caused and not the effect of something else. Your "I" as for free will as you use it, is its own cause and not the effect of the rest of the universe.
But you don't understand that, because you haven't checked it. It is a hidden assumption in your thinking, which you take for granted as true.
So free will is compatible with science, if we can observe it. Your test is not observation. It is philosophy and you haven't done that according to the rule of philosophy, because you haven't checked for hidden assumptions.
You don't have to learn this, but I will still point it out. You apparently can't separate test as per science and test as per philosophy. In philosophy you test your own thinking and other humans thinking be figuring out what both you and they take for granted.
So if you ask me what I take for granted about the meaning of the universe, life and everything, I can answer that, because I have learned to find my own hidden assumptions and thus they are not hidden anymore.
That is all there is to philosophy in the end: You learn to think about how you think and what you take for granted.
Regards
Mikkel
I never said anything about an un-caused I. perhaps it was one of your hidden assumptions.
We went down a path of your choosing. You shouldn't be surprised where we ended up.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
"I choose" requires that the "I" is not caused in its choice and thus truly the "I" makes the choice. You are assuming that the "I" is more than a placeholder for caused non-free processes in a brain, i.e. neurology.