Do You Have Free Will?
3 years ago in Abundance Tribe by thoughts-in-time (67)
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Yes, we have free will. It is quite easily observable.
However, if you place the constrains of "Modern Materialistic Science" you cannot prove or disprove free will.
This is not an issue of free will, it is a problem of "Modern Materialistic Science". It literally defines the experience as unproveable. It even defines it as unstudiable.
"Modern Materialistic Science" separated physics from metaphysics.
And thus, you cannot use scientific analysis on the occurrence of free will.
Further, i could make an even more solid sounding case for there not being any free will.
I can show you many lives, and all the choices that that person could/would make basically work out the same. Imagine plotting a life path in 3D. each stream of light a path, each choice a divergence, splitting of paths. And when we look at most people's lives up close, it looks kinda like a log with no branches.
When we look at it further away, it looks like a straight line.
However, given this analogy, there are many people who have a log with a branch, or several branches.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter @builderofcastles!
Certainly the e-motion of "free-will" is "easily observable".
However, your e-motion has no basis in your conscious decision making process.
(IFF) you PLAN to do something (THEN) your PLAN must be CAUSED by some desire.
Your WILL is a measure of your ability to PLAN.
Your WILL is a slave to your DESIRE.
Your WILL is not "free".
Sorry, you have made the fallacy of which i have spoken just above.
You try to apply the scientific method of "modern materialistic science" to this, and of course, you get this conclusion.
In this, you are assuming time is linear and that the cause is before the effect.
Neither assumption is correct, and will lead you to a faulty conclusion.
(further, to talk about free will, we must talk about the now, and how it can affect the future and the past)
I would say that your will is closer to your ability to desire.
This is patently not true.
You see, there is a spot, a silence before the storm, where you can make a change in outcome.
Just after the incident, and just before your emotional response.
Every yogi knows this spot and makes use of it to change their lives.
Of course, this is all in the realm of metaphysics... so it is denied by "modern materialistic physics"
From where i stand, i can clearly see the effect of free will.
Which "framework" do you believe makes "free-will" a coherent concept?
I'm 100% onboard with "blocktime" and "non-linear causality" and all that, but NONE of these frameworks "fix" "the problem".
Once again, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yes, this is the "best" vantage-point from which to "choose your path" (so-to-speak).
HOWEver, this "quiet-place" is not "without desire".
This "quiet-place" is not "fully-neutral".
This "quiet-place" is somewhat insulated from the "immediate storm" of "this moment".
What you are in this "quiet-place" is still the amalgam of your "life-experience" and your "biology" (including your "instincts").
The "you" that is calm and quiet "inside yourself" is still shaped by your past.
The "you" that is calm and quiet "inside yourself" is still a slave to DESIRE.
The "you" that is calm and quiet "inside yourself" still wants something.
The "you" that is calm and quiet "inside yourself" still has a goal.
And although that goal may be more subtle and more "noble", it's still compelling you to act.
And compelled action is not "free".
The predictive programming around this topic hit me like a ton of bricks watching "Westworld", the amount of bigdata controlling us is already here, it's not when it is now. A snippet from a most excellent doc "Persona" should scare people but most like to be asleep so no use wasting time waking them up O.o
NOW, by age 7 kids are already being pigeon holed into what slot they 'may' fit in, that is if this isn't all a mass culling and A.I. can do all the things the expendable lower and even white collar class does
Smart thinking. Gahh, I've got to revisit that season.
It was deeper than I remember, thinking back on it.
CELLY TEXT: W@nT $Om3 M0NeY?!Will we even have the illusion of free will if AI knows exactly how much we will put up with, or what minimum price it needs to pay to move us into any given position or direction? Deep stuff, @battleaxe. Thanks for the documentary recommendation. I've got HBO/Max for a few more months, so I'll check that out for sure.
If I understand this correctly at all: this suggests that an AI - or any other entity - can know more about me than I know about myself. Knowledge of and about oneself is, of course, deeply subjective and full of paradoxes. AIs are not able to process paradoxes. At least not in the abysmal and humorous way that we humans are. If they were capable of doing so, they would not be AI but humans. Analogies are really great, but ultimately analogies. Nothing resembles anything else in an exact way. These tiny to large differences in the nature of all living things are what make a difference. There is nothing in the world where you can consider one thing absolutely proven down to the last factor. After all, mathematics, however good it may be, can never include all factors with all other factors in one calculation. The search for the world formula is therefore as pointless as it is megalomaniacal. Although it certainly has many a beautiful and surprising effect when one deals with such things.
I agree with you to some degree. However, have you ever taken a personality profiling test, where it gives you one of the 16 different personality types? Even those alone hone down quite a bit onto how someone might behave in any given situation.
I find those tests kind of interesting and were in fact highly involved in the matter during my education in 2012 as a consultant for social and family affairs. I then dug into this theme quite intensely. Have you heard of Gregory Bateson?
While there is a tendency showing in the tests which can be very accurate in prediction it nevertheless will not predict anything where a human being behaves differently. That's the point where it gets interesting for me. It's not so much the prediction and the foreseeable but "chance" or paradoxes or other phenomena.
I have not heard of Gregory Bateson. So the tests can predict accurately, but cannot predict the unpredictable. Or more simply put, they're not 100% accurate.
:)) yes. I like the way you put it in this sentence. Isn't it the best thing, when you did something or reacted in a way which not only surprised the other but also yourself?
Thank you, M19!
Nice topic. I have thought about it several times.
I think it is a question of personal choice whether I grant myself free will. Regardless of whether some consider this to be proven or unproven, or they say this question cannot be answered. Nevertheless, we have an attitude towards it, insofar as it comes up as an issue. For me personally, the preferable construct is to assume my free will, because it seems more than nonsensical to me to assume the opposite. If I were to assume that I had no free will at all, why would I want to make any decision at all or take it seriously? I could just as well flip a coin and act according to what the coin tells me. Incidentally, deciding to do something is not a bad idea for self-examination. Because where the statement is "yes" for "heads" and "no" for "tails", I immediately recognise an inner resistance, depending on the result. Of course, I can also toss the coin more often and have a resistance with both results, in which case it just means that I think coin tossing is a stupid decision-making aid :)
The recognition of an inner resistance is probably what causes me to recognise my free will, because where there is a resistance, I seem to be struggling with something. Of course, this quarrelling first takes place only with myself and in my head, and then I could still ask whether I have free will towards myself, which quasi lets the self quarrel with the me. HaHa!
Of course, each of us knows at the same time that not everything is subject to our free will and that there are currents beyond our influence. Therefore, it is far too simple a question anyway and basically only worth pursuing if I am interested in a profound maturing process.
Do you think you left this comment because of your free will? What if I told you that you made this comment only because you responded to my post, and had I not made the post, you would not have commented. Even my free will didn't make this post on its own. I got inspired by the words of a friend who was influenced by something else entirely. The chain of causal events goes back forever to the beginning of time as we know it.
I would say it is enough that I think I would have commented of my own free will and we had a nice conversation together. :)
The beginning of time and what of it affects me, well, you can think long and hard about that, can't you?
Greetings.
I enjoyed our conversation as well!
Important topic. Here are my two cents, based on my observations and studies. Let me first propose a different analogy: not a ball rolling downhill, but a drop of water in a sea whose tides are everchanging. The drop can't control the sea, and resisting the ebb and flow of the waters is not only futile but painful.
Another analogy is the cog in a machine, or the cell in a body. Can the cog control the operation of the whole machine, or the cell control the body? No. They fulfill a purpose in a larger structure and they're compelled to behave in very specific ways, they can resist this no better than the drop can resist the sea.
So where's Free Will in all this? In gaining awareness and thus responsibility of our own role in the story. The drop, the cog and the cell all have a choice: they can view this larger structure in which they're immersed as a prison, or they can see it as a home. They can either accept their function and flow naturally through the happenings around them, or they can resist it and suffer inexorably.
In other words, Free Will isn't about controlling the path, but about electing how to approach that path. Eventually, with sufficient exploration, we learn that there was never any difference between the drop and the sea, the cog and the machine, the cell and the body. They're not separate entities. Then Free Will, as a concept, ceases to be relevant.
I very much enjoyed your analogies, insight, and poetic conclusion on this topic. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter!