leyline

sodium

"But no one would advocate "trusting emotions" as a way to determine information, when being incorrect can have obvious negative results. "

well hang on there, what about.....

"But no one would advocate "trusting materialism" as a way to determine information, when being incorrect can have obvious negative results. "

according to us emotionalists when we 'never' trust our emotions and spiritual intuitions and so on it indeed has negative results. Trust is trust whether it is emotions, materialism or whatever.

here's another.

"But no one would advocate "trusting memories" as a way to determine information, when being incorrect can have obvious negative results. "

'not' trusting memories would have even more catastrophic results.

WRT your experiment, well i wouldn't claim that emotions are entirely trustworthy anymore than my rationality or other senses are totally trustworthy. I am not a determinist, I don't fear chaos to that extreme and i don't seek total trust. More importantly i do not have an either/or attitude with regard to materialism as i have stated before. I believe that the physical world restricts and affects our freewill profoundly. But not to the point of excluding it entirely. mine is an 'and' type philosophy. I reckon i speak for most people who believe in freewill in this respect.

I would also point out that the whole setting up of that experiment according to my worldview involves the freewill of the people who set it up and pressed the buttons! lol ........ We 'freewillers' do not believe in a well behaved universal law that states the conservation of freewill.

"If some trickster god offered to give me a soul, I'd reject the offer without hesitation. The present situation, of the interaction of particles under physical laws, is what makes me. "

whatever turns you on man. Each to their own.

Kent Stevens

The idea that without free will we would be simple robots is wrong. That because we are capable of complex behaviour that we must have free will. For perhaps a supercomputer that calculates weather predictions would also then have free will, as otherwise it would be a simple machine incapable of such calculation. Free will is not the miraculous ingredient that is necessary to provide complex behaviour to an entity.

Free will suggests that we are separate from the rest of the universe. It says that we could have done different if we had the opportunity to choose again. But we would have done the same things in the same set of circumstances. In this we are no different from machines or other physical systems. To believe in free will is to be consistent with believing in souls that act independently of the bodies that they inhabit. To believe in free will is to believe in the property of magic.

sodium

It's pretty clear this discussion is winding down. I can't really figure out what you mean by this statement and those that follow. However, I will point out that it seems to me that people do tend to act as if materialism is true when they think it really counts. For whatever reason, scientists don't usually consider supernatural explanations for things. But perhaps more tellingly, politicians don't either. For example, although it is almost an obligation for US politicians to claim belief in an interventionist God, the massive American military is a good sign that Americans don't like to rely on that "in God we trust" thing.

Now for Osama Bin Laden, of course, things are a little different. It was perfectly sensible that the Taliban would defeat the US military, because, after all, the outcome was up to God. And why should God care which side had a better Air Force? But then, he was/is a madman. Sane people, although they may strongly believe in the supernatural, tend to act as if materialism were true, when they think it counts.

soulofdarwin

In contemplating a worldview anchored in reality, marked by the absence of metaphysical notions, a commonly voiced complaint is that such a worldview spawns some missing dimension in the universe. Being a cause and effect kind of guy, most aspects of the universe are, for me, missing. If I had an understanding of quantum mechanics and, therefore, an appreciation for the fact that matter and anti-matter are continually being made from nothing, I would be missing a few less of those things. The point is that most of us (at least those of us who are not working in theoretical physics) are never going to have answers for the questions of how the universe has arisen (the WHAT), if, indeed, it had a beginning, or the purpose of its existence (the WHY), if there is such reason. Since I can’t know the WHAT, I have to regard the WHY as irrelevant. But, as we all have to have a concept of this realm in which we dwell and of our relationship to it, therein lays the dilemma (lack of such a concept is, in my view, a working definition of insanity). At some point, we have to stop looking for the unanswerable and just go with what we know. In my view, this is the essence of the process that shapes an individual philosophy. My philosophy is based on what I know and nothing more than that, even in the knowledge that what I don’t know far outweighs what I do know. When early human forms first developed a contemplative awareness of physical phenomena, an unimaginably powerful object like the sun must have been a source of great fear. To remove fear, sentient beings look for explanations. The primitive mind had no explanation, yet it had to have an explanation to maintain sanity. Mythologies are the legacy of the unanswerable fears of our ancestors, a legacy that, unfortunately, has persisted even into the 21st century. It does take a certain intellectual resolve to look squarely at the unknown and accept it, without invention.

We all fear what is for us the ultimate personal “unknown�, death. Perhaps English speakers have a particularly heavy burden in this related to the language – DEATH!! It even sounds scary, doesn’t it? The Spanish word for death, in referring to the death of an individual, is difuncion (dysfunction), a relatively benign and somewhat more descriptive term. First you have function. Then, you don’t. No supernatural connotations there. Of course, that seeming casualness of description is probably due to the Catholic premise that death is only a transition from one state of existence to the next. At any rate, I suspect that our fear of death is rooted in our physiology. The collective demands of every corporeal atom, molecule, and cell to continue their existence constitute a powerful emotive force – our “will� to survive. In fact, I believe that collective emotive force might be the source of all human emotion and motivation. In that light, you might ask yourself: Why do I wear socks? If I didn’t wear socks, my employer might think I’m weird. And, if my employer thinks I’m weird, he might fire me. And, if I lose my job, I won’t be able to pay my rent. And, if I’m homeless, I might die. Therefore, I wear socks so I won’t die. Laughable? Perhaps the simplistic nature of that reasoning belies the truth in it. I believe it a premise worth exploring – that all emotion related to love, hate, friendship, joy, and sorrow is rooted in our innate fear of death. In other words, human emotion is the body’s answer to the unknown.

Might there be more to the universe than what we are able to perceive? I suppose that idea could provide an answer for some fear that we have. Personally, I have steeled myself against the imperceptible, and, in so doing, have become fearless.

Having said that, let me make clear that I in no way consider the emotional output of our neurological processes less important or of less value to us personally than the rational output of those processes. In fact, everything that we experience as beautiful in our existence and all that makes that existence worthwhile comes to us via our emotions. Unfortunately, that existence also relies on knowledge, and emotion can only serve to cloud the processes by which we acquire knowledge. A mind clear of emotion is essential to rational thinking.

Finally, we could have a look at the scientific view of emotion:

EMOTION:

Neuro term.: 1. A pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain. 2. Specifically, feelings of agreement, anger, certainty, control, disagreement, disgust, disliking, embarrassment, fear, happiness, hate, interest, liking, love, sadness, shame, surprise, and uncertainty --as expressed nonverbally, apart from words.

Meaning: Emotions are mammalian elaborations of vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (e.g., dopamine, noradrenalin, and serotonin) step up or step down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures. In mammals, primates, and human beings, feelings are displayed as emotion cues.

Anatomy. Before the mammalian brain, life in the Nonverbal World was automatic, preconscious, and predictable. Reptilian motor centers reacted to vision, sound, touch, chemical, gravity, and motion sensory cues with preset body movements and programmed postures. With the arrival of night-active mammals, approximately 180 million years past, smell replaced sight as the dominant sense, and a newer, more flexible way of responding, based on emotion and emotional memory, arose from the olfactory sense. In the Jurassic period, the mammalian brain invested heavily in aroma circuits to succeed at night as reptiles slept. These odor pathways gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our limbic brain.

Physiology. "Heart rate is a convenient and sensitive indicator of emotional tension." (Cherkovich and Tatoyan, 1973:265).

RESEARCH REPORTS:

Though our fingers, hands, and arms show feelings as well, the study of emotion has focused mainly on facial expressions. 1. In The Face of Emotion, Izard (1971:185) proposed nine major emotions: interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, disgust, anger, shame, fear, and contempt. 2. From research on the face, six basic emotions--surprise, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness--have been proposed (Ekman 1984). 3. Primary (i.e., innate) emotions, such as fear, "depend on limbic system circuitry," with the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus being "key players" (Damasio 1994:133). 4. Secondary emotions (i.e., feelings attached to objects [e.g., to dental drills], events, and situations through learning) require additional input from the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices (Damasio 1994:134; viz. "The stimulus may still be processed directly via the amygdala but is now also analyzed in the thought process . . ." [Damasio 1994:137].). 5. "Thoughts and emotions are interwoven: every thought, however bland, almost always carries with it some emotional undertone, however subtle" (Restak 1995:21).

Neuro-notes I: 1. Smell carries directly to limbic areas of the mammalian brain via nerves running from the olfactory bulbs to the septum, amygdala, and hippocampus. In the aquatic brain, olfaction was critical for detecting food, foes, and mates from a distance in murky waters. 2. Like an emotional feeling, aroma has a volatile or "thin-skinned" quality because sensory cells lie on the exposed exterior of the olfactory epithelium (i.e., on the bodily surface itself). 3. Like a whiff of smelling salts, a sudden feeling may jolt the mind. The force of a mood is reminiscent of a smell's intensity (e.g., soft and gentle, pungent, or overpowering), and similarly permeates and fades as well. The design of emotion cues, in tandem with the forebrain's olfactory prehistory, suggests that the sense of smell is the neurological model for our emotions.

Neuro-notes II: Like aromas, emotions are either positive or negative (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant)--and rarely neutral. Like odors, feelings come and go, defy logic, and clearly show upon our face in mood signs. It is likely that many emotions evolved from aroma paleocircuits a. in subcortical nuclei (e.g., the paleocortex of the amygdala), and b. in layers of nerve cells within the forebrain's outer covering of neocortex. (Note: The latter's stratified architecture resembles that of the olfactory bulb, which is organized in layers as well.)

pi_noir

Is there any clue as to the identity of the mysterious force that chooses B instead of C, as leyline was saying? It seems rather mystical, which always raises a red flag in my mind. Maybe like in chaotic systems, different outcomes B and C both seem to be possible, but really only one is. We just aren't sophisticated enough to predict which.
In one way, emotions have extraordinary signifcane for the determinist. They are part of the multitude of factors that decide the fate of the universe! But I do concede that ultimately all our struggles, triumphs and emotions are meaningless. We are parts of a system we can't escape from. So I guess the best thing for our species to do is to sweep the whole thing under the rug and continue to try ro improve the world as though we could change our destiny. But I do think that the lack of free will should be kept in mind in certain cases (like capital punishment).

Jax

To be a little broad for a moment, and probably state what has been said already with far less eloquence....

To truly have free will, one must be omnipotent.
Omnipotence is an impossibility. Therefore free will is an impossibility.

Kent Stevens

You could use similar words and phrases to free will without giving out metaphysical connotations. You could talk of someone without freedom of choice, someone being compelled, or even of someone doing something against their own will.

In legal cases we are normally concerned about whether people were acting freely or whether they were being compelled to do something.

A determinist stance covers any situation. If someone murders another person this would be due to various causes. If someone considers murdering someone but then decides against it, this is also due to various causes. If someone never thinks about murdering someone in their entire life this is yet again due to various causes.