Does Physics disprove the existence of free will?

Because of the Speed to make a decision

 

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Freedom , free-will , is beyond natural laws .

Natural Laws are applied to non-living things . Energy/Matter

Without energy/matter , life could not exist .

Free-will is about Living Beings

 

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No, we have been quite irate with Iceaura because - apart from asserting no less than seven times that every one else is invoking supernaturalism - he was the only one invoking it. He would have done much better to lay out the steps as to how it is the implication of what we were asserting, without actually jamming the words in our mouths as if we actually said it. That would have saved about fifty posts of "I never said that. Stop saying I did." But that never seemed to bother him, nor could we cajole him into explaining himself.

Anyway, water under the bridge now. You've clarified it in your inimitable way. I'm ready to move on.

 

Free-will is about Life

Universe has not only matter in it , non-living , but also Life .

Call Life " supernatural " if you like . But no matter what you call Life , Life in this Universe exists , period .

 

Freedom of will:

"It's My Will and I am free to use it as I see fit"

The important point that is rarely addressed is that the issue of free will can not be separated from the owner of that will. The one that makes use of that will, the willer, regardless of theoretical deterministic factors has a will to do with as HE pleases.
Therefore unless proven that the self is not the self, the I is not the I, the ME is not the Me, I fail to see how or why I would agree that my freedom to use my will as I see fit is unavailable to me or an illusion.

 

The problem with this is that one needs no consensus to "call" it reality.

Example:
Living in a tent in isolation in a forest with an ocean beach nearby. ( no consensus available)

Claiming only those who can reach a consensus can know what is real or not is uneccesarilly limiting the conscious experience beyond what is actually the case.

 

I believe this was originally addressed to Yazata. But let's say that I got tired of seeing it waiting at the train stop. (Could have missed it being picked-up elsewhere, though.) Just to get it rolling somewhere, even if another person has to come along to give it further legs (including Yaz).

Most people at the subway are probably usually running zombie-like through habituated routine (their mind is on getting to their destination, looking at or talking to their smartphone, etc). They aren't consciously focused on the tracks or the possibilities they and an approaching "train" present. So we need an example where deliberating attention is actually in play.

For the sake of just speedily using it as a model rather than exploring every potential possibility detouring away from that, I'll assume the superficial information below was indeed the case or all that need be considered.

Two people killed after jumping in front of Brooklyn subway train: "Witnesses told police the pair appeared to intentionally leap in the path of the Manhattan-bound C train at Broadway Junction station around 4:45 p.m."

The following pertaining to both individuals, but described singly for sake of convenience.

During the time before the incident, there was surely a lingering self-preservation narrative transpiring in the head which was reluctant or did not desire to leap. Despite another narrative in the same head which obviously did. One of the internal dialogues eventually did not get what it wished. Which is to say: a particular, competing, internal thought process having the liberty to put into action what it wants is contingent rather than applicable to all situations. But the proposal finally selected is still the choice or behavior of the overall brain/body system. Because only one result was outwardly witnessed does not mean multiple possibilities were not mulled over.

~

 

True, but that does not guarantee accuracy.

No guarantee you are not living in a dream, lots of recluses with very strange ideas of reality.

Not really. We can still experience the illusion of say, a fata morgana. The difference is we know it's a reflection and not real, it's true nature. In days of old that's where the gods dwelled, even by consensus, which by all accounts, has skewed our perspective of Nature itself for centuries.
Religion anyone?

Is consensus not why science demands proofs (falsification, verification, physical proof) of apparently non-explainable phenomena and what causes them?

 

Context, JamesR. Context.
If someone is arguing a psosition, and the other says "you're wrong..." and then starts spieling away about things irrelevant to that argument as if it in some way rebuts it, with a clear agenda to discuss a different matter, then I feel the response I gave is fair.
Second, the discussion at the time, in the thread that you have now merged, was focussed on the argument from determinism. It is disingenuous of you, the one who merged the threads, to then raise the issue that I was, in that thread, focusing on determinism.

No. I just want to be sure that one does not mix and match between arguments. As was the case in the previous thread, and hence my desire in the second to get a working definition / understanding for purposes of discussion. And it settled on the compatabilist view.

 

Note how this is a conclusion, not an assumption.

Further, the argument is only valid if the properties of the universe are deterministic (or probabilistically so), or are something else that fulfill the "since (1) can't come from (2)". There may be (not that I have heard of any) natural laws that allow (1) to come from (2), but deterministic laws don't seem to be one.

 

And kept making the same mistakes each time.

Not this time, for reasons repeatedly given.

I probably wouldn't, colloquially. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it is.
Define what you mean by "free" when you say "free choice" and it will most likely be driven by how it appears to be, not necessarily by what is actually going on. And if one argues that it is not defined by appearance but by things that are actually going on then they are simply not looking at fine enough detail, and are still looking at mere appearance.
But that's okay. Colloquially no one would dispute that we have free will, that our choices are free. But when you start to turn any basic notion of what it means for something to be free to the question of how things actually work, you get a different story. And to resolve it you need to define what it means for a conscious entity to be "free" differently from how you might define what it means for an inert/mundane object to be free.

Once you have redefined it, explicitly or implicitly, context of discussion takes care of the rest. Other than in philosophical discussions when both/all meanings can come into play.

Define "will". While you may think this is me trying to be evasive, it is actually me trying to ensure you are not simply sweeping issues under a carpet of wave-handery.
[qupte]Supposing we get past that and decide that there actually was an act of will involved in this case. In other words, you considered whether or not to jump in front of the train, and you decided not to. Then the question is: was your decision a "free" choice?

The answer to that question will depend entirely on how you want to define "free". So, tell us, Sarkus. When is a choice free, and when is it not free?[/quote]Two possible answers I can think of: one is when we define "free" along the lines of when it appears to ourselves that we have weighed up the options, thought that we could do either, but ended up doing one. A non-free choice under this notion would be when there is only one option available.
The other answer is that it never is free.

Using the term "genuine" is to try to differentiate between what simply appears to ourselves to be a choice, and what actually isn't a choice. To not introduce this distinction would be to a priori assume that we judge entirely by appearance, of how it feels to us. Again, if this is what someone wishes to define as freewill then the question of "genuine" or not disappears.

Assume a Newtonian, deterministic universe. In that case, it was destined from the big bang that you would either jump in front of the train or you wouldn't. But the moment before the event itself, no individual human being could say which event would occur, with certainty. That's only due to lack of knowledge, of course. Would this determinism rule out it being a "genuine option" to jump in front, then, in your opinion?[/quote]Yes, unless we define words like "option" and "free" in terms of how it appears/feels etc.

If I was, and if I was defining those words for purposes of discussion with reference to that determinism, then no - not really.

If one wishes to define it as such.

I can argue from both sides. I am an incompatibilist when one defines words in reference to that determinism (or probabilistic determinism etc), and I am a compatabilist when using terms that are defined according to feeling / appearance etc.
I don't think the world operates any differently in either view. It is just perspective, based upon how words are defined.

Definition/focus of the word.

That said, even in the purely compatabilist realm there are undoubtedly occasions when one believes they had a choice, but really they didn't. As raised by others, addiction etc. And possibly even more mundane examples.
For me, it might be argued that jumping in front of a train to end my life is a choice I have. But it really isn't.

 

No, I mean specifically the argument from determinism. Not just the incompatibilist view but that specific argument. DaveC raised it, Baldeee then summarised it quite well. Others then bleated on about the supernatural.

Then my apologies.

One thread was primarily a discussion of an argument from determinism.
The thread in the philosophy forum (this one) was seemingly becoming a discussion about the compatabilist view, exploring that without reference to the incompatibilist view. But with the threads now merged it will likely once again revert to simply a incompatibilist v compatabilist debate, rather than what it was becoming.
If you don't see that as a loss, or the merging of two separate issues, fair enough. But not all threads about freewill need be simply the argument between incompatabilist v compatabilist. Your merging was too hasty, in my view. But we are where we are

 

That was a summation of it yes, and the post you have linked was addressed to Baldeee. Did you want me to respond to it?

It's not just a matter of "reasons". Causation does not equate to determinism. Strict determinism is merely a type of causation. So to equate determinism to "cause" or "impact" or "influence" is a mistake. Strict determinism states that the same inputs to a system will always give the same outputs. Probabilistic determinism is, while inherently deterministic, the notion that the same inputs always give the same probability function as the output.
A discussion between Baldeee and NotEinstein considered whether the randomness within the latter is sufficient for something to be considered free.
Another sense of "free" was offered along the lines of degrees of freedom in Engineering, but this only offers "free" if an object in space is free to choose its orientation. After al, it has degrees of freedom.
The argument from strict determinism very much tackles whether choices are free: if a system can only ever give the same output to the same input, how can the output be classified as free. Unless, of course, one alters the perspective and ignores the actual workings of the system at the fine-grain detail, and thereby redefines what it means to be "free" for conscious choice.

To accuse DaveC, Baldeee, myself, of assuming from the outset that "freewill" must be supernatural. We don't. It is simply a conclusion of the logic offered up by Baldeee that IF a system built from deterministic interactions is also deterministic, and IF there a deterministic interaction is not "free" THEN the system is also not "free". There is no assumption in here that freewill must be supernatural. Sure, if you also assume that all physical laws are deterministic, and that it is possible for free will to nonetheless exist, then you could conclude that any existent freewill would be supernatural.
My conclusion from the logic, however, ends with free will not existing within a deterministic system. That's all the logic says. Anything else requires additional assumptions. But "supernatural freewill" would still only be a conclusion, not an assumption as iceaura claims.
Or maybe that was not the issue you were referring to?

Define "choice". That is where the answer lies.

The meaningfulness of the distinction is context driven. In a philosophical discussions, it seems to be of significance. In casual parlance, not so much.

A thread in a philosophy or physics forum is not exactly what I would consider colloquial. Colloquial is the way you would talk to the man in the street, not to someone while discussing and arguing the nature off reality, for example.

To offer one: not restrained or confined.

So you are advocating a different notion of "free" when applying it to one thing rather than another. Okay. That's what I've said is done. Thanks for confirming my point.

I'm okay to work with that.

Where in the premise is the notion that the will is never free? Point out the premise that states this, please. I do hope you're not suffering the same confusion over what is an assumption and what is a conclusion?

Not inferior. Just different. We live our lives according to the feeling or appearance, irrespective of whether it is "actual" or not. It is just another way of looking at the exactly the same things. No one is proposing that freewill is supernatural. No one so proposing thathat the universe operates in ways that it doesn't. If anything it is the compatabilists who feel threatened. Me? I just see it as different. My thinking started with the argument from determinism, and thus what I might consider "actual" is based on the notions within that argument. If I change the notions to only look at conscious activity, the compatabilist view, then in those terms free will exists and is genuine.

I have no idea what it might look like. Possibly no different than the "illusion". Possibly very different. If our universe operates in a manner that can not give rise to "actual" free will then you're looking at a completely different set of physics for it to arise. So what that might look like is anybody's guess.

Free will is necessarily bound by natural laws if it is to exist, though, whatever they may be, and if not deterministic then probabilistic/random etc. The physics thread, being the physics thread, one would think would be above recourse to notions of the supernatural. If it was concluded that it had to be supernatural to exist then the only conclusion would be that it doesn't exist. The supernatural had no place in that forum. Only those who were assuming freewill existed ever mentioned it.
I don't need to have my cake and eat it. I will happily follow where the argument validly and soundly lead. If that is to the non-existence of freewill then that is okay, as long as I also understand the applicability of that conclusion, the meaning of terms it uses etc. If someone puts forth another argument that uses different meanings, then great, let's see where that one goes.

You could. You could then move this thread into the religion forum.

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And the conflict, if indeed there is one (and really there's isnt once semantic issues are resolved - although that is the bulk of the apparent difference), would seem to hold for non-deterministic universe as we'll, if that non-determinism is merely random, I'd say.

 

Erratum: In the post above, 2nd paragraph, I meant to type "Probabilistic determinism, while inherently indeterministic...". The tablet I'm using auto-incorrected and I didn't pick it up. Apologies.