Free Will vs Determinism

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jayjacobus
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by jayjacobus »

Determinism applies to physical events. Physical events occur in a cascade of mechanical action. ^The cascade continues into the future. But people are in the present and interpret the physical world and act accordingly. I am not physically bound to write this post but I write it because I want to. I will stop when I am finished and don't want to say anything more. My actions are what I want them to be.

Besides, when i stop and do something else, what I do next is not part of a cascade.
Belinda
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can wrote replied to my saying that he too could "change the course of events":
A Determinist would never say that, because they think the "course of events" is fixed by prior forces, and so is not open to any "approach" or "change."
Yes, but only partly. Determinism includes , besides prior forces, also simultaneous forces which include traditional moral codes, scientific models and accepted theories, peer pressure, biological forces, ongoing natural events, personality, and pressure from social media.

The human mind deals in decisions that are so complex that after many of our decisions we are left feeling that we exerted free will, as we cannot undertake to identify all the component parts and the layer upon layer of evaluation. Such freedom as our decisions contain is not inconsiderable and our decisions are all the more free the more they are guided by the best of human reasoning.

I'm not claiming that impulsive people are less reasonable but that there is a happy median between reflectivity and impulsivity.
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Jay Jacobus, as I understand you , you are expressing the same point regarding simultaneous causes.
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henry quirk
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Post by henry quirk »

"I agree. And yet, here we are...ninety-some pages, and still arguing with folks who think nobody can actually "change" their mind anyway."

Yeah, we must be fated to repeat, repeat, repeat.

Or, mebbe, we're just optimists.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Belinda wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 11:30 am Immanuel Can wrote replied to my saying that he too could "change the course of events":
A Determinist would never say that, because they think the "course of events" is fixed by prior forces, and so is not open to any "approach" or "change."
Yes, but only partly. Determinism includes , besides prior forces, also simultaneous forces which include traditional moral codes, scientific models and accepted theories, peer pressure, biological forces, ongoing natural events, personality, and pressure from social media.
Actually, it includes none of these.

See in the IEP, a peer-reviewed source on philosophical terms:

Causal determinism (hereafter, simply "determinism") is the thesis that the course of the future is entirely determined by the conjunction of the past and the laws of nature.

You can see that Determinism's only about physical cause-and-effect. It rules out anything that is a product of human choice or social will, calling these things "epiphenomena," meaning essentially "illusions that just somehow happen to appear at certain stages of physical cause-and-effect chains."
Such freedom as our decisions contain is not inconsiderable
Then you're no Determinist, obviously. There's no place at all for any conception of "free will" in it.
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Immanuel Can
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Re:

Post by Immanuel Can »

henry quirk wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 2:18 pm "I agree. And yet, here we are...ninety-some pages, and still arguing with folks who think nobody can actually "change" their mind anyway."

Yeah, we must be fated to repeat, repeat, repeat.

Or, mebbe, we're just optimists.
Or maybe we're a couple of masochists.

Pass the scourge, please. :lol:
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henry quirk
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"maybe we're a couple of masochists"

Post by henry quirk »

HA!

Mebbe so, Mannie.
Belinda
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can, the IEP also includes:
Some philosophers do not believe that free will is required for moral responsibility. According to John Martin Fischer, human agents do not have free will, but they are still morally responsible for their choices and actions. In a nutshell, Fischer thinks that the kind of control needed for moral responsibility is weaker than the kind of control needed for free will. Furthermore, he thinks that the truth of causal determinism would preclude the kind of control needed for free will, but that it wouldn’t preclude the kind of control needed for moral responsibility. See Fischer (1994).
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes in its section entitled Free Will:
Causal determinism (hereafter, simply "determinism") is the thesis that the course of the future is entirely determined by the conjunction of the past and the laws of nature.
This was quoted by Immanuel Can in order to object to my description of how someone's complex thoughts are partly determined by simultaneous events. You see, Immanuel Can, simultaneous events such as I listed are laws of nature in the sense that these events are lawlike because they are actually happening and because they necessarily happen and could not happen otherwise than they do.

These simultaneous or nomic (lawlike) events are not in any sense an excuse for a man's avoiding moral responsibility. Man's reason is also a lawlike , ongoing event.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Belinda:

Causal Determinism rules out anything but material cause-and-effect chains.

As Kant said, "ought implies can." You can't ask beings to be "morally responsible" if they could not possibly "respond" any other way than they actually did. That's why we don't charge crimes to children and the mentally incompetent; but in the Deterministic world, we probably shouldn't charge them to anybody. After all, nobody had a choice.

So in your world, no oppressor can be blamed for oppression. (S)he had no choice: she could only ridiculously play out the hand of cards that had been dealt to her, and only in the order and way foreordained by the material laws of cause and effect. Likewise, those she tyrannized were predetermined to be her victims, so we cannot rationally give them pity or help; they are what they are, just as she is what she was made to be by material causes. They cannot be "helped" to have a different Fate, any more than the tyrant can be "helped" not to be a tyrant.

Of course, those things are observably not true in the real world.

There is simply no free will in Determinism. All attempts to avoid this end up doing one of two things: 1) subverting free will by claiming it's actually governed by material cause-and-effect (as in the badly named philosophy called "Compatibilism," for example), or 2) subverting Determinism itself, by offering things that are not actually Deterministic (such as social "patterns," or anthropological "regularities") as illustrations of Determinism.

Yours is the second error.
Belinda
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can accused me:
So in your world, no oppressor can be blamed for oppression. (S)he had no choice: she could only ridiculously play out the hand of cards that had been dealt to her, and only in the order and way foreordained by the material laws of cause and effect. Likewise, those she tyrannized were predetermined to be her victims, so we cannot rationally give them pity or help; they are what they are, just as she is what she was made to be by material causes. They cannot be "helped" to have a different Fate, any more than the tyrant can be "helped" not to be a tyrant.
My world, and your world, and everybody elses' world is unalterably imperfect . You look to God for the source of perfection: I look to reason for its source. In our imperfect world we control infringements of common moral codes by justice systems: we bring criminals to justice. In our world criminals are blamed so that they can be punished. Oppressors are criminals by definition. We both believe that we should punish criminals under recognised national and international laws. In order to punish we both of us have to blame the criminals as if they chose freely ; even the Nuremberg defence that they were "following orders" does not impress you or me.

The difference that being of deterministic persuasion makes is that the determinist wants the judgement to take account of all detectable extenuating circumstances such as extreme youth, mental illness, or poor socialisation as a child. Free Will believers tend to presume that the will (whatever that be) is free at all time for all humans and in all circumstances.

The practical application of these stances to administration of justice is that the Free Will believer will tend to be punitive while the determinist will tend to support rehabilitation.

This post responds to IC's which is about oppressors. I could similarly respond if IC accused determinists of not blaming foreign powers for infringements of human rights. A successful diplomat will get all possible information about the foreign power so as to arrive at a mutual agreement and avoid whenever possible violence and trade wars.

The Free Will believer thinks that in all cases the foreign leader has Free Will and their horribleness is therefore to be met with bombs or by depriving the commoners of necessities of life.

Take Assad, for instance. Determinists and Free Willers alike hate how he poisons his own people. How to stop the atrocities ?
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henry quirk
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"How to stop the atrocities?"

Post by henry quirk »

In a world where wills are not free, where folks are nuthin' but automatons, philsophical zombies, there are no 'atrocities' just the simple fall of one domino after another.

You may think you give a shit about the atrocities but, really, that's just elctro-chemical reaction...the atrocities are hollow, you're hollow, your reaction is hollow.


In a world where wills are free, where folks choose, deliberate, self-direct, atrocities are the result of choice, deliberation, self-direction, and the folks who orchestrate atrocities are responsible for them.


In Robot World: what is done about atrocities is what will happen (meaningless reactions).

In Free Will World: what is done about atrocities is what folks choose to do (meaningful responses).
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Belinda wrote: Wed Apr 11, 2018 11:44 am Immanuel Can accused me:
Actually, I didn't "accuse you" anything.

I indicted the worldview you were articulating as rationally committed to certain outcomes. We're arguing about philosophies, not personalities.

I have no view of you personally. As I said, I make no ad hominems.

Not everything is personal, you know.
Belinda
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can. Absolutely! I had not thought of 'accused me ' as an ad hominem. I have no objection to being accused except when abuse is involved which was not the case.
Belinda
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can, please look at this YouTube video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h14hcBr ... e=youtu.be

at 33:32

where there is an explanation of what free will probably is.
TomJrzk
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Re: Free Will vs Determinism

Post by TomJrzk »

Belinda wrote: Sun Apr 08, 2018 9:43 am Tomjrzk, I agree that Free Will is an excuse and a rationale for blaming people . Is it the case that Free Will believers are Conservatives and determinism believers are Left Wing?
I do believe in compatiblist free will. People whose character can not overcome their negative conditions should be removed from victims.

I think religious people, who are usually among the social conservatives, have an understandable bias toward lfw (libertarian free will).
Sophie.x
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Re: "How to stop the atrocities?"

Post by Sophie.x »

Bruh free will cannot exist as you are completely influenced by the environment, the past and how your brain chemically works. With each ‘choice’ or action you make, you slightly change your brain, so that you could only ever do one thing, there is only the illusion of different choices. Due to everyone around you, you are shaped into who you are today, abd what they do has influenced what you do, and you may think you could do something else, but really your life is completely unchangeable and set out for you. You say you could have done something, but really you wouldnt have, as the chemical changes in your brain form who you are, the people around you mould what you do, and the chromosomes you were born with determine exactly what you can and cannot do. For example, you living in the house you are in (or flat or whatever) in only there because someone built it, and they can only build it because of say, they got fired from their last job and had to become a builder, and they only got fired because they walked out on their boss shouting at them, and he was only shouting because he didnt get his morning coffee, and so on. Your do what you do because of your everchanging personality, which would only ever allow you to really do one option, and because of everyone else. I can garuntee everyone in the world has in some way affected your life, but really they couldn’t do anything else. I’m not saying that what some people do isn’t bad, like killing someone, but really their fate has been set since the start of time.
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