New answers tagged free-will
0
So if I was to gather all the matter(and dark matter) in the universe, reconstitute it exactly as it was in the beginning and have exactly the same conditions , I would still make a tit of myself in the pub last saturday night.
0
View http://truthnpower.com/2014/05/16/free-will-or-determinism/
The man there seemed to have a good answer.
0
Because even if you accepted that the universe was a deterministic system you can't know the entire prior state and so deterministic chaos becomes synonymous with true randomness, and the premises to your argument are therefore invalid.
0
If you would upload a brain to a computer and run it it would make the
same decisions as the human version.
I don't think this logic is true. There would be unseen causes that affect our decision making.
(Just for example) If there are three kinds of miseries (adhyātmika, adhibhautika and adhidaivika) they would be affecting our decision making also.
...
1
You have kind of answered the question yourself, you can't do any if the things you propose in order to prove that free will doesn't exist, therefore you have no objective way to prove your premise is correct, so you have no basis to make the claim in the first place
0
Because it is a religious Judeo-Christian concept. ref here Over 40% of the American people still believe that Adam and Eve were the first two people on earth and reject Darwinian evolution. Article on creationism here.
Genesis 2:16-17 New International Version (NIV) And the Lord God
commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;
...
2
Reproducibility
I think the other answers cover the more philosophical and logical aspects of the argument quite well. I would like to consider in more depth a particular claim that you made:
If you would upload a brain to a computer and run it it would make the same decisions as the human version.
The problem with this claim is that it is utter ...
2
If you define free will as the generation of decisions from nothing then you have begged the question as to free will's nonexistence, if you are also presuming that every event is generated from some prior event.
When other respondents invoke quantum mechanics they are essentially attacking the latter point, i.e. determinism - that every event is generated ...
1
Assume everything is deterministic as proposed except for me. Then your proposal is predestined rather than being a result of genuine reasoning, as are the opinions of everyone who disagrees.
The exception is necessary for me to figure this out instead of being predestined.
3
There are at the moment I'm writing this five six answers to this question. I'm not going to give you yet a sixth seventh guy's opinion... I think that's a bit useless (and you'll probably get at least a seventh an eighth); rather, I'm going to make an attempt to specifically address your concerns here.
So let's start here.
1. The problem of determinism
...
3
I would say that any definition of free will would require a conscious beeing and that any object considered to posess a free will would have to be considered conscious.
If we follow the opinion that consciousness is strongly emergent (which is a popular opinion) i would say this would allow for actual free will.
If we follow the opinion that consciousness ...
2
Your position is one of the three sectarian views that lead to inaction that the Buddha declared 2500 years ago, in Anguttara Nikaya 3.61. That is the logical moral argument anyways..
The issue with the position that 'only the past affects the present and the future', is that it denies active choice in the present outright. But active choice (life) is shown ...
17
Schiphol's answer is correct, in that you need to first say what kind of free will you're talking about. I'm going to answer your question assuming that you're talking about libertarian free will. It's the "real", pre-philosophical kind of free will that most people think that have. Ted Wrigley's answer is also correct, in that free will seems like something ...
2
Here is an example of an argument against determinism and in favour of free will.
In a deterministic universe the past, the present, and the future are all fully determined. This means that the total information content of the universe remains constant over time. For example, Laplace's demon would know everything about the future state of the universe, so ...
10
We believe in free will because — aside from a few people with particular psychological conditions — we experience ourselves as beings capable of making choices and exercising free will. When someone brews a cup of coffee and drinks it, they do not generally think:
That was not an action any agent took, but an event predestined since
the beginning of ...
28
Most academic philosophers (around 60%, according to the PhilPapers survey) lean toward compatibilism: the view that determinism (which is what you are getting at, more or less) is compatible with free will.
Think of it this way: even if every decision is determined (in the "determinism" sense of the word), it's still useful to distinguish between what you ...
0
Free will and Consciousness- those are my favorite topics, because they are at the core of our existence and are key to understanding reality.
When it comes to investigating these topics, I always approach them in the most scientific way possible, in order to be sure I find out the truth and not just a theory.
The best method is to use direct experience ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
