/liberty/ - Liberty

Saying "free will is an illusion" is a lot like saying "truth doesn't matter" or "the universe is an arbitrary simulation". If you presume the claim is true, it resolves you of all the responsibility of thinking about the matter any further (because after all, you had no choice). Point is, it's not possible to disprove (or prove) the claim, but it makes itself irrelevant if it were true.

If you commit to some action without external coercion affecting it, it was a product of YOUR agency; hence your will. No one believes in absolute free-will, but humans will always have posses agency for their actions, and responsibility.

>>67353

Wow, you sure fucking convinced me dude.

>>67355

>BUT I CHOSE TO DO IT SO THAT MEANS I HAVE FREE WILL

Yes and the choice was an inevitable outcome. At least try to understand the argument.

>>67360

See, this is why argument is moronic. There is no condition in which "Free will doesn't exist" can be falsified. You can always classify something that's happened in the past as inevitable, simply because it's not possible to change the past

So no matter what argumentative examples he brings up regarding choice, you can always recursively reply "well the condition that to happen was inevitable!".

But does this grant you any predictive power? No.

>>67363

You would have to prove that decisions made in the present don't depend on the past. I don't think that's possible either, but that's why I don't believe in free will.

>But does this grant you any predictive power? No.

And?

just as human action is always selfish, it is equally true that it is always a choice

if I have an itch I usually scratch it, I CHOSE to scratch it because it itched, the itch dosnt make the choice any less valid

sometimes, I dont scratch, if I think scratching would make it worse I resist the urge, I can choose to or not to scratch at my leisure

I chose to reply to this thread, no invisible force made me like gravity keeping me on the ground when I choose to fly

>>67385

Free will doesn't hold that people don't 'choose' things. It's more that the choices were dependent and could not have been otherwise

yea of course decisions depend on things, as long as people can take in data about the world around them they will use it to inform the decisions

what of it?

>>67336 umm easy? I believe it because I have no other choice? If it is true then cool, if it isn't it doesn't matter. Thanks for trying to "be deep" but I recommend you hit yourself in the head with a hammer

. You will find you feel better and better about yourself the more you do it.

>>67353

da fuq? I love that poster. Only women have to consent to have sex since you know… cant rape a man!!!!!!l!!o!l!!! Women are stupid little children that can't think for themselves so we have to protect them from being alive!

>>67387

>as long as people can take in data about the world around them they will use it to inform the decisions

what of it?

That's only a part of what I'm talking about. Everything about the decision is dependent on other things going back to the creation of the universe in 4000BC

The universe is just a wind up toy slowly unwinding. But it wound itself up, and it will never run out

>>67360

can you prove the choice was an inevitable outcome? If there is no agent acting upon you, your will is directly of yourself, and you take responsibility for it. Hence the term, free-will.

>>67396

>can you prove the choice was an inevitable outcome?

The laws of physics apply to your brain, kid. Your brain was always going to do that shit

>>67397

>being this reductionist

lol, what shit are you implying in particular? You're such a fucking pseud it's unreal.

Since there is absolute law there is absolute certainty; the mind must always behave that way if you repeated the conditions

>>67336

>ctrl + f "compatibilism"

>0 results

You all fail.

>>67336

Can you make uncoerced decisions?

Yes

Can your decision-making escape physical causality?

No.

The idea of free will is an incoherent idea because it proposes that no mechanism underlies one's decision-making. It only arises out of our lack of understanding of neurology.

>I can't understand the causes that give rise to X's decision, therefore it's magic.

Attributing free will to a human makes about as much sense as attributing free will to a computer.

>>67396

Who is "yourself"? You just passed the buck by not explaining what a will is.

>>67353

The need to be vindictive arises out of the demand that people make that it be so. They only assented to abstaining from revenge because the state promises to enact revenge upon the criminal.

If someone murdered my family and would thereafter be subjected to a painless program of reform that guaranteed that he would not commit this crime again, I would NOT be satisfied. My family is dead, motherfucker.

>>67470

>"It's all just chemicals, Morty. *burrrppp* There is no god.''

If the mechinisms that drive a computer don't bestow self awareness then no amount of added complexity would apply that to a living being. Yet, human beings have self awareness, so they must possess something that machines lack.

disagree with me if you literally dont have a soul

>>67470

>>67472

This is your brain on atheism. The same old postmodernist thinking that seeks to deconstruct everything and make "truth" subjective.

>dude free will doesn't exist lmao!

You decided, out of your own free will, to post.

You have, out of your own free will, the option to reply to this post or not.

I remember when I was a pseudo-intellectual leftist who thought he had everything figured out.. oh boy was I naive. Grow out of your edgy phase.

>>67474

He should read some C.S. Lewis.

https://www.youtube.com/user/CSLewisDoodle/videos

All the crap he spouts has already been countered.

>>67363

>But does this grant you any predictive power? No.

It gives me a lot of predictive power, in fact, because human behavior is predictable. Our society and our interpersonal relationships are predicated on that fact. Best friends don't murder each other out of the blue, parents take care if their kids, humans sometimes steal when tempted, the emotionally traumatized have a hard time forming relationships, addicts take some substance over and over again unless sufficient reasons are presented to them not to, etc. etc.

If our wills were all free and we could magically will any decision, none of these things would he true. Advocates if free will do not consider how non-free our decisions are every day.

>>67389

>ummm

>uptalk

100000000000 years of gulag for you, my friend.

>>67476

Heck, even the latest video tackles the subject of free will.

>>67470

>The idea of free will is an incoherent idea because it proposes that no mechanism underlies one's decision-making.

This is functioning under a very popular yet nonsensical conception of what free will is. Free will, properly understood, is merely the ability to make decisions. It is the capacity to select between alternatives. If we define it such that it denies any influence whatsoever on that decision, then we have trivially defined it out of existence, but that is merely wordplay. You rightly recognize such a conception of free will as being utterly without any logical merit. I put it to you that anyone advocating for it under such a definition is not engaged in anything that could properly be considered philosophy.

Having addressed the meaning of "free will", let us address what it means for something to be "deterministic". There are two senses in which this word is typically used, and when those senses are used interchangeably, you get the sort of confusion we see in this discussion.

In the first sense, a process is "deterministic" if its outcomes are wholly causally determined by natural–that is physical–conditions. In this sense, all events which occur are deterministic. No effect proceeds without cause.

The second sense, which is much less precise and probably shouldn't be used much at all, holds that an event is "deterministic" if we (or any observer) is capable in principle of predicting its outcome given sufficient data about its initial conditions. In this sense, no process is deterministic at all scales, as some degree of uncertainty must necessarily exist in all initial conditions. Chaos theory shows us that many processes are so sensitive to initial conditions that we cannot acquire enough data to accurately predict the outcomes beyond some rather wide tolerances. We refer to these events as "random". Some processes are even infinitely sensitive to initial conditions, meaning that any difference, no matter how infinitesmally slight, will result in a significant change in outcomes. Such events are still "deterministic" in the sense that their outcomes are wholly the product of physical factors, but they are not "deterministic" in the sense that we can predict them, because we fundamentally cannot.

>>67473

>They only assented to abstaining from revenge because the state promises to enact revenge upon the criminal.

You don't think there's a general causal process which tends to favor pro-social behavior in the absence of state mechanisms? Don't you think humans have evolved a general tendency to try to stay on everyone's good side, possibly because despite your drive for revenge, you recognize that other people have similar drives that could make your seeking of it worse for you in the long run?

>>67475

>This is your brain on atheism.

For the record, I'm an atheist but not a postmodernist, nihilist, polylogist, or anything of the sort. The absolute nature of truth and logic informs my rejection of divinity and comprehension of ethics and free will. There is a lot of philosophical variance among atheists. We're not all against you.

>>67477

>because human behavior is predictable

At what scale, though? Yes, you can predict trends, but you can't really predict what a given human will do anywhere near as well as you can predict what a large group of them will do. When you view chaotic systems in sufficiently large quantities, you will see statistical distributions, but that merely quantifies the degree of unpredictability of a given event. There must necessarily be some finite distribution because there is only a finite range of possible behaviors. That statistical "predictability" is merely a mathematical representation of the ground conceded to unpredictability, and trivially must exist on some scale.

You simply cannot predict the outcome of a fairly-rolled die, no matter how much information you have, because it is infinitely sensitive to initial conditions. You can, however, that a million such die rolls will tend to float around an average of 3.5, because of the range of possible outcomes. You can only get a number between 1 and 6, so trivially the statistical distribution must lie somewhere between those values.

Humans are much more complex than that, with a much wider range of possible behaviors and a much greater dimensionality to those ranges as well.

Of course, even if you could predict a given person's actions with perfect accuracy, that wouldn't mean their will isn't free; it just means that you have perfect information about their decision-making process. Knowing what someone is going to choose doesn't mean that the choice does not occur; that's an unreasonable criterion for defining "choice".

>>67336

>what is your stance on free will?

is real

If there's no free will value cannot be subjective.

>>67517

>implying

>>67474

>If the mechinisms that drive a computer don't bestow self awareness

And how do you know this? How can you know that no possible computer program would be self-aware?

Suppose your brain were simulated, atom-for-atom, on a computer. Would this simulation of you also lack self-awareness?

>disagree with me if you literally dont have a soul

Appeal to consequence, and the soul only arose as an idea because people did not have a theory as to what could animate living beings and have them perform complex behaviors. Today we klhave the answer: the brain and the computations performed therein. Nobody has ever been able to explaun what a "soul" consists of or how it works, and nobody ever will.

>>67491

>You simply cannot predict the outcome of a fairly-rolled die, no matter how much information you have

I absolutely can, unless you define "fairly rolled" as being physically impossible (no dice roll is 100% "fair") or as something truly random like the collapse of a wave-function.

In any case, true randomness does not result in free will because, very importantly, you do not control the randomness. If your decisions come from, say, the truly random outcomes of quantum events, how are they your decisions. It's like being asked to raise either your left or right hand; I flip a coin, it comes up heads, and then I tell you: you want to raise your left hand.

>>67593

>Suppose your brain were simulated, atom-for-atom, on a computer. Would this simulation of you also lack self-awareness?

Yes. Computers can't be aware any more than the motor in your car. Consider the old analog computers that were driven by solely mechanical means and stored their data on punch cards instead of electricity. Are those self aware? You might as well ask if the rivers and the streams are self aware. Now consider a lightbulb in a circuit. Is it self aware? No. Now add another circuit, and another, add ten million circuits, make it as complex as you want and it might as well be a brain, but deep down each individual piece is still a dumb bit of metal, reacting in it's predetermined way and you could have rigged the exact same setup using steampunk pipes but pipes in water aren't aware of their self or their actions, and there's nothing special about doing it all over but with electricity. There is something fundamentally missing from computers, and I'd wager fundamentally missing from our current understanding of the brain, to make the bold accusation that there's no such thing as free will.

>>67336

It's irrelevant. You can't derive any justification for anything from the answer.

>>67353

>It means that on some level what we do is not our fault

It doesn't. It either is or is not. There is no arbitrary"some level". When we talk of "free will" we mean the necessity of personal agency to distinguish actors. If you don't want any sort of functional ethical, moral and legal system, then do whatever and assume whatever. It's a matter of choice between relative order and utter chaos.

Daily reminder: """Freedom""" as autonomy to self-author a "rational" plan by incorporating into that plan a complete mechanistic account of the underlying processes of the brain, and thereafter follow it 100% deterministically, without "irrational" chance or contingency intervening, in reciprocity with the thereby fully "rationalized" and deterministic society, is what gave us Communism: the greatest mindfuck and scam in history.

>>67599

Your argument comes down to

>there's no sharp dividing line between A and B, therefore A cannot become B

This is easily contradicted by the example of grains of sand: suppose you have 1 grain of sand. Is this a beach? No. Now suppose you add one grain of sand. Does the addition of a single grain of sand to something that's not a beach cause it to become a beach? Evidently not… And yet, a beach is simply a collection of grains of sand, and nobody would propose extra, mystical "beach-essence". It's a gradual transition from a few grains to a beach.

>>67639

>"""anarcho"""-Marxism

>essences are mysticism :^)

Leibniz already made the Sorites argument. Quite fitting, and telling you can't see much of a difference, as your system is merely a plot to implement the Monadology IRL using humans as neurons and society as the meta-mind.

>>67599

If you are the object, proving your awareness is trivial. If you are not, impossible.

>>67639

A beach is just what we call a collection of sand near water. Really, it's no different from it's compoment sand, there's just a lot of it.

>>67652

The paradox of the heap is simply a result of confusing a magnitude: qualitative/heuristic/relative with quantity. We never see a massive collection of grains (unless on the early stages of an LSD trip), we just see the pile, or the beach. Only when we specifically set out to count does it become a quantitative matter.

Why do most libertarians believe free will is real? Was it Ayn Rand that put the two convictions together? If I believe free will is an illusion, is that inconsistent in some way with anarcho-capitalism it does it preclude me from believing it?

t. small brain

>>67353

>So there is no need to 'punish' people

Why? If one is morally acquitted from all his actions because he doesn't choose to do them, what makes him punishing someone for something they didn't choose to do any worse than that thing? You cannot argue about how one has a position of power and the "choice" to carry out a policy that's consistent with determinalist policy or not, because he doesn't have the choice, at least not any more as the the other guy and his original crime.

>>67473

There are cases where individuals might need to take revenge, but the state is much better

>>67491

>free will is just making decisions

It means a lot more than that. Otherwise there would be no debate.

>>67607

>it doesn't

It does. They chose to do it but they could not have chosen otherwise. Are they responsible? Only on some level.

If you set up a clock to go off and it wakes someone up, it both is and isn't the clock's fault.

>>67662

>what makes him punishing someone for something they didn't choose to do any worse than that thing

They're both bad, but not in the way that implies 'moral' culpability. It's only the consequences that are bad.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

>>67699

>They chose to do it but they could not have chosen otherwise

That doesn't change a thing. The only thing that matters is to locate the one who commits the action. Nobody has to debate whether the human mind is a force entirely in itself. What matters is identifying the actor. If you bother tracing the primal cause of origin to place the blame on it you'll regress to the origin of existence. For someone to be responsible only "on some level" there would have to be a level where their actions are entirely self-driven and that is not possible.

>>67708

That's a whole different issue. I don't think the system of justice we apply is efficient. We say "punishment" but we really mean manipulation. We are trying to change someone's behavior via coercion. They're not really supposed to atone or learn anything. Most often they serve a purpose of satisfying our longing for vindication. As it is, we neither try to help them, nor the victims. We don't have any objective limits on what "helping" means either.

If we could truly change a criminal what makes it not OK to social engineer further? Is making Brave New World a reality the final stretch? You definitely can't coerce someone who is created to enjoy his slavery on a genetic level, even more, it would be cruel to deny his wishes. A world where people are physically and mentally incapable of doing "wrong" or being unhappy.

Or what if we were a bunch of Dr Manhattan's walking around knowing everything and that we can't change it. There are certain boundaries that we can not have any objective justification to cross or not. The best we can do is focus on the avoidance of conflict on the individual level. We avoid arbitrary Law not because there is some objective "good", but because it's incoherent to us and humans can't efficiently deal with what they have not yet the capacity to grasp. We need recognizable patterns to adapt to in order to function.

How can you rationally deny free will? I'm not saying free will exists but the stance that it definitely doesn't kinda undercuts itself.

>>67639

I can't believe the communist is making this argument

>>67595

>I absolutely can

You quite literally cannot, as its sensitivity to initial conditions is infinite. You do not have infinite information about its starting conditions, so you cannot reliably predict its outcome.

>true randomness does not result in free will

I never said it did. Read it again. Chaotic systems were used to illustrate the problems with the typical use of the term "determinism", and to provide clarifying criticism. At no point was randomness used to establish free will.

>>67699

>It means a lot more than that. Otherwise there would be no debate.

My whole point is that there is only a debate because people have some vague and misguided notion that it means more than that. If you read my post thoroughly, you will find that my argument is to establish reasonable common definitions in lieu of the popular yet wholly inadequate ones, and then to resolve the discussion within them. This debate (like probably all philosophical debate, if I may conjecture) only exists because people cannot clearly define their terms. If you can define a problem clearly enough, the solution becomes trivially obvious.

This debate doesn't need to happen. Of all the silly philosophical debates that get tossed around, this is possibly one of the easiest to resolve, and frankly I'd be embarrassed to keep trying to argue one side or the other after having it all so clearly spelled out.

>>67715

It's not a whole different issue. It's linked to it through the reason I mention. The desire to punish caused by the belief that people are really culpable for their actions.

>>67725

Except nobody has ever said that people don't make decisions, so that clearly isn't the debate.

>>67648

There's no such thing as anacho-Marxism and I'm not a Marxist. Bakunin split from Marx in the 19th century of Marx's state-cuckery.

>>67761

>Except nobody has ever said that people don't make decisions

Exactly. That's exactly my point. This whole debate even exists because you've got different sides operating on different definitions which aren't compatible with one another. If you can't adopt the same definitions, you're not talking about the same things and are just talking past each other. Nobody really disagrees much when you're using the same definitions.

Free will means making decisions. Nothing magic about it. Determinism means that everything proceeds according to causality. Recognizing that there's no conflict there is called "Compatibilism". Shit only gets confused when people start including nonsense into their definitions of things, like some kind of vague transcendent quality of decision-making. It's a causal process just like everything else. You still make decisions, and the deterministic nature of reality means that those decisions proceed according to physical laws, even if they can never be reliably predicted on an individual basis.

>>67875

But if nobody has ever debated the fact that people make decisions, why would free will people feel the need to argue anything?

Surely they argue that people can make 'true' decisions, whose outcomes are not decided totally by other factors>>67875

>>67892

>But if nobody has ever debated the fact that people make decisions, why would free will people feel the need to argue anything?

Two reasons come to mind:

1) They thought that people were debating that fact, because they said Free Will wasn't a thing, leading the proponent to think they were denying Free Will under the same definition.

2) They are pseudo-mystical and not engaged in anything that can be properly called "philosophy", as per >>67491 .

>Surely they argue that people can make 'true' decisions, whose outcomes are not decided totally by other factors

These are the pseudo-mystics I referenced above. Those people seem to be relatively rare. I'm not denying that they exist, but they aren't representative of the philosophical concept of Free Will.

Anyone saying that there is such a thing as decision-making which is utterly divorced from causal influence is frankly insane, and I wouldn't consider it worth my time to even argue with them. I would advise answering them with silence, or laughing at them if you must respond.

>>67349

> it's not possible to disprove (or prove) the claim

protip: neurobiology

The question is meaningless. There is no option other than to act as if you have free will.

>>68557

but the answer for the question has impact on policies

Compatibilism is the right. also that OP pic, oof