Free Will - the illusion

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Excellent point. Why be angry with people if they are simply 'following their programming'? That's not very rational!

Holy crap, but this response is complete gibberish. Wow. The amount of contortious, circular, illogical 'reasoning' that one must engage in in order to be a committed atheistic materialist is nothing short of astonishing. Answer this question for me: If the will wasn't at all free, in any sense, then how on Earth can you say it was 'theirs'? So they "feel good about it". So what? Can't people feel good about things that had nothing to do with their will, and which was beyond their control? I feel good about the recent election result in Australia (the lefties lost! - Yay!), but I didn't have any choice in who the Prime Minister would be. Did I miss something here?

Exactly. At least you understand there are various 'shades' of free will, that it isn't an all-or-nothing affair. Too many people are just too dogmatic these days when it comes to issues such as this.

Why does everything have to be a "social construct" these days? NO, it is NOT a "social construct"! Why should I believe this? What evidence do you have that would indicate it was so? If there is no free will (as you apparently believe), then why do you even bother getting up every morning? Isn't life completely pointless if nothing we do is affected by what we desire, if we cannot even say "No" to temptations, if we have to rely upon blind instinct? We have free will if only because, among other things, we can resist the obvious course of action, reject instinct, think things through, base our decisions upon objective facts, and... I choose to stop here in my response to you. It was my free choice to do so.

So the experiment suggests:
People re-write-history/alter-their-memory to suit their emotional needs?
To service their desire to be correct?
And by doing so, it negates the concept of their freedom of choice?

In essence, in this particular experiment, it seems their emotional centres of the brain dominate the neocortex which would/should house the mechanism of free will.

I would like to re-write the statement presented in the article from:
"Free will might be an illusion created by our brains,"
To:
"Free will might be corrupted by the emotional components of the brain."

What the above quote suggests to me is that the corruption of free will may be more applicable to those who predominantly use intuitive thought rather than considered reflection.

Those who know me might pre-empt what I am going to say next.
Assuming the quote has some validity, it would seem to me that those who live in delusion are more likely to be those who embrace heuristics and depend on gut-feelings/intuition when making a decision, namely, you guessed it, neurotypicals.

Once again there might be yet another reason for banishing the influences of the emotion centres of the brain altogether.
Lobotomy anyone?...anyone?...anyone at all?
Going once, going twice, third and last call...

But what is governing their programming in this experiment?
And were all participants affected?
The stats aren't presented so we can only speculate.

Going beyond the context of this experiment, I am unconvinced we have what could be considered true free will since all manner of factors influence our decision making, much/most of which is probably unknowable to us, except for me, of course.

As I get under the cognitive dissonance around this one it seems to fit in a lot with a video I just posted in 'the problems of prosperity', ie. the kinds of conversation Monday Blue and The Wandering Wojak would have about human cognition and how most people tend to operate ('normies' or otherwise).

Life seems to at least 'feel' better if we have a bias toward our own beliefs and one generally doesn't have to believe anything they don't want to as long as the costs for those beliefs can consistently be born by someone else. The free will debate is a really good example of this in motion, and technically people can argue that of all of the things you could rather believe that aren't true that believing in free will is one of the least negatively consequential, or even going further, out to where Dan Dennett is at, there's even a fear that if no free will were truly believed and accepted by everyone that there'd be absolute social disaster (I used to really think this was disingenuous but the more I think about how people are - there may be something to that).

One of the absurdities of life that's quite difficult for most people to accept is that nature is ice cold and that consequences will rain down upon a system and various people in it who can't shield themselves from consequence or adequately defer consequences for their own actions on to other people, and that sort of system can go on for a very long time quite successfully if that suffering falls on people with no power. That system, from enough abuse, eventually unravels in a quite spectacularly awful way but as long as people can lie to themselves and secure their own comfort it'll keep plodding along until it becomes impossible for it to plod any further.

Where I get even more stark than a lot of people, I'm willing to accept that in a functionally godless world that a person's experience of death will include getting hug-bombed by the vast consciousness of the universe and likely find out that the fundamental basis of the universe is bliss. Nothing quite says 'dissociation' much more clearly than the sort of reality we currently inhabit. Maybe this is part of why people can't handle the free will issue or have to take hard stances of theism or '500% certain there is no god' forms of atheism, ie. that the actual details do too much violence to their inner life for there to be any hope of objectivity?

Whatever the case may be I think the issue of why people need to believe what they believe probably needs far more attention than it gets and most debates on anything remotely abstract will most often be pointless/fruitless because people are too invested in how they form their sanity and the stories they tell themselves about their own lives, with some mix of solid and rotten foundations, to want to tinker with things that they have no assurance that they can survive tinkering with.

The myth of strict Determinism is used by people to absolve themselves of blame and responsibility.

Ah, your economic beliefs got the upper hand on your ontology I see.

No worries, no one's perfect.

To me, someone would have to believe in the existence of some implicit divinity, for want of a better word, in order to embrace determinism.
Not my cup of tea either.



Look at me!
Look at me!
I'm not perfect either!

Would you say that consistent reality or consistent physics = divinity? If not I'm not sure I understand your argument.

Exactly, and they seem to be using it with evermore frequency these days. What makes it even worse is that people are actually falling for it, partly because they too have fallen for the lie that we have no free will.

The topic of free will is bloody complicated.
Is there any wonder there is convoluted thinking involved?
I am myself quite intimidated by the subject but I still like to muddle around with the eventual hope of enlightenment at the end of the tunnel.

Yes, we did dodge a political bullet with the re-erection of the conservative party. (Can't say the "Liberal" party without confusing the septic tanks.)



Would it be correct to say you are philosophically theist?

Last edited by Pepe on 12 Jun 2019, 8:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"Whether you understand or not isn't under your control" - at approx. 6:05 in the Sam Harris clip.

Actually it is. If I don't understand something, I can make the conscious effort to learn about it until I do. In order for me to do this, I must have a will that is free to at least some extent, otherwise I would have to remain as I am until some random event over which I have no control comes along and prods me in that direction. Is this how anyone lives their life, in the expectation that (somehow) everything will just fall into place? How seriously can I take someone who admits they believe in luck?

I very thought-provoking podcast.
<ponders deeply>
<ponders sumore>

"This is where a wiser man than I would see life as a comedy and enjoy a good laugh."
Damn!
Who would have thought I was wiser than Sam Harris? <beam>

Yep, Sam, self-righteousness is a biatch.
A Rabbi peacock. <chuckle>

"The universe is pulling your strings", agreed.

[quote="techstepgenr8tion"]