Free-will and Atheism

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NarcissusSavage
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26 Feb 2012, 2:44 am

Vigilans wrote:

cw10...
Furthermore this pointless tangent once again allowed you to slip out of answering the actual questions posed to you

He doesn't answer questions posed to him.

Eg. of my impression of how a typical conversation goes...

Q: How are you?
A: What does that mean? Of course the weather is fine.

Q: Wait...what? No, it's pouring outside dude, and a hurricane is imminent. Did you read the forecast?
A: I've read revelations. And you're going to hell, heathen.

Q: Excuse me?
A: Yeah, and all the commies too, they're atheists, and you are, so you must be a commie.

Q: ...I just wanted to ask how you were doing.
A: I don't share my personal information with commies. 10 of every 8 commies are leftwing spies for the imperials. And they all hate Jesus. Which proves there is a god.

Q: ...

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MCalavera
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26 Feb 2012, 3:02 am

Declension wrote:

heavenlyabyss wrote:

moral relativism is a dangerous concept

We shouldn't reject concepts just because they're dangerous. Darwinism is a dangerous concept.

Moral relativism should be rejected because it is bad philosophy, not because it is dangerous. Moral relativists, just like hard determinists and solipsists, are forced into defending extremely silly positions that they cannot possibly hold. When your philosophy causes you to betray your own integrity, the philosophy is not fit for purpose. The point of philosophy is to explain what you know, not to insist that you don't actually know it.

I go with hard determinism because of Occam's razor. Hard determinism explains everything in this reality more sufficiently without the need for an extra unnecessary (and, may I add, vaguely defined) entity called "free will".

Moral relativism is also not a bad one. I challenge any absolutist to come up with evidence for an absolute standard for our morals.

Both philosophies go along quite well with my integrity. In fact, denying them compels one to contradict reality in various aspects.

Vigilans
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26 Feb 2012, 3:28 am

NarcissusSavage wrote:

Vigilans wrote:

cw10...
Furthermore this pointless tangent once again allowed you to slip out of answering the actual questions posed to you

sadly accurate

Q: What airline do you usually fly on?
A: No American planes have ever crashed, technically

Q: What? That doesn't make sense, besides being out of the left field, I was just asking you your favored airline
A: No, up and down are subjective. To people on the opposite side of the planet, those planes were actually traveling upwards towards them

Q: ...
A: You are immoral

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Declension
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26 Feb 2012, 3:43 am

MCalavera wrote:

Hard determinism explains everything in this reality

You know that you can make choices. You know this far more intimately than you know about physics. If you really think that the two conflict, then you must abandon the latter, not the former.

MCalavera wrote:

I challenge any absolutist to come up with evidence for an absolute standard for our morals.

You know that there is such a thing as right and wrong. You know this far more intimately than you know about the origin of human societies. If you really think that the two conflict, then you must abandon the latter, not the former.

Oodain
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26 Feb 2012, 3:52 am

Declension wrote:

MCalavera wrote:

Hard determinism explains everything in this reality

You know that you can make choices. You know this far more intimately than you know about physics. If you really think that the two conflict, then you must abandon the latter, not the former.

MCalavera wrote:

I challenge any absolutist to come up with evidence for an absolute standard for our morals.

or our perception is inherently flawed and this leads us to think we have free will, how can you prove that tyou actually would do something different when history teels us you didnt?

untill we know our neurology in a much more complete way it will be near impossible to even properly speculate (anything untill then will be guesswork based on what will in most cases be flawed guesswork)

also it doesnt take a genius to see that while killing is generally wrong there are situations where it is a better outcome fro society, not because of capital punishment or the like, but simply if an officer shoots a wrongdoer to save an innocent person, that conversely also isnt absolute as it depends on the circumstances surrounding it.

in reality i think there are some axioms that most cultures will agree on and some that will vary wildly, that in itself suggests that there is no "clear cut and universally true morality", something that taken the size of the universe into account becomes ever more unlikely the more we discover, intelligent life on another planet would make or break such a theory.

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Declension
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26 Feb 2012, 3:57 am

Oodain wrote:

our perception is inherently flawed and this leads us to think we have free will

As soon as you allow yourself to think that your own perception might be inherently flawed, then you can no longer believe anything! If your perception might be inherently flawed, then how do you know that anything is real? How do you know that you have really learned about science? How do you know that you were correct when you decided that the science made sense? All of this relies on your perception.

If you were to list all of the propositions that you have ever considered, from most likely to be true to least likely to be true, "I can make choices" would be tied for first at the very top, because you know for certain that you can make choices, just like you know for certain that you exist. "The current understanding of physics is correct" would be at the very bottom, because our current understanding of physics cannot be correct, since it is contradictory.

But actually, this isn't even important, because theories of physics do not require hard determinism.

heavenlyabyss
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26 Feb 2012, 4:26 am

MCalavera wrote:

Declension wrote:

heavenlyabyss wrote:

moral relativism is a dangerous concept

Actually I cannot make an argument for moral absolutism. I will simply say that in some cases I am right and others are wrong, but if a person can change my mind through a well-reasoned argument, I will adjust my opinion. People should tell me I am wrong if they believe I am wrong. That doesn't mean I have to listen, but I am receptive to criticism for the most part.

The idea of hard determinism does not sit right with me but if you can give some scientific reason for why I should believe it, I might change my mind.

Oodain
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26 Feb 2012, 4:51 am

Declension wrote:

Oodain wrote:

our perception is inherently flawed and this leads us to think we have free will

the reason science is such a powerfull tool is excactly because it allows us to concisely share and test our beliefs and observations in a way that allows for objectivity,
we know human perception is flawed, the only discussion is how much, very very very few people make for reliable eye witnesses (even that is in dispute as the cases where true eidetic memory has been observed were never exhaustively tested)

then comes the case of human bias.

that is also why large swaths of even the western population will quite literally believe in anything(from conspiracies to the silliest of religiious cults)s) so in a way you have answered your own question.
as said untill we know what a choice even is neurologically (what affects them and how they form) it would be pure speculation to say if we have it or not.

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//through chaos comes complexity//

the scent of the tamarillo is pungent and powerfull,
woe be to the nose who nears it.

NarcissusSavage
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26 Feb 2012, 5:00 am

Declension wrote:

Oodain wrote:

our perception is inherently flawed and this leads us to think we have free will

I don't really believe anything...and I acknowledge my perception is inherently flawed. I've accepted that everything I think could be flawed, I've accepted that everything I think I know could be wrong. Nothing is completely certain. I will out of necessity of communication sometimes speak as if I am certain of something, but even then I'm not completely certain of it. It's just practical to do so. Belief is silly, in my opinion, possibly even delusional.

I know I cannot make different choices other than the choices I make. Free will is a mind set, it is purely subjective, and the objective truth is determinism. Everything that has ever happened was going to happen exactly as it has happened, and the proof is that it did happen. This truth is painfully obvious.

The question we should be asking is not whether or not free will is real. The question of relevance and importance is why do people recoil from the fact that everything is already determined? What about that causes people to reject the truth?

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heavenlyabyss
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26 Feb 2012, 5:04 am

NarcissusSavage wrote:

Declension wrote:

Oodain wrote:

our perception is inherently flawed and this leads us to think we have free will

I appreciate your fluency with language, but you have not proven anything here. I don't mean that as an insult, I actually understand exactly what you are saying, but this is just not a scientific argument that I find convincing.

Declension
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26 Feb 2012, 5:05 am

NarcissusSavage wrote:

I don't really believe anything

NarcissusSavage wrote:

everything I think I know could be wrong

NarcissusSavage wrote:

Nothing is completely certain

Well, that's very brave of you, to say that you don't believe anything. So I guess you don't believe these things either:

NarcissusSavage wrote:

the objective truth is determinism.

NarcissusSavage wrote:

This truth is painfully obvious.

NarcissusSavage wrote:

the fact

NarcissusSavage wrote:

the truth

Declension
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26 Feb 2012, 5:15 am

Oodain wrote:

we know human perception is flawed

That's a self-defeating idea. If human perception is flawed, then we can't claim to know anything! Perception isn't only the thing that allows us to know that we can make choices. Perception is also the thing that we use to do science. Science cannot be more reliable than perception itself!

Oodain wrote:

untill we know what a choice even is neurologically (what affects them and how they form) it would be pure speculation to say if we have it or not.

The physics and biology of the brain actually have nothing to do with hard determinism. You can prove, right now, that hard determinism is false, without knowing anything about physics or biology. You know that you can make choices. Hard determinism claims that you cannot make choices. So hard determinism is wrong.

Whatever the physics and biology turn out to be, they will be compatible with the ability to make choices. We know this in advance, because we already know that we can make choices!

It seems to me that you have this issue back-to-front.

Oodain
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26 Feb 2012, 5:57 am

you dont know what a choice is,

saying you know we have it is then pure ingorance of your own limitations.

nor does the fact that human perception is flawed undermine actual knowledge.
to be honest i dont even know how anyone cant see that human perception has obvious limitations, especially when we move past the here and now and look at memories,
nothing you remember is assured to be the truth even if you believe it, only through verifying it with either the perception of others or external evidence can one be sure and even then the conclusions drawn are far from guaranteed to be reality, the whisper chain experiment is a decent example of how we twist everything through our own bias.

you say that science cannot be more reliable than perception itself, yet it is blatantly obvious that all science is, is a way to improve upon our perceptive abilities through systematic observation and comparrison of those observations.
as said that is excactly the reason science works.

you also say you can prove you can make a choice, please do, in a peer reviewable manner,
anything short of that is speculation, reality is not shaped by rhetoric but the physical procceses that lie underneath said rhetoric.

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the scent of the tamarillo is pungent and powerfull,
woe be to the nose who nears it.

Last edited by Oodain on 26 Feb 2012, 6:00 am, edited 2 times in total.

NarcissusSavage
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26 Feb 2012, 5:59 am

heavenlyabyss wrote:

I'm not trying to convince, but express. And most importantly, ask questions a little different than those being asked already.

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NarcissusSavage
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26 Feb 2012, 6:02 am

Declension wrote:

NarcissusSavage wrote:

I don't really believe anything

NarcissusSavage wrote:

everything I think I know could be wrong

NarcissusSavage wrote:

Nothing is completely certain

Well, that's very brave of you, to say that you don't believe anything. So I guess you don't believe these things either:

NarcissusSavage wrote:

the objective truth is determinism.

NarcissusSavage wrote:

This truth is painfully obvious.

NarcissusSavage wrote:

the fact

NarcissusSavage wrote:

the truth

You missed something. I’ll bold it for you.

NarcissusSavage wrote:

It is in my opinion that it delusional to believe something completely, due to many, many factors, inherent flaws in thought and perception being at the top of that list. That does not prevent me from arriving at conclusions, processing facts, or understanding truths. While I am not certain, it is impractical to state that each and every time I write anything, so out of efficiency and practicality I state things, in a definitive manner, that reach near certainty.

All of this you are taking exception to is irrelevant to my point.

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I am Ignostic.
Go ahead and define god, with universal acceptance of said definition.
I'll wait.

Last edited by NarcissusSavage on 26 Feb 2012, 6:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

heavenlyabyss
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26 Feb 2012, 6:07 am

NarcissusSavage wrote:

heavenlyabyss wrote:

I'm not trying to convince, but express. And most importantly, ask questions a little different than those being asked already.

Fair enough.

I actually have held your views in the past, but lately it just seems to me that this kind of thinking is counterproductive. If a kind of thinking serves no purpose, is it useful? Yes, maybe. But it is important not to become masochistic as well. Sometimes thoughts run around in my head so much that I end up attacking myself. A person must believe in something if they wish to serve a purpose. They may be wrong, but at least they are not destroying themself in the process.

To me, hard determinism implies moral nihilism which is in my opinion a destructive force in this world. People need to believe things. To deny all reality is damaging to oneself.

Not sure if that makes sense or not. I get your point, but I believe in free will because I find it beneficial. Sometimes we need to think about what is useful. And thinking about what is useful is changing the course of hard determinism, because I believe it be so.

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