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.
Literally my own point, and you state I cannot absorb it…
A thousand times more, indeterminate is not Free Will. It’s just free. Will is determinate. Free Will = indeterminate determinacy: ¬A = A.
And yet technology works, consistently - almost as though we built things that we predicted would function in highly specific ways long into the future… almost as if our models of causation were accurate even if they are still improving and are imperfect - and a thousand times more: the ever-closing gaps are unknowns, not known indeterminates, and even if we could determine that they were necessarily indeterminate, they would be free, not will.
I suspect your awareness my of awareness of my self is whatever you need it to be.
I have no horse in the race, I’m just pointing out evidence from controlled testing of the world and pointing out logic to back it up, such as “free” (indeterminate) =/= “will” (determinate). I don’t care either way, I have no polarity. You, however… - ask yourself whether you care whether Free Will is possible or not. I think it’s obvious by now that you do care - you care overwhelmingly. This emotional attachment is driving your argument and the resulting Confirmation Bias is guiding your attempts to reason Free Will into the realm of not only “possible” but “necessary”. When you decide what the outcome is before you argue, this is the logical fallacy of Circular Reasoning. Stop needing reality to be one way over another. Take your horse out the race and just look around neutrally, observe what’s going on, and point it out. That’s all I’m doing. What I’ve noticed has nothing to do with me, it would be the case with or without me. Be objective. Self-awareness can’t even begin until you do this, and thereby understand all the assumptions and reliances that you’re taking away - and then see your place in the world, as the world, what is really important, how you really act, who you really are. This is what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra did when he removed himself from the world, only to return to it to teach what he had learned - the prologue is only 17 pages, read some Nietzsche before you next try to drop in decontextualised terminology of his to your posts.
Ah but you do have a horse in the race, everybody does.
My Will is Free. I am the living embodiment of Free-Will. I tend to pity your Abrahamic-Nihilistic type, but then I remind myself, Ignorance (Determinism) is Bliss. So you have your narcotics to enjoy.
Just don’t pretend I’m wrong when I’m not.
Firstly, both order and disorder are a presence of something, not an absence of something.
Order is as much an absence of disorder as disorder is an absence of order.
I don’t have to say there is no (relative) order in x, I can say there is (relative) disorder in x, at least at this scale, at this point in space-time, as far as whatever instruments I’m using can detect.
For example if my desk is messy, I can say it’s messy, I don’t have to say it’s not tidy or it contains no tidiness.
Secondly, I’m going to ask you a question.
Does tyrannosaurus rex reside on planet earth?
Is he hiding in your attic?
Yes, no, probably, probably not, maybe?
Why can’t freewill exist?
No rich academic will give a poor unacademic the time of day.
As far as I know, there’ve been few academic studies done on the efficacy of cheap, DIY, homemade remedies because there’s little-no money to be made in them, but there’s a litany of so called skeptics and debunkers who’ll ridicule and defame you if you do one.
But there’s no scientist looking for acausality.
For them, disorder = complex causality, not acausality.
And there’s no team of scientists measuring how much disorder there is in the cosmos.
Of course order and disorder are at least somewhat relative, but nearly everyone, academic and layman alike, seems to assume there’s far more order than disorder and that this disorder is complex causality.
I guess the irony here goes straight over your head…
Here you are saying “the universe is Undetermined”, and yet you can determine with certainty, about everyone, that they have a horse in the race. Convenient, no?
I think I see what’s going on here.
Being the living embodiment of “Free-Will”, your will is so free that you can will anything you want to be true, even in the face of logical contradiction, right?
I can be the “Abrahamic-Nihilistic type” yet also secular and have a horse in the race - in direct contradiction respectively - at the same time! Under Free Will anything you want is possible, so of course you can simply decide you’re not wrong when you are free from reason =D>
You have no idea how easy you make this for me to point out all your hilarious inconsistencies. I used to find it frustrating, but it’s actually fun to have you provide for free all this practice in spotting fallacies and biases. It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but at least you’re brilliant at showing how ridiculous your position is for the benefit of other people here who might have otherwise been tempted by it - keep it coming, my good friend and ally.
Unfortunately I can’t pretend you aren’t arguing in favour of “¬A = A” with free (indeterminate) will (determinacy).
Here we have a situation where more self-knowledge means being more able to determine why you do things, why things happen to you, and how the world around you works - self-knowledge literally scales with Determinism. I guess you can tell how self-knowing somebody is by the degree to which they are in favour of Determinism and against Free Will… by definition: knowledge = ability to determine.
An interesting notion that disorder is a presence of something, since the definition of a thing requires order. How do you define something as present if its bounds of identification as a specific present thing are disorderly? Of course in practice, order and disorder are not absolute, and come in tandem with one another to some relative degree in terms of both quantity and quality. The more disorderly the harder it is to be specific. You’ve probably come across the term “entropy” which is commonly associated with disorder, but is more a measure of relative energy states from smaller to bigger scales, and how much they have reached equilibrium (higher entropy) - in this sense, you don’t even have to worry about saying messy or tidy because there’s a measure you can use to encapsulate the whole thing.
But given this, I’m still not exactly sure what your point is here?
Devise an experiment to test this question. Define T-rex and what suffices as knowledge that a T-Rex does not currently reside on planet earth? For example: are there conditions under which T-Rex cannot currently be on earth? You might require that “looking everywhere” is the only sufficient test, but even then, as soon as you look in another place, perhaps evidence appears where you were looking before but you’ve moved on from looking there now. An essential element of science is to know and state variables and such that you have not controlled for. Another thing you do is define scope and parameters for what you’re testing, sample sizes and whatnot. No serious science considers searching the entire globe, not least because of the costliness - it’s unfeasible in many respects, so any conclusions you come to will be short of this. This is why the incentive is to be creative with your questions and approaches to investigating answers to your questions. For example, I could write a particularly short study on your attic hypothesis by stating that I do not have an attic. Conclusion: T-Rex cannot be hiding in my attic. More seriously though, you might have to consult some second-hand studies on the conditions necessary for a T-Rex to survive - perhaps identifying different oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere that we no longer have but are necessary to keep a T-Rex alive - perhaps identifying its food sources and investigating them, assuming any still exist.
Does that help you at all in clarifying what the scientific process really is? Obviously you intended for me to resort to common sense and either say no or qualify no with some relative and unbacked probability, but I thought it would be better to illuminate how it’s not as simple as that.
I don’t think you’ve been around over the past 15 months that I’ve been arguing this - participating in any of the threads that I was concerning this topic, at least. There’s a few reasons.
I summed up some of the main themes in 3 arguments:
- Free Will as “could have done otherwise” is unfalsifiable, as you cannot recreate the exact same universal conditions where you made one choice in order to test whether you could indeed have chosen otherwise. To claim you could requires a conflation of “possibility” with “actuality” - you imagine that it was perfectly possible for you to have chosen otherwise, based on knowledge of options within physical (and to an extent social) constraints, but there was always a reason that determined why you chose one and not another. Choosing the initially unchosen option at a later date is a different choice, which is just as determined by the new environment and preferences. In turn, each environment you find yourself in, and all preferences you have at any one point are not just determined by prior conditions, but those prior conditions were determined be conditions even prior to that - and so on beyond the point you were even born.
- Free Will implicitly requires Substance Dualism in order for the mind to be “free” from matter, and this requires a resolution of the “mind-body problem”. If they are separate, what bridges them such that they correspond to and can interact to any extent? A third substance? If so, what connects the third to the first and second, and if even if a third could be posited, this would violate the separation between mind and body that Free Will requires. This needs solving before Free Will can even be on the table.
- Since mind needs to be free from matter in order for Free Will to make sense, it is a contradiction to claim that the mind can be informed about the world in order to make a rational decision on how to act upon that which it is supposed to be free from, whilst also not being influenced by information about the world so as to be free from it.
There’s also my argument that “Free” requires indeterminacy, whilst “Will” requires determinacy, and ¬A^A is a logical contradiction. If “will” were not determined by anything, it would be random which is not will, and if it did not determine anything it would be useless and invalid as something that could have the agency that Free Will requires.
Basically, it’s unfalsifiable, requires the resolution of an insurmountable problem, and contains contradictions. ALL of these issues need to be resolved in order to even begin to treat it as a valid concept.
I would argue that this would only be true if “richness” was in terms of fame and number of citations etc., and even then, genuine scientists are basically humble by virtue of being attracted to science and being able to be good at it. You have to be able to embrace the objectivity element, eliminating as much personal subjective influence as possible, in order to arrive at acceptable theories - because you are constantly subject to intense scrutiny by the rest of the scientific community, who all (including yourself) “gain points” by proving one another wrong. It’s the only realm where “perfect competition” really functions. To take all this criticism and persevere equally requires humility - I think if an academic rich in monetary wealth didn’t give a poor academic the time of day, it would be because they were snooty about their wealth irrespective of the fact that they were an academic.
Scientists generally aren’t after money from inventing new things, remedies or otherwise - they just want to be able to justify their funding to maintin their career of trying to publish their findings, and there isn’t much money in this even if they are operating far beyond the realms of cheap, DIY, homemade inventions. Even if a scientist did find a remedy, perhaps even intending to make money from it, this is where capitalists take over who have all the business contacts, experience and knowledge about businesses and markets. The scientists who have been able to do this all themselves are such icons because of the very fact that they are so unbelievably rare. The vast vast majority of the time, the scientists remain behind the scenes doing all the actual work and making someone else money. The argument that Capitalism rewards creativity is almost an absolute myth - it makes money and takes credit from the creativity of others, and calls their business the creation. But back on topic, skeptical debunking is part and parcel of science - from all corners, and even from you - but the challenge is to be legitimate about it, thus respected and cited by people who equally want to be respected and cited. All the quacks and trolls have no influence on the scientific world - they influence the political world, and the best they can do is wrestle political and financial motivations away from something you’re studying perfectly legimately and scientifically. This should never ever happen, but it does appear that there is a bit of overlap going on in certain areas like gender science. But to be perfectly clear - this isn’t because of science, it’s because of politics.
All scientists are looking for phenomena. If causality can be attributed, then so be it. If it necessarily shows that no causality can be attributed then so be it. Everything is on the table, but to be perfectly clear again, if indeterminacy becomes the best theory, this still does not open the door for Free Will. We have to be careful of the false dilemma fallacy here. “Not Determinism” does not mean “Free Will” - the issues I laid out above remain the ultimate barrier - and by contrast I am quite open to the model of Determinism being replaced by indeterminacy - but you have to legitimately prove why first. Determinism may have a mountain of legitimate evidence to support it, but it is falsifiable because such a mountain can be conquered like all scientific theories can - just show the legitimate proof.
Let’s go back to the issue of gravity.
Gravity does different things at different scales and in different regions of the cosmos.
Which’s the simpler explanation?
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Gravity behaves differently across space-time.
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Gravity only appears to behave differently across space-time, but there’s an imperceptible, intangible mass we call dark matter scattered throughout the cosmos, which explains why there’s more gravity in some regions than there ought to be, given the amount of perceptible, tangible mass.
The former is the simpler explanation, because it’s just acknowledging what is, it’s not unnecessarily introducing any mysterious entities to explain away what is.
Now this has a bearing on freewill, because if matter-energy is at least partly acausal, than that means the brain-mind, which is at least partly composed of matter/energy, is in all likelihood partly acausal.
For me, freewill isn’t something we turn on when we behave consciously and deliberately, it’s ever-present, even when we’re behaving subconsciously and indeliberately.