I guess I did oversimplify it, but I hoped it made sense within the context of the post regarding free will: if free will is what makes us human, then constraining or denying free will (especially for a concept that may very well be false) means that you forsake your right at being called a human. There is no denying that religion did have a role to price in the building of modern society, however the cost was very, very high and it's arguable that it was worth the sacrifice. We may never know what effect a lack of religion may have had today, this being a hypothetical scenario and such. We may still be paying today for the prevalence of religion by not letting go of an outdated mechanism, an obsolete tool. The last part of your post may be the most interesting part: is mankind at fault for having ever needed religion? My initial reaction is that there is definitely something wrong there, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It's a very intriguing question, I'll give it more thought, thanks a lot for this take on things.

Well, I definitely can't agree with the claim that our possession of free will is what makes us human, as I don't believe in the existence of it and find it a completely nonsensical idea altogether when scrutinized a bit more thoroughly. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the concept of determinism and what do you think of its compatibility with free will, but just in case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

The last sentence wasn't really meant as a serious argument for anything, it was basically just saying that the problem was that there was a problem; I don't think we can fault mankind for needing religion.

Not believing in free will is the most boring of opinions. No offense.

@Necessitarian Then we'll have to agree to disagree for I do not believe in determinism simply because it reduces humans to a number, which according to my statistics studies is a mistake, because humans do not act predictably or logically given a set of circumstances and they often contradict themselves. They have a choice to make and they don't always make the best one. Sometimes they know this since before they make a decision. That's what I call free will.

My stance on determinism is that it is true for all things that do not involve humans. If we place two identical rocks on top on a hill, in an identical surface and blow a stream of wind so that it hits the rocks in the same angle, at the same force, on the same surface area, both rocks will roll down the hill (how they do it is irrelevant for purposes of this example). However you can't expect two people to ever react the same way to a situation, regardless of their upbringing and thought patterns. It's entirely unpredictable, we can say what would be the best choice but we can't be certain that's the choice the will make.

I'd like it if your elaborated on why is free will so nonsensical to you, however if we disagree on premises of a purely hypothetical nature, then we will have to leave the argument at that.

EDIT: Added @Necessitarian

Does holding opinions have to be really exciting? Or do you get the sense he's just saying that to be edgy (which would validate your post)?

Sorry, but that is a lousy example (with the rocks). I could as easily say that, hypothetically, if you put two people on a hill and put two jet engines 3 feet behind them, and turn the engines on, the guys blowing down the hill from the effect shows and proves the lack of free will.

I hold not much faith in overly religious people after that incident where a family let his son die from disease by not taking him to the hospital, waiting for the Lord to cure him via prayers. I can't get much impressed by ignorant claims after things like that.

@Frog: It seems like he's pointing at determinism and saying: "See! Free will does not exist! Gotcha!"

You know how it is a trend in neuropsychology to try to disprove the existence of a free will by showing that our brain reacts in certain ways before we form decisions or whatever? I think it boils down to not actually understanding what free will means. I don't know if he's saying it to be edgy or not, but that kind of position really doesn't seem all that well-conceived to me.

I can try and elaborate using Kant, but I'd really rather not.

@matras Misses the point completely. Under the same set of circumstances, that which isn't human will do the same thing. Let's take those two people. Knowing what you are going to do, you'd think they would not stand there willingly, right? It goes against their survival instinct, one of the greatest impulses in humans. You'd have to force them to be there. Then you'd picture them screaming their lungs off as they fell down the hill. But what if I said they wanted to be there? How would you imagine them now?

Point is if they didn't want to be there, that's free will. You can't limit a person's liberty and then say he/she has no free will. On the other hand, if they wanted to be there, then that's obviously free will too. Now then you can't impose free will over everything. What you want makes no difference on reality: you shoot yourself in the face, you will die. But before that there is a choice. Under the circumstances that you describe, those people will fall down the hill and they still have free will whether they wanted to be thrown off or not.

Good, it's a shame women feel the need to flaunt their genitals just to be noticed.

Aye, I get it. Just asking for clarity. We can discuss Kant. I am...a scholar of sorts....but also, because of that...it's tedious and annoying typing everything out on a forum where it will largely be overlooked.

I probably won't overlook it, if that makes you feel better. But no promises, cuz I don't know shit about Kant, so I'd just be watching you guys talk.



Or if you put them in the stocks between a wall and a wrecking ball.
Free will is a limited thing. The Stranger is a pretty good book.

I'd like to hear more from the religious about ridiculous things they hear in church or other religious functions; stuff which, as a [Belief Investment Bank routing number] really steams them.

@Nochielo
I don't think I miss the point. I think you changed the scenario to make your parallell more plausible. Because now you have entered another factor into the equation: "knowledge of outcome" of a choice.

That would mean you think that people are something magical, something beyond the laws that govern everything else. There's absolutely no reason to believe this, unless your justification for it is that it seems to be this way - which is not that great of a justification. Humans don't act predictably cause there's too much information you'd have to know in order to make accurate predictions - humans and their will is a bit more complicated than rocks. You can't expect two people to act the same cause they're not identical. Identical results come from identical starting points.

Free will doesn't match anything else we know about cause and effect at all. For will to be free it would mean that it has no underlying cause, which seems pretty nonsensical to me.


It's also the only intellectually honest one. Hope this offends.


Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm doing. That is in no way an argument against my position though.


Well, what does free will mean? Does it just mean will? Cause I'm not denying the existence of that. Do you have an argument against that trend you mention?


You're arguing for will, not free will. Are humans free to have that survival instinct? If not, that's one thing that conditions your will that you did not choose. That alone makes it not free.


If anyone has the time, and wants my position put into words clearly, you can watch this Sam Harris video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

@Frog: Yeah, I already have a hard time getting done all those essays I have to do twice a year, so there's not much enthusiasm in me writing long, detailed paragraphs on a metal forum either. 3 lines is all I can do right now

Kant is kind of a standard resource regarding questions concerning human freedom. The thing is: As someone who adopted the Newtonian worldview and thereby believed in physical determinism, he absolutely believed in the existence of human freedom as well. According to him freedom/to follow a free will means to follow a principle that a rational mind gives itself, so that's one defintion of free will right there that makes it totally possible despite determinism.

A principle that the rational mind is not free to give itself, but that results from prior causes. So, yeah, if you take free will to mean unfree will...

Everything results from prior causes. That's the nature of the world. Otherwise everything would be completely random. You set such high standards for what qualifies as free will that it's literally impossible to satisfy them. Making up your own definitions of words and ignoring that they are contradictory to the general consent of the academic field they belong to, now that's intellectually dishonest.

Everything results from prior causes means that things were not free to happen otherwise. Given the same conditions everything would follow the exact same path every single time. You're free to call that freedom.

Quantum theory suggests not even that is true (nevermind it's a completely hypothetical scenario without any real world implications anyways).

Randomness won't give you any more freedom of the will. Do you agree with the scenario?

I don't think it is relevant. The fact that the particles of the universe are not free does not mean everything made from those particles isn't free, because freedom can mean something different on a different layer of reality. You could claim that life does not exist because it is actually just particles organized in a certain way, without any qualitative difference to something dead. But that is not relevant to our reality. A nation is a concept that does not have any meaning if you only look at individual humans, yet it is a real thing. Free will is a concept that does not have any meaning if you only look at the laws of physics. But the same is true for almost everything humans care about.

I don't agree. It does mean that. Your definition of freedom has nothing to do with freedom. Free will is nonsense. Just because the concept exists doesn't mean the thing exists in actuality.


Not the same thing. Human life is human life just the same.


What do you mean? An individual human is a part of the nation. I don't get the point of these examples at all. You're basically saying that humans plus humans equals group of humans. Unfree actions plus unfree actions equals free actions. Or at least that humans plus humans could equal something that's directly opposite to humanity.


Free will is a concept that has no meaning if you look at the whole of reality. The second sentence would contain no arguments even if the first one made sense.

Edit: You edited your quantum theory post to mean something else from what you said in the first place. Not nice. Edit2: Or maybe I'm understanding it wrong and it still means the same. Is the 'hypothetical scenario' part about quantum theory or my previous post?

Ugh, believe what you want, dude.

Edit: I edited my quantum theory post to be non-ambiguous and actually say what I meant. And I was talking about your "what if" scenario.

No way, I'll believe what I'm predetermined to believe.

Sure, sure, or that

I didn't want to bring this up because hypothetical statements aren't the best answer to anything, but under this scenario a pair of genetic clones raised equally in every aspect would make the exact same choices. I can't prove they wouldn't, you can't prove they would. So, again, if we disagree in the premises of an argument, there can be no argument.

Same here.

Survival instinct comes with the package at birth. It is possible to go against it though great effort, that's why people who are deadly afraid of heights go skydiving. You argue for absolute will, where I'm the master of my every impulse and thought. Depression would not exist, people wouldn't act on stupid impulses. You can't change what you believe, but you can change how you will you act next. You can reach a conclusion in your mind about what you must do, and not do it. I feel we are about to argue over semantics, which is yet another pointless argument.


Whereas you assume people have the intelligence of rocks? In your argument you took out a person’s intelligence, and I put it back in. For the sake of argument however, let’s say they didn’t know anything. Ask them if they want to be violently thrown off a hill. They’ll be thrown off regardless of their answer but they don’t know this. They have a choice to make. They decide. Free will. Can they act upon it? Maybe not , but it is irrelevant: they compared the courses of action and made a choice. That's it.

Anyway, it's clear there's no argument here if we disagree in premises. Your points are all noted, let's just go back to bashing religious people.

Dude, your superior rhetoric talent makes my attempts to convince him look pretty sad

They wouldn't be the same if they both existed. But if it were possible to imagine two entities having the exact same everything, I see no reason to dismiss the conclusion. According to everything we know, if the conditions were exactly the same, there could be no other solution. Rewind the tape and everything would go as it did before. I don't see how you can disagree with that without invoking magic. You'll have to be comfortable with calling that free will if you insist on using the term and don't fancy a magical explanation for it.


Could you offer me an explanation on the origin of this impulse to go against the instinct?

We really are arguing over semantics (which is all I ever seem to do, heh), but I don't see how you can define the 'free' part in free will as free and be satisfied with it. And it does have real implications to morality, like holding people culpable for their actions when they're not.

It saddens me that nobody took the time to answer my question about evolution and morality. Perhaps, people took at as an example of stupid things religious people say

Thank you so much! Honestly, I think I am being rhetorically destroyed, by pretty much everyone here, including you, inhumanist. It's nice to be complimented, though .

I agree, but there is no reason to dismiss any other possibility though as this is all guesswork.

More guesswork. We could go on about this all day and we would have attained nothing. We go from "no reason to dismiss the conclusion" to "there is no other solution" really fast here. I can't say you're wrong because my argument is really no better.

I owe you that one. For the most part it's not wise to go against your instincts but there countless cases of people who do. I have no idea.

I don't think our viewpoints differ that much really. However we can only define through parallels and such a complex concept doesn't have any good analogues that I know of. Probably everyone has its own concept, it's not something you can really agree on a definition. Quot capita tot sensus.

My point was that this is the conclusion that follows, i.e. determinism/lack of free will, and that the others don't, from what we know to be true. They (lack of determinism, really) get dismissed immediately.


There can be no other solution if you accept our existing knowledge about how everything works as valid. If you're not going to accept it then we've almost got back on the original topic all of a sudden. But I'm sure you do accept. Right now all you're doing is arguing against the possibility of ever knowing or predicting anything, it seems to me.

If you're convinced that I can't change your mind, then I think we can bury this now, as I (arrogantly ) think that my mind isn't getting changed any time soon.

This is what I mean. We can't argue anything when we can't even agree on the basics. It's pointless.

Wait...? That's what this is about? I never argue to change someone's mind. It doesn't work. Let's bury it and be done with it.

Well I thought that I was going to be done with this thread after I peacefully bowed out but alas I keep coming back. I wanted to comment on the whole mankind needing religion thing. So I would say that for most of our history (pre history and all of recorded history) mankind has needed religion up until the last few centuries or so. Way back when religion was a way to explain the inexplicable and bring order to things, so yeah in order for people to stay sane they needed "god". But since modern scientific advances and what not mankind no longer needs religion for those purposes and thus mankind no longer needs religion. Unless of course you believe in God.

And @ Grave_Wyrm: I'd be more than happy to answer any questions you may have to the best of my abilities.

I'm kind of at a loss for questions other than, what's the case for the existence of God? If it matters, how does the Christian definition know it's right?

If there's more to it than faith, what is it? Is there a case beyond belief?

Edit: and it got buried by the symposium, but I was looking forward to hearing from the religious people some anecdotes relevant to the OP, people they'd heard at church or gatherings, things that made you facepalm and cringe that these were your people. or maybe some debates within the community. I know Jews are known to debate the aims and substance of the word. Who else and what do they say?

Which one? I thought I answered them all. Must have missed one.

I was in my Western Religions class, and my professor was talking about Islam and Judaism and how the Arabs were descendants from one of Abraham's sons and blah blah. This girl next to me raised her hand and said, "So, if Arabs were descendants from the slave son, we can infer that they are, perhaps, more extremist and radical compare to their Jewish counterparts, right?" Professor then went onto a lengthy speech about how she literally was one of the most ignorant person he has ever met.

@Nochielo

I don't assume people have the intelligence of rocks. You were the one bringing up rocks in an example of lack of free will, and then made an example of causality (i.e. rocks rolling down a hill). I said it was a bad example and to point out how bad it was I made an example with people getting pushed down.
All of a sudden you bring in intelligence (not the same as 'free will'), assumed knowledge of plausible outcome (not the same as 'free will') and survival instinct (not the same as 'free will'), all without bringing them up in the original example. That's intellectually dishonest.
You brought in the rocks, not me.

Would you come to the same conclusion when it comes to animals? Do you think they have free will?

You misunderstand me, "If you're not going to accept it then we've almost got back on the original topic all of a sudden." was a poor jokey stab at you to convert you with an ad hominem, i.e. blaming you of ignorant things religious people say.

But, still, I take it you don't believe in anything science has taught us then?


It's certainly not the only reason, but if there's no chance at all of either one changing their minds, then, yeah, I'd say there's no reason to continue the discussion.

Also, for the record:

You edited this a bit after I'd already begin to answer yesterday, so I missed the revised part and didn't answer properly. I think this can be explained by dead and alive things not being opposites, but merely seeming so because of the language. Here's a link to explain. While freedom and unfreedom are opposites incapable of both existing at once. But you might have a point there, I'm not quite sure.

My take is that I'm perfectly comfortable with life ultimately consisting of lifeless things, but freedom consisting of unfree actions I can make no sense of. Life doesn't have to be a magical concept, but for freedom to exist in the way people think it does (I did one thing, but was free to do another) there would have to be a supernatural explanation.

^This may be of interest?


http://www.buddhism-guide.com/buddhism/madhyamaka.htm

Also people thousands of years ago rationalised that meditation and being mindful was the logical approach to living peaceably in their surroundings.