Topic: Free will (Read 24161 times)

SloS13 · « **on:** March 24, 2009, 10:46:50 AM »

Does it exist? No. Free will is synaptical illusion perpetrated by consciousness. The idea of free will spits in the face of everything we have learned about chemistry and physics in the past eveventy billion years.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Free will is an action that is independent of any other action.

This implies:
1. An new action which is independent of any other action is new energy. You cannot have new energy.
2. There is randomness in the universe.

Brains are machines. They take in information and process it. We are at the will of physics and chemistry. Nothing we do is truly random nor do we actually have any real control over our actions.

Discuss...

dtrain · « **Reply #1 on:** March 24, 2009, 10:49:09 AM »

must be some good pot.

SloS13 · « **Reply #2 on:** March 24, 2009, 10:51:25 AM »

it makes perfect sense. Your inability to process such simple, yet mindblowing information is your brain's own coping mechanism. It's a natural reaction.

dtrain · « **Reply #3 on:** March 24, 2009, 10:55:14 AM »

no....its...i just woke up and havent had breakfast.....

Kain · « **Reply #4 on:** March 24, 2009, 10:56:16 AM »

Rush - Free Will

Kenny Rogers · « **Reply #5 on:** March 24, 2009, 11:08:31 AM »

Your definition of "free will" needs clarification. Let's say I want to pick up my coffee cup in front of me. Because of my will to do so, I can reach forward, grasp it with my hand and then lift it. To me, that's free will.

Of course, while I'm picking up the cup, I am forced to follow all the rules of physics and chemistry. I counter-act gravity with an upward force and I burn calories (ATP) with muscle movement.

If your definition of free will is to break the boundaries of physical limitations then I think Jesus might be the only guy with free will.

Edit: Rawr, go get a job as a philosopher... I'm sure it pays better than minimum wage

colt45 · « **Reply #6 on:** March 24, 2009, 11:22:09 AM »

Quote from: SloS13 on March 24, 2009, 10:51:25 AM

it makes perfect sense. Your inability to process such simple, yet mindblowing information is your brain's own coping mechanism. It's a natural reaction.

i cant in my mind's eye think of "nothing" and like-wise i can't think of everything. Although i know nothing and everything exist, i can't imagine what either would be like. no matter how hard i try, i can't consciously think of nothing.

and besides, if humans didnt subscribe to the illusion of choice, whole batches would be lost, and if whole batches of humans are lost, where will the greys keep our souls?

SloS13 · « **Reply #7 on:** March 24, 2009, 11:28:03 AM »

rawr - give me a few hours/weeks to retort.

Quote from: Kenny Rogers on March 24, 2009, 11:08:31 AM

Your definition of "free will" needs clarification. Let's say I want to pick up my coffee cup in front of me. Because of my will to do so, I can reach forward, grasp it with my hand and then lift it. To me, that's free will.

The definition of free will I'm going by is people's assumptions that our minds are somehow exempt from the principles of physics. Every decision we make is pre-determined by the laws of physics. Our brain is made of atoms, that make up cells, which make up a chemical machine called a brain. I'm not too good about putting my thoughts into words $:-\$

Your will to pick up that coffee cup was pre-determined. Quantum-physics aside your decision to pick up that coffee cup could have been predicted billions of years ago.

You can't will an atom to give up an electron, so therefore you don't really have free will. That make sense?

Joseph Davis · « **Reply #8 on:** March 24, 2009, 11:36:59 AM »

"I have no free will," I sang
As I flew about the murder
Mrs. Richard Holmes, she screamed;
You really should have heard her
I sang and I laughed, I howled and I wept
I panted like a pup
I blew a hole in Mrs. Richard Holmes
And her husband he stood up

And he screamed, "You are an evil man"
And I paused a while to wonder
"If I have no free will then how could I
Be morally culpable, I wonder?"

Kenny Rogers · « **Reply #9 on:** March 24, 2009, 11:43:39 AM »

Quote from: SloS13 on March 24, 2009, 11:28:03 AM

rawr - give me a few hours/weeks to retort.

Quote from: Kenny Rogers on March 24, 2009, 11:08:31 AM
Your definition of "free will" needs clarification. Let's say I want to pick up my coffee cup in front of me. Because of my will to do so, I can reach forward, grasp it with my hand and then lift it. To me, that's free will.

The definition of free will I'm going by is people's assumptions that our minds are somehow exempt from the principles of physics. Every decision we make is pre-determined by the laws of physics. Our brain is made of atoms, that make up cells, which make up a chemical machine called a brain. I'm not too good about putting my thoughts into words $:-\$

Your will to pick up that coffee cup was pre-determined. Quantum-physics aside your decision to pick up that coffee cup could have been predicted billions of years ago.

You can't will an atom to give up an electron, so therefore you don't really have free will. That make sense?

It sounds like a combination of "A Brief History of Time" and "Donny Darko". Both of them were a bit of a mind fuck for me, so this argument will surely destroy my feeble brain, lol.

5thgenlx · « **Reply #10 on:** March 24, 2009, 12:14:38 PM »

if you question free will look at dragsters, nasa, submarines, nanotechnologies, corruption, greed and on the flip side selflessness and purity. a lack of free will is saying we are an animal incapable of doing something for ourselves/others. i think you are trying to say something specific yet didn't quite get it across.

and now after reading your last post i see what you are trying to say but no. unless you believe in god. otherwise, just no. memory, thought, dreams, etc our consciousness basically proves otherwise. if you did not have our brains, like all other animals in the world, i'd say yes. and remember this, the two things that we as humans no the least about is the deep ocean and the human brain. the only people thinking their minds are free from the laws of nature however are those who voted for obama

SloS13 · « **Reply #11 on:** March 24, 2009, 12:25:05 PM »

Quote from: 5thgenlx on March 24, 2009, 12:14:38 PM

and now after reading your last post i see what you are trying to say but no. unless you believe in god. otherwise, just no. memory, thought, dreams, etc our consciousness basically proves otherwise. if you did not have our brains, like all other animals in the world, i'd say yes. and remember this, the two things that we as humans no the least about is the deep ocean and the human brain. the only people thinking their minds are free from the laws of nature however are those who voted for obama

You can't believe in free will and at the same time believe that our minds are somehow exempt from the laws of nature. How is the brain different than any other machine with gears and switches? Granted, it's exponentially more complex but it's all just atoms afterall and they do what they do. Unless people have some magical power, you cannot intervene.

If you were to have a super-powerful computer and you took a snapshot of every single atom, proton, neutron, etc in a brain, you could use the laws of physics to infer where each of those particles would be at an infinitely small amount of time later, right? At what point does the brain intervene and cause any of those particles to follow a path which does not follow the laws of physics?

5thgenlx · « **Reply #12 on:** March 24, 2009, 12:34:24 PM »

Quote from: SloS13 on March 24, 2009, 12:25:05 PM

Quote from: 5thgenlx on March 24, 2009, 12:14:38 PM
and now after reading your last post i see what you are trying to say but no. unless you believe in god. otherwise, just no. memory, thought, dreams, etc our consciousness basically proves otherwise. if you did not have our brains, like all other animals in the world, i'd say yes. and remember this, the two things that we as humans no the least about is the deep ocean and the human brain. the only people thinking their minds are free from the laws of nature however are those who voted for obama

You can't believe in free will and at the same time believe that our minds are somehow exempt from the laws of nature. How is the brain different than any other machine with gears and switches? Granted, it's exponentially more complex but it's all just atoms afterall and they do what they do. Unless people have some magical power, you cannot intervene.

If you were to have a super-powerful computer and you took a snapshot of every single atom, proton, neutron, etc in a brain, you could use the laws of physics to infer where each of those particles would be at an infinitely small amount of time later, right? At what point does the brain intervene and cause any of those particles to follow a path which does not follow the laws of physics?

because there are things we already don't know how they work. explain memory. explain conscious thought. we don't know how that works for starters. second, the brain is mainly following basics of chemistry than anything else. the brain intervenes because it dictates and sends impulses where we want it to and where it wants to. pain, the brains ability to block it. you can train your brain, force it to react certain ways. its moldable/trainable. education changes how we do things. basically you are saying that once we're broken down anatomically into atoms we have no choice, yeah, no shit. its the collective that creates our abilities. but we are not being controlled(lack of free will) by our atoms. and to specifically put fault to your last sentence, all the fucking time. when it sends chemicals here or there to stop this, block that etc. if you believe in evolution, then you can't believe your last statement for it flies in the face of it.

fuck i'm late for picking up my motorcycle

to be continued

QikEnuF · « **Reply #13 on:** March 24, 2009, 12:58:17 PM »

It is a bold man who challenges Rawr concerning the concentration of the degree he is working on

Joseph Davis · « **Reply #14 on:** March 24, 2009, 01:01:09 PM »

STFU, Henry.

SloS13 · « **Reply #15 on:** March 24, 2009, 01:02:51 PM »

an animate thing is just a collection of inanimate things.

I'm not arguing that the brain isnt awesome. Just like any other computational machine, it takes in a lot of information and makes decisions based on that information, but the brain doesn't "mainly" follow chemistry (physics), it 100.00% follows chemistry/physics.

What I'm saying is that everything we do and will do and anything that (quantum mechanics aside) anyone/thing will do has already been pre-determined and our wills cannot change that.

I'm keeping quantum mechanics out of the argument for simplicity sake. If there truly is randomness in quantum mechanics, so be it but it is still something not under our control.

rawr uses bigger words than I do. I has hard timestuff doing make what I say into the words for typing.

bigdaddyvtec · « **Reply #16 on:** March 24, 2009, 01:06:12 PM »

FREE WILLIE!!!

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://new-brunswick.net/new-brunswick/whales/pics/willie2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://new-brunswick.net/new-brunswick/whales/willie2.html&usg=__2LEmtfv6gbtLNyhs1_IurWbDBy8=&h=314&w=470&sz=32&hl=en&start=15&um=1&tbnid=7Od0tA9rXkjIcM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=129&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfree%2Bwillie%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1

MTZ · « **Reply #17 on:** March 24, 2009, 01:17:06 PM »

Quote from: SloS13 on March 24, 2009, 01:02:51 PM

an animate thing is just a collection of inanimate things.

I'm not arguing that the brain isnt awesome. Just like any other computational machine, it takes in a lot of information and makes decisions based on that information, but the brain doesn't "mainly" follow chemistry (physics), it 100.00% follows chemistry/physics.

What I'm saying is that everything we do and will do and anything that (quantum mechanics aside) anyone/thing will do has already been pre-determined and our wills cannot change that.

I'm keeping quantum mechanics out of the argument for simplicity sake. If there truly is randomness in quantum mechanics, so be it but it is still something not under our control.

rawr uses bigger words than I do. I has hard timestuff doing make what I say into the words for typing.

i am a simple man so i really dont care if things are pre determined or not BUT i still have my opinion on the subject and i think there is no way in hell everything is written in stone, reason being that the way you affect someone without knowing i could be walking around and unknowingly affect some1s life (regardless if for good or bad) i can spit in the ground then 10min later some1 falls drinks my spit goes home kills his annoying wife cause he was so fing pissed from before those are variables that you cant control its almost like this;

your engine is mechanical you know how it works and how it can fail the part that is known pistons go up and down blah blah oil and all the other crap, now your driving and somehow a DRASTIC change in cllimate (bear with me for the sake of argument) makes your car leaner or richer and bottomline the shit blows up. its out of the Known and controlled equation yes you know why it happened just like we know why some people kill but you have no control over it. (i guess you could have driven away lol )

thats how i think of it but w/e if u cant make sense of it

MTZ · « **Reply #18 on:** March 24, 2009, 01:20:52 PM »

Quote from: rawr on March 24, 2009, 01:15:43 PM

Quote from: SloS13 on March 24, 2009, 01:02:51 PM
an animate thing is just a collection of inanimate things.

I disagree. If that premise were true it would seem to be that one could put any set of inanimate things together and then I could claim it was animate. There clearly exist some properties of animate things that are inexplicable within the current bounds of science. Aristotle uses the concept of being moved to explain what is animate compared to what is not and this is almost the very concept of a will.

It's easy to see a set of properties that define something and to assign meaning to what that object is; however, it is extremely difficult to define what exactly those properties are.

there is nothing inanimate because everything we know is composed of atoms and shit like that making it "alive".

everything slowly dies even if it is eroding away or phsycally dying yet that energy turns into something else and never really dies

Jorsher · « **Reply #19 on:** March 24, 2009, 01:27:57 PM »

I said basically the exact same thing on oHMT (RIP).

Assuming nothing truly random ever occurs and everything is a predictable (relatively, it's impossible to have exact precise measurements) reaction, then no -- free will doesn't exist.

I don't believe it does. Your "thoughts" are made up of reactions at the atomic level, which possibly could be calculated accurately (as accurate as the measurements they're based on).

But anyway, I don't believe in magical free-will like a majority of people do. Realizing that picking up a cup because you "want to" and picking up a cup because the atomic state of your head made you "want to" are two entirely different things. You have to look at it from a different perspective than "I wanted to so I did -- bam, free will."

JD - that's one of the first things that crossed my mind after reaching the revelation that free will is a fairy tale. How do you punish a criminal that was just acting on the laws of physics?

QikEnuF · « **Reply #20 on:** March 24, 2009, 01:36:26 PM »

Quote from: Joseph Davis on March 24, 2009, 01:01:09 PM

STFU, Henry.

Ok. fuckwipe

SloS13 · « **Reply #21 on:** March 24, 2009, 02:16:24 PM »

Quote from: Jorsher on March 24, 2009, 01:27:57 PM

But anyway, I don't believe in magical free-will like a majority of people do. Realizing that picking up a cup because you "want to" and picking up a cup because the atomic state of your head made you "want to" are two entirely different things. You have to look at it from a different perspective than "I wanted to so I did -- bam, free will."

when you finally figure it out, it clicks and there's no going back. If people did have free will then we would also be able to modify matter with the power of our will because free-will is technically the idea that the consciousness can force it's will upon matter.

MTZ · « **Reply #22 on:** March 24, 2009, 02:34:49 PM »

Quote from: rawr on March 24, 2009, 02:32:02 PM

You're taking the definition of free will and turning it into something with the ability to will things into existence. That has nothing to do with free will.

+1

free will is the fact that you can do w/e u want

(obviously according to your cirmstances)

say i wanna go to oreilleys or i could whip out my gun and rob it i choose what to do...

j.h.christ · « **Reply #23 on:** March 24, 2009, 02:35:48 PM »

SloS13 · « **Reply #24 on:** March 24, 2009, 03:26:45 PM »

Quote from: rawr on March 24, 2009, 02:32:02 PM

You're taking the definition of free will and turning it into something with the ability to will things into existence. That has nothing to do with free will.

That's exactly what free will would have to be if it were real.

Jorsher · « **Reply #25 on:** March 24, 2009, 03:48:52 PM »

Quote from: MTZ on March 24, 2009, 02:34:49 PM

say i wanna go to oreilleys or i could whip out my gun and rob it i choose what to do...

You don't get it.

patsmx5 · « **Reply #26 on:** March 24, 2009, 04:00:14 PM »

$:-\$ I don't wanna think about this. Wait, did I choose not to think of this or....

Foowee · « **Reply #27 on:** March 24, 2009, 04:07:05 PM »

Quote from: SloS13 on March 24, 2009, 10:46:50 AM

Does it exist? No. Free will is synaptical illusion perpetrated by consciousness. The idea of free will spits in the face of everything we have learned about chemistry and physics in the past eveventy billion years.

Brains are machines. They take in information and process it. We are at the will of physics and chemistry. Nothing we do is truly random nor do we actually have any real control over our actions.

It's not your fault you fags love the taste of cock, it just how you process things... Just goto the jy, get more turbos, put them on your cars, go fast...

xpert787 · « **Reply #28 on:** March 24, 2009, 04:07:34 PM »

I disagree with 1. Ever action has an equal and opposite reaction. If that is really the case for everything then why does the universe even exist as that law should prevent it.

SloS13 · « **Reply #29 on:** March 24, 2009, 04:26:28 PM »

Quote from: rawr on March 24, 2009, 04:21:52 PM

I think you misunderstand the definition of a will.

I was talking about my friend, Will. What the hell are you talking about?

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Author Topic: Free will (Read 24161 times)

QikEnuF

QikEnuF