Sorry for the length. I'm seriously into this subject.
Originally posted by Zantra
Ya, mentat and I already had this argument eons ago. It's a stalemate. He can't prove free will exists any more than I can prove that it doesn't. No one can. But it's been kinda slow in in philosophy lately. Was just trying to create a debate
This is a neverending argument, but we still argue it- Why? I guess because it passes the time.. lol. Actually- I argue it. Mentat just points out how futile it is
Great stuff. I thought that you thought that you could prove that you could prove something, even though you were trying to prove that you weren't free to make up your own mind on whether you agreed with what you were trying to prove or not. My mistake.
I'm not quite certain yet that we can't work out the freewill thing. But we probably have to come at it from a different angle. Great minds have explored all the technicalities of this issue for millenia, and they haven't got anywhere from a 'Western' perspective.
Maybe we're stuck in the wrong paradigm, looking at it in the wrong way, asking the wrong questions. Maybe the world is stranger than we think it is, and we're just not imaginative enough to see it for what it really is. After all we only get a bunch of electrochemical patterns in our brains, we have to reconstruct the world from those.
Bad mistakes must be possible. Mistakes that are life threatening, like a belief that tigers are harmless, would soon be weeded out by evolutionary selection. But what about mistakes that aren't life threatening, or those that actually make us more likely to reproduce?
We could have errors in our conception of the world that go back to the dawn of time when you think about it seriously, we just wouldn't know. As long as they promoted our physical survival they would persist forever in our species as evolving memes. Imagining we have freewill may be one of these persistent errors.
But then the whole notion of a 'real' phenemenal world may be a persistent error. After all this is what Plato and other idealists have been arguing for at least three thousand years. If we can't be certain that the phenomenal world really exists then proving freewill is the least of our problems.
There doesn't seem to be any way through this inevitable muddle. This is why I'm sure that there must be a different way of thinking about it.
The trouble with this subject is that it leads all over the place. For instance the existence of freewill implies that consciousness is causal, and causal consciousness combined with freewill is a definite scientific no-no. So the fundamental mechanisms of cause and effect is the part of the issue as well.
The question of freewill, as you probably know already, raises other difficult questions and eventually calls into question our whole idea of our existence as 'selves' in the 'world'.
“Very few seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questionner.” (The Vampire Marius, Ann Rice, The Vampire Lestat)
To the biochemical stuff. Well basically, I'm saying that we react to situations at a basic level, regardless of their relevance, guilt or not. That's the premise of it. After the initial response, we then logical sort it out with our higher brain functions, which is based on past experiences, and all the other factors that go into determinism.
I can read that two ways. Are you saying that we act/react and then afterwards create a narrative to explain what happened to ourselves, are are you saying that all this is an entirely physical process?
There is a saying. Problems cannot be solved at the same level at which they were created- al einstein said this. And this means that we are trying to solve the problem of how we arrive at a particular conclusion, but we are using our own minds to do it.
I'm certain that you're right. We must see beyond the shadows.
We need a computer much more complexed than the human mind to calculate all the variables involved in the deterministic equation-assuming such an equation exists.
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What makes you say that? I would have thought that we need to simplify the problem, not make it complicated to the point where we need a machine to do it for us.
As far as freewill goes my guess is that any such machine would only ever be able to tell us what we'd told it.
Be funny if we built one and, after many long years of programming and waiting, it refused to cooperate or answer any questions.