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BinyaminDelta t1_ittkdkf wrote

Reply to comment by SejaGentil in Our Conscious Experience of the World Is But a Memory, Says New Theory by Shelfrock77

Saying "we take no part in our actions" is interesting, but be cautious.

This view can lead to a dangerous path, which is the "humans have no free will" claim.

I say dangerous, because history has shown disturbing outcomes to this way of thinking. Crimes against others become easier to justify if "free will is an illusion" and we're just walking physical impulses.

Why is slavery wrong if humans don't have free will at all? Why is fascism evil if groups of humans are just chemical reactions?

Humanism -- and I would suppose most here are humanists -- should lean toward the presumption of free will and work to defend it, not minimize it.

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ebolathrowawayy t1_itv31rx wrote

> This view can lead to a dangerous path, which is the "humans have no free will" claim.

Perhaps. I'm convinced that hard determinism is correct. There is no reason to think that free will exists unless one believes in spirits, the mystical, religious bs, etc. and there's no evidence of those things.

If suddenly everyone became convinced that free will doesn't exist, would a great many people become evil? Probably. I imagine there are millions of people who only "behave" because of some fear of divine punishment.

> I say dangerous, because history has shown disturbing outcomes to this way of thinking. Crimes against others become easier to justify if "free will is an illusion" and we're just walking physical impulses.

History has definitely shown that religious belief leads to disturbing outcomes, genocide and war. I'm not aware of any history that shows a group of people not believing in free will causing them to do disturbing things.

> Why is slavery wrong if humans don't have free will at all? Why is fascism evil if groups of humans are just chemical reactions?

Interesting question. I'm atheist and a hard determinist. I believe I have a strong moral compass and I think it was developed by poor parents (abusive) and a troubled upbringing. I realized what harming others must feel like for them because of what I've gone through and I simply don't want to harm others. It "feels" bad. I think morality is half genetically baked in and half human experience. I don't think religion or belief in free will is required.

> Humanism -- and I would suppose most here are humanists -- should lean toward the presumption of free will and work to defend it, not minimize it.

I don't think we should defend free will because then we're defending the mystical and unverifiable. People who believe in things that can't be proven true or false (religion) have poor critical thinking skills and often fall victim to conspiracies or radical thinking (qanon) that is hard to shake them out of and they're often anti-science and anti-fact. I think it's dangerous to raise children in an environment where believing in "santa for adults", whatever religious flavor that is. The responsible thing to do is to try to eliminate religion by passively accepting other's crazy beliefs while raising children outside of that dogma until religion is dead. At that point it is safe for everyone to not believe in free will because their moral compass won't rely on religious beliefs.

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triton100 t1_itva7fv wrote

If determinism is true then what happened before the Big Bang. What caused or instigated the Big Bang in order to trigger the domino effect of the chaos theory. As equally those who believe in free will cannot prove it, neither can those who believe in determinism. And without evidence anything is possible. We didn’t even know what electricity was until recently, imagine how many other mind boggling things are yet to be discovered

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ebolathrowawayy t1_itvh93a wrote

> If determinism is true then what happened before the Big Bang.

No one knows what caused it or what was there before.

> As equally those who believe in free will cannot prove it, neither can those who believe in determinism.

What caused the BB or what existed before it has no bearing on the discussion of free will. In order to disprove determinism, some evidence needs to be found that shows that actions can be taken by a human (or thinking machine) that have no prior cause. Even the many worlds theory and all of quantum physics does not disprove determinism. Evidence would have to break the universal law of cause and effect, not likely.

(P) Humans are only made up of matter

(Q) Matter is always affected by cause and effect

In order to disprove determinism you need to show that P or Q is false.

Free will can't be disproven, it's unverifiable because its belief is rooted in spiritual nonsense. Think about it. If P were false and humans had a spirit, then what governs our spirit's actions? Wouldn't a spirit still follow cause and effect? Why would a spirit make a decision without any prior cause? What mechanism could make that possible? All answers to this question are unverifiable. Souls have a funny way of changing whenever science improves understanding.

Maybe a special form of matter is discovered that winks into and out of existence with no discernible pattern or cause and it interacts with other matter in some way. This new matter would still affect other matter, still creating cause and effect chains. How this new form of matter winks into and out of existence isn't relevant. What if a new form of matter is discovered that doesn't interact with itself or anything else? That's rhetorical because that matter can't be discovered and would have no impact on determinism. I can't think of any possible way to disprove Q and I read a lot of scifi.

We have a ton of evidence validating hard determinism and no evidence of free will.

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triton100 t1_itwx80h wrote

I agree with your thesis completely. However several things come to mind. You say that what happened before the big bang has no baring on determinism, which could be true. However, it’s not something that can be dismissed so quickly. Regardless of whether or not the human existence exists separately to whatever caused it’s existence via the Big Bang, and in accordance with its own set of universal laws, whatever brought the universe in existence is probably an occurrence of which we could not even ever comprehend. And therefore throws open many questions. Is there a god. Are there aliens. Are there superior intelligent machines. Did either of these three beings create us. Or does one choose to believe that the universe simply formed itself out of nothing. Gaseous substances simply materialised and formed life. And if we were brought into existence by either of these three scenarios, does that not change how we see free will and determinism. In that there are probably likely many new universal laws that we are not actually aware of yet. P and Q may well be false. We just haven’t made that discovery yet.

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ebolathrowawayy t1_itwzb7u wrote

> However, it’s not something that can be dismissed so quickly.

Why not? Knowing what was before the BB or what caused it is literally impossible. It's like trying to see outside of a black hole while inside it. That information either no longer exists or would require a computer larger than the universe to reconstruct t=0 of the universe.

> Are there aliens. Are there superior intelligent machines. Did either of these three beings create us. Or does one choose to believe that the universe simply formed itself out of nothing. Gaseous substances simply materialised and formed life. And if we were brought into existence by either of these three scenarios, does that not change how we see free will and determinism.

None of that would change anything.

> In that there are probably likely many new universal laws that we are not actually aware of yet.

Unlikely, but as soon as evidence exists then sure. It just doesn't logically follow that P or Q can be false and I can't imagine any possible scenario where they could be, even with exotic matter or the existence of a creator. Maybe someone else can think of a possible scenario where if X exists then P or Q is false, I can't.

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triton100 t1_itx1dxg wrote

It’s only relatively recently that humanity has discovered universal laws. I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t more to come.

Didn’t scientists recently discovered that some sub atomic particles displayed random movement behaviour that could suggest a diversion away from deterministic behaviour?

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ebolathrowawayy t1_iu0mbzc wrote

> It’s only relatively recently that humanity has discovered universal laws. I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t more to come.

Universal laws akin to if A then B? Yes. There is almost no chance for causality to break, like you're more likely to get struck by lightning 10,000 times within 5 seconds than for there to be a discovery that contradicts causality, it's not even worth discussing because if causality breaks down then nothing makes sense anymore, not even logic.

> Didn’t scientists recently discovered that some sub atomic particles displayed random movement behaviour that could suggest a diversion away from deterministic behaviour?

Yes (I don't think it was recent, unless you mean since the discovery of quantum physics). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-quantum-mechanics-rule-out-free-will/

Even if every particle was completely random that doesn't mean the universe isn't deterministic though. In computer science, random number generators will always produce a deterministic output, but the distribution of numbers it spits out is "random". There has never been a discovery of true randomness. Particle decay is useful for creating a random distribution of numbers and it's used as a random number generator for some applications, but the decaying radioactive substance was always going to decay in precisely a certain way and the detector was always going to detect isotopes exactly where they land on the detector and always at the same time and always leading to the same numbers generated. No matter how many times you rewind time the outcome is the same. Nothing is truly random in the universe.

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