The Concept of "Free will" is a lie!!

Personally, I do not believe in free will. I believe we like the idea
of being free to make whatever choice we want, but we can still only
choose from that which we have been presented. No matter how hard we
try to consider options we have never heard or seen before, it cannot
happen. We are confined to the choices available based on our prior
choices that have brought us to the place we are now. Cause and Effect.
Thus, true free will, does not exist.

Originally posted by SpeakerofTruth

Originally posted by WEOPPOSEDECEPTION
I agree that free will is an illusion. A very persistent one however. Try choosing what your next 10 thoughts will be.
If you ponder this deep enough, you might question what exactly the "self" is. It's like a camera that takes credit/ownership for what it sees.

Very true. Also, some will say, "Well, you can choose to be good or bad."Yeah, but we are predispostioned towards one or the other. If not through upbringing, experience. So, again, how is that "free wil."



[edit on 11-8-2008 by SpeakerofTruth]

I will say it, only I will say it correctly... It's not choosing between good and bad, it's the ability we have to make a decision, we are not preprogrammed to make one decision or another, it's the fact that we can that gives us our free will... Just because someone puts a gun to your head and says jump doesn't mean you have to choose to jump, but most likely you will... This has nothing to do with your free will even though the guy with the gun is attempting to force this action on you... I believe your perception of free will is off a bit... That is all..

reply to post by ElectricUncleSam



What do you mean it doesn't have anything to do with "free will?" In the circumstance that you mention, there is no choice at all... All you did was re-affirm what I have been saying.
Thank ya. That's all.

I dont believe things are determined by circumstance, only by consequence.

What goes around comes around.

And when justice isnt whats working what comes next is trouble.


sarc

Originally posted by sarcastic

I dont believe things are determined by circumstance, only by consequence.

What goes around comes around.

And when justice isnt whats working what comes next is trouble.


sarc

Either way, it kind of makes "free will" a moot concept. Like I said, I'd like to believe in free will, for humanity's sake, but the longer I live, the less I believe it to be a fact.

Free will is not so free if your influenced by evil - This all depends on what your angry about, your limit of Free will.

What got you so angry about your Free Will ?

So you are right that you could be in some type of bondage, or, your a slave to or in something, and you do not have free will in them area's, also limited - because you might want to fly, because that could be your free will to do so, but can't with limited knowledge - i'm not saying you can't fly.

Free will is not a lie - when you pick up a glass of water and put it to your lips this is the free will - did you not want to do that? then your point is only in part, but still true.

This in point, GOD will not go against your freewill, Thats why you don't get to know HIM, until you ask HIM, Not that GOD does not want you to ask to know HIM " Because HE does want you to ask "- thats why HE sends people who, by their free will, will go and do what HE would like them to do, the person sent is not a slave in this, He wants to please GOD after he got to know HIM, and how much GOD really IS GOD, He would like to tell the world about GOD.

No one can go against your free will about GOD, or prove GOD to you, if you do not want anything to do with GOD, then you will miss what others see and tell you they see or seen, this makes you blind to GOD - GOD knows your free will.

So you can beat me up for speaking about GOD, I don't care.

I know that GOD wants you to know HIM.

I know that one day you will see, right now what you can't see is because you don't ask. You have not, because you ask not.

GOD gave us free will, even evil has free will.

Free will is not a lie.

Originally posted by SpeakerofTruth

Originally posted by _Heretic

I am sure we could find harmony with cause and effect and use it to our advantage instead of being its slave

Well, I mean, in order for that to happen we simply hav to understand cause and effect.

exactly, and we do this in the contexts we create or understand, like science and like billiards, aim, hit, ball in pocket...cause and effect, yet we have created a context where we have control of cause and effect

If you run into a middle of a a busy highway and get struck by a vehicle the cause is you running into the oad and the effect is being struckby a vehicle. How do you avoid that? Don't run into the road.

I am sort of being facetious, but that is really what it boils down to.

your correct in my eyes

this would be the application of responsibility to avoid a context with negative cause an effect, and one...you are NOT in control of...

...if we could only make the vehicle bank and drop into the corner pocket

I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but I challenge your premise on the definition of free will. You say free will is the ability to choose, or will, something without regards to preceding events/causes. I disagree strongly. That is a definition of determinism....of course one thing will determine the next.

I will go so far as to give my own personal definition of free will, which you can then argue against. I say free will is the ability to perform an action, regardless of limiting factors which are indeed out of our control, which isn't externally forced upon you.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, to me, implies that free will exists. There is no such thing as predestination.

Originally posted by Alexander_Supertramp
I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but I challenge your premise on the definition of free will. You say free will is the ability to choose, or will, something without regards to preceding events/causes. I disagree strongly. That is a definition of determinism....of course one thing will determine the next.

I will go so far as to give my own personal definition of free will, which you can then argue against. I say free will is the ability to perform an action, regardless of limiting factors which are indeed out of our control, which isn't externally forced upon you.

here here

now were talking

Originally posted by Alexander_Supertramp

I will go so far as to give my own personal definition of free will, which you can then argue against. I say free will is the ability to perform an action, regardless of limiting factors which are indeed out of our control, which isn't externally forced upon you.

Well, when you act towards something, do you always take the action you really want to take? I bet not.

Originally posted by Migxp

So you can beat me up for speaking about GOD, I don't care.

I know that GOD wants you to know HIM.

I know that one day you will see, right now what you can't see is because you don't ask. You have not, because you ask not.

GOD gave us free will, even evil has free will.

Free will is not a lie.

Why would I want to beat you up over this? I seriously doubt that anyone has any closer connection to God than I do. I don't have to "believe" there isa God, I know there is. However, I don't think things are the way organized religion say it is. I have grown past group think.

not picking on God or Believers as I am one, just not religious anymore and I think there is a big difference.

But isn't free will and the 10 commandments mutually exclusive

would love to hear an explanation to it that isn't simply scripture

I think that the answer to question of whether free-will exists cannot be effectively answered by philosophy. It can/could be answered by quantum mechanics and an understanding of conscious awareness.

The MWI (The Many-Worlds Interpretation) is an approach to quantum mechanics according to which, in addition to the world we are aware of directly, there are many other similar worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time. The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory and thus from all physics. (more info)

There being many-worlds coexisting simultaneously ALL possible quantum states exist simultaneously.

My addition, to how the MWI interacts at a physiological/psychological level, is in short:

Conscious awareness is a precursor of the function of our actions within the world-line within which we are consciously aware of as individuals. Thus, we have what appears to be free-will; as each individual makes a decision, that leads to an action, their conscious awareness shifts into a world-line where that decision, and its correlative quantum history, have already occurred. It is the concept of "branching" in the MWI.

So in effect we DO in fact have free-will to choose..... among an infinite number of multiple choices (quantum states) that already exist. Thus allowing an adherence to a strict deterministic series of events and free-will to choose from a number of pre-existing/pre-determined choices.

It also dispenses with the necessity of bringing gods, angels, demons, et cetera into the argument.
-Euclid


[edit on 15-8-2008 by euclid]

In essence I would say one has to free their will while here, going through it with Eyes wide open.


Obeserving every minute detail (that) makes life something fascinating.

The concept of determinism is a consequence of Newtonian physics. In classical mechanics, everything has a cause and effect.

It may appear to be true, however, things are not what they appear to be in quantum mechanics.

From wiki
en.wikipedia.org...

Since the beginning of the 20th century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Newtonian physics, taken in isolation rather than as an approximation to quantum mechanics, depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determinative ways. At human scale levels of interaction, Newtonian mechanics gives predictions that in many areas check out as completely perfectible, to the accuracy of measurement. Poorly designed and fabricated guns and ammunition scatter their shots rather widely around the center of a target, and better guns produce tighter patterns. Absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet should produce absolutely reliable predictions of its path, or so was thought. However, knowledge is never absolute in practice and the equations of Newtonian mechanics can exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions, meaning small errors in knowledge of initial conditions can result in arbitrarily large deviations from predicted behavior. At atomic scales the paths of objects can only be predicted in a probabilistic way. The paths may not be exactly specified in a full quantum description of the particles; "path" is a classical concept which quantum particles do not exactly possess. The probability arises from the measurement of the perceived path of the particle. In some cases, a quantum particle may trace an exact path, and the probability of finding the particles in that path is one. The quantum development is at least as predictable as the classical motion, but it describes wave functions that cannot be easily expressed in ordinary language. In double-slit experiments, light is fired singly through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen and does not arrive at a single point, nor do the photons arrive in a scattered pattern analogous to bullets fired by a fixed gun at a distant target. Instead, the light arrives in varying concentrations at widely separated points, and the distribution of its collisions can be calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of light in this apparatus is deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference pattern an individual photon will make its contribution (see Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).

Atom decay is uncaused in Uranium-238.

Even before the laws of quantum mechanics were fully developed, the phenomenon of radioactivity posed a challenge to determinism. A gram of uranium-238, a commonly occurring radioactive substance, contains some 2.5 x 1021 atoms. By all tests known to science these atoms are identical and indistinguishable. Yet about 12600 times a second one of the atoms in that gram will decay, giving off an alpha particle. This decay does not depend on external stimulus and no extant theory of physics predicts when any given atom will decay, with realistically obtainable knowledge.

Albert Einstein did not like quantum mechanics
According to Al, "God does not play dice"

reply to post by Deaf Alien


As I said the MWI supplants the definition of the quantum physics that you posted. In the MWI there is no heisenberg uncertainty principle, there is no collapsing of the HUP. All quantum states exist at the same time.

My addition to that is that our conscious awareness is by definition only aware of ONE realilty (referred to as a world-line in the MWI).

I agree god doesn't play with dice.... god created all possibilities and made them exist at the same; and our conscious awareness just chooses which world-lines it will transit within based on the decisions we make.

-Euclid

The concept of free will is currently under study with some very interesting results. In this article, Brain Scanners Can See Your Decision Before You Make Them, scientist were able to predict the subjects decisions based on brain patterns up to seven seconds before the choice was made.

In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine.

Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation.

This seems to add weight to the argument presented by the OP. However, it should be noted that this study was not perfect.

The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction.

Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.

So, obviously more extensive testing will be done to try and determine just how much conscious control we really have in the decisions being made.

I'd also like to comment on this statment by the OP.

Honestly, being someone who believes in a Godhead, I have to say that we play the role we were individually meant to lay. Look at the universe, particularly our solar system. The planets rotate just as they should. Do they not? Are we to assume that this is just a cosmic accident or joke? I think not;I think not.

Well, what might seem like planets rotating as they should to you, seems more like a lot of random chaos to me. For one, the planets do not orbit the sun in any perfect form or shape. The Earth, for example, changes the shape of it's elliptical orbit over the course of 100,000 years. This is called Eccentricity. Also, Mercury, Venus, and Pluto actually spin retrograde to the other planets while Uranus is tilted on it's side and spins north to south. So, does that support the idea that they all rotate as they should? I think not.

Milankovitch Cycles

Strange Twist on Our Spinning Planet

reply to post by Evil Genius


The current brain-mapping/scanning technology is allowing us to "see" the physiological/mechanical aspects that are the function of the unconscious, preconscious and conscious awareness modalities of human perception; that are sub-systems of the overall quantum mechanical system I described. See Norman F. Dixon's book "Preconscious Processing" (for an understanding of how preconscious and unconscious awareness are able to process information that is both subliminal and outside the limen of conscous awareness); the neural activity is caused by the unconscious being "aware" of the possible choices and is the reason frontal corticle stimulation occurs. The preconscious processing information system shifts to that region and analyzes the data presented from the unconscious awareness. The data being analyzed is the quantum information pattern of the "future" event about to take place. Once the data is sufficiently analyzed neurological activity is transferred back to the parietal cortex for sensory integration, as described, and ultimately physiological execution.

At the level of execution in the decision process the conscious awareness has final executive discretion and may decide to choose differently. Thus explaining the discrepencies in the experiments. Freewill is therefore preserved and in spite of that a strong deteministic reality is preserved due to the nature of the underlying MWI quantum reality and that described by the General Theory.

-Euclid



[edit on 15-8-2008 by euclid]

Well, quantum mechanics is used more in an efort to understand physical systems, which really aren't physical at all, but that is an entirely different subject. Just what exactly it has to do with judment and the decision making process is a mystery to me.

However,Euclid, you made some good points, particularly the "many-worlds" theory...

[edit on 15-8-2008 by SpeakerofTruth]