Treacle Worshipper

Thank you for the book ideas, Neilium & KI. I have spent my "book budget" for this month, but I will get them next month & get back to you when I have read them.

Warwick:
I believe the above factors would influence a range of choices in which you would choose an action (or actions) that is in your own perceived best interest.
I'm not sure how this relates to free will or lack thereof; please can you explain further?

Neilium:
How exactly would a scientist tell exactly when someone consciously thinks something?
I was confused about this, too.

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I am more interested in mental processes than physical ones at the moment.
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Mental processes are physical processes.
I was trying to express "I am more interested in what goes on in the brain as opposed to other parts of the body", but obviously was clumsy about it!

If this were the case, identical twins raised in the same family would make identical decisions all the time (same genes, same environment). They would even speak in unison all the time. How creepy would that be?
From an article in The Big Issue Cymru, 17-23 March 2003, about "Twins: The Identity Test", shown on BBC1 18.3.03: "you realise, as the programme progresses, that you have no way - physically or emotionally - of telling one from the other. The second round of tests include the pairs going out separately to a restaurant, where they all choose the same food as their twin; going separately to a theme park to test thrill-seeking, where they all choose the same ride; and viewing film clips to gauge sense of humour and phobias, when their almost synchronised body language is incredible to watch."
These people are so identical that it is almost impossible to tell them apart, according to the article.

Control of the self does not evaporate simply because the self was formed by means outside the self's control.
How do you think we control the self? What mechanism (for want of a better word) do we use?

The sum total of my envrionment, my genetic makeup, my experiences is my consiousness, my will: ME. They affect the decisions I make, because if they didn't, it wouldn't be me making the decisions.
How is the self separate from the factors that go into making it up?
I'm afraid these are extremely basic questions; my understanding of the subject is extremely basic, & I am trying to learn more.

How does the "ability to choose free from external physical force" differ from free will?
Not wishing to pre-empt John, but the way our minds form will determine how we respond to certain situations & decisions. Therefore, even if there is no external force influencing us, there will be internal ones. Hence, no free will.

King's Indian:
Some problems with accepting that there is no free will.
Belief
Nowhere357's point, in effect: How can one decide to accept, or come to the conclusion consistently that there is no free will?
If I believe that there is no over-arching part of me that is outside the influence of my physical body (ie. a soul), how can what I do be influenced by anything other than the physical? I'm not in control of my body - it has millions of parts and functions which I'm completely unaware of at the conscious level. What comes through to my consciousness is not under my control either; so I conclude I have restrictions beyond my control on how I make my decisions, therefore I think I don't have free will, as per the dictionary definiton we've looked at.

Legal
Again, if we are entities with patterns of behaviour rigorously proscribed by material laws that give the illusion of freedom of movement (rather like clouds, which is quite a lovely thought), then how can wrongdoing be defined? It's not the cloud's fault it rained on you, and there is no real way to think how we could put one on trial.
I admit this is a problem. Off the top of my head: The current legal system is based on punishment; if it were based on rehabilitation, ie, changing someone's environment, I think that would go part way to solving the problem.

Moral
Wouldn't this idea, if one believed and acted on it, make one succumb to fatalism? After all, if one's conscious decisions are the bubbles on the washing-up water, then my decision to stay here in bed all day and rot has all the force of a law of nature.
Precisely. This is why the idea that we have free will is so important, or it does become very fatalistic. I'm trying to make a distinction between what goes on in the brain (ie, set patterns conditioned by genetics & environment) & what we perceive in the mind, ie. free will. I think that at the subconscious level, our actions and resposes are largely set at a young age; at the conscious level we are largely not aware of this.

Nowhere357:
As soon as you decided to accept the preconception that you "have no free will", you exercised your free will!
I would say I have come to an inevitable conclusion based on my brain structure, which has been created by genes and environment

After all, even your physical body is illusion. Did your body exist before you were born? After you die? Does it not change constantly? The boundaries between a body and the world are illusion, so the body doesn't exist. How does that interpretation help understanding?
Well, it doesn't when you're living on the everyday level. But I think it's kind of cool that nothing really exists & everything's full of holes, & if you had a needle long & thin enough you could push it right through the earth. I agree these things make absolutely no difference to how we go about our lives.

Can someone please explain what determinism is? And I will try to address the points concerning it.
TW

Amos

Hello John, in my Free Will argument the soul, or subconscious mind, has become one with the conscious mind. In this concept the division within our own mind has been annihilated and we are free the choose.In my determinism we are not free to chose because we are divided within our own mind. Anything more than that is beyond my scope of the free will argument.

In this analogy a Freethinker is someone who doesn't have to think because he knows his own mind and since nothing can be conceived to exist outside of his own mind he is omniscient.

Neilium

TW,

Awesome! That just kicks my ass. I thought my identical twins question was solid, to the point of my feeling overconfident. Thanks for finding this article and tearing another aspect of my worldview asunder.

I don't have time at the moment to address the rest of your post, but I will get to it as soon as I can. I just didn't want too much time to lapse without at least some expression of appreciation.

Also, John Page, precise and succinct as always. I've got a lot to think through, and I don't want to bore you with my unfocused ramblings.

Finally, TW, here's one view of determinism: http://www.determinism.com/

I'm muddling my way through it now.

-Neil

John Page

I'm missing something here. How does fusing the conscious and sub-conscious enable us to be free to choose? Whether our conscious mind has access to our subconscious mind or not doesn't seem to make any difference.

What you seem to be saying is that the mind has a mind of its own - but this is neither an argument for or against free will.

Cheers, John

beastmaster

But one does not *decide* to accept anything. That's what it means to not have free will.

Punishment is justified -- even in a world without free will -- on the bases of: deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.

Punishment need not be based on retribution.

The law of nature suggests that you will eventually get hungry (or bored or have to take a piss) and get out of bed.

The point is that humans are sufficiently complex that it is nearly impossible to succumb to "decision inertia."

I don't consider any of these objections to be "problems" at all.

beastmaster

But one does not *decide* to accept anything. That's what it means to not have free will.

Punishment is justified -- even in a world without free will -- on the bases of: deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.

Punishment need not be based on retribution.

The law of nature suggests that you will eventually get hungry (or bored or have to take a piss) and get out of bed.

The point is that humans are sufficiently complex that it is nearly impossible to succumb to "decision inertia."

John Page

Apologies for jumping in, KI.

A deterministic systems can be demonstrated to exhibit "choice". If it is complex enough that we cannot predict its behavior then (to us) we can say "it chooses".

IMO we can detect that systems are able to choose because we experience (somewhat) our own internal process of decision making. Sometimes we try and rationalize this by verbalizing the problem (talking to ourselves).

I'm not sure how clear this is. Have I conveyed/convinced you that choice and determinism are not mutually exclusive and that choice does not necessitate free will?

Cheers, John

Amos

We must always chose to do something or go someplace so the fact that choices must be made is not part of the argument. The argument is if we are free to chose and for this we must be of one mind.

If your argument is aimed to remove the idea that choices must be made the "free will" argument would not exist because the reality of free will is needed to make determinism possible.

DRFseven

But don't you say this because you think of "deciding" or "choosing" as an action requiring free will? If free will were the case, there would be nothing on which to base our decisions. So "determined will" enables decision-making.

Our decisions are always based on something, even if we are unaware of it. We can never be free (and would never want to be free) of our framework for decision-making; otherwise there would be nothing but fence-sitting. We make decisions, but they are bound to our circumstances.

John Page

OK, free from what?