Free Will as a false dichotomy • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

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posted by jwray

3 months 3 weeks ago • 249 views

You have voluntary control over your actions, however your subjective experience of voluntary control over your actions is only an abstraction of the operation of all the atoms of your body according to the laws of physics. There is no need to choose between physicalism and responsibility for actions.

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I agree. Free will has no physical basis, aside from being a persistent sensation that has been imparted to us through evolution. Just because we parceled it up into a philosophical dilemma doesn't give it special status over our other neural states, which we loosely categorize into emotions, thoughts, and senses.

See: THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS By V.S. Ramachandran

written by fissionchips

| 3 months 3 weeks ago | CH

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utilization of the laws of physics is not the same as being ruled by those laws. My free will is in the choices I make; those choices include taking advantage of the laws of the universe. If you're going to say that free will is illusory simply because we are bound by the limits of our physical nature, then what's the point of such a discussion? it's a given.

written by smibbo

| 3 months 3 weeks ago | CH

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>> ^smibbo:
utilization of the laws of physics is not the same as being ruled by those laws.

I sort of disagree. I think it is not utilization, but composition. example:

I make a painting on a canvas with paint, it does not "utilize" paint, it is not "ruled" by the rules of paint, it is paint. It is also a particular arrangement of paint, which has the additional property of reflecting light in a manner similar to some object, it is not that object, and the fact that it looks like the object in no way effects the fact that it is paint.

Similarly "consciousness" is not something that acts on physical laws, it is a consequence of these laws, we are in effect, made of physics. The fact that we appear to ourselves to be ruled by a force other then deterministic physics does not effect how we actually function, any more then a painting looking like a tree would stop being paint.

I like how Dennet puts it: Being deterministic does not mean that the future is inevitable
because inevitable = un-avoidable, which does not apply to deterministic systems who have evolved specifically on the basis of our capacity to avoid harm. If evolution can work in a deterministic system, which is easily provable, then inevitability is not an aspect of deterministic systems. Since our consciousness is evolved to avoid harm and aid in survival it stands to reason that what it does works, or it would have been discarded on the giant pile of evolutionary failures. Since consciousness works it's output can not be ineffective in creating desirable outcomes, so thought/action is not futile, but neither is it necessarily non-deterministic.

written by dgandhi