where I come from this means "a man" or is used as an informal greeting with positive overtones to a male acquaintance, as in "all right geezer", a bit like "mate" "pal" etc. What does geezer mean where you come from?
People told me God exists and I went to a Christian Church, but it was hard for me to grasp and I never understood it well. My faith wasn't so good, then in 2003 God spoke to me,"Good News", and I recieved a Good News bible soon after.
You've summarized it pretty well. Without free will our behavior is wholly dependent on our body's architecture and external stimuli. Of course we could change either of those things to change our behavior. However, we certainly wouldn't be "changing ourselves" because it wasn't we who made the decision to change those factors. The environment simply changed itself in an indirect way.
Surely that would be stretching the definition of "environment". The activity of the person is still an important link in the causal chain. A decision doesn't suddenly lose its status as a decision once we've discovered why a particular response was chosen over another.
In other words, it would be like saying your computer decided to change you by running the applications that you tell it to. Interacting with your computer programs definitely affects you. And you are an important part of the computer's environment. But does that mean the computer changed itself? I suppose it depends on your perspective, but from a human's elevated point of view, we see that a computer doesn't change itself. We do all of the changing.
The computer can influence my behavior, and I can influence the the computer's activity. We don't normally blame or praise computers because they are not subject to the controls of punishment and reward in the way that humans are. Verbal fault-finding is unlikely to change a computer's future behavior unless a technician intervenes. This is why we don't use words like "responsibility" when we refer to computer errors.
Does that perhaps alter your perspective at all, or would you still say that a being with no free will can change itself?
Well, the change could be initiated by an identified external force, or the change could be capricious. Either way, the agent is changing itself in the sense that it's executing an action that alters its future actions.
Do you contend that the agent only changes itself when the reason for the change is unknown?
I still see the will as being most free when it is random. When we examine the genetic and environmental influences on human behavior, we have a better understanding of the principles under which behaviors are generated and modulated.
I've enjoyed this dialogue and I hope that you write back.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.
Then again, believing in randomness itself takes a bit of faith. I think you would agree with that.
I don't think it requires an undue amount of faith, unless you are trying to promote the solipsistic belief that every concept requires faith. We need only a bit of statistical analysis to establish that an outcome is random. I like to think of randomness as a platonic ideal. In that sense, some sequences of events more closely resemble theoretical randomness than others. It would be difficult to prove that an event was truly uncaused because in order to do so, we would need to systematically eliminate all mediating influences that could potentially instigate said event.
One should remember that random events are not necessarily uncaused, but uncaused events would be random. We call an outcome "random" not because it is uncaused, but rather because it follows stochastic variation. For instance, there is evidence to suggest that the motions of a coin are subject to the laws of physics -- however, the outcomes of a coin flip manifest themselves probabilistically. This is because the forces acting on the coin are highly variable and favor no one side in particular.
You are right to feel that we don't have perfect certainty, but that lack of certainty doesn't grant one the epistemological license to arbitrarily accept explanatory fictions. We shouldn't conclude that all ideas are equally erroneous just because our perceptions are limited and fallible. Science does not grant us perfect certainty, but it is still, nevertheless, useful.
A place like this could provide the "super-existence" necessary to create ours. Is this my explanation for the universe? Hardly. It's just a feeble attempt at resolving the dilemma you've proposed.
You admit that it is a feeble explanation; perhaps you should declare that it's an explanatory fiction and abandon it all together. I could use a similar "super-existence" to explain how my plumbing system works, but it wouldn't be a very useful or convincing explanation.
It's important to keep in mind: free will isn't the only thing that defies logic.
If your conception of free will admittedly defies logic, then it may behoove you to look into some of the research in the disciplines of behavioral science, genetics, and neurophysiology that explain why we do what we do.
All we can say for certain is that nothing is certain; nothing is provable. Even the most basic beliefs are built on the tenet of faith.
I'm a pragmatist. I'm not particularly concerned with what is ultimately true or false. I do, however, care about what works.
I believe in them because I feel that without these things, our lives couldn't possibly have meaning.
Are you saying that you believe in those things because they appeal to your sense of vanity, and not because you have evidence for their existence?
Meaning is a pretty safe measuring stick if you think about it.
I find meaning to be a very poor metric. First of all, we don't have units to measure the level of meaning that an object has. Secondly, a meaning will very greatly from one person to the next.
But with it, there is the promise of truth. In my opinion, we were designed to use meaning as a heuristic for determining our closeness to absolute truth.
Are you trying to tell me that a belief that feels meaningful is more likely to be true?
If Slashdot locks the comments on this story, I would like to continue this discussion in an email exchange.
My email address is selectivepressure a t gmail'com.
I didn't say human will is unaffected by the body's environment.
If we are affected by our environment, then we should conclude that we are not truly free from its control.
Yikes. How did you read fatalism from my post?
Your notion that a lack of free will abdicates responsibility sounds like a form of fatalism to me.
My previous post points out that a consequence of dismissing free will is dismissal of anyone's personal responsibility for their behavior.
We could ask whether it's the temperature, the humidity, or the barometric pressure that causes rain, but no single element acts alone -- they all are responsible. If another car sideswipes my car after running a red light, we blame the person who violated the rule even though both cars were necessary in bringing the collision to fruition. We assign responsibility to the rule breaker as a convenient means of preventing future accidents.
No matter how unpredictable your actions may be, randomness cannot provide the metaphysical truth of independent agency.
A phenomena may be caused by a preceding event, randomly generated, or brought about by a stochastic synthesis of the above (e.g. white noise modulating a sine wave in an analog synthesizer). Can you give me an example of an event that is not random, not stochastic, and not caused by antecedent events?
I'm not talking about "decisions" the way you're talking about them. Your body can react to stimuli, but that's not independent decision making.
If a decision were independent of external control, would it not be random?
In other words, you cannot alter the course of your own thoughts and actions unless you have free will.
I could change my environment to alter the course of my behavior. I don't see why I would need a metaphysical agent to do that. And if we assume that my behavior is under the control of a soul, free will, a homunculus, or some such, then what controls the soul? I have a hard time imagining a first cause that isn't random.
Humans place a lot of importance on this. Why? Because most of us believe that we can make choices that aren't dictated by our environment, that somehow we can truly change ourselves. This is impossible with a wholly naturalistic view of the universe.
This is where I'm not understanding you. If our behavior is subject to the control of our biological constitution and its environment, then we should be able to change ourselves by altering our environment and/or our biology.
All thoughts and actions are simply the cumulative effect of all of the stimuli that have acted on your body over the course of its existence. Therefore, there is no such thing as personal responsibility because it is impossible for "you" to make a decision.
Responsibility is a way of delegating rewards and punishments. If human will was free from the control of its environment, then I don't see why we would need to delegate responsibility. The efficacy of rewarding and punishing stimuli suggests that human will is not free from the control of the environment.
On the other hand, if you believe that a person can make choices, you must believe that there is more to your brain that just meat. You could think of the mind as a supernatural component of the brain, or simply a supernatural stimulus. This is what allows people to alter the course of their own thoughts.
It seems that you are confusing determinism with fatalism. A man could make a decision that was not truly free (i.e. random). There are plenty of events that are not supernatural that still alter behavior. I haven't found any evidence to suggest that I need anything more than a body and mediating stimuli to make decisions.
What causes a free will to act? If it is truly a first cause (and thus not under the control of antecedent causes), wouldn't free will just serve as a random activity generator?
Significance is simply a value judgment that our thalami and amygdalae use to sort sensory data. If you find that your life experiences are insignificant, my advice is to find something that stimulates your serotonin an dopamine receptors with a more rewarding schedule.
Even if the universe and time are finite, the amount of time that even humanity as a whole will likely be around is so much smaller than it that we can for all intents and purposes be said not to exist.
I still don't see the connection between age and level of significance that you seem to be making. Many strains of bacteria have been around for longer than the human race. You can even find trees that are older than any individual human. According to your logic, does it follow that they are more significant than us?
The brain may be aware but it is so utterly insignificant in relation to the cosmos that it may as well not be, for all intents and purposes.
Please tell me why you are dividing your age by the age of the universe. Are you trying to say that an object's significance is directly proportional to it's age?
No, because all agnostics could be considered atheists in the sense that they don't worship any gods. Ergo, both strong and weak agnostics belong in the weak atheist group. Although, a weak atheist could be a strong or weak agnostic.
For instance say I pick up my pen and twirl it. Why did I do that?
It isn't easy to predict an event with perfect accuracy and precision. I never claimed that I could predict the times and places that you will emit every behavior in your repertoire. I could just as easily report a cryptic anecdote about how the room's air pressure dropped, but that wouldn't prove the absence of any rules that lawfully govern the gasses surrounding me. No one has a complete understanding of how the brain works, but there is a wealth of information that has accumulated in the last fifty years and our ability to predict the incidence of certain behaviors has improved.
My point is that you still can't predict human behavior in general.
Retailers need to predict human behavior when they stock their merchandise. The ones that stay in business are pretty good at predicting what the public will buy, how much they'll buy, and what price they're willing to pay.
Sure, if you look for it you can find aberrations, mistakes, and statistical noise, but that doesn't stop us from seeing the patterns that allow us to make predictions. I don't see the point that you are trying to communicate by repeatedly mentioning examples of irrational and bizarre behavior.
Our basic motives are limited, and a normal person's affect is fairly consistent. People work to get access to food, drink and sex. Behavioral scientists call these forms of stimulation "primary reinforcers". Stimuli provided by iontophoresis, implanted electrodes, and psychoactive drugs have been known to stimulate areas of the brain that are associated with motivation. Heroin and morphine, for example, yield metabolic byproducts that fit into endogenous opioid receptors. In this way they mimic the body's own natural painkillers.
A reinforcer that has been contrived through stimulus paring, like money, is called a conditioned reinforcer. Multifaceted experiences such as the accumulation of status or social dominance are debatably mixtures of primary and conditioned reinforcers.
Besides (and this is semantic to) a cause of something is a long way from controlling it.
My suspicion is that your interpretation of the word "controlling" is more narrow than mine. A controlling agent can be direct and precise, or it can be weak and intermittent, while still existing as a form of control. People tend to think of control in terms of restrictions, but reinforcers can sometimes be a more powerful means of control than punishments.
If I'm shopping for a product among vendors that provide equal service, I will do business with the shop that offers the lowest price. That's a static rule on my part. The interesting variables in this case are the prices that are available to me. The vendor who sets the lowest price is controlling my shopping behavior. Do you see how the variable that my behavior is contingent upon is an external force in this example? The rules that govern my behavior are quite simple compared to the complexities of my environment.
a computer either has a rule or does something randomly while a human can weigh in on what the 'best' decision is even if all the outcomes are undesirable or unknown.
I don't understand what you're trying to communicate in that statement. If I have to choose from an assortment of potential outcomes, some of which are undesirable, and some of which are unknown, then I will pseudo-randomly select one of the options with the unknown outcome. That seems like a pretty simple rule to me. I'm just avoiding the options that I know are bad, while blindly selecting a neutral option.
No but the mere fact that I can do something irrational if I so choose proves the existance of free will. People do irrational things all the time, I don't see why this is such a surprise.
Well if behaving irrationally is essential to exercising one's free will, then I'd prefer not to have it.
They almost never are, we have to choose what to do
If an event isn't random, then it must be under the control of a preceding event.
Which isn't true, at least in the sense in which we currently understand computers, otherwise we'd be able to build an AI easily
Programming a catalogue of complex behaviors isn't the hard part of AI research. The main difficulty is getting the computer to respond properly to discriminative stimuli.
There's still nothing stopping you from from eating cashews anyway, date someone with a ratio of 0.8 or holding you hand over a flame even when its too hot.
Why would I do those things if they went against my best interests? Is capricious and irrational behavior essential to your definition of free will?
If the options are equal in all other ways, then my preference does effectively stop me from acting in a contrary way. I'm compelled to repeat certain experiences. There is evidence to suggests that those experiences induce the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. The experiences that I'm referring to are known as rewards or reinforcers. I'm also compelled to avoid certain forms of stimulation. As you probably guessed, those stimuli are known as punishments.
Nice dig at Christianity...
The genesis myth that I was referring to predates Christianity by several centuries.
You have a very reasonable perspective (and I suspect one that we will all have to take when materialism finally trumps dualism) however the way I look at it is that if "free will" arises from purely physical means, and if we someday have the scientific knowledge to trace every cause and effect from your genes through all your experiences to some action you produce, should you really be held responsible for those actions any more than a hurricaine should be held responsible for its distruction?
Yes. We allocate responsibility in order to control other people's behavior. We could try to punish a hurricane for destroying a village, but it wouldn't change the hurricane's future behavior. Many legal systems have the means to limit the punishment of people for whom it would be ineffective (as is the case with the insanity defense). This has led some to erroneously believe that if it is found that certain criminal behaviors may have been elicited by environmental and biological influences, that the defendant should no longer be punished. A determinist understands that finding a cause does not necessarily render the powers of reward and punishment useless.
Elbert Hubbard once said "Life is just one damned thing after another". Time is the word that we use to describe the sequence of events. 1992 happened after 1991 and before 1993. We progress through time experiencing events that occur sooner before events that occur later. You will have a hard time finding anyone who will contest this.
How do you know?
All observations confirm this. I can scarcely think of conjectures that come closer to approximating ideal objectivity.
Finally, when evaluating a theory, one needs to understand what a good theory does. Good theories should do one or more of these three: explain, predict, guide.
That's a good point. We already know that certain chemicals can control behavior. It may behoove us to research the best ways to control behavior.
By and large, both determinists and those who believe in the concept of free will agree that humans have the ability to make decisions. The philosophical difference between the two groups is that a determinist tends to rigorously question why certain decisions are made over others.
When asked why someone did something, someone who attributes human behavior to free will may be content with self-reported answers such as "I felt like it" or "I wanted to". A determinist may ask "why did you feel like it", "what made you want such a thing?".
I have free will in the sense that I can make decisions, but I did not implement the decision-making algorithms that control my behavior. I never programmed myself to prefer peanuts to cashews, or to be attracted to waist to hip ratios of 0.7. Nor did I set the temperature that would make me retreat from a heat source.
An event is either caused by a preceding event, or it is random. I like to think that most of my decisions are controlled rather than random. If my decisions are random, is that really such a good thing? I would like to hear an opinion regarding weather human behavior is controlled or random from a proponent of free will.
I consider myself a determinist because I understand that my behavior is under the control of my history of punishment and reward.
I hypothesize that free will was a concept manufactured to defend a god that was either stupid enough of cruel enough or sufficiently reckless to create things like the tree of knowledge and the devil.
We can encourage people to exercise self-control and restraint of our genetic traits that might be harmful so that we can all get along and create a world worth living in.
We assign blame and responsibility to people in order to allocate punishments and rewards. Punishment and reward are just tools that we use to control other people's behavior. If we are already controlling human behavior using moral prescription, money, and the legal system, why should we deny ourselves the benefit gained by using the behavioral technologies that science yields?
Oh, and that whole "9/11 was brilliant" thing? Disgusting. You should know better than to express admiration for mass murderers. That kind of thing just isn't okay.
Why shouldn't we be allowed to admit that the september eleventh attacks took a lot of hard work, skill, and cunning coordination to accomplish. Do you think that you could mastermind a more effective terrorist attack?
People spend large amounts of time engaging in non-vital activities in order to demonstrate that they are part of the leisure class.
The three main fitness indicators that people examine to evaluate potential mates are: conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and somatic health.
We have the Olympics because we enjoy watching the spectacle of competition. The purpose of the games is not to encourage athleticism. And even if we assume that it does promote athletic competition, we still know that favorable environmental conditions as well as good genes are needed to win.
Slashdot Mirror
You dont want your furniture stolen? dont buy it man, you have no right to stop me stealing it.
If you want to make copies of my furniture, go ahead. I won't report you to the police.
where I come from this means "a man" or is used as an informal greeting with positive overtones to a male acquaintance, as in "all right geezer", a bit like "mate" "pal" etc. What does geezer mean where you come from?
Geezer means old person in American English.
Do you believe in maladaptive preferences? Many people with behavioral problems voluntarily pay medical professionals for help.
People told me God exists and I went to a Christian Church, but it was hard for me to grasp and I never understood it well. My faith wasn't so good, then in 2003 God spoke to me,"Good News", and I recieved a Good News bible soon after.
What did this deity say to you?
You've summarized it pretty well. Without free will our behavior is wholly dependent on our body's architecture and external stimuli. Of course we could change either of those things to change our behavior. However, we certainly wouldn't be "changing ourselves" because it wasn't we who made the decision to change those factors. The environment simply changed itself in an indirect way.
Surely that would be stretching the definition of "environment". The activity of the person is still an important link in the causal chain. A decision doesn't suddenly lose its status as a decision once we've discovered why a particular response was chosen over another.
In other words, it would be like saying your computer decided to change you by running the applications that you tell it to. Interacting with your computer programs definitely affects you. And you are an important part of the computer's environment. But does that mean the computer changed itself? I suppose it depends on your perspective, but from a human's elevated point of view, we see that a computer doesn't change itself. We do all of the changing.
The computer can influence my behavior, and I can influence the the computer's activity. We don't normally blame or praise computers because they are not subject to the controls of punishment and reward in the way that humans are. Verbal fault-finding is unlikely to change a computer's future behavior unless a technician intervenes. This is why we don't use words like "responsibility" when we refer to computer errors.
Does that perhaps alter your perspective at all, or would you still say that a being with no free will can change itself?
Well, the change could be initiated by an identified external force, or the change could be capricious. Either way, the agent is changing itself in the sense that it's executing an action that alters its future actions.
Do you contend that the agent only changes itself when the reason for the change is unknown?
I still see the will as being most free when it is random. When we examine the genetic and environmental influences on human behavior, we have a better understanding of the principles under which behaviors are generated and modulated.
I've enjoyed this dialogue and I hope that you write back.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.
Then again, believing in randomness itself takes a bit of faith. I think you would agree with that.
I don't think it requires an undue amount of faith, unless you are trying to promote the solipsistic belief that every concept requires faith. We need only a bit of statistical analysis to establish that an outcome is random. I like to think of randomness as a platonic ideal. In that sense, some sequences of events more closely resemble theoretical randomness than others. It would be difficult to prove that an event was truly uncaused because in order to do so, we would need to systematically eliminate all mediating influences that could potentially instigate said event.
One should remember that random events are not necessarily uncaused, but uncaused events would be random. We call an outcome "random" not because it is uncaused, but rather because it follows stochastic variation. For instance, there is evidence to suggest that the motions of a coin are subject to the laws of physics -- however, the outcomes of a coin flip manifest themselves probabilistically. This is because the forces acting on the coin are highly variable and favor no one side in particular.
You are right to feel that we don't have perfect certainty, but that lack of certainty doesn't grant one the epistemological license to arbitrarily accept explanatory fictions. We shouldn't conclude that all ideas are equally erroneous just because our perceptions are limited and fallible. Science does not grant us perfect certainty, but it is still, nevertheless, useful.
A place like this could provide the "super-existence" necessary to create ours. Is this my explanation for the universe? Hardly. It's just a feeble attempt at resolving the dilemma you've proposed.
You admit that it is a feeble explanation; perhaps you should declare that it's an explanatory fiction and abandon it all together. I could use a similar "super-existence" to explain how my plumbing system works, but it wouldn't be a very useful or convincing explanation.
It's important to keep in mind: free will isn't the only thing that defies logic.
If your conception of free will admittedly defies logic, then it may behoove you to look into some of the research in the disciplines of behavioral science, genetics, and neurophysiology that explain why we do what we do.
All we can say for certain is that nothing is certain; nothing is provable. Even the most basic beliefs are built on the tenet of faith.
I'm a pragmatist. I'm not particularly concerned with what is ultimately true or false. I do, however, care about what works.
I believe in them because I feel that without these things, our lives couldn't possibly have meaning.
Are you saying that you believe in those things because they appeal to your sense of vanity, and not because you have evidence for their existence?
Meaning is a pretty safe measuring stick if you think about it.
I find meaning to be a very poor metric. First of all, we don't have units to measure the level of meaning that an object has. Secondly, a meaning will very greatly from one person to the next.
But with it, there is the promise of truth. In my opinion, we were designed to use meaning as a heuristic for determining our closeness to absolute truth.
Are you trying to tell me that a belief that feels meaningful is more likely to be true?
If Slashdot locks the comments on this story, I would like to continue this discussion in an email exchange.
My email address is selectivepressure a t gmail'com.
I didn't say human will is unaffected by the body's environment.
If we are affected by our environment, then we should conclude that we are not truly free from its control.
Yikes. How did you read fatalism from my post?
Your notion that a lack of free will abdicates responsibility sounds like a form of fatalism to me.
My previous post points out that a consequence of dismissing free will is dismissal of anyone's personal responsibility for their behavior.
We could ask whether it's the temperature, the humidity, or the barometric pressure that causes rain, but no single element acts alone -- they all are responsible. If another car sideswipes my car after running a red light, we blame the person who violated the rule even though both cars were necessary in bringing the collision to fruition. We assign responsibility to the rule breaker as a convenient means of preventing future accidents.
No matter how unpredictable your actions may be, randomness cannot provide the metaphysical truth of independent agency.
A phenomena may be caused by a preceding event, randomly generated, or brought about by a stochastic synthesis of the above (e.g. white noise modulating a sine wave in an analog synthesizer). Can you give me an example of an event that is not random, not stochastic, and not caused by antecedent events?
I'm not talking about "decisions" the way you're talking about them. Your body can react to stimuli, but that's not independent decision making.
If a decision were independent of external control, would it not be random?
In other words, you cannot alter the course of your own thoughts and actions unless you have free will.
I could change my environment to alter the course of my behavior. I don't see why I would need a metaphysical agent to do that. And if we assume that my behavior is under the control of a soul, free will, a homunculus, or some such, then what controls the soul? I have a hard time imagining a first cause that isn't random.
Humans place a lot of importance on this. Why? Because most of us believe that we can make choices that aren't dictated by our environment, that somehow we can truly change ourselves. This is impossible with a wholly naturalistic view of the universe.
This is where I'm not understanding you. If our behavior is subject to the control of our biological constitution and its environment, then we should be able to change ourselves by altering our environment and/or our biology.
All thoughts and actions are simply the cumulative effect of all of the stimuli that have acted on your body over the course of its existence. Therefore, there is no such thing as personal responsibility because it is impossible for "you" to make a decision.
Responsibility is a way of delegating rewards and punishments. If human will was free from the control of its environment, then I don't see why we would need to delegate responsibility. The efficacy of rewarding and punishing stimuli suggests that human will is not free from the control of the environment.
On the other hand, if you believe that a person can make choices, you must believe that there is more to your brain that just meat. You could think of the mind as a supernatural component of the brain, or simply a supernatural stimulus. This is what allows people to alter the course of their own thoughts.
It seems that you are confusing determinism with fatalism. A man could make a decision that was not truly free (i.e. random). There are plenty of events that are not supernatural that still alter behavior. I haven't found any evidence to suggest that I need anything more than a body and mediating stimuli to make decisions.
What can a mind do that a brain can't?
What causes a free will to act? If it is truly a first cause (and thus not under the control of antecedent causes), wouldn't free will just serve as a random activity generator?
Significance is simply a value judgment that our thalami and amygdalae use to sort sensory data. If you find that your life experiences are insignificant, my advice is to find something that stimulates your serotonin an dopamine receptors with a more rewarding schedule.
Even if the universe and time are finite, the amount of time that even humanity as a whole will likely be around is so much smaller than it that we can for all intents and purposes be said not to exist.
I still don't see the connection between age and level of significance that you seem to be making. Many strains of bacteria have been around for longer than the human race. You can even find trees that are older than any individual human. According to your logic, does it follow that they are more significant than us?
The brain may be aware but it is so utterly insignificant in relation to the cosmos that it may as well not be, for all intents and purposes.
Please tell me why you are dividing your age by the age of the universe. Are you trying to say that an object's significance is directly proportional to it's age?
That would indicate to me that if you believe that the soul is an illusion you would logically also have to believe that awareness is an illusion.
Why would a brain need a soul to have awareness?
Atheism is a subset of agnosticism
No, because all agnostics could be considered atheists in the sense that they don't worship any gods. Ergo, both strong and weak agnostics belong in the weak atheist group. Although, a weak atheist could be a strong or weak agnostic.
all atheists
/ \
strong atheist | weak atheist
| all agnostics
/ \
| weak agnostics | strong agnostics
Agnostics belong in a subset of atheism.
For instance say I pick up my pen and twirl it. Why did I do that?
It isn't easy to predict an event with perfect accuracy and precision. I never claimed that I could predict the times and places that you will emit every behavior in your repertoire. I could just as easily report a cryptic anecdote about how the room's air pressure dropped, but that wouldn't prove the absence of any rules that lawfully govern the gasses surrounding me. No one has a complete understanding of how the brain works, but there is a wealth of information that has accumulated in the last fifty years and our ability to predict the incidence of certain behaviors has improved.
My point is that you still can't predict human behavior in general.
Retailers need to predict human behavior when they stock their merchandise. The ones that stay in business are pretty good at predicting what the public will buy, how much they'll buy, and what price they're willing to pay.
Sure, if you look for it you can find aberrations, mistakes, and statistical noise, but that doesn't stop us from seeing the patterns that allow us to make predictions. I don't see the point that you are trying to communicate by repeatedly mentioning examples of irrational and bizarre behavior.
Our basic motives are limited, and a normal person's affect is fairly consistent. People work to get access to food, drink and sex. Behavioral scientists call these forms of stimulation "primary reinforcers". Stimuli provided by iontophoresis, implanted electrodes, and psychoactive drugs have been known to stimulate areas of the brain that are associated with motivation. Heroin and morphine, for example, yield metabolic byproducts that fit into endogenous opioid receptors. In this way they mimic the body's own natural painkillers.
A reinforcer that has been contrived through stimulus paring, like money, is called a conditioned reinforcer. Multifaceted experiences such as the accumulation of status or social dominance are debatably mixtures of primary and conditioned reinforcers.
Besides (and this is semantic to) a cause of something is a long way from controlling it.
My suspicion is that your interpretation of the word "controlling" is more narrow than mine. A controlling agent can be direct and precise, or it can be weak and intermittent, while still existing as a form of control. People tend to think of control in terms of restrictions, but reinforcers can sometimes be a more powerful means of control than punishments.
If I'm shopping for a product among vendors that provide equal service, I will do business with the shop that offers the lowest price. That's a static rule on my part. The interesting variables in this case are the prices that are available to me. The vendor who sets the lowest price is controlling my shopping behavior. Do you see how the variable that my behavior is contingent upon is an external force in this example? The rules that govern my behavior are quite simple compared to the complexities of my environment.
a computer either has a rule or does something randomly while a human can weigh in on what the 'best' decision is even if all the outcomes are undesirable or unknown.
I don't understand what you're trying to communicate in that statement. If I have to choose from an assortment of potential outcomes, some of which are undesirable, and some of which are unknown, then I will pseudo-randomly select one of the options with the unknown outcome. That seems like a pretty simple rule to me. I'm just avoiding the options that I know are bad, while blindly selecting a neutral option.
No but the mere fact that I can do something irrational if I so choose proves the existance of free will. People do irrational things all the time, I don't see why this is such a surprise.
Well if behaving irrationally is essential to exercising one's free will, then I'd prefer not to have it.
They almost never are, we have to choose what to do
And no unpredictable doesn't mean random.
If an event isn't random, then it must be under the control of a preceding event.
Which isn't true, at least in the sense in which we currently understand computers, otherwise we'd be able to build an AI easily
Programming a catalogue of complex behaviors isn't the hard part of AI research. The main difficulty is getting the computer to respond properly to discriminative stimuli.
There's still nothing stopping you from from eating cashews anyway, date someone with a ratio of 0.8 or holding you hand over a flame even when its too hot.
Why would I do those things if they went against my best interests? Is capricious and irrational behavior essential to your definition of free will?
If the options are equal in all other ways, then my preference does effectively stop me from acting in a contrary way. I'm compelled to repeat certain experiences. There is evidence to suggests that those experiences induce the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. The experiences that I'm referring to are known as rewards or reinforcers. I'm also compelled to avoid certain forms of stimulation. As you probably guessed, those stimuli are known as punishments.
Nice dig at Christianity...
The genesis myth that I was referring to predates Christianity by several centuries.
You have a very reasonable perspective (and I suspect one that we will all have to take when materialism finally trumps dualism) however the way I look at it is that if "free will" arises from purely physical means, and if we someday have the scientific knowledge to trace every cause and effect from your genes through all your experiences to some action you produce, should you really be held responsible for those actions any more than a hurricaine should be held responsible for its distruction?
Yes. We allocate responsibility in order to control other people's behavior. We could try to punish a hurricane for destroying a village, but it wouldn't change the hurricane's future behavior. Many legal systems have the means to limit the punishment of people for whom it would be ineffective (as is the case with the insanity defense). This has led some to erroneously believe that if it is found that certain criminal behaviors may have been elicited by environmental and biological influences, that the defendant should no longer be punished. A determinist understands that finding a cause does not necessarily render the powers of reward and punishment useless.
Which direction does time go?
Elbert Hubbard once said "Life is just one damned thing after another". Time is the word that we use to describe the sequence of events. 1992 happened after 1991 and before 1993. We progress through time experiencing events that occur sooner before events that occur later. You will have a hard time finding anyone who will contest this.
How do you know?
All observations confirm this. I can scarcely think of conjectures that come closer to approximating ideal objectivity.
Finally, when evaluating a theory, one needs to understand what a good theory does. Good theories should do one or more of these three: explain, predict, guide.
That's a good point. We already know that certain chemicals can control behavior. It may behoove us to research the best ways to control behavior.
By and large, both determinists and those who believe in the concept of free will agree that humans have the ability to make decisions. The philosophical difference between the two groups is that a determinist tends to rigorously question why certain decisions are made over others.
When asked why someone did something, someone who attributes human behavior to free will may be content with self-reported answers such as "I felt like it" or "I wanted to". A determinist may ask "why did you feel like it", "what made you want such a thing?".
I have free will in the sense that I can make decisions, but I did not implement the decision-making algorithms that control my behavior. I never programmed myself to prefer peanuts to cashews, or to be attracted to waist to hip ratios of 0.7. Nor did I set the temperature that would make me retreat from a heat source.
An event is either caused by a preceding event, or it is random. I like to think that most of my decisions are controlled rather than random. If my decisions are random, is that really such a good thing? I would like to hear an opinion regarding weather human behavior is controlled or random from a proponent of free will.
I consider myself a determinist because I understand that my behavior is under the control of my history of punishment and reward.
I hypothesize that free will was a concept manufactured to defend a god that was either stupid enough of cruel enough or sufficiently reckless to create things like the tree of knowledge and the devil.
We can encourage people to exercise self-control and restraint of our genetic traits that might be harmful so that we can all get along and create a world worth living in.
We assign blame and responsibility to people in order to allocate punishments and rewards. Punishment and reward are just tools that we use to control other people's behavior. If we are already controlling human behavior using moral prescription, money, and the legal system, why should we deny ourselves the benefit gained by using the behavioral technologies that science yields?
Oh, and that whole "9/11 was brilliant" thing? Disgusting. You should know better than to express admiration for mass murderers. That kind of thing just isn't okay.
Why shouldn't we be allowed to admit that the september eleventh attacks took a lot of hard work, skill, and cunning coordination to accomplish. Do you think that you could mastermind a more effective terrorist attack?
People spend large amounts of time engaging in non-vital activities in order to demonstrate that they are part of the leisure class.
The three main fitness indicators that people examine to evaluate potential mates are: conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and somatic health.
We have the Olympics because we enjoy watching the spectacle of competition. The purpose of the games is not to encourage athleticism. And even if we assume that it does promote athletic competition, we still know that favorable environmental conditions as well as good genes are needed to win.