A3

Hi Nial,

Yes, and it seems to me the only aspect that has relation to everyday life.
If I could respond and present a Swedenborgian view, although to do a complete believe system justice in a few words is impossible. In short, our believe is build on the internal or spiritual meaning of the Word. We refer to what you just said as ‘old Church stuff’ and see it as not even a close description of the real situation. Ages ago people took the Old and New Testament in a literal way and applied it to their lifes without much of a problem. Through many centuries while life and knowledge developed, these dogmas were blindly copied and passed on.
We believe, however, that the Old Testament was written from the perspective of a young child who is told by a loving parent to obey and become healthy and wealthy or disobey and be punished by a then angry parent. The parent really does seem angry to the child but this is an appearance.
A God who is love itself cannot get angry or even punish and least of all wish damnation on anyone. It seems more just and make more sense to create a human race that has complete freedom and love them, warts and all. In short, when we do what we love we are happy. If we love what is good we enter a heavenly state, if we love what is evil we enter into a hellish state. Both states start here on earth and when we die we remain in that state. A loving God lets everyone become the person they want to be, but in order to do that we need the freedom and the ability to choose either. And we do.
Once the outrageous concept of a loving God has somewhat settled and seen as a remote possibility than there is room made for an idea that maybe we really are a spirit also. Again this is very simplistic and the tip of the iceberg.

In most countries it seems that the law punishes someone to the extend that they are responsible. Physically as well as mentally.

Regards
Adriaan

jpbrooks

Wow! This topic has really taken off since my last visit.

This draws attention to an interesting point. The difference between our (living} brains and mechanical devices, (i'll leave the issue of non human animal brains out of the discussion for the present time), seems to be that our brains are conscious and possess the ability to make choices on the basis of factors that motivate us. Being a kind of "determinist", I don't believe that motivations lie outside the sequence of causes and effects in the universe. But I'm not sure how motivations (and the emotions that arise in response that cause us to act or make certain choices) can be (re)produced by a purely mechanical (non living) process or thing. Perhaps, then, it is not so unreasonable to hold that our conscious ("free"?) choices (unlike our unconscious mental "activity") need not be (viewed as being) wholly the result of antecedent causes. If this is all that "free will" involves, then I don't see why it would be considered incompatible with determinism. (However, I suspect that "free will", for some of its advocates, may involve something more than this.)

-John Phillip Brooks

[ June 22, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Liquidrage

That is not a normal definition of free will though.
I've seen a lot of "this is what free will means to me" posts and it really makes me wonder. Why are people attempting to squeeze their views of how the mind works into the term free will? There's no reason for it. Call it "this is how the mind works" or call it "consciousness" or something. Just don't call it free will. That term is already defined.

A3

DRFseven
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What about a random act of kindness? Obviously there is no thought of reward here. Swedenborg maintains if we want to move up in the spiritual world we have to get away from doing good things for rewards. Animals work that way, humans shouldn’t.
[quote]Sure, people can call this mechanism free will, because it is we who possess the weighted memories that precipitate the choice. But this is like saying we determine when our hearts will beat because the sinus nodes are a part of us.[\quote]
OK so we can call it free will, and then I would compare it with our breathing. We can choose to take breaths whenever we want (within limits) and so enter an environment that we otherwise couldn’t.
Do you make choices without thinking????? Do animals think like humans??? Can machines think????????? Do you really see yourselves as no more than an air-conditioner, just more complex? Do you know, uberhaupt, what ‘thought’ is?

Liquidrage

Originally posted by A3:

What about a random act of kindness? Obviously there is no thought of reward here. Swedenborg maintains if we want to move up in the spiritual world we have to get away from doing good things for rewards. Animals work that way, humans shouldn’t.

Do you make choices without thinking????? Do animals think like humans??? Can machines think????????? Do you really see yourselves as no more than an air-conditioner, just more complex? Do you know, uberhaupt, what ‘thought’ is?


It is not obvious that random acts of kindness are done without a reward. Not enough information is known to determine why certain acts are done. You are concluding it is obvious without giving any reasoning. You are ignoring the mechanism that produces the choices of which one is choosen as well as the mechanism that makes the choice.

What is the spiritual world? Describe it, define it or don't use it.

I don't know about DRF7 (though we tend to agree a lot in this area of discussion) but I see myself as a very complex carbon machine of sorts.
I do not in any way consider humans divine.

[ June 22, 2002: Message edited by: Liquidrage ]</p>

DRFseven

Yes, are we so delicate that we can't look something in the face? The fact that even those who accept determinism in every other facet strive to shield their eyes against the uncomfortable glare of psychological determinism. They cite technical ways the will could be thought of as free, they understand determinsm all the way down to human behavior and then suddenly posit "wiggle room". Dennett confuses people on the question of free will with his term "elbow room", and ends up concluding that though free will is an illusion, we feel that we have freedom since we make decisions.

As Thomas J. Clark, in <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/determin.htm" target="_blank">How to Cope With Creeping Mechanism</a>, puts it: "But if we find ourselves regretting the loss of what now seems an illusory freedom, we are more than compensated by knowing that to have what we want – even poetry – we need not be more than we actually are."

[ June 22, 2002: Message edited by: DRFseven ]</p>

DRFseven

It's hard for me to believe you actually think this. Can you not see that you feel rewarded for "random" acts of kindness? If people don't feel good about committing acts of kindness, they don't commit them. Sometimes people commit acts of UNkindness, such as burning crosses in peoples' yards, pouring gasoline on cats and setting them afire. Why? Because they feel GOOD about it (they are rewarded with a physiological pleasure jolt).

Oh, he does, does he? Well then, he'd better get busy redesigning us and the other animals on this planet since we are all motivated by a physiological reward system.

That's a cute sentence.

I make choices by thinking; that is the whole point of the argument. To choose FREELY we'd have to do it without thinking. Do vacuum cleaners move like humans????? Well, in a way, they do (they move forward and backward). In another way they don't (they don't walk, they roll). Your questions are meaningless to the point of this discussion. No one has ever argued that there are no differences in the way humans, other animals, and machines think. Yet, as different as they are, there is still a decision-making process by which one alternative is selected. So what? Where is the bad news in that? You ask if I see myself as "no more" than an air-conditioner, except perhaps more complex. No more WHAT than an air-conditioner? I've already said I'm more complex than it is (actually it was a thermostat). I feel I am prettier than an air-conditioner, but, you know, that's just my bias. I do think many air-conditioners are more efficient than I am at cooling houses and cars, so in that way, an air-conditioner is "more" than I am.

This is what I think thought is: sensory perception + memory. What do you think thought is?

jpbrooks

... Which is why I don't claim to be an advocate of "free will".
I have not yet seen a definition of "free will" with which all or most "free will" advocates would agree. And I suspect that when such a clear definition is finally provided, it would either reveal some inconsistency in the concept of "free will" or provide us with a conception of "free will" that is compatible with some form of determinism. I admit that my suspicions could turn out to be erroneous, but I doubt that they will because the "free will" advocate, for example has to be able to provide a coherent account for how one's "free" choice interacts with (or relates to) the "realm" of cause and effect if it is not already a part of it.

(I'll be back later.)

NialScorva

The apparent paradox is in punishing someone when there's no means by which the punishment will affect their behavior, since it's predetermined. The idea is that the punishment (or threat of) influences the decision, and if there is no meaningful decisions, then there's no justifiable reason to punish.

The bulk of my point is that the hypotheticals are not a mechanism for exploration of the question in the first place, by the very fact that we can *have* hypotheticals is the question capable of being asked. In other words, through language, we are capable of describing something that is not real, and free will is another way of describing the answer to the question "what if the linguistic-not-reality was reality?", since the question doesn't have an answer as such.

NialScorva

Hey! Welcome to the forum, I think this is the first time we've really run across each other.


I strongly disagree, in fact a consequence of my argument is that this aspect has no relation to everyday life. It's pretty much a corrolary to my main thrust.

No offense intended, but I don't see how this pertains to the free will debate. My comment was more intended as a historical statement. However, the free will problem exists for any belief system that insists on an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent diety that in any way distinguishes right from wrong in people.

Aye, and almost exclusively with the empirical free will I touched on, using a presumption of metaphysical naturalism. That's how the insanity defense works, show empirically that the person's ability to choose is constrained in a way that made them incapable of deciding differently, or at least incapable of properly evaulating the choices.