Free will

L

lacoste3000

New member
On many occassions in discussing various topics from beliefs to criminality, the issue of choice and free will has been brought up and drawn contentious arguments from many posters.

Personally I have argued that essentially free will is an illusion and we are primarily driven to choices and decisions based on a culmination of our genes, our memories and experiences. Many posters have disagreed to a lesser or greater degree with this assertion, but I was wondering how many watched Horizon the other night on the subject of the concious and subconcious mind ... and have a slightly different opinion than they had before.

Horizon - Out of Control

Do you still believe in the freedom to choose, believe and control most aspects of your life ?
 
Are you saying that our learned behaviour dictates how we will act in future situations? If so, surely if we are concious of that fact then it becomes easier to make a decision against that learning.

For example i have a saying i was taught "If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got" But then i guess i have learned to follow a decision that hasn't got me the desired result.

So i have supported the argument against free will. But the way i have always thought of free will is not being pre-destined to follow a certain path.

So to test whether we have free will or not, you would need a pair of identical twins to be brought up exactley the same way and exposed to exactley the same stimuli and then monitor how they make decisions throughout this process. But that method is, by no means, foolproof.
 
Will watch the horizon programme later. I used to hate the idea of a lack of free will, but now I agree it doesn't really exist due to everything being based on the past.

I think everything could be reduced down to equations however everything that has ever happened would have to be taken into account so it would be impossible to do.

Therefore I think free will does not exist however the illusion of free will does which to all intents and purposes is the same thing in relation to day to day running of our lives.
 
I've not yet watch the Horizon programme (probably this evening), but in the meantime I'll contribute a slightly amended copy of one of my posts in an earlier thread. I broadly agree with what the others have said so far:

Free will must be an illusion, unless you want to invent some completely unsuspected property of carbon.

The brain is a collection of carbon and other atoms held together in some chemical relationship, which are in turn asserablages of the fundamental building blocks of matter, all obeying the basic laws of the Universe. Or, to put it another way, a kilo or so of mushy porridge. To ascribe free will to that, you must allow it the ability to alter the behaviour of fundamental particles using some as-yet-undreamt-of physical process. In the free will scenario, this is the 'mind'; an effect of the workings of the brain which is divorced from the matter of which it's made.

In order to exist, that 'mind' must have a source of energy. But where from? It can't be from the brain, or any other known physical matter, because that would destroy its independence. And yet in order to implement its decisions, it must be able to influence the behaviour of matter in some way which does not involve physical interaction.

Suppose my arm is resting on my desk. Left to itself, it would stay there until something external happened to it. So if I now decide to lift it up, I must instruct the fundamental particles in its atoms to alter their behaviour. I do this in my brain by altering the behaviour of the components of certain neurons. But how could a non-physical 'mind' do that? It would need the ability to control matter directly, and there is simply no known mechanism in the Universe by which it could.

Okay, the pro-free-will advocates might respond: then we'll have to postulate an unknown mechanism. But that's silly: why not simply go the obvious route and assume that all the mind is is the focus of the brain's activity, analogous to the instruction mill in a CPU. That makes everything simpler and easier to understand. It does of course have the implication that not only does free will not exist, but that the Universe is totally deterministic from the moment of the Big Bang (subject to the vagaries of quantum uncertainty). But that's not a big deal: as far as we know, the DNA brain is the only object in the Universe which might, under the concept of free will, counter that determinism. In other worRAB, why should the brain be unique in the Universe, and how could it be?

And that opens up another train of thought: how far 'down' the evolutionary ladder do the advocates of free will believe it extenRAB? Do chimps have it? Dogs? BirRAB? Reptiles? Fish? Insects?

Not to mention ET?
 
Our learned behaviour, the genetic makeup of our brain, experiences and memories.

Science is showing us that we are actually conscious of a very small amount of our brains activity.
The way we make decisions and the processes that our brains use to provide us with not only the answers but it's interpretations of the evidence.

You can't really choose to like coffee rather than tea. You either like one, the other or both.
We could attempt to alter that preference by forcing oneself to drink coffee regularly over tea until we got a taste for it, however did we really freely choose to alter that preference, or was the decision to take that action itself the result of previous experiences, genetics etc providing the impetious for that inclination ?

That is merely a preference in taste.

How more so our preferences in the opposite sex, what we believe, how we evaluate and weight evidence.

There are some people who's genetics, experiences and learned behaviour will disincline them to accept scientific evidence in favour of other sources of information and understanding.
 
= remaining single!

i.e. doing what you want when you wan't

but being a pragmatist -and married to me free will don't exist,

(so especially after marriage )
 
I would say that free will is a person being able to make an informed choice or decision of their own volition and having the capacity to do so. ie isn't drugged so is incapable of making the choice or lacking in mental capacity like perhaps an elderly person with dementia or some one with the mental age of a two year old.
 
The ability to make concious choices free from external influences or predetermined by causality.

I assert that human beings are predetermined to make certain decisions and choices by who they are ie their personality, the environment they are in, the events that led up to their current situation and how they have understood and interpreted such events.

Current scientific understanding appears to support this assertion.

Person A may be born with a genetic makeup that means their brain is more susceptable to generating phobic responses to events and stimulae.
If during that persons life, they experience certain events such as being trapped in a lift, it may well bring about a phobic response and in the future they will actively avoid small spaces and lifts.
Person B with the same genetic makeup may not encounter such an event and be free from phobic responses to small spaces.
Place both people in a tall building with a choice to take the stairs or the lift.
Person A will most likely take the stairs due to their fear of lifts.
Person B however if on their own may take the lift if that to them is the most reasonable way to achieve arriving at the bottom of the building.
However, person B might be on a diet and take the stairs because of a desire to loose weight.
Person B might take the stairs because he is with person A and feels a sense of empathy or commoradary.

None of those actions are free choices even though they feel like they are.
 
It applies to all of us.

You are no more concious of your brain telling your heart to beat or incontroll of your reflexes than you are in your choice to decide if something is good or bad.

If you are hungry and are choosing lunch, you are essentially being given a series of inputs and data. Your brain is taking in all that information and comming to a conclusion - you see the sandwiches and fancy one of them ... why, what exactly is fancying that particular sandwich ?

Do you choose to be hungry, choose to be turned on or even choose to act or not act upon those desires ?

We all experience pain or desires at different strenghts and intensities.
One person can give up smoking easily while another struggles.
One person can shrug off a headache with another neeRAB to lay down in a dark room.
Many people who were premature babies suffer from hightened sensitivty to pain. If two people were doing a task that caused physical discomfort, the choice of when to stop working would somewhat predetermined by how much discomfort those individuals could take.
The person with a low pain threashold may give up early and the the other person who doesn't expereince the same amount of pain may feel that they other is simply giving up and could choose to carry on like they are.
 
I don't think you've come up with a very good definition there - if I aquire information and then make a decision based on it, you can't say it's not free will because the information influenced me. It's a pointless definition.
 
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