No free will = giving up?

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I'm not dogmatic. I'm an empiricist.

Demonstrate to me that the mind and the brain are divisible. Is there evidence for such a thing?

Not the quoted party, but I have to answer...

The brain is a physical thing and the mind is generally considered to be a function of it, I don't know what that has to do with free will though? Why do you seem to believe that the brain isn't affected things outside, despite it existing largely to process, interpret, and learn from information received from outside? Such a thing couldn't exist without physically being affected by outside influences.

Leaving aside the contracted am and is instances, take hormones as an example of the mind existing outside the brain. Glands also demonstrate conditioned responses. Then add in all the chemical communication from assorted tissues, and you can see how to distinguish brain from mind.

Real empiricists learn about science before commenting on it.

Learn to read please.

I made no such confusion.

If you're gonna correct me, at least correct something I actually said, instead of correcting the near opposite of what I said. I didn't say acting rationally disproves free will (if anything I am saying the opposite). You may have been fated by the universe to not touch the snake because you are shackled by having common sense. But the moment you encounter the snake you still have to operate as if there is free will, and not assume that your fated to live 80 more years so therefore its okay to touch the snake.

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The subject is "if there is no free will do you give up [all hope]". What I am saying is that you will have a better destiny (even if it is fated, and there is no free will) if you operate under the assumption that there IS free will. There fore the nonexistence of free will shouldn't cause you to "give up".

There is no such thing as absolute "free will." There is always something which will prevent one from doing exactly what one desires to do.

However, even the vast majority of religions contain a strong "free will" component. Many times, within the wisdom of these religions, it is said that God (or gods) want us to "fight it out amongst ourselves," rather than rely upon these deities to solve all problems. Very few religions (mostly "cultist" ones) contain a component whereby a "Supreme Being" is the "supremely" dominant component in one's fate in everyday, earthly existence.

The concept of "fighting it out amongst ourselves" involves considerable free will. It involves people using their "free will" to make choices. It involves the deities "staying out of it," so to speak.

When did I say the brain wasn't affected by outside things? Of course it is.

The mind cannot exist without the brain. It is not divisible. The functions within the brain which lead to the choices we make are all part of the self. The self is not divisible. Therefore, the self is making the choice.

Hormones do not prove the existence of a mind divisible from the brain. Hormones and other chemicals affect the mind because they affect the brain.

Just as I see no evidence for fairies or gods, I see no evidence for a mind existing without a brain.

I see only confirmation bias, and possibly laziness. If you wanted to see such evidence, you have the whole internet before you, containing dozens of easily accessible papers on Biology's modern understanding of the mind and the brain.

I'd really recommend Sam Harris's talk on JRE below because this isn't as difficult to hash out as it sounds.

Essentially societal reactions to crimes and imposition of penalty are a pragmatic issue. Sam's argument is that, to their own degree, everyone's a bit like Charles Whitman however there isn't the massive tumor Charles Whitman had to make the moral case quite as obvious. Criminals and law breakers still go to jail but the emphasis is much more on rehabilitation, ie. looking at their state of affairs as being more akin to alcoholism, and the 'punishing evil' holdover from protestant philosophy gets pulled back - both as pernicious and factually false (considering that everything they were was the sum total of their genes, upbringing, and environment).

As for living 'as if' there were free will - its part in parcel with what we are. If you consider the role of consciousness it's a mechanism by which lower-level aggregations of living matter send signals upward, to a processor which tries to calculate the best course of action from processing the balance of the most salient inputs, which then syncs the signals in favor or action and sends them back down the hierarchy to the endocrine and muscular systems in executive response.

Your conscious mind holds up one end of the stick, your amygdala seems to hold the other, and which has the more active role in the decision made has more to do with the requirements and degree of threat that shows up in that given situation. I'd also add that past patterns of abuse, emotional and endocrine balance, also help decide in favor of whether you're problem-solving from the frontal lobe or the amygdala. Another issue is that you do have a lot of subconscious processes and aspects that you aren't aware of that will come to the fore as intuitions, and I might also ad some woo here for good measure - there probably are external systems, other than our usual senses, that apply some degree of exertion over us, most often very mildly, sometimes almost insatiably, and if it's big enough trouble you're in and an agency with vested interest doesn't want you maimed, dead, or to have your life jammed down a particularly nasty path you could very easily hear something like a human voice from within your own head telling you to duck, jump, feel an overwhelming urge to stay home, or whatever else. Stories along those lines with people who had near brushes with death (not NDE's but those who narrowly avoided the opportunity) seem to occur quite often. My own thought on that last bit is that we might want to go back to a more radically functionalist theory of consciousness but saying much more than that's probably better left to another thread.

I think the biggest mistakes people make with determinism are assessments like the idea that it would mean that people can't learn, can't change, etc.. It has little or no implication in that direction and if anything, particularly with situations that were traumatic or embarrassing to one degree or another, you can't not learn. Even if your conscious mind wants to go on doing exactly what it wants to do your amygdala will show that it clearly did learn the lesson when the situation comes back around.

In all the human apparatus and the universe it resides in is too complex, even from a purely materialist standpoint, to suggest that lack of free will means that we'd have the fate that we see ourselves having at any given moment. It's complex enough that we're nearly always wrong and even when our options are largely closed off for finance, disability, etc.. reasons we still can only call so much accurately thinking from the past and now. Heck, you have Robert Sapolsky in some of his Stanford lectures talking about fundamental noise in living systems actually being a large part of the basis that creates them and keeps them going (to hear more on that look up his 'chaos and reductionism' lecture). Even if we are automata to some degree we clearly aren't of the cheap variety, not by a long shot.

Arguments are not evidence.

Doesn't look like there's much scientific evidence for dualism, the mind being separate from the brain:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sc ... kQgQMIJDAA

I don't even think dualism would help the free will case if it were true.

Primary question to a dualist who believes in free will: are the consequences of dualism occurring in action and reaction within time? If yes - thank you, you've made my case that it's irrelevant to establishing a precedent or mechanism for free will.

I think dualism hurts the free will argument. I'm not a dualist.

My argument is that all the processes withing the brain (which includes reactions to external stimuli), which are ultimately responsible for our choices, cannot be separated from the self. Ergo, the self is freely making choices. If you alter the chemicals in the brain or remove a physical part of the brain, that is a different self. Eg -- if I inject you with hormones, you are an altered version of you; you are not the same person you were moments ago.

I actually used to not believe in free will because I thought all of our choices were the result of all the stuff happening in the brain -- the firing of neurons, chemicals, etc. While that is why we make our choices, those processes are us. There doesn't appear to be any evidence for a non-physical form of the self.

The processes which cause me to make my choices are actually Me; therefore I am actually making my choices. The firing of neurons, the chemicals, etc are Me. They are not divisible. To remove or alter them would create a different Me.

I stopped reading at this point. We actually DO have free will, in spite of what so many committed reductionistic materialists may say about it, and in spite of the 'evidence' they bring to the debate. Much, if not most, of the arguments for the non-existence of free will are built upon the foundational philosophical assumption that material reality is all there is, and this purely philosophical prejudice (as D. B. Hart once famously called it) is often touted as being based upon "reality as it has been revealed to us by the totally impartial practice of the scientific method". Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

If free will isn't real, then how on Earth did anyone reach such a conclusion based upon an impartial, free and objective examination of the available evidence? Absent the existence of free will, conclusions that are reached are entirely pre-determined, and an impartial examination of the evidence available (and its correct interpretation) becomes impossible.

My mistake, I thought you were arguing against free will.

What you're implying seems to be a pragmatic argument - ie. that if there's no one or nothing else to be but the being performing the actions your performing, whether you generate your desires, history, resulting behaviors that you're observing from your own vehicle and intimately involved with then there's nothing else for you to do but claim full accountability for the behavior.

I still have a great deal of trouble with any arguments of 'free will within determinism' or within the kind of chaos that amounts to the same lack of choice. To call it free will just seems confusing. Agency and pragmatic accountability for the custody of one's actions - sure, I wouldn't argue with that as a reality, but I think it's worlds away from arguing that a person has some type of libertarian 'choice' that can be made along the way. Conflating or twining the two arguments seems misleading and like it just creates more confusion than its worth. The role of consciousness seems to be that of feeling the sensation of choice and experiencing choice, which is why the idea that no choice that could have been made otherwise is happening seems really counter-intuitive, but I think that's the case. It's an effort-filled and often strenuous course but I'd argue that it's determined, if not physically at least temporally, regardless.

I'm guessing you can see from a few posts above that I don't share your physicalist view of consciousness, I did at once point but it ran into too many problems that weren't reconcilable. Interestingly enough I don't think that my current metaphysical views have made a dent in my views on free will. I was a physicalist at the time when I came to the conclusion that personal identity, experience, and behavior were ultimately a web of actions and reactions fully dependent on external factors however to move toward an open-system monism or functionalism, or even at the times where I might have deeply entertained idealism, it didn't matter. It could be Dan Dennett's metaphysical reality or it could be Rudolph Steiner's. It doesn't seem like it would make a dent in the problems that come with any notion of any sort of truly self-caused action. The best we have are various conduits of amplified and self-folding/compounded complexity that can make the results look libertarian on casual observation because the reality of how they come out performatively is too rough and chaotic to map to our predictive models.

I think it Saturn's scythe took Free Will to join some of his other divine brethren across the River Styx before Pallas Athena could birth him.