Taamalus

As a chemist I deal a lot with random action. >>Gerppfandsd<< Like this one.

Quantum Physics does show a deterministic universe, but this is limited to energy without thought. I think, and I think freely. That I happen to be made up out of only sixteen basic elements is incidental.

The subconscious determines what the conscious can deal with. Since the subconscious absorbs all data. But this is it. The final say of thought is up to the conscious. Therefore I think freely and consequently have free will. That others think they can force their will upon me again is incidental.

sodium

Determinism doesn't really mean that you have no control over your actions. Your will can still be the cause of your actions, although what you want is in turn determined by prior causes. Of course, most of the time, you don't want it any other way, since you want to want the things you want.

And I agree with the previous comment that determinism probably does not hold at the quantum level, though it is a close approximation.

Godless Wonder

I think there is no relationship between conciousness and free will. Free will does not exist.

What do you mean by "need" for consciousness? In order for something to be "needed", there must be somebody who is "needing" it. Consciousness must come before there is anybody to "need" it. Or, maybe I don't understand the question.

Is the quesition "why did conciousness evolve?" or "how is it possible that conciousness can evolve in a deterministic universe?" Do you suppose that it is possible for anything to evolve in a deterministic universe? (My answer to that would be "yes".)

One (probably wrong :-) way to think of conciousness is as an absurdly complex reflex action. Reflexes require no conciousness as we think of it, yet they provide responses to stimuli.

One can think of conciousness as a generalized (and almost incredibly complex) reflex action which is constantly generating responses to the combined accumulation of all the stimuli it has ever received (though that's probably stretching the meaning of the word "reflex" to near breaking point.) But consider nerve cells and neurons are really not so different. Of course describing it this way doesn't really help at all with understanding how conciousness works. This is the "hard problem" in neurobiology, and is not one that can be figured out by philosophizing.

xorbie

Hopefully I am not repeating anything others have said, as I am too tired to read them all carefully. However, there are several things wrong with the very premise of your question. First of all, if hypothetically everything was deterministic then "I" would be totally unable to gauge "my" response to this news.

More importantly, and this is why I had those pronouns in quotation marks, is that determinism vs. free will is a an argument that doesn't exist at all in the first place.

The problem arises when you carefully examine what the debate is. Determinists will say "physical forces create your DNA, your own determined parents control how you are raised, your DNA controls how you change and how you act, physical forces control all external events etc etc". WELL, DUH! The point is that to say that "I" no longer have any free will at this point is silly. What am "I"? Well I am actually composed of DNA and other molecules (quite the revelation, huh?). So DNA controls what I do... so what? That just means that part of me has a large influence over what I do. You cannot get this deap into physics, biology, chemistry etc and yet somehow still keep the person as this sort of amorphous, disconnected self. If you are going to say people have a soul, it would be silly to think that this soul is determined. If we don't have a soul, we determine ourselves.

Well, that's my 2 cents.

Volker.Doormann

Your logic contains two statements i.) The conclusion shell be determined. ii.) The conclusion shell be a cognition out of the order of truth.

A conclusion is a result of an insight in a truth. An insight (cognition) is only possible if there is a degree of freedom in a dimension (truth), otherwise an insight would not an insight. This learns, that a conclusion is a result of a consciousness that has the freedom to conclude in this degree of freedom - truth.

If one does conclude that there is determinism and this determinism should be absolute, then this is a contradiction. Either there is a freedom from determinism in the process of insight and conclusion, or it is not. Both are not possible.

Quote:

Perhaps more disconcerting, however, is that free-will has been proven to be nothing but an illusion. Every movement you have ever made and every thought you have ever had, were laid down and planned out seconds into the inception of the universe. You have no control over any of the events of your life, not even the choice to end that life - unless it was part of your destiny, which had been planned out since, and was caused by, the Big Bang. However, you are still conscious of your entire experience. It's just that you have absolutely no control over it.

This thinking lacks on the cognition, that cognition is an adequate tool, but not acting, and have supposed a control.

Each being has the total freedom of cognition. If one does not make use of it, but is a slave of acting, and not a master of acting, then he is in bondage in the law of cause and effect. A master of acting knows about the absolute trueness of causality, which perceiving actionists call ‘determinism’. Only slaves of causality do act without making use of cognition, or do ignore strictly the effects of acting. No one has shown, that the disorder in this world does decrease from (causal) acts. No one has shown that cognition that is without acting has an effect. The law of causality is no determinism; it is a law, that it’s absolute causality can lead to the insight and conclusion, that cognition in the truth of nature frees from the slavery of causal acting (‘determinism’). The very point here is only, that some actionists, who have rejected cognition because they believe that action is free from determinism, becomes unemployed, if they stop acting.

Volker

rainbow walking

And when you think about the will...whether it's free or not...you understand it to be a decision making faculty. The elements required to make a decision are:

1: Alternatives to choose from

2. Knowledge of those alternatives

3. The ability to make a choice



Number one first: Would we ever be able to completely isolate a single moment of decision from the alternatives that confront us to be selected from and accurately describe:

1. Where each of those alternatives originated

2. How accurately we are processing the consequence of each specific alternative were we to select that alternative

3. How many possible unknown alternatives also existed that we weren't aware of.

Number two: Seeing as we define knowledge in such as way that absolute certainty is virtually impossible to assure:

1. How much of our decision making process is motivated by ignorance

2. How much of what we believe to be true is only so by consensus which could influence the consequence of our choice away from what we anticipated it to be

3. What percentage of our choices align with our anticipated consequence

Number Three:Many of our percieved abilities to make a choice may actually be subject to unconscious duress from physical forces within us like pressures and anxieties that we've learned to repress:

1. How many, if any, of these unconscious anxieties are the result of our past choices and how many are naturally inherent in all of us

2. If some of these inherent anxieties are the result of past choices how far do they affect our future choices

3. If all of us are subject to inherent natural anxieties, what relative value could be gained in determining what they are and predicting their influence over our decisions



Additional considerations:

1. Our actual decision can be accurately reflected by ones and zeros. It's binary.

2. When we actually make a choice from among all the percieved alternatives we have only made one choice to the exclusion of all others.

3. Once this choice is made all the alternatives vanish into either missed opportunities or choices best left alone.

4. There is a very high probability that there were alternatives that would have been better choices but we simply weren't aware of them.

5. Ignorance will prevail.

Conclusion: There are two many variables in the decision making process for it to ever be seriously impaired by determinism or to become so predictable as to eliminate the need to plan or speculate or move ahead on faith or hope or justified belief.

A greater degree of predictability in the decision making process would be a good thing for man. So determinism is not a bad thing to incorporate into ones reasoning powers when faced with a choice.

Determinism, in the final analysis, is just complying with the reality of our existence. Ignorance is the factor that frees up our choices to such a degree as to make them appear random or less than predictable consequentially.

Thus the more we learn about our universe the further we will move away from those factors that provide the illusion of "free" will.

Wyrdsmyth

Many philosophers find determinism to be compatible with free will. That position is called 'compatibilism' or 'soft determinism.' For an example, take a look at Elbow Room: Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, by Daniel Dennett (1984).

Free will is a confusing subject. Many of us think of it as the power to do whatever we choose, regardless of the antecedent causes. But the problem with this conception of free will is that it does not take into account that antecedent causes contribute to our choice in the first place. Another confusion, IMO, is that we have an archaic conception of an essential 'self' or 'ego' that 'makes' the decisions, and this ego just really isn't physically there, it's just a convention of language, an abstraction. So, trying to find out how it fits in the whole deterministic scheme of impersonalized forces doesn't work very well. We might ask, "If determinism is true, then how can there be room for me -- my 'self' -- to make decisions and have an effect on the world?" But whatever your self is, is the product of the same forces that are determining everything else, you're all in the same river of causation, so to speak.

To me, free will questions are more about coercion, imprisonment, behavioral control, drugged manipulation and so forth than worrying about whether all the electrons in the universe are indeed bumping into each other with absolutely unwavering precision.

excreationist

spacer1:
At first glance, the quantum world doesn't seem to be deterministic though... it seems to involve chance.
On the other hand, the Many-worlds interpretation (MWI, aka the many-histories interpretation), is deterministic in a way... all of the possible courses of history become real, but the version of history you exist in is due to chance. (Though "you" can't exist in a version of our universe where no life exists).
Anyway, it isn't clear whether the quantum world is deterministic or not... and it would have a slight effect on larger scale things, like molecules and neurons (brain cells).

According to MWI, whenever quantum particles get to flip a coin (or whatever - a wave collapses?) all of the possible outcomes become alternate courses of history and become parallel universes. These in turn can give rise to more alternate histories. So one course of history wouldn't be set in stone from the beginning - there would be many possible histories. The effects of quantum fluctuations on your brain would be quite small though, and in small amounts of time there normally wouldn't be enough time for your decisions to diverge very much. When it comes to a tough decision where the choices seem similarly appealing, it would be more likely for your decision to change throughout alternate histories. That really just involves chance though... that's not exactly free-will.

spacer1

ALL:

I really should clarify that the OP was not a statement of breaking news. It was a thought experiment. Also, I should have used the term "fatalism" rather than "determinism". However, since the thought experiment involves determinism being true and rules out free-will, it was intended to be the same thing.

I hope this clarifies matters, and apologize for leaving these comments out of the OP.

spacer1

I have never encountered a body-less consciousness. I have, however, encountered an unconscious body. Given these facts, I don't see how consciousness "must come before there is anybody to need it." Consciousness requires a body to provide it......unless you know of a counter-example.....
Do you mean that determinism, if true, eliminates the possibility of self-awareness (unable to formulate the concept of "I")?
Do you mean that determinism, if true, eliminates the possibility of self-awareness?

Does this imply that consciousness creates free-will? (and I don't mean consciousness "imagines" free-will, but that it allows for it.)