Free will re-redux

I don't think he made the same claim, I just think that you are all going in circles. Paul goes "Okay how do things happen if not for determinism and randomness", we go "Okay this is how things might occur without determinism and randomness" and Paul goes "Okay so things might happen without determinism and randomness, but HOW do they happen?"

It's a pointless circle. Sure, you have to take it on faith Paul, done. We can't disprove free will but we can't exactly figure out right now how it might occur, but it very tangibly exists for every person (unless of course you don't feel free in which case I advise going to see a specialist since not being in control of your own actions is generally a cause for concern), so you simply pick an opinion and wait. Entire conversation, over.

Also, I don't think Paul is trolling, but he very purposefully started this thread knowing there is NO answer considering he wasnt convinced last time. I also don't trust his integrity considering he doesn't respond to me calling out how stupid and pointless this entire discussion is, only you guys so it can KEEP going.

First of all, nonsense: No one has said how things might occur without determinism and randomness. You have simply asserted it. If I am wrong, please point me to the relevant post in this thread.



Second: How could I possibly have started this thread knowing there is no answer, when I haven't been involved in the ongoing discussion about free will here or anywhere else for years? It would be wrong of me to assume there has been no progress.



I admit, though, that I was interested in seeing how people were doing.




~~ Paul

What's different this time? Seems like it's just a variation on claiming all events must be deterministic or random thus free will can't exist.

I can't conceive of just-so determinism as that to me is just randomness, and randomness is an "ex nihilo" causal explanation and thus IMO is nonsensical by definition as it's a violation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Yet plenty of physicalists and even immaterialists are happy to accept Laws of Nature even when they're probabilistic...which again is Just One Look territory to me except I'm screaming WHAT KEEPS THE LAWS FROM CHANGING?!

The laws are merely descriptive, so what keeps the behavior of the universe from changing? Nothing. Is that possibility helpful to a description of how indeterministic effects occur?

~~ Paul

He's asking how without determinism or randomness things might happen and saying sure I'm open to it being different just tell me how. I admit it's hard question, he's essentially saying how would something happen without a cause. But then a decision would HAVE to be caused by something because we consciously deliberate about stuff, so at the very least it would be influenced and then how does it not become determinism or randomness. I don't know. I'm sure some libertarian would have addressed it but I don't care and I don't subscribe to libertarianism anyway.

As for panpsychism, that is interesting, and might bring the conversation along, but I really doubt its gonna square this circle convo. I do wonder, even with particles, if they are just zipping about would it just not be random. It would look random to us. Maybe we're hitting a brick wall because we're coming at the topic strictly from a deterministic/randomistic base, like neuroscientists trying to figure out consciousness when materialism doesn't measure subjective qualitive aspects. I don't know.

I appreciate this response. I think the decision would have to be caused by something, because an uncaused event sounds suspiciously like an arbitrary event. Though, again, I remain open to some other explanation.

~~ Paul

Not sure what you mean here - are you saying accepting/rejecting the exclusivity of the randomness/deterministic dichotomy is an act of faith?

It sounds like it. Except we have all sorts of evidence for what strongly appears to be determinism (computer) and randomness (alpha decay). I don't see any evidence for a third kind of cause-effect relationship. I suppose if I really thought that my decisions "seem free," that would be evidence of a sort. But even if I thought that, I wouldn't trust my thinking.

~~ Paul

The thread is a complete waste of time if anyone thinks it's going to lead to anything fruitful, but that's not a criticism. I'm not saying don't do it, just that as Typoz very aptly pointed out, it's really just social engagement. Paul/Malf etc are not going to concede anything. 

In order to falsify materialism, all you have to do is demonstrate that thoughts can be created/occur without a brain. This has been done beyond reasonable doubt in many people's opinion, but (of course) not to an experimental standard that is going to convince mainstream science, yet.

By all means, discard materialism. My question still stands. You cannot argue for free will merely on the basis that consciousness is not wholly a function of the brain. Saying that consciousness is the agent of free will is nothing but a statement of the source of free will, not a statement of how a free decision is made.

~~ Paul

But even more mysteriously, we can't even enunciate a vague notion of what it means to make an indeterminate decision that is not random. It's not that we have no detailed explanation, we don't even have a logical description of the concept.

~~ Paul

Speak for yourself.

The actual outcomes from factors like: intention, desire, want and understanding seem to elude your personal construction of science's reach.  In fact - they can be modeled in informational science terms.  

Science methods measure forces that move and activate physical reality.

Science methods measure purposes that move and activate informational reality.

Information science measures the outcomes of beliefs, and their associated target states, that come from intentions, desires, wants and turn-offs in terms of statistical behavioral data.  Decision theory, likewise, models how to understand when minds are processing important data.  Further, logical computation predicts how information was structured in the past and how it will evolve in the future.  The informational  activity in humanity's natural environment is just our evolving emotional strivings responding to challenges from changing states of affairs. 

Meanings drive beliefs and desires - and in turn they drive behavior.

I'm not sure why you are so convinced that creativity just can't be the result of determinism and randomness. Can you explain what it is about creativity that disallows this?

~~ Paul

Oh well. You ignored my remarks on this very point. I'll repeat them:

"An example. We know the works of Shakespeare are the product of conscious intelligence involving creativity and a very great number of individual intelligent choices, and certainly are not the result of a random process. Materialism would seem to hold that their origin then must be the only other option, deterministic causal chains. But how can it possibly be claimed that myriads of inter-reacting deterministic cause-effect chains can somehow have produced the works of Shakespeare (and all the other literature of the world)? This would require that all this unique highly complex specified information was somehow magically predetermined - creatively incorporated in the fabric of space-time and matter and energy at the time of the Big Bang. 
Of course this just pushes the free will and creativity problem back into some sort of transcendental stage."

Of course the preposterousness is obvious of the notion that the works of Shakespeare were predetermined at the moment of the Big Bang by means of configurations of matter being somehow magically arranged at that early moment 13 billion years ago so that subsequent causal chains produced them via strict causal determinism plus random perturbations. But that is the inevitable implication of the claim that creativity is the result of determinism and randomness. And it begs the question of what was the ultimate intelligent origin of this large mass of intricately organized complex specified information having many other unique qualities humanly termed things like beauty, pathos, etc. If it was not truly creative human mental action involving truly free will choices, then what was it? In our universe, in our experience, large amounts of highly organized complex specified information doesn't magically appear out of absolutely nothing. It requires intelligence. And of course this doesn't answer your probably unanswerable question of what could that essential something beside the deterministic/random dichotomy be - it just establishes that it must exist.

Speak for yourself.

The actual outcomes from factors like: intention, desire, want and understanding seem to elude your personal construction of science's reach.  In fact - they can be modeled in informational science terms.  

Science methods measure forces that move and activate physical reality.

Science methods measure purposes that move and activate informational reality.

Information science measures the outcomes of beliefs, and their associated target states, that come from intentions, desires, wants and turn-offs in terms of statistical behavioral data.  Decision theory, likewise, models how to understand when minds are processing important data.  Further, logical computation predicts how information was structured in the past and how it will evolve in the future.  The informational  activity in humanity's natural environment is just our evolving emotional strivings responding to challenges from changing states of affairs. 

Meanings drive beliefs and desires - and in turn they drive behavior.

I agree that intention, desire, want, and understanding are all factors in making decisions. But those are the names of sources of information for a decision, not a description of how the decision is made.

~~ Paul

Oh well. You ignored my remarks on this very point. I'll repeat them:

"An example. We know the works of Shakespeare are the product of conscious intelligence involving creativity and a very great number of individual intelligent choices, and certainly are not the result of a random process. Materialism would seem to hold that their origin then must be the only other option, deterministic causal chains. But how can it possibly be claimed that myriads of inter-reacting deterministic cause-effect chains can somehow have produced the works of Shakespeare (and all the other literature of the world)? This would require that all this unique highly complex specified information was somehow magically predetermined - creatively incorporated in the fabric of space-time and matter and energy at the time of the Big Bang. 
Of course this just pushes the free will and creativity problem back into some sort of transcendental stage."

Of course the preposterousness is obvious of the notion that the works of Shakespeare were predetermined at the moment of the Big Bang by means of configurations of matter being somehow magically arranged at that early moment 13 billion years ago so that subsequent causal chains produced them via strict causal determinism plus random perturbations. But that is the inevitable implication of the claim that creativity is the result of determinism and randomness. And it begs the question of what was the ultimate intelligent origin of this large mass of intricately organized complex specified information having many other unique qualities humanly termed things like beauty, pathos, etc. If it was not truly creative human mental action involving truly free will choices, then what was it? In our universe, in our experience, large amounts of highly organized complex specified information doesn't magically appear out of absolutely nothing. It requires intelligence. And of course this doesn't answer your probably unanswerable question of what could that essential something beside the deterministic/random dichotomy be - it just establishes that it must exist.

First of all, who says that random processes in the brain could not have contributed to Shakespeare's writing? It's a just-so claim that they did not, possibly based on some strange idea that someone is suggesting the entire project was random.

The second paragraph is a strawman. No one is suggesting that the universe has played out entirely deterministically. There most certainly are random processes involved, unless you're going to claim that everything we think is stochastic is in fact deterministic. So even if Shakespeare's brain involved no random processes, the state of the universe up to his first writing certainly did.

So that leaves us with the claim that intelligent writing requires free will. I'm not convinced.

~~ Paul

So that leaves us with the claim that intelligent writing requires free will. I'm not convinced.

~~ Paul

That's an interesting statement about your personal incredulity.