Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 7:29 am
So let me get this straight ... If I happen to believe in free will, to the free will denier I'm deluded and I have no choice to believe otherwise, yet a free will denier is also completely deluded in trying to convince me otherwise, precisely because I can't change my mind about this, but nevertheless they have no choice but to try to convince me otherwise. Carry on if you must, but If there is choice, I'm not sure why one would.
Just because there is no free will doesnt mean actions dont have results. We are free to choose what we want, but not free to want what we want.
To paraphrase the Buddha "The choice is made but there is no one that chooses".
As with all such apparent dilemmas, with fusion, the confusion ends.
Here out of instinct or grace we seek
soulmates in these galleries of hieroglyph and glass,
where mutual longings and sufferings of love
are laid bare in transfigured exhibition of our hearts,
we who crave deep secrets and mysteries,
as elusive as the avatars of our dreams.
Yes people do seem to get tied up in clever knots they’ve tied themselves, and when you suggest as much, they answer along the lines: “you just don’t understand how complicated and sophisticated this knot is”...
(I removed the CS Lewis Doodle because it's maybe not directly relevant, even though they are brilliant )
Ideas are certain original forms of things, their archetypes, permanent and incommunicable, which are contained in the Divine intelligence. And though they neither begin to be nor cease, yet upon them are patterned the manifold things of the world that come into being and pass away.
St Augustine
Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 10:20 am
Dana hits the point here. In a similar sense, here:
Brad Walker wrote: ↑Fri Jan 22, 2021 1:04 amSociety could be less predatory if people got over the illusion of free will.
words like "could be ... if ..." should have absolutely no meaning if everything is predetermined at the Big Bang.
But anyway. The problem is of completely different nature here.
Brad, I'm not saying that you don't understand your own idea about determinism/free-will but I'll say that it has nothing to do with these ideas as used in science and philosophy.
Right, the concept of freedom is implicit in the language we use, the social interactions we have, and the culture we inhabit. That bolded statement from Brad says it all. We don't need to know whether Reality is deterministic in some absolute sense to know that we do not live our lives according to such a "belief". If we did, then we would stop trying to communicate to others or do anything to make our lives or society 'better'. Since we don't, and we continue communicating with others and seek all manner of goal-directed activity, we know that we believe in our own freedom.
Could someone stop believing in their own metaphysical freedom? Sure, and that's generally when they become seriously apathetic towards life and suicidal.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
With the belief in doership, we always have a nagging sense that life could have been different than it was or is. All human suffering arises when that could becomes a 'should'. Wants or desires are not the problem - it the false idea that life 'should' go 'our' way.
Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 7:29 am
So let me get this straight ... If I happen to believe in free will, to the free will denier I'm deluded and I have no choice to believe otherwise
It's possible to change one's mind but unlikely. The issue is prone to perpetual confusion and believers, not deniers or agnostics, seem to have multiple emotional attachments that drive the misunderstanding. They have nothing to take pride in, predetermination somehow makes life meaningless, etc.
I like BK's idea of freewill - that we are free to be ourselves unless overridden by external forces (other wills). Obviously we will act according to our nature, or it would not be our nature.
Yes we act according to our nature, but that’s a moderately strong constraint rather than a determination. Our evolved instinct is for survival, but people still commit suicide for example.
I think there are three assumptions which make people doubt free will. One is scientism, where the objective, mechanistic view that science must assume, is assumed to be all that’s real. If everything is just the physical, electrical and chemical reactions of matter, there is no room for any other cause. This of course pushes all causes back to the big bang, and everything is clockwork after that.
Another is a mistaken understanding of predestination, where god’s knowledge of a choice is seen as removing the freedom to make the choice. This is just a categorical error between knowledge and choice.
Finally there is the interpretation of eastern beliefs in the self, where there is no real self to make the choices. This could be debated in all kinds of ways, including the difference between the self and the ego, then down a level to the difference between the wave and the ocean etc etc. However at the end of the day, all these eastern views ask you to choose simplicity, chose to meditate and be mindful, to be one pointed, chose to fast, chose to be compassionate etc. So there is a fundamental assumption that the choices a person makes are not determined, and make a difference.
You could argue for a fourth which is modern philosophy, but as far as I can see, this is always when one or more of these is taken as an axiom, and then layers and layers built on top of it...
Ideas are certain original forms of things, their archetypes, permanent and incommunicable, which are contained in the Divine intelligence. And though they neither begin to be nor cease, yet upon them are patterned the manifold things of the world that come into being and pass away.
St Augustine
The issue is prone to perpetual confusion and believers, not deniers ...
In this case, how is the 'denier' not also a 'believer'? In denying any free will, isn't that just believing that it can't possibly be the case, given there's no definitive way of making the case? At best it might be a plausible hypothesis.
Here out of instinct or grace we seek
soulmates in these galleries of hieroglyph and glass,
where mutual longings and sufferings of love
are laid bare in transfigured exhibition of our hearts,
we who crave deep secrets and mysteries,
as elusive as the avatars of our dreams.
Most of the confusion comes from not distinguishing freedom from indeterminism. Of course it all depends on how we define and interpret freedom. IMO freedom is a measure of a degree of conditioning or autonomy of choices and decisions. The functioning of our minds is typically strongly conditioned by the external and internal influences and circumstances, yet has a certain degree of autonomy, and we do have an intrinsic ability to make our choices unconditioned by external and even internal conditions and circumstances. Even when we have strong internal desires or biases, we still have an ability to make decisions and choices contrary to or unconditioned by those biases. To me that is what freedom means. And it has nothing to do with whether on the most fundamental level the mental and physical processes are deterministic or random. Even if they are deterministic, that does not make them not free in a sense of being conditioned. It is the non-conditioning and the degree of autonomy that makes them free. But of course we live in a very interdependent world and nothing can be fully unconditional, so it's all the question of the degree of freedom and autonomy, it's a continuum between a state of no freedom (all choices are totally conditioned) and a totally unconditional freedom (all choices are ultimately unconditioned). In reality our freedom is always somewhere in between of those two polarities being always partially conditioned but also to some degree unconditioned, and the question of freedom becomes a question of how much of each component is in the mix. In other words, ultimate freedom is an unachievable ideal, in reality there only a degree of freedom, but what we can realistically do is to realize our ability to have unconditioned choices and learn to increase the degree of our internal freedom and the ability to make such unconditioned choices.
"Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kanzas anymore" Dorothy
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