Biological Will

Artimas.

Is agreeing with all parts of every picture always correct?

For example, given the set of all things right and wrong.

If I disagree with the wrong parts of this set, am I missing them?

“Will” is (dubiously as per the quote I wrote out) the picking of causation and effect, if anything - not freedom.

As Nietzsche and I covered, freedom has nothing consistent to do with it.

We are able to do and use science. Our models show it’s as determined for us to use it as for other animals to not use it.

Technology and science can predict the reactions of biological beings - that’s the thing. The overlap of reliable predictivity even in the biological world is growing scarily.

Everyone thinks and acts on thoughts and feelings - as you say - which is just as much a dependency on said thoughts and feelings as is being argued against by others here. Your thoughts and feelings determine your actions. Your thoughts and feelings are in turn determined by your experiences and preferences. You think and feel about things because of prior things. And in turn because of things prior to even that - all the way back to before you were born, or some other instance that clearly isn’t up to you. Any reasonable being knows their reasons are the things that determine their thoughts and feelings. Are you a reasonable being?

You’re exactly right that people act by doing nothing, by refraining, tempering their motivation etc. Their reasons for doing or not doing this are the things that determine both action and inaction. Logically the only thing you can be doing, if you’re not acting because of something that determines you to want to act that way, is to act randomly - which is not your will, nevermind a free will.

If you want to “get around” causality, you’ll be doing that/wanting to do that… for a reason. If there’s a reason determining this, or the want to do this, then Determinism. It’s literally inescapable.

Sil, so you are saying that everything about someone and who they are what they think comes from the past, but even eureka moments? Inspired ideas are causally born or are they random, infrequent events, spontaneity at its finest? Are they part of chaos that is brought to order?

We have a past but it is not shared so our reactions to limitless, varied stimuli would not be shared either. Scientific experiments are drawn in controlled environments which preclude “real” choices. I think science has dumbed down plausabilites and possibilities to such a degree that what they are predicting is not a valid sample.

Scientists who have integrity are not ones to claim knowledge where it is currently insufficient. I would suspect there is currently a lack of data on things like “eureka moments” because they are unreliable events and difficult to control for and define.

2 things about this example though:

1. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Given the trajectory of advances and successes in neuroscience, I would expect there to become a way to reliably study such phenomena even if I can’t say it’s going to be 100% deterministic for sure. There might be more known about such things than I’m aware of though. It would be great if there was instead a way to prove that things like “eureka moments” were necessarily not deterministic. But until people know either way, nobody should be saying they know.

2. “Eureka” moments are certainly not “Free Will”. If anything it’s as though they choose you, as though they’re being done to you, whether or not they do so for a reason, or in a determined sense. In the same way that you can’t tickle yourself but you can “work through” a problem in your mind, “eureka” moments have the quality of being surprised - in the sense that Nietzsche breaks down the “will” into both commanding and obeying in one, it’s as though the commander wasn’t home and only the obeyer was around whenever you are hit by inspiration. It’s not the same as figuring something out with reason and logic, as anyone honest who experiences creativity will attest to.

In the search for indeterminacy, I think “Eureka moments” would be an interesting place to start - you make a good suggestion. Unfortunately for Free Will, though, even this suggestion is a non-starter.

Got it, so if somebody has a Eureka moment, or by God’s Divine Will, a free action and undetermined is possible, then Sil will have his Eureka moment.

Free-Will is the standard, not the exception.

The universe is un-determined.

Classic Urwrongx1000 determined to not read my words.

Read point 2 again: there can be no way in which any potential indetermined occurence such as “inspiration” is Free Will, because it’s not your will, it just happens independently of your will. Not by God - still desperate to force in that “Association Fallacy” I see - classic Urwrongx1000 strikes again.

My position has always been either free OR will, not both. Indetermined would be free, but not will, Determined could be will but not free.

I’m sure the Motte and Bailey is trying to creep back in here as well: arguing the indisputed incomplete usage of the word “free” as the Motte to defend the disputed complete usage of the word “free” as the Bailey, from which you can retreat back to the Motte over and over every time it’s felled… classic Urwrongx1000: Confirmation bias, and plural commitment of fallacies.

It is conceivable that eureka moments are not in any way sliding the slippery slope between the will and the indeterminacy, when it is considered that. the very beginning to an allegory such as the cave or the abyss, has an inner and outer willful conflation about it. By being in the position if “nothingness” , to get to any substantiality about which a mover-movement has to begin the moment, where can a fallacy be inferred by association? The will, as both master and slave change roles, they do not at once act in perfect accord, the slave has to go along with it, even if it is a matter of remaining in the darkness of nothingness.
The imperative to jump out, is the product of the will, as understanding of the interaction between them develops.
For instance modern aristocracy is only thought different by supposed genetic markers of intelligence, and that intelligence Nowedays is predicated on accumulation: of knowledge to reformulate the betterment of the economic standing of humam beings and their ilk. The economy of the id, the markers of limitation in the scheme of things, of aqired characteristics, if compromised, slide the effect of utilization toward compensation, and vested hierarchies reappear through differing forms.

The will to power, to overcome, the transition, to compensate, has as much to do with it, while changing, retention of formal elements can hide during long evolutionary stretches.

The span has Erika moments all the time, ilthrough the flow of socially acquired signs of cohesion. The will is but a simmered down sign of a singular apex of organization, which can be apprehended on other then a nominal level, but it usually reduces through the association into a slavery of appeal to falkacy.

Why? A politi cal move by the masters of manipulation to effect intelligent sifting of the terminology by which strength of will through power are interpreted . the wedge of the will has to be sharpened by elimination of numerical superiority, hence mastering that power utilizes reducing the numbers viewing for the leading edge of control and determination over them.

Power by power, strength, with subterfuge , the will is complex, and with multiple underlying derivitive in the bay, nothing really dubious, and fallaciousness is introduced in the effort to blind those who may not be willing or able to follow the idea of the illogic of the undetermined.
To be determined to bring to light the realm of darkness , out of which historically distant and imminently present forces are utilized , the politically manifested will , strives to overcome resistance toward the fearful non political efforts of those, who clothe that resistance as the fear of the Lord.
That man has acquired freedom from the animal, is even now a matter being constantly sliced between consensus and the moment if inspiration: inspiration drawing its energy from the will to survive

Survival of the fittest is wrapped with all kinds of political issues, and some of those are shewn in existence’s most brilliant pathos: Dostoevsky"s idiot"s letters, from underground.
That will, emanating from the soul of serfdom everywhere has a unique power , with an unfounded rationale: to survive and redeem the enormous power of this heart of darkness.
That is where true and real power exists, and that is the spark implicit in a Rasputin, its germ implicit in the soul.
No amount of argument can dissolve these elemental powers if the soul.
It has to by sheer force of repetitive necessity, overcome it’s self through others" enslavement to ‘reason’

Well my definition of freewill was to think then to act and no one disagreed with it, a eureka moment is as I defined it…the purest freewill there is.

Yes, Wendy, its a.great definition. Do You think it has to do with surging inspiration that compels a person to act out of some inner strength?
I am adapting Your definition within my own situation, which does not appear so unique.

My thought is, that other’s disagreement does not enter into the moment, only upon reflection. That is why in those rare times, I’d rather not think, but act spontaneously, abandoning the opinion of others, not that they would not interact on a hidden level somehow.

Nice hearing from You again.

Yeah. The moment where the subconscious/unconscious surfaces to itself. Like popping up in a mirror and the mirror is the conscious mind that projects it into the world.

Meno wrote

Hey, be well.

Absence of evidence, is evidence of absence.
If it wasn’t, then there might be an elephant in your room, big foot in your backyard or Nessie in Loch Ness.
Now sure, we can’t rule anything out entirely, perhaps Nessie lives on another planet or dimension, occasionally teleporting from there to Loch Ness, or maybe she’s wearing a cloaking device, or perhaps she just got really, really lucky and evaded detection by scientific equipment hundreds of times.
Still, we can at least conclude that in all likelihood, a Nessie we’re capable of interacting with, that isn’t supernatural, preternatural or sci fi, doesn’t reside in Loch Ness.

Well, the same goes for anything, including causality.
The more we thoroughly look for something, and can’t find it, the more likely it’s not there, at least in any meaningful sense if at all.
It’s not any easier to be sure something is, than isn’t, for what appears to be, could always be illusory somehow, just as what appears not to be, could always be elusive.
You’ve just unnecessarily limited your perception of what’s possible for you to know.
You’ve said I can know what is, but what not what is not.

Take gravity for instance.
On earth at the perceptible scale, gravity appears very reliable, but at the quantum scale, gravity, or whatever they call the force of attraction at the quantum scale, isn’t very reliable, nor is it at the interstellar or galactic scale.
Scientists will very reluctantly and with a great consternation and reservation admit the force of attraction at the quantum scale is partly acausal, but they won’t admit galactic/interstellar gravity is partly acausal.
There’s far more gravity in some regions of the cosmos than their models predict there should be, and they’ve invented an unfalsifiable entity, dark matter to explain it away.
Isn’t the simpler explanation gravity isn’t absolute, rather than concocting unfalsifiable entities?

When we discover something orderly, we agree it’s orderly, we don’t assume it’s really disorderly, and wait for more evidence to prove it’s disorderly, so why assume something is covertly orderly when it’s overtly disorderly?
Why is disorder in the physical, and the psychological realm, never a possibility?
If you won’t even entertain its possibility, of course you will never find it, and scientists don’t entertain it, for they’re bound by their metaphysical assumptions.

There are countless examples of scientists thoroughly looking for a cause, any cause for a long period of time, sometimes centuries, even millennia but not finding one.
Whenever they can’t find one, they point to all the instances where a cause finally turned up after a long period of searching, but they don’t point to instances where a cause never turned up, or where what they thought was the cause, turned out not to be.

There are few, if any examples of scientists looking for freewill/whatever you want to call it, transgressions of the so called laws of nature, and finding one, because again the metaphysicians of science said it’s impossible, we must have law and order, right?
Wrong, while some things may be more probable than others in light of observational evidence, all things are possible, except for something strictly contradictory.
The idea the cosmos has laws it obeys is an artefact of our Judeo-Christian, Platonic and Aristotelian thinking.
We’ve done away with the need for a lawgiver, but not for laws.
Science isn’t fully experimental, if it was than every possibility would be on the table, the metaphysicians of science won’t allow us to entertain certain possibilities, freewill and genuine spontaneity in the cosmos is one of many of them, but there are many others.

Presence of evidence isn’t evidence of presence, at least not necessarily.
As we’ve seen, even in a perfectly random system, some order is not only possible, but probable, in fact it probalby isn’t perfectly random if there isn’t some order.
While a random system ought to produce some order, most of what it produces ought to be disorder.
But for all we know the cosmos is mostly disorder.
There’s a ton of stuff that we think we can explain, but there’s also a ton of stuff we can’t, the latter we assume is ultimately explicable, rather than assuming the former is ultimately inexplicable.
Humans are obsessed with order and what we think we know because it’s practical to be and makes us feel secure, so there may be far less order than we realize, and this is true of most scientists too.

While there are scientists that study randomness on paper, and perhaps in nature, these scientists are the exception, they don’t represent the majority of scientists, and I doubt they’ve devised a systematic way of measuring how much disorder there is in the cosmos, they probably only measured it within a particular realm, or the theory apart from any data.
So there may be far more disorder than order in the cosmos, and that minority of order too might be a by-product of perfect randomness.
We can go on our intuition, and say, well there seems like there’s a lot more order and things we can explain than not, but that is not a philosophical or scientific argument, it is just an opinion, and while opinions have validity, they’re not definitive or proof positive of anything.

Determinism is a framework within which freewill operates. The framework is always evolving, morphing based on the direction of one’s freewill.

Sure, that’s certainly the experience we all have and it’s where every proponent of some degree of Free Will seems to stop.

But is “free” the right word here? - that’s my qualm.

To think then to act without anyone getting in the way - you’re willing and you’re free from obstacles, but are you also free from causation? That’s why I call the first part the incomplete use of the word “freedom” - it’s how people colloquially use the word all the time - but add in causation to use the word in a more complete sense, and “free” loses its applicability. As an analogy, if “you are free to do what you like within your prison cell”: you are “free” in an incomplete sense, but ultimately you’re not free.

All this talk by various people of “the subconscious/unconscious surfacing to itself and mirrored into the world by the conscious mind” and “abandoning the opinion of others” and “inspiration compelling a person to act out of some inner strength” - this is all perfectly fine, everyone experiences this, in the incomplete sense of the term “free”. It’s the freedom inside the cage. Causation reveals that all this freedom is ultimately not free, whether people like it or not - that’s my point.

Even putting thought into action means the action is determined by the thought: it was caused by the thought. The thought was in turn caused by environment and preferences, which in turn are all caused by previous experiences - meaning that what you’re going to choose is bounded by these previous experiences that ultimately go back to before you were born - so clearly neither your will nor free. You are in a sense bound by your previous self - as explained by my Nietzsche quote that doesn’t just stop at “how the experience seems to be”, it goes further and picks apart all the ingredients that go into this notion “will” - and around this section in the book he is going into the implications of this on the “I” that “wills”. There’s a “chicken and egg” relationship going on here too, and the “I” and the “will” are better explained as just another aspect of environment - in the hippie “we are all one” sense (I know you’ll hate that on principle, sorry). If you go into this much depth, all of the concepts necessary for “Free Will” - as people casually throw around as an accepted given - dissolve and fall apart.

Simple examples refute this - this is why it’s considered a fallacy: an “Appeal to Ignorance”.

Consider “Black Swan Theory”. Was the absence of evidence of black swans evidence of their absence? Well clearly such evidence wasn’t very good, because black swans turned out to exist! Think of germ theory: there was an absence of evidence simply because people couldn’t see things that were too small for the naked eye to distinguish. Was that evidence that micro-organisms and bacteria and viruses didn’t exist? Was it evidence that it was spirits all along because the bible was evidence enough for that? The same goes for any newly discovered thing - and thinking in line with what you said would mean we’d all still be back in the dark ages. There’s huge importance to not falling for that fallacy.

The more you look for something and fail to find it is nothing more than evidence that there’s an issue in looking for that something - the issue could be that it doesn’t exist, it could be that it’s hard to find, but a lack of a gain in knowledge is not a gain in knowledge one way or another. It just means you still don’t know. What’s the rush to fill the gap of “don’t know yet” with “I know now”? It doesn’t have to be one or the other, it’s neither. I expect the compulsion to fill in the gaps is to avoid the cognitive dissonance of an unresolved case where both yes and no are still possible. It reminds me of Derrida’s commentary on zombies being an example of an “undecidable”, which is what adds to their horror - they are living dead, yet neither living nor dead.

But to gravity - I take it you haven’t come across the Universal Gravitational Constant? And even out to scales of galaxies, gravity is at play, forming their shapes and the movements within, and even beyond. Does it get very hard to detect at such scales? Of course - the effects of gravity decrease inversely proportionally to the square of the distance that something is away from something else, and yet the evidence it’s still acting across the universe remains. Gravity is also dependent on mass, and when things get small enough, so do masses, so the effects get similarly hard to measure as you get smaller just they do as you get further away. The electro-magnetic force, by contrast, affects things far more strongly the closer they get, even on tiny scales - and its effects far override those of gravity as things get smaller - yet as they get further away it all but disappears. The all too human danger is to conclude that negligible means non-existence.

Something like dark matter isn’t simply to “explain away” some phenomena like “God” is. It’s literally just a hypothesis - no credible scientist will tell you it exists: the aim of a hypothesis is to conceive of something that you would be able to look for - something falsifiable. Science is riddled with failed hypotheses and dark matter might just as easily add to the pile - again we don’t know yet. The point is we’ve established the kind of thing we think we are looking for, we might be wrong, let’s find out, let’s keep forming informed ideas of ways that could explain whatever anomalies we’re measuring rather than poking around in the dark and literally guessing aimlessly. It would be just as simple to say gravity isn’t universal, despite evidence that it appears to be - the important thing is to form hypotheses to prove one way or another, or better explain these things by going out and looking for supporting or detracting evidence and improve what we’ve got so far. We don’t know, absolutely speaking, but we know huge amounts relatively speaking - it’s a work in process, and to say it’s finished is wrong - which goes for “we know it doesn’t exist” just as much as “we know it exists”. Science isn’t assuming anything is true, any assumptions are preliminary and subject to evidence both for and against - it’s not assuming order any more than disorder, it’s literally cobbling together a mental structure from what we have, knowing it might collapse in different areas at different times, but also knowing that the fact that a structure this impressive can hold at all means something - which is evidenced by our ability to take these concepts and create new technologies that work!

You can know something is false absolutely if it shows contradiction, like Free Will. The impossibility of a square circle doesn’t mean we haven’t looked hard enough yet, it means we’ve found the answer that it can’t exist. There’s plenty of people looking for outlandish ideas, and so there should be. There’s not much point in having people look for impossible things though, yet there still are. I don’t get where your picture of science comes from, as though it’s some kind of strict and absolute club or something - everyone can engage in science. Funding is the only issue, but that’s just Capitalism, not because of science. It’s an unfortunate truth that most cheap experiments have been done to death, and if you want to get somewhere new you need money to acquire the measuring devices you require, and for that you have to appeal to the people who have it.

All good scientists, particularly statisticians are studying randomness - and not just on paper, and they are certainly not a minority. You’re remarkably presumptuous, no? Did you know that there’s a huge scientific field to predict times of chaos like riots or disease outbreaks? The police, for example, really do use this data to better position and apportion their limited resources. There’s all kinds of applications - and obviously there’s the famous Chaos Theory. There are literally mathematical models that you can use to model “chaotic” systems as well as statistics to measure all kinds of metrics to make as much sense of it as you can in all kinds of useful ways, even given the seeming lack of sense at a glance. You should find out about these things before you comment on them, in my opinion.

Sil wrote

Free to have a thought and free to make an act. Why does the word trouble you so much?

Perhaps perspective is what divides this debate in the consideration that there is no such thing as absolute freedom. We are confined, limited to some degree as a part of existence in which we create without knowing our true power or identity. I would call that determined but not by a causal line, what we do as we live is more of a rebellion to our creation, or existence in which we serve our time perhaps it’s time served indefinitely, but we change course within our confines, quite literally by heading east or west, up or down. Those choices are ours not predetermined like our original confines. Yes, the past is connected to the present, but the past is like peer pressure to be ignored at times, sure it still exists and makes itself known ,but it does not instruct our consciousness as to the next thought or action.

Have you ever had an action that did not follow the thought that wasn’t a bit of a miscalculation, but more of an obliviousness to the precipitated thought?

Patterns of us and our preferences exist but it is not a causal line that creates us, we create us once our consciousness forms and our bodies develop, we develop a pattern of us.

Perhaps the linear passage of time makes everything seem dependent on the moment before and some times that pass that is true but then there are other occurrences when what happens is a random choice or a coincidental choice not connected to a causal chain.

Some causal influence, ultimate choice is free but not in any absolute sense.

Determination based on Will huh??? Sounds completely subjective and nothing to do with science or Causality to me!

You try again.

If Determination is based on Will, then any abstracted or generalized notion of Determination begs-the-question, whose Will exactly?

According to whom?!

I agree though; Determinism is Subjective. Further proof that it has less to do with (Objective) Science or (Universal) Causality. We are back down to interpretations by individuals. That’s fine, but don’t pretend like your perspective or interpretation speaks for everybody else. Which is also why one person’s “Freedom” impedes upon others, with or without realizing it. One organism’s “Freedom” or Free-Will always exists as a cost and relationship to other organisms.

This applies to all individuals, and thus appears within all societies/organic groupings/species.

You’re not looking deep enough.

So you have an experience and it “causes” you to learn to think twice. But wait, you say… “it can be overcome through willpower”. Sure enough you can overcome your fears/barriers and whatnot, “break the causation”… but what is the reason you were able to do so? Does each causation morph into something else that caused you to break it? No - that is moving the goalposts and it’s not what’s going on. Each causation stays the same, but the number of them that you become aware of come together to explain better and better how you came to choose however you do. If you’re attentive enough you can narrow down every point at which you were able to do anything within your power. Your “freedom” becomes entirely transparent to you the more you know yourself.

Put another way, the less you know yourself, the more you don’t realise why you act in such and such a way. You think you’re free and random and crazy and exciting.

Denial and ego-protection are further barriers to overcoming this inexperience, perhaps combined with incompetence in some unfortunate few. The more used you get to entertaining the worst as well as the best in yourself, the more the pieces fit and you actually surpass “overthinking”, because things are no longer a surprise to you when you know them so well. There can be a point where you are no longer playing chess against yourself, but playing chess against yourself playing chess against yourself. But taken further, knowing yourself need not be a burden, a bore, nor restrictive. You can come to know your optimal grounds to being creative and exercising your ingenuity. You maximise what laymen mean by “free” and come to realise how unfree you really are. I get the feeling that Artimas might know what I’m talking about, but hasn’t yet quite gotten to the bottom of it.

But that’s just the psychology side. The neuroscience just happens to back it up, not coincidentally…

This is the chicken and egg scenario that I described. As the “I” develops, so does the will and the reverse in turn: a dialectic. A feedback loop of misunderstanding.

I think a problem that everybody has with regard to Choice and Free-Will, is that “Choices” are not only momentary. They have a length and duration in time. A choice is not a one-time-instance. A choice can last an entire lifetime. A choice is route of existence. Organisms are guided and “Determined” by their instinctive and reflexive impulses. The “Choice” occurs when any individual has a plan/pattern and course-of-action, in order to fulfill specific ideals (Values). Choices are made, to complete goals and objectives. Without knowing or understanding those objectives, you will not then understand the Choices involved, beforehand (“Predetermined”), or thereafter.

Choices involve randomness. Knowledge is never complete, absolute, or perfect. Thus, organisms make “Choices” (dodge left or right), with respect to their objectives.

Silhouette’s best argument in support of Determinism is that Biology is “perfectly determined” insuchthat all objectives are known or could be known, and all reflexes and impulses are predictable.

Which they’re not. When humans can’t even understand or know themselves, their own bodies and minds, then there is no way in hell, that humans can make claims about the ‘Determinism’ of all other things. At the very least, a human would need to demonstrate an astounding ability of self-knowledge, perception, and consciousness before imposing such an ability upon others. But that’s not true either. People cannot predict each-other fully. People cannot read each other’s minds fully. But by degree. And so the “Indetermination” is always a factor of knowledge and its lacking. People ‘know’, to a degree, their own minds, and the minds of others.

The ways-in-which humanity, and biology, is Predictable, is the way-in-which it is claimed to be “(Pre)-Determined”. But life is unpredictable. And Determinists are determined to say and believe otherwise.

Really.

… quotations? Sources? Citations? References? Specifics?

No?

I’ve been actively reprimanding absolutes, qualifying the scope and intentions of science, citing the problem of induction, and firmly housing my argument within realistic relativity - so no. I have nowhere been supporting Determinism as “perfect” - I have been doing the EXACT opposite.

Classic Urwrongx1000.

Randomness is not will.

It is the literal opposite of will.

If you’re throwing open a choice to randomness, you are relinquishing will… in favour of freedom in fact! - One or the other. Not both.

I have a problem with this?

Nope.

You’re more or less reiterating my entire point against Free Will and in favour of Determinism here.

Organisms can be determined by their instinctive and reflexive impulses, and they can be determined by their long-term choices and objectives, yes. They are doubly determined as you just explained, thanks.

I keep saying absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The more you know the variables, the better knowledge you have of the minds of others. Top competitors live this professionally. Every failure they experience is a lack of their ability to predict from which they learn to successfully predict in future.

But I’m not even talking about this. I’m talking about ways to literally hook up a brain to a machine, and interpret the information in such a way as to predict what the person will do before they do it, to even manipulate the brain to change what they will do. You can literally interface directly with the brain in a manner no different to how the brain interfaces with its inputs and mechanics in everyday life - and knowledge of how to do this gets better with more and more scientific testing every day. It seems kinda dystopian in a way, but whether you like it or not, people are making headway all the time. Are brains free from the stimuli that makes them work? That would be a contradiction so clearly no.

Your job is to prove why they can’t do what they’re literally doing all the time.

Self-Awareness = Self-Knowledge = Self-Conscious = Epistemology,

The aspects of unknown, means Un-determined and Indeterminate.

Since you cannot absorb this information, I suspect that your Self-awareness is miniscule if not completely absent. Free-will exists from the Un-determined aspects of existence or in-spite of everything that could be “Determined”. Here’s the thing though, neither you, nor anybody else, knows “The Future”. You don’t know. So yes, the universe is Undetermined. And the “Determining” aspects represent what is Willed, and the basis of this Will, is Freedom.

You have things backward. And maybe it’s impossible for you to reverse your own polarity. Just because you are Determined, doesn’t mean that everybody and everything else is though.