The soul and free will

Post Reply New Topic

But your preferences are an illusion. Why should you be proud of that or demeaning of those who have different preferences?

Did I claim any pride? I merely indicated my way of thinking.

That outcome was pretty much determined by the second premise where the soul was limited to observer status. If the soul (which I am guessing means self) was defined as having executive control over the body it would affect the rest of the analysis.

As I understand the term, the selfplex consists of portions of the brain, or perhaps more precisely the thoughts contained therein, that govern the rest of the brain which in turn governs the rest of the body. If the soul were defined like that I would agree there is no free will, but not if it is spiritual and external to the body.

There is not and never was any indication ever that there was a soul separate from a body. That is pure superstition and as far as the "self" being in executive control that is total baloney.The body and the mind are one unit and what we call the conscious self has all sorts of limitations put upon it by the demands of the rest of the system. The body operates as a unit with the mind and much of what is considered conscious decision making is very much under the influence of all sorts of body conditions from pain to hunger to exhaustion to lack of oxygen etc., etc., etc. and that can be demonstrated easily.

That's not the case I'm making though. The case I'm making is that the eternal soul, whether existing in whatever universal plemora or type of heaven when not here would - as a sentient object - perhaps be in a more pleasing environmental state but, even in that case, it has no free will as its still reacting to stimuli.

My case in this thread is that ultimately; the soul has no free will, the body in this world have free will - thus a materialist atheist's claim that there is no free will of the individual is perfectly valid, a dualists claim that there is no free will because the body and soul is simply the fusing of two things with no free will rather than just one.

I guess I still can't understand, looking back at the thread, why people keep talking about no free will only in our physical realm but, if you bring in spiritualism or 'something special' all bets are off - it doesn't make any sense. It seems like such a common viewpoint here that I'm trying to figure out whether I'm missing something or if there's really just this much mindless dogma going around.

Even the point I'd make about God existing outside of time, it would simply mean that his time line is perpendicular to ours - I've explained this one before in talking about the universe as a giant Heron play or something like a book. Faith, interaction, general 'theism' rather than 'deism' things, prayers being answered, all of that could happen at the same level that an author is something of a god to the characters in an epic novel they wrote - just like the author can insert themselves at will if they chose, can intervene if they chose, and yet rather than dealing with time the way the characters would they can hold their character's entire reality - life from beginning to end - in the palm of their hand as a three-dimensional object. I'm not making a case that its that simple nor am I indicating that Tom Clancy or Margret Weiss and Tracey Hickman are creating other universes - just that this seems like the only way a being could be 'outside of time', ie. outside of our time line, rather on a time line with an orientation utterly different from our own. In the end math on that though, still, like there's publishing and release of sale for the final draft of a novel, or there's a certain lever that when hit sets one of Heron's plays into motion - the button has been pushed, we're here, there's no revising it, thus still - nothing special, no free will appears from that either.

Why would spiritualism make things any different?

With subatomic randomness though, still, if you replayed a sequence of time over and over again - 100 time, 1000, times, 1,000,000,000,000,000 times, is there reason to believe that these seemingly random events would occur any differently?

Free will assumes some sort of independent control. Randomness is mere chaos.

1). Chaos is still infinitely down by time like any other event, thus making whatever happened exactly what did happen - time and material existence having a perfect one to one relationship.
2). There is no such thing as an independent control for anything that exists within time.
3). Nothing outside of this time line can enter in unless by alias.

Free will, as you say DOES require a control. A control I do not claim we have.
But randomness, or the appearance of randomness... Something which breaks away from direct cause & effect and shows that determinism does not have to be absolute.... That creates a potential. But that is all I'm claiming that it is, a potential. The method of control is the major failing point in my theory. How our "self" meaning the ideas, which make up our brain's software, so to say, would have to have an avenue to alter something at that sub atomic or quantum level. Even from there, for free will to exist, there has to be a method by which the "self" controls what new additions/deletions/modifications are to be applied to the "self" or software. This is what my mind is currently working on.

Regarding the question about repeating a quantum even over and over... and whether there is any reason to believe that it would not unfold exactly the same each and every time.
Well, no there is no reason not to believe that it would be the same.
But neither is there a reason to believe that it WOULD be the same.... Except for the general 'universality of the universe' as i'll call it... in that things at one level of scale, tend to operate in at least similar methods and behaviors to other scales. Thus one would think if you drop a ball and it falls every time the same way, given the same situations, then if you watch a photon under the same situations it should always act the same way.

My suspicion on this... it WOULD act the same way, each and every time. But there is potential there for it to act different. Something could, in these cases cause it to act different, otherwise the potential wouldn't be there.... Unless there was something even more elementary than what we call "elementary particles" And that would account for the supposed randomness of the quantum world, without violating hard determinism.

What my view of the randomness of the quantum world is, again in different words, is that it is indeterminate only because there is a potential for something to act upon it, which as of yet, science cannot see. That potential force is by far and away the exception, not the rule.

Why do I believe that there is a level of control upon matter? Why do I think it is not completely pre-determinable?
Because I don't believe that the universe would have ever resolved itself into existence if the entire programme was pre-determined. And I will not close myself off to either alternative, until I've exhausted all possible sources for that control to come from.

Intelligent effective decisions are made to determine desired results. If randomness is in effect it destroys any means to control an outcome. That is more than dangerous, it is total insanity.

Yes, but what I'm proposing, would put an end to the "perceived randomness of the quantum world" in a way consistent with the many worlds hypothesis.

It takes a quantum event to split the universe... but if a quantum event is not "observed" and thus "resolving it's waveform" the universe does not split.

if all quantum events were deterministic, and only appear to be random due to lack of ability to either measure, or apply proper controls, then there is an unmeasured effect at play that we cannot see. Given that we "KNOW" that "OBSERVATION" resolves the wave form... why would the nature of such observation not be a prime place to look in order to find that unmeasured effect?

If in fact observation does resolve the waveform, then there must be a property of observation that causes the waveform to be resolved. That is to say that a property of observation affected not only matter, but reality itself.

Though if one really looked at it this way, I am not 100% sure it still creates free will...
It would mean that a copy of "me" exists for every different choice that I could have made, and all the trees of choices derivative from choices that I didn't make. If all versions exist, it could be coincidence that I'm the one I am.

Why have I never read a criticism of Shrodinger's Cat asking "Can the cat not observe?" That question has bugged me from the first time I read thought experiment.

It wouldn't .
(I wasn't implying that it would ; I was stating my view on the matter.)
-

Somewhere in here is the implication that choice can be unmotivated by desired results. But a choice so made does not conform to the definition of choice. All choice comes out of reason which is entirely dependent upon past experience and projections of results, each of which is derived rigidly from the past. You cannot break that chain and still call it choice. Randomness itself totally destroys choice.

With rationality, comes the ability to be irrational.
Can you not do something that is completely contrary to what you want to do? I know I do it all the time.

If something is random, then no it is not choice. But what IS that randomness? Why are we so eager to accept that there IS a random element to nature at the quantum level, why are we not looking at every possible alternative to find out the "cause" of the seeming randomness, so that we can see it causally. If there is a cause that we cannot measure the randomness may not be random.. it may well be determinable.

Quantum events are only resolved if they are observed. Thus the universe is only resolving waveforms if the effects of the waveform will eventually be observed. Being observed doesn't mean that the observer has effect on the event, it means that the event has an effect on the observer.
Why would having an effect on an observer matter other than to "play out the algorithm when strict determinism no longer holds"

Obviously you don't understand the term random and you don't understand yourself since nobody freely chooses to do something they don't want to do. That they make that choice indicates their desire.