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This doesn't work on mobile. Free will and self-determination are not the same thing. Free will means the consequences and outcomes you face can be tracked bac

by _8j50 3y ago

This doesn't work on mobile. Free will and self-determination are not the same thing. Free will means the consequences and outcomes you face can be tracked back to decisions you made. Everything can be pre-destined at a level that transcends time and space as we understand it, and you can still have free will. Imagine starting a program you wrote, you know exactly what it will do given you already know the exact parameters of it's execution environment and inputs. If the program has free will, it means that it will make decisions without those decisions being hard coded into it. In other words, its decision making is free from the will of the programmer or other programs, however, the environment, what other programs do and how the programmer adapts to the program's decision will affect the outcome. The programmer, being outside of the software reality the program is facing is able to know what free will decisions will be made and pre-plan all things accordingly. To put it a bit diffrently, this measurement and people in general confuse free will with controllable outcomes. Free will does not mean you have any control over outcomes or that your decisions cannot and have not already been predicted and known. It just means that you are allowed to make decisions based on certain input and environemnt. In a moral context, this is relevant because you get held responsible for or credited for decisions you make. Your will is free because despite outside influence or even coercion you still get a choice, even if your choice in the end had no effect on anything, you were allowed to make it anyways. If your will isn't free, you would be a mere processor executing instructions, processing decisions that were already made by others. Either your will is free, your will is not free and you are an agent of soemone else's will or some might say it's all randomness (a concept incompatible with our knowledge of causal reality).

vidarh 3y ago
Your definition of free will is a compatibilist one, and a lot of people reacts strongly negatively to compatibilist definitions when you turn explain that in a deterministic universe they are compatible with you not actually being able to make a different choice if we "rewound time". To me, a compatibilist "free will" is not free - it's an illusion. Being aware the "free" part of compatibilist free will is an illusion is important, because it has major moral implications. E.g. if people could not have acted differently than they have, then ascribing responsibility to people for their actions can reasonably be considered immoral. Your last paragraph is assuming there is agency to start with, something which is not a given, and so the argument is not logically valid as stated.
- _8j50 3y ago
  I think the critical thing you and I disagree with is how you think chance and randomness exist, there is no proof that they do, everything has a cause. There is no rewinding of time. You and I are experiencing time one reality clockrate at a time and our minds refuse to contemplate reality beyond time as we know it, that's why infinity is a difficult to grasp concept for us. You couldn't have made a different decision, but it was still your decision. It is because you assumed that your decisions control all outcomes that you feel deluded. Or you assumed your decisions can't be predicted. Let me give you an example: A man wantes to kill himself so he took cyanide but it just so happens, a car ran into his house by accident and found him in time, then after recovery he shoots himself in the mouth directly to the brain with a shotgun but in the last second his neighbor made a loud sound that startled him and he ended up shooting half of his face off instead, he recovered from that and jumped off a building but he landed on a car and somehow he broke a lot of bones but was still alive, he crawled out his hospital bed after a few years, he hanged himself but the rope wasn't thr right length, he broke his neck and the rope snapped, he spent many decades paralyzed on a hospital bed. Now that man had free will to make the decision about killing himself but the outcome is that in each case he failed because his destiny of be a paralytic was planned around his decisions to attempt suicide. In no way was his free will an illusion? he was allowed to make the decision and act on it but whether or not things go as he planned is what he does not control. A less morbid example: I want to get tacos and head over to my regular taqueria but they happen to be closed due to a plumbing emergency, so I head over to mcdonalds instead. I made a free will decision to get tacos but the fact that I couldn't doesn't mean I don't have free will. Now, if the persons who own the taqueria and mcdonalds predicted beforehand that I will attempt to get tacos this morning and orchestrated a fake plumbing emergency, knowing with certainty that I will go to mcdonalds, does that mean my will was any less free? No. Because my ability to control outcomes is what I don't have, I was still able to make that decision to get tacos. Now, if those business owners brainwash me to a point where they can control my decision to get tacos or mcdonalds, then I would have lost free will because it isn't outcomes but my decision making process that is being controlled. What makes you feel deluded is you now have to face the fact that you are not in control of your outcome, but only of your decisions. Concepts like justice would not need to exist if everyone controlled their own outcomes. Step back to the begining, did you decide to be born or to exist? If you couldn't even control that, why did you presume you could control any outcome? You can make decisions and hopefully most of the time the outcome goes your way but at what point between birth and adulthood did you suddenly gain control of your destiny? I wish more people can read this but therein is the difference between fate and destiny. Destiny is the outcome you can't control, fate is that same outcome but connected to specific decisions you and others made. In my first example, becoming a paralytic was his destiny, his excercise of free will to attempt suicides is the cause of his tragic paralytic fate (and I hope my morbid example scared someone off lol).

by _8j50 3y ago

vidarh 3y ago

Your definition of free will is a compatibilist one, and a lot of people reacts strongly negatively to compatibilist definitions when you turn explain that in a deterministic universe they are compatible with you not actually being able to make a different choice if we "rewound time". To me, a compatibilist "free will" is not free - it's an illusion. Being aware the "free" part of compatibilist free will is an illusion is important, because it has major moral implications. E.g. if people could not have acted differently than they have, then ascribing responsibility to people for their actions can reasonably be considered immoral. Your last paragraph is assuming there is agency to start with, something which is not a given, and so the argument is not logically valid as stated.

_8j50 3y ago
I think the critical thing you and I disagree with is how you think chance and randomness exist, there is no proof that they do, everything has a cause. There is no rewinding of time. You and I are experiencing time one reality clockrate at a time and our minds refuse to contemplate reality beyond time as we know it, that's why infinity is a difficult to grasp concept for us. You couldn't have made a different decision, but it was still your decision. It is because you assumed that your decisions control all outcomes that you feel deluded. Or you assumed your decisions can't be predicted. Let me give you an example: A man wantes to kill himself so he took cyanide but it just so happens, a car ran into his house by accident and found him in time, then after recovery he shoots himself in the mouth directly to the brain with a shotgun but in the last second his neighbor made a loud sound that startled him and he ended up shooting half of his face off instead, he recovered from that and jumped off a building but he landed on a car and somehow he broke a lot of bones but was still alive, he crawled out his hospital bed after a few years, he hanged himself but the rope wasn't thr right length, he broke his neck and the rope snapped, he spent many decades paralyzed on a hospital bed. Now that man had free will to make the decision about killing himself but the outcome is that in each case he failed because his destiny of be a paralytic was planned around his decisions to attempt suicide. In no way was his free will an illusion? he was allowed to make the decision and act on it but whether or not things go as he planned is what he does not control. A less morbid example: I want to get tacos and head over to my regular taqueria but they happen to be closed due to a plumbing emergency, so I head over to mcdonalds instead. I made a free will decision to get tacos but the fact that I couldn't doesn't mean I don't have free will. Now, if the persons who own the taqueria and mcdonalds predicted beforehand that I will attempt to get tacos this morning and orchestrated a fake plumbing emergency, knowing with certainty that I will go to mcdonalds, does that mean my will was any less free? No. Because my ability to control outcomes is what I don't have, I was still able to make that decision to get tacos. Now, if those business owners brainwash me to a point where they can control my decision to get tacos or mcdonalds, then I would have lost free will because it isn't outcomes but my decision making process that is being controlled. What makes you feel deluded is you now have to face the fact that you are not in control of your outcome, but only of your decisions. Concepts like justice would not need to exist if everyone controlled their own outcomes. Step back to the begining, did you decide to be born or to exist? If you couldn't even control that, why did you presume you could control any outcome? You can make decisions and hopefully most of the time the outcome goes your way but at what point between birth and adulthood did you suddenly gain control of your destiny? I wish more people can read this but therein is the difference between fate and destiny. Destiny is the outcome you can't control, fate is that same outcome but connected to specific decisions you and others made. In my first example, becoming a paralytic was his destiny, his excercise of free will to attempt suicides is the cause of his tragic paralytic fate (and I hope my morbid example scared someone off lol).