Guys is he right?

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/

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youtube.com/watch?v=xCwY36a19aQ
youtube.com/watch?v=w8Q6CWv7IXo
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yes

With no free will, wheres the incentive to work hard. Just follow the welfare train and die then. What a life

No, a man chooses.
Though the Christian tradition of espousing "free will" is pantsu on head retarded.

good job reading the article ya donut

> i have no idea what im talking about

So Sam Harris finally admits he's a nihilistic Jewish tool.

Good to know.

Sam Harris actually talks very nicely about Christians .

He's right but makes strange conclusions. It proves that one day in the future strong AI would be possible, but how does that invalidate everything humans do? The "free will" merely implies agency of every human, and he doesn't deny it, he attacks the idea that neurons can stop following the laws of physics, which nobody claimed ever.

"right" implies "true" and "true" means "rationally achieved through consideration of reality and not contradicting any other facts".

if one does not have free will, then, ones thoughts are not chosen, and one does not choose a course of action being that it were true or rational but merely that it was inevitable one would do so.

to argument that there is no free will is to acknowledge that one did not reason and choose to think that there is no free will - meaning there is no greater reason to believe that there is no free will than that there is, because after all, the deniers of free will simply have no choice in being a denier!

such is absurdity.

free will is axiomatic to our nature, and, NO - it does NOT have to operate along whatever narrow lines you can draw for it. consider that there are billions of true things which have not yet been proven!

>acknowledging scientific reality makes you a nihilist.

You're a fucking idiot.

>to argument that there is no free will is to acknowledge that one did not reason and choose to think that there is no free will - meaning there is no greater reason to believe that there is no free will than that there is, because after all, the deniers of free will simply have no choice in being a denier!
Learn English and then attempt your pseudo-intellectual vomit again.

see, we can create a "means" by which "free will might be real".

lets decide that the "means" is neurons acting without cause! nevermind that it's preposterous.

neurons don't act without cause! therefore free will is not real!

but there are infinite ways that something may be true. i could imagine 100 different mechanics that explain free will, and several of them i am rather sure have great or partial validity towards the "true truth" behind all.

in any case truth exists separately of what anyone thinks or says.

>muh reductionism
>"I can know my conscious experience is an illusion by using my conscious experience to observe reality"

alas, to have a 8th grade reading level again, and to enjoy the sweet loss of virginity once more with homer and plotinius and cecil...

There is no definition what free will is even. My definition of free will is that every human is an independent rational agent. No more, no less. Where humans don't act rational it was proven to be because of an evolutionary method of avoiding intracable problems, aka problems that take more time to solve than is rational to spend on them and choosing quickly based on limited number of known variables and constants.

>alas
/cringe

If you knew you my education background you'd crawl back into the shithole you spawned from.

Your shitty argument put forth here: appears to be a non sequitur logical fallacy, but it's most intelligible garbage.

>free will is axiomatic to our nature, and, NO - it does NOT have to operate along whatever narrow lines you can draw for it. consider that there are billions of true things which have not yet been proven!
It even has a creationist-tier closing sentence. Neat!

...

No. Causality in the physical sense is so all encompassing it means nothing to the question. Humans can choose things on a whim or they can choose a thing by taking thought. These experiments don't consider the choices made during a chess match or any such problem but mere motor control.

Free will pisses me off because everyone has an opinion on it and most of them have no idea what they are talking about t. Philosopher

What the fuck does free will even mean? You are your brain. Your choices are both fully yours and deterministic at the same time.

This debate is gibberish.

>No one is to blame for their actions. It's all the system's fault.

Is that the gist?

>>There is no definition what free will is even.

words have definitions. thus do sentences.

>> My definition

you don't get your own, marxist.

if i knew your educational background i'd probably shudder that they've perfected such methods of making people less intelligent but more sure they're intelligent.

you don't understand. you don't like. you smart! you show! you're like bad dumb group people think me show you!

t-plebberal student aka (you)

wow i am crie (you) got me

>What the fuck does free will even mean?
They are trying to say that humans can't think rationally because our neurons can't break the laws of physics.

Close, but no
>Everyone is a puppet because if you go back long enough you find an algorythm behind human brain.
>you don't get your own, marxist
>marxist
What. Give me a definition of free will according to you.

I actually wrote a paper on this. The problem with free will is that if a choice is influnced AT ALL, then the decision is not truly free. No choices are made in a vacuum independent of everything else that is going on around you. And how are humans the only thing in the universe with free will?

i don't have a personal definition.

i believe that there are probably better places to go for definitions than the dictionary but worse places to start.

free will
noun
1.
the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.

that's pretty accurate.


consider that a flower can not choose to act against its knowledge and interest, but a man can become a drunkard and perish. a human has the capacity to choose good or evil courses at any moment of his life.

>The problem with free will is that if a choice is influnced AT ALL, then the decision is not truly free.

lmao you just take that for granted

>I actually wrote a paper on this. The problem with free will is that if a choice is influnced AT ALL, then the decision is not truly free.

If you're in a vacuum there's nothing to choose, though. All decisions would be meaningless.

You're saying that if a choice has meaning, it's not a choice. Fuck that retard tier philosophy.

>i want to paint the moon green!

>"fuck that is hard"

>curse you, there is no free willlllllllllllllllllllllllll

please screenshot your posts so you can re-read them when you're older

How is it not nihilistic to assume all 'reality' is material?

please imagine that you were younger and write something worth screen-shooting.

you'll realize that as you got older, you didn't get older, you really just got gayer, and then one day you were just sitting there on your computer as always and feeling bad feelings at someone writing something like people don't usually write, and you felt stupid too, and you got angry and typed some stuff to make them stop their typing, but then he typed some stuff back at you, and you realized what could have been if you...

had made better choices!

haha.

i'm 27 anyways my brain is permanently like this faggot

What would be influenced exactly? What is this "you" that is being chained down by outside forces and forced to act in a specific way? A person is a brain, and that brain is made up of deterministic elements that change over time due to external stimuli and the expression of genes. It has the free will to form whatever thoughts it wants and move the body however it wants and those choices will be chosen based on the makeup of the brain.

I don't understand what's even being debated here.

>the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
Everyone acts at their own discretion, this is called agency, and this is exactly what I meant, retard. Your brain has a changing algorythm which is governmed by another changing algorytmn etc. if you look deep enough. It does not take independence of your thought chain away, just means that you don't live in vacuum and your thought process is influenced by sensory input.

no, i am saying that choice is an illusion. and yes that is what most deterministic people think as well.

nice argument fag

>caring about the opinion of a nihilistic edgelord

They are trying to do to philosophy and law exactly what Cultural Marxism did to Art and Entertainment.

Namely, reduce all of it to Jackson Pollack tier drivel.

This is why the Jew has you. You can never appreciate the argument exist only to serve the agenda.

What a loser. This guy will dangle on a rope with the rest of them.

wow, how am i going to refute all those baseless unfalsifiable assertions.

>>what would be influenced?

you.

>>What is this "you"

you.

>>that is being chained down by outside forces and forced to act in a specific way?

what? yes, you can put someone in chains. is that really the point here? you can't chain thought.

>> A person is a brain

wew lad, care to prove that to any rigorous standard? i'm telling the brain is just an amplifier, it receives a signal and makes it louder to push through nerves to muscles etc.

>>and that brain is made up of deterministic elements that change over time due to external stimuli and the expression of genes.

WEW
E
W

i wonder if these external elements are entirely and neatly collated into a list, like how many of them are there really? you think one of them might be 'you'?

>>It has the free will to form whatever thoughts it wants and move the body however it wants

what is 'it' vs 'you'?

>>and those choices will be chosen based on the makeup of the brain.

and the makeup of the brain is exhaustively known, to pencil proofs? or does the makeup of the brain actually constantly change and alter according to what are at our most understood level emergent variables that coelasce without an EFFICIENT cause, but, which to our direct knowledge, come from 'you'?

>>I don't understand what's even being debated here.

clearly.

>>nice argument fag

it wasn't an argument. it was an example of what your thinking really results in.

>>Your brain has a changing algorythm which is governmed by another changing algorytmn etc. if you look deep enough. It does not take independence of your thought chain away, just means that you don't live in vacuum and your thought process is influenced by sensory input.

wow, so, you can map out these algorythms, right, since you're sure of that? i mean, if you couldn't, you'd essentially just be saying "ghosts".

works continued

The argument a determinist would make has nothing to do with external influence.

youtube.com/watch?v=xCwY36a19aQ
Humble thyself before Christian power Harris the heretic.

>>Your brain has a changing algorythm which is governmed by another changing algorytmn etc. if you look deep enough. It does not take independence of your thought chain away, just means that you don't live in vacuum and your thought process is influenced by sensory input.

jesus christ people you have perfect knowledge of your own organism, YOU ARE PEOPLE ASKING WHAT PEOPLE IS WELL FUCK YOU HAVE ONE EXAMINE HIM.

also,

>>that dude punched me in the nose

>>IM FUCKING ANGRY NOW

>>APPARENTLY MY THOUGHTS ARE DETERMINISTIC TOO

The same way red and blue are two completely different colors. How do you even answer a question like this?

I believe in determinism, I don't think there is such a thing as free will but rather you can predict the decisions most people would do with great accuracy if you have enough information on them. While there are going to be a really small percentage of people that will not be tied to determinism either because mostly of a personality unbalance or a mental illness, the majority of people will always act in a predictable way making our "free will" not free at all since we use several tools (some of which are out of our control) to make decisions making a tiny variations in those tools making people react differently to the same situation.

>jesus christ people you have perfect knowledge of your own organism.

patently false. A tooth can't bite itself. We can't observe ourselves in the way you're suggestion. The observation itself would require another observation, and that observation would require yet another.

Causality makes free will just as impossible as existance, both seem to not have valid cause. Yet most of determinists believe that (world) exists.

>wow, so, you can map out these algorythms, right,
I can't personally, but experiments on mice with electric brain stimulation have proven that such sequence of algorithms does exist. Basically you're agreeing with me that human thought process is independent from any external pressure except sensory input, but dependence on sensory input takes "free will" away from your neurons. Logically then, you're saying that a brain floating in a water tank that is stimulated by electricity has free will but a living human does not because he's constantly influenced by what's happening around him. And this makes no sense to me, so as I said my definition of free will stops at agency - if your brain is not a part of any hivemind and has it's own chemistry as source of motivation then you have a free will.

>if i knew your educational background i'd probably shudder that they've perfected such methods of making people less intelligent but more sure they're intelligent.
zzzzz

>you don't understand. you don't like. you smart! you show! you're like bad dumb group people think me show you!
Learn English.
>t-plebberal student aka (you)
wew lad, nice one.

In other news,
>to argument that there is no free will is to acknowledge that one did not reason and choose to think that there is no free will
is a non sequitur logical fallacy. Stay dumb, you laughably stupid fuckhead.

There was a scientific study that showed via brain scans that the brain knows what is going to happen several seconds before something occurs. I'm not sure if that's what this link is referencing or not, I'm not giving the atlantic free page views. For all I know OP is a shill trying to sell a book.

No. Libet's experiment doesn't prove anything. His subjects knew what they were meant to do before doing the experiment, so they weren't exactly free if the unconscious mind decided when to press. Also the fact that you have a window to veto a volitional action or means the question is still wide open.

>Causality makes free will just as impossible as existance
No, it doesn't.

Comparing existence to free will via causality shows an abject ignorance on at least one of those terms.

No,causality doesn't make life impossible just HIGHLY unlikely but as any statistician/mathematician would know given enough time an improbable odd WILL be true at some point.

Is like studying limits in calculus or speaking about irrational numbers.

Yes which is why any political philosophy that relies on personal responsibility and "freedom" or "liberty" is a lie.

That study was regarding, iirc, pressing a button -- or something like that.

There's no reason to extrapolate that study into everything you do, since that would mean the brain can foresee the future in all events.

Who here chose where to be born?
Who here picked their parents?
So on and so forth..

the one that i was thinking of showed either a pleasant picture or a horrific picture and it was 100% accurate and the delay was 7 to 10 seconds iirc. i'll try and dig it up

There can't be free will if the universe is deterministic.

You can predict everything you want if you are able to consider the huge amount of variables.

If I had been born as you, with the exact same atoms, history, etc. there is no physical property that would have allowed me to choose differently than what you have chosen at any given moment. I would have the same personality, the same tastes, etc. due to the fact that the physical world is ruled by cause and effect. Everything you've ever done, ever will do or ever will be was preceded by a cascade of events that you had no say over.

If I then think of my own life in the same way, the nature of my existence becomes unintuitive. Aren't I now choosing to type these words? It feels like I am. Didn't I choose to eat that sandwich last night? Didn't I choose my hobbies? We can easily cycle back through the past to debunk these feelings: I grew up being taught English, English was created way before I existed, sandwiches existed before I ever had a craving for them, my hobbies all fit pretty neatly into what would be considered "appropriate" activities in my society, governed by social norms that have been passed down for thousands of years and that no one living had any say in.

My conclusion then is simply that this feeling of autonomy is an illusion. If all my actions are constrained by what has happened up to that moment, this feeling of choosing must be some genetically beneficial quirk or some spillover of a self-aware mind.

I see this reality as liberating. I can pass from moment to moment without the burdens of guilt and hatred, with lessened anxiety for my future and the world. Things could not have been any different. I may feel I am choosing, moment to moment, but in the grand scheme, my life is only a short melody, existence a grand orchestral composition spinning on the record player, each preceding moment in the music following perfectly from the last. Understanding that free will is an illusion is simply seeing the grooves in the record. The record would have played whether I ever noticed them or not.

I'm not clicking the OP's link, but the question of whether free will exists is far from closed, whether you're talking to physicists or neuroscientists (few researchers believe that the brain is deterministic), to say nothing of philosophers. It's an extremely complex, nuanced question, we may never be able to answer it completely, and we're certainly nowhere close to answering it now.

>complex question that depends on the nature of causality, quantum mechanics, and a bunch of other shit.
>lol its just ur brans is computer

everybody walks a path paved by those around them and in turn they pave the paths for others.

Free will ultimately boils down to confidence and the freedom and ability to say no.

So create a definition of free will to straw man free will

>universe
>deterministic
wew lad.
Quantum mechanics would like a word with you.

Sure life is a lot like a train on rails, but even rails have track selectors.

Your post loses meaning in that your thoughts on the subject cease to exist if you are somebody else.

>reading meme intellectuals
I remember when i was 14 years old

It's not currently known if subatomic particle behavior is deterministic or not. You can't prove it either way from current quantum theory. inb4 muh Copenhagen and muh quantum shit is super duper mysterious popsci bullshit

The point Harris (the author of the book mentioned on the OP) makes is that that ability to say no is non existent since the moment of your inception and the moment you decide something you already made that decision even before being asked about it.

Is like why you don't see people dancing naked in the street right now, because everyone has the free will to do that if they want but due to how everyone is enforced by society and your morals and how you were raised and shit ton of other stuff that you decide against it and is a fairly predictable decision. Harris argues that EVERY decision you make is as predictable as that and that the only reason why would someone couldn't predict it is because we lack the power to see all the variables that would make the evacuation work.

In mathematical terms all human decisions are accusations of the N order and the SLE is a SDC with only one solution but we lack the tools to see all the variables to actually know the solution of the SLE but we can make a guess of what that solution is if we had enough understanding of the variables.

GEB is a good book that talks about this

Dude modern Quantum mechanics doesn't determinate if subatomic particles are deterministic or not, currently we can make guess (very accurate ones mind you) of where they could be, which proves some sort of determinism inherent in them is just that we lack the knowledge to make more accurate predictions or to finally prove that subatomic particles are in fact non deterministic and we will always have to rely on an statistical model.

>it's unknown
exactly the point i'm trying to make.
did you know something about science?
if it can't answer a question or at the very least take an informed guess, it doesn't care.
IT DOESN'T FUCKING CARE.
meaning that there is no point in discussing it.
because some meme tier faggot isn't going to be able to answer the question.
if you are right for the wrong reasons, you're still wrong.

Actually red and blue are two completely different wavelengths of light. Color is a delusional mental construct.

And just as red and blue are both derivatives of light. Materialism and Determinism are derivatives of Nihilism.

> there is no free will
> with an effort you can have a better life

NO YOU CAN'T!

t. realised neccessity

Not quite. Quantum theory is set up in such a way that things are fully deterministic at a macro scale aside from a few vanishing statistical irregularities. The randomness smooths out based on statistical distributions. So it has no bearing on free will.

Yep, he's right.

the macro is built off the quantum.
you cannot ignore it like that.
you do realize the big bang was at the level where quantum probability could actually do something?

Yeah but you don't understand what he is saying. The macro is build of the subatomic particles but on a macro level the unpredictability of sub atomic particles is taken into consideration and disregarded, even if they behave erratically that we can't currently explain them but can guess based on statistical models on the macro level the subatomic particles don't change he deterministic nature of the atoms.

Is like arguing that every single real number isn't included in PI only because the probabilities are low but we all know that on the infinite that affirmation is true, the logic of subatomic particles is the opposite of that despite their erratic behavior they behave in such a way that atomic world doesn't get affected by their perceive randomness (I say perceive because we can't currently prove that the subatomic particles are deterministic but we can't also disprove that they are deterministic) so either their effects are nullified or they are indeed deterministic in nature.

i did understand what he meant, but
>i don't like loosing
>i am autistic and want quantum probability to be included for memes sake.

No, they are related concepts. They do not imply each other, namely the former do not imply the latter.

That's like saying that relativistic effects are relevant to the trajectory of the piss you take every morning. It's literally built into quantum theory itself that it should merge into regular mechanics at a large enough scale. Also the alternative to deterministic is randomness, which just as little to do with free will as determinism. It still produces results based on an absolute set of rules with a restrained set of outcomes that will produce the same distribution with sufficient number of trials. You're still cucked by physics.

wheres the archive?
wheres the pastebin?

fuck off marketer

I watched him discuss free will with Joe Rogan and he convinced me. We don't have free will. He's a very smart guy and he explains it well. Rogan also asks some pretty good questions. I recommended watching it if you're interested in this sort of thing

youtube.com/watch?v=w8Q6CWv7IXo

What is worse from that philosophy is that from randomness you can get a deterministic universe, which is insane. Personally I believe we will discover at some point how to explain in a deterministic way subatomic particles because the option is literally madness.

yes, a man chooses, but he does so based on facts that he has no influence on, so therefore all his decisions have always been set in stone.

It's not that surprising. First, things behave randomly but still follow rules, like probability distributions. There are many statistical laws to what happens when you start stacking many events based on probability distributions on top of each other. So, what you consider deterministic is merely the consistency of the "stacking", meaning that you observe that a certain observe tends to a given value with probability 1, provided you drew a sufficiently large number of values from probability distributions.

Still, most philosophers consider what you described to be free will. I don't agree but that's what they think.

youtube.com/watch?v=xCwY36a19aQ
I hope this video helps. Everything besides the music is really nice.

...

No that is extrapolating behavior from a statistical pool of data but in physics that doesn't have room since outside of quantum mechanics and some sort of usage of it in electronics every other physical event is deterministic in nature and if you can't see the determinism is because you lacked something to explain it. Like electromagnetism that weren't proven deterministic until Faraday proven their existence and then Maxwell gave it a mathematical frame.

It's a semantics debate that reduces to gibberish most of the time. The alternative to the kraut's definition would be to assume that the human soul is an ephemeral acausal substance independent from the brain that can act at complete random. That's completely useless and absurd so why would you ever define free will that way?

Indeterminism and free will are related how exactly?

Focusing our mind is itself a "choice". That cop out does not work.

Then, I don't really get what the discussion is about.
I do not believe in free will and I say that all our actions (and I define action as anything our body can do, including thinking) are determined either deterministically or probabilistically by a set of previously defined variables and/or parameters; that is, that our behavior follows patterns and that these patterns can be summarized in simpler descriptions than the actual descriptions of the behaviors themselves.
Whether it is possible to know what these patterns are or not (whether behavior is predictable) is not really a necessity.

If you say free will is about choosing what arguments to use when guiding action, note that choosing these arguments is an action in itself. Still, if you think that being aware of a "choice" of reasons prior to acting is free will, then whatever. You are not disagreeing with me.

>If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.

DAS RAYCIST