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Free will or fate?

lizzie said:
Please clarify what you are asking. It makes no sense to me in the context of the thread. Are you wanting to discuss autonomic nervous system function, or making choices and decisions?
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Can you give me an example of each? to, well, shoe me the difference?
 
I can't intellectually create a scenario where anything beyond the illusion of free will could possibly exist.

We're reactions, not actions.
 
Methusala said:
Can you give me an example of each? to, well, shoe me the difference?
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I already did in the posts above.
Bodily functions (breathing, heart rate, etc) are autonomic.
Making a conscious decision is what I am assuming your thread is supposed to be about (in addition to the concepts of free will and predeterminism/ related concepts).
Are you being purposely obtuse?
 
lizzie said:
I already did in the posts above.
Bodily functions (breathing, heart rate, etc) are autonomic.
Making a conscious decision is what I am assuming your thread is supposed to be about (in addition to the concepts of free will and predeterminism/ related concepts).
Are you being purposely obtuse?
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No, i am sorry for wasting your time. thanks for showing me the right way to approach things.
 
Methusala said:
No, i am sorry for wasting your time. thanks for showing me the right way to approach things.
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Well, if you want to play semantics games, or try to pretend that I am talking above your head, just understand I'm not into games. If you want to have an honest discussion, and toss ideas back and forth, then that's cool, but I'm really not very good at pretentiousness and mind-games, and prefer someone to be honest with me, rather than disingenuous.
 
lizzie said:
Well, if you want to play semantics games, or try to pretend that I am talking above your head, just understand I'm not into games. If you want to have an honest discussion, and toss ideas back and forth, then that's cool, but I'm really not very good at pretentiousness and mind-games, and prefer someone to be honest with me, rather than disingenuous.
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Okay,

Am i deciding to reply to you, or, am i reacting?
 
Methusala said:
Okay,

Am i deciding to reply to you, or, am i reacting?
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Both- which was my initial premise. Fate is the hand of cards you are dealt. Free will is how you decide to respond. You may respond in any of a choice of manners. You may get irritated. You may laugh. You may decide to ignore me altogether. It's up to you, and your reaction is not dependent upon my action.
 
What looks like free will to us is the outcome of a complex process with millions of moving parts (some electrical, some chemical) in our brains and bodies. With perfect information, every person's reaction to every stimulus could probably be predicted. But no one will ever have that perfect information, and there does seem to be true randomness (and thus reactions that cannot be predicted) on the subatomic level. On the macro level, this is effectively free will. We never make choices that are really equal. We lean towards one outcome or the other based on various elements, including our past experiences, our hormones, and our physical state. No choice is ever made in a vacuum and we can understand the things that push us in one direction or the other.

While free will may not exist in an ultimate sense, it effectively exists on our human scale.
 
Paschendale said:
What looks like free will to us is the outcome of a complex process with millions of moving parts (some electrical, some chemical) in our brains and bodies. With perfect information, every person's reaction to every stimulus could probably be predicted. But no one will ever have that perfect information, and there does seem to be true randomness (and thus reactions that cannot be predicted) on the subatomic level. On the macro level, this is effectively free will. We never make choices that are really equal. We lean towards one outcome or the other based on various elements, including our past experiences, our hormones, and our physical state. No choice is ever made in a vacuum and we can understand the things that push us in one direction or the other.

While free will may not exist in an ultimate sense, it effectively exists on our human scale.
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Then, there is only the path of least resistance? accepting this as true will clear up all your emotional problems with your lives, as you will just accept the cards dealt to you, yes?
 
Methusala said:
Then, there is only the path of least resistance? accepting this as true will clear up all your emotional problems with your lives, as you will just accept the cards dealt to you, yes?
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Sure, you can call it the path of least resistance. But you must remember that most of the resistances are unconscious and not part of our conscious awareness.
 
TeleKat said:
One of the great things about free will is your ability to deny that it exists. :)
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You don't have a choice in the matter. It's all predestined that you either believe or disbelieve in free will!
 
RAMOSS said:
You don't have a choice in the matter. It's all predestined that you either believe or disbelieve in free will!
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Good thing you're allowed to think that.
 
Paschendale said:
What looks like free will to us is the outcome of a complex process with millions of moving parts (some electrical, some chemical) in our brains and bodies. With perfect information, every person's reaction to every stimulus could probably be predicted. But no one will ever have that perfect information, and there does seem to be true randomness (and thus reactions that cannot be predicted) on the subatomic level. On the macro level, this is effectively free will. We never make choices that are really equal. We lean towards one outcome or the other based on various elements, including our past experiences, our hormones, and our physical state. No choice is ever made in a vacuum and we can understand the things that push us in one direction or the other.

While free will may not exist in an ultimate sense, it effectively exists on our human scale.
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Continuing this line of thought, I believe that quantum mechanics is integral to the concept of free will. We are forbidden to know both the position and momentum of any individual particle. Quantum mechanics describes each particle as a wave function, which is essentially a range of places/momentums that a particular particle can take, with different probabilities assigned to the different places/momentums. When we observe the wave function, it 'collapses' into having either a defined place/momentum, but the process of measuring one prevents you from knowing the other.

I don't believe in the idea of a soul, but I do think there are lots of issues when trying to reconcile the idea of conscience/free will with purely naturalistic theories that describe the world as a collection of interacting particles. As mentioned above, perfect information would lead to knowledge of the past and future (Laplace's Demon). It's purely speculative on my part but I'd be surprised if the collapse of the wavefunction was somehow linked to free will and conscience.
 
TeleKat said:
Good thing you're allowed to think that.
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Allowed to think that?? I don't have a choice in the matter. Just as you don't have a choice in thinking there is free will.
 
If I wanted to, I could get in my car and drive it around the block. Just because I have the power to do it, does not mean that I do it 24/7/365 for all of eternity.
 
Nilly said:
Continuing this line of thought, I believe that quantum mechanics is integral to the concept of free will. We are forbidden to know both the position and momentum of any individual particle. Quantum mechanics describes each particle as a wave function, which is essentially a range of places/momentums that a particular particle can take, with different probabilities assigned to the different places/momentums. When we observe the wave function, it 'collapses' into having either a defined place/momentum, but the process of measuring one prevents you from knowing the other.
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I wouldn't say "forbidden". We may in the future discover a way to breach uncertainty. But it won't be any time soon.

Declan said:
If I wanted to, I could get in my car and drive it around the block. Just because I have the power to do it, does not mean that I do it 24/7/365 for all of eternity.
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Yeah, but whether or not you want to isn't something you just choose in a vacuum.
 
Paschendale said:
Yeah, but whether or not you want to isn't something you just choose in a vacuum.
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Could be. I am random. The point is that, assuming God exists, then that he has the power to do something does not mean that he always does it. It is a common false choice I see presented when people discuss free will in a religious context.
 
lizzie said:
All of the above.
Destiny or fate would be the circumstances/ places/ people in, and with whom you find yourself. Free will would be how you choose to act, interact, or respond to what life itself presents to you.
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I don't see where that makes any sense. If free will is how you choose to act, interact, and respond, then how could destiny explain the circumstances you find yourself in when everyone else in those circumstances you would interact with would be free always to choose how they acted, interacted, and responded to the circumstances they found themselves in.

If anyone is destined for anything, then no one else has free will.

If we all have free will, then no one is destined for anything.
 
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Paschendale said:
I wouldn't say "forbidden". We may in the future discover a way to breach uncertainty. But it won't be any time soon.

Yeah, but whether or not you want to isn't something you just choose in a vacuum.
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No. I don't have a crystal ball but pending scientific omnipotence I don't think that will happen. The uncertainty principle is often thought as arising when we try to make measurements of a quantum system, that when we try to measure a system we impart energy into the system which causes uncertainty. While that's what Heisenberg himself said, it's not strictly true. The uncertainty principle is an intrinsic quality of the universe, and arises from the mathematics behind quantum mechanics (specifically the non-zero commuter between the position and momentum operators).

Again, I can't see into the future and have no way of knowing whether we'll blow the laws of physics apart, but according to our current understanding, it's not a limit that we can breach given more powerful/sensitive technology. It's fundamental to the universe.

(But I digress...)
 
Methusala said:
Like, for example, the influence of things around the person taking effect on the person, and the effects of the person having affects on God's love for them? this would be like a water cycle, yes? there are many cycles in the world, and gradually improves the person's understanding of the way God will affect them, and, what triggers what reaction, yes?
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Like Karma,yes.
 
I lean more towards determinism lately based on my own observation and what I know of existing research (which isn't a lot, but is more than nothing). If you study temperament you learn a lot about how a person reacts to certain events. If you know a person's temperament well enough, predicting how they will react in many situations can oftentimes be trivial. The more you know about the person's temperament, the better you are at predicting their behavior. You can test this and practice it (as long as you can find someone whose temperament you are familiar with and can observe), and with time you can get really good at it. When you predict exactly how someone will act and then they do, it raises the question whether they ever really had a choice in the matter or were simply going to act out the part their temperament dictated they would. It seems logical to conclude that we could keep learning more about a person's temperament and our predictions would become more accurate until, at some point, having achieved perfect knowledge of who that person is and how they act, we can predict their reaction to anything with 100% accuracy. At that point, where is free will?
 
Unrepresented said:
I can't intellectually create a scenario where anything beyond the illusion of free will could possibly exist.

We're reactions, not actions.
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Are you classifying learning as a reaction?

Observing several inputs that are unrelated and occurring around you, but not to you, and then making a decision about the observations that creates a future action.

You are not directly reacting a particular thing, but are rather assimilating information and creating, creatively, a course of action based on those unrelated observations.

You may even be creating a course of action to achieve a position that you have never previously considered, but which you can visualize: Call it a Gestalt Revelation.
 
Paschendale said:
Sure, you can call it the path of least resistance. But you must remember that most of the resistances are unconscious and not part of our conscious awareness.
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I disagree. There are many that choose the path of greater or even greatest resistance.

Others in the same situation do choose the path of least resistance.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
I don't see where that makes any sense. If free will is how you choose to act, interact, and respond, then how could destiny explain the circumstances you find yourself in when everyone else in those circumstances you would interact with would be free always to choose how they acted, interacted, and responded to the circumstances they found themselves in.

If anyone is destined for anything, then no one else has free will.

If we all have free will, then no one is destined for anything.
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Destiny exists only upon further review.
 
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