"Scientists say Free will isn't real, but urge "Believe!""

[IJesusChrist]

hxxp://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/ ... 2010-04-06

A middle-aged man hires a prostitute, knowingly exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted infection and exploiting a young drug addict for his own pleasure. Should the man be punished somehow for his transgression? Should we hold him accountable? Most people, I’d wager, wouldn’t hesitate to say “yes” to both questions.

But what if you thought about it in the following slightly different, scientific terms? The man’s decision to have sex with this woman was in accordance with his physiology at that time, which had arisen as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular genotype, which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants of similar traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. Even his ability to inhibit or “override” these forces, or to understand his own behavior, is the product itself of these forces! What’s more, this man’s brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness; rather, his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioral algorithms that responded, either normally or in error, in ways that had favored genetic success in the ancestral past.

I've believed in determinism since I was 13 or 14, once I started realizing the ties between biology & physics & chemistry. I have wondered though - how does the acknowledgement of determinism (no free will) change the way we think? It most certainly does, but should it?

It's a very deep understanding of ourselves we need to reason with this question - I don't particularly think that we are ready to understand what society really means by this idea. We are all timeless, that is to say, time is just the screen in which the script is shown upon. The script has been written, and always has been - time is just the wonderful embodyment of it's dependance.

Does the fact that knowing of you're inability to make decisions beyond your DNA and historical occurences allow you to be free of social ideals and morals? Well no, why would we want an entity that believes s/he can do evil under any circumstances? Yet s/he was always going to turn out that way, so should we ignore it?

No matter what our decision is, it was always going to be that. :wink:

 

[maxfreakout]

determinism doesnt necessarily imply no free-will, depending on whether it is 'compatibilist determinism' or 'incompatibilist determinism'

 

[BrainEater]

we can do evil, because we can. however we can do good, because we can, too...
what would happen though, if we couldn't do one or the other any more??? well apparently there would take place some sort of polarization, and if it were gone, what would there be left??? what if we were not fully conscious of the choices we were constantly be taking regarding good/evil??? well actually that's what appears to be going on. varying degrees of consciousness and already made choices, define the attitudes we take towards the choices that have been, are or yet are to be presented to the authors and audiences of consciousness. so what roles do we take in that play??? and why??? think about it...

so what's there to say? make yourself bigger or expand, when you are too small!!! give what you would want to be receiving!!!
be grateful for what you have and who you are!!! free will is a human invention and i heard god's (sorry for that word there) only condition for the creation of our puny existences once, has been considered to be free will...
anyways... i suppose you quickly figured out the existence of polarities, boundaries, limitations and all other that would go along with such a godly creation... so this poses the premise for misery and suffering for the human experience in general,
but had not buddha [aka "the enlightened" (it's a title, just like jesus)] already had it pointed out, ...that (all?) "life is suffering"???

hence that seems to direct awareness surprisingly to the responsability we take for our lives and others... stop creating what you don't want and start creating fully and exclusively just what you DO want...then all shall be good... or at least as you want it...
how could you have a free will, if you didn't even know/were aware, that you had been being trapped!? free will is an illusion amongst many. true free will is what you are truely in the essence of your being, for true love is too strong for letting itself be trapped for a long time...

and well yeah.. the acknowledgement of determinism by itself should change the way we think, because if it wouldn't how would we be acknowledging any determinism then??? also do i have to point out, that a whole understanding of what "time" really seems to be, might be too big for many to give it room in their private deterministic systems aka their minds???
life is in fact a relativity to time and space provides the rest for what is needed for the universe to manifest the possibly infinite amount of possibilities it may be containing, if it were, is and shall be a infinite universe.


i think knowing that we don't know, or the acceptance of such a fact, may facilitate our feets in gently walking the paths of our life that is possibly yet to be unfolded, which is basically all the time of our life.
choose mental liberation, thru universal-dimensional acceptance of love, life and light!!!
may the omni-directional, -dimensional, -scient, -potent, -present, -loving energy force be with you, as it is with-in and without you, as it shall be so. just open your eyes .... and you shall see!!! 8) :lol:

determinism is not a self-consistent belief-system i belive, tho... well actually i guess it MIGHT be, but that would probably make it necessary for it to be declared a matter of perspective and by that it might just fall into mostly the same sets of categories, that might contain the idea/paradigm/belief-system of delusion. maybe (the state) of delusion might be defined beforehand as the amount of perceived illusions out of the amount of all possibly perceivable illusions???

let us not forget, we might have forgotten something and that we might indeed be more than we might probably be thinking we possibly could be. well lets face it. how much can you actually imagine to be??? and how much of that do you want??? and what are you waiting for if you figured out your personal answers for the previously asked questions??? recognize potential and then realize it, if that's what you want!!!


peace :weedman:

 

[Brugmansia]

Outside our once embraced consciousness with the included imagination its possibilities of unbounded freedom, two gateways with passages open up; both very narrow, but they may look spectacular because it's also where the oblivious path of size becomes a lucid fact.

This is the visual portray of it:

Blake's a genius. :heart:

As a cellibate, I have hired a hooker as well a few times. Although it wasn't my thing, I'm glad I practised it.

 

[Brugmansia]

Make this your head

Make this your heart

And find the deepest connection between body and mind through psilocybine and cacti.

 

[IJesusChrist]

@ max,

Firstly:
If consciousness is seperate from determinism, what causes it?
If it is caused by something, like you're choices, which are caused by something else, isn't this determinism? You can't escape it, you do not have free-will.

Secondly:
If your consciousness is seperate from determinism, and there is no logical cause for it,
than by definition, it is random.

The universe is partly random, or entirely determined.

Is random choices the same as free-will?

@ Brain and Brug:

Why can't your answers just be simple sometimes

 

[BrainEater]

hmm so you could swipe away the deterministic nature of the universe by accumulating as many random choices as possible and with a big enough pile you'd be able to drown the sophisticated universal rubber duckie, which is surfing the windy seas of the individualistic streams of consciousness??? like making the universal processor overload and crash the system, hence freeing the will???
or might just choosing free will be the most vital step in the process of attaining free will??? i dunno.... :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[IJesusChrist]

Choosing free-will with a blatant anvil in front of you would be like blindly dropping to the ocean. You choose how you'd like to succumb, with a veil or with a tissue.

 

[ararat]

choosing determinism didn't pay off either, I have to say. made me feel help and powerless. subjecting yourself to any term or concept doesn't pay off I guess.

 

[Crimzen]

i guess determinism and free-will can co-exist because of the way time works
as has already been said everything that has been and will be already is
but i dont agree with the definition of time in this regard
i think the way things are is the only way they could ever be because of cause and effect
but i think the future is formed, its not currently existant (and theres only one direction of time at the moment)
think of it as a fibonacci spiral (coz i want to) if you were to draw one to exact measurements the act of drawing it creates it therefore its not already there
BUT because of its internal structure it will always be the same in the end
no matter how many times you do it, it can only come out one way

i think free will and consciousness is like the pencil one would use to draw the spiral
time is the paper and the end product of the spiral is the determined outcome

?

 

[IJesusChrist]

mmmmmm i get what you're saying, but if the past is all decided by cause and effect up to the current, the future becomes the past so how can it be any different?

What determinism says is that all of your previous histroy combined has made the only out come of what you draw, exactly the outcome of what you draw... In essense, given enough information about you and your past, one could completely predict your every move.

Yet you can still be conscious.

 

[BrainEater]

hmm yeah!! what is connecting the continuum of possibly endless paths from the past into the future?? it's the now!! and well...
how can you have (or rather be?) free will??? possibly never, if your mind is constantly thinking about the past or the future and with time comes habit and attachment, which do the rest of the job of making the free will unfree. but of course, you might retain a small fraction of free will and even get into thinking while in that state, that you are the prevailing influence of your decisions and therefore of your own will. however this might be an illusion, considering that the most effective slavery would of course be that the enslaved beings would be, while being enslaved, thinking they were not.

 

[IJesusChrist]

what is connecting the continuum of possibly endless paths from the past into the future??

There is only 1 path.

 

[BrainEater]

right!! in the timelesness of the eternal now. which is basically forever. not to mention it is hence infinite... or is it forever, because of being infinite?? whether it matters or not, who cares?? just go find it... in the core of your own infinite being, it is awaiting you, to be found...

i think it can be funny to think about infinity... how much more infinity is 10x infinity compared to just 1xinfinity??? what is crazier?? infinite complexity or infinite simplicity??? :mrgreen:


to me reality is this:

regarding time: before the now it goes direction infinity and after the now, as well...
regarding space: it can be zoomed in direciton infinity and zoomed out, as well...

maybe that's the 4th dimension.. not sure... dimensionality mostly confuses me..

 

[Ioan]

The main point of that SA article was how perhaps "deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions".
Morality is about social fairness.
Indeed, if you are primed to believe that what you do is inevitable why should you act socially fair...just do what is best for you.

However, one issue I might point out in the study is that they were feeding the participants not just deterministic messages, but also fatalistic ones. As pointed out in this summary (ttp://www.naturalism.org/roundup.htm#2010) the sort of free will the authors of the experiment in the SA article probably had in mind is clearly libertarian, or a sort of supernatural freedom, which is by the way, the kind probably held by the typical person. Some people, such as compatibilists, hold free will and determinism as compatible, and that messages of inevitability are fatalistic rather than deterministic. So, the authors of the experiment are clearly feeding participants pessimistic no-free will messages, while there are arguably less pessimistic and realistic views out there such as compatibilism.

Second, I would generally say the issue with experiments like these is that what they show is mainly how easily many people are primed or lead to believe something. Consider if some great argument was on the headline news about how we don't have free will. Would people understand it? Chance that this would change peoples day-today lives much....not much.

As to the topic if we are free or not I generally considermyself compatabilist and find that postion best reasoned, but the position is complicated, and it is not like I would be surprised to learn the way things are as they are and can't be otherwise. The moral consequences of people realizing we don't have some supernatural freedom should be going away from retributive punishment toward consequentalism. Search for the paper "for the law neuroscience changes nothing and everything" for a good explanation.

First post here and this caught my eye. When I ponder things like free will I mostly continue the realization of how little I understand, and my head hurts a bit. Suppose that is partly why I got out of philosophy.

 

[IJesusChrist]

thanks for that insight ful post & welcome.

I was aware the purpose of the research;

As the statement "My brain made me do it" becomes more understandable by people, will it reflect a change in their behavior?

I really could care less, the people that do become affected and actually change who they are and how they act upon realizing free-will is false are fairly unintelligent beings to begin with. Morals do not simply drift away upon the perception of life through another looking glass...

One must realize no matter what the truth holds, it has always been holding that, before and after realization, and there is no cause for change to correlate with a change in perception [in this case atleast].

 

[McAllister]

Does the fact that knowing of you're inability to make decisions beyond your DNA and historical occurences allow you to be free of social ideals and morals? Well no, why would we want an entity that believes s/he can do evil under any circumstances? Yet s/he was always going to turn out that way, so should we ignore it?

No matter what our decision is, it was always going to be that. :wink:

I've studied Thelema and what you're describing as DNA and historical occurences seems a lot like what Aleister Crowley describes as "true will" where "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" but Crowley goes on to explain that harming someone else isn't your true will because it's like harming yourself, likewise restricting someone else's liberty is like restricting your own liberty. In these terms you can't do evil under any circumstances, "true will" is exercising your free will without harming anyone or restricting their liberty.

There's also determinism which I see like what free will is the lower ego allowed to exercise. In the UK the prostitution trade has had it bad from a government infiltrated by extremist feminists which will hopefully be out of power by Friday so I will use a prostitution friendly example.

A man is sexually unsatisfied with his partner and his true will is urging him to seek sexual satisfaction elsewhere. The task is provided by the higher will but the means by which it will be determined is to be provided by the free will of the lower ego. Thus he may decide his options are:
1) Find a mistress and risk her disrupting his relationship with his wife by trying to make the relationship more permanent and causing him untold stress;
2) Chat up a woman in a bar who may make him have unprotected sex and may be a hiv risk before she hasn't been tested for sexually transmitted diseases;
3) See a prostitute at a flat. having heard the arguments of the prostitution trade in the UK he may feel this is relatively safe because the ladies at the flat practice safe sex and always use a condom, and the ladies at the flat get regularly tested for stds. This would also have the advantage of being a commercial transaction that wouldn't spill over into his relationship with his wife;
4) Be faithful to his wife, suppress his true will, and take all the agony and suppression/repression that brings with it.

Under these circumstances the free will of the man may determine that option 3 is the best option, or he can chose any other option as he is free to do so, although only options 1-3 will lead to him fulfilling the task set by his higher will.

 

[_Avatar_]

But what if you thought about it in the following slightly different, scientific terms? The man’s decision to have sex with this woman was in accordance with his physiology at that time, which had arisen as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural...

That's what I've been saying for a long time. And to answer IJC's question, yes, it does change the way you interact with the world. Because once you grasp this fully, you can "hate the sin, not the sinner." You can also forgive yourself for your past mistakes. It does not mean you become an irresponsible or "evil" person. I even think it gives a gentle heart, because you start focusing less on the "evildoers" and more on structures (the family, education, businesses, churches and other institutions) that turn people wicked. There are no evil beings, only evil dynamics (some of which have been operative for hundreds or thousands of years).

The free will we have (from the individual perspective) allows us to make changes in these dynamics: to educate parents, teachers, employers, employees, clergy and so on about healthier, constructive and more humane ways of interacting. And not just educating (the verbal part): it also requires experiential therapy (the nonverbal part), but that's a whole different subject which I've already hinted at a couple of times. It's also in the nonverbal realm (accessed by meditation, psychedelics and so on) that one attains authentic "social ideals and morals", turning one into a genuine, self-motivated saint rather than a law-abiding or God-fearing follower.

 

[IJesusChrist]

Ahhh, avatar you have a wise contradiction to the statement - the article is fearful of a collective becoming aware and using the excuse "my brain made me do it" when found in negative situations.

But you say, having realized these, we can only condemn the situation the person is in, or the system which had brought them to be. I would agree with this, for the most part, aside from that DNA can be linked to abusiveness... Well, actually I doubt there is scientific evidence for that.

 

[_Avatar_]

we can only condemn the situation the person is in, or the system which had brought them to be. I would agree with this, for the most part, aside from that DNA can be linked to abusiveness... Well, actually I doubt there is scientific evidence for that.

If it were true (let's say it was proven by some research team), one could then make statements like "Redneck DNA is clearly abusive" or "see, this is why the Arabs have adopted such an abusive religion!" In other words, there would be a scientific basis for racism, which would have disastrous results.

I don't believe abusiveness is related to DNA or similar mechanisms (previous lives etc.). Have you heard about Stanford University's prison experiment? It clearly showed that any person can become cruel, given a certain position in an authoritarian setting.

What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

You can read about the experiment here: http://www.prisonexp.org/
Or here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Or here: http://www.zimbardo.com/zimbardo.html

Fascinating stuff.