Argue for Free Will

[TheIceQueen]

Due to my own psychological theoretical orientation, I take the stance quite similar to existentialism, though not quite as jarring, that determinism is only useful for making excuses about one's actions and that everyone has the power to change and has a choice, even if we're stuck in a concentration camp. As I'm training to become a counselor, I really dislike the idea of determinism as it can seriously undermine helping a client to change.

 

[AperioContra]

I think this is what the Zen Masters call: "A Question Wrongly Put." First, the way the question is worded leaves me with more baffling questions about the intent. What do you mean by "Believer?" Do you mean a deistic belief? Or is this more of a general "I believe in freewill," belief? Secondly, what do you mean by, "Free Will?" Are you talking about my ability to choose bologna or turkey on my sandwich? Or are you talking about the sum total path of my personal timeline? And as respected to what? What do you mean "Convincing argument?" Whom am I trying to convince? What is their stance on this issue? What is my reference frame?

I don't mean to sound snide, but these are the questions that come up when I read your question. And furthermore I just don't know if my having freewill is a terribly interesting question. The question I find more fascinating is: If we have freewill, what does that mean to us? And what do we do with it?

Nevertheless, if you clarify these questions, I think I'll be more than happy to give you the arguments to the best of my ability. I'll be checking in for updates.

Don't Forget To Be Awesome (DFTBA) - Jack.

 

[LetalisK]

I'm of the position that there is no free will, or rather that there is no reason to believe in such a thing as it is essentially a secular soul, but I'm also of the opinion that it isn't a valuable position without omniscience, which we don't have. So, effectively, we have some free will.

 

[Agayek]

Is somebody making their own choice when a belief they hold is what tells them they should fast, even to the detriment of their own health and life?

Existant beliefs inform your choices. They don't force you to make them.

I'm not so sure "the ability to make a choice" is free will, any more so than our intelligence and beliefs cause us to have "souls".

It's a nebulous thing because the only hard explanation we have for it right now is so simplistic as to be a useless definition anyway.

Hence my point. Either we have a clear, concise definition for Free Will, and therefore we have a clear, concise answer, or this is nothing more than an exercise in mental masturbation.

 

[FalloutJack]

Don't Forget To Be Awesome (DFTBA) - Jack.

Could you tell me which Jack said this? It wasn't me, but it sounds like something I'd say. Who said it?

 

[Hagi]

I like Schopenhauer on this topic:

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

Take from that what you will. As others have noted, free will doesn't really have any meaningful definition so it's kinda useless to argue about it.

 

[Old Father Eternity]

"We are shaped by fate, just as we shape it."


What is the minimal word count anyway?

 

[Realitycrash]

I like Schopenhauer on this topic:

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

Take from that what you will. As others have noted, free will doesn't really have any meaningful definition so it's kinda useless to argue about it.

His 'will' is more about a reoccurring current of urges through a human being, it doesn't mean that he doesn't believe in Free Will.

OT: Asa I have said before, arguing for or against Free Will is pointless and Academic. Either we have Free Will, and everything is fine, or we do not, and then we will continue to act as we will. Even if we were to 'disprove' Free Will, then people won't accept it. People feel free. Our justice system and system of morality is dependent on Free Will, so any 'disproof' will just be ignored.

 

[sth1729]

Murderers.
The act of murder itself violates laws of society and nature, and psychology is a field that can't predict with absolute certainty who these kinds of people will be. To me this signifies that there is indeed free will, even if a lot of people don't exercise it to it's full extent for the good of society as a whole.

 

[Wyes]

That being said, in the absence of any hard evidence either way, it seems most reasonable that free will exists in some form based on human experience. We can think and weigh options. We have indecisive moments, where we are unsure of things and must find our way to one option or another. We appear, empirically, to have free will. There is nothing to suggest, except in the realms of "maybe" and "what if" and fanciful interpretations, that free will is completely illusory. Ergo, on the basis of empirical/observational experience and the absence of any form of equivalently meaningful counterevidence, it's a safe assumption that we have free will.

I agreed with most of your post, but I'd just like to point out that this is not evidence of free will. Part of the problem with arguing about free will is that we are part of the system. All of these actions can occur without free will.

No one really has free will - on a fundamental level, we're all just a bag of particles following the laws of physics, with weird things popping in to existence now and again because of quantum. But that system is complex enough to make a damn good illusion - and that's honestly good enough.

I really like this answer.

Due to my own psychological theoretical orientation, I take the stance quite similar to existentialism, though not quite as jarring, that determinism is only useful for making excuses about one's actions and that everyone has the power to change and has a choice, even if we're stuck in a concentration camp. As I'm training to become a counselor, I really dislike the idea of determinism as it can seriously undermine helping a client to change.

I completely understand why you'd dislike the idea of determinism, and that's cool, but it's important to remember that what we want doesn't shape reality. Which is not to say that we live in a deterministic universe or not, but we do live in a universe where our desires don't change facts.

 

[Alleged_Alec]

No one really has free will - on a fundamental level, we're all just a bag of particles following the laws of physics, with weird things popping in to existence now and again because of quantum. But that system is complex enough to make a damn good illusion - and that's honestly good enough.

This guy gets it. We cannot change the future any more than we can change the past. All is foreordained, possibly though not necessarily by any higher power, but by the laws of physics.

Don't talk to me of quantum uncertainty -- that may show that we can never predict what will happen, which provides a strong enough illusion of free will for most purposes, including punishment for wrongdoing, but that doesn't mean that we can ever alter the future, either.

Because we cannot predict the future. We cannot with any amount of certainty predict the weather, how do you expect us to predict human behaviour? Hell, I don't even know what I'm going to do 90% of the time! We do not know what people will do, so therefore, for all intents and purposes, people have free will.

Also: as Philip Pullman put it:

"We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not," said the witch [Serafina Pekkala], "or die of despair."

 

[Wyes]

Because we cannot predict the future. We cannot with any amount of certainty predict the weather, how do you expect us to predict human behaviour? Hell, I don't even know what I'm going to do 90% of the time! We do not know what people will do, so therefore, for all intents and purposes, people have free will.

Also: as Philip Pullman put it:

"We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not," said the witch [Serafina Pekkala], "or die of despair."

Just because it is hard to predict the future does not make it impossible.

I do like the His Dark Materials reference though.

CAPTCHA: 'one way' - well, at least it wasn't one direction.

 

[TheIceQueen]

Due to my own psychological theoretical orientation, I take the stance quite similar to existentialism, though not quite as jarring, that determinism is only useful for making excuses about one's actions and that everyone has the power to change and has a choice, even if we're stuck in a concentration camp. As I'm training to become a counselor, I really dislike the idea of determinism as it can seriously undermine helping a client to change.

I completely understand why you'd dislike the idea of determinism, and that's cool, but it's important to remember that what we want doesn't shape reality. Which is not to say that we live in a deterministic universe or not, but we do live in a universe where our desires don't change facts.

Determinism is a philosophical position, so it has about as much facts as your standard Fox News reporter. That's how it is with pretty much any philosophical position including the one that I'd argue for. The only difference is that determinism likes to pretend it's much more by masquerading as a philosophy of physics.

 

[Wyes]

Determinism is a philosophical position, so it has about as much facts as your standard Fox News reporter. That's how it is with pretty much any philosophical position including the one that I'd argue for. The only difference is that determinism likes to pretend it's much more by masquerading as a philosophy of physics.

Determinism either is or is not a property of the universe. It is also a philosophical position, and one may have opinions about it, that doesn't change whether it is or is not true. I don't know whether or not its true, I'm inclined to think there's a kind of probabilistic determinism, but not true classical determinism. However, that is my opinion and has no bearing on the nature of the universe.

It is closely related to physics, however.

 

[Flatfrog]

Take a look at Dennett's "Freedom Evolves" - he makes a very convincing argument that free will at a conscious level and determinism at the level of atoms are not incommensurate. For me it amounts to a simple application of chaos theory: there are never two situations that are 'the same' so there is never a meaningful sense in which you 'could have done something different in the same situation'. Free will is the application of learning (including the 'learning' of billions of years of evolution) to mechanistic processes.

 

[Alleged_Alec]

Because we cannot predict the future. We cannot with any amount of certainty predict the weather, how do you expect us to predict human behaviour? Hell, I don't even know what I'm going to do 90% of the time! We do not know what people will do, so therefore, for all intents and purposes, people have free will.

Also: as Philip Pullman put it:

"We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not," said the witch [Serafina Pekkala], "or die of despair."

Just because it is hard to predict the future does not make it impossible.

I do like the His Dark Materials reference though.

CAPTCHA: 'one way' - well, at least it wasn't one direction.

I don't know. I'm a theoretical biologist, and I've seen too much chaos theory in too simple systems to believe that each system is predictable. Deterministic? Maybe, I think it's likely. Predictable? Not so much.

 

[Wyes]

Take a look at Dennett's "Freedom Evolves" - he makes a very convincing argument that free will at a conscious level and determinism at the level of atoms are not incommensurate. For me it amounts to a simple application of chaos theory: there are never two situations that are 'the same' so there is never a meaningful sense in which you 'could have done something different in the same situation'. Free will is the application of learning (including the 'learning' of billions of years of evolution) to mechanistic processes.

I don't think you understand chaos theory...

In particular, chaos does not apply to every physical system. For a system to be chaotic, it must be sensitively dependent on initial conditions, transitive, and have dense orbits. Not all systems satisfy those conditions (and they all have precise mathematical definitions which I'm not going to get in to, but you should be able to find it online somewhere).

Chaos is not an argument against determinism.

 

[TheIceQueen]

Determinism is a philosophical position, so it has about as much facts as your standard Fox News reporter. That's how it is with pretty much any philosophical position including the one that I'd argue for. The only difference is that determinism likes to pretend it's much more by masquerading as a philosophy of physics.

Determinism either is or is not a property of the universe. It is also a philosophical position, and one may have opinions about it, that doesn't change whether it is or is not true. I don't know whether or not its true, I'm inclined to think there's a kind of probabilistic determinism, but not true classical determinism. However, that is my opinion and has no bearing on the nature of the universe.

It *is* closely related to physics, however.

I've only ever heard of it as a philosophical position and I've not heard any mention of it in any of my science classes. Whether it is or is not a property of the universe is still going to be a question heavily involved in philosophy, no matter how close you can get it to physics, which, unless it can be empirically proven, I'll always turn my nose upwards at the idea of it. If it can be empirically proven, however, and goes through peer review and meta-analysis, then I'd be forced to accept it.

Until then, I will always scoff at the philosophy.