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Post #121
That's not affirming the consequent. Affirming the consequent is an argument of the form:
P -> Q
Q
Therefore, P
That would have to be something like:
If something is made of atoms, then its position can be predicted
A human's position can be predicted
Therefore a human is made of atoms
None of those arguments were of that form. Your complaint is one against inductive reasoning.
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The fact that in any given moment I can decide to type "rat" or "acorn" or whatnot seems to be proof enough for me.
Now some of you may say: "ah but don't you see? Thats the facade, its your biochemistry doing XYZ."
If I 'believe' I have the ability to enact my fate, and the result happens, it might as well be free-will for all intents and purposes.
Edited:
Also consciousness is not a chemical reaction.
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Then what is it?
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That believe is a chemical reaction. and how is consciousness not a chemical reaction? consciousness is created by our brains, which is one giant chemical computer.
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Consciousness exists grounded within reality but is on its own plane. It most certainly is not simply a chemical reaction because that would mean to imply that if one could replicate these experiments in a closed environment they would be able to create a conscious being.
The fact of the matter is that there is not even close to being enough scientific data to do more than assert that actions are little more than just electrons firing off in other directions.
And if actions and emotions were nothing more than brain states, then it would logically make sense that brain states would necessarily follow actions. If this was true, then everyone diagnosed with depression but not treated would either attempt suicide, or no one would.
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conscious exists in it's own "plane"? do you have any evidence to back up that claim? and there's more evidence supporting our theory then yours. we do know brains are electrical. also, no two brains have identical reactions. It isn't a closed experiment, results may very.
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Determinism is the only philosophy on free will I can agree with. I mean it makes sense, everything else in the universe is subject to cause and effect, why wouldn't our will? Many studies have shown that the mind can make decisions subconsciously seconds before a person makes a conscious choice.
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is it?
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What reasoning or evidence supports this assertion? Is it even possible to support the assertion with evidence? If consciousness is not physical, by what means to you intend to prove this claim? Certainly it can't be investigated scientifically.
Yes. I don't see why not. We may not be able to create a conscious being at the moment, but I don't see why it is impossible in principle.
I think this is the closest thing in your post to being correct. Neuroscience is a very new field of study, but I think regardless that all evidence points toward consciousness being an entirely material phenomenon. All other phenomena as far as I know have materialistic explanations, or appear to be explainable materialistically, so I think it would take some rather extraordinary evidence to justify that the claim that consciousness is an exception.
Depression is a label for a broad variety of patterns of mental function. That you are depressed does not mean you suffer exactly the same illness as every other depressed person, or that it will manifest in the same way, or that you will act in the same way because of it. The brain may be mechanistic, but it is by no means simple. It responds to stimuli in a very complex and subtle way. No two people are exactly alike physically, nor do they exist in the same external physical conditions, so regardless of whether two people are depressed, it doesn't instantly determine whether or not they will kill themselves. I could say that two mathematical functions pass through the point (0,0), but it doesn't make them the same function.
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If free will doesn't exist, how would we make our social structure compatible with that?
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Rehabilitative criminal law. On a personal level, trying to understand why people do things we don't like and accounting for it rather than immediately leveling blame.
Although any social structure is compatible with the idea of lack of free will, since lack of free will implies that our social structure is not actually determined by us. It will be what it will be.
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I suppose the trite and inevitable question is why bother, then?
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Why bother what?
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Why bother with anything?
If we're set on rails of determinism why bother with notions of freedom?
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That is a logical response from you because you are thinking about free will, and naturally you want to believe you have free will and thus you think about the fact that you can think about rats and acorns, but that is only because that is what you thought of because you thought of free will. Which as you can see is your brain doing A because it was faced with B in the setting of C with a past of D.
As I've mentioned earlier. Free will is an illusion that allows us to "choose" a better destiny, an attitude that regards free will as obsolete will just not give a fuck because "it was all meant to be this way anyways". Basically the whole discussion around free will is unecessary since we should act as if it exists anyways, but it's too interesting to let go.
Haven't ever pondered about consciousness, but I would assume that is just our brain confirming for itself that it is actually living and doing things.
You wouldn't just have to replicate experiments in a closed environment. You would need a human being being born by the same person at the same time at the same place in the same environment with the same people around it and with the same childhood. And I'm not talking about similar kind of people here, everything has to be completely identical down to a scale of impossible measurements, at least for now (and probably forever).
But there is currently no reason to think otherwise, and like johnnymo said, there is really nothing else that doesn't follow that pattern. I think it's quite odd and stupid that people place human beings above everything else, although most of them even admit we've just evolved from apes (as far as we currently theorize and believe).
No, because everyone has a completely different past and current. Their life situations are completely fucking different causing completely fucking different responses and actions towards their depression. A depressed porn star and a depressed cashier will have very different life situations causing very different reactions towards it, because there are billion other factors to account for. The easiest place to start with is the childhood and their genes.
Because if you don't everything will go to hell.
Previously covered this in this post. But take this other quote from one of my earlier posts on page 3 as well:
People ponder about the meaning of their life all the time and the only actual conclusion they have ever come to is that there is no reason, so they'll just have to live to live to be happy and get kids that can bring the generations coming. Life is pointless, but why give a fuck? You live and your very existence is so impossible to explain you should just be thankful enough that you do exist.
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Thanks for telling me that they didn't split atoms 3000 (or 3000 years before christ) years ago when they were using rocks as weapons.
But stones as a weapon and splitting an atom just shows the variety of stuff human mind and body can do. I'm not arguing over anything here. Might as well call you retarded for whatever retarded reason like you telling me the most obvious shit, like the usefulness of our thumb or whatever the fuck.
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That's what you implied with your post.
And it can do it because it's progressed and gathered more information that it can combine and try out and end up with new inventions. It is not in any way proof of free will, but rather proof that the influence of A and the observation of B causes C which is basically how everything works, everything is built upon everything else and that's the basic principle of the way we learn and act and do everything we do.
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The 2nd argument was something like affirming the consequent, but that wasn't the one relevant to the discussion
Edited:
A crudely put argument against free will would be something like this:
1) X is an atomic structure -> X is predeterimined
2) humans are atomic structures
3) therefore they are predetermined
4) X is predetermined -> it has no free will
5) therefore humans have no free will
I can object to 1 and 4 - the only ones that count. So this crude rendition of the deterministic argument is faulty.
(I'm not using a strawman here; I'm not trying to say anything about the more justified deterministic arguments.)
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And why do you think this is impossible?
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One of my lecturers last year opened my eyes to the fact that consciousness can actually be reduced down to a system of flag waving. Imagine trillions of people all waving flags, performing the same function as the brain (imagine we could recreate this function). According to the functionalist account of consciousness, this system of flag waving is in and of itself a conscious entity. Frankly I love this idea; I don't see why so many people abhor to the possibility of consciousness not having to be squidgy.
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Have you given Gdel, Escher, Bach a look? You'd like it.
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Still no! I remember you telling me about it a while ago and it sounds really fascinating! I'll look into it now.
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-snip-
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I love this idea too. It doesn't necessarily make it true, but I don't see many problems with it, other than we don't actually know how specific the conditions needed for consciousness are.
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Alright well that's a good way to put it..
Anyway.. what's there left to say? Our brains are simply miraculous if you think of all the things we've built.
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If a computer can't do what it's not programmed to do, how can we?
Assuming our consciousness is physical, we are just more advanced computers.
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Existence is miraculous. But using our abilities and using our bodies to the extent they can be used is not all that miraculous. It does however seem miraculous to most of us.
Well, we can't.
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"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
- Lyall Watson
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"Lyall Watson is a bit of a nutjob, as evidenced by the following bookcover (reading it causes brain damage and is not recommended)"
- Contag, this post
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I can assume this is speaking from personal experience?
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But he does have a point, it's very difficult for a complex system to understand itself."Lyall Watson is a bit of a nutjob, as evidenced by the following bookcover (reading it causes brain damage and is not recommended)"
- Contag, this post
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Yes and no.
I completely agree with the saying though. But I think it applies more to details, to get that 100% understanding about how everything about it works and what causes it to work and such. But understanding how it works in the very basics should be possible.
Don't think I would ever label anything as impossible to understand though. Pretty much everything we have made and use today was deemed impossible at some point, the limit for what's impossible and what is possible is stretched every day. Computers may be restricted from the programmers knowledge, but it can do more with the programmers knowledge than the programmer him/herself, so who knows, information going back and forth between humans and computers could at some day possibly map the whole human brain and how it works. Unlikely, yes, possible, I would assume so.
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Do we live in a world without hypothetical questions?
There you go.
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Thank you for this utterly irrelevant post
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i'm going to ignore the extreme pseudo intellectualism in this thread and just chip in my two cents
it makes no sense to me that an action I take now determines an action I'll take at an arbitrary point in the future and that's just the way it is. I understand the concept being discussed - that no matter what action I take, I do it because the context of the situation that has developed dictates no other "right" path for me to take, so I'll only do that - but I think it's ignorant to believe that since there's no way of observing it let alone falsifying it. that isn't to say that free will is different in that respect, but I know I have the right to choose from moment to moment, which in my opinion counts for more than this blather about physics dictating biochemistry and biochemistry dictating our mind therefore the laws of nature dictates our intelligence and consciousness. Basically, I can only take seriously what I experience.
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doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try to claim that it's irrational not to believe in free will by rejecting a basic assumption of the sciences: that everything has a material cause
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But having the right to chose isn't the same as being able to chose.
We always have choices, but there is only one choice we will take, and it is pre-determined by the past combined with the present.
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When people are repeatedly given a handful of choices and still happen to choose the same option time and time again, they do it not because they lack free will, but because there's rarely any reason for them to pick a different choice. Life is short, and usually there's only a few ways to achieve the optimal level of happiness that a person perceives they can attain, so naturally the range of choices a person will make throughout their life will seem rather small and rigid. But do not mistake that for lack of free will.
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You're missing the point. Regardless of the "choice" the that was made, it was the only possible outcome. It's like flipping a coin. While it's in the air, you think that coin flip could come out either way. But it couldn't. From the moment it went up into the air, the conditions of the universe and the way it was flipped dictated exactly what the outcome of that coin toss would be. Even before it was flipped, other factors determined how it would be flipped. It's the same way with the human mind. It may be sensitive and difficult to predict, but it still obeys physical laws.
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