Free will an absurdity
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Thomas More and Jarvis
I could reply by saying “you would say that, wouldn’t you”. It would be a cheap shot, so thankfully I didn’t use that quip.
However, even if I did, I’m sure you two, of all people, would be the last to blame me.
Risking the moderators’ wrath (perhaps they don’t have a choice in the matter), you might find the article below interesting.
https://aeon.co/essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wrong-about-free-will
I didn’t have a choice about being a socialist. My brain did that.
“It wasn’t me, it was my brain that did it”. Interesting line of argument, and a good example of Poe’s law too.
If “you” are not your brain are “you” any other parts of your body? If not I guess there’s no need to worry about the nuclear apocalypse.
BJ, you are not beyond the laws of cause and effect. Your ideas, opinions and feelings are not. Your actions are not. Your choices are not. Your socialism is not. Your will is not.
None of these things could exist outside of the laws of cause and effect. Consequently, all your choices, ideas, opinions, thoughts, feelings and actions, your likes and dislikes, are determined by what precedes them in the chain of cause and effect, including your agency to change the direction of that chain. I am not denying you possess will, only that it is free and independent. It only feels that way to you because you are not analysing its nature; you are not cognisant of the laws of motion that rule matter, including your brain, senses and nervous system.A whiff of seasonal air brings a memory to your mind. Were you free to have that memory or not?
You forgot to make the tea because you were thinking of something else. Were you free to forget to make the tea or not? Were you free to make the tea in spite of forgetting to do so?
My opinions infuriate you. Are you free not to be infuriated by what infuriates you? Are you free not to have the opinions you have?
Something causes you great sorrow. Are you free to not feel the sorrow? Are you free to feel it?My opinions infuriate you.
I can’t help thinking that this discussion is baren for at least two reasons.
1. If I hit you on the nose because I found your comments annoying, you’re going to feel resentment towards me regardless of how much you think that free will is an illusion and that everything is the result of cause and effect. See P.F Strawson’s 1962 paper “Freedom and Resentment”
https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/P._F._Strawson_Freedom_&_Resentment.pdf2. People exist at the level of society in a world of agents that have beliefs and intentions, not at the level of atoms or sub-atomic particles. It’s a mistake to think that social explanations can, or should be, reduced to explanations about physics. See this video from Christian List below for example:
1) Am i free not to resent it if i resent it, is the point.
2) Precisely because organisms are more complex makes their free will even more absurd. What you are is the result of so many intricate layers, antecedents, motives etc , most of which you are not even conscious of.
I assume you do party political work. Why, if people’s wills are not subject to motive? It is surely then a waste of time trying to persuade them of anything, since they are independent of persuasion, of cause and effect?
Since science deals with matter, and motion is integral to matter, any scientist seemingly believing in free will is either interpreting the term differently from the materialist philosophers or else is trying to unite science with religious dogma (and many scientists are avowedly deists). Materialist philosophy has already disproven free will by means of reason.
Of course no one ever made a choice without being influenced by some external or subconscious factors. I know some people define “free will” that way.
But the plainest common garden use of “free will” just means something like an uncoerced choice made from alternative possibilities.
But I have the feeling we’ve been over this before…
Free will is a religious and theological conception. It is an idea that I learned many years ago with the Jesuits and the Salesians
I don’t think any magical or religious meanings have to be read into it.
Perhaps you should have spoken to some Calvinists or Lutherans.
TM “ you are not cognisant of the laws of motion that rule matter, including your brain, senses and nervous system”
I’m pretty cognisant of basic Newtonian physics, which I think you are referring to. I spent a number of years studying it.
The point made in the link I made is that quantum mechanics demonstrates, as I understand it, appears to show that Newtonian models do not adequately explain quantum level.
So the idea that the Big Bang was a little like cueing off a gigantic snooker game, where the initial explosion set off a course of motion that was inevitable from the beginning does not appear to fit into the experimental data.
Looking further into the way that fundamental particles appear to behave, it appears that reality is very different, at this level of scrutiny, from the standard 19th century explanations for matter and motion.
The reality, if we ever approach understanding it, appears to be a great deal weirder than we think.
I don’t think any magical or religious meanings have to be read into it.
Perhaps you should have spoken to some Calvinists or Lutherans.
====================================================================================================I have known, and I know, and I have spoken with peoples from different religions tendencies. We have written hundred of articles and pamphlets about religion and they must be read in order to be understood
” But the plainest common garden use of “free will” just means something like an uncoerced choice made from alternative possibilities.”
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No one can choose other than as s/he chooses, and every choice is a yielding to the motive that weighs most heavily on the will.
One cannot choose in accord with the weakest motive, but only in accord with the strongest. The strongest motive isn’t necessarily the most rational.
Using the term “free will” out of its historical context in the history of thought is just further debasement of and loose use of language, damaging coherence and rendering terms meaningless. Free choice is as foolish as free will. Choice and will, minus the idealist adjective, are however fully consistent with a materialist understanding. There is no First Cause, without being itself an effect, not even the Big Bang, which was surely an effect as well as a cause.
A believer in free will is applying deism to “Man” and to him/herself. Free will is idealist, deistic thought. It is the negation too of historical materialism, which is based on the analysis of social cause and effect, and its application to the human mind too; social movement and psychological changes being all part of the dynamic.But then, since you believe in free will, why not save yourself the frustration and anger of being a socialist and just stop being one? Abracadabra!😄
All Christians, including Calvinists, affirm free will, since without it the entire Christian doctrine and fable is irrelevant. The whole Christian concept of redemption is based on human free will creating Original Sin. No Original Sin, no need for redemption, no need for Christ.
But, uninformed as usual, you will retort, “What about predestination?”
I repeat again, Calvinism, by “predestination”, is referring to a particular doctrine of its own, that it is predestined who is going to Heaven and who to Hell. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Necessity vs Free Will debate. (Which debate was settled, btw, in the 18th century, where materialist thinkers are concerned. Advances in the study of organisms, beyond mechanics, only make, i repeat, free will more absurd, by comprehending complexity and its infinite multiplication, beyond mere mechanical physics,of antecedents, causes, effects, motives, subconscious as well as conscious. Free will is an absurdity).
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