Determinism vs Free Will
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  1. ISO #1

    Determinism vs Free Will

    1. Are they mutually exclusive
    2. If so, which one do you believe in?
    3. Otherwise, why are they not mutually exclusive?

    Personally I'm leaning on them not being mutually exclusive. I always thought that argument was kinda weird. Like, if you think they're exclusive, you're basically saying that:
    a) your actions/decisions/thoughts/whatever are determined by external influences you have no control over (like the molecules/atoms/protons?? in your brain, even the Big Bang if you wanna go that far), or you could stop at simply saying that because your decisions are determined by the makeup of your brain/genetics/whatever the fuck, you don't have free will
    b) IF they're mutually exclusive, then the only way we could have free will is if our decisions are randomly determined.

    a) Is problematic because it kinda looks like splitting hairs from my perspective. I say you do have free will because your decisions are determined by your internal processes, like your wishes, your interpretation, and then you make a decision based on how you think it best to fulfil your wish
    b) Is obviously an even bigger problem: if b is true, then literally the only things that have free will are quantum events

    And maybe not even those, it isn't absolutely clear to me that they're really as random as they seem.
    Last edited by Oberon; April 21st, 2021 at 03:48 PM.

  2. ISO #2

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    I remember long ago reading or hearing of some study that shows that humans can only control their attitude. Sounds like a load of bull crap to me now; either you can control everything or nothing at all.

    Despite that though, I remember being impressed by it enough to believe it even now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  3. ISO #3

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    Quote Originally Posted by OzyWho View Post
    I remember long ago reading or hearing of some study that shows that humans can only control their attitude. Sounds like a load of bull crap to me now; either you can control everything or nothing at all.

    Despite that though, I remember being impressed by it enough to believe it even now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    In my philosophy class, I remember there was a study the professor mentioned where they basically said the impulse to move your hand came before you were consciously aware of it.
    So, basically, you'd already made your decision - subconsciously.

  4. ISO #4

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    I agree that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they could also both be false. You could be living in a universe governed by random phenomena and also have no true control over your actions :P
    Quote Originally Posted by Blinkstorteddd02 View Post
    naz, he's claiming to have been at your house last night and infected you. I know u were drunk but PLEASE try as hard as you can to remember... That burning you felt the next morning when you went pee was from me, not him.

  5. ISO #5

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    Quote Originally Posted by yzb25 View Post
    I agree that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they could also both be false. You could be living in a universe governed by random phenomena and also have no true control over your actions :P
    Not untrue.

  6. ISO #6

  7. ISO #7

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    I am inclined to view them both as illusions created by the way we experience things. But even if they aren't, I think people should be able to at least acknowledge that neither are necessarily true, and that it's fascinating that human beings produce these concepts so naturally without knowing whether they're true... it's so natural for us to take their truth for granted.

    It's kinda like how people can see jagged rocks and come up with notions of squares and rectangles, regardless of whether perfect squares or rectangles actually exist anywhere. Somehow it just seems natural to assume these things exist as well defined concepts that we can talk about. It's an example of people's flawed perception of an impure reality giving birth to pure concepts and it's fascinating that people do that so naturally.

    I assume whether these assumptions seem natural to us can be heavily influenced by our environment. Perhaps if you live in an erratic, chaotic environment the notion of determinism feels more alien. Like, the old testament god is super impulsive and irrational compared to the new testament god or the portrayal of god in the Qu'ran. Maybe that reflects the fact people's understanding of the world developed and the world seemed more orderly and systematic than it did to second temple jews, and that informed their view of how a god must function.
    Last edited by yzb25; April 21st, 2021 at 04:13 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Blinkstorteddd02 View Post
    naz, he's claiming to have been at your house last night and infected you. I know u were drunk but PLEASE try as hard as you can to remember... That burning you felt the next morning when you went pee was from me, not him.

  8. ISO #8

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    Theres a number of things to unpack there. Determinism follows the line that all things are predictable if you have 100% information so the most complex and unlikely interactions (even chaos theory stuff such as the butterfly effect in weather) should be predictable in advance.

    In line with Determinism Kant had a pretty cool way of thinking about it I came across when I was like 12 that changed how I thought about thinking. He had some scribblings that basically formulated our thoughts as being a combination of prior knowledge and current experience which equated to the issue of a sort of 'tullage' that limits creativity / innovation into the bounds of our surroundings and interactions and pushed that this is the specific thing creative minds should target to eliminate.

    You could also just simplify the idea of thought processes in determinism by the fact our minds are physical and so are our thoughts, thus they hold to the same rules of physics as the weather and such.

    But then quantum theory has an aspect of (what we think is) 'random' to it dealing with probability. So if true randomization exists on that level you should not be able to have a deterministic reality because the blocks its built on are random. One issue with this I have is that the theorys asign some theoretical possibility your finger could quantum phase 1 cm away from your hand and fall off, and in our age of video nothing 'weird' of the sort has ever been recorded.

    But then this 'randomization' may not really random in line with Thomas Youngs double slit experiment. sending photons through 2 slits seems to have constructive and destructive interference creating an interference pattern on the other side from the interactions of multiple particle waves. And then it gets weird with 1 single photon seemingly going through both slits on its own creating the same interference pattern. This pattern is predictable suggesting- not random. And you could even argue that sense a pattern exists laws of averages will set in and essentially return a non-quantum reality to the predictable world of determinism.

    And then if you step outside of that into ideas like 'the human soul' you once again have to shake up the model. Even if everything except us can be determined we could be an exception (Although thats the type of human centric thinking I feel is very flawed) by saying we have a soul and it drives us outside of physical factors.

    I was talking the other day with someone and we were joking about how in sociology you can seemingly find patterns of decisions at scale that appear to have the same patterns as Thomas Young's double slit experiment and maybe the macro is just represented in the micro on a truly fundamental level as that same sort of 'micro to macro' interaction seems to be reflected in how society's function.

    All that to say- I could see it both ways? Although on an 'absolute' level you basically have to adjust the meaning of determinism in order to allow for free will to exist because a very simplistic and absolute view of it would suggest all your actions in your life are pre-determined. But you could even take it a step further by asking questions like 'is does mathematics exist on a fundamental level and we discover it or is it something we make up that freakishly well describes our world around us? if you really want to jump down the rabbit hole on this one. Because if math is just our creation we have no clue how reality functions and everything I just said on the subject is invalid as fuck.

  9. ISO #9

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    Quote Originally Posted by Oberon View Post
    1. Are they mutually exclusive
    2. If so, which one do you believe in?
    3. Otherwise, why are they not mutually exclusive?
    1. No.
    2. Both and none at the same time.
    3. Helz said it best:
    Quote Originally Posted by Helz View Post
    Determinism follows the line that all things are predictable if you have 100% information so the most complex and unlikely interactions (even chaos theory stuff such as the butterfly effect in weather) should be predictable in advance.
    Last edited by OzyWho; April 22nd, 2021 at 04:23 AM.

  10. ISO #10

    Re: Determinism vs Free Will

    You can fuck really hard with this one. Determinism is impossible to prove - it's possible that the patterns you observe are totally random and they just seem like they have rules behind them by chance. Of course, in our present universe, this is exceedingly unlikely, but it isn't impossible per se. And that's assuming that you really are observing things at all. For all you know you could literally be a Boltzmann brain existing in a random vacuum and having your experiences generated by chance movements of particles within your brain.

 

 

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