Is free will a sign of love?

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^^^^

By almost any epistemological standard one is justified in believing in free will. It is one of the properly basic beliefs. Even if the science went against it, society is required, due to the requirement that we are responsible for our actions being a near universal value, to adhere to free will.

And no, not all evidence points that way. Some studies have been bought up here, the neuroscience one in particular was universally panned by the establishment.

If free will is an illusion for humans how can we assume that God has free will?
If we do not need free will to exist, why does God need free will to exist?
If we only have the present, why does God need the future or the past?
If God has no free will and we have no free will that is your answer.

I will not expand on the free will bit. Said it. Let it be.

Om God. past and future : Time does not apply to God - built into this universe like the clock chip in your computer so the programs run right. God looking HERE sees four dimensions in toto as Gestalt. Wheras we here looking around see a small distance in all directions of theree dimensionas and a very short way into the past on the time line.

Do you limit God to four dimensions? Are there more?

Last edited by aghogday on 05 Feb 2011, 3:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

I would rather feel nothing but pain and despair than lack free will.

That's not conclusive evidence. That's just you trying to find a requirement for us to take responsibility. It doesn't mean it necessarily exists. It's not a necessary requirement. Evolution play a good role in why many tend to take responsibility for their actions.



Even then, there's still no conclusive evidence for the existence of such a magical thing.

What if you wouldn't have the free will to experience pain and despair?

But guess what? You most likely don't have free will anyway.

The bland assumption that not having free will frees somebody or something from responsibility is one of those perpetual idiocies religious people propagate to confuse understanding. A car has no free will, a refrigerator has no free will, but when one of these machines starts behaving badly and needing repair a proper response is to repair them. If people behave badly with or without free will society needs to do something to make them behave properly for the same motivations as machine repair. It's quite obvious no one expects a murderer or a rapist to "repair" himself.

Completely unverifiable.

Not at all. What exactly is free will? If it is the ability to make choices without examining the consequences then what use is it? Will is the ability to choose after examining the consequences of that choice and that choice depends upon your experience and intelligence, neither of which you can control, then that will is controlled. If you make a choice against your intelligence and your experience you are probably choosing a disaster but if you do so, it must be for a reason. That reason is preset and not in your control. There is no free will. Nor would you want one.

x2

Going one step further do people simply think those experiences (more precisely memory), intelligence and decisions come form nowhere?

Who knows? Here we can be pretty sure of 4. String Theory buffs add in a pile. Are theee even any dimensions in eternity?

I have a fair working idea of my environment, some guesses as to how God interacts with this environment. Beyond that - pgd might ask "does Gof have red hair?". Me, I don't go there - have not been there.

I write software for robots for a living. A robot can make "choices". Any program can. But the choices don't happen in a vacuum. They happen as a result of past state and current input. Once a choice is made, the internal state is updated and that affects the next choice.

What could possibly make will "free", in any useful way? Would it be free of its inputs? Of its past state? Some philosophers try to bring in quantum uncertainty, but that makes your will random, not free. You still can't step outside the system and make a choice with more inputs that you had before. If you did, you'd be back in the original situation, but with a few more inputs. That just delays the issue. It doesn't add freedom.

We try to use free will to establish justification for moral responsibility. If free will is an illusion, then either so is responsibility, or we need another basis for establishing responsibility. One objective of responsibility is to make others behave in a way you want, what you consider "moral". Do you need free will for that? Isn't it sufficient to establish the consequences that occur if one makes the wrong choice? Then simple computation will balance the desired ends of the self and others with current state and inputs to choose some outcome and a path to it. (It might not be the "best" outcome. One often finds heuristic programming in robotics that must select a choice within a deadline without knowing that it's the best possible choice. For example, a chess program would take eternity to find the optimal move, and so must compromise and guess at what is the best move within the time given.)

Because we assume we ourselves have free will, and we tend to anthropomorphise the intentness effects of the Universe around us.

God doesn't exist. Beside, rocks exist and they don't have Free Will. It's a moot point.

The arrow of time is only perceived by things that are subjected to the entropic transformations within the Universe. The fact that we perceive time is actually exceptionally good evidence against free will, since it shows we follow the low-high entropy, "cause-and-effect" transformation all other matter undergoes.

Can the theists here seriously not imaging that people only have subjective free will, but are subject to the causal chain like everything else in the Universe? Even if they don't believe it true?