A truly terrifying thought!

Open Forum in English
101

Steve,

I could take the easy way out and say I judged you because of the laws of physics which I don’t have control over. The true answer is: I felt like judging you, perhaps because of free will or because of predetermination, I really don’t know.

I said that the question of free will isn’t finally settled. I am of course outraged at what Hitler and Stalin did. But if science one day proofs that we all are indeed only puppets and that physics is the ultimate puppet master, it would be difficult to blame anyone for what he/she does. But in that case whatever happens, inevitably happens, quite a brain twister.

The universe is complicated, isn’t it?

102

“The notion that there is no truly free will . . .” does not have to make you “depressed” because it does not signify that you have no control over your decisions as a human being.

103

Needless to say that there is an excellent article on the subject on wikipedia (which I know Steve doesn’t like that much)

104

“I find your posts a bit too aggressive for my taste.”
all I want to get in a discussion are clear and precise answers. If it seems to me that the answer, once I get it, is in contradiction with what person has previously said, I will point it out. I’m sorry if you find that approach too aggressive, I definitely have no intention of being so.

“I said I find the notion that there is no truly free will (which I tend to believe even I don’t like it) depressing”
no, sorry, I don’t get it… if by ‘truly free will’ you refer to the abstract definition you gave me, I already explained that it makes no sense, because it creates a paradox.

“because I’d rather like to think that I am in control of my decisions.”
and there is absolutely no evidence that you (you = everything you are) are not. you improvised the evidence for such claim, at the beginning of the topic. read again my question about relation between consciousness and subconsciousness as well as my posts about what constitutes our ‘free will’ (our decision making). I’m really tempted to ask now, but you do not have to answer since I am a bit tired of this discussion - what do you consider ‘you’? I have only one answer - my brain, as a product of my genes and my experience. there is nothing more ‘me’ than my brain, there’s nothing outside of it that is ‘me’. and my brain is what makes decisions and perceives them.

“if we are biological clockworks or machines, and I mean EVERYTHING about us including thoughts, experience etc., than our life unfolds like a clockwork without true power over it.”
in my opinion, you keep using terms without really thinking what exactly you mean by them. what is a ‘true power’ over your life? is it something as abstract as ‘true free will’? I gave you in my first post the example of a decision to go and live underwater. Yes, I definitely do not have a true power over my life - I can’t fulfil this decision. But I do have power over will I go to sleep now or later. You may choose to call this ‘just a notion of a power’, but that notion is what we perceive as free will, or power itself and it has served the humanity quite well so far, so I do not see any reason to be depressed.

and now I’m gonna listen to SanneT’s advice and go back to language learning :slight_smile:

105

Here is a great article in the New York Times on the subject, both fun to read and informative:

106

sorry, here is the correct link: Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t - The New York Times

107

Make sure to copy the entire above link including the .html into the address line of your browser. For some reason the forum software here always screws up the link when converting it to a hyperlink, may be it has free will.

URL: “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t - The New York Times”

108

Oh man, now for the last time, I hope it is correct now (above the space after the dot was included automatically)

URL: “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t - The New York Times”

109

Take the link above, remove the space after the “.” and the link will work. For some reason the forum software changes it and adds the space when I input the link, maybe Steve knows why…

110

I do not find Aineko agressive. On the contrary she is remarkably patient and she is clear in her reasoning. I find Friedemann condescending in his assumption that people who disagree with him do not understand him.

Friedemann, once you start a discussion the tone of the people who discuss with you, and the length of their posts, is not within your control. Your own thoughts and the expression of these thoughts are.

Yes, we are molecules and our thoughts are electro-chemical reactions. We know. We don’t care. We still lead our lives, make decisions, satisfy our needs and desires.

I am reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo on my Kindle right now. Mark decided to give me the Kindle. I decided not to use it for a long time. Then I decided to use it, decided to buy a few inexpensive ebooks on it, decided it was convenient and am enjoying it. Someone decided to invent the Kindle. Victor Hugo decided to write books, and on every page made decisions about the plot and characters which I find most enjoyable. To make life livable we condemn people like Hitler and Stalin and celebrate people like Victor Hugo. I find nothing in all of that depressing.

We are not about to fix the problem we have with long links on our Forum. We have decided that we have other priorities right not. Please short URLs. Go to Bitly for example.

111

Steve,

read the tone of your post above and you know why your blog is in steady decline for a year now.

Yes, I found Aineko’s posts lengthy and found it hard to understand what her points were. I DO NOT generally assume that people don’t understand me when they disagree with me, but then again I don’t often discuss issues of quantum mechanichs, uncertainty principle and wavefunctions on a language forum. You see, it is these little verbal attacks of yours, here and there that get people’s blood boiling.

I like an exchange of opposing arguments but I don’t like personal attacks leveled at me and I found that to be your style of discussion I’m afraid.

You didn’t care about the issue at hand already in your first statement and never cared to adress my core argument, fine! But why do you keep on re-stating that you don’t care? If you go on the internet you’ll find that the issue of determinism and free will is a serious issue. It is and has been hotly debated by great minds even if Steve Kaufmann does not care.

I didn’t blame you for any problems with your software, ok, I just NOTICED it, in case someone just clicked on the hyperlink and ended up in nirvana, jeeez!

112

My blog is doing fine with about the same number of visitors as a year ago, which I consider remarkable since I am a broken record on the subject of input based language learning. Some people like what I have to say, and how I say it, and regularly tell me so, others don’t and also tell me so, usually less politely.

In one of your earliest posts you said;

"The type of reactions here tells me that this topic is maybe a bit too esoteric for most people, I’ve encountered the same if I discuss this with friends. But in fact it is a very down to earth one and modern science is now capable to research it in detail.

Steve, maybe you don’t fully understand my point. If we are “machines” you don’t lead your life, your life just happens. I’d like to think that I can convince people or myself to do the right thing, I’d like to be in control of what I do. If there is no free will at all, all this is an illusion and we cannot even be mad at Stalin or Hitler. It’s a world like in that matrix movie. How can that not be terrifying??? "

No Friedemann, once again, not terrifying, not esoteric, banal and irrelevant to most people. I care about free will, and I have read a great deal on evolution, including three great books by Dawkins, I just don’t buy your hysterics. That is not a personal attack, just a statement of my opinion.

113

Steve,

if you call my attitude condescending, if find that out of line. If you read my exchange with Victor2, he actually understood my argument, probably because he is trained in physics, as he said. Still I didn’t agree with him, no problem. Some others here I think did not even understand my point, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect them. There are many things in life that I don’t understand either.

I do think the discussions on your blog have become less and less lively and less interesting over the last year. These vulgar attacks have also increased notably. I suspect many of your serious commenters found that off-putting and packed up. Maybe you’re ok with that, I don’t know. I just thought I’d give you my observation here for what it’s worth.

114

Rohr,

How is discussing scientific evidence for or against free will not begging the question?

115

Doo, you can call me by my first name, Friedemann. I am not sure I fully understood your question. Maybe that is what you meant: The fact that we discuss the evidence for or against free will does not proof that truly free will really exists. I recommend to have a look at the NYT article I posted above.

Scientists distinguish between perceived free will and truly free will and there are shades of gray to the degree of freedom of that free will. There is no doubt that most of us will have the perception of free will but that is no scientific proof. Science can address a lot of things that are not in line with our subjective perception, such as extra dimensions and the nature of space and time.

Friedemann

116

“The fact that we discuss the evidence for or against free will does not proof that truly free will really exists.”

On the contrary, I am not asserting anything about free will for the following reason:
Recognising something as evident, including scientific evidence for or against free will, carries with it the assumption that you could have done otherwise, that is, the assumption of free will. This holds true for all sentient beings, of which scientists are a subset.

117

“Recognising something as evident, including scientific evidence for or against free will, carries with it the assumption that you could have done otherwise, that is, the assumption of free will.”

Arguing for the non existance of free will, in hindsight you could always claim that the events unfolded deterministicly, including the processes in your brain weighing the evidence. In that sense the perceived choice was never really there. It is like watching a movie for the second time.

118

“There is no doubt that most of us will have the perception of free will but that is no scientific proof.”

scientific proof of what? of existence of ‘true free will’? I’ve read the article you posted so I’m going to quote some of parts and relate them to what we were discussing here.

first, about the definition of free will that you gave me, that ‘magical’ free will where the decisions are not influenced by anything but are still made by you. The article says this:

" So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”

People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.

But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words “molten chocolate.”"

If you, rohr, do not believe that it is the soul or spirit, why were you terrified with the results of the experiments?

Then, from the mouth of the person who did the experiments you were talking about:

“Dr. Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.”

haven’t I said earlier in the topic that it is the interaction between the consciousness and subconsciousness where you are going to find your free will? you have completely ignored that statement, although I repeated it couple of times. You also seemed to have ignored it in the article itself.
more on the same thought:
"Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.

“All the varieties of free will worth having, we have,” Dr. Dennett said.

“We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes,” he said. “We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.”"

and something related to my post about our free will actually being a perception:

"Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.

“It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” "

I think that it is an ‘illusion’ only for people who believed in the ‘magical’ free will. I’ve never believed in it, so for me our notion of free will is the free will itself. As I said earlier, our power over our life is limited, but the little power we have serves us pretty well.
as for your question how can free will emerge from determinism, there is a whole page in the article discussing it (synergy is also mentioned), too long to copy it here. yes, what is said there denies ‘magical’ free will, but does not denies usefulness of what we got.

and a nice quote from the end of the article:
““The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.””

rohr, it seems to me from all this that you have believed in the ‘magical’ free will your whole life, without actually giving any logical thought to the question “can I make decisions that are not influenced by what I am (my genes + my experience, which are further down determined by laws of physics)?” and then once you heard about these experiments you found these ideas ‘terrifying’, ‘depressing’, ‘esoteric to most people’… When I disagreed with you, you automatically assumed that I did not understand you, while the truth might be that I have actually thought about these things earlier than you did (maybe because I’m doing genetics and have read Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’ long time ago, so I had a lot of time and ‘material’ to think about determinism and freedom of human behaviour). Now, after reading the article I see that my thoughts correspond with the prevailing idea of people who work on this - that our free will is limited but usable. you, on the other hand, seem to be shocked by the idea that our free will is limited (that is to say - it is not the magical one).

this may sound aggressive or arrogant to you, but it’s not (at least it’s not meant to be). it is just my impression from your reactions.

and, yes, I know this post is long, but these are not a one sentence topics. if you do not think things through (and explain them clearly) you fall into a trap of contradicting yourself once you are asked to give precise answers.

119

“Arguing for the non existance of free will, in hindsight you could always claim that the events unfolded deterministicly, including the processes in your brain weighing the evidence. In that sense the perceived choice was never really there. It is like watching a movie for the second time.”

In the above scenario, you are recognising the “processes in your brain weighing the evidence”. You are perceiving the perceived choice. There is, and always will be a point of recognition in which the assumption of free will is implied.

120

If you are interested in the existence or nonexistence of free will of consumers and producers in commodity markets, you should study not only physics but also economics. I don’t think physics is almighty. You should study both macro economics and micro economics, but understanding the mechanism of economies is not enough for predicting the business fluctuations. There is no telling what will happen next year. There is no truly free will in the social world, but if it should exist, it would not be so effective to attain your own economic goals. Are these things depressing or not?