Been watching a lot of YouTube lately about atheists and free will. Cosmicskeptic and rationalityrules make good cases for us not having free will but I disagree. A rock doesn't have free will it does what the laws of the universe make it do. I think it's a requirement for life to have free will because even one celled organisms make simple decisions in the search for nutrients. A rock will never move of it's own volition life does and that proves to me that we have free will. Idk just my opinion.
1
Enjoy being online again!
Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.Create your free account
3 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.These are all really good justifications for personal beliefs. However, the free will debate goes deeper. But let's first consider our arguments. Based on a lot of the replies, it seems like the general argument for free will is: free will lets me make decisions, I fell as though I exercise free will, therefore free will must exist.
This is a good start, but it is essentially an appeal to emotion. You want free will to exist. You feel as though it does. This doesn't have any bearing on whether free will actually exists.
We could defeat a lot of these arguments by asking a few questions. But first, We can either have free will, that is making a decision without previous events influencing those events. Or we can be confined to a deterministic system in which we merely have the illusion of free will.
So let's look at these examples of free will and ask the questions
Seminarian: " Personally I'd like to travel faster than the speed of light"
But why do you want to do that. Did that desire to travel faster than the speed of light come from you? Or did it come from some proceeding event? Are we not a curious species? If that is true, does the desire to travel faster than the speed of light come from a sense of curiosity, therefore preceeding and superseeding the individual? And if it precedes you, (i.e. you are not the only one) was it really free will?
When we examine these questions we have to look deeper than just the feelings we have. Or curiosities. We have to examine if our motivations are truly our own choices.
DFox: " I see free will as the ability to choose"
What's free about a choice that is predetermined? How do you know that you were ever going to make the other decision? Because you felt in control? But that begs the question, what decided what choices were available to you? Why did you think of those choices in particular and not another set of choices? A gut feeling? Did your gut influence your decision? Can we then really say it was your free will?
True free will essentially boils down to randomness. If nothing before a choice influences the likelihood of that particular choice being made, it's random. But if there is something that influences it such as physical events... Hunger motivates subsistence practices and so on. Food or nutrient deprivation leads to hunger. Biological processes depletes the energy in food leading to the deprecation. At this point be have regressed to something like subsistence practices being motivated by or influenced by factors in a chemical level. And just like rocks, chemicals do not have free will.
Ask yourself, how often do you exit your house through a window rather than the door? If free will or randomness dictates, we should expect that you use the Windows more often than the door. Because we simply have more Windows than the doors. Something is influencing your decision to take that door a disproportional amount of times. Are you really freely chosing?
Ceneaa
Level 3
Aug 19, 2018
0
Dfox:
This is were I have issue. This entire thought has no actual reason behind it. It doesn't change our lives in any substantial way. In your explanation of it it is a random choice that has no predetermined decision with no experience based on prior choices to influence weather you believe in free will or not. It's an existential question that can only even be thought of because we have the free will to do so.
The idea of free will was probably never a conspiracy to hang children. Free will makes intuitive sense. Even as I argue against free will I struggle with the idea that I could argue for it, but for one reason or another I argue against it.
Religion just kind of scooped it up as it was probably already a cultural idea. Religions are attempts for societies to make sense on their natural world in a time and place where they did not have the knowledge or skills to understand it. It was a failed attempt, but an attempt nontheless.
Over time the idea most likely became what it is now, a justification for blaming individuals for systemic and societal issues.
Free will also allows us to assign blame. It gives us someone to be upset with. If free will is the reason criminals do bad things we get an outlet for our anger, and we don't need to examine the deeper issues of what led the perpetrator or commit those acts. We can just say they chose it. When we dispense with free will it removes the outlet for our anger. If the person who committed the crime had no choice, but rather it was the natural consequence of genetics, epigenetic and environmental factors being angry makes no sense anymore. We'd be forced to see crime as a public health issue and criminals as victims to their own environment. They would be no more culpable that people who have cancer or diabetes.
Dfox:
@Ceneaa and once again that's a sign of free will. There are criminals who had no reason to commit the crime other then they thought th er y could get away with it. That's an example of free will. Yes there are criminals with troubled a troubled passed or mental disorders or biological or social needs to commit the crime. However it's the ones who don't have any of that and just say hey I wonder what it's like to kill someone or more realistically I'm gonna grab this candy bar and just walk out without paying cuz fuck it.
We have more freewill than most animals, who must build nests and dens the same way, court the same way, etc. to survive. We can at least choose what kind of housing and clothing we want to use. But of course we are limited by our DNA, upbringing, social status, physical health, etc.
Someone who is under five feet tall couldn't choose to be an NBA star, for example.
birdingnut
Level 8
Aug 19, 2018
0
How many people would chose to not have a house if they had the means to afford it? With such a strong preference for having dwellings it's hard to call it free will.what's the point of free will if it is so limited that it is really just making choices about superficialities.
My point here is that the choices we are making are not much different than the voices birds are making. We just have a tendency to put more value in our own choices.
Why do we find hav8by a dwelling so appealing? Well for one it increases the likelihood of our offspring surviving. Did we chose that? Or are we pre-programmed by evolution?
We have free will within the confines of natural laws. We don't have free will to grow wings and fly for example. We can't choose to live forever either. So we aren't completely free. Personally I'd like to travel faster than the speed of light so theoretically I could travel back in time and fix all the screw ups I made exercising choices I was allowed to make within the confines of natural law.
Seminarian
Level 7
Aug 19, 2018
1
Dfox:
I don't think that the examples you gave are good examples but I understand what you were trying to express. Of course we have to abide by the laws of nature and the universe but I see our ability to manipulate those laws to reach our goals as an exercise of free will. No we can't just decide to grow wings but we can build an airplane to reach the same result. If there was no free will we would have excepted that we evolved to be terrestrial animals and we can't fly.
@Dfox Fair enough, but even though we can create new technology we are still bound by universal laws. Of course we are free to make choices within these rules. I guess it depends on our definition of freedom, and our knowing what the rules really are versus what we believe they are. Clearly ancient religions started out as an early attempt to define these laws by people without scientific understanding. Eventually future scientist might ridicule our understanding of these laws as well. Freewill does allow us to make these discoveries and act accordingly. Thats what's important. right?
Dfox:
@Seminarian that's what I'm getting at. Of course we have to work within natural or universal law but while working in those confines we still have free will to decided how we are going to work through those confines.
@Dfox We are in agreement. I would still like wings though. Gills would be cool too. Trans Humanists are working on artificially increasing our intelligence. Even transferring human consciousness to artificial bodies. If they pull it off I'm ordering my new body with gills and wings.
Enjoy being online again!
Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.Create your free account
Share this post
Categories
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.