topherreynoso

Meditate on free will for a while with our friend Krishna and when you "know" that materialism can not be reconciled with free will, I'll let you know where you can send my porsche. :)

The smartest people I know are at least agnostic, recognizing that something else is going on but struggling with the ability to identify it. I don't trust the atheists, to me it means they haven't thought about it enough or they think we're all bio-robo-zombies (sounds like a good B movie). If you think we're all bio-robo-zombies, I get worried that you might be a bio-robo-zombie.

And I'll be damned if I'm gonna trust a bio-robo-zombie with this decision. (See what I did there? Oh, come on that was pretty good. ~sigh~... this is why no one invites me to parties)

What you're describing could easily be said about gravity. If you really start pressing physicists on this subject it gets muddy really quickly, even the definition (don't just tell me what gravity does or the effect it has, tell me what it is). One of the going theories involves gravitons, a massless particle with a spin-2 boson. Many physicists posit that the graviton itself is unobservable. In that sense its "properties" are very difficult, if not impossible, to really nail down. That does not change the fact that gravitational force is experienced and responsible for a great deal of work in the universe.

We observe a force, we hypothesize about it based on those observations and we try to build tests for those theories. That's my point with the free will, mind-body problem, substance dualism argument. We observe free will, we build rules for our civilization around it, each of us can observe its existence. Admittedly, some people are willing to throw it out, argue against it, claim that we have no "free will" that it is merely action and reaction, we can only do what we are biologically programmed to do (that destroys most civilization's systems of rewards and punishment, btw) and I would say that most people, based off of their observable experience with their own minds and actions are unwilling to accept such a notion. Some people try to explain it away by saying that it's nothing more than randomness, like the kind we observe in quantum mechanics. I would say that most people are not inclined to equate "randomness" to "free will" either.

If you observe free will and accept its existence you now have a great deal of work to do in order to explain it, hypothesize about it, test it, etc. especially if you are only accepting materialism in the traditional sense. This, like many scientists have in the past when observing strange matter (anti-matter, neutrinos, gravitons, etc), leads many people to decide that there must be some other "force" or "power" outside of the observable material world in order to make sense of one's ability to think, act, react freely.

I'll be the first to admit that I've heard a lot of irrational arguments from people trying to advocate or disprove a particular religion. But you're saying that because you've only heard or explored irrational arguments for theism or atheism that all arguments for theism or atheism are irrational. Your argument is irrational.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough. Questioning the existence and using rational arguments for or against the possibility of free will itself is a rational argument that affects theism or atheism. My point wasn't to tell you what my friends believe but to help you understand that there is a whole body of work dedicated to substance dualism that is based in rational arguments. That's just one philosophical subject, there are plenty others. Simply waving your hand and saying that rational arguments about theism or atheism are absurd is lazy at best. Take a look, there are plenty to be had.

>> To try and dress up either atheism or theism in rational arguments is absurd

Why? I know plenty of philosophers that are great with rational arguments that spend their time in atheism or theism. I know several who believe in God or some kind of higher power simply because of free will. Can you give a definition of free will? Can you provide evidence of it or prove or disprove it even if we can agree what it is that we think we are talking about? Just because we may not have the slightest figment of a clue, not even a scrap, doesn't mean that we can't feel strongly whether free will actually exists or not or posit experiments or rational arguments to explain its existence or non-existence one way or the other. Do you believe in free will? I do and I know several philosophers who do too, who feel that since they feel so strongly about its existence, despite it going against everything we understand about a physical universe (causal relationships, action and reaction and whatnot) that there must be something else going on in the universe other than mere atoms bumping into atoms, the existence that we can observe. Sounds like a pretty rational argument that dresses up atheism or theism quite nicely. Maybe you just haven't explored enough rational arguments or questioned your own ability to think and act freely to even reach the questions? Maybe you have. I don't know you, but I do know that there are all kinds of ways to talk about atheism and theism in very rational ways.

Jonathan Swift is slow-clapping somewhere.

I think we need to determine what free will is first because to me random or just unpredictable does not equal free will (that's how I think of the buffer overflow you describe). Nor does complete freedom to act or do whatever you want equal free will. For example, having free will doesn't mean I can now fly or defy other natural laws. Free will, to me, incorporates interpretation and response, and the ability to change the rules regarding interpretation and response. It doesn't mean not having rules and laws regulating interpretation and response, it just means having the ability to redefine those laws. So yes, at some point I'll need something above causal reaction in order to have free will but that doesn't automatically imply that I'm boxed out because that free will is attributed to matter (strange as that matter may be). The whole point of the comparison to strange matter isn't that free will is a particle, but rather a way to show that physical laws don't clearly attach to everything in the universe. And I don't mean to imply that free will must be one thing or another. I think that's what I'm taking issue with in your argument. Especially your last sentence in the above comment. My comparison to strange matter is merely to show that free will cannot be discounted by physical laws. Your assertion says that free will, if existent, must be in a particular form. While my position can't be disproved, yours can't be proven. So I guess neither of us are pushing this argument much of anywhere.

Glad to see the questions raised but I fail to see how free will can at all be compared to buffer overflow or how in doing so we draw any closer to an explanation or understanding of its existence. I think if your goal is merely to show that free will can't be discounted by the laws of the known universe you're better off comparing it to "strange matter," things that share physical properties with most matter but are missing fundamental blocks of what we call matter like mass (gravitons) or interaction with matter (neutrinos). That allows us to say that if this "strange matter" can violate those rules, there is the possibility that something exists in the universe that operates on the fringe of known matter, still interacting but violating most of what we consider "rules" regarding matter's existence, perhaps even allowing us to operate freely. In computing terms, free will is probably more like a systemic computer, maybe it's more easily understood as a human's ability to reprogram itself. A highly evolved, biological machine capable of reprogramming itself. Although that just begs the question since the reprogrammer must still be programmed at some higher level to follow commands. The process of making a biological machine like that is a blast, but they're wildly unpredictable, as you would expect anything truly capable of freely reprogramming itself would be. ;)

unreal, no matter what your stance is on how people should enter this country, i think we should all agree that if you've been here 10+ years, paid taxes, and have no criminal record, citizenship should be automatic. my father immigrated to the states with his parents when he was 4, they came and were granted legal residency but it took nearly 50 years for him to finally get citizenship and not for lack of trying. it was a proud day when we went down to LA and watched him go through the ceremony and swearing in to become a citizen but it just made me so upset that it took so long. what's crazier is that he was a police officer for nearly 10 years, was a small business owner (which made him a millionaire) and created 15 jobs in California, never went a year after 18 without paying taxes, and went through the citizenship process five times before they finally granted it (the previous four times he was just told "we'll call you when we're ready to make you a citizen"). for a country that was founded because of taxation without representation, it's pretty backwards the way we treat tax paying "visitors". i know none of this helps you but i was in need of a rant on the subject. :)