According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[DBT]

Incomprehensible sensations, shapes, sounds, noises, etc, that make no sense, not knowing who or what you are, no self awareness, unable to function, unable to recognize common objects or people you have known your entire life is not consciousness as you currently experience it

Yet again, "not consciousness as you currently experience it" is not even actually a sensible statement.

Of course it is. A body without a functional mind is nothing like a healthy body with normal cognitive functions.

Are you trying to say that a patient in the last stages of memory loss experiences self and the world in the way they did before the onset of their decline?

Even the consciousness you have now is not consciousness as you experienced it a second ago, because what we are aware of changes both with the configuration of the thing generating awareness of stuff (so as to change what it CAN be aware of), AND the information being provided from which such awareness of phenomena is assembled.

Memory loss is progressive, first short term memory followed by a decline in other cognitive functions, autobiographical memory, episodic, sensory, procedural, semantic, etc, where the degree of impairment is related to the degree of degeneration of connectivity.

Consciousness of things, however, exists in both situations: one is consciousness of well ordered data, of many data extracted from a complicated signal, and the other is of noise. Both are "consciousness", it's just that one isn't very useful.

Without a working memory in it's various forms and functions, there is no recognition, there is no comprehension, there is no coherent thought, there is no planning, no considered actions, or rational decisions .

So there is nothing that you could label or define as being 'free will,' which was never the means of rational thought and decision making in the first place.

''The increments of a normal brain state is not as obvious as direct coercion, a microchip, or a tumor, but the “obviousness” is irrelevant here. Brain states incrementally get to the state they are in one moment at a time. In each moment of that process the brain is in one state, and the specific environment and biological conditions leads to the very next state. Depending on that state, this will cause you to behave in a specific way within an environment (decide in a specific way), in which all of those things that are outside of a person constantly bombard your senses changing your very brain state. The internal dialogue in your mind you have no real control over.''

 

[Jarhyn]

Of course it is.

No, it is not, and I've discussed this many times before. You didn't even respond to the explanation, any of the stuff behind the claim, you just produced this complete non-sequitur:

A body without a functional mind is nothing like a healthy body with normal cognitive functions.

The fact is, this is not sequitur to the statement. I am criticizing your usage so as to say something can be "generally conscious" without any actual address of the things they are conscious of. Consider each of these bad usages:

"That person is not conscious"

"That number is not additive"

"Consciousness" is ubiquitous everywhere. There is no "as I experience it" anywhere except in this particular and unique example, and the system, in its experience of itself (the sum total of things that are conscious in some subunit of reality that you consider "me") is not the same experience as I had even a single plank second later.

You cannot make either statement without some unstated context of what you surmise the person is conscious OF, what numbers you surmise the number is the additive output of.

You could absolutely say "that number is not the additive result of 1 and 5", and then suddenly the statement resolves.

Similarly, you could say "that person is not conscious of the colors that object is emitting" assuming 'that person' was blind, for example. Again, the statement now resolves.

But notions like "whether someone is conscious" are ill formed at best. They are conscious, of all sorts of things.

And still, there are wills and freedoms... though dictated by more by ever more basic physical phenomena, until you reach the deterministic bedrock of thermodynamics.

I have shown that so long as there are switches, the system is capable of experiencing, having a will, and having some manner of freedom towards those wills that can be observed and discussed externally.

I can say "that bear trap encodes a will to close if the plate is stepped on", or "that bear trap has the will to close if the plate is stepped on, but lacks the freedom to close completely so long as that block is there between its jaw-closing-path."

Clearly, even without a "brain" as you would consider the concept, with a single simple mechanical switch, with the presence of any contingent mechanism of action in fact, freedom and will are observed (and so, arguably, anywhere there is a gradient between two charge states such that some event would allow least action to take hold).

The pathway between the gradients is their provisional freedom, the pathway that least action follows is the real freedom, and The gradients themselves are the will.

These exist ubiquitously across nature as phenomena and metadata, and are no more 'imaginary' than 'imaginary' numbers, which are not, in fact, actually imaginary any more than Freedom and Wills.

 

[DBT]

Of course it is.

No, it is not, and I've discussed this many times before. You didn't even respond to the explanation, any of the stuff behind the claim, you just produced this complete non-sequitur:

I have refuted your claims in each and every reply on the issue.

The problem is that you don't appear to understand what the consequences of total and irrevocable memory function loss are, and what it means for self awareness, personality and character of the person who has lost their memory and themselves.

Esssentially, we are our memories and our memories are us.

A body without a functional mind is nothing like a healthy body with normal cognitive functions.

The fact is, this is not sequitur to the statement. I am criticizing your usage so as to say something can be "generally conscious" without any actual address of the things they are conscious of. Consider each of these bad usages:

"That person is not conscious"

"That number is not additive"

"Consciousness" is ubiquitous everywhere. There is no "as I experience it" anywhere except in this particular and unique example, and the system, in its experience of itself (the sum total of things that are conscious in some subunit of reality that you consider "me") is not the same experience as I had even a single plank second later.

You miss the point entirely because you have no apparent understanding of what the consequences of total and irrevocable memory loss are.

Or else to acknowledge the profound loss of self that it entails doesn't suit your belief in free will

Again;

Quote;
''People suffering from Alzheimer's disease are not only losing their memory, but they are also losing their personality. In order to understand the relationship between personality and memory, it is important to define personality and memory.

Personality, as defined by some neurobiologists and psychologists, is a collection of behaviors, emotions, and thoughts that are not controlled by the I-function.

Memory, on the other hand, is controlled and regulated by the I-function of the neocortex. It is a collection of short stories that the I-function makes-up in order to account for the events and people. Memory is also defined as the ability to retain information, and it is influenced by three important stages.

The first stage is encoding and processing the information, the second stage is the storing of the memory, and the third stage is memory retrieval. There are also the different types of memories like sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. The sensory memory relates to the initial moment when an event or an object is first detected.

short-term memories are characterized by slow, transient alterations in communication between neurons and long-term memories (1). Long-term memories are marked by permanent changes to the neural structure''

The terminal Stages of the disease, and the consequences of such a profound memory loss being; Symptoms:

''Can't recognize family or image of self in mirror.
Little capacity for self-care.
Can't communicate with words.
May put everything in mouth or touch everything.
Can't control bowels, bladder.''

You cannot make either statement without some unstated context of what you surmise the person is conscious OF, what numbers you surmise the number is the additive output of.

You have to be joking.

You could absolutely say "that number is not the additive result of 1 and 5", and then suddenly the statement resolves.

Similarly, you could say "that person is not conscious of the colors that object is emitting" assuming 'that person' was blind, for example. Again, the statement now resolves.

But notions like "whether someone is conscious" are ill formed at best. They are conscious, of all sorts of things.

And still, there are wills and freedoms... though dictated by more by ever more basic physical phenomena, until you reach the deterministic bedrock of thermodynamics.

I have shown that so long as there are switches, the system is capable of experiencing, having a will, and having some manner of freedom towards those wills that can be observed and discussed externally.

I can say "that bear trap encodes a will to close if the plate is stepped on", or "that bear trap has the will to close if the plate is stepped on, but lacks the freedom to close completely so long as that block is there between its jaw-closing-path."

Clearly, even without a "brain" as you would consider the concept, with a single simple mechanical switch, with the presence of any contingent mechanism of action in fact, freedom and will are observed (and so, arguably, anywhere there is a gradient between two charge states such that some event would allow least action to take hold).

The pathway between the gradients is their provisional freedom, the pathway that least action follows is the real freedom, and The gradients themselves are the will.

These exist ubiquitously across nature as phenomena and metadata, and are no more 'imaginary' than 'imaginary' numbers, which are not, in fact, actually imaginary any more than Freedom and Wills.

You fail to understand the consequences of permanent and irrevocable memory loss and miss the point entirely.

What do you think consciousness is like when nothing can be recognized? Where the senses transmit information to a brain that is no longer capable of making sense of that information, where sensations are incomprehensible, where voices and speech is just random noise, where there is no coherent thought or the ability to plan or consider or act rationally.

Can you not understand that this is not consciousness as you are now experiencing it?

 

[Jarhyn]

The problem is that you don't appear to understand what the consequences of total and irrevocable memory function loss are

No, you don't seem to understand what the basic structural cause of you losing access to your memory is, so as to understand from any complete and holistic understanding of consciousness what the applicable language is for describing what is going on.

You are like Emily Lake with her consistent reliance on a social concept in her attempts to discuss biological concepts and conditions: it's quite inappropriate and yet you seem unable recover from this.

You have to be joking

No, I am not. I have discussed this many times now insofar as you cannot be vague and hand-wavy in the sloppy way you have been, in the not-even-wrong mode of conversation that happens between a viking and a Christian where they argue between their respective creation myths not even considering evolution, which won't be proposed for another thousand years.

I have been very clear: the idea that "things" are conscious is no more useful than the idea that some piece of matter is "atomic". "Atomic" tells you nothing about something that is broadly true of everything, you have to actually ask what atoms it is made of, how those atoms are structured, and so on.

For consciousness, you have to specify a target location/region and a "target statement", and ask "is the target statement expressed at the target location".

So you could ask "is the Avionics/Pitot node conscious of the reported fault on the electronics system?" And you could say "no there is no message nor state in Avionics that encodes awareness of any current hardware faults in the electrical system, because those messages are being hijacked at the delivery node".

You could not ask "is it conscious", sensibly, because there are many things that it is self-conscious about in specific ways. You could fill a library of all the facts and things that the avionics is not conscious of, but what it does maintain conscious awareness of is how much time it has to finish it's job, and how much time it took last time.

You can trivially discover what exists in the consciousness awareness of the avionics package of a 787 just by popping open it's local memory and dumping that out. It's trivially conscious of all that (but good luck translating it).

This is how those words work, and they work just as well for humans as they do for machines but how these words don't work in actual modern conceptions of it is in such utterances as "it does/doesn't have consciousness". Such a use is a colloquialism, a turn of phrase, and should not be construed to actually mea there is some nebulous quality called "consciousness" that something either has or does not.

I have been trying to hammer this into your head for years, that your discussion on the topic is simplistic, childish even, like trying to discuss set theory and the foundations of math with a 7 year old, and arguing that imaginary numbers really exist and being questioned on this because "imaginary things don't exist, it's how they are defined".

 

[DBT]

The problem is that you don't appear to understand what the consequences of total and irrevocable memory function loss are

No, you don't seem to understand what the basic structural cause of you losing access to your memory is, so as to understand from any complete and holistic understanding of consciousness what the applicable language is for describing what is going on.

You consistently miss the point. Is it just a means of maintaining the illusion of free will?


The point being: Whatever the cause of memory function loss may - which may be any number of conditions and causes, lesions, tangles, dementia, etc - has no bearing on the end result, as described, inability to recognize, comprehend, understand, think or act coherently, the loss of self awareness, self identity, character and personality.

Delving into the various neural causes and mechanics of memory function loss does nothing to change the consequences of the condition for the patient.

You are like Emily Lake with her consistent reliance on a social concept in her attempts to discuss biological concepts and conditions: it's quite inappropriate and yet you seem unable recover from this.

Amazing.

Incredible

What you say has virtually nothing to do with what I said, implied or suggested.

Are you even reading what I have say or post, which really has nothing to do with social factors?

What I said about memory loss and its consequences is directly related to brain function and condition.

Memory function loss is a physical condition that has physical consequences for consciousness, which is a form of physical brain activity.

In a nutshell, that the physical condition of the brain, neural architecture, electrochemical activity, inputs, memory, information processing and consciousness, is the state of you.


I couldn't be bothered with the rest of your post, it's too much. I say one thing, yet you respond to something that was not said, implied or even suggested.

 

[Jarhyn]

inability to recognize, comprehend, understand, think or act coherently, the loss of self awareness, self identity, character and personality.

You keep conflating some regional inability of recognition by one part of a brain (the 'visible you') to mean the global lack of coherence, recursive awareness, character, or personality (of the 'total you').

It is similar to looking at an avionics package and making the declaration "this system lacks the ability to recognize" because it lacks the ability to recognize when the pitot is clogged, failing to acknowledge that it still has "the ability to recognize" many things that AREN'T the pitot tube, and that things are just more fundamentally complicated than your tinker-toy mental model accounts for.

 

[pood]

It is worth remembering that the ancient debate over free will had nothing to do with causal determinism. It had to do with the paradox of an omniscient omnipotent God judging the behavior of creations that it knew for certain would misbehave. God's certain knowledge of the future behavior of humans corresponds to causal determinism in the modern godless variant of the paradox. How can we hold people any more responsible for their actions if they are no more than "moist robots", to use Scott Adam's famously humorous take on the subject:

“Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.”​

I think more specifically the idea has been that if God knows for certain in advance what I will do, then I must do that thing, and that therefore I have no free will and cannot be morally culpable. This is a modal fallacy. It says, If God knows in advance I will do x, then I must do x. The corrected version is only a relative necessity: Necessarily (if God knows in advance I will do x, then I will [not must] do x.) The upshot is I am free to do x or y, but I am not free to evade God’s detection of my action. If I do x, God will know in advance I do x. If I do y, God will know in advance I will do y. But I am free to do either x or y.

 

[Jarhyn]

It is worth remembering that the ancient debate over free will had nothing to do with causal determinism. It had to do with the paradox of an omniscient omnipotent God judging the behavior of creations that it knew for certain would misbehave. God's certain knowledge of the future behavior of humans corresponds to causal determinism in the modern godless variant of the paradox. How can we hold people any more responsible for their actions if they are no more than "moist robots", to use Scott Adam's famously humorous take on the subject:

“Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.”​

I think more specifically the idea has been that if God knows for certain in advance what I will do, then I must do that thing, and that therefore I have no free will and cannot be morally culpable. This is a modal fallacy. It says, If God knows in advance I will do x, then I must do x. The corrected version is only a relative necessity: Necessarily (if God knows in advance I will do x, then I will [not must] do x.) The upshot is I am free to do x or y, but I am not free to evade God’s detection of my action. If I do x, God will know in advance I do x. If I do y, God will know in advance I will do y. But I am free to do either x or y.

*If the preconditions to X or Y end up being satisfied.

 

[Copernicus]

...
It is worth remembering that the ancient debate over free will had nothing to do with causal determinism. It had to do with the paradox of an omniscient omnipotent God judging the behavior of creations that it knew for certain would misbehave. God's certain knowledge of the future behavior of humans corresponds to causal determinism in the modern godless variant of the paradox. How can we hold people any more responsible for their actions if they are no more than "moist robots", to use Scott Adam's famously humorous take on the subject:

“Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.”​

I think more specifically the idea has been that if God knows for certain in advance what I will do, then I must do that thing, and that therefore I have no free will and cannot be morally culpable. This is a modal fallacy. It says, If God knows in advance I will do x, then I must do x. The corrected version is only a relative necessity: Necessarily (if God knows in advance I will do x, then I will [not must] do x.) The upshot is I am free to do x or y, but I am not free to evade God’s detection of my action. If I do x, God will know in advance I do x. If I do y, God will know in advance I will do y. But I am free to do either x or y.

I don't quite buy your analysis here. First of all, from a purely technical standpoint, the modal verb must always entails a future event. It has no past tense, unlike other modal verbs. Secondly, God was imagined to be both omniscient and omnipotent, meaning that God had ultimate control over all future outcomes. So part of the argument had to do with whether such a deity would be justified in punishing its creations for behaving the way they would. It was never about whether God was just a detached observer of a future event. Unlike Cassandra, God had the option to create beings that would always choose to do what he wanted them to do or prevent them from doing what he didn't want them to do. The claim of modal fallacy frames God as essentially equivalent to Cassandra--a being powerless to create, change, or influence future outcomes that she knew would happen.

 

[pood]

I don't quite buy your analysis here. First of all, from a purely technical standpoint, the modal verb must always entails a future event. It has no past tense, unlike other modal verbs. Secondly, God was imagined to be both omniscient and omnipotent, meaning that God had ultimate control over all future outcomes. So part of the argument had to do with whether such a deity would be justified in punishing its creations for behaving the way they would. It was never about whether God was just a detached observer of a future event. Unlike Cassandra, God had the option to create beings that would always choose to do what he wanted them to do or prevent them from doing what he didn't want them to do. The claim of modal fallacy frames God as essentially equivalent to Cassandra--a being powerless to create, change, or influence future outcomes.

Correct. I was only talking about how omniscience fails to rule out free choice, not omnipotence. But it’s still a distinction worth making, if only for breaking down the logic of a being who can foresee everything still cannot rule out free choice. If you factor in omnipotence, it’s a different matter.

 

[Jarhyn]

I don't quite buy your analysis here. First of all, from a purely technical standpoint, the modal verb must always entails a future event. It has no past tense, unlike other modal verbs. Secondly, God was imagined to be both omniscient and omnipotent, meaning that God had ultimate control over all future outcomes. So part of the argument had to do with whether such a deity would be justified in punishing its creations for behaving the way they would. It was never about whether God was just a detached observer of a future event. Unlike Cassandra, God had the option to create beings that would always choose to do what he wanted them to do or prevent them from doing what he didn't want them to do. The claim of modal fallacy frames God as essentially equivalent to Cassandra--a being powerless to create, change, or influence future outcomes.

Correct. I was only talking about how omniscience fails to rule out free choice, not omnipotence. But it’s still a distinction worth making, if only for breaking down the logic of a being who can foresee everything still cannot rule out free choice. If you factor in omnipotence, it’s a different matter.

Heck, even in the face of omnipotence, free will still exists. The only thing that makes free will cease to exist is some infinite and perfect obligation to constant action subverting the action of what would otherwise be the laws of the system.

You're only not responsible for your actions if the thing that could be responded to is not structurally involved in rendering the outcome (ie: there is no contingent mechanism to disrupt), which is only the case if the omnipotence is obligatory (as God is unavailable for rendering physical responses to).

"God", assuming it exists (it doesn't) may be responsible for sitting on his hands and not fixing things, but this doesn't erase the responsibility you have in your own frame of reference.

 

[Copernicus]

I don't quite buy your analysis here. First of all, from a purely technical standpoint, the modal verb must always entails a future event. It has no past tense, unlike other modal verbs. Secondly, God was imagined to be both omniscient and omnipotent, meaning that God had ultimate control over all future outcomes. So part of the argument had to do with whether such a deity would be justified in punishing its creations for behaving the way they would. It was never about whether God was just a detached observer of a future event. Unlike Cassandra, God had the option to create beings that would always choose to do what he wanted them to do or prevent them from doing what he didn't want them to do. The claim of modal fallacy frames God as essentially equivalent to Cassandra--a being powerless to create, change, or influence future outcomes.

Correct. I was only talking about how omniscience fails to rule out free choice, not omnipotence. But it’s still a distinction worth making, if only for breaking down the logic of a being who can foresee everything still cannot rule out free choice. If you factor in omnipotence, it’s a different matter.

Heck, even in the face of omnipotence, free will still exists. The only thing that makes free will cease to exist is some infinite and perfect obligation to constant action subverting the action of what would otherwise be the laws of the system.

You're only not responsible for your actions if the thing that could be responded to is not structurally involved in rendering the outcome (ie: there is no contingent mechanism to disrupt), which is only the case if the omnipotence is obligatory (as God is unavailable for rendering physical responses to).

"God", assuming it exists (it doesn't) may be responsible for sitting on his hands and not fixing things, but this doesn't erase the responsibility you have in your own frame of reference.

I think you are meandering towards compatibilism, which takes free will to be definable within a deterministic reality. The same reasoning could be applied to the theological argument. If free will is defined in terms of an agent's control over outcomes, then it makes perfect sense that people (and non-fleshy robots, in principle) possess free will. At the time a choice is made, the future is inherently unknown. A chooser can only imagine outcomes, and the freedom comes from being able to select an action intended to bring about a desired outcome. Unforeseen circumstances can happen that interfere with that freedom, so people can ultimately plead that the consequence of their action was not what they intended. Hence, they should be absolved of responsibility for the outcome. For example, I do not normally hiccup of my own free will, so I shouldn't be held responsible for the failing to stop the hiccups.

 

[Jarhyn]

I don't quite buy your analysis here. First of all, from a purely technical standpoint, the modal verb must always entails a future event. It has no past tense, unlike other modal verbs. Secondly, God was imagined to be both omniscient and omnipotent, meaning that God had ultimate control over all future outcomes. So part of the argument had to do with whether such a deity would be justified in punishing its creations for behaving the way they would. It was never about whether God was just a detached observer of a future event. Unlike Cassandra, God had the option to create beings that would always choose to do what he wanted them to do or prevent them from doing what he didn't want them to do. The claim of modal fallacy frames God as essentially equivalent to Cassandra--a being powerless to create, change, or influence future outcomes.

Correct. I was only talking about how omniscience fails to rule out free choice, not omnipotence. But it’s still a distinction worth making, if only for breaking down the logic of a being who can foresee everything still cannot rule out free choice. If you factor in omnipotence, it’s a different matter.

Heck, even in the face of omnipotence, free will still exists. The only thing that makes free will cease to exist is some infinite and perfect obligation to constant action subverting the action of what would otherwise be the laws of the system.

You're only not responsible for your actions if the thing that could be responded to is not structurally involved in rendering the outcome (ie: there is no contingent mechanism to disrupt), which is only the case if the omnipotence is obligatory (as God is unavailable for rendering physical responses to).

"God", assuming it exists (it doesn't) may be responsible for sitting on his hands and not fixing things, but this doesn't erase the responsibility you have in your own frame of reference.

I think you are meandering towards compatibilism, which takes free will to be definable within a deterministic reality. The same reasoning could be applied to the theological argument. If free will is defined in terms of an agent's control over outcomes, then it makes perfect sense that people (and non-fleshy robots, in principle) possess free will. At the time a choice is made, the future is inherently unknown. A chooser can only imagine outcomes, and the freedom comes from being able to select an action intended to bring about a desired outcome. Unforeseen circumstances can happen that interfere with that freedom, so people can ultimately plead that the consequence of their action was not what they intended. Hence, they should be absolved of responsibility for the outcome. For example, I do not normally hiccup of my own free will, so I shouldn't be held responsible for the failing to stop the hiccups.

Meandering towards? I'm quite well and fully at, and probably a fair bit past there.

Philosophically speaking, my principle foundation is in fact on the idea of compatibility, and even on the first night I heard the term (and in fact the first time I ever heard some people hinge their idea of free will on seeking indeterministic actions) my response was a long the lines of disbelief that folks could possibly think responsibility existed outside of deterministic processes OR that deterministic process fails to undergird mental function.

My breakdown on how I think that the system of the mind functions so as to interrelate process and freedom and agency is one of the more recent posts to r/compatibilism in fact.

 

[DBT]

inability to recognize, comprehend, understand, think or act coherently, the loss of self awareness, self identity, character and personality.

You keep conflating some regional inability of recognition by one part of a brain (the 'visible you') to mean the global lack of coherence, recursive awareness, character, or personality (of the 'total you').

No, I don't. You keep insisting on your own terms and conditions regardless of what is being said.

The condition of progressive and permanent memory loss is real. It happens.

The condition can and does progress to the point where the patient cannot recognize common objects, events, previously familiar people or oneself. Sadly, it happens.

For the purpose of this discussion, agency, the nature of cognition and the role of will, the mechanics of the condition are secondary to the consequences of the condition for the person as a conscious entity.....which have been described, and its significance for any claim of 'free will.'

It is similar to looking at an avionics package and making the declaration "this system lacks the ability to recognize" because it lacks the ability to recognize when the pitot is clogged, failing to acknowledge that it still has "the ability to recognize" many things that AREN'T the pitot tube, and that things are just more fundamentally complicated than your tinker-toy mental model accounts for.

Oh, boy, way off the mark.

Refer to what I said above and in previous posts.

Basically;
A brain acquires and processes information unconsciously, according to its physical makeup (genes), attributes and properties prior to conscious representation of some of that information.

State and condition is everything (normal functions, degenerative conditions, etc), where state and condition is not a matter of choice.

Which comes down to: deterministic processes make it impossible for us to “cause and control our actions in the right kind of way.''

 

[Jarhyn]

No, I don't. You keep insisting on your own terms and conditions regardless of what is being said

Yes you do, and these childish denials and refusal to self evaluate are just tired at this point.

The condition of progressive and permanent memory loss is real

You seem to be disinterested in actually looking at the process to understand it, to understand why your use of language around it is not-even-wrong.

Of course some region of the brain occasionally loses access to a system, but this does not make the system "lose consciousness" or "lose awareness" in some way that applies to some lofty floating general "consciousness" or "awareness", as these are not correct usages of those terms.

I've explained this. Go back and actually READ my posts and rather than getting triggered by the fact that I say "freedom" and "wills" are real, try to understand how that is to see if it makes sense.

You clearly have admitted that compatibilist terminology makes sense in the past, but that you just didn't want to pick it up because of some belief you hold in some ill-informed "terms and conditions" of determinism, as if that holds any water in the face of actual observed systems.

Yet again I am going to invite you to open DF, download DF-hack, and look at how individuals being responsible for their actions works directly in practice in an observable deterministic system.

Oh, boy, way off the mark

Guy, I explained how the system function from direct experience here. You can't say it's off the mark when that's how a 787 works. I demonstrated that systemic consciousness is a function of local access, linguistic systemic structure, and of physical locality. That you dislike using these words when describing what is happening inside a computer despite their applicability is your own issue, not mine.

Quit your religion. It's just as gross as Lion's in its own way

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I think you are meandering towards compatibilism, which takes free will to be definable within a deterministic reality.

Which could be called more simply limited free will. I'd reduce it even further and say that we have a will. Do people simply mean "will" when they claim "free will?" Probably. We execute choices but the breadth of those choices is certainly predetermined, not limitless, as far as the individual is concerned, imagination and ignorance notwithstanding. That's fact.

 

[Jarhyn]

I think you are meandering towards compatibilism, which takes free will to be definable within a deterministic reality.

Which could be called more simply limited free will. I'd reduce it even further and say that we have a will. Do people simply mean "will" when they claim "free will?" Probably. We execute choices but the breadth of those choices is certainly predetermined, not limitless, as far as the individual is concerned, imagination and ignorance notwithstanding. That's fact.

Well, again the phrase "predetermined". It is limited, yes, but predetermined is a stretch, and is as limited in its own way as the alternatives are in theirs.

Really the "free" part is just there to say "the thing I was responsible for was 'choosing to do this for my own reasons without outside influence of message containing this whole and delivered will from outside (this specific area of my skin bounding what is inside)."

Let's consider that humans are things capable of arbitrary code execution. The source of this code that is being executed is of pointed interest. Generally, code originating from some source or another is going to contain, or may contain from the agent's perspective, some directive or goal for the benefit of others rather than the individual, even things mutually exclusive of the executing agent's goals.

As a result, scrutiny on where some piece of arbitrary code came from is important to the process of goal attainment. This is why we ask "did I do this 'of my free will' or did I do this 'under undue influence'?"

When arbitrary code execution happens on a program from outside sources, this is treated generally as a cause for alarm, after all. This is what a "computer virus" is.

This concept, when some spoken natural language directive is considered holding the same role as the code in the computer example, sheds light on why it is important to maintain autonomy, and personal freedom from coercive elements: so that the actions we take serve our goals rather than defeating those goals.

Further, it lets us look at the source of messages and make careful-ish adjustments to the logic that accepts some outside goal, or for that matter the logic that rejects particular outside goals. This puts the "response" in "responsibility".

 

[Copernicus]

I think you are meandering towards compatibilism, which takes free will to be definable within a deterministic reality.

Which could be called more simply limited free will. I'd reduce it even further and say that we have a will. Do people simply mean "will" when they claim "free will?" Probably. We execute choices but the breadth of those choices is certainly predetermined, not limitless, as far as the individual is concerned, imagination and ignorance notwithstanding. That's fact.

My problem with the determinism vs free will debate is over what "free" means. Do we really have a choice when presented with our limited options for taking an action? The answer is yes, because the future is always indeterminate from the perspective of the chooser. The options are real. The factors that compel us to choose one option over the others are a part of what makes us free. Factors that interfere with our compulsions are what truly hinder free choice.

If someone sticks a gun to your head and demands your wallet, do you hand it over willingly or not? Yes, you hand it over willingly rather than die. No, you don't hand it over willingly, because you have to contend with the unwanted threat to your life. Should you be held responsible for handing your wallet over willingly? A jury would probably say no.

If we shift our perspective to that of an omniscient third party observer--one that is not the agent faced with alternative options--then the freedom in question becomes moot. There is no freedom when the future is fully determinate, and a jury looks at the determinate past where your free will was thwarted. In debates over free will vs determinism or free will vs an omniscient/omnipotent deity, people keep jumping back and forth between the perspective of the agent looking at an indeterminate future and the non-agent observer looking at a determinate future. Freedom only exists from the perspective of the agent facing an uncertain future.

 

[pood]

I think you are meandering towards compatibilism, which takes free will to be definable within a deterministic reality.

Which could be called more simply limited free will. I'd reduce it even further and say that we have a will. Do people simply mean "will" when they claim "free will?" Probably. We execute choices but the breadth of those choices is certainly predetermined, not limitless, as far as the individual is concerned, imagination and ignorance notwithstanding. That's fact.

My problem with the determinism vs free will debate is over what "free" means. Do we really have a choice when presented with our limited options for taking an action? The answer is yes, because the future is always indeterminate from the perspective of the chooser. The options are real. The factors that compel us to choose one option over the others are a part of what makes us free. Factors that interfere with our compulsions are what truly hinder free choice.

If someone sticks a gun to your head and demands your wallet, do you hand it over willingly or not? Yes, you hand it over willingly rather than die. No, you don't hand it over willingly, because you have to contend with the unwanted threat to your life. Should you be held responsible for handing your wallet over willingly? A jury would probably say no.

If we shift our perspective to that of an omniscient third party observer--one that is not the agent faced with alternative options--then the freedom in question becomes moot. There is no freedom when the future is fully determinate, and a jury looks at the determinate past where your free will was thwarted. In debates over free will vs determinism or free will vs an omniscient/omnipotent deity, people keep jumping back and forth between the perspective of the agent looking at an indeterminate future and the non-agent observer looking at a determinate future. Freedom only exists from the perspective of the agent facing an uncertain future.

If there were an omniscient third-party observer dwelling outside space and time and looking down at the entire history of the universe, the Minkowski block world with past, present and future all evident and spread out before this observer, he/she/it would see a staggering number of world tubes, including all the world tubes of everyone who ever existed and all the choices that they made. There would be ONE history, putting aside stuff like quantum many world branches. And if such an observer saw the whole history of everything, including everyone who ever lived from birth to death and every single one of their choices, it would be perfectly legitimate for that observer to conclude that each one of those choices was freely made except for the ones compelled, such as with a gun to the head.

 

[Jarhyn]

I think you are meandering towards compatibilism, which takes free will to be definable within a deterministic reality.

Which could be called more simply limited free will. I'd reduce it even further and say that we have a will. Do people simply mean "will" when they claim "free will?" Probably. We execute choices but the breadth of those choices is certainly predetermined, not limitless, as far as the individual is concerned, imagination and ignorance notwithstanding. That's fact.

My problem with the determinism vs free will debate is over what "free" means. Do we really have a choice when presented with our limited options for taking an action? The answer is yes, because the future is always indeterminate from the perspective of the chooser. The options are real. The factors that compel us to choose one option over the others are a part of what makes us free. Factors that interfere with our compulsions are what truly hinder free choice.

If someone sticks a gun to your head and demands your wallet, do you hand it over willingly or not? Yes, you hand it over willingly rather than die. No, you don't hand it over willingly, because you have to contend with the unwanted threat to your life. Should you be held responsible for handing your wallet over willingly? A jury would probably say no.

If we shift our perspective to that of an omniscient third party observer--one that is not the agent faced with alternative options--then the freedom in question becomes moot. There is no freedom when the future is fully determinate, and a jury looks at the determinate past where your free will was thwarted. In debates over free will vs determinism or free will vs an omniscient/omnipotent deity, people keep jumping back and forth between the perspective of the agent looking at an indeterminate future and the non-agent observer looking at a determinate future. Freedom only exists from the perspective of the agent facing an uncertain future.

If there were an omniscient third-party observer dwelling outside space and time and looking down at the entire history of the universe, the Minkowski block world with past, present and future all evident and spread out before this observer, he/she/it would see a staggering number of world tubes, including all the world tubes of everyone who ever existed and all the choices that they made. There would be ONE history, putting aside stuff like quantum many world branches. And if such an observer saw the whole history of everything, including everyone who ever lived from birth to death and every single one of their choices, it would be perfectly legitimate for that observer to conclude that each one of those choices was freely made except for the ones compelled, such as with a gun to the head.

And this is an exercise that is eminently available for the observer and one of the reasons why I bang on about Dwarf Fortress: you can do exactly this thing you describe, or near enough.