Matter transforms into energy, and we are evanescent, outstanding, beautiful creatures, of marvelous construction and design.
There’s something out there called “dark matter-energy”. We can feel its presence, but it can’t be directly penetrated. Who’s to say that there really isn’t a God consciousness system floating over our heads that can point and direct us to make miracles happen?
As logical and scientific you get about the forces moving us around, a small act of courage can move mountains.
You know, like when I was dreaming I could fly in Fairytopia.
Okay, that works for you. It doesn’t work for me. Human interactions unfolded on planet earth long before philosophers came along. And they are still unfolding apace long after. And while some philosophers might think it advisable to break the discipline down into such components as logic and epistemology and philology and ethics and metaphysics, etc., it doesn’t change the fact that one way or another everything gets intertwined in the actual choices that we make in interacting with others from day to day.
So, my kind of philosopher never forgets that. And, however clearly futile that is given the yawning gap between “I” and “all there is” , he or she at least makes the attempt to somehow intertwine the essential and the existential.
This thread merely offers speculations regarding whether or not these attempts themselves “are beyond our control”. Naturally as it were.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Still, we don’t really know for certain if what we know we know is not just another manifestation of nature unfolding only as it does…only as it can…only as it must.
The amoeba is just further down the line when – somehow! – mindless matter became living matter became self-conscious living matter became you and I.
How, exactly, on a biological, genetic, chemical and neurological level did this “layering of representations” tumble over into having actual options to act on this…freely?
And then part where all the memes come in.
Sure, those autonomous aliens could look down at us and describe this communication by noting the things that we choose to do. But then noting in turn that we only think that we are choosing freely to do what we do because nature/matter has evolved into a human brain able to create the psychological illusion of actual volition.
But: How would they go about communicating that to us?
Which merely demonstrates that very, very intelligent people grapple with this and come to differing conclusions. Conflicting wants and desires seem to suggest [if only “intuitively”] that “I” am there as more than just another mechanical component ever in sync with the laws of matter. But how is that then established as in fact true? Or that the establishing of this itself is just another manifestation of nature’s inevitable march into the future.
Dennett insists!
Well, I guess that settles it then. Unless, of course, other very, very smart folks insist that it is something else entirely.
Ok. Genotypes and evolutionary development may not or may foreshadow the layers of representations which may result in consciousness , including that of the self.
However , precognizant waste of life and post cognizant abortion of an overproduction of human beings resulting in overpopulation. to the degree that it endangers human life as a given, does shift the scientific rational into the teleological purpose, if any.
My point is, that because of.lack of stasis, it is not arguable.
But You forgot the Bunny Box!! Boxes are everywhere. Lords of wonderland pipe a well curled shape of Your Meganium. She bathes in a Yugioh pyramid swimming pool with a Marius Florin galactic super civilizations Politoed. Here’s what He says about “Free Will”:
“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page
All this reflects of course is the fact that our brain is able to come up with things like this in order to “prove” we have free will.
As though we can’t have a dream in which the same scenario unfolds. You walk out the door and go looking for a place to eat. Now, in the dream you think you are doing it freely. Or I certainly do in my dreams.
But, of course, that’s just a dream! In the waking world it’s all different. Why? Because we can think up scenarios like the one above and that proves it.
Quite the contrary insist those who believe in an omniscient God. He can predict what you’ll wind up eating.
Even Wall’s conviction that he chose to become an atheist is only based on the assumption that he might have freely opted instead to become a Christian.
And that you have thought yourself into believing that you are freely choosing what to pick from the menu is really as far as you can go by way of “demonstrating” it.
On and on folks like Hall go creating arguments out of words and then using the arguments themselves as the intellectual’s equivalent of the scientific method.
It is not to decide what to be atheist or Theist, but of the structural integrity between them in stasis, where one can sit back and decide, buy with the coming of attractions of centralized structural AI, the opportunity to distinguish will be anything based but on human recall.
Everything is on line including that of the philosophy and description of ‘mind’
“Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will” Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.
Kerri Smith in Nature magazine.
This is really what it comes down to for many. We may never know beyond all doubt whether the behaviors that we choose involve at least some element of freedom. But since we don’t seem to know this unequivocally now, this leaves open the possibilty that we don’t.
But: the implications of that can be either very, very disturbing or very, very comforting.
It depends in large part on how many achievements you can claim to take credit for and how many failures you can claim are “beyond my control”.
And how do you wrap your head around the idea that in choosing coffee instead of tea you are merely in sync with the laws of matter going back [so far] 13.8 billion years.
Yet even given some measure of free will, our reactions to this are in turn but a reflection of all the existential variables in our lives that predispose some to think about it deeply and others not to think about it at all.
It all just gets tangled up in/with all of the other human-all-too-human factors that prompt us to go in so many different directions in the course of choosing either this or that.
We simply make up our minds one way or the other and carry on. We’re all basically stuck here.
Ontologically perhaps, but Cosmo-Teleologically we should not!
Social psychology being more determinate Nowedays, as a matrix around which philosophy and psychology revolve around, , the credibility of ‘unstickiness’ may be more viable.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
So, what have we here? Isn’t it basically a “thought experiment” provided to us as “proof” that on some admittedly complex level, the crewmen each possess in their own way the capacity to choose their behaviors?
Is he actually able to describe what goes on in the brain of the crewmen such that he reaches this crucial point, amidst entirely natural chemical and neurological interactions, where each individual “I” here is freely opting toward the wheel of his own volition?
Close enough to the science of free will?
Again, only to the extent that he could probe the brain of someone who did quit smoking and note how, empirically, “I” here is not compelled by the laws of nature, would he be able to establish definitively that the quitter’s will was free.
Until then, how is it not just another rendition of what Kerri Smith noted above:
“The conscious decision to [quit smoking] was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.”
“The conscious decision to [quit smoking] was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.”
But even if that’s so, whether we made up our minds sub-consciously or not, there is little merit in the notion that somehow sub conscious determination is due to extrinsic or internal causation: where the later is more associated with free will or not.
This argument splices reason ing to such a determinative shift that includes one to doubt it’s argumentative sense.
It more results in a fed back determinism that relies on defining from Ontologically gained facts, rather then from those that are micro-manageable.
Uncertainty has taken a toll with reasoning, to be sure.!
For instance,
'Cassirer altered and widened this approach by stating that the ongoing change of mental frame-which is a unique quality of mankind, as well as his flexibility and ability to create future and realms of possibility-can only emerge from a broader knowledge about relational order. Those skills are grounded in man’s ability to expand mental terms and settings of cognition beyond the borders of language to even more abstract spheres, thus claiming that a system of “invariants of experi-ence” (Invariantensystem der Erfahrung) is an integral trait of human cognition (Pluemacher/Sandkuehler ’
This. in reference to the problem You introduced with the splicing of conscious/subconscious variants to the problem of freedom, in purport of increasing insecurity in describing that difference.
The indifference and the resulting embededness causes the very Ontologically verifiable tendency to resist a change. To the mind, that type of reductive analysis, necessarily short-cuts any uncertain causality that may serve a better (higher) purpose.
“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page
This is where from my frame of mind the arguments get rather unreal, strange…even bizarre.
If Harris doesn’t believe in free will given the manner in which I have come to understand a determined universe then he could not have not been an atheist any more than religious folks could not have not believed in God. Yet his reactions to religion is precisely the reaction that one would expect from someone who believes that one is able [obligated] to freely choose atheism because it is more rational.
On the other hand, if Harris doesn’t say that science has proven that free will doesn’t exist, can Hall say that science has proven it does exist? How are both points of view not clearly embedded in all that is still yet to be learned by science here?
All any of us can explain about why we choose one selection from the menu rather than another is what we think “here and now” we know about what is happening “in our head” then. When in fact none of us do know everything that we must know in order to answer the question definitively.
That’s the part both sides seem unwilling to accept. The part that [to me] revolves more around a human psychology [compelled or not] ever and always inclined to believe that having an answer is far, far better than being unsure that there is an answer.
Besides, there must be an answer. Why? Because they have already found it!
“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page
Okay, but what I keep coming back to here is how interesting it might be to point out to Mr. Harris that in a wholly determined universe, i.e. a universe in which all matter [including brain matter] is governed by natural laws, what any of us come to understand about the definition of free will is the only thing we were ever able to come to understand about it.
In other words, over and again I’m confronted with the prospect that I must be missing something really important here about the manner in which folks like this discuss these relationships.
Same for the author here. How is he able to demonstrate that what he understands about these relationships is beyond all doubt the embodiment of his own free will? However circumscribed and/or circumvented it will be by any number of actual existential variables.
His leap to free will is no less an intellectual contraption in my view. We’re all stuck trying to pin the tail on this donkey going all the way back to why something rather than nothing exists at all. And why this something and not another something altogether.
In other words, why and how does the human brain do what it does such that this can be traced back to God or to nature or to some component embedded in the chemical and neurological interactions inside the brain that can be pinpointed to explain how this living matter became autonomous.