Depends which philosopher is running for office.

"Vote for Spinoza! ... It's not like you have a choice"

Hate to break the news, but Barry's dead, bro..

edit: Or Benny, depending on which name you wanna go with.. I like Barry.

Aw, not to me. :wub: I could almost stick a picture of him on my wall. And if anybody laughs I'll say I had no choice - Barry made me do it! oo:

natura naturans = natura naturata
:D





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Acky dead impressed wit bossman now.. me always thinks dat da big book in da bookcase 'bout a chick named Ethica.. :blink:

She's worthy of a http://www.trygve.com/uekiss.html indeed.

(inadvertently found that while searching for Spinoza jokes. And hey, they mention my name! Zenoian is my favourite one of the list too )

Of course we don't have free will. You think people choose to play Runescape? Utterly unthinkable.

Can we really not know forever? Assuming humanity goes on forever. I'm sure someone will stumble upon it sometime. Also I can't stand people who say it doesn't matter, and to just go on with their life. It's such a... why are you even here posting kind of post? More than that if I could live forever I sure as hell don't want to be some sort of loop flesh bot or robot or what have you and do the same [censored] over and over again. The only way to grow is to push boundaries and question. You learn new things, and there is always stuff to see. Or you could go and live life on repeat and come home every day/night after work tired and just loop that [censored] forever. Have... fun?

Edit
@ the person earlier who linked me to the Freud doll thing. HAHAHAh that was classic. :celebration: I am not a psychologist yet, but I just got my offers of admission into a bachelor of psychology and have sort of been up all night happy to get into the course. Although I obviously have an interest in it. I took a basic course in high school, and some... sort of in between ones in College. Got interested in it, and left College for University.

Luckily, I read http://consc.net/misc/philosophicalterms.html.. otherwise I would have been clueless in this conversation
Really helped clear things up for me

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Lewis: author of books about Narnia <--- Acky knew dis B)
pragmatist: as hard-headed as they come <-- dis Acky den :nod:

I'm with Rousseau on this one: "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they."

In other words, yes we are free, but our obligations and interactions with society determine specific lines of conduct, and if you venture outside of these expectations the consequences tend to be unprofitable. You can call in sick for work, but your boss may decide to fire you - in this case your choice to not go to work has resulted in the choice not to have a job. The initial choice is under your control, but the repercussions are not: it's unlikely that you could choose to both stay at home and have a job.

So maybe freedom is more like a series of branches: instead of a chaotic, laissez-faire mass of random decisions, the choices we make close off other forks of decision, with end results which are mutually exclusive and determined by the choices we make. And yet I still can't believe life is purely deterministic like that: there's too much complexity in the simplest human mind to be fully mappable along such fatalistic lines.

We are free in the sense that a zoo animal is free to wonder around its cage.

Psychological determinism is the only thing that makes sense with what we know of the universe. The only other options are a quantum brain or metaphysics. The quantum brain is highly unlikely, even though we know that in QM things really do behave non-deterministically. The level at which things behave this way is almost certainly not something that affects us within our brains. Even if for each action we take, something like the position of an electron would determine the difference between one action and another, you haven't made a decision. It's a purely statistical outcome.

Truly, for those who are all for the idea that people actually make decisions and are free to choose whichever they want in the traditional sense, really, try to imagine what is physically making the decision. If you decide to wave your hand, where did that motor impulse stem from?

People tend to think of what makes them, "them" as something separate from the body. Something higher than the brain that interprets the brain's interpretation of sensory input. Something that chooses how the body will move. How else could we truly SEE this grand picture in front of us, rather than just having the knowledge of what we are seeing? And I agree, it's an incredibly difficult illusion to shake. But that's all it is. An amazing illusion of the brain.

Well you're a party pooper. So I'm going to play Fallout 3, my electrons have decided.

:wave:



Me too, and for the record; I didn't wave my hand, because I chose not to. Luckily, there was this smiley..







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Acky waved :blush:
me Acky always waves at da 'puter box peoples and be friendly-like-sorts-not-brutish

You are free to choose that which you are told to choose.

Yes we do.

Our minds are pre-conditioned to lean towards a certain kind of choice, instinct is still alive in a modern human. But I can make a conscious choice to go the other way. My mind will tell me which choice is the right one, or what I think is the right choice anyway, but I can pick the opposite out of spite if I want to. It's a complicated issue, and it's not one I really think about.

Andrew Ryan is freaking dead! :flamethrower:

That's not free will, and that's not the point of the question. Whether you will choose to pick the opposite out of spite is based on the existing state of your mind. Also "my mind will tell me" is a nonsensical statement. Who is "me"? Your mind is telling whom? You are your mind.

IMO, not as much as some would care to admit to. We have some free Will but about 95% or something up there of out brain is fully automated so...

But our minds are far from static: the act of thinking about thinking about something changes the very outcome of those thoughts, to the point where the end decision may as well be non-deterministic, even if what you say about humans being statistically fatalistic is true. If my body presents me with an itch, I can choose to act on that impulse to scratch or not, and then I might start to feel conscious about other itches I'm ignoring, until I finally succumb to the temptation and decide to act - how is that purely determined behaviour? It's the dynamic interaction of these competing "thoughts" that make us who we are, and often result in completely irrational decisions. Even if humans are some kind of chemical automaton, the processes are so complex as to be indistinguishable from a truly random system - if you placed the same human into the same situation more than once, I don't believe the results would ever be the same (even if that were physically possible - chaos ftw...)

The problem is that chaotic systems do not exist barring QM. Every single movement of every single atom in the universe is determined by what happened directly before that movement. I mean, I see what you're saying, but I don't think you understand how psychological determinism works. All the thinking about other "itches" as you say is a result of what memories and behaviors the original "itch" brings up through neural pathways. Undoubtedly it is extremely complex, but what you seem to be arguing is that complexity means psychological determinism cannot be true.

I see so many people using this exact "argument" to prove that they do have free will and that they are indeed able to choose what their actions will be. Popular variations of this argument include "I could have chosen not to respond to this thread/your post but I did because I chose to."

You doing or not doing something doesn't prove that you do indeed have free will and it is an incredibly ignorant attempt of an argument proving that, because people completely disregard the fact that their doing or not doing something is just another one of those actions which the person they respond to was talking about and that it is, like any other action, just something that stems from whatever happens in our brains/bodies.

Should I have mentioned that I decided to pick my nose instead, and then belayed that until I scratched myself, and then totally forgot to pick my nose until just now?
also, you took me out of context..
you forgot my wave smiley


so in a sense, I still don't know. And thankfully, ignorance is bliss since now I can lie to myself and say that I do have free will

Determinism, while still unfalsifiable, can be said to not work until further research of the beginning of the universe has been conducted. The reason why, in my opinion, is that most pure deterministic views, where free will is governed by the laws of nature and so on, use the consequence argument, which can't be applied until the aforementioned research has been done. (I actually can't go too far with this as it borders religion.) This applies to the incompatabilists, fatalists and other deterministic views. Or you can just say that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_Ry8J_jdw

On the other side of the spectrum there are the indeterminists and libertarians who uses systems akin to the dualistic viewpoint of matter, overriding the deterministic cause-effect system. This can't be proven as we have no way (or in the words of Karl Popper "can't think of a way") to disprove it. The are some differenct viewpoints on this matter with Robert Kane's and Robert Nozick's being the most famous. It's metaphysical and as such can make the layman confused. Just look up libertarianism on the wiki if you're interested.

Then there's the middleground, the compatabilists. They implement a compromise where free will goes hand-in-hand with determinism.

Personally I see free will as the ability to act willingly within the boundaries of nature, meaning that while you can't send out nuclear death rays from your hands, you can choose whether or not to e.g. tune out on me and play games instead. We are to a certain extent limited by the laws of nature but it only limits the different choices we can make. What kind of choice you can make depends on the situation and what you're physically capable of doing. It's much like in The Sims, where you have all these meters on your character's well-being but how and when you decide to use the toilet you choose yourself. You could e.g. choose to go and let the load out or you can choose not to and pee your pants. In this system there are no laws governing the conscious decisions, but this is just my opinion.

Of course, you could just go the Matrix way and say we are all nakedly plugged into computers in a Borg hivemind. But where's the fun in that?

For this, you need to explain a mechanism for choosing that isn't deterministic. None such explanation exists, or can exist.

Perhaps there is something I'm missing about the argument for psychological determinism, in which case I'm all ears... But to me it seems this: I have desires/needs, whichever proves strongest is the one I inevitably follow, and there's my "decision". And I can understand that: our neural pathways are electro-chemical rather than magical, and they follow the usual laws of physical causality - put in X input to get Y output (to a certain extent, at least - those electro-chemical processes still have a degree of variance.) But while the individual actions may be determined, I think the dynamics between them cannot: my argument is simply that there are so many competing desires in a human (not just the basic physical sensations like hunger, but also guilt, greed, etc.) that the end result is a chaotic mess resulting from the unending competition of those desires. You may make a "decision" one minute, and arrive at a completely different "decision" the next, which implies that each "decision" is actually a heuristic evaluation dependent on how long you had to think about the problem. The wider I consider my possibilities, the greater my scope for making the "best" decision - but it is still my choice to look beyond the obvious or not.

But, then again, I don't have the benefit of studying the topic in depth, so if I've missed the crux please enlighten me.