Do you know how you think? What do you have to do to initiate a thought? What do you have to do to raise your arm in the air? Free will is discredited on the grounds that we aren't actually the ones doing the thinking. Try as I will I can't think of anyway to answer the questions above (humor). The answer to what do we have to do to initiate a thought is: nothing. Therefore it can't be us initiating the thought, can it? Therefore can we say we have free will? I think not. (again a little irony) Your thoughts? (even more irony)
Generally, I think your right SouthStar. Humans believe they are the ones thinking, but they have no proof of the fact. Hah! You think you are thinking! Stupid humans.
Most human thought is initiated by television. Free will is a joke. The power of suggestion is far more powerful than most of us imagine. We think so many of our ideas are our own when someone else has put them there for their own purposes. If the TV commands "all young men must wear ridiculous baggy shorts that hang below the knees" most of them obey willingly, thinking that they are being independent by antagonizing an older generation. They are blindly following yet thinking they are acting independently.
As an after thought, do you think this nullify's personal responsibility? Can I be responsible for murder or armed robbery if I was not responsible for thinking that in the first place? Of course not! (Not saying that I will, just hypothesizing) Therefore we must do away with all laws that presuppose something so absurd as we are responsible for our actions.
Thinking is initiated by a stimulus. One comes across a stimulus and is driven to respond with an opinion. One does not need to find questions outside of his own head either. Memories and hormones and what not come into play. One thought stems from many others. Fate is there, but there is also free will, since each action is a choice. Having a choice is having freedom. With choices come consequences, and here lies responsibility. Well, of course, if you sit around and point to gods each time you have trouble finding an answer, then you are not thinking.
The Root of Human Conflict: Emotion vs. Reason by Mark D. Hamill Most people would probably agree that the polarity between the belief groups is the root cause of much of our civil strife. Most belief systems tend to assert the absolute correctness of their beliefs. This, of course, typically implies that other belief systems are either partially or fundamentally flawed. Certainly one doesn't have to look far to find examples of these conflicts: Palestinians vs. Israelis; anti-abortionists vs. pro-choice advocates; Communists vs. Capitalists (thankfully resolved, but at a horrendous cost); racists vs. non racists; and Ulster Unionists vs. the Irish Republican Army, to name but a few. Even when done without resorting to violence, the philosophical battles can certainly be vicious, as Washington D.C. certainly demonstrates. What interests me is to examine these beliefs and see on what foundations they rest upon. Most claim to rest on the highest of foundations (typically God itself, the ultimate trump card). And yet these are also areas which are the most impossible to independently prove. It seems curious to me that we invest so much energy defending beliefs which have no solid underpinnings. How could one expend so much of their time and energy to champion causes that are largely unproven and unverifiable? The answer, as unpopular as it may be, is that most of us are born into a belief system which we wholeheartedly adopt and then propagate as parents. Why else would so many of us practice the very same religion our parents did? Christian parents instill Christian beliefs in their children. Muslim parents instill belief in Islam to their children. Humanist parents instill humanism in their children too. I suspect the main reason we speak with such utter certainty about these core beliefs is because they come to us, as children, from our most god-like source: our parents. By the time we develop the ability impartially examine our parents beliefs it is largely too late to change our basic nature, which is now largely formed. These beliefs form the absolute center of who we are and are the basis for our behavior and personality. By the time we are grown adults these beliefs become extremely difficult, if not impossible to change. Often the cost of change is enormous emotional turmoil where it becomes difficult to believe in anyone or any idea again. When I look for the source of our conflicts then, I begin to go back when geography separated groups of humans so that each group could form their own divergent belief systems. As we traveled and propagated our species, it was easier for these cultural differences to cause problems. It does not surprise me then that in modern times we have witnessed barbarity on such an enormous scale. But if one shopped for a belief the same way we shopped for a car, what would one look for to distinguish a quality belief from a silly belief? To me the test of a good belief is to examine it and see if it has roots more substantial than mere blind faith. Many faiths, for example, celebrate the virtue of love. God is assumed to be the source from which all love flows. I dispute this conclusion as a hasty and unthinking. My understanding of evolution suggests that love has always been a characteristic of our humanity. It certainly predates monotheism and even polytheism. Indeed, I think a convincing case can be made that love is most likely the manifestation an evolutionary trait of mammals which mammals use to help our species survive. It seems most probable to me that the roots of love are more in our animal past rather than our "civilized" present. Consequently I believe it is more likely that love is a product of our evolution rather than a gift from God. However, my belief that love has evolved, rather than having come from God, does not diminish at all its almost mystical powers on us humans, nor our need as human beings to both get and receive love to live happily and fully. I pick love as an example, but there are many more attributes of our humanity for which this logic should apply. I assert our beliefs should evolve along with our increased understanding of our universe. At one time the notion of a earth centered universe seemed perfectly reasonable based on our understanding of the physical world. When Copernicus proved this was not the case it was reasonable to abandon the notion. Copernicus' equations describing how planets orbited the sun proved not entirely correct, but a better working model. The subsequent discovery that planets' orbits were actually ellipses turned out to be more correct. Newton's Laws and Einstein's Law of Relativity have brought us to an even closer understanding of our physical universe. I contend that beliefs which have a rational basis rooted on scientific understanding are inherently more viable than beliefs based on faith only. It would be silly of me to claim I have discovered final answers, or to even claim with certainty that I am on the right track. I can only optimistically assert that my beliefs are a closer approximation of the truth that actually exists. I use aspects of the scientific method in judging a believe because when I do I find that my beliefs then have some substance to them. A belief that rests wholly on faith really potentially rests on sand, and the next scientific discovery can easily make them seem absurd. And it would indeed be silly to spend my life advocating beliefs that are untrue and may turn out to be counterproductive to humanity. Perhaps because I am a software engineer by trade I have learned the value of abstraction. It is hard for me to look at any system without trying to abstract it to learn underlying truths. I see an enormous cost to human progress due to conflicting belief systems in our societies. To truly evolve our species must find a way to reconcile these conflicts. But after a while I see similarities in approach regardless of the beliefs being advocated. It is too tempting not to abstract these similarities and look for a more fundamental cause. And after many years I think I have found the abstraction that makes the most sense to me. Let me know if you agree. I believe the root of humanity's problems are not based on conflicting beliefs but rather our own struggle with reconciling reason and emotion. I suspect that the answer to our problems lies neither in emotion nor in reason, but in some place in between. What I search for, and what I believe we all really search for is a life in which we can be happy, productive and challenged. (Often this level of self actualization is not possible, and we simply must survive. This becomes an end in itself.) If we can create a space inside us where emotion and reason can reside in peace, then we may have found the basis for our own happiness and for a solution to much of our misery as a species. I extrapolate further: I believe that almost all emotions are modern manifestations of our less evolved ancestors. They had to make complex choices in a difficult and scary world that would ensure their survival over the survival of other species. But their brains were not sufficiently rational to make these complex choices. Consequently emotional response became the ingrained default way to deal with difficult problems. And they in turn drove our system of beliefs. The root of our common law - our abhorrence of murder, our need for fidelity so that our children could survive to adulthood, even our need to feel hatred so we could internalize our feelings rather than take them out on other people and thus ensure our survival - has, I believe, its root in the raw emotions that come with being a human. These in turn came from the many species from which we have evolved. To survive in the modern world we seek to find a place of peace between our emotions and our reason. But this is difficult because emotions and reason are by their nature often polar opposites. Our sense of reason suggests we must react rationally in all our actions and there is little in acting emotionally worth considering. Our emotions always lurk close beneath the surface and seem to have the upper hand over reason. It is hard to fight millions of years of evolution where emotions proved critical to our survival. When one is emotional reason seems irrelevant. In fact emotion typically triumphs over reason and is the more powerful. It is little wonder then that statistically ninety percent of humanity claims to be religious. The appeal of religion is primarily emotional. Thus it appears to be far more natural to be religious than not, as it is more natural to be heterosexual than homosexual. However because we are primarily emotional creatures this does not mean that living a wholly emotional life is either correct or desirable. For acting out of pure emotion can be dangerous too, and the use of reason is usually a better method of surviving today. And perhaps because reason typically works better in our modern and complex world, more of us today are drawn toward reason even though it conflicts with our emotions. This conflict often results in anxiety and inner turmoil. Both pure reason and pure emotion may be a form of natural narcotic which prevents the growth we really need as humans. And so we seek a restful place. The problem is that most of us chose either the extreme of emotion or the extreme of reason. To grow, what we really need is some place in between. I believe one key to happiness is to understand that to experience emotions is to be human. Thus emotion should be experienced and expressed, but they must be tempered by the application of reason. Sanity and happiness come from understanding the forces and motivations of both and using each effectively to ensure your own happiness and the happiness of those you love. So emote or remain logical as mankind has done for generations. Or I propose this new radical notion: find some happy medium in between that is right for you. But do so with your eyes open. Trust never wholly to either, but use the synthesis of both to find a place where you can live happily. And if you find that spot then you can begin a process that few humans take, because most people trained never to leave one side or the other. Like the toddler taking his first steps, like the adolescent observing his parents as human for the first time you now have the opportunity to see the world with new eyes. Now, perhaps, you can change the world because you can affect the world as it is, rather than how others would choose you to see it. If your experience is like mine, your world will become new and the possibilities for your life, like those proclaimed for heaven itself, become as limitless as your imagination. (c) 1997, Mark D. Hamill
What I'm saying is, are we the ones who initiate or respond? Ask yourself why you are reading this. And now tell me how you asked yourself. You of course have no idea; you only know that the thought occured. I should have added this then, but I think (irony) that we are simply spectators or observers of thoughts from our brains and not the actual initiators. Sayiang each "action is a choice" (in this case thought being the action) is unfounded since by responses to the questions posed we can say we didn't 'choose' to have those thoughts. Therefore there is no free will.
I would say it is a mixture, some actions are really initiated by thought. This very post I wrote because I want to. You do not compell me to, neither does anyone else. But for example my breathing is not directly my choice, even when I am unconscious, I still breathe. In short, there is free will, but not everything is governed by it.
Breathing is not a thought.. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Tell me these things: 1) How do you know you wrote the post because you want to? 2) And now, did you merely observe the thought, or did you actually initiate it?
I know it because I first had to think about all the other things that were written in this thread. Then I filtered the information and decided what had relevance to me and what not. After that, I thought about it and broke the information apart, discriminated between pro and contra and compared that to the things I perceive as right. After that, I quite willingly opened my browser window, went on Sciforums and formulated a post that contained a brief insight into my thoughts. I gave an individual and thoughtful answer to your posts, and I initiated this action, I was not forced or compelled, just because I made the choice to reply does not negate my of choice of not writing it. So, how do you know that I did not write the post because I wanted to. And no, I did not observe the thought, I really initiated it. Furthermore, I did not say that breathing is a though, but it is an action that can be influenced by thoughts, at least to some extend. So it can be guided by thought, but it can also be enacted without thought. I can choose to stop breathing for a minute or so. But it will set in again, no matter if I want to or not.
Southstar, Then define thought. Breathing is regulated by the brain and while it is autonomous, it can also be controlled consciously. You can hold your breath. You can breath fast or slow. By conscious thought. Absolutely not. Depends on what you mean by "we". Those boys in the basement are just as much you as you are. You just don't let them into the living room very often. Is it any wonder that they so often run amuck when they do get to come out to play? Thing has already stated that thoughts are initiated by stimuli. This is pretty much the case. However, one should keep in mind that thought itself is a stimulus and impulses pretty much cycle back and forth in the mind, sometimes growing stronger, sometimes growing weaker, being reorganized, back to front, front to back, middle to sides, ad infinitum. You yourself (conscious and unconscious) are a product of these impulses and therefore you may not be able to entirely 'take credit' for them. But, they can 'take credit' for you. So, what's the difference? Don't get caught up in the foibles of the mind. All you are is a collection of tics and response patterns and so on. But, so what? You sure do a good job of pretending to be a man. Don't you? And, as to free will. Does it matter if you're really in charge or not? As long as you think you are, everything is fine. It has been shown that the human mind does not see things as they are. It sees things as it has been predicted to be from the events of a half second earlier. It takes time for stimuli to travel from our retinas to our visual cortex. Then it takes time for processing for this stimuli to actively enter our consciousness. However, we don't live in a backwards universe. We aren't living a half-second in the past. We live in the now. We (the boys in the basement) predict the outcome and pass that on to us (the conscious) in order to allow us to interact in real time. This gives rise to many optical illusions and possibilities of manipulation. But, does it eradicate free will? Somewhat. But, it doesn't matter. As long as you think you're free. It's the thought that counts. Dreamwalker, Ah. But did you make an active choice or did you merely rationalize the decision that was made for you in the recesses of your mind? Where do the words come from that you typed out? Did you consciously dredge them up from their place of residence? Each for their specific purpose? Or did they rise, unbidden, from the machinery that exists below your conscious mind? The conscious mind is the thinnest sliver that covers a vast clockwork of gears and pulleys and sweaty muscle men pulling ropes and cranking levers. All the work is done by the boys in the basement and the conscious mind is merely the figurehead who takes the credit for it all. Oh? And how did you do all that then? Would you be able to tell the difference between being forced and making an active choice? Wasn't it in fact initiated by reading the initial post to which you responded? And wasn't this also an extension of the impulses that were bouncing around that brain of yours while browsing and reading other threads here? CosmicTraveler, Stop.
I'm reading because I'm interested. I'm interested because the subject of thought interests me in general. I asked myself the question because you asked me to ask myself, and I found it interesting enough to comply. What on earth told you to post this thread? There is always free will, because there is always a choice. One choice is bad, the other is good, but you are still free to make the "bad" choice. The existence of consequences is inevitable. But those consequences depend on choices of others, if living things are involved. The chain is infinite, in your mind and outside of it. If you want to be like the guy in The Beautiful Mind, heheh, that's an interesting view on things, but don't devote too much time to it; after all it might be totally wrong.
But, who decides it's interesting? You or your hippocampus? Of course, it's all you. But it's not conscious. You can't choose to be interested in something. You either are or you aren't.
Indeed I dredged them up, every word I write is precedet by a conscious effort of finding the right word in my mind. Then, I have had to employ them to make a construct of though which enabled me to understand what was written here and after that, I had to order them in a way that makes my posts more or less understandable. From the day I was born, I received input from the outside world. Images, feeling and smell first, followed by chains of phonemes. These sounds uttered by other beings I affixed to certain objects that they obviously referred to. Over time, I was able to develop simple constructs in my mind, like the old example of five apples, take two away and there are only three left. This is a simple and yet abstract mental construct that can exist without simultaneous input from the outside. On simple objects like apples, more abstract things like "fruits" can be build and understood. In a great mental effort, we are able to make concepts of god, the universe and whatever. But we can only use things that we received as input from the outside, and we can only employ them if we have a self-created concept of them, if we consciously konw about them and can combine them. I do not know how you perceive it, but I am aware of every thought I create and of those I reflect and perceive. Yes, I can. I have practiced long to control my thoughts ultimately and I can shut them down completely thinking nothing. At some point, they return, they can be initiated by an action and it is easy to be aware of those that you initiate yourself, and those that are forced upon you. EDIT: No, I have read many posts today, and I did not want to reply to all of them, so I did not do it. But to this one, I gave some thought and when I analised, discriminated and interpreted all that was said here, I wanted to share my thoughts on this subject. So I commanded my fingers to type, focused my eyes on the text and dragged up some words from the recesses of my memories and arranged them in a conventional order to write this text.
The will makes my muscles to move my body, even to levitate for a moment, by jumping. When I want something, I send a power and give it a direction. If I want to raise my arm, which hangs down because the earth draws it towards it, then this power, which moves in me by willpower, flows to my hand and makes the muscles in this body to raise it. This way I have conquered the gravity - a great power. This happens also when I jump in the air, but only for a moment, because my willpower to move my whole body from the earth is only for a moment greater than the earth's gravity. If I could increase my willpower and store it in my body, I could overcome earth's gravity for longer periods and levitate higher in the air. But this I can't do until I am conscious on a divine state. But the initiated can, whenever he wants, pour in this eternal source of power without the need of converting it. He can be in the air as long as he directs his willpower against the gravity. - The chemical consistency of matter commands which vibrations the body is able to resist. If a body takes in radiation which it cannot resist, it can lead to total mental breakdown, even to death. This is why the body must first develop if we want to initiate a human consciousness to the highest grade of divine power. The willpower of man is of same vibration as the power in the Ark of the Covenant, but in the Ark of the Covenant, this power was thousands of times stronger. It gives Life or takes life, according to the dose.
invert_nexus............ Why should I stop when I make as much sense as others that post here. Just because I use others thoughts about what is being discussed I think they state what I think is true about such things as "thought".
all this confusional conflict between 'free will' an 'determinism' is i large large part due to the usually unacknowledged deeper duality of a 'knower' and a 'known' a 'subject' and an 'object'........i am not speaking of the appropriation of this insight by Adviata Vedanta, because teven though they profess to go beyond duality, yet they still- themselves-are caught up in the duality of a 'One' and a 'Many'--where the 'many' is thought to be illusionary or 'Maya'. So i am not meaning that what i mean is a feeling where there is no taking sides...it is a complimentarty between indeterminism and determinism....for example modern physics jhas shown this to be the case with how we see reality....it is like a play so how does free will be understood in this insight.? well, you CAN feel that actions are involuntary, and you can feel actions are voluntary DEPENDING on how you are feeling yourself to be IF you feel you are lving in a deterministic-al universe, then you will feel that---if you are open to a spontaneous complimentarity, then you will be aware of that. it is all to do with how you play with reality. what you feel is what you get...
SouthStar makes a very poignant realization. That is, Free Will can only exist where there is a thinking entity. Furthermore, where there is a thinking entity, there is necessarily free will (though, perhaps not absolutely free). Yet, I ask SouthStar, if it is not I who is thinking, then who? To whom or what should the thought be attributed, unless you would say that there is actually no thought taking place? In which case, what then do you consider a thought? If you do consider a thought to be taking place, but not by me, or us, then what are we? Are we that physical entity in which the electrical impulses which correlate to thought take place in? If so, are we then not the thinking thing? If we are not the physical entity, then what are we? You suggest that we are observers of thoughts. Is it not necessary to have awareness to observe, and does not awareness necessitate thought?
This "we are simply spectators or observers of thoughts from our brains and not the actual initiators" would mean that there is another brain in our head, required to observe what the first brain does. And then it would take yet another brain to observe what that second brain does, and so ad infinitum. There is a much simpler explanation for the above phenomenon. Thinking that we are merely observers of our own thoughts is a concept that needs to be elaborated a bit: Namely, we make observations of the 1st order, as well as observatios of the 2nd order. Observations of the 1st order ar those "immediate" ones, their result is that we think of the world and ourselves the way we have observed. "This is a computer." But we are also able to reflect on our own observation -- and these are the observations of the 2nd order, the meta-thoughts. Whenever we say things like, "I don't understand this", "I think I made a mistake in my conclusion" etc. -- this is when we make observations of the 2nd order. Seen as a whole, we are both observers and the observed. From the position of 1st order observations, we indeed seem predetermined and without free will. But from the position of 2nd order observations, we surely have free will. Free will is a certain meta-concept, the way, for example, criteria for what is scientific or what is normal are. Say, a criterium for what is scientific is intersubjective provability: this is a criterium that is applied on certain data in a certain way and is satisfied if a certain outcome is achieved; but we could not speak of intersubjective provability per se, without applying it to actual examples. Per analogy, we can say that free will is a socio-psychological concept (institute) that fulfills a certain task: People do things. In order to organize social life, the system of human society produced the concept of free will. So that when people do things, doing those things can be personally ascribed to them, and they held accountable -- this is what the concept (institute) of free will is there for, this is what it does. This goes in good and in bad. It just so happens that when it comes to the bad, there is a tendency to say "There really is no free will, so how can anybody be guilty when they have shot someone?" Nobody likes to take credit for a bad thing he did. But when it comes to good things, people like to take credit and say what they have done -- wrote a bestseller, saved people from a burning house etc. -- is soooooooo a product of their free will. That they were "creative". From the point of view of free will, shooting someone or writing a book are both acts of free will.
