I have to disagree on several points.

First, as far as I’m concerned, free will does exist (although, admittedly, what I think of as free will may not be the same thing as what you’re saying doesn’t exist.)

Second, determinism, by definition, says that all things are the effect of something else. But saying “Determinism allows for the human factor” implies that “the human factor” is somehow deterministically different from, say, billiard balls. Other than complexity, what’s the difference between the determinism in billiard balls and the determinism in “the human factor”. Both are either deterministic or not. (Unless you’re talking about differences in degree and not category. In which case ignore this point.)

Third, I’m having a tough time with the “volition” thing”. Is volition deterministic? Is it the effect of some other cause? If so, then the statement “Free will therefore necessarily presupposes a creature capable of volition. ” seems self-contradictory – “Free will therefore necessarily presupposes a [deterministic factor].” But if volition is not deterministic, then it seems to me that it is/must be the defining factor of free will, and the statement is effectively an identity – “Free will therefore necessarily presupposes a creature capable of [free will].”

It seems that the problem is in the necessary conclusion (from the statement “Free will does not exist.”) that choice is deterministic. But if that is so, then either there are instances where the exact same causes acting on the exact same subjects result in different effects (and all of science flies out the window) or determinism must reduce to pre-determinism. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Lastly, regardingIn common usage, this would be true. However, that statement starts in the middle of the cycle, not at the beginning. The beginning of the whole cycle is at the point where a decision is made regarding the existence of “A”. That is, one must decide that “A” exists before one can choose “A”. And that is where free will enters the picture. The act of deciding that something exists (or not) is the purest manifestation of free will.

JMHO

Personally I don't like the term "free will." So get rid of the word "free."

The Will is the power of self direction.

The Will arises along with consciousness. If you are "unconscious" or "unaware" you cannot use the Will to consciously direct your thoughts or attention with purpose. When you are not using your will then you are reacting according to natural programing or instinct which is in place to operate in the absence of awareness or consciousness.

Example: If you are unconscious, your heart still beats, your body still operates. Even if you are conscious, these things operate automatically. But some people have demonstrated the ability to slow their heart beats with the power of their will.

Certain things you do and think are automatic as a result of genetics or DNA programming. When you are not focused with purpose you will do things automatically.

When we do things unconsciously, we are not really using our will. To use the will takes conscious thought and action.

Determinism: I'm not sure what that really means when it is applied to me or my will, but I don't believe in "fate."

I read Tarot Cards. What I read is the process of an event and its momentum. The "outcome" card is not the future, it is the probable outcome given the momentum of the event in progress. The Tarot Cards do not predict the future.

When someone asks me what will happen... and the cards predict a certain thing, it means that this will happen if the momentum of the event does not change. If something changes, then the outcome can change.

It is the power of the will that initiates the changes. It is a conscious decision to change the momentum of the event. That decision will change the outcome IF it is not too late and IF the momentum is not so strong that you have passed the point of no return in the event.

Example of passing the point of no return in an event:
You decide to kill yourself by driving off of a cliff with your car. You change your mind. If when you change your mind, you still have time to hit the brakes and stop the car, you will change the outcome of the event. If, on the other hand you change your mind as you are flying off the cliff, or before you can stop the car in time, you have passed the point of no return.

The will can change the outcome by changing the decision, but it depends on the momentum of the event in progress.

Determinism depends on the absence of the Will and the absence of consciousness. If there were no consciousness, and only robots living here, with no power of Will of their own, then everything would be "determined" according to their programs and the law of cause and effect.

Thanks, Massagetrade and Creative Soul, for voicing your opinion on my line of thinking.

There is another line of argument against free will and haphazard (non-deterministic) physical happenings in the material world.

In a strictly cause-and-effect type of world, such as ours seems to be, everything seems to have a cause for being or happening, and everything that is or happens causes something else in a way to be or happen, such as a change in them. Or even no change in them.

If I hit a nail with a hammer, the nail will go into the wood. The cause-and-effect chain is obvious for us all.

If the world was NOT deterministic, then we ought to see some instances in which the cause-and-effect chain would misbehave. Such as if we hit a nail with a hammer, then a new twenty-year-old virgin would be borne ont he spot, anatomically correct and complete with a flame thrower and a life insurance policy.

This sort of thing just does not happen. Never has, we have no reliable evidence that it has.

Therefore the cause-and-effect chain never breaks.


Which means that the world is deterministic.

One's will equates to what a person wants, and therefore, in arguments for free will, it is held as the sole driving mechanism behind deliberate actions. This is clearly proven and must be the case. That is further established by the fact that one cannot purposefully choose wrongly(make a mistake).

I am saying that no choice is or can be made without some form of influence from the will. One's will is completely determined and continuously developed(changes) by that which one accepts as true and/or correlates to personal preferences(likes/dislikes). One does not freely choose personal preferences. That is proven by the fact that one cannot voluntarily decide to change their favorite foods or colors or sexual preferences, etc. Therefore, no choice is 'freely' recognized, let alone made. One example of an uninfluenced 'choice' would negate this. In my life, I have yet to witness one being given.



Human behavior, due to the sheer amount of influencing factors - of which most are held in unconscious thought processes - is inherently unpredictable. Billiard balls have a finite amount of known factors which influence their behavior, and therefore are quite predictable. Humans have the ability to come up with new ideas through inference. These kinds of thoughts do not arise - cannot arise - without something from which to infer.

Even 'new' ideas are based upon prior experience.



Volition is the ability to forsee the possible future outcome of one's current choices. In order for one to freely choose between options, there must be more than one option. If there is more than one, then there must be a mechanism which assesses the potential value of each so that one can choose which is best.



Choice is deterministic sky. One chooses what is recognized as the best choice. What they think is the best choice is completely determined by what is recognized as a possible option. What is recognized is determined by how one frames what they perceive. That frame is constructed by personal preference and belief, therefore belief and preference not only determines what one willfully chooses, but also what one involuntarily perceives as being a choice.

Your understanding of pre-determinism is failing to account for completely unknown variables which include, but are not limited to, the seemingly infinite amount of complex ways in which the human mind is affected by exposure and therefore changes accordingly. If we knew all of the possible factors and all of the possible influences according to those factors we would be able to predict human behavior exactly.

The fact that one can involuntarily be exposed to something which causes their perception to change cannot be predicted because we simply do not know enough to be able to do such a thing. Not to mention the fact that the equation itself, even if we had all of the knowledge required, would be completely impractical to solve with human minds. That does not mean that the factors, themselves, do not exist, or are not being actualized in reality. It means that we do not know what they are. Therefore, pre-determination is a useless model of reality to work with, especially when given the sheer complexity of the situation. We do not have that kind of knowledge at our disposal. That does not make the universe nor humans inherently unpredictable. It just means that we do not know enough to be able to predict human behavior consistently.



Perception necessarily comes prior to decision making about what is being perceived. How one frames that which is being perceived is completely determined by one's belief system. One's original belief system is not freely chosen.

That is irrefutable.

Personally, I don’t equate will with what a person wants. Although they may be closely related in the sense that one applies one’s will to obtain what one wants. But to me, will is not dependent on wants, just as electricity is not dependent on light bulbs, nor are light bulbs dependent on electricity. Per the definition of “will” from dictionary.com (“the faculty of conscious and especially of deliberate action; the power of control the mind has over its own actions”) will is more of a potential (a “faculty” or “power”) than a product of something. It exists independently regardless of whether it is being “applied”. In other words, the potential/faculty/power exists, regardless whether anything is wanted or not.

Now I would have to agree with “… no choice is or can be made without some form of influence from the will ” because choice is necessarily the product of will. But everything following that I completely disagree with. Particularly “…one cannot voluntarily decide to change their favorite foods or colors or sexual preferences, etc.” As far as I’m concerned, that sentence is completely false, despite the weight of authority and majority agreement that it seems to have behind it.

Moreover, there had to be some decision as to favorite food/whatever in the first place. So if one decides what one’s favorite food is (i.e. decides what one wants) then one has in fact voluntarily (i.e. willfully) changed their favorite food (from nothing to something).

In short, it is my view that one does “freely choose personal preferences”. The very fact that they are personal preferences requires that they be chosen freely – otherwise they would not be one’s own preferences, they would be someone (or something) else’s preferences.

And again I don’t agree. I don’t think all “new ideas” necessarily arise exclusively through inference. But then, there’s another semantic swamp there, which I don’t relish slogging through. Suffice it to say that I consider decision to be the source of new ideas, not the other way around.

And here we run into our conflicting views on the difference between “choice” and “decision”. To me, decision requires will – choice does not. (One could “choose” by tossing a coin, but deciding to carry out the choice determined by the coin toss requires will.)

In the interests of brevity, see my replies regarding the difference between “choice” and “decision”, and the “personal preference” issue.

Ummm…. I admit that view is held to (often vehemently) by many, but it is not an assumption that I agree with.

No argument there.

Well if the decision is being made “about” something, then yes, the perception of that thing must come before the decision about it.

Since the belief system (or a portion thereof) is the “frame”, then yes, it necessarily is a factor in the interpretation of perception.

If there were a way to prove that, I’d be very interested. But as far as I can see, there isn’t, so I’ll hold to my existing opinion that original belief system is freely chosen.

However, just so I clearly understand what you mean by “freely choosing a belief system”, if a person freely chooses to go to a hypnotist and receive a hypnotic command that changes his belief system, does that constitute “freely choosing to change one’s belief system”? In other words, must the “free choice” be direct, or can it be indirect in the sense of freely choosing to place oneself in a situation where external factors could affect one’s belief system?

No it does not, that only means that cause and effect does work. But like I said in my post, a completely deterministic world would require the absence of any conscious will. It would have to be occupied by nothing but robots that are not conscious and have no will.

Creative said:



Why do you think that ones' will equates to what a person wants? Where did you come up with that idea?




What is "clearly proven?"

I don't think you have any idea what "the will" even is.

Creative said:






Wrong. Some, even most choices are made automatically and unconsciously. Automated and unconscious choices do not require the will to be in use.



Wrong. This statement proves to me that your understanding of what "the will" is and mine are not the same at all.




Of course we freely choose our personal preferences. Who else chooses them?

It is NOT "proven" by your alleged "fact" that we cannot change our favorite foods, or colors or even sexual preferences. (Albeit sexual preferences have to do with biological chemicals etc. and are a poor example in this case.)

Your logic is flawed because this does not follow your previous statement even if your previous statement were true, which it is not.



What on earth are you thinking? Do you really believe these things?

I find that hard to swallow. None of this makes any logical sense at all.

I think you’re missing an option – the possibility that there are both deterministic and non-deterministic factors at work in the world.

Exactly!

The machinery of "the world" or "this reality" is determined completely by the laws of cause and effect, the laws of attraction, etc. This is the machine.

Then the occupants of the machine are CONSCIOUS OBSERVERS who have a will, which is the power of self direction. (decision)

These decisions are part of the cause within the machine that disrupts the deterministic nature of everything and introduces the random factor.

If you believe in a higher power than us then you do not believe in free will nor can it exist in that environment, it is a sham.

In my opinion a conscious will and a completely deterministic world are not at all mutually exclusive.

A conscious will is something that will be determined by considerations, factors to make decisions, stimuli that drive motivation. That is completely compatible with the idea that the conscious will is going to respond to the inner and outer environment in the same way in two separate but identical set of circumstances.

In other words, a conscious will is not going to come up with a solution to the individual's current needs that is completely incongruous to the learned and inherent expectations of the individual of how his actions will make this happen.

An example would be that if a boss gives a subordinate a task which both are aware the subordinate is capable of doing, thent he subordinate's expected reaction by both parties will be that he will do the task, and not that he will bring in Madonna and Paul McCartney and forcefully make them mate on company time.

If the model and conscious will not was fully deterministic, then the Madonna-Paul thing would be an unexpected and inconsistent but not outrageous thing to happen, as similar things would be happening all over the place.

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You can sense your conscience, so it exists; but because it has nothing to do with decision making, it is outside of the realm of determinism. And will is a focussed biological centre to make decisions, which are determined by cause and effect.

One other thing regarding "...we have no reliable evidence that it has."

Evidence itself requires a cause-and-effect chain, so how could there be evidence of something that "breaks the chain"? If it breaks the chain, then it is external to the chain and thus the chain itself cannot be used as evidence because it is no longer a chain - it is broken by the non-deterministic factor.

In other words, asking for evidence of a non-deterministic factor is nonsensical. If it is non-deterministic, there can be no evidence of it, by definition.

I covered that already, when I said there has been never a palpable evidence for the existence of non-deterministic factors. Much like no evidence of ever a non-caused effect.

Again, you are exercising the old tactics of making me repeat myself, of pretending to not understand what I said, of coming back to a point that has been closed, and you wear me down this way. I swore off of debating with you for this very reason in the past, and now you are doing the EXACT SAME THING. I wouldn't have responded to this if Jennybean did not so enthusiastically agree with you here. No more of this, please, and if yes, I won't respond.

Okay, I respond to this because this is new.

You say that evidence relies on determistically based measurements and therefore it can only detect deterministically caused effects.

I don't think so. One example would be (which I gave already) a nail hitting a board and a virgin forming there as an effect.

There the cause-effect chain would be definitely broken by a non-deterministic factor. Yet the event is fully measurable by a deterministic chain of cause-effect, and therefore there CAN be evidence, even by observing the definition.

That is completely detectable by deterministic ways, and it is completely outside the determinstic world if it happens. But it never happens.

So your statement that determinstic measurements cannot measure outcomes of factors that are not in the realm of the deterministic world is false.

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Please try to read my posts accurately. If you are very furiously and emotionally attached to a world view, please understand that that world view has a capacity to be wrong and you can only understand that if you have an open mind to reason and logic, not only to intelligence.

Yes, and I covered that already. Expecting evidence of a non-deterministic factor is nonsensical. It is, by definition, no possible.

I'm not making you do anything. (But that's just my opinion. I can understand that for one who believes all is deterministic, that one could be "made" to post in a forum, without making a decision to do so.)

And I might add that YOU are "doing the EXACT SAME THING" in assuming that a point is closed just because YOU say it's closed.

Well, I don't happen to agree that it is closed, so I feel perfectly free to comment on it in any way I see fit (in accordance with the forum rules.

But if you feel it's closed, then by all means don't reply to any comments about it.

You’ve completely left out the key point: where is “the non-deterministic factor” in your example? The way you state it, it looks to me like the nail hitting the board was the factor that determined the emergence of the virgin. So you’ve set up a scenario where you’ve specifically stated a cause (nail hitting board) and it’s effect (virgin). You have not shown or explained or exemplified anything non-deterministic at all. If the hammer hitting the nail is not what caused the virgin to appear, then what did?

On the other hand, if you are simply arguing that non-determinism is equivalent to “unexpected”, then I can go along with that – as a starting point. But for that to be realistically applied in the determination of non-deterministic events, one would have to know any and every possible deterministic factor. Not very practical.

Excellent advice that I would urge you to follow in the same spirit as you have urged me to.

What environment are you talking about?

The will has nothing to do with a belief in a "higher power."

It is all about conscious awareness.

Whelp,

I'm done here...