Posted on 04/27/2021 4:50:21 PM PDT by DeweyCA
The difficulty in explaining the enigma of free will to those unfamiliar with the subject isn’t that it’s complex or obscure. It’s that the experience of possessing free will – the feeling that we are the authors of our choices – is so utterly basic to everyone’s existence that it can be hard to get enough mental distance to see what’s going on. Suppose you find yourself feeling moderately hungry one afternoon, so you walk to the fruit bowl in your kitchen, where you see one apple and one banana. As it happens, you choose the banana. But it seems absolutely obvious that you were free to choose the apple – or neither, or both – instead. That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one. Nothing could be more self-evident.
And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.
According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.
Arguments against free will go back millennia, but the latest resurgence of scepticism has been driven by advances in neuroscience during the past few decades. Now that it’s possible to observe – thanks to neuroimaging – the physical brain activity associated with our decisions, it’s easier to think of those decisions as just another part of the mechanics of the material universe, in which “free will” plays no role.
The implications of this are that people should not be held responsible, or given credit, for our actions. There should not be any prisons because the perpetrators were not really at fault. after all, they couldn't help themselves. In the same way, there is no such thing as love. It also is just a neurological chemical reaction in our brains and so people should not be praised for loving others, nor for gallantry in battle because in both instances they were simply doing what they had been unknowingly programmed to do. This is the logical outcome of what these foolish men are teaching to our college kids, and (via YouTube) to our younger kids. [eg. see atheist Cornell prof William Provine in a debate with Berkeley law prof Philip Johnson at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9W1Y_PmhSI&t=140s]
And finally, of course, NONE of these professors live consistently with these implications of what they are teaching others. They all are hypocrites. It is impossible to live according to their insane ideas. Atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw where this argument led over 120 years ago and he spent the last several years of his life as an insane person. Students are being taught foolish ideas by very foolish pseudo-intellectual professors. And all because the professors do not want to submit and be held accountable to the sovereign creator and Lord of the universe. Such a pity and waste.
"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." (Romans 1:22)
Yes, of course we do.
“We know the will is free, and there’s an end on it.” — Samuel Johnson
Steve Pinker turned out to be a real asshole.
Not only that, but there’s a misunderstanding of “free will.” Nothing we do is “surprising” to God, or contrary to antecedents. But “free” doesn’t mean “meaningless,” “capricious,” or “random”; it means in accordance to ourselves as opposed to imposed on us from purely external forces. Nor is freedom opposed to predictability: if I know you’ll want to cuddle puppies, that doesn’t mean you didn’t freely choose to do so.
I’m thankful for my Savior, Jesus Christ. If I’m wrong compared to if their wrong says a lot for seeking Jesus.
No.
A lot of people would like it to be that way so they could avoid being held accountable for their crimes. If there’s no free will then building hydrogen bombs and giving them to politicians is perfectly okay. It’s not the physicists’ fault.
“thus to predict and manipulate our choices”
So you can act at someone else’s will but not your own. And that someone else would be thinking they are willing you to act, but if they have no free will, they would be unable to do so. Their manipulation would be nothing more than a striking coincidence in that they believe they are willing you to do something shortly before you actually do it.
Year ago when I was in grad school there was a lively debate about the relative wisdom of submitting to what was known s psychophysical reductionism. That is, it’s all just neurons and chemicals, there is no “ghost in the machine.” Then we developed “systems theory,” which posited that systems can be analyzed and understood at a variety of levels, with increasing complexity at each level.
One principle that evolved was the observation that increasingly complex levels of systems developed “emergent properties” which could not be predicted or explained by reference to a lower level. What we call “free will” is such a property.
While you can trace and follow a series of cognitions and responses by watching neurons light up, you still cannot use that to predict with certainty what the person will do next. It’s that simple.
Do what your impulse tells you.
You’re right, and this thinking leads to even worse actions than you mentioned. If we are simply machines, doing only what we are programmed to do, then we are not responsible for our actions as you surmised. However what should the government do with poorly programmed machines? The simplest response it to simply destroy wrong thinking people. After all, they can always make more and hopefully program them to be more compliant, starting at birth and going through the formative years.
From what is my will free?
Genesis 3:5
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
If it isn’t, we need to behave as if it is.
I don’t know about this theory.
But I was surprised to hear the old predestination believers were attacked for implying that God was cruel. The other side said God had set up some people to be fine from birth and go to Heaven and others had no say in the matter and no chance to better themselves from being born to go to Hell eventually no matter how hard they tried. Plus, enjoy sin all the time because you were damned to your fate anyway. Interesting idea.
Some objections: From “Common Objections to the Reformed Doctrine of Predestination”By Loraine Boettner——
That it Makes God the Author of Sin
That it Discourages All Motives to Exertion
That it Represents God as a Respecter of Persons or as Unjustly Partial
That it is Unfavorable to Good Morality
That it Precludes a Sincere Offer of the Gospel to the Non-Elect
Nope
We make conscious choices every day and we easily could do many different ones than we actually pick.
In fact i would really prefer to make certain choices than others, and under cetain conditions i would/will, but there is a thing called delayed gratification.
the fact we dont all make the identical choices under the same circumstances proves free will. The woman who sees an accident and concludes God doesn’t exist, and anothr woman seeing the same thing has it confirm her faith in God, experience the same thing yet dont make identical choices.
Free will is overrated. It’s only good until you learn life is Christ’s will or hell. Free will until you learn Christ’s will. Then free will is of no use.
Then, how do you explain psychic ability? In 1978 Inwas a participant in a week long seminar in NYC. The last day we had Breakfast at Windows on the World and I had a premonition that the buildings would tip over. When 9/11/01 happened I was mortified. I have had other such premonitions, certainly not of that scale. This blasts these protoplasmic peahens out of the water.
If there isn’t, how do I explain all the crappy gun deals I’ve made over the years?
If we are just machines and we have free neurons available, then why not hook us all up to the cloud and use our free neurons to better mankind?
Things could get real creepy, real soon if we start disbelieving in free will and personhood.
>“We know the will is free, and there’s an end on it.” — Samuel Johnson
From our limited perspective, we have free will. But from God’s infinite perspective, it’s predestination. Our choices are life changing and long lasting. One day we all must give an account so choose wisely.
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
-Frank
“The implications of this are that people should not be held responsible, or given credit, for our actions.”
You’re right.
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