The Law of the Excluded Middle and Free Will

[Philocrat]

METAPHYSICAL DISAMBIGUATION OF NATURAL STRUCTURES TO RELEASE OR EXPOSE THEIR NATURAL POTENTIALS

What does this means? It means looking thoroughly at the underlying structures of things to expose what is possible and what is not possible in them. The hidden underlying potentials and capabilities of things maybe decisively blocked or concealed by their awkward outer appearances. If you don’t look or make any effort to find out, how could you know what is possible and not possible in things? Even those that appear naturally impossible after having made such an effort to look or check them out may need further metaphysical disambiguation.

Ok, for the sake of an argument, let us look at several natural possibilities within our own world. Let us look at the following natural scenarios and metaphysically expose their underlying natural potentials, while at the same time expose the determinist’s ignorance and premature assumptions:

SCENARIO 1

Determinist: “How come those birds have wings and can fly and we humans don’t have them and can’t fly?” Without thinking, asking further questions, paying a visit to a local library to make further research, or going to a local university to ask scientists, he/she hastily concludes “Human beings are predestined not to have wings and fly”

Really? Is that so? Just because human beings do not have wings and can’t fly does not immediately translate into a concrete fact that they are predestined not to ever fly. Of course, human beings can have wings and fly if they ever wake up one morning and decide to do so. They are not predestined, for they are naturally empowered to turn on their wings whenever they so desire or will!

SCENARIO 2

Determinist: “I have had this snake as a pet for years now. I am fed up with the fact that every time I take it out for a walk it cannot walk. Why do I have to drag it along all the time? All that snakes ever do is crawl! Why can’t they walk?” After embittering himself and swearing under his breath, and his vision clouded by emotions, without further thought or deliberation, he concluded, “Snakes are predestined not to have limbs” and then consoled himself with the defeatist maxim “Never mind, I guess will have to learn to live with snakes not having limbs!”

How do you know that snakes were predestined not to have limbs? Have you asked scientists whether this is true or not? Just because snakes have no limbs does not immediately translate into an absolute fact that snakes are naturally predisposed or predestined not have limbs. That is a metaphysical illusion. The Limbs-enabling Genes are there lying dormant in your pet snake. Some mutation within the evolutionary pathway may have turned them off in the past (so evolutionary biology and genetic science say). Who stands on your way? You have the will and the power to turn them back on. Dormant ‘Possibilities-Enabling Genes’ (PEG’s) are there on the evolutionary pathways to be turned on and off at will. If you are fed up with crawling pet snakes, then turn the limbs back on! You are naturally short-changing yourself by enslaving yourself in ignorance of the world that you know little or nothing about. If you restrict your will in this manner, why should you blame God for it?

SCENARIO 3

Determinist: “I wonder why human beings sleep less. Why can’t human beings sleep longer? Why can’t we choose to sleep now and wake up in 14 day’s time or in five years?” Upon the same inherent habit, he hastily concludes, “Humans’ are predestined to sleep less.”

Your guess is as good as mine. We have creatures that can sleep for seven years. If you want to sleep longer, have you investigated to see whether sleeping longer is possible in the human evolutionary biology? Why jump into conclusion? Why limit your will in this way? What about creatures that don’t sleep at all? Is sleeplessness not a natural possibility? What in your basket of facts rules out this possibility in the evolutionary pathway of the humans? In the end you still have to ask that fundamental question.: WHAT IS THE OUTWARD VALUE OF SLEEPING LESS OR SLEEPING LONGER? For example, does sleeping longer make you live longer, let alone forever? Of course, the choice of action may also depend on which choice produces the highest evolutionary value such as living longer or immortality or multi-static migration (change from state to state in an unrestricted way).

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Hence the issue is (1) of the possibility of a given choice and (2) of the outward quality or value of the consequence of that choice.
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The pssibilities are endless. Do you want me to continuing listing them? Perhaps not. Or maybe I am misunderstanding the whole fixtures and strictures of the argument altogether.

NOTE: The law of excluded middle may be factionally naive by insisting on everything being either black or white, this or that, true or false, yes or no, but it cannot invite everyone of us to err on the same epistemological token. I reserve my right to differ and that is the right to always exmine a range of possiblities, and above all, a range of methodologies with a range of alternative truth-values!

 

[moving finger]

With respect, Philocrat, You did not answer my questions, shall I repeat them?

Sorry, Philocrat, is this question addressed to me? What "original theory" are you referring to please?

When I know who you are adressing and what “original theory” you are referring to then maybe (if it is indeed me you are addressing) I can make a stab at an answer to your questions?

I invited you to make a choice between scenario (a) and (b) and say which of the two option is metaphysically equivalently to free will proper.

And as I pointed out already, before we can usefully debate something that we choose to call "free will", we first need to define what is meant by "free will".

Free will means being able to think and act freely without constraints.

Good, now we get rid of the wishy-washy hyperbole, and get onto something that we can start debating.

Firstly, we should eliminate the redundant word “freely” from your definition, otherwise it becomes a tautology (free will = acting freely), which would be meaningless. Therefore your definition in essence actually says : Free will means being able to think and act without constraints.

If we accept this definition, how do you know whether anything thinks and acts without constraints? In other words, it may be the case that free will as you have defined it simply does not exist. And I would challenge you to prove that free will as you have defined it DOES exist.

Metaphysically, Epistemic determinism works both ways. Even if a free acting agent were arguably constrained by the preknowedge of his or her action by any of the above intervening agents, so long as he or she, by balance of measure or power, KNEW HOW TO OVERCOME such interventions or restraints, then this would be METAPHYSICALLY EQUIVALENT TO THINKING AND ACTING FREELY .

Sorry, and with respect, but this is still just so much mumbo-jumbo. If you agree that an “agent is arguably constrained by the preknowledge of his or her action”, then please explain how one can “know how to overcome” something that is epistemically determined? In other words, if I know infallibly that A will happen at a future time, then please explain what kind of knowledge I might be able to have to “overcome” A (ie ensure that A does not happen)?

The problem in dwelling on the fruitless poject of proving one's theory…… instead of trying to drum determinism into everyone's throat..

Proving what theory? What on Earth are you referring to here? With respect…. whilst the rest of us are happy debating these things, you seem to be the only one here trying to push theories down our throats…….

MF

 

[moving finger]

If I could change the future, I would change it precisely. Nature and Nurture contain information with which to predict the future. The question now is how many of us have even bothered to look in these two baskets for parameters for such predictions? If I started to 'Naturally' and 'Nurturally' observe Hitler from birth and from the data amassed within a reasonable period of time before Hitler’s maturity predicted that Hitler would start the second world war on so-so date, then I would have alerted the world to this fact and got him stopped in one way or the other. By so doing I may have changed the future history of the world.

You cannot “change” something that has not happened yet. Your introduction of the highlighted terms naturally and nurturally is (with respect) pretentious mumbo-jumbo which simply obfuscates.

For many years (in fact, up to late last century) no scientific prediction of any kind was thought possible.

Untrue. Astronomical predictions have been made for millenia. The possessors of the knowledge required to make such predictions were held in high esteem.

If you told people many years ago that you could predict the weather, you could use ‘Nature’s Signatures’ to predict Natural Disasters, you could genetically alter the future appearance, growth, size, colour, shape or height of a living organism, or that you could wake up one morning and make a conscious decision to build a spaceship and travel to the moon, the free will spin-doctors world say that you are mad or that you are daydreaming. All these possibilities were thought to be within the bounds of science fiction.

This has nothing to do with free will.

You can predict the future of an action if you get hold of the information of both its cause and its absolutely certain or likely consequence.

Untrue. Study chaos theory to understand how accurate prediction can be impossible even in a purely deterministic world please.

With this information you can change your future.

Again, this is a meaningless statement. It is meaningless to talk of changing something that has not yet happened.

This is metaphysically equivalent to acting freely.

No, it is meaningless.

For example, if I went with my wife to a medical doctor to check and confirm for certain that we are both fertile and can breed as many babies as we like, armed with this information myself and my wife may decide to change our future

Your future has not happened yet, how can you change it?

by not having any children because we want to spend the rest of our lives traveling around world without any worries about huge responsibilities that child care always bring.

You make your decision, and your decision determines your future. This has nothing to do with “changing” your future. Nothing has been “changed”, because the possible future where you had children never existed, except as a possibility in your imagination.

It is our choice and we have made it firmly without any interference by a third party.

Choice has nothing to do with free will. Choice can be as simple as taking two inputs and producing one output. Even a simple machine can choose in this way (“firmly without any interference by a third party").

In this very case, based on the information made available to us before hand, we have chosen a different future from a list of available futures: that of not having children.

Now you have it right – you have chosen a future from a list of available POSSIBLE futures. A machine could do the same thing.

The future of having children is different from that of not having children.

Yes, but only ONE future ever exists.

all that matters here is that we have the capacities to predict those futures with virtual certainty and to choose from amongst them without restrictions.

Again, this is all about choice, which a deterministic machine can do. It says absolutely nothing about unconstrained choices.

Knowledge is an instrument of free will. You cannot think and act freely unless you know how to do so. I watched in amazement two years ago two building site labourers arguing violently about how to get a giant bed through a tiny door way. They argued and argued until it resulted in a big fight. The foreman who overheard them in the next room came to the room, without stopping the fight, went straight to the bed, pressed one or two buttons on it, and the bed like magic folded into the size of a chair …..more than enough to pass through the door. Seeing this, the two labourers stopped fighting and one of them said, “Oh, I didn’t know that?” The foreman replied, “Now you know!”

The lesson of this true story is to illustrate how knowledge is important in overcoming natural obstacles and barriers.

What on Earth does this have to do with free will? What has been described could have been carried out by purely deterministic machines.

How then can you sit down and make all these wild assumptions that “OUR FUTURE MAY BE SO BUGGED DOWN OR TIED UP TO THE PAST SUCH THAT IT MAY BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR US TO EXERCISE OUR FREE WILL NOW OR IN FUTURE AND THAT NOTHING THAT WE WOULD HAVE DONE NOW OR IN FUTURE WOULD HAVE MADE ANY DIFFERENCE” .

This is fatalism, which is NOT the same as causal determinism. It is a fallacy promulgated by many anti-determinists that if we give up the notion of free will then we must necessarily become fatalists. It is completely wrong.

Well, as an epistemologist, I am fully licensed to ask you “HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS?” .

Just as I (as a human being) am licensed to ask : How do you know that you act freely (ie without constraints)?

MF

 

[Tournesol]

Choice has nothing to do with free will. Choice can be as simple as taking two inputs and producing one output. Even a simple machine can choose in this way (“firmly without any interference by a third party").

That shows you can have choice -- or "choice" -- without FW;
whether you can have FW without choice is another matter.
You need to be more careful about your nothing-to-do-withs.

 

[moving finger]

That shows you can have choice -- or "choice" -- without FW;
whether you can have FW without choice is another matter.
You need to be more careful about your nothing-to-do-withs.

oh my we are pedantic aren't we.

what I should have said is that choice is not dependent on free will.

i consider my wrist slapped!

MF

 

[TheUnknown]

Anyone wanting to see this beings faults (moving_finger) in his belief of no free will, please visit Special and General Relativiy, under GR and time travel paradoxes... witness his sudden loss of memory (amnesia) in everything me and him discuss... and give him knowledge 300 years in advance which he cannot fathom... as some of us evolve into the 4th dimension, beings such as him are left behind... this is published in Stanley Watsons book in 2316. ;) believe it or not finger... all i can do is try to help lost souls such as you... so as you may be enlightened, but as our studies show, only 2% of your kind ever change. (you call them determinists?) also i predicted the next natural catastrophe that happened today, another earthquake. and another news article came out on the faulty missile defense system of the US... i can say no more, for beings such as you scare us... ever heard of the saying, give em an inch and he takes a mile? so i can say no more on predictions except those that remain. and yes his wrist should be slapped, slap it enough and he'll stop making mistakes. choice does not necessarily define free will... in cases where we have no choice... it doesn't mean we have no free will... we can still make the best of the siutation. but again... you also cannot have free will with no choice. free will is not simply explained away with words and logic, it is much deeper in which entites it resides in etc.

 

[moving finger]

give him knowledge 300 years in advance which he cannot fathom... as some of us evolve into the 4th dimension, beings such as him are left behind... this is published in Stanley Watsons book in 2316. ;)

Ohhhh pleeeease!

believe it or not finger... all i can do is try to help lost souls such as you... so as you may be enlightened, but as our studies show, only 2% of your kind ever change. (you call them determinists?) also i predicted the next natural catastrophe that happened today, another earthquake. and another news article came out on the faulty missile defense system of the US.. .

good grief… what ARE you smoking?

i can say no more, for beings such as you scare us... ever heard of the saying, give em an inch and he takes a mile? so i can say no more on predictions except those that remain. and yes his wrist should be slapped, slap it enough and he'll stop making mistakes. choice does not necessarily define free will... in cases where we have no choice... it doesn't mean we have no free will... we can still make the best of the siutation. but again... you also cannot have free will with no choice. free will is not simply explained away with words and logic, it is much deeper in which entites it resides in etc.

sad. Sad. Sad. So very sad. Why is it, whenever a human cannot (does not want to?) understand simple logic, they always resort to such strange behaviour?

Can we move on now?

MF

 

[medium]

Question:In terms of universals, is it or is it not true, that what binds all humanity together or tears it apart is conscience!? Is there such a thing as conscience!? Is it the ultimate form of consciousness!? Is it the prime mover!? Is it the ultimate standard therefore to be considered when one makes a choice!? Are, therfore, all choices necessarily mutually exclusive!? Foregive my intrusion, but I'm a newcomer to this interesting dialog. Am I on the right track considering what has been discussed so far? Please comment> ....MEDIUM.....>

 

[moving finger]

Question:In terms of universals, is it or is it not true, that what binds all humanity together or tears it apart is conscience!?

I think there are many other things which "bind humanity together" apart from conscience, therefore I would have to say the statement is untrue.

Is there such a thing as conscience!?

If you ever feel a conscience then I think the answer is obvious.

Is it the ultimate form of consciousness!?

What is an "ultimate form" of anything?

Is it the prime mover!?

Of what? The universe? I don't think so (but that's my belief)

Is it the ultimate standard therefore to be considered when one makes a choice!?

No, again I don't think so. I believe when humans make a choice they take into account many different factors, of which conscience may be one.

Are, therfore, all choices necessarily mutually exclusive!?

Why should this follow as a "therefore"? I see no reason why (even if conscience drives all choices) this implies mutual exclusivity of choices.

MF