What are we? Material Objects, or Persons w/ souls?

When you see a beautiful woman you are compelled to look at her cleavage when the opportunity arises. Or to look away if she notices it.

No free will. No decision was taken. A behavioural pattern was executed nonetheless.

 

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What if I was gay?

Yes, we are prisoners to our biological imperatives. Monkey be, monkey see, monkey do. I still think that comes under physical constraints. But outside of that we're free, I tell you - free!!! Free to grope those beautiful breasts and rob banks and poo where we please; free to cross continents in stolen cars and punch our bosses and knock policemen's hats off. Free, I tell you! Free!!!

 

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If you don't have free will, you are a robot following instructions. In general, free will is all that is real. The proof that free will is all that is real is expressed in the fact that the rock does not control a damn thing. The rock is just junk data, just atoms configured in a certain way.

 

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Actually no we are not prisoners to biology. We can evolve.

 

You think your boss is a cunt. You want to shout at your boss telling him he is a cunt.

You cannot.

You can if the conditions are right. You feel confident. You just found a new job. You did too many drugs in the morning and can't think straight.

Where is the free will if you can act only under special circumstances? The existence of a theoretical possibility to call your boss a cunt doesn't imply that there is a real possibility.

Slave to the system.

 

That just means the boss has more will power. You have free will to do anything you want, that does not mean it's always smart to do so.

 

No, it means your actions are directed by circumstances. If you would have free will you would be able to take any action at any time.

 

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FREEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMMM!!

 

I know, I know. All the while that I was espousing our great freedoms I knew, in my heart of hearts, all this to be true. But still the theoretical possibility exists - which is what this thread is about, isn't it. The moments when the theoretical possibility becomes a practical one, and we tell the boss exactly what we think and leave that very morning, bound for the Arctic wastes of darkest Canada, are truly some of life's greatest. I only wish they could come more often - God willing.

 

This theory can easily be tested. Put the same person in the same set of environmental cues a few hundred times and monitor his behaviour. Then change something radical.

According to the free will theory his reaction in the first set of similar situations should give a range of very different outcomes.

I predict very much a limited set of outcomes.

I predict that changing the environment will change the 'free will'.

Theory isn't really interesting if reality says otherwise.

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Why chance? Why do you view evolution as chance? It is a very shrewd processes, an interaction between variety and environment. What is chancy about that?

You should spend some time studying this thing that you denigrate all the time. Pick up a few books on evolution and read them through. It might not make you accept the observations of others, but at least you can have some informed objections, rather than making stuff up and sounding uneducated.

Oh, and rocks don't have neurons. A soul? Do you think it is any coincidence that animals have varying amounts of neurons, and those with the highest ratio to body weight seem to have something more similar to what you call a soul? Lizards seem to have more of a "soul" than worms do, and rats even moreso, and then puppies and chimps and us. Wow... there certainly seems to be come correlation between neurons and souls. I wonder what that could mean?

It's also funny how a baseball-bat to the cranium seems to mix up what the soul does. It can change a person's likes and dislikes, their moral choices, their behavior, permanently. Another clue?

Hmmm, neurological disorders seem to rob people of their souls. My grandfather, with his Alzheimer's, started to seem like a lifeless mass of flesh once his neurons turned to mush. The evidence is mounting...

Compare all of this to the evidence for a "soul", which would be exactly none, and any person choosing "soul" has obviously forfeited reason for superstition.

 

There is no single entity that is 'us'. It's just vast impulses which make up a single nervous system.

 

99 people queuing up at a bank will hand over their hard-earned cash like the pathetic, dull, mindless automatons they are, so that the bank can make ever more 'ethical' investments and buy ludicrous amounts of Nazi gold.

The 100th person - ie, me - would jam a shotgun in the hapless cashier's face and scream at her to fill the bag and be ruddy well quick about it.

Only kidding. I queue up like the pathetic, dull, mindless automaton that I am and proffer my life-savings for them to spend on lollipops and cruise missiles.

My mate Mental Barry wouldn't though, he robs banks all the time. Well, not all the time - he's currently doing a 15 stretch in Strangeways.

But the question is, O Wise Monkey: why O why O why are Mental Barry's so much bigger than mine?

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He is not bigger. His standard response to being in the bank environment is to initiate bankrobbing behavioural patterns. He is without free will like you.

 

But he shouldn't even be in there. He's been told to keep away. He doesn't though.

 

He is compelled to go near banks.

You are just providing data that supports my case. Thank you my friend.

 

No, I was just being silly, my overly deterministic chum.

Don't misunderstand me, I largely share your outlook, but still feel that we have a certain amount of freedom to do the right (or the wrong) thing. Bankrobbers can become priests and priests can become bankrobbers. We reserve the right to thumb our nose at our instincts and our most-venerated institutions.

Admittedly these things don't happen that often but it's the anomalies that make the headlines and establish the exceptions to the rule. Not everything we do is governed by our ancestry, or morality, or our upbringing. These constrain our choices to a great extent but we as individuals are the ultimate arbiters. A father can forbid his teenage daughter from dying her hair bright red but a strong-willed individual will still go ahead and do it. He, his wife, his family, friends and the local priest might tell her she must keep her unborn child but ultimately the decision about whether or not to do so is hers and hers alone - and such decisions don't conform to any established behaviour patterns and aren't governed by any kind of simplistic left-right thinking.

There are times in life where we enter new territory and don't really have any precedents to draw on - decisions to make that make us the people we are.

 

redarmy11:
I trust you're not a dualist. If you're like me, you believe cognition/consciousness is a consequence of our brains' activities. If I'm right that I have judged you as a monist, then I don't see how you can think we are free. The atoms in our brains do what they must do, in the same exact way as the atoms in a rock do what they must do. The difference between a brain and a rock is that the brain is highly organized matter. The brain creates patterns which result in consciousness and apparent "willingness" whereas rocks do not. That the patterns created by our brains result in a consciousness and an illusion of freedom is incidental.

 

Haha, good one. Very good.

 

Thanks, and I agree with your posts, but wouldn't it be more of a probabilistic system, rather than a deterministic one? As we discover more about how the brain works, it isn't as cut-and-dry as the old model of chemical reaction -> Neuron firing -> chemical reaction -> repeat.

Now we understand that the chemicals have to build to a certain threshold. Anything in this shady boundary will cause a single synapse to fire, but the dendrite that receives this firing probably won't do anything. It might take 3 firings in 2 milliseconds for this other neuron to fire. Another might take 5 inputs in 10 milliseconds. What about 5 in 10.2 milliseconds? Sometimes you get a firing, and sometimes you don't, it depends, not just on the amount of chemicals built up, but how long since the last firing, and the exact position of these chemicals.

At what point does this chaotic mess become more probability than determinism?

I think, if we had perfect knowledge of all of the brain's processes, we would say that in my particular situation, I have a 96.78% chance of hitting the submit button after this paragraph (having planed the post thusly), but there is the 3.22% chance that I might add another sentence, as a related thought pops into my head. Even with perfect knowledge of all brain states and activities, this might be the closest we can get to predicting human behavior.


Free will. <---- Woo Hoo!

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