People react in the most favorable way they perceive in consideration of the choices they consider concerning what is dictated by their environment. The only way to truly enhance the scope of a person's "free will" is for them to become skillful and knowledgeable about the factors which influence their lives. They can then learn to manipulate their environments rather than have their environments manipulate them.

I would also point out that the arguments of free will versus determinism, especially in casual discussions, tend towards a black and white view.

It's just not as simple as "we can do whatever we want" vs. "life is planned out for us", which is essentially the argument the layman will gravitate towards. People forget that as humans we engage in complicated web of interdependency where we make individual decisions that then affect others who make decisions as well.

You could start with a free will argument, but then hit so many points where one "free will" decision affects others that you might end up finding yourself driven to determinism (in OP's case, raw instinct). There are, however, far too many variables in life to have determinism explain all points of existence.

It might be better to say that in _practical_ terms free will exists to enable independent decisions, but in _actual_ terms life is a combination of internally influenced activity and externally influenced activity, and each person operates under a certain ratio that is affecting their "node" in the web of social interconnection. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but I hope so.

Or something like that.

ultimately, everything in the universe can be calculated (yes, even on the quantum scale including the "true" randomness) so by that we cannot have something which you might call "free will" .
so free will can only be applied to political or physical freedom, like studying everything you want if you are good enough, not being determined or measured from your skin color etc..

in other words, everything is set in stone.

now as another scenario, even if everything was not set in stone we couldnt determine if we were a lifeform with free will or not because our perception alters the result making said result flawed.
you may want to look up goedels incompleteness theorem.

here is a link that addresses this issue although not directly but you will get the idea..
http://www.myrkul.org/recent/godel.htm

sorry for my bad english, its kinda late here

>>122
I haven't checked the link yet, but I will when I have time. Beyond that, however, I would like to point out this part of your post:

>ultimately, everything in the universe can be calculated (yes, even on the quantum scale including the "true" randomness)

My knowledge of Quantum Physics is minimal, at best, but I do recall the theory put forward by Stephen Hawking that, on a quantum scale, small black holes develop spontaneously and absorb surround materials. These black holes then collapse under their own weight and disappear.

I believe this was more theory than mathematical or empirical fact, but if we took that as true for a moment, we would be acknowledging that information about the Universe was being spontaneously destroyed at random or pseudo-random intervals. This would necessarily introduce a layer of chaos into the equation and make a case for non-causally-based activity in the Universe.

It's all theory, but interesting to discuss.

>>125
Problem with this is, no philosopher is a physicist. At least, not in the standard iterations of what those terms mean.

People are really good at taking a theory - especially one they barely understand - and using it to justify completely unrelated/irrelevant things. Not to say Hawking doesn't have a good understanding of what he's... clicking... at, but the caricature he presents is misused by the same fallacy like what likes to say thermodynamics disproves evolution, because, there's no sun, obviously.

What you refer to is something called the Copenhagen Interpretation. There are competing interpretations; at the moment, though, we have more data with the CI and it's simply more efficient by Occam's Razor to first test hypotheses assuming true randomness. When we can rule this out, we will move on. The weird thing is, it's generally better not to assume randomness by Occam's Razor (the goddidit answer), producing a queer moment when the same principle proscribes two competing courses of action.



But the thing is, nothing is even conclusive yet; and in this field of science, likely won't ever be. A GUT is a long ways away. People can choose whether to interpret the data as they see fit, but unfortunately, unlike, say, with evolution where we have observable demonstrable evidence conclusively ruling out the competing hypotheses in favor of a particular theory, there are only hypotheses at this level of this flavor of science with evidence not really ruling any out, short of the "dinosaurs munching on children's teardrops in a matrix like time cube dimension" variety. Hell, even those aren't really ruled out, they just fail the falsifiability test.


It's not that physics in any less of a science, it's just that because it is a science it doesn't pretend (Kaku, Hawking, Tyson, pretentious bastard number 6 et al. excluded) to have the fundamental answers. It's like we can't prove there's a god, but we can prove whether or not the sun is 6000 years old.

>>158

I've been thinking about what you wrote, and I think the thesis of you argument is with these two points:

>Problem with this is, no philosopher is a physicist. At least, not in the standard iterations of what those terms mean.

>People are really good at taking a theory - especially one they barely understand - and using it to justify completely unrelated/irrelevant things. Not to say Hawking doesn't have a good understanding of what he's... clicking... at, but the caricature he presents is misused by the same fallacy like what likes to say thermodynamics disproves evolution, because, there's no sun, obviously.

I don't disagree with what I see there: People take ideas that are only very loosely related (or not related at all) and turn them into something completely inaccurate. I understand and can relate to that, and I think it happens quite a bit.

Unfortunately, going further in-depth into this would take us too far afield from the free-will vs. determinism debate. I think what I will say on the issue is that we have to remember that metaphor places a huge level of importance in human communication. There was a time when the functions of the brain were described in terms of steam or liquid based on our understanding of thermal and hydrodynamics. After the Industrial Revolution, the brain came to be described as a machine, then a computer. This was the act of taking what was then modern scientific understanding and using it metaphorically to describe something we didn't understand at all and largely still do not understand.

Based on that, when philosophers use science in any form to describe a philosophical concept, they can only do so metaphorically. Naturally, there is the risk here that people will trip up and take things literally. That's the unfortunately part of human communication. It is largely metaphorical and therefore ambiguous and layered with meaning.

To bring this back to the thread's subject, this is why we have a free-will vs. determinism debate at all. Our communication tools are very general and the subject very difficult to determine directly. As a result, it's a question that will never be answered on a grand scale, but possibly on a personal scale on a case-by-case basis (ie. moments of life, but not whole days, weeks, months, or years).

>>168
My issue with it, put simply though, is that this isn't being used metaphorically. People straight up assume that because one interpretive hypothesis happens to be in vogue at the moment in (popular) academia, it is either 100% true or 100% false. So they are taking it literally when they say science "proves" free will, and not as the inconclusive hypothesis it really is.



Maybe one day, we will have the GUT that will account for everything, and the philosophies will merge again. But, right now, to say, that empirical science has an opinion on free will or determinism, is ludicrous.

I don't think I've ever heard it as a metaphor, is all. I personally tend towards determinism, though, so I might just be butthurt.

>>170

I understand what you're saying. I think it's because most of the time people either practice armchair philosophy, armchair science, or just want to justify why they feel one way over the other. Remember the Shroud of Turin? There was some scientist trying to tie it to every major biblical event just because he was a die-hard Christian.

Getting back to the debate, though, I think >>89
said it best. I think life is free-will in some cases and deterministic in others. Getting shot will do serious body trauma. It's basic cause-and-effect. Getting shot in the head usually means death. Getting shot somewhere else might be extremely painful, but surviving might be the result of one's personal will to live.

We all experience hunger because of how our bodies are wired. We can, however, decide when we eat, what and how.

It's a complex mix. I think, anyway.

>>172
I've always believed the debate was when you reduced it down, so to speak.


The perception of hunger is largely the result of the stomach communicating chemically with the brain, right? This I don't think is in the rhealm of armchair philosophy - the body's senses are largely dependent on the nervous system. Sever them, and there is no perception of the outside world for that individual.

I believe it can be reasoned from this, that human behavior is the result of being acted upon by external stimulae. Even stupid decisions have there roots, and I believe that those are largely a combination of imperfect foresight and misshapen priorities. Think, for example, of the anti-intellectual behavior of turn of the (19 to 20) century America - who needs book-learning when you have plows to drive? It's not that book-learning is bad, they just don't get the important things in life done.



Now just think absolutely about cause and effect. Simply put, why might a typical person eat breakfast? They're hungry.

Or perhaps something more exterior: a person takes a blanket. Why take a blanket? They're cold. Why are they cold? They're used to a hot environment. Where do the environments come from? The difference in environments depends on a large number of factors, ultimately stemming from how much energy the sun puts out. Whence cometh the sun? Our observations lead us to suspect that stars are formed by the collapse of gas clouds, etc., etc, until you get to the questions of "what caused the universe to be", where you have the choice of saying a goddidit, begging the question of where the god came from, and that the universe itself has the properties of that god in question.



Perhaps it's an extrapolation to the point of absurdity, but I believe it's simplest to assume that things have causes. I don't think I've ever heard of a set of actions that didn't derive from some underlying cause.

What is an uncaused cause?