The free will question

The point I was getting at was literally everything in your life (and everyone else's) is essentially rendered meaningless by your advocacy for determinism.

CEO decides to hire a death squad to take out workers organizing for a union? Oh no, he didn't decide that based on the information and values he had at the time, he's actually a non-thinking robot just following the system! (Which makes you question as to why a billion other people wouldn't make that same choice despite living under the same system and being indoctrinated with essentially the same values).

It's like some rejiggered secular version of Calvinism, which makes it all the more stupid. It's a lazy view that absolves you of having to do anything at all and contributes nothing to humanity.

How can matter be deterministic?

Conditions create circumstance

History is the process of the resolution of contradictions and the creation of new contradictions

Where is the inconsistency in these two statements?

i'm sure Ethiopians would love to know how they can have a Quantum Thanksgiving Dinner pop out of nowhere.

Are you familiar with the concept of cause and effect?

Shit take. Leftover religious determinism doesn't change the fact that every single day, every human being on earth is constantly barraged with choice after choice every minute of the day. Only brainlets believe in fate/stay night you dork.

Attached: 1511999684261.png (500x248, 131.48K)

And it doesn't matter how many "choices" you make when what determines what you choose is deterministic.

It's obvious you're completely unfamiliar with the arguments from either side of the free will debate.

Attached: 1454993456479.png (514x366, 415.63K)

Why do you even consider yourself a leftist if revolution can't be achieved (except for when situations have allowed for one)? Just because you're in an ocean does not mean you're not swimming.

Attached: Victory-Pose-3.jpg (400x240, 15.23K)

...

Read the SEP page on free will or something before you embarrass yourself further.

You absolute brainlet, the debate for/against free will is not "HURRRR I CAN CHOSE MY OWN SHIT"
But to dumb it down for you
I LIKE BOOK

Who are you quoting
.
Determinism, and I'll say this again for

(You) is an ideology of the weak and those in need of excuses. While every choice does have deterministic value, you can still act against your class interests.
Don't do it then sausage roll.

Attached: Flynn Smirking.png (512x512, 180.6K)

Why don't you spend five minutes reading up on the arguments for and against free will, determinism and compatibilism respectively before posting your hot takes, you weeb faggot?

Holy shit no one is denying this. Please fuck out of this thread.

Why? We're still a moment of the predetermined universe unfolding itself. Our part is as significant as any other. Even though our will is the result of outside effects, it is still thoroughly our will.
Everything that will happen is part of a chain of cause-and-effect, but we are a significant link in that chain, so what we choose to do does matter.

If you have free will, why do you choose to be a retard?

every fucking time

We are determined to function as if we had free will either way - the human thought-process seems exceptionally suited for retroactively perceiving willful behavior in past events. Therefore, postulating the fact of being determined doesn't affect our practice, it remains in the area of speculative analysis.

In my view, free will isn't something we have naturally, but something we acquire as we distance ourselves from "external" factors influencing our behavior.

Some examples:
- Suppose you're a slave and have to obey your master. You aren't acting out of free will, but because you are threatened with beatings if you do not obey. At one point you and your fellow slaves team up, kill your master, and escape to a place where no one knows you. Doing this asserts your free will over the will of your master.
- Suppose that you drank Coca Cola all your life and have a sugar addiction. At one point, you decide that this is unhealthy behavior influenced by outdated instincts, and that you want to put an end to it. Doing this is an assertion of your free will over your inauthentic craving for sugar.
- Suppose that you were raised religiously and continued practicing religion for most your life. Eventually you become aware that religion is based on a tradition of ancient storytelling that, when looked at from the same perspective as you look upon anything else, is just an expression of the superstitions of pre-scientific peoples. The only reason you're adopted these beliefs is that you naively accepted what other people told you, guided perhaps by your own irrational need for supernatural meaning in this world. For this reason, you stop practicing religion. You've just asserted your free will over your religious beliefs.

The basic pattern is that you become aware of a factor influencing your behavior, decide that this influence is illegitimate when compared to your personal aims, and decide to subdue it. It's this self-reflective capacity that makes humans free, while animals, who presumably haven't developed it to any recognizable degree, aren't free.

This

Why does the smirk when Akira is cucking him by using Isabeau as his sex slave? absolute degenerate.

This is true. What I'm especially curious about is whether this is simply a condition of human neurology, or inextricably tied to reason and consciousness itself.
I disagree with this. Postulating that you are determined has definite implications to our practice. It begs us to be deeply critical of what goes into any actions we may take, while telling us that this critical inquiry by necessity has no end, that there is no ultimate free ego that gives us a firm basis, except (!) in the form of this abstract limiting point.

The """illusion""" of free will is exactly equivalent to it being "real" to everyone except a hypothetical god who exists outside space and time and can explore the entire space of possibilities.
also the autistic technical definition of 'free will' implies that if the universe is partially random then free will is really real, which is retarded.
What you probably think of when you ask 'do we have free will' we do, yes, have.

I used to think any notion of really existing free will was dumb, until a smart dude explained compatabilism to me

Basically they redefine free will as “being able to act in accordance with one’s intentions”, and posit the existence of intentional states, dualism, etc

read Marx lol

Sounds like some people haven't read their Frankfurt tbqh

Determinists argue that one's intentions are, themselves, deterministic. You don't get to choose what you want, or even what you want to want.

This view is backed up experimentally. Active scans of the brain show that decisions are made subconsciously before we are even aware of them. What actually happens when we deliberate on a decision is we retroactively justify our subconscious decisions to ourselves. If we change our minds in the process of this justification it still happens subconsciously before we are aware that we have changed our mind. At no point do we actually make a free choice.

This so much.

Even if you didn't have the ability to choose otherwise, it doesn't follow that you didn't make a choice.

Thats retarded. Of fucking course you can't choose what you believe or who you are. You make the decisions you do based on how you feel about whatever input, which is different to someone else because of you. What would 'deciding what you'd decide' even mean? Its nonsense.
"You can't choose to do something you wouldn't choose to do lol free will bfto"

Free-will is the dumbest unquestioned shit there is. Read Spinoza. Man thinks he's free because he's aware of his desire but unaware of the causes that determines him.
By knowing the causes that determine our desires, we can achieve a kind of meta-position and this is the path of true freedom, by unshackling ourselves from external determinations and become ever more active in our lives.
Personality of choice is an illusion. If I were anyone else, I'd have done the same choices as them because I'd literally be them. I'd have their name, lived their past moments, I'd have had the same upbringing, values, disappointments, success and abilities.
kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/9092/Auslegung.v11.n01.378-389.pdf;sequence=1

youtu.be/hiU5Q5-X6mA

en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ethics_(Spinoza)/Part_3
and Part 4 :
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ethics_(Spinoza)/Part_4
Keep in mind this is probably one of the hardest reads of western philosophy but probably the greatest intelligence accelerator there is. I'd suggest grabbing a paper copy of the ethics and peruse through it whenever you feel like it. Part 1 and 2 are more about metaphysics and offer a somewhat interesting yet obscure synthesis of medieval scolastics.
From part 3 and onwards, Spinoza deals with things we experience on a daily basis such as :
Grab a paper copy and read about this. Also read about stoicians, epicureans, read about theological debates about predestination, read about social science, learn as much as you can in as many fields of knowledge as possible. Learn about social science, read about bourdieu, habitus, cultural capital.

A challenger appears
youtu.be/VrCPsntzSDs

yawn.

Don't really think you're cut out for philosophy if you can't read 10 pages or listen to a ten minute lecture to be informed enough to actually comment on it.

Sorry but I have no interest in reading that specifically. How exactly can philosophy be an emancipatory tool if it shelters itself from readers who actually need it? All this form fetichism to reach lukewarm conclusions already made a billion times before.

This is a paper given to intro students, and you're telling me you can't understand it well enough to actually address any arguments in it, but you expect your ideas, which are also not in any way original and you aren't adding anything besides "akshually babby fuck totally okay great scholastic heretic (but still theist) say so," to be taken seriously?

I'm not saying I can't understand it, I'm saying I have no interest in reading it. Reading comprehension. Its already fucking self explanatory that personality of choice is an empty phrase if you have a deterministic standpoint and I've made my point clear. If the author cannot express himself without resorting to variables and abstractions, I'd rather spend my time reading actually engaging content.
You don't know what you are talking about.

You're a brainlet, you're ideas are trash, and you're citing books you haven't read.

Truth doesn't care about your engagement levels you sophomoric pseud.

If you dropped the Dunning-Kruger bit for long enough to shut the fuck up and listen, you might learn from the expertise of others, but you're incapable of doing that so I won't waste more time on you. Good luck with pretending to have read books to say controversial things to impress your friends.

No, you literally don't make a choice. Your subconscious does based on your personality and experiences and genetics ect, and then you retroactively justify it to yourself. Mechanically speaking, a free choice never occurs. Your "decisions" are chosen for you before you think to give a voice to those thoughts. Calling this process "free will" is nonsense. What's "free" about it? And what "will"?

The fact that the decision is made according to your personality, what you're like, your qualities and past experiences.
There is not something outside of what should be called 'you' making the decision instead of you. So its "your" "will" as far as I care.
This isnt really different whether you make a decision consciously or subconsciously.
And, exactly what evidence do you have that 'you decide subconsciously then justify it after the fact' is true of all decisions rather than just some?

Variables and abstractions are engaging as fuck tho. You're just a brainlet who can't see the beauty in an elegant proof.

Call that "will" if you like, but how on Earth can you consider that to be "free"?

Well what the hell do you mean by free then? Random? Not subject to causality the likes of "I did this because Im a person who would do this given what I saw and knew at the time"?
If it wasnt compelled by anything other than my own mind(ie, my brain, the part of my body that actually holds 'me'.), how is it anything but free? I was able to do what I would do, and then did so.

Your mind, itself, is compelled.

You weren't able to do anything else.

The freedom to make a different choice.

Demonstrate that this is impossible.
Not all processes in nature are deterministic, and this is a demonstrable fact. The onus is on you to demonstrate that with complete knowledge of the prior state you could predict the future state.
Maybe start by justifying the PSR?

...

>

Me reacting to something the way I would react to it is not me being "compelled" to react that way.

...

Do you actually believe this means free will is an illusion?
Serious question. The contradiction should be immediately apparent to you here if you're a physicalist.

Lets for a moment entertain that there are immaterial, magical souls, that can reach into the material world and change it with no material causality. The soul is the deepest seat of your personality.
The soul receives information about the world from your senses. Then, as something with a particular outlook, temprement, blahblahblah, it will come to some conclusion about that information.
How could it possibly have free will as you're defining the term? To have 'free will', as in, the ability to make any choice including choices its personality is not predisposed to given its input? That would have to mean that it could suddenly change its personality or knowledge at will. But, wait, if its deciding to do that, how is it doing so? By way of its current personality and knowledge. That would still be deterministic. So it has to happen totally at random. But then its not an ability it has, its just random shit happening to it.

This doesnt disprove free will so much as it proves your definition of free will is absurd and useless, and claiming that its not real is masturbation.

For this he has to be saying that your subconscious is not really you.
And he also never answered the question as to whether that evidence provides any support at all for the idea that all decisions are like that rather than just some.

that's not what I said faggot.

Attached: 1456604746675.png (1672x1672, 1.53M)

Do not try and hide your superstition behind quantum spookiness. Disproving determinism does not prove free will. Can even ONE of you prove to me you have more free will than a tossed coin?

I'm a stupid Brainlet and I'll admit I haven't been arguing in good faith thus far but at the same time it's hard to believe in determinism with no links

compatabalists are determinists
they assert that acting in accordance with one's determined intentions is free will

Meme replies and smugness aside, I'm genuinely curious how you reconcile quantum mechanics with determinism without some kind of god of the gaps justification

no, just invisible ones. The psychic paradigm between consciousness and unconsciousness provides an apt architecture of the processes which guide our actions - but primarily being a construction of your environment does not discard your individuality nor your ability to redeem consciousness, which is retracted after the trauma of reality, you can assume free will through concentration on asserting intentional action upon the universe, the more consciously irrational, the less doubt you have that you are a hedonistic mechanism - for example, i have burned and scarred my skin to prove that i am not an unconscious organism being triggered through dynamics of pleasure and pain, but that reality is an internal dialogue which grants me autonomy from the structures of ideology present in the world. Philosophy helps to cultivate autonomy as well, since it allows us to meditate on good and evil, and the accomplishment of either for our personal satisfaction.

Attached: EmilysQuotes.Com-unconscious-conscious-direct-life-fate-understanding-wisdom-intelligent-C.G.-Jung.jpg (1145x668, 435.4K)

I knew quantum mechanics would be brought up eventually, but can we just put a lid on that? Can we please not pretend anyone on leftypol has a clue what the fuck quantum mechanics is? When the greatest physicists seem to continously ram their heads against the walls trying to figure it out the ramifications of the double slid experiment, should we really think we can use it in a debate about determinism?
Also, does it reallllllly matter for the question about free will whether we are robots or a cup of dice?

Attached: Unavngivet.jpg (720x577, 91.65K)

I'm the world of str smt Brainlet who believes in free will and I'm going to prove everything you understand about quantum mechanics false.
theepochtimes.com/4-common-misconceptions-about-quantum-physics_1410931.html

Welcome to philosophy. It's all just playing with words.

Welcome to vulgar Marxism, where I can say I'm not doing philosophy so it's totally not philosophy :^)
Sorry bub, you're already inside this banter called the western philosophical tradition, whether you like it or not.

Where did I say I'm a Marxist?

No one cares about your hot takes brainlet

Back to twitter with you and your "hot takes"

Wittgenstein was stuck in the anglo mode of thinking where philosophical problems can be arbitrarily divided into discrete puzzles. This was always a shitty outlook, and though late Witty offers several crucial insights I still don't agree with his general method. There's no way to "abandon" philosophy aside from a different school of philosophising.

Unless you can prove how linking chemicals in your brain to liking certain kinds of music, art, and politics, you have no basis for that, really. When people talk of free will what they mean is whether or not they have a basis for behaviorism that is set in stone. Interestingly, if we could find what kinds of chemicals can manipluate political opinion, then all we have to do is alter the brain chemistry a la 'transhumanism science' in people and babies and perhaps pre-natal, then we'll biologically engineer communism, or at least a worldwide army of anti-reactionary, militant, uncompromising communists who aren't swayed by concessions, not subject to becoming class traitors, and always work for the sole purpose of achieving communism. It'll be Catechism of a Revolutionary but this time people will take it seriously.

"We can will what we want, but we cannot will what we will", we are reacting to this world, biologically. if you don't like smoking, you cannot like smoking, but you CAN still smoke, thereby transversing your biological predisposition. If you're predisposed to be a communist you can always go back to being a reactionary but you probably won't because it wouldn't please you. This alone in my mind is a better basis for destroying moralism, second only to Stirner's take.

Ultimately what you believe, deterministic or free will, doesn't matter; it won't change the way you act. Even if you're a slave to yourself, just enjoy yourself. You like being happy.

user he's not the Flynnposter

The mention of quantum physics isnt dude weed lmao THE UNIVERSE KNOWS IM WATCHING IT *rips bong*.

Quantum physics has consistently demonstrated that the universe is partially random.
Which means that given a particular configuration of your brain, and the exact same input, will not always result in the same subsequent state. Its a complex system of many extraordinarily small parts, so its relevant, and even if that werent just visiting a web interface to some universities quantum hardware RNG would make it so.

Random processes changing what happens is obviously not you 'willing' something different to happen, but its consistent with the definition hard detereminists here are crying about. State A does not always deterministically result in state B. I cant imagine what else 'willing your will' could possibly look like. The idea is absurd, but the hard determinists entire framing of the argument is absurd.

In the same sense, it's pretty easy to argue that because your subconscious is subject to the same RNG, then the natural result is your lower brain making decisions based on deterministic values that your higher brain is unaware of. The decision is still made, but the code allocated to the decision is incredibly low.

Late Witty is continental through and through. He got mixed up in anglo autism when he was young but managed to transcend it.

But that's clearly not free will in action, even if it might look like it. You aren't the one willing those quantum effects into reality. They just happen on their own.

As the example given in the thread, we may posit that a coin can land on heads or tails at random but we wouldn't say it has free will.

Its indistinguishable from free will as you've been talking about it up until now. The fact that its obviously not should clue you in to how asinine the way you're talking about free will is.

Considering the fact that the nature and predictability of matter is pretty integral to determinist thought, I don't think we can just fucking ignore it now can we?

basic probability theory

again, probability theory.
just because you can draw a normal line concerning a set of outcomes, it doesn't mean all predictions are equally valid.

So you ARE saying a tossed coin has free will.

Sure, some outcomes are more likely than others, however wouldn't this line of reasoning create a kind of stalemate where one can neither say that the future is predetermined but at the same time cannot say that individuals have free will?

...

Pilot-Wave/Bohm Theory. Cockshott did a video on it, but you can find other sources on YouTube or wherever. The Copenhagen Interpretation is just idealist bullshit.

If your "decisions" are made from a combination of deterministic forces and probabilistic forces, you still have no more free will than a tossed coin because you aren't actually making decisions. You're just a subject of forces outside your control. The fact that you can't squeeze free will into this state of affairs isn't proof that I'm defining it wrong - ITS PROOF THAT FREE WILL DOES NOT EXIST

youtube.com/watch?v=cOe-7GH83Us

no because probability is still zero-sum.
if something extremely unlikely happens now, that means something extremely likely is probably gonna happen after

In the highest truth time isn't real the way think it is, nor causation. So the question is a bit silly. Insisting on the determinism of physical laws is meaningless since we don't know the physical laws. Complete physics and get back to me lol. But by then you'll realize that nothing is causing anything, there is only a timeless singularity

How does that prove free will doesn't exist? You still haven't done this. You haven't demonstrated that free will is incompatible with determinism, nor that nature is fundamentally deterministic, you've just restated that in various ways.

Where's the proof?

You don't get to pick and choose physical theories based on whats most convenient for your philosophy.

Once again - the decisions of a magical soul piloting your body from outside of material reality would be "deterministic". Your "free will" would require people not to have any personality or thought guiding their actions to be real, which is just about the opposite of what people first think of when they think of "free will", whether or not they can make and act on their own choices.
You're disproving your own useless autistic definition of "free will" which you've defined to be self contradictory nonsense. Anyone should be able to see that what you're talking about doesnt real because it doesnt even make sense, but it doesn't capture what people mean when they talk about free will or carry any of the implications anti-free will fags jump to.