The process of contemplating upon a difficult decision and then eventually making a choice, doesn't feel the slighest bit controlled by you?

I find this hard to believe.

I would guess that you're denying or ignoring this feeling of control; rather than not experiencing it at all.

I am quite certain that I am involved in the calculation and thereby important. No different than if a faulty calculator were plopped in would result in a different result.

There's no 'you' to be involved in the calculation under a deterministic explanation of decision-making.

Determinism defines 'you' out of existence and substitutes in process instead. How could 'you' have control over that process when you are the process?

You have the illusion of control....or at least a consistent determinist would admit rather than dancing around the matter.

Rain falls out of storm clouds. Some sort of stuff happens inside a storm cloud in concert with some stuff that happens outside of the storm cloud to make the rain fall. I'm pretty sure that gravity is involved as one of the laws of nature that make the rain not go up when it is falling down. Determinism doesn't say that storm clouds don't exist, or that rain doesn't exist, or that the pavement doesn't get wet. Rain clouds are ever-changing and ephemeral, just like me.* It is really hard to determine where they end and the surrounding stuff begins temporally and spatially in philosophical terms, but it is a useful distinction nonetheless, just like me and my surroundings (temporally and spatially). Determinism doesn't define storm clouds out of existence.

*not exactly like me. Rain clouds don't have skin and their spelling is atrocious and they don't become alarmed if you say "that arm isn't really you, so don't whine while it is on fire," or "you are the ugly half of a cute couple," or "you are just like your mother!"

How much thought did you put into this? The rain/clouds/gravity aren't conscious. Some of us consider there is no 'you' in the important sense - not the merely physical - if determinism is true. OTOH, your view soothes the mind better problem being that you might not be right.

4.3-seconds thought went in total. 3.9 seconds went into double checking my spelling of "ephemeral" and "spatially".

I dilly-dallied for .3 of the seconds whilst considering dragons and unicorns, so really about .1 second if we are going to only consider my time on the actual task for the post.

Indeed, in explaning decisions determinists have the luxury to label 'me' as narrowly (e.g. body) or broadly (e.g. body AND immediate environment) as they want. Very convenient "theory".

To continue...

Your body is the only thing in the universe that is experienced both subjectively and objectively. Of all things, it is the only thing that has this kind of dual-existence if you will. You can see and experience your fingers as an object in the world, like all other objects, but you can also experience them as a subjective feeling of sorts - of control.

What is the something that feels that control? - the control to move any one finger at any moment...

This subjective feeling of control, like that of moving your fingers, when you decide what to eat for dinner and then change your mind 5 minutes before cooking or ordering that, do you have it?

I don't experience anything "objectively." No one else does either, as far as I am aware.

Well you don't have the same kind of control over the movement of tree branches, for example, as you do over your fingers, yes?

You experience tree branches as existing independently (or objectively) to that which you feel direct and immediate control over.

I'm not sure what you are banging on about. I feel what I feel. I don't know much about trees. It seems that the whole "not fitting within my skinsuit" is relevant

I'm sorry if im not being clear enough. Perhaps I shouldn't refer to it as a feeling, so ill rephrase.

You haven't had the experience of being able to move your fingers at any given moment? Of controlling them one by one, at your discretion?

If you have, my argument is that this experience is not substantially different to the experience (of control) that you have while making a decision.

I do experience my inner workings. I just don't feel my will as being unconstrained by who I have come to be and my current environment.

I'd give it up, Vee. We are walking around the carnival enjoying all of the various attractions while BTM is strapped into one of the rides the entire time and he likes it that way.

Well said.

I suppose at least he's admitted to experiencing his inner workings. It's not all just ducks lining up in a row. There is some sense of control.

He'll likely wiggle out of that somehow.

I've never denied* that I have consciousness (awareness) or anything of the sort, including such things as" wants and needs, working on deciding on a course of action, picking what I want off the menu when in a restaurant, pondering life's mysteries, learning from experience, etc.

I just cannot understand how you get from those things to "yep, my will is free from cause."

*I've explicitly stated that I experience those sorts of things.

For my part I don't understand how you think you can have it both ways.

This is all because most people if not the 99% of the planet are convinced they can do whatever they like and they operate outside the physical world in some mental universe that plays the external game with complete guidance from the inner super pilot mega self in control. LOL! It aint that way guys! All this that you feel is what you experience and it sure feels like full control because after all it has to feel that way in order for things to be happening in a way that prior wisdom proves useful and makes the experience a happy one with results! You are not in control. The illusion of control is in control lol. Prior information and the rest of the universe are in control (that includes you too. So you are in unconscious control in a way due to locally generated luck in interactions with particles you call your body and the rest of the world).

Your will is what usually appears to make sense as something that works in design to get something else (design building on prior information that essentially builds the "design" itself over time). Sure enough it is important to appear to you that way. It is important to be able to go out and do things you imagine before. The problem with that is that you have no idea how the imagination/ideas come to you and you want to claim it comes from a very free place that somehow doesn't obey the laws of physics. And all i do is claim that where it comes from is the same nature that all things out there are made of and that a lot of it is emergent ie the result of other things coming together that are more fundamental.

For example traffic is an example of something emergent with properties that appear to give it a life of its own (its character). It is the result of the laws of motion of cars obeying usually road rules making errors and trying to generally not hit each other but operating also very selfishly most of the time under conditions of heavy activity. If intelligent machines were driving you wouldnt have had this kind of traffic but a much more smooth adjustment of speed flow without the vast irritation we experience. Because machines unlike humans would converge to cooperation and optimization. Another emergent thing is information, self education and news propagation that connects people worldwide instantly with major events and knowledge. This is a new reality for example that exists only because of the internet and the way people interact with others that on top of other great things is essential to modern terrorism too. Without the kind of unprecedented connections we have today present day terrorism would be not at all as strong or even an issue.

Only emergent structures are in play here (like intelligence and its processing of information to solve problems). Nothing magical happens just because complexity forms interesting nerve structures. Nothing free is born out of the interactions. Only something that can register knowledge/wisdom and operate intelligently based on information to solve problems. Sure of course its all magnificent. Matter from earth would have had no chance in hell to visit the moon the way it did and then come back with other matter from there! Complexity made that possible.

We must be reminded here that we're talking about positions of faith. Talking with you about this, I get the impression that you don't consider this a matter of belief/faith and that the determinist position on human decision-making is not a belief, but rather a scientific fact. I hope you don't view it this way. Otherwise any conversations you will have with people of the opposing position will only ever go in circles.

With this in mind, I am hopeful that you can suspend your disbelief for a moment and contemplate upon that experience or sense of control - when moving your fingers independently or making/changing decisions. Why is that experience so pervasive, especially it's presence when you change your mind about something? Couldn't the calculator change the outcome of its calculation without the sense or experience of your involvement in that process?

Couldn't the human brain, through deterministic processes, make all the same decisions you currently make without that experience or sense of control? Either we call this experience or sense of control - illusory - and deny the subjective experience as misleading or we consider that we may not know what exactly is happening here.

Consider a model whereby your physical brain perfoms everything it needs for you to live and develop motives, hopes, memories and beliefs, but it also serves the function of a receiver. Your consciousness or free-will is received from outside space-time. This is one of a few hypothetical models I believe that have been put forth. Another one can be understood more clearly by watching Howard's video on page 1 of this thread. These types of models are difficult to conceive of but far too soon to dismiss so quickly perhaps.

But i do not currently think determinism is valid here. I see determinism only as a crude statistical thing that works up to a point. In the microscopic sense luck plays a role that kills the sequence of causation. It only takes a random quantum measurement event to mess up the whole clockwork mechanism and make it non deterministic chaos instead.

I see determinism only as approximate. I also see it as something that requires crystal clear spacetime geometry that is continuous.

What if the order of things become impossible to claim due to uncertainty?

I imagine for example that if you could run the world from the same point macroscopically (microscopically is hard to define without measuring everything which is not possible) you would get a different outcome given enough "time" distance from the reset point. And determinism would not allow that. In our world it wouldn't turn out the same way always. Take a nucleus that is about to decay. It will always do it differently each time you run it. It wont happen the exact same time (or within a range) and that is enough to alter the entire sequence of things even if the rest were totally deterministic. But none is actually. You cannot run a quantum domino sequence the same way each time. Even the classical domino system eventually will couple with the quantum world and lead to different result after trillions of pieces.

It is a much bigger leap of faith to imagine the chemistry of cells in the brain (that by the way have scale far larger than quantum systems making it pretty much nearly classical systems) suddenly connects with a world beyond the current space-time? If that is true it must be true for all matter and our world is a subset of a bigger system. Why make brains so special? Brain is just another natural phenomenon in a physical system.

You see by making brain so magically special you are left without an explanation for how the transition happens from baby to toddler to child to adult where the levels of awareness and "control" or "design"are substantially different. A baby is a totally clueless system actually. It gets to higher awareness only after enough time and interactions with the environment. This is why its all emergent. The answer is right there. Nothing out of this world in our brains.

I'm brainstorming here so bear with me or just ignore the below.

First. Imagine consciousness, defined ONLY as free-will; the freedom to interpret your situation in life and in the universe however you want AND the freedom to choose amongst some finite set of choices that is determined. For example, if I ask you to list some action movie stars from the 80s, your brain will give you a set of choices and perhaps it may not give you Sylvester Stallone. This is what I mean by finite set of choices that is determined - within which you have the freedom to choose.

In this conception of consciousness, awareness is not included and your point about children is not a rebutall since children would still qualify under the fact they meet the only criteria - that of free will (albeit the set of determined choices available to children to choose from would be more narrowed than of a grown adult due to smaller memory, less knowledge etc.).

Second. Consider the concious observer (conciousness) as simultaneously and inseparably coming into existence with the observed (defined as the physical universe, including the human body and brain and space-time). In this model, the universe could not exist prior to or independently of the conscious observer. Here, you would naturally ask - how then do you explain the seemingly emergent nature of the universe, of species, of the human body/brain and every natural phenomenon?

Third. Emergence - (I'll get to this tomorrow, but perhaps you can have some guesses as to how we'd explain it under this model).

Free will simply doesn't have anything to do with consciousness and cognition. They are completely different things.

Do you have the ability to write a reply, realize that it doesn't convey your thinking clearly, erase and re-write it to your satisfaction?


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I want to distance myself from anything to do w/ faith, however Vee is using it. I do not say that determinism is false, only that it is premature and provide reasons for why that is the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

Is it possible to imagine a world where there is no credit and no blame?

I can. We'd go on assigning credit and blame, though, 1. bec few pay attention to the debate and 2. all of our social constructs would fall apart otherwise and 3. many reasons that I'm not going to think up atm.

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The cover of this month's SciAm is about the 'Quantum Multiverse.' Here's a summary: Something, something eternal inflation, something, something, Many Worlds interpretation, something, something we may be living not in 'real' space but rather in 'probability space.'

'They' keep coming up w/ wild stuff and it's why I smh at people that tell me that something's a fact, Jack.