If the will is unfree a billion (or any "big" number) more of the time than it's free, I tend to view it as essentially unfree.

If the will is free 20% (or above say 0.1%) of the time, I'd say there's some free will.

If we sometimes have free will and sometimes do not have free will, when do we have free will and when do we not have free will?

I just watched London Has Fallen the whole way through. This, I think, proves that I have free will.

It could also be a bit free. My decisions may be 20% free, the rest being practically predestined. Doing "my" 20% "right" increases the probability of, but does not assure, success. Not much else to do.

It would be quite odd to believe that anything could be 100% free from causal factors. For instance, my lack of wings limits my options quite a bit.

Yes it does. But the information that is shared between the particles: where is that located? In space-time (/physical world)? It can't be since there's a limit on how fast information (or anything) can travel. Am I missing something here?

Well, yes. But what road would we have gone down if we'd followed the Eastern philosophers? Not that I know much about them either except that what I come across sounds flaky and they never get mentioned here at all. For all we know the world's greatest philosopher was a 16th century Bedouin goat herder. We'd never hear from that person but we hear from what I believe is a relatively small Pantheon of comfortably situated white men. So, yes, build on what's gone before but remember that it wasn't backed by hard science.

Not that the examples are relevant or necessary but Schopenhauer gives the example of a monk wilfully starving himself to death; as the single most virtuous act any willing individual can perform. He was a determinist and pessimist (im going to keep equating these until someone corrects me) aa well, so you're in good company.

I'm a determinist and an optimist, so there is that.

Yes.

Is that similar to a determinist in denial?

I can't understand how being a determinist has anything to do with pessimism, fwiw.

BTM: I want to ask if you think most determinists have your 'Jolly good, I like it!' attitude?

I don't think he likes it.

Perhaps he identifies himself with a strong or wise person that faces up to the "facts" and doesn't cower from them. The last thing he'd want to do is have belief or faith in something that might make others interpret him as airy-fairy or as weak and incapable of facing up to facts.

There is perhaps no gloomier "fact" than that of determinism. If believed consistently and thoroughly, it's not far off from fatalism. Many will vehemently deny this, to little avail.

Few thinkers don't do violence to this truth.

IDK about all of that. Somewhere in here I think he says that he relies on determinism to give him the best sandwich possible.

I don't think it makes any difference to anyone's mood either way, other than that it tends to lead one to have a kinder take on others.

It is hard to hate on annoying people if you believe that they are annoying for a reason. I mean, they are still annoying, but it isn't their fault that they are *******s.

Fatalism is silly. I've no idea what I will have for lunch tomorrow, and I am certain that what I get will depend on what restaurant I decide to go to and what I pick off the menu. I'll probably give it a great deal of thought, as I am apt to do. Maybe it will be chicken teriyaki. I want that sometimes. I've been thinking about it all day, so there is a decent chance that it will turn out that I get that. I currently hope I will order it with extra vegetables instead of rice, but knowing me, I probably will give in to the temptation of carbs. Maybe me typing that will lead to me ordering it with extra veggies. I'll let you know tomorrow if I remember.

I too see no contradiction between determinism and optimism. It's possible to be optimistic about what cards you are about to pick up, or what the weather will be like tomorrow, isn't it?

This begs the question what "could have" means. It its everyday meaning, and perhaps even a legal meaning (I looked for a definition of what acting freely means in law, but I couldn't find a good one, if there is one), people make free choices all the time.

I make the distinction between deterministic and pre-determined or pre-destined.

So the wave-particle duality and such of quantum mechanics seems to counter strict determinism.

However, despite the problems with determinism, something always seems to happen.

My view is, whatever happens, was always destined to happen. While it might not be pre-determinable, it was still pre-destined. We can not predict the future however the future was still set in stone despite our inability to predict it.

Admitably the situation is arguably underdetermined, so different views need not imply someone is wrong.

I don't get this at all. You can see violations of Bells inequalities with flipping coins......not because of anything outside standard physics, but because purely classical physics can figure out the probability of coin flips. Not sure why we should reach a different conclusion with humans.

I think it's useful every once in a while to step back and consider what we are doing with all these words we say to each other. These are stories we tell trying to describe and explain what goes on. There is no inherent meaning in the words. Meaning is experienced. Meaning is subjective. This is as true for our scientific models as it is for the most obscure Bob Dylan lyrics.

There is a difference between the mathematical models of physics and the philosophy of physicalism. The models amount to filing cabinets for organizing data and providing predictions. They act as metaphors to connect to our experiences and provoke in us an experience of meaning. The philosophy of physicalism is a higher level concept we intuit out of that experience of meaning and which evokes yet another experience of meaning for how things are. Yet these are all stories we tell ourselves. Remove us from the universe and the stories disappear, our experience of meaning no longer exists.

Our notions of cause and effect are just such stories. They connect to our experiences. They are concepts which evoke an experience of meaning in us about what goes on. Yet quantum theory tells a different story; one where, as Einstein put it, God plays dice with the universe. In quantum theory the universe can be viewed as being in one universal indeterminate quantum state of evolving entanglement; evolving according to Schrodinger's complex wave function, a mathematical device which most physicists don't believe has any physical existence. Yet the universe proceeds and things happen in such a way that we tell the story of cause and effect to describe what goes on.

Can we ever tell the real story, the true story, the perfect story? Seems doubtful to me. I'm afraid we're stuck with talking points.


PairTheBoard

That sounds wrong. Can you provide a source for what you're referring to?


PairTheBoard

In that example I am a little.

On the front of Sam Harris' book, he show puppets on strings. Until I feel like a puppet on a string, I'm not worried about whether I am a puppet on a string.

A philosopher whose name eludes me now, once said, and I paraphrase - If a system is complex enough that an outsider can never determine what choice it will make and that system has the subjective feeling of free will, then that is good enough.

Its a little basic to source....the first line of the wiki on Bells Theorem explains that it draws a crucial distinction between quantum and classical mechanics. It would be very convoluted to actually set up a similar experiment with coins, but very easy on a computer, just replacing quantum wavefunctions with classical probabilities.

We shouldn't -- the premise is that if there is a difference it's because somehow human consciousness got its mojo into the experiment. Frankly the whole thing is a bit of a head scratcher. Apparently consciousness is something separate from the material world yet this guy is designing a physical experiment that will detect it? It's also not clear why you couldn't just do the experiment with a machine that flips coins, other than the fact that quantum entanglement sounds mysterious and spooky.