Free will / fatalism / life purpose

[Frosti85]

I don't believe in free will.

I think my brain is just a very advanced biological computer and the output (muscle movements) is 100% determined by
the input (everything in the environment, past things that happend to me) and genetics.
There could be some randomness involved because of quantum mechanics, but randomness is not the same as free will
(it just means that my actions cannot be predicted with 100% certainity, more like a probability function)

And everything I know points to the conclusion that there is no free will.

Science: The universe is deterministic, the law of causality makes free will impossible.
If free will was possible, all of science would be pretty much wrong.

Common Sense: If you know someone very well, you can predict his/her reaction in a lot of situations.. so they
have no free will. And it's very hard to change even minor habits, also pointing to no free will.
Also if I had free will, I could just decide to become a homosexual, or just decide to become asexual and
have no lust & desire anymore. But it doesn't work like that..

My personal experience: Sometimes I do something, and then 10 seconds later I'm like "Why did I do this ? I have
no fucking clue". Also I cannot control my mood, and when I meditate I have no control over the
thoughts that come up. I ruminate a lot about the past, and I also cannot make myself stop. Maybe distract myself
for some time, but the thoughts will come back.
(and if I can make myself stop at some points, this is also just a result from something in the environment,
or time passing)

Just a remark: If you define free will as "your brain can make choices" then it exists, but which choice
it will ultimately take, is not free and is 100% determined by physics.
(freedom as defined by independence of outside causality.. which is of course impossible)
If you could rewind time in the universe to a specific point in time, it would play out in the exact
same way (ignoring quantum mechanis again)

This mindset benefits me when I think about the past, because I don't really regret anything, because I know
there was no possibility for me that act in any other way
(if the outcome of an action was bad, I can still learn from it and take a different action in the future,
but I don't regret it)

But when it comes to the future, it's hard not to fall into fatalism.
If everything is predetermined, what is the point in doing anything ? Me writing this and thinking
about this is all predetermined... in the end I will probably still do something, because my brain
prefers the choice of doing to not doing.
If I could scan and simulate your brain right now, I could predict the answer you are going to write to this thread.

But thinking about it drives me crazy in some way. Why am I conscious ? What is the benefit of it ?
If I'm just a biological machine 100% determined by the laws of physics, what is the point of being conscious ?
Why does it feel like that I have control.. when I don't ?

Also when I think about it, I'm just a biological machine with a brain that feels good/bad depending on
how likely some situation was for my ancestors to propagate their genes to the next generation
(e.g. I just had a breakup, and now I feel sad, because of course now the probabilty of me
successfully replicating just got a little bit lower).
There must be more to life than this ? How do I find some purpose ?

[fiby41]

The Riddle of Fate and Free-Will Solved

My views on this topic.

[7Wannabe5]

I would have to attempt and master some coursework on the topic of Non-linear Dynamics in order to best answer this question, but I am not going to do that right now, because I have other things I want to do first that I feel are more in alignment with my self-interest.

However, I believe that it may be true that it has been mathematically proven sometime in the last 30 years that it is impossible to determine what behavior an open highly complex system composed of other highly complex systems, such as a human being will next exhibit, but it is easier to determine next behavior if the human being being analyzed is sleeping or in a coma. (pass baton up to somebody, anybody, on this forum who does have knowledge of the math.) IOW, when you are awake, it will be more difficult for other sentient beings to hazard a guess as to your next likely to be exhibited behavior, and it will often be the case that you will be the best predictor of the impossible to know behavior of future you under a variety of possible circumstances. This is due to the fact that your brain retains some artifact of the momentary impressions your structure previously experienced. However, you consist of a set of systems within systems that is constantly engaged in cognition with your environment which is also a complex set of systems within systems, so you can't predict your own conscious (as opposed to reflexive) behavior all that well. The claim that all behavior that seems to be conscious is just a series of predictable reflexive behaviors is to say that you are a system that never acts upon your environment, and that is obviously false. You are constantly engaged in active cognition with your environment, and when you are awake, you are constantly engaged in conscious cognition with your environment. This remains true even though the process of constant conscious cognition with environment may at times become so likely to create a cascade of momentary perceptions known as the feeling of pain, it might seem like engaging in a behavior such as dehydrating your brain by pouring alcohol into your mouth from whence it will be unconsciously further processed by your system would be the best solution.

Something like that.

[Frosti85]

I would have to attempt and master some coursework on the topic of Non-linear Dynamics in order to best answer this question, but I am not going to do that right now, because I have other things I want to do first that I feel are more in alignment with my self-interest.

However, I believe that it may be true that it has been mathematically proven sometime in the last 30 years that it is impossible to determine what behavior an open highly complex system composed of other highly complex systems, such as a human being will next exhibit, but it is easier to determine next behavior if the human being being analyzed is sleeping or in a coma. (pass baton up to somebody, anybody, on this forum who does have knowledge of the math.) IOW, when you are awake, it will be more difficult for other sentient beings to hazard a guess as to your next likely to be exhibited behavior, and it will often be the case that you will be the best predictor of the impossible to know behavior of future you under a variety of possible circumstances. This is due to the fact that your brain retains some artifact of the momentary impressions your structure previously experienced. However, you consist of a set of systems within systems that is constantly engaged in cognition with your environment which is also a complex set of systems within systems, so you can't predict your own conscious (as opposed to reflexive) behavior all that well. The claim that all behavior that seems to be conscious is just a series of predictable reflexive behaviors is to say that you are a system that never acts upon your environment, and that is obviously false. You are constantly engaged in active cognition with your environment, and when you are awake, you are constantly engaged in conscious cognition with your environment. This remains true even though the process of constant conscious cognition with environment may at times become so likely to create a cascade of momentary perceptions known as the feeling of pain, it might seem like engaging in a behavior such as dehydrating your brain by pouring alcohol into your mouth from whence it will be unconsciously further processed by your system would be the best solution.

Something like that.

I don't really get your point. Just because we cannot predict something with high accuracy doesn't make it non-deterministic.
(e.g. the weather)

The claim that all behavior that seems to be conscious is just a series of predictable reflexive behaviors is to say that you are a system that never acts upon your environment, and that is obviously false. You are constantly engaged in active cognition with your environment, and when you are awake, you are constantly engaged in conscious cognition with your environment.

The reflexive behavior is a product of the environment.
If i get into a car accident, I will probably later reflect on it how I can avoid it in the future, but me reflecting on it is 100% determined by the environment.

I think I don't understand your point, please elaborate.

[Jason]

I do not believe in free will either, at least in the libertarian sense of the idea. But I view it from a providential standpoint. So I derive comfort from the fact that I have no free will.

Whenever I'm in line at Dunkin Donuts and I watch these people deliberating endlessly on which Donuts they are selecting, I always think to myself "No matter which donut they decide upon, its a still a fuckin donut." Meaning, the commonalities between each donut are greater than the distinctions between each donut. So you can apply the same concept to where you live, who you marry, what job you take, which index fund you pick. And on top of that, irregardless of which decision you make, you are still going to fucking die. There's no way to choose out of that.

The decision you actually have that impacts your life iss the metaphysical structure of the universe that you decide you are operating in. You have four choices: theism, deism, pantheism, materialism. I choose the first so when I ask for my Boston Creme donut, I know that God ordained that purchase from before the foundations of the earth. It actually makes the donut more enjoyable as I am assured I willl be forgiven for eating it when I meet God and He asks me why I have chocolate frosting on my lips.

[7Wannabe5]

@Frosti8: Once again I will note my not-even-advanced-beginner status, and suggest with huge grain of salt, that research conducted by human beings over the last 30 years might indicate that it would be more proper to state the situation as "Just because it has been proven that the weather can't be determined does not lead to the conclusion that it can't be predicted with some high degree of accuracy."

I knew that the other thing I typed that you quoted wasn't quite right, but I don't know how to fix it. Maybe something about how a feedback loop is different from a mechanism?

Let me attempt an entirely different tack. Prove to me that you have no conscious purpose by initiating no conscious behavior for the next 10 minutes.

@Jason:

I choose pantheism.

[Jason]

@ 7W5

Shocking.

[FBeyer]

... It actually makes the donut more enjoyable as I am assured I willl be forgiven for eating it when I meet God and He asks me why I have chocolate frosting on my lips.

Well, I've got to keep myself, got to keep myself faithful
And you know that I've been so good
Except for drinking
But he knew that I would, yeah

[Frosti85]

Let me attempt an entirely different tack. Prove to me that you have no conscious purpose by initiating no conscious behavior for the next 10 minutes.

How would you evaluate if my behavior was conscious or not ?

I just got a coffee. But to even have the idea to drink coffee:

- you need to know what coffee is (some information you got in the past)
- you need to know where to get it (some information you got in the past)
- you need to know that you like it (... the past)
- you need to be in the right biochemical state

all of that was determined from the environment.

if you would create a clone of me, put him into the exact same environment (but without the coffee), and then put him into my
place (in the world with the coffee) he would not think about getting coffee.

[7Wannabe5]

@Frosti85:

I am sorry. I should have written:

Prove to yourself that you have no conscious purpose by initiating no conscious behavior for the next 10 minutes. Then inform me about the results of your experiment.

[OTCW]

I don't believe in free will either, but it doesn't really bother me. I' m not in control of things before they happen, but I'm not aware of the outcomes before they happen, and I'm not in control of the response of others, so that is enough to me to avoid feeling like a biological robot.

[Riggerjack]

I feel like you guys are fucking with me. Didn't we just do this?
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8043

@fbeyer:
I'm gonna leave this place better
Than the way I found it was

[BRUTE]

it's been a year, Rigger. this is the other global warming thread.

[Frosti85]

@Riggerjack & BRUTE:

this thread should be more about how you avoid becoming lazy / fatalistic if you believe in hard determinism

[Frosti85]

I was just thinking... what is the point of being conscious, especially if you have no free will ?

If we are just biological machines and the brain a big biological computer, 100% determined by physics, what is the point of being conscious ?

Science seems to have no fucking clue what creates consciousness.

Now I have to rethink this whole issue.. maybe free will is in fact possible.

Because science is just a model, it's not reality, just the best understanding of reality we have right now. But it might change in the future, and
because science cannot explain consciousness at all at the moment, I think that leaves a lot of room for possibility of free will.

[bryan]

echo @Riggerjack sentiment. At least my post there on the matter.

best talk i've seen on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8 and I've taken to repeating the bit about the "purpose of life" (around 36m) being to hydrogenate CO2. Hey, we doin pretty good; hitting our stride now!

[BRUTE]

@Riggerjack & BRUTE:

this thread should be more about how you avoid becoming lazy / fatalistic if you believe in hard determinism

why would brute avoid becoming lazy and fatalistic? isn't that the whole point of believing in determinism?

[7Wannabe5]

Erase some of what I typed above. My grasp on vocabulary in this realm is fairly poor.

In short, the presence of chaos in a system implies that perfect prediction a la Laplace is impossible not only in practice but also in principle, since we can never know Xo (initial conditions) to infinitely many decimal places. This is a profound negative result that, along with quantum mechanics, helped wipe out the optimistic nineteenth-century view of a clockwork Newtonian universe that ticked along its predictable path.- from "Complexity: A Guided Tour"- Mitchell (by way of Henri Poincare and Robert May)

I think the concept that prediction is impossible in practice due to not having perfect information about initial conditions is accepted by most people, but not the concept that it is impossible in principle.

(Making a huge leap here. Might have to read 4 more books in order to defend tottering position. ) IOW, the notion of determinism has nothing, and can not have anything, to say about the emergent property of your consciousness, or the autobiography you construct within it.

[Jason]

It might be helpful to address the issue of free will from a historical basis, not just an abstract basis. That way one can stand on the shoulders of some giants in regard to the topic.

ERE holds to the Renaissance ideal. Correct? So who was the greatest humanist scholar of the Renaissance? That would unarguably be Erasmus of Rotterdam, the first great public intellectual, the first guy to make a name and a living for himself strictly by his erudition. And guess what? Erasmus addressed the issue of free will, specifically in response to Martin Luther's tract "The Bondage of The Will."

https://www.prca.org/prtj/nov95b.html

If you read the synopsis, free will is discussed (1) in terms of man's anthropology (is man capable of good) and (2) his relationship to God (can he choose Him or does God choose man). So it's essentially a moral discussion. Erasmus represents the positive, thriving, Renaissance view of man and Luther holds to the ancient, Augustinian negative, pessimistic view of man. That being said, the Renaissance discussion of Free choice vs. determinism takes place within a Judeo-Christian framework. That's just historical truth.

Now, as you move into the mid 17th century and atheism/deism arise, you encounter many variations and definitions of these terms. But to keep things simple, its a three way fight: atheism, providential deism, and non-providential deism. But the basic idea is still moral, the big difference now is that it becomes culturally acceptable for man to make decisions in this world/life free from having eternal consequences. This is the main thrust of the copernican revolution and the movement from a geocentric to a heliocentric world. Deism is essentially a divinely ordered world without personal moral accountability to a personal god. In some ways its a restatement of Aristotle's unomoveable mover.

So the point is that the it the discussion always take place within the framework of moral obligation. So in 1517, I was "free" to kill you, but I would be punished (earthly and eternally speaking) because it was against both God's moral law and the laws of the state. In 2017 I am still "Free" to kill you, but I would be punished (only earthly) according to state law that has no reference to an eternal law but more of a natural law.

Essentially the "narrative" was not one of "can I choose and determine my own fate" but a narrative of "why I should and shouldn't do certain things."

[Frosti85]

@Riggerjack & BRUTE:

this thread should be more about how you avoid becoming lazy / fatalistic if you believe in hard determinism

why would brute avoid becoming lazy and fatalistic? isn't that the whole point of believing in determinism?

I believe in determinism/no free will because I think it's the truth (or very close to it). But that doesn't mean I like it.

There is no problem with being lazy, as long as you are content with it.

For me believing that everything is pre-determined is kinda depressing but also kinda liberating.. it depends on my mood.