If one believes in a universal creator. ie GOD or , THE ONE, or CREATOR, or etc.... there has to be free will. Otherwise there is no porpuse in existance. If we were pre destined we would not be free to make choices because "God" would already know the outcome. If one doesnt believe in a creator then free will is a non issue

Try applying the Lorenz stuff about chaos on a complicated presence as human
we're just the result of an index of data evolved through our lifetimes, all our decisions are bare logical and predictable ..
people think the same everywhere
no such thing as free will

I call bullshit on people thinking the same everywhere. Religion (and some peoples' lack thereof) alone proves my point.

The free is the capacity to resist the pain and the courage to get over the tragedy. The miracle is the free, the miracle is do possible the impossible. The christian and other religions people by comfortable in their faith, but the Rocker not comfortably waiting a gift, the Rocker want a conquest the new life, the new eternity. God teach me imploration mercy upon my knees, but Lucifer teach me to struggle through the pain and adversity, to fight for my site in the universe. The free is the struggle.

^ Did anybody else understand that?

Sure you have a free will the question is do you do everything you do feel like or are you being held back by moral, ethic, social background etc.

Written by DevouredByAbyss on 24.11.2011 at 18:57

The free is the capacity to resist the pain and the courage to get over the tragedy. The miracle is the free, the miracle is do possible the impossible. The christian and other religions people by comfortable in their faith, but the Rocker not comfortably waiting a gift, the Rocker want a conquest the new life, the new eternity. God teach me imploration mercy upon my knees, but Lucifer teach me to struggle through the pain and adversity, to fight for my site in the universe. The free is the struggle.

You're even more ridiculous than Jerry Falwell.

The fact that humans have reached the level of complexity to begin to question their own freedom within what we know as existence hints that maybe this complexity has overridden the natural flow of events through space time giving us free will to an extent. You should also take into account quantum mechanics when talking about free will. Given that the existence is made up of tiny atoms that all react together into some sort of endless chemical reaction/flow of energy, then there would be no way for free will I think. All of you're actions could be determined through some incredibly complex equation which will most likely never be able to be obtained by humans if such an equation even exists.

Now to complicate that a bit more into quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics attempts to explain even smaller units of universal organization. However, this is where my philosophical ideas tend to hold less value since I'm not at all a physicist. But, some of the implications of quantum mechanics are the MWI, which states that at any specific time and position of an atom, its momentum cannot be determined. So, the MWI says that atom creates another duplicate dimension within the next unit of time with the only difference being the possible outcomes of the atom's movement. So, every unit of time (if you even can split time into units) nearly infinite copies of parallel universes are created that are nearly identical to one another. If this is completely true, then free will does not exist. To me though, I think theres probably more to this theory that just that, and physicists will probably make some interesting discoveries about quantum mechanics that key into the nature of our existence.

I read about a study where the movement of a small particle was actually effected by the researchers thoughts about the particle. This possibility, tied in with the implications of quantum mechanics make the question of free will very complex imo.

Yes, shit things wouldn't get done otherwise

Of course man has free will. It's apparent in such minute choices as "what am I going to eat tonight?" (I chose pizza this night btw, yum yum) It's also apparent in some of the larger issues we face, such as choosing good or evil, selflessness or selfishness, love or hate, etc.

Written by Guest on 13.05.2012 at 08:21
Of course man has free will. It's apparent in such minute choices as "what am I going to eat tonight?"

Some people believe it's already pre-destined that you would have eaten pizza, even when you think you change your mind to eat something else, that something else was the only actual option at the end of the day.

I believe in free will but it's very interesting to read up on fate/destiny.

Written by Troy Killjoy on 13.05.2012 at 14:26

Some people believe it's already pre-destined that you would have eaten pizza, even when you think you change your mind to eat something else, that something else was the only actual option at the end of the day.

Those people fail to realize just because something is known doesn't mean are not also still freely choosing. The two ideas aren't incompatible.

Now if any of you who believe in free will, was born in a poor Afghani family who always had to live in fear of a new kind of deadly attack , a new deadly explosion of bombs, being always in danger,could still believe in free will, if you ask me no I don't believe : some are born to sweet delight,Some are born to endless night.

Yes

No fate or Creator or karma or the matrix or whatever else would have bothered to predestine me to type yes to this question, right now at this given time, for no apparent reason on a message forum chatting with people I don't know. I did it because I felt like it.

Of course free will exist. I think the question rather is to which amount it exist (maybe it's already been said, I haven't looked through all the pages). I can do whatever I want, but many of my choices are influenced by nature, society, other people and my past.

Like, did I really choose for myself to study at the university to become a teacher? Did I only do it because I really wanted to? Probably not. I also did it because society tells me to have a job. If I didn't need a job, I wouldn't work at all.

To talk about the more "spiritual" side of it, if everything is already laid out from birth. No. I'm just not the type who believes in fate and such, although it is interesting and I must say that some things in my life have been such bizarre coincidences that I have questioned my view on destiny.

I'm a bit surprised that so many people take free will for granted. Surely, common sense says we don't have free will. It's not that some skeptics want to believe we don't have free will and therefore come up with way to prove it; rather, very commonsensical premises everybody accepts lead to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that we don't have free will, which is something we can't accept. It's a genuine dilemma, and saying "of course free will exists" is missing the point entirely. Maybe it's a given that we must believe in it, but how can we defend that belief against our conflicing, equally credible beliefs?

It's not really a question of predestination, fate or even physics. It's simply some very general propositions that we tend to accept. Everything is determined by a cause. Things don't randomly happen for no reason. The simplest definition of free will is a will whose actions are self-determined and not controlled by an outside cause. An effect can't be its own cause by definition. Therefore your mental states have to be caused by something else. It could be preceding mental states, it doesn't have to be physical states. But still, every mental state you have is clearly caused by something, and therefore not autonomous and independent.

It's a bit difficult to discuss this issue seperately, to be honest. We would need to cover philosophy of the mind more extensively before we can narrow it down. Questions of mental causation are pretty central here. How can the mental be in causal relationship with the physical without being reduced to epiphenomenal status?

^ That is an interesting take on the subject. I think most of us (myself included) had assumed this was about free will vs some type of external fate or control but what you are talking about are internal factors. Well, I guess I don't really have an answer for that one yet, I'd have to ponder that. You're definitely onto something. I think it comes down to how much locus of control do human beings have over their mental states and such.

And to elaborate on that:

I assumed that mental states have preceeding causes. That our decisions and beliefs are the consequence of our previous beliefs, wishes, physical needs, so on. It's fair to say that the causes can be either physical or mental, there's no reason to limit them to one or the other. (Surely the decision to pee is caused by physical pressure in your bladder, whereas me writing here is most immediately a result of my intellectual interests. Both actions obviously have a more complicated network of contributing causes both physical and mental.)

But let's say this isn't the case. Maybe our mental states aren't causally determined by preceding mental or physical states. That seems to be necessary for some common understanding of "free will" - something deterministically railroaded cannot be free. But the alternative would be that mental states don't have causal causes. If they aren't causally determined, they must be random. (And some random variation is what quantum physics allows for in some basic level of physical reality, I believe.) This seems even more damning for free will, because random mental states without any predictable cause doesn't exactly strike me as meaningful or sensible freedom. Random thoughts popping into your mind for no reason doesn't sound like free will, and yet it seems to be the only alternative to mental states being causally determined.


I don't have a very good personal opinion on the subject. On one hand, it seems plainly obvious that humans are physical beings just like ping pong balls or microsopic particles. We're subject to the same causal connections as everything in the physical universe, and that extends to our brains. We cannot have mental states seperately of the physical state of our brain, as I'm sure most people here will concede. It's not fate, destiny or a divine plan that guides us, but rather the arbitrary machine of causation. Still, the mental reality of experiencing the self clearly demands free will. Perhaps its illusory, but I'm more inclined to believe our categories of causation, explanation, freedom etc. are confused and therefore we haven't really set the question in terms we can understand.

Who was it that suggested that we have no choice, but to have free will? I remember Hitchens saying something like that, but I believe he was quoting.

Does free will exist?

Yes - but is rarely recognized and expressed by those whom possess it (which is all).

Some good reasons to doubt that we have free will in the absolute sense:

Free will in the absolute sense suggests that the will, the faculty of the mind that is volitional and produces actions, can act without antecedent causes. But what does it look like for something's actions to be uncaused? It's hard to imagine but it looks like something that is totally chaotic, whatever that might look like. We only know what it doesn't look like, and it doesn't look like what we do. If your will wasn't caused by an intelligence, in this case an intelligent system of the brain honed by evolutionary processes, it wouldn't be able to make a choice, say to choose vanilla over chocolate, it wouldn't do anything at all because it would have no coherency, certainly not enough to do something amazing like choose vanilla flavored ice cream. That suggests a preference, which is, gasp, a cause.

That we have a personality at all suggests that we can't originate a will de novo, the will is determined by the stimuli and the personality which is a product of brain states as far as we know. Some people are still trying to argue that there could be some sort of uncaused aspect of the will even if most of it is the result of the brain's configuration, and all the power to them but we have bigger problems to deal with. Forever chasing the unfalsifiable down the metaphysical foxhole isn't for me.

But this poses a bit of a problem for people, some people can handle being a feeling biological machine, and others definitely can't.

One problem that arises from this is whether or not we should still punish people who do bad things even though "their brain made them do it" and their mind was just along for the ride? And the best answer is that yes we can, but punishment isn't really the point, there is no point to vengeance in and of itself. The point is making sure that they don't do it again and other people are deterred from doing what they did. Free will or not life still matters for us and what people do matters to our lives. And frankly the less we consider punishment as "something that they deserved" and more a way to improve the world, the better.

Possibly the biggest problem people have when they renounce free will is that they lose their dignity as their egotistical self. We like to think of ourselves as the drivers of the vehicle, and a lot of our pride and self-esteem is tied into being a good driver. But if the driver is an illusion and isn't actually driving, and the vehicle is driving the driver, then the ego feels like it has no purpose anymore.

My imperfect solution is to accept that "I" am not just the conscious mind but the entire body and that the second the conscious mind stops thinking of itself as important it doesn't perform as well anymore, so being a good body means acknowledging the importance of the mind. Try accomplishing something great if you don't have a sense of self-efficacy, it's not going to work well. And we still have qualitative mental lives to live that require us to be trying hard. That may sound crazy but there are people who learned that they don't have free will and became dejected and rather unimpressive and mopey human beings, which ended up making their lives worse.

Maintaining dignity in a post-free-will life for me also involved active deliberation. I can't change how I think without the act of trying to change how I think being determined by how I think, but I can at least live life on my own terms and do the things that are best for me. It's reprogramming. And this is one benefit to thinking of oneself as not having free will. If people think that they have free will they don't deliberate as much. They figure they can make it up on the spot because they're free and not significantly habit-driven. Couldn't be further from the truth. Deciding what to do ahead of time is going to be very beneficial and gives an undeniable sense of control and dignity as opposed to being a fleshy bag of impulses.

It's a crazy feeling to maintain that I don't have free will, almost maddening sometimes. I know that I have to think a certain way and do certain things and it feels like my mind is actually controlling itself and is in charge but I also know that it isn't actually my mind, myself, calling the shots, but the processes of the brain. And it makes me want to say that I have free will, but I can't do it. All I can do is cope, and I'm good at it, I think.

And hell, most of the time I just don't think about it. I have to think about it a little bit and I wouldn't have it any other way but it's nice to be able to live without the constant reminder.

Written by Anthem on 12.11.2011 at 06:27

If one believes in a universal creator. ie GOD or , THE ONE, or CREATOR, or etc.... there has to be free will. Otherwise there is no porpuse in existance. If we were pre destined we would not be free to make choices because "God" would already know the outcome. If one doesnt believe in a creator then free will is a non issue

Actually free will does not make sense if you believe in the Christian God (or any omniscient/omnipotent God). At least not in the way we normally define free will.

If God is Omniscient then he has all of the information in the world. If he has all of the information in the world he can predict events with 100% accuracy, unless he is subject to the Chaos Theory which implies that infinitely small changes in the starting position of a variable in a complex system yields unpredictable behavior in the long-run. However God is also Omnipotent, which implies that he cannot be subject to anything, or at the very least the short-run (the period in which the system is not chaotic) is arbitrarily large.

Thus if you believe in an all Mighty and All knowing God free will does not exist in the sense that our actions and decisions change the outcome. However freewill can exist if we define it differently. Perhaps freewill represents our inability to known the future and our belief that our actions somehow influence the final outcome.

Hah, this is a doozey eh? As mentioned by IronAngel, we certainly aren't going to come to a perfectly scientific conclusion anytime soon. Especially considering this question is as old as life itself. Here are some things I'd like to consider adding to the equation:

Is compatiblism acceptable? Compatiblists recognize that when studying the subject from an objective perspective it is clear that because of the laws of causation that free will cannot make sense logically. When we study as an observer, from the outside, the world and the universe and all life appear to be machinery. As mentioned earlier, even quantum mechanic's apparent randomness and dissonance with relative physics does not really account for actual free will. However, compatiblists also accept that from a first person perspective, from the inside, we do have free will. This feeling we have that we are making a choice is real. The two accounts seem entirely contradictory and many will say that the objective scientific perspective overrides the first person perspective. On the other hand, in truth, everything we know flows through our first person perspective at some point. Nothing is ever experienced truly objectively. If that is the case, is consciousness not even more central to our understanding of the universe than even logic and science? It's an interesting conundrum to consider. Many believe compatiblism to be a cop out, but I thought it would be worth bringing up.

Also, there is this tricky relationship choice has with time. As we know, the past has already been determined, because it cannot change. We believe that the future can change when we believe in free will, but what about when those moments become the past? You made the decision, but when you look back on it, wasn't it the decision you were always going to make? Even if you were deliberating up to the last second, you still made the decision. If you go back on it, you aren't actually changing the past, you are creating a new past that, when you look back on it, was always going to happen. It's kind of like taking the whole 'hindsight is 20/20' bit a little too far. I know a lot of people get really annoyed with this kind of question, but it's actually pertinent and worth thinking about.

My personal belief is that free will is a romantic idea that people cling to. The world is much bigger than that. Perhaps parts of an incredibly complicated idea similar to free will occur and every time we see them we're like 'that's it! that's the free choice I made,' but the world just doesn't quite work that way. I think there is more beyond a scientific view of the world and that we as a species are actually limited by our senses and logical brain structure instead of liberated by them. Science and mathematics are merely the most consistent way we have of understanding our universe.

Written by helofloki on 19.07.2012 at 17:24

.

Wow this is a much more eloquent way to describe what I was trying to say in my previous point. I was not aware of what compatiblism was until I saw your post, its a very interesting concept and something that I'm looking forward to reading about.

This is a toughie...

let me see if i can expound on this some more.


free will exists and it does not exist.


now to go into more depth.. on a physical level "it exists" meaning we can perform that action by moving our muscles and so forth

but on a mental level "it does not exist" meaning we have to do what we are told, eg: a job and can't run up to our boss and punch him in the face or there will be punishment
there really is no free will, if there was we would just sit here and do nothing, we have to be told what to do.

as i said earlier on a physical level we can move our arms and walk around..thus giving the imitation of a free will.

but on a mental level: our brain gives us orders hence no free will, we take orders from the brain, we live. (this is where philosophy comes into play, we know good from bad, meaning we won't perform a certain action because we feel it's bad. and again no free will because of that, (unless of course a chemical imbalance in the brain or a VERY low brain capacity then in which case we will perform that action because of said aliement.)

so does it really exist? it does and it does not. that is my answer.


do you comprehend what im saying or do i need to simplify it somewhat?
because i would be more then happy to

and i really enjoyed this question. it really made me think lol

Written by axelx666 on 28.07.2012 at 20:43
but on a mental level "it does not exist" meaning we have to do what we are told, eg: a job and can't run up to our boss and punch him in the face or there will be punishment

You kind of contradicted yourself with this part. I could argue that I have the free will to walk up to my boss and punch him in the face. The punishment I'm given is merely a result of my actions, but it was my choice to do what I did. Therein lies free will.

Written by Troy Killjoy on 29.07.2012 at 04:25

Written by axelx666 on 28.07.2012 at 20:43
but on a mental level "it does not exist" meaning we have to do what we are told, eg: a job and can't run up to our boss and punch him in the face or there will be punishment

You kind of contradicted yourself with this part. I could argue that I have the free will to walk up to my boss and punch him in the face. The punishment I'm given is merely a result of my actions, but it was my choice to do what I did. Therein lies free will.

ah a valid point. i suppose i did, i get carried away sometimes. . . .hehe

I think everything from the first person feels like free will. Even in the face of 'the slavery of jobdom' we feel we have made a choice. This choice is backed by weighing options like 'money is good, I need it to live' vs. 'free time is sweet, but also poor!'. In that way you have made a long term decision, with your free will, that it is worth it to follow your job's schedule instead of being unemployed. So it may appear like you are a slave to a 40 hour a week schedule, when in your mental reality, you chose to make that decision and are sticking to it for a certain duration. Just because something doesn't change, doesn't mean a conscious decision hasn't been made.

I really think the only place where free will breaks down is when interpreting it from the third person. This is when appearances and physics and math and cause and effect all get involved. And the interesting thing about this is, even if stuff does change all the time and appears inconsistent, according to cause and effect and physics, none of it involves free will.

Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22czcPNG-3M&feature=player_detailpage

I dont know whether this is related to the topic but it seems to be. Teenagers were celebrating a birthday party and religious extremists group barged in and beat them up because they were wearing western clothes and celebrating their birthday western style.

How insane is this?

The concept of 'free will' is obsolete. There is only a 'will', which has a certain amount of freedom. Much of the perceived freedom you have is bound by your character and environment.