Free will is an illusion....?

[Juana]

LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...

[Hype]

Oh, there are lots of people like me (I mean, relatively speaking... after all, you noticed Sam Harris is one, sort of), just usually they're in science departments, not in the humanities. For whatever reason, especially in philosophy recently, there has been a lot of interest in defending views that make humans "special" and are anti-Darwinian in various technical ways. I don't get it, personally. Though I guess I get the existential worry that if Darwin is right a lot of our behaviour is not only not our own, but is destined to be our downfall (almost every species that has ever existed is extinct).

It's equally weird that I'm fairly rogue in my dept., because we're known for being a bastion of "analytic Marxism" (see: G.A. Cohen), and Marx was a determinist (influenced by Hegel, who was influenced by Spinoza) and a materialist. (I am, by the way, as a result of my views about human nature and free will, a pretty radical socialist... if you hadn't noticed.)

Btw, I missed Jasper's post at the bottom of the previous page. He comes to my defense a bit in this disagreement with LJF about what exactly he (LJF) needs to say to adequately defend his view. I think Jasper's exactly right (not because he is defending me, but because I think he clearly sees what I have been trying to explain to LJF), and I hope others can see what he's saying too. I was pushing LJF because he's the only one who hasn't "acquiesced" (another word for Mockbee to look up? It's a word I only know because of Spinoza...) to my onslaught against 'free will' (this is actually not true anymore, Juana seems to believe in free will too, but he actually gave a pretty decent explanation for his belief, to which I responded by asking a couple of questions, so we'll see where that goes). I really would have liked to see LJF actually try to explain why he believes/feels the way he does. I know lots of people who agree with him, and are philosophers, and try really freakin' hard to be clear about their reasons and fail, but at least they try. I am aware that I could be wrong, if I've missed a detail somewhere, or whatever, but I have no idea what I could have missed, and it'd be nice if someone with the opposing view could show me where it is. I also have enjoyed Mockbee's posts in this thread a lot. It's great to see non-academics really interested in examining their own minds.

As for "dumbing down"... I have been doing my best to articulate things in ways that are not "dumbed down", but don't presume prior knowledge, and move slower than I would amongst peers who I know know the same background stuff I do. I am writing to you guys the way I talk to the undergraduate students I teach. Frankly, you guys are doing better than most of them do.

[Hype]

LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...

I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?

Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.

Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.

[Pandemonium]

LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...

I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?

Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.

Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.

Drive the 405 Freeway through LA during rush hour. It's easy.

[chaos]

Don't try and dumb stuff down for us, unless you encounter evidence that deems it necessary......

[well, hopefully there is some stuff here in the entire thread that hasn't been drastically 'dumbed down'.............................]



I really have got the most out of looking up terminology on my own that I have never seen or don't know the meaning of. It helps elevate my thinking.

@Mockbee

There are several universities that put their courses online for the public for free. You can watch the lectures, download assignments and some reading material; you are on your own with regarding to books, but I'm sure you can find them at a local library.

Yale has a nice site. Here is the link: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy. This will take you to the philosophy offerings. There are currently two courses posted. There are a variety of courses. Just hit the "courses" link on the upper left side of the page to see all of the offerings.

What is Open Yale Courses?

Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

Registration is not required.
No course credit, degree, or certificate is available.
The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. It also gives the user a wide variety of other options for structuring the learning process, for example downloading, redistributing, and remixing course materials.

Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

[Hype]

LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...

I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?

Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.

Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.

Drive the 405 Freeway through LA during rush hour. It's easy.

That clearly counts as a sufficient prior cause for some.

[Hype]

Don't try and dumb stuff down for us, unless you encounter evidence that deems it necessary......

[well, hopefully there is some stuff here in the entire thread that hasn't been drastically 'dumbed down'.............................]



I really have got the most out of looking up terminology on my own that I have never seen or don't know the meaning of. It helps elevate my thinking.

@Mockbee

There are several universities that put their courses online for the public for free. You can watch the lectures, download assignments and some reading material; you are on your own with regarding to books, but I'm sure you can find them at a local library.

Yale has a nice site. Here is the link: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy. This will take you to the philosophy offerings. There are currently two courses posted. There are a variety of courses. Just hit the "courses" link on the upper left side of the page to see all of the offerings.

What is Open Yale Courses?

Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

Registration is not required.
No course credit, degree, or certificate is available.
The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. It also gives the user a wide variety of other options for structuring the learning process, for example downloading, redistributing, and remixing course materials.

Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

I can add that I have a friend currently at Yale (and a former prof is now a prof in that dept., and is one of my referees) and have been down there. Tamar Gendler is amazing. Not this coming year, but the year after, it's fairly likely I'll be studying at Yale for the year.

I mean... definitely check that stuff out.

[Jasper]

Not this coming year, but the year after, it's fairly likely I'll be studying at Yale for the year.

I mean... definitely check that stuff out.

You can get some of the world's absolute best pizza in New Haven. No joke.

[Hype]

Not this coming year, but the year after, it's fairly likely I'll be studying at Yale for the year.

I mean... definitely check that stuff out.

You can get some of the world's absolute best pizza in New Haven. No joke.

I had pub-food in New Haven when I was there. With a good beer called "Three Philosophers": http://www.ommegang.com/index.php?mcat= ... beer_three


Oh, I also had a beer called "King Crimson" which I chose because felt all prog-rocky:


New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.

But this is a LIBRARY:


And they treat their grad students alright (This is the Grad Club):

[mockbee]

@ hype: Okay, at first I was going to say, of course I know what "acquiesced" means in the literal sense, but I had not seen it used in the sense Spinoza intended.........

“From this kind of knowledge arises the highest possible mental acquiescence, that is (Def of the Emotions, xxv.), pleasure, and this acquiescence is accompanied by the idea of the mind itself”

The Ethics

“God or to the mind, it may rightly be called acquiescence of spirit, which (Def. of the Emotions, xxv. xxx.) is not really distinguished from glory.”

The Ethics

Now that's what I'm talking about!


.........................


I appreciate people being so supportive and excited here, it's really amazing what is happening, huh?!

But, I will say, that my cards or my way, as far as I am aware of it; does not include books or classes [lectures maybe], there are just too, too many things that I would do first, namely building stuff and going places [and writing about them......... ] that I would choose to do first. I am not at all uncomfortable with the word 'choice' either when saying I deny the existence of free will. We only know what we know. We can only go forward based on that and on the things that happen to us..... there are never really any choices involved there. We may think there are. But as hype said, you are limited by what you are conscious of, your previous experience. How would you possibly be aware of something that you don't know? You only know what you have experienced and what you have been told. You have no control over either of those things..................and that is all that you base your conscious next 'choice' on. Maybe there is something else at play, but wouldn't that just further dispute the validity of 'free will'....

I know it makes the brain hurt. I have found that thoughts are the originator of all my actions, or choices, and often we think it is more difficult to control thoughts than actions........... but how would this be so if all actions were based on prior thought. What is controlling our thoughts? Do not think about syrup on pancakes.....maple scented sweet and sticky syrup on some fluffy and crusty on the edges, golden brown buttermilk pancakes with plump and juicy blueberries nestled within..........Don't think about those pancakes. If you're not thinking about them, you're probably thinking, don't read this sentence..... So with that weak, weak mind comes forth all our actions.....great.....mantras are the key.

Mantras are HUGE in yoga. I do ashtanga yoga 3-5 times a week. It's the best thing ever for the mind/body connection............I mean what else is there in life, outside of the mind body connection. ............. I guess death.

[Hype]

Yeah. Elwes translates "acquiescentia" as "acquiescence", which I kinda like. For some reason Curley (the academic standard translation) renders it "satisfaction".

So instead of "acquiescence of spirit", we're now supposed to read: "satisfaction of mind". I kinda like Elwes's way better since it implies literal quieting or calming down or becoming silenced.

By the way, it also follows from individual human minds being determined and limited, that we are more powerful together than individually, since we have can combine our ideas to make up for gaps in knowledge and ability. (You can from this see why many Libertarians are rabid individualists... they really think they're something like little gods... though there are a good deal of Libertarians who just hate federalism and think community/social/collective stuff can be done at a local or state level...)

One other issue for me is the implication this has for learning/teaching. In order for a student to learn a new (complex/difficult) concept, they have to work with the existing concepts they have in their head already (this could also include bodily/sensory knowledge like how to do something). But the teacher doesn't know which concepts their students have or don't have, and so, I think, to successfully get ideas across, a teacher should be trying to find basic, common, concepts and combine them with other common concepts to produce analogies to the more complex stuff. I don't think learning/teaching is possible any other way, except accidentally. But I know for a fact a lot of teachers don't think about the fact that they must work only with what the pupils already have in their heads. And a lot of students don't realize that that's all they have to work with too, and so, learning isn't as difficult as it sometimes seems, if only you can be shown the right stuff to put together.

[Jasper]

New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.

I know. I chose not to mention that.

[Hype]

New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.

I know. I chose not to mention that.

They should've named it New Hades.

[Jasper]

New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.

I know. I chose not to mention that.

They should've named it New Hades.

Maybe after that you can have a stay at Harvard.

[Hype]

New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.

I know. I chose not to mention that.

They should've named it New Hades.

Maybe after that you can have a stay at Harvard.

Unfortunately, they just don't have a good Spinoza scholar there. I'd be more likely to try for a visiting studentship at BU (Aaron Garrett is awesome and a huge influence), or Wisconsin (Steven Nadler is also great, and was my supervisor's MA supervisor).

[Jasper]

Unfortunately, they just don't have a good Spinoza scholar there. I'd be more likely to try for a visiting studentship at BU (Aaron Garrett is awesome and a huge influence), or Wisconsin (Steven Nadler is also great, and was my supervisor's MA supervisor).

Well, you could always try to inform them that they need a good Spinoza scholar, and that you're willing to come in as a visiting scholar to demonstrate what they're missing.

Harvard's just so beautiful, especially if you appreciate colonial architecture.


Eh, but BU's nice. It's well-situated for access to various parts of the city. It does share a nice view of the Charles River with Harvard and MIT.

[Juana]

LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...

I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?

Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.

Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.

I will not delve into this but if I knew someone WANTED to die I would do it out of loyalty.

As for the murderous rage it seems we're built to survive and not just randomly kill (obviously except the % that are socio/pyschopaths and violent) but I think if anyone felt their lively hood was threatened in ANY shape they would kill. Even if it was just a 1% possibility... so what makes us not weigh the other 99% in that situation? I mean in that situation there are more reasons not to snap than there are to go on a rampage. I know why it happens from a clinical point of view... but those feelings were they always there? were they developed? or was it just a person that didn't want to lose their pool in the back yard?

As for the laws of nature we want a structure, housing, food, reproduce, etc... but why the need to just one up everyone else in the community?

Things like that make me think that because man will NEVER know/understand ALL the laws of nature that some of the other views are flawed... not wrong, but not 100%.. just thousands of years of educated guessing.

[Matz]

The idea is this: if you recognize that people aren't freely choosing to be assholes or hurt you or others, or to make bad decisions, but are being caused by prior events which can be known, then it follows that if we want people to be different than they are, we should accept that they have been caused to be the way they are in specific ways, and try to remedy these things in the future, instead of hurting ourselves or acting rashly in the present because we do not understand what is going on.

yeah, well, I knew that already and I do forgive and have forgiven a lot of things based on this kind of rationale but you can only do that to a point. I mean you can't keep forgiving a guy who continually steals a 100 dollars from you every week because his dad was in that "business" as well

[LJF]

The reason I believe there is free will because we can think, we create thoughts, process our thoughts then we come to a conclusion. Each person can create their own thoughts and control those thoughts. Yes I agree there are certain laws like the law of gravity, but within those laws we live our lives. Yes outside things might influence our thoughts, but we alone make that final decision.

If there was some great force governing everyone, wouldn't we all be the same, think the same and act the same. Because we are all unique this means to me that there is free will. When two people are presented with the same question, they can come to their own conclusion using there own thought process. While they might make the same conclusion, they didn't come to it the same way. They both use their own reasons for their conclusion.

So my reason to think there is free will is basic and it is because we can think and control our thoughts.

[mockbee]

@LJF

It's curious to me that you haven't thought 'SCREW THIS!' and left. You interestingly keep coming back with the same exact thought again and again for eight pages. That's really odd....... That isn't a put down, think about it. Why haven't you acted on your likely thought; "these people are elitist idiots! I'm outta here!". You decide to keep saying the same thing. There is a reason why..........maybe ask yourself? You are welcome here, I'm just wondering what makes you inside want to come back over and over to say the same thing......... And no, other people are not saying the same thing over and over.....thoughts are definitely evolving.



And you don't have to answer this, but how old are you? That is a question purely out of curiosity.

[LJF]

@LJF

It's curious to me that you haven't thought 'SCREW THIS!' and left. You interestingly keep coming back with the same exact thought again and again for eight pages. That's really odd....... That isn't a put down, think about it. Why haven't you acted on your likely thought; "these people are elitist idiots! I'm outta here!". You decide to keep saying the same thing. There is a reason why..........maybe ask yourself? You are welcome here, I'm just wondering what makes you inside want to come back over and over to say the same thing......... And no, other people are not saying the same thing over and over.....thoughts are definitely evolving.



And you don't have to answer this, but how old are you? That is a question purely out of curiosity.

You have asked why I believe in free will and I gave my reason. I believe in x because y. I'm not saying you need to believe what I think, but you asked why and I gave my reason.

40 yrs old and I dress myself, have kids and function in society.

[mockbee]

You have asked why I believe in free will and I gave my reason. I believe in x because y. I'm not saying you need to believe what I think, but you asked why and I gave my reason.

40 yrs old and I dress myself, have kids and function in society.

I truly hope you have an awesome day, I'm planning on having a damn good one myself.

[Hype]

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... free-will/

We’re all schizophrenics now: Jonathan Kay on James Holmes, Sam Harris, and the morally terrifying case against free will

Jonathan Kay Jul 26, 2012 – 11:55 AM ET | Last Updated: Jul 27, 2012 10:54 AM ET

At his court appearance this week, James Holmes made a strong case for an insanity plea, without even opening his mouth. The Colorado mass-shooting suspect — who has dyed his hair a lurid shade of red, and refers to himself as “The Joker” — looked as if his brain were on another planet.

Holmes is 24 years old, around the age when the symptoms of schizophrenia typically become acute. Cho Seung-Hui, the mentally unstable Viginia Tech shooter, was 23 when he killed 32 people in 2007. John Hinckley, Jr. was 25 when he tried to kill Ronald Reagan, thinking that this would win him the affections of Jodie Foster. At trial, the lead psychiatric expert for the defense successfully argued that Hinckley was insane — specifically, that he suffered from schizophrenia, depression, “suicidal features,” and an “autistic retreat from reality.”

In other words, Hinckley was nuts. In the period leading up to his assassination attempt, he imagined he was Travis Bickle from the movie Taxi Driver, and also sometimes slipped into the notion that he was John Lennon in some sort of resurrected form. His notes to Foster began as love letters, but over time became weird and demented.

Yet, despite all these facts, Americans were outraged when a Washington jury came back with an insanity verdict. In the years following, numerous U.S. states responded to the Hinckley acquittal by tightening their standards for gauging insanity. (Three — Idaho, Montana and Utah — abolished the insanity defense altogether.) A national poll, taken the day after the verdict was read, found that five out of six Americans thought “justice was not done.”

I suspect you’d get a similar poll result from Americans if Holmes also gets off on insanity. All of us have an evolved instinct to separate humanity into good and evil categories. Human-engineered tragedies such as terrorist attacks and spree shootings push that instinct into overdrive, because the killers seem like the very embodiment of pure evil. The words “not guilty by reason of insanity” frustrate that instinct, and leave us morally unsatisfied. To victims and their families especially, the idea that a killer is not responsible for his butchery makes it feel like a hole has been ripped in the good-evil continuum.

But a new book raises a question that puts the very existence of that continuum into doubt: What if none of us are truly “responsible” for our actions?

The question lies at the heart of Free Will, by neuroscientist Sam Harris (an author better known for Letter to a Christian Nation, and other works in the “New Atheism” genre). Harris makes the case that every human being — the “sane” and the “insane” alike — are bound by rigid, deterministic forces that guide us through life according to the chemical reactions occurring in our brains, even if some brains obviously work better than others. Eating breakfast, going to work, switching radio stations, shooting the President to impress Jodie Foster: It’s all chemicals.

Of course, the argument is not new: Theologians have been debating the concept of free will for centuries, and the philosophical genre is so well-developed that it has generated a host of arcane sub-theories with names like “hard incompatibilism” and “Libertarianism Volition.” But Harris make his case in unusually stark terms, and he does so at a time when new brain-scanning technologies and other scientific breakthroughs are letting us examine the cerebrum in the way that watchmakers take apart the gears of a clock.

More than ever before, the brain looks to modern researchers like a mere machine, processing inputs and generating outputs like any other. On this understanding, a brain has no more capacity for “good” or “evil” than does a car or a microwave oven.

By way of example, Harris provides a list of five hypothetical killers — (1) a four-year-old who accidentally shoots someone while playing with his father’s gun; (2) a severely abused 12-year-old who kills a tormentor; (3) a child-abuse victim who, as an adult, shoots his ex-girlfriend after she leaves him; (4) a 25-year-with a solid upbringing, who kills a young woman “just for the fun of it”; and (5) a seemingly heartless murderer who later is discovered to have a large tumor that is short-circuiting his prefrontal cortex.

By conventional analysis, #3 and #4 would be branded evildoers; #1 and #5 would be given a free pass on grounds of age and biology, respectively; and #2 would lie somewhere in between. But Harris’ point is that, once you put aside our mythical religious baggage about good and evil (as he sees it), all of these cases are motivated by the same amoral whirling of a human brain’s synaptic gears. But not for the luck of the biological draw, any one of us — in another life — could be #1, #2, #3, #4 or #5: There is no magical, spiritual, free-willed force within our minds that will allow us to overcome the fate that is wired into the physical universe.

As an atheist, Harris is quite untroubled by all this. Indeed, he thinks his readers should be relieved by his revelations, because “few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems.” Once we all learn to shed our belief in notions like God and sin, moreover, he believes, we can build a “scientifically informed system of justice.” Under such a system, criminals would be jailed, yes — but only to pursue the explicitly utilitarian goal of preventing them from committing more crimes. Criminal justice would be stripped of any notion of retribution — since “a desire for retribution, arising from the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion — and perpetuates a moral one.”

On the level of scientific logic, I could not find a single sentence in Free Will with which I disagreed. Yet from a human standpoint, the book is quietly terrifying. As horrible (am I even allowed to use that word, Mr. Harris?) as monsters (ditto) such as James Holmes and Cho Seung-Hui may be, there is some deeply rooted psychological solace to be found in our collective ability to call them by that name — to make a line in the sand, placing the community of law-abiding fathers, mothers, sons and daughters on one side, and on the other marking “Here there be monsters.” To erase that line is to erase millions of years of evolutionary psychology, which has programmed us with useful moral instincts aimed at identifying and punishing harmful elements within our society.

I believe that free will truly is an illusion, just as Sam Harris says. But it is a valuable illusion, and one that is deeply rooted in every human culture known to anthropology — much like the belief in an almighty, which Mr. Harris equally dismisses. That’s why, like most thinking people, I have given up on letting it bother me. If the illusion of free will went away, we would be left with a world so morally stark and (literally) inhuman that, I dare say, even Mr. Harris himself would long for the fairy tales of good and evil he so cleverly debunks.

National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com

[LJF]

You have asked why I believe in free will and I gave my reason. I believe in x because y. I'm not saying you need to believe what I think, but you asked why and I gave my reason.

40 yrs old and I dress myself, have kids and function in society.

I truly hope you have an awesome day, I'm planning on having a damn good one myself.

Drove to Buffalo last night it's my wife's 20 yr high school reunion, will try to have fun at that. Just got back from the zoo with the kids that was enjoyable. Not sure what I think about zoos.

You enjoy your weekend.

[Hype]

The idea is this: if you recognize that people aren't freely choosing to be assholes or hurt you or others, or to make bad decisions, but are being caused by prior events which can be known, then it follows that if we want people to be different than they are, we should accept that they have been caused to be the way they are in specific ways, and try to remedy these things in the future, instead of hurting ourselves or acting rashly in the present because we do not understand what is going on.

yeah, well, I knew that already and I do forgive and have forgiven a lot of things based on this kind of rationale but you can only do that to a point. I mean you can't keep forgiving a guy who continually steals a 100 dollars from you every week because his dad was in that "business" as well

I agree. There's a difference between forgiving and understanding. I don't think you need to forgive those who wrong you, but in understanding them, some will be forgiven, and others not, but you will also not be so bothered by them. It's more important that you are less affected (less mentally disturbed) by others, than that you forgive them.