Do You Know That You Have NFW? ( ie. 100% GED )

Post Reply New Topic

But why did you go with "impulse" rather than "conviction"? Weren't you bothered enough by your conviction being overturned to try and find out why it was?

.

I made a decision regarding what was important to me; the difference between the long-term and the short-term desires and goals. To make a gross overstatement... Everything is malleable; there are no absolutes. Why should the fact that I changed my mind be evidence of something being "overturned"? Sometimes a stone is merely a stone.


M.

I see no evidence for free will in what you have described. You make your actions sound like those of a leaf being blown hither and thither by the wind, ( the wind being your various impulses/convictions etc ). It sounds in fact like a very good description of not having free will.

.

Which is purely subjective; you're asking me to discard what I have experienced for what you believe is true... and it isn't going to happen. I can accept that I am full of contradictions and flaws, that I constantly re-evaluate things. Where you see no free will, I see nothing but - what I have done, I have chosen to do, aware of the options and sometimes at my own personal cost, to follow my own interests. As I've said, free will is the ability to see one's options, know what is their own best interest, and still choose to follow their own path. It's an interesting subject to explore, but if we are going to discuss the matter I would appreciate it if you would take the time to respond to my questions instead of relating conscious decision to leaves blowing, scattered in the wind. Thank you.


M.

I thought it went rather well after "a stone is merely a stone".

"Why should the fact that you changed your mind be evidence of something being overturned"? I didn't say it was. I picked up on your saying that you went with "impulse over conviction". It's a fairly normal way of describing the process of a plan being altered/aborted by a later decision.

Am I right in thinking that you see free will in a fairly classically Augustinian light, as being our capacity to do otherwise than what we believe to be the "right"/wisest/best thing? And you don't beat yourself up about doing that either, so long as you don't do it "too" often.

A sort of inner dialogue between various parties, with more or less equal voting rights, ( all with different ideas about what is most important ) about what they want to do, with your actions based on a general consensus among them? Or do you see yourself as a CEO choosing between different briefs that various parts o you provide you with at any moment?

Has there ever been a time when you were not happy about your decisions, when you began to feel that decisions were far too often not in your best interests?

.

Last edited by ouinon on 19 Dec 2009, 12:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Impulse (short-term) over conviction (long-term); sorry if I was not clear in that regard.

I would not refer to myself as Augustinian; it is the ability to choose between selfish and selfless, profit and altruism, to follow one's own path despite societal impressions that direct one to another course of action. I don't beat myself for changing my mind; I do regret missed opportunities, but accept those are the result of the decisions I've made. Not a general consensus, either - a re-evaluation of what I want, at that time. Sometimes I am not happy with my decisions, but in the end they remain just that - my decisions, and not the result of extant external forces.


M.

Indeed. And if you then told me that the earth does not exist I would disagree with you. I would disagree and I would continue to disagree with you even if you told me that you knew of someone who described the earth as flat and pointed out that the earth is not flat. You could produce an enormous list of erroneous beliefs one or more people hold about the earth, and I would still continue to disagree with your assertion that there is no earth.

I am aware that you have suggested this, however I am also aware that you have not proven this, and further that it is not particularly relevant to my opinion that the phenomenon people commonly refer to as free will is in fact a skill/skill set that does indeed exist.

You claim that the phenomenon that I refer to are determined, but I would suggest that they are not necessarily any more determined than other skills such as proficiency in running, writing, swimming, or public speaking. So being determined does not necessarily mean "cannot be a skill".

To recap, you have not demonstrated that we or anything in the universe is actually determined or determinalistic, but rather seem to simply assume as much perhaps because you also assume that everything is a singular effect of a cause and every cause has a singular effect. While the latter assumption is certainly intuitive, it has not (and probably cannot) be proven, and further, not all observed data is easily reconcilible with the traditional "cause and effect" axioms.

Having made these assumptions, you have further assumed that "if it is determiend" then it is "not free".

You have also added to this set of assumptions an assumption that "if it is not free and people refer to it or think of it as free, then it does not exist".

At some juncture or other, you toss in a slew of necessary conditions for the state "being free/is free" that you treat as axiomatic and then impose on all arguments or assertions pertaining to free will. This is done without actually ever giving any depth of thought to the concept/definition of "free", and with the expectation that everyone else involved should simply accept this utterly unexamined incoherency is the only appropriate/correct definition of free.

Even more oddly, you seem to think that everyone who has ever used the phrase 'free will" must necessarily (have) conceptualiz(ed) and define(d) "free" exactly as you do, and further, that in every instance where anyone has used the word (or used at least those instances where it was immediately followed by the word "will"), they necessarily meant this and only this particular definition of "free", and meant it absolutely literally.

This does not amount to a sound argument as the truth of the premises does not imply the necessary truth of the conclusion. It is not a compelling argument, as the logical links in many instances are either non-existent or too weak to be readily apparent, and the premises, in addition to being unsubstantiated are far from likely.



I am quite bemused that you do not appear to understand that your analogy entailing a flat earther is not analogous with either of our positions or views as expressed in this thread. A fitting analogy is that which I provided, whereby because a flat earther asserts that the earth is flat, and you do not believe that the earth is flat, you decide that the earth does not and cannot exist.

I am not saying that "will"/self-awareness/ability to act on self, to change, etc etc etc , ( the "earth" in my analogy ), does not exist. I am saying that these things are determined, ie. not free; eg. that the earth we walk around on, that we experience every day, whose existence I would not deny anymore than the existence of self-awareness etc etc etc, is round, not flat. We agree on the existence of these things, but we disagree about their nature.

I think that, if anything, I am even more bemused than you are, that you do not understand this analogy/parallel.

On the other hand I am in no doubt at all that you have no intention of rethinking your position on free will. I actually did re-examine my own, at several points during our discussion, because your argument seemed not only necessarily "weighty", ( coming from you and taking up so many pages ), but also somewhat original, but you appear to be as fixated on the word "free" in this case as I am.

I think that I am unlikely to forget the lesson which I learned from this discussion, ( for the second but far more indelible time ), which is that belief in "free will" is like belief in god; and there is no point in expecting anyone who believes in it to do anymore than accept that it might be "merely" subjective, and have no objective existence, ( as you in fact did earlier on ).


"Free will" is something subjective. I totally agree. It has no objective existence, just like god. I think, by the way, that scientists have already established that beliefs/subjective experience have a measurable/objective effect on people's behaviour.

I accept that belief in free will may be as important, and perhaps as useful and comforting to you as my belief in god is to me. But I think that belief in free will has a negative effect on some/many people, aswell as on society as a whole, ( rather like belief in an avenging old-testament-style god used to have, and still does have in some places ).

.

Actually, I think that if I hadn't believed so fervently, consciously, even passionately, in free will for several years I might not only not have been able to "decide" to believe in god, ( because without belief in free will, the choice, determined by genes and environment as I now see it, would not have meant very much, might even have been impossible ), but the experience of believing in free will was also a very valuable, if painful, lesson, ( in "whose" will was actually "being done" ), which meant that when I decided to believe in god I "found"/experienced a rather different sort of god than the old testament style one which I would otherwise have come face to face with.

So, as I argued a while back on another thread, belief in free will was in fact a valuable "bridge/path" of ( subjective ) "truth" for me, and may be for many, so long as they test it and question it and follow it right to its logical conclusion, as if it were a guide.

It's funny; this thread was intended to be about the role that a label like Aspergers/autism plays in society and our lives, with reference to our understanding of/belief in free will, ( which is why I originally posted it in Adult In-Depth ). I didn't want yet another argument about its existence, ... and I have remembered exactly why I didn't.

.

We have already established that when people say "free will", in general they are referring to something that exists even if they are not entirely correct or clear about the nature and qualities of the thing they are referring to. I posit that the thing they refer to is a skill or skill set. You posit that even though it is a real thing that does exist, that real thing does not exist because they use the word "free" and whatever they might mean by that, to you, having not really thought abou the concept or definition of "free" they must mean some magical thing with supernatural qualities, ergo the real and existing thing they are referring is not real.

Which is all rather self contrary and not particularly logical in my view.

Once again, I remind you that 'being determined" does not mean "is not a skill that can and does exist", so it is mysterious to me that you consider determination might be an evidence against my claim that free will exists and is a skill/skill set.

You claim that we do not agree on the nature of things whose existence we both accept. I am not convinced this is the case particularly since you keep referring back to determination as though this is somehow materially relevant.

However, you could argue otherwise if you can demonstrate that there is "flatness" to the nature I am positing (that being a skill is not or cannot be a property or attribute of the thing people use the phrase "free will" to refer to. You cannot do this by referrring to determination unless you also demonstrate that "if X is determined, then X is not a skill".

It is not that I do not understand, but rather that I know better.

The earth does exist and does not cease to exist if someone erroneously attributes the quality of being flat to it. You have stated that free will does exist and is a real thing but that some or many people attribute qualities to it that it is not characterized by, and therefore it does not exist.

Free will is analogous with the earth and those who are mistaken about the nature and qualities are analogous with those who are mistaken about the qualities of the earth.

I am not in the least bit fixated on the word "free". My opinion as to the existence of free will does not rely on the word free in any respect.

Your argument relies entirely on the word free and a particualr definition of that word that reduces the meaning of "I do not have free will" to "I am not omnipotent". I do not find it plausible that generally when people say they have free will, that they are trying to convey a claim that are omnipotent. So I do not think the particular definition of "free" that you are relying on to reach your conclusion is even relevant to claims of having "free will".

Your argument is exactly analogous to an argument whereby you conclude the planet Mars does not exist because Mars means a particular "God of War", and that particular God does not exist. None the less, the planet Mars continues to orbit the sun, and would do so even if it were called "free will" even though the planet Mars is not omnipotent.

You have not come up with any argument that demonstrates or even strongly indicates that the referent of "free will" is omnipotence, and your only basis for claiming as much appears to be the word "free" appears in the phrase "free will".

The actual referent that the phrase "free will" refers to, is irrrelevent to your arguments and reasoning about the referent of "free will" apparently. This is why I suggest your argument amounts to a form of semantic pedantism, whereby if something is sufficently poorly or confusingly named, the naming convention at issue can cause the non-existence of the absolutely real referent. I suggest this is unrealistic, as the non-existence of a God of War and the use of a word that means God of War as a noun for a particular planet, does not cause that planet to dematerialize and no longer exist. You have not produced any counter-argument for my argument that you are ignoring the referent of "free will" and instead fixating on the sign itself.

As to not rethinking my position, I have not made a single argument or posted a single comment in this thread without repeating evaluation of my position. To me, this is a significant cause of the enjoyment that I have derived from the discussion and it is that enjoyment that motivates my involvement. If not for such re-evaluation (aka "rethinking"), I doubt I would be motivated to participate, and so would unlikely to be involved in this discussion.

I think that you may not be entirely clear about the subtle distinctions involved in my earlier statement. My earlier assertion does not assert that "free will" is a thing that one can only have a subjective opinion about the existence of, or can only be subjectively considered to exist. But rather, that like a preference for strawberry ice-cream over chocolate ice-cream, whether or not free will exists can be and is a question with an objective answer, but that the qualities of free will (like the qualities of a preference for ice cream flavours) is subjective.


If it can be objectively measured, then the question of its existence is clearly an objective one. So it is quite clear from the above commentary that I am not accepting that the question as to whether or not "free will" exists is a subjective one, and one that can only have a subjective answer.

"Free will" is subjective as a preference for ice cream flavours is subjective. Preferences for ice cream flavours do exist and the question of their existence is an objective one, but they do not exist as objective things. This is an important distinction and it is not clear from your comments that you have understood and included this distinction in your reasoning.

Be that as it may, to objectively measure the effects and qualities of free will" in the sense referred to in my comments above would require that "free will" be objectively defined as an object. We might be able to generate objective measurements that one could subjectively claim are measurements of aspects or effects of free will, but this is distinct to being able to objectively measure the aspects or effects of free will.

I do not understand why the convenience of this particular premise is relevant to determining the truth. Either free will exists whether or not this is convenient, or free will does not exist whether or not it is convenient. Adding "belief in" does not change this (either free will exists whether or not belief in free will is convenient, or free will does not exist whether or not belief in free will is not convenient).

Your conclusions and the argument for it are not actually about free will, but rather about the sign used to refer to it and are exactly analogous to arguing that the planet Mars does not exist because the sign "Mars" has at least one definition that describes something that does not exist.

You may have established this to your satisfaction, but I see no reason to think that the thing which most people mean when they refer to free will exists. ... The evidence is all in the other direction ( experiments showing that people experience themselves as making a decision after their body had already started carrying it out, etc ). This thing which most people mean when they refer to free will is as imaginary, as subjective, as the "flat earth" which flat-earthers believe in.


The thing that you refer to is a skill set, whose objective existence I agree with if it refers to self-awareness, mindfulness, and a few other skills with perfectly good names, none of which are "free will". Why introduce another concept to describe these things, when they already have names which describe them pretty well? Why cling to/insist on the term "free will" when you could just say that people are varyingly self-aware, have a ( 100% genetically and environmentally determined ) ability to change" themselves, etc?

What is it about the term/concept "free will" which is so important to you that you must refer to genetically and environmentally determined skills/talents like self-awareness, mindfulness, etc as "free will"? You say that you do so because you believe that is what the first people to use the term were referring to. That is your interpretation again, and even if it were so, why not simply use the modern words, why insist on using a name/word/label which you have yourself said is something of a misnomer?

You may not be fixated on the word "free", but you are definitely very very attached to the archaic, and misleading, term "free will", for some reason.


I haven't replied to this "objection" before now because it seemed so obviously ridiculous a notion that it had to be a mere "jibe", not worth a reply. However you have now repeated it so often ( and makuranososhi mentioned it too in his recent posts ), that I have to conclude that you seriously believe that this is what I think most people mean when they refer to free will. I do not. I do not believe that the existence of "free will", as it is generally understood, would mean our omnipotence.

.

When I say that we have already established, I meant that within the course of this discussion, this point has been settled apon as not contested by either of us.
.
Then why did you assert the contrary earlier in the discussion? Your response to my comment I believe that when people began to refer to free will, they were either completely imagining things, or were accurately reporting something real, or were inaccurately reporting something real... was


None of which contradicts free will as I conceive it, nor does it contradict that the phenomena that people experience and interpret/construe/perceive as free will exists. The only relevance it may have is in respect of the nature or quality of the phenomena if it exists.

I disagree.

It is not the introduction of a new concept, but rather my opinion as to the nature and identity of the thing that people perceive themselves as experiencing and refer to as "free will".

I do not cling to the term and really do not care if people use other terms. But this is quite different to ignoring that the phenomenon that people report as free will actually is a skill set and pretending that people who claim to have "free will" are having grandiose delusions of themselves as omnipotent.

The term is not important to me. Neither is the term "ball cock" but if a plumber told you he thought the problem with your toilet was related to the ball cock and you told me he was claiming there was a ball and genitalia or a male chicken in your toilet, I would not accept that the plumber had made such an assertion.

No I do not say that at all.
I am not insisting that anyone use the phrase. I do not care whether they do or do not. I do not believe that the defintion you are attaching to free will is what is meant by the phrase. Your definition of free will is in effect a claim to omnipotence. I do not believe that makuronoshi believes that he is omnipotent, I do not believe the philosophers throughout the ages who asserted that have they free will in the course of their philosophical meanderings believed they were omnipotent. I do not believe that the majority of people who claim to have free will believe that they can will themselves to fly into the air like a bird, create universes at will, transport themselves through time etc, in other words I do not believe that they are claiming to be omnipotent.

I do believe that they are refering to a range of characteristics, attributes and traits, and those characteristics, attributes and traits are not to me indistinguishible from skills.

No I am not. I simply see no reason to obstruct effective communication by failing to uphold the pragmatics of communication to the best of my ability. For instance the cooperative principal whereby people seek to understand the content of a message even where doing so requires that one make interpretations that are not derived from or even are contrary to the semantic elements utilized to convey the message.


The objection refers to the definition of free will, and it is absolutely obvious to me that the definition of "free will" is core evaluating whether or not "free will" is something that exists. You are defining "free will" as being some kind of supernatural quality that entails being omnipotent. I do not believe the message people intend when they say "I have free will" is "I am omnipotent". Rather I think when people make this statement they are refering to such things as being able to make and perceive themselves as making choices etc. In my view these are certainly things that do exist, and I classify them as skills/a skill set.

You have posited definitions of free will that do not require supernatural qualities and those are consistent with my claim that free will exists and is a skill set yet you still assert that my opinion is some of kind "taking it on faith" (rather than an attempt to identify what people might be refering to when they say "free will" and evaluating whether or not such a thing appears plausible and extant); your only counter arguments for this rely on free will having supernatural qualities that you claim cannot be real and existing (for instance if we are not completely independent of environmental influence and cause and effect relationships then free will does not exist).

While you might interpret that when makuranososhi claims to have free will, he is claiming (for instance) to not be subject to environmental influence, that is tantamount to a claim of supernatural qualities and makuranososhi has already confirmed that this is not what he is communicating when he makes such a claim. I do not think that the majority of other people who make such claims are any more prone to delusions of supernatural grandeur than makuronososhi. I think most of them are referring to the same things that makurnososhi appears to be using the phrase to refer to, and that those things do indeed exist and are skills.

Either free will is something supernatural, ( which in my opinion does not exist ), and/or it is a subjective experience only, which, if someone insists on thinking that it is objectively "real", ( as many people do who believe that genes and environment only lay out possibilities, reduce options, while somehow still leaving room for manoevre outside them, as makuranososhi seemed to be saying ), makes it a kind of illusion, OR it is a set of ( objectively "real" ) skills which are entirely determined by genes and environment, which need no other name, and certainly not one as ambiguous and misleading and "loaded" as "free will" ( which suggests the very opposite of what the "real" thing actually is ).

.

Aha, well then if your question is "do you realize that you are not supernatural?" the answer is it frankly never occured to me to consider that I might be supernatural and I strongly suspect most people do not think that they are supernatural.

ouinon... you've already started out the thread with an assumptive and rather provocative title, and now you're attempting to constrain the possible opinions that people can have by saying it can only be this or that. Such is only your opinion... it doesn't represent the scope of perspectives on the subject. I've not suggested that one's will exists outside of genetics or environmental constraints - rather, that we operate within those limitations, which are not fixed but elastic ranges that are surprisingly flexible when the right pressures are applied. You keep insisting that because genetics and/or environmental factors impose limitations that there is no free will, which is where our rift resides - I do not see these as predetermining factor, only obstacles. Some are insurmountable, some can be navigated, but it ultimately how we choose to operate and respond in these situations that determines who we are... not the other way around. If the ideal of fatalism helps you as a coping skill, I do not argue that... but I can't not agree with your suggestion.


M.

It's so odd. I wrote it simply wanting to make a parallel with autism diagnoses, the sort of three letter abbreviated label that people on here are so familiar with; PDD, NOS, ASD, NVLD, ADHD, etc. It was meant to be thought-provoking, yes, but I wasn't aware that provoking thought was frowned on on WP! Assumptive, no, just full of conviction. Slightly different.


I am not. I was trying to find out, ( by reducing the verbiage, by declaring/restating, as clearly as possible, what exactly I see the meanings of free will to be ), what the source of the confusion between pandd and myself is, so that we might perhaps stop going round in circles apparently talking about different things.

Exactly! And that is all it was. Do I have to repeat in every assertion that I make that "this is only my opinion" for people to understand it that way? My last post was, as all my previous posts have been, only my opinion!


That is your opinion!

Obviously my "summary" was simplified. But I think that it covered, with broad strokes, the three main meanings of "free will": the supernatural and/or subjective meanings, ( which I bracket together because they both belong to the world of belief and subjective experience ), and the objectively "real" skills which aren't free but are 100% determined. Which meaning of free will do you think is missing from that?


And what is it, if anything, which determines how you choose to operate and respond in those situtations? "Where", is the "I" located which is doing the choosing? What makes it choose certain operations, or responses?

Is your "choosing" agent a physical thing, made up of chemicals etc, acting on other chemicals? Or is it a non-physical thing?

If it does not have physical existence I do not understand how it acts on the physical world of our brains/bodies, and if it is a physical/chemical thing then it is determined.
.

Last edited by ouinon on 22 Dec 2009, 3:48 am, edited 1 time in total.