Originally Posted by pocketfours

Thinking too much about this stuff can make one realize that there is no such thing as free will

Originally Posted by pocketfours

Wrong. It is totally clear and obvious to me that free will doesn't exist. It was even clear to me before I read anything at all on the subject. When I couldn't reason myself out of it I looked it up on the net and found out about hard determinism and felt that it matched my views quite closely. I felt really sick and depressed for several weeks and I'm still not over it.

We are nothing more than advanced biological 'robots'. Free will is merely an illusion and I didn't write this post because I chose to, I wrote it because all the particles in the universe dictated that I was destined to do it.

We are programmed (by evolution) to always choose what is best for us. Think of a man like a mosquito flying through air. The mosquito might think that it can stop beating its wings at any moment - but it's an illusion. It's not 'programmed' to stop beating its wings in mid-air.

A similar thought is that while driving on a freeway you feel like you could suddenly turn the wheel and crash hard. It's just an illusion, you couldn't do it. You simply COULD NOT do it. You could only do it if you wanted to harm yourself, but still you feel like you could do it - even if you didn't want to do it.

I think the most ridiculous thing is that the particles we are made of are so advanced, that by simply flowing around for millions of years, they group in such away that they create beings that realize that they are only freely flowing particles flying around. This tought still tilts me.

I really like what boost said about this, and I'm just happy that the 'movie' I'm watching has been really great, so far. And because 'my movie' is so good, I've got to take all the bad things in my life and realize that none of the good things could ever have happened without them. It's a good method for real-life tilt control.

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

Oh my. I don't have the time write now. But I will give you something to think about to bring you back to a happier side. It's gonna be fun

Originally Posted by boost

pocketfours I agree with you about us not having free will, however you make some really atrocious arguments. Youve confused evolution with the chemistry that makes us tick. If we are to believe that we simply are a complex series of chemical reactions than evolution plays no part in our destiny since it too is predetermined by this endless set of reactions.

Originally Posted by pocketfours

We can know and we do. Unless we possess some kind of divine powers that can change the laws of physics within our body then free will isn't possible.

Originally Posted by pocketfours

Wrong. It is totally clear and obvious to me that free will doesn't exist. It was even clear to me before I read anything at all on the subject. When I couldn't reason myself out of it I looked it up on the net and found out about hard determinism and felt that it matched my views quite closely. I felt really sick and depressed for several weeks and I'm still not over it.

We are nothing more than advanced biological 'robots'.

Originally Posted by boost

pocketfours I agree with you about us not having free will, however you make some really atrocious arguments. Youve confused evolution with the chemistry that makes us tick. If we are to believe that we simply are a complex series of chemical reactions than evolution plays no part in our destiny since it too is predetermined by this endless set of reactions.

A sort of mindfuck that I find interesting is that if we agree for a second that everything is simply a complex series of reactions which of course could then be represented by equations, then what exactly happens when an equation contains a square root?

Originally Posted by pocketfours

We can know and we do. Unless we possess some kind of divine powers that can change the laws of physics within our body then free will isn't possible.

Originally Posted by pocketfours

I haven't confused evolution with anything. Evolution is the 'process' that perfects the machines (us). All particles in the universe are flowing freely, their paths are altered only by the forces of other freely flowing particles (in other words not by our free will). Evolution is simply the name for the particle flow event that occurs when life improves itself from generation to generation.

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

I don’t think your idea of ‘robots’ is an accurate or realistic one. So I’m going to take a moment to explore AI. Artificial intelligences will probably not exist in the computers of today. The great AI advancements of the past, like Eliza which could fool people in believing it was demonstrating human behavioral intelligence by learning to rephrase your comments or questions back to you in hopes of making you believe it was understanding. If you typed in, "My boyfriend and I don't talk anymore," Eliza might say, "Tell me more about your boyfriend." or "Why do you think you and your boyfriend don't talk anymore?" Or Deep Blue which beat Gary Kasparov at chess. Deep Blue didn't intuitively outwit Kasparov. An expert human player looks at a board position and immediately sees what areas of play are most likely to be fruitful or dangerous, whereas a computer has no innate sense of what is important and must explore many more options. Deep Blue had no sense of history for the game or knows anything about its opponent. It won because it could think much, much faster than a human. But like a calculator can do arithmetic but not understand it, Deep blue could play chess but doesn't understand it. That was lifted from the book this guy wrote: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/125 (Thank you, ProZach). I'm telling you, you can not equate yourself to a robot with how you understand robots currently. Your brain is not here to execute a series of tasks which dictate your survival and reproduction or whatever else you think you're here to do. It takes 10 times as much feedback than it gives output. Your brain is constantly adjusting to its senses and it is predictive in nature. Robots as you know them are a code, a processor to read the code and memory to store information. Hawkins offers an interesting thought experiment to demonstrate the difference between an computer as you know them (A CPU, memory and programming) and your brain (which receives immediate feedback and possess a sense or understanding of time; which processes rapidly changing streams of information; and possesses memory which is predictive in nature): "Suppose you have a room with a slot in one wall, and inside is an English-speaking person sitting at a desk. He has a big book of instructions and all the pencils and scratch paper he could ever need. Flipping through the book, he sees that the instructions, written in English, dictate ways to manipulate, sort and compare Chinese characters. Mind you, the directions say nothing about the meanings of the Chinese characters; they only deal with how the characters are to be copies, erased, reordered, transcribed, and so forth. Someone outside the room slips a piece of paper through the slot. On it is written a story and questions about the story, all in Chinese. The man inside doesn't speak or read a word Chinese, but he picks up the paper and goes to work with the rule book. He toils and toils, rotely following the instructions in the book. At times the instructions tell him to write characters on scrap paper, and at other times to move and erase characters. Applying rule after rule, writing and erasing characters, the man works until the book's instructions tell him he is done. When he is finished at last he has written a new page of characters, which unbeknownst to him are the answers to the questions. The book tells him to pass his paper back through the slot. He does it, and wonders what this whole tedious exercise has been about." He goes on to say that the paper slide in is a story in Chinese with some questions at the end to test his knowledge of the material. The paper which he slides out of the room demonstrates an insightful understanding of the Chinese story and questions passed in. From outside, it seems as though the room demonstrates true understanding. When, in reality, no specific part of the room demonstrated any understanding of the story. Not the CPU, the person mindlessly executing commands, not the book or the software program feeding instructions to the CPU and not the scratch paper memory scattered throughout the room. He adds, "This argument created a huge row among philosophers and AI pundits. It spawned hundreds of articles, plus more than a little vitriol and bad blood. AI defenders came up with dozens of counterarguments to Searle, such as claiming that although none of the room's component parts understood Chinese, the entire room as a whole did, or that the person in the room really did understand Chinese, but just didn't know it. As for me, I think Searle had it right. When I thought about how computers worked, I didn't see understanding happening anywhere." The only way we're going to have AI like humans is when we construct robots who's brains are similar in structure to our own brains. We do not execute commands based on the stimulus of our environment or the programming of our brains. We won't be like robots, robots will be like us. This is the point where I'm asking for that non-intuitive jump, you simply don't understand enough about your brain right now to know what it is that your brain is doing. It is not a robot, in how I believe you think robots to be. If anything was going to give us free will, it would be our brains and you simply don’t know enough about your brain to know for certain that you are programmed. Though the behaviors you demonstrate may seem programmed, the workings of your mind could be free to do what they wish. And that freedom could be based solely on the feedback from other workings of your mind. Developing a network created simply by how the network wished to be created.

Even if all the particles in the world acted by AND-OR-IF-etc-logic; acted by a set of laws with all motion pre-prescribed, There are some freedoms out there. There are too many variables, too many particles and energies interacting at once for there to be a set flow or a destiny. With an infinite number of particles and energies interacting an infinite amount of time with almost an infinite number other particles, there's plenty of room for randomness.

The mosquito is different from the human by its brain. It's a good point, but when it comes to free will or other philosophical threads, drawing a parallel between humans and bugs is going to leave some heavy elements out of consideration and should just be thrown out the window. I am basing this off the idea that our brains give us free will. And our brains differ from other animals brains in structure and detail. And again, we do not know enough about how our brains work to be certain of anything.

As a sidebar and a huge spoiler alert, this is why I love the movie Fight Club. If you can recall the scene where Edward Norton and Brad Pitt are in the car and Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden lets go of the steering wheel. Edward Norton’s character is driven to grab the wheel. Tyler Durden says, “Look at you! You’re pathetic!” “Fine…” he says as he reluctantly releases the wheel and prepares to crash. Later in the movie, you realize that Edward Norton created his alter ego Tyler Durden. I just love thinking about how one side of his brain says to the other, “You programmed piece of shit, LIVE for once!” Hence, the line after the car accident, “You just had a near-life experience!”

I believe that we don't yet understand the workings of our brain to realize that there is no such thing as free will. To make that realization, you're making big assumptions which could easily be wrong. If you can acknowledge that, then you should be able to reason yourself out of the rest of it.

Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan

Question:

Let's say your mind and observation capabilities were large enough to know everything about everything. You know "Bob" as well as his best friend could ever dream. You know when an asteroid will hit the earth to the millisecond. Etc.

If someone did actually have the capabilties of knowing every fine point of the present, could he conceivably predict the future?

Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan

Question:

Let's say your mind and observation capabilities were large enough to know everything about everything. You know "Bob" as well as his best friend could ever dream. You know when an asteroid will hit the earth to the millisecond. Etc.

If someone did actually have the capabilties of knowing every fine point of the present, could he conceivably predict the future?

Originally Posted by boost

rilla my point about a square root in an equation is that there would not be one answer, I guess I was kinda trying to hint at parrallel universes. A kind of combination of free-will and everything being predetermined in the sense that everytime therei s a choice to be made it could be represented by an equation that resulted in the square root of a positive number. Of course there cant be two choices, so what happens to the other correct solution to the equation? Idk... Im just kinda rambling on an abstract thought.

As for other things n this thread, I have a lot of thoughts but I cant seem to put them into words very well right now. Ill revisit the thread later when I feel I can articulate my thoughts better.

Originally Posted by zook

I also don't think humans have free will. BUT, I think that fact is utterly meaningless. We feel like we have free will and we will never (and I'm saying never) be able to measure all the variables in the human brain such that we can accurately predict all future actions and decision-making.

Originally Posted by boost

ya and how would we know that the machine is wrong, that it really doesnt have free will? Even if we did know this, I dont see how it relates to providing an answer to whether we have free will.

Originally Posted by zook

rilla: I lost you a few places, but I think you're suggesting that we're going to figure out enough about the brain to "prove" that we have free will and explain how it works? I think the opposite will happen. The more we study decision-making, the more we'll see that brain activity predictive of the action we're planning precedes the conscious thought. Researchers will be able to predict decisions before you even make them. Some of these experiments have already been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

Originally Posted by zook

We will have programmed it! We'll know exactly what's determining all of it's actions, so we'll know it doesn't have free will!

Originally Posted by zook

We will have programmed it! We'll know exactly what's determining all of it's actions, so we'll know it doesn't have free will!

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

If I play chess but replace the knight with an empty salt shaker, I'm still playing chess. Even if I replace every functioning piece, they still act exactly as the actual pieces and I am still actually playing chess.

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

Like Deep Blue playing chess but not understanding chess?

Originally Posted by baron_greenback

What value is a morally righteous act if there is no such thing as free-will?

Originally Posted by spoonitnow

I thought I'd add to this particular example that an uncountable number of times I (and others, obviously) have played chess without a board because of our visualization and feelings for chess positions (and for what it's worth, you don't lose nearly as much playing strength while doing this as you would first expect). We'd just verbally call out our move and wait for the other person. What's also interesting is when you play someone who has sight of a board and moves the pieces along with the game you're playing with them, but you don't have sight of a board.

Just thought I'd throw that out there for consumption.

Originally Posted by baron_greenback

What value is a morally righteous act if there is no such thing as free-will?

Originally Posted by boost

kinda a side track but there are christian based religions out there that believe that god has set everything up and we are destine to our fate. Im pretty sure the omish are one of these groups. What perplexes me is what then drives them to live such dull repressed lives? What purpose is there for judgment after death if everything is predetermined?

Originally Posted by pocketfours

EDITING to remove length.
-P4's

Originally Posted by wufwugy

rillas drunk everybody. put everything on hold till he gets his sobriety sorted out.

Originally Posted by pocketfours

I really appreciate your thoughts 'rilla.

I could write a reaaaallly long answer but I don't think we would be anywhere close to a conclusion. I will answer with short points:

1. I'm as open-minded as anyone else you will ever meet. I also have a very analytical way of thinking. I have accepted the lack of free will as a fact, but that's mostly for the reason of building a foundation on top of which I can build and expand my understanding of life and the universe. I'm not saying that it's impossible that I will change my mind on that some day, but it's very unlikely since it would necessarily require that I would have misunderstood some of the fundamental laws of physics. Why are you applying physics to biology though? We have no Newtons laws of biological processes. So in making this jump of that the laws of the universe are like the laws of living creatures (where free will exists), doesn't make sense to me.

2. I agree 100% that the brain is so complicated that we might never understand how exactly it works. But that's not the point. I firmly believe that in this universe, it is not possible for any living being, no matter how advanced, to possess free will. If there is some alien race out there, one million times more advance than we are, even they will not have free will. I do think that a basic understanding of quantum physics is enough to understand why we free will simply isn't possible.

3. It took me a long time and a lot of thinking before I could accept that freely flowing particles could form something as advanced as a human being. Having accepted that, the lack of free will seems very obvious and logical. So you're saying that the freely flowing particles can not create something with free will?

4. Repeating what wufwugy wrote: If we would have free will, then we would still do everything precicely the same way. We wouldn't be 'human' if we wouldn't always choose the action that we prefer the most. Again, you have no idea exactly how your brain is choosing the actions that you take. You're making big assumptions here.

5. The fact that we always 'do what we want to do' will often lead us to trouble in life. We get addicted to things we know are bad for us. We tilt at the poker tables and choose to play badly because we want to do it (because it feels good). Etc.

6. I would also really want to believe that we possess truly free will, but in light of all the evidence to the contrary I have to believe that we do not. I usually don't like to preach about this because I think it might be a little too much for some people to handle.

7. I also believe that there is no such thing as 'meaning of life'. I think that life on this planet is very much comparable to mold growing on a rotten apple - we simply just 'exist' because some incredibly unlikely events took place that formed our solar system the way it is and sparked life on this planet. We might be advanced enough to closer explore our galaxy one day, but I see that just as 'the mold expanding'. The universe as a whole might have some kind of meaning or purpose, and perhaps that's what ultimately should be considered as 'the meaning of life'.

8. You might think from all this that I'm a really negative and unmotivated person, but it's not like that. I'm a very positive minded and optimistic fellow who likes to enjoy life to the fullest. I'm also way more intelligent than the average person (as most winning poker players probably are and clearly many of the posters here), and I think about these things because I can, but also because my findings might change the way I think about life. That in part might enable me to find happiness in places where others would never even think of looking, and it already has.

-P4's

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

Why are you applying physics to biology though? We have no Newtons laws of biological processes. So in making this jump of that the laws of the universe are like the laws of living creatures (where free will exists), doesn't make sense to me.

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

So you're saying that the freely flowing particles can not create something with free will?

Originally Posted by pocketfours

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

Your brain doesn't work this way. I don't know how it works, but I know it's not like this. Or even anything analogous to this.