[OT] Plato's Pub and Philosophical Society

[Chronon]

I have to admit that I'm highly dubious of the extreme determinist position. Here are my two cents (or eurocents):

I'll grant that natural law (genetics, physics, etc.) does have some effect on basic human function, personality and so on. What I look like, how my body has developed, and my basic temperment does seem to have been imposed by natural law. After seeing the development of my daughter and her friends, I would agree that natural law does play a significant role (I used to be more of an extremist on the nurture side in the "nature versus nurture" debate).

But, I don't see how natural law makes me stay up too late working on the frigate design for my ship set, or dictates which type of cereal I eat in the morning.

So, the way I see it, natural law dictates a certain range of behaviors on the macro level, but free will has everything to do with decisions on a micro level. Perhaps quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics are indeed a good analogy. Newtonian works for large bodies, but fails for small ones, just in the same way that natural law works for the general parameters of life, but not for determining what one eats for breakfast.

[dogscoff]

I have to admit that I'm highly dubious of the extreme determinist position. Here are my two cents (or eurocents):

I agree with you, but I'm playing devil's advocate here, so...

So, the way I see it, natural law dictates a certain range of behaviors on the macro level, but free will has everything to do with decisions on a micro level.

But the macro level is just a manifestation of events on the micro level. In fact, there *is* no macro level- that's just an abstraction made up by our puny mortal minds that, for some obscure reason, find it easier to process the concept of "a lump of wood" than "a hundred squillion carbon, hydrogen and assorted other atoms in a particulr arrangement."

I'll grant that natural law (genetics, physics, etc.) does have some effect on basic human function, personality and so on. What I look like, how my body has developed, and my basic temperment does seem to have been imposed by natural law. After seeing the development of my daughter and her friends, I would agree that natural law does play a significant role (I used to be more of an extremist on the nurture side in the "nature versus nurture" debate).

It's not nature vs nurture- nature and nurture are *both* within the realm of cause and effect. I'll explain after another quote or two...

But, I don't see how natural law makes me stay up too late working on the frigate design for my ship set, or dictates which type of cereal I eat in the morning.

Let me put it this way: Your every decision and your every involuntary process is a result of who You are. (Note the capital letter) If you stay up all night on your shipset, it's because there are factors at work in You stronger than your urge to sleep. There's no mystery to it- A desire for completion, a desire to impress your peers, the fact that you had a nap just after lunch and aren't too tired... Dozens of conflicting factors that all combine to make Your behaviour. The question is, who are You?

The trouble is, you can't let go of this idea that You are any less a pile of atoms than your breakfast cereal or your desk. Your brain and body constitute a hugely complex pattern of matter, but it is still just a finite lump of matter.

The pattern your matter-lump now happens to occupy is You. Your entire state of mind and personality, your memories and emotions, all of it down to every Last tiny detail is encoded in the exact, unique arrangement of nerves and cells and tissues and chemicals that make up your brain and body at this exact moment. In a micro second it will be changed- gone forever, replaced by a slightly different You.

The important thing is that all those factors I mentioned earlier, the ones that decide whether or not you go to bed, those things are encoded in your current pattern as well. Your creative urge is a particularly complex budles of nerves somewhere in your head. Your tiredness is a build up of chemicals in your nervous system. Which one is stronger? Your decision to stay up or go to bed is determined by the interaction of this physical matter in You- your "pattern", as I keep calling it.

has everything to do with decisions on a micro level.

But the micro-level physical matter that is You is still subject to physical laws. If you were to look at any particle in your body at any given moment in time (for example the crucial atom in your brain that can tip the balance between you going to bed or not), if you looked at it you would see that it does not have a choice about what happens to it next. Physics (ignoring quantum stuff) only allows one possible course of action. There is only one thing it can do, so you WILL go to bed or you WILL stay up.

And all of this holds for every single one of your atoms and protons and neutrons and whatever-elsons, and all the other particles in the universe, all the time, and it has done since the Big Bang, and shall be ever thus until the entire universe crumples into itself in a great big entropic heap.

Extrapolate this process backwards through your life, with the state of your physical being at any given moment being the inevitable result of the state it was in an instant before, and you see that you have no free will. You just think you do, atom-bag.

[ March 21, 2003, 16:25: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Kamog:
There seems to be at least two points of view in regards to how our thoughts originate. (1) There is the biochemistry view that says thoughts are a result of chemical reactions in the brain; i.e. the different chemical and electrical processes are what thought is. If this is so, free will would be an illusion. (2) Another view is that we have a soul or spirit which is separate from physical matter. Thoughts originate from this non-physical spirit, and the chemical processes in the brain are a secondary phenomenon caused by the thought. Then free will is possible because thoughts can originate independently of the arrangement of chemicals and atoms in the physical brain.

Interesting take, but it does point out one important fact: Competing base unproveable assumptions. 1) Measureable reality is all that exists. 2) Soul exists and has influence.

Niether of these can be objectively tested (barring some controversial expieriments where dying people lost 3/4 of an ounce on death, disreputable claims on psionics, near-death experiences, et cetera) which would put the debate up to an endurance challenge on which side can keep shouting the longest, as both sides assume different things and niether assumption is either proveable or disproveable, and everything follows from those base assumptions.

[Suicide Junkie]

An interesting experiment had people reacting to things while in a real time scanner (CAT or MRI or something).

When for example, they touched something hot, they would, naturally, jerk their hand back.
A noticable amount of time later, the brain activity would kick up in response.

The people would report that they actively moved their hand, when it was a subconsious reflex, and the brain simply hadn't had a chance to notice and respond by that time. They just didn't remember it that way.

[Fyron]

Nerve cells do have some degree of functionality independant of the brain, after all.

[Suicide Junkie]

IIRC, most (if not all) reflexes just go to the spinal cord and back, rather than all the way up.

The thing is, those people remembered deciding to do something, when really, they had no choice.

Ah!
I just remembered what I was thinking about on the way to school this morning:

Consider a (3D) movie, and the characters in that movie.
From a vantage point independent of time (such as a god's) how are is our universe different from that movie reel?

[Krsqk]

I guess that would depend on the point of view one takes (deterministic or free will). A determinist would say that the film makes up life--every event was pre-recorded, and it only is a matter of happening. A free-will-ist would say the reverse, that life--each individual's thread of events--makes up the film.

The question gets more interesting when you throw in the two views of supernatural sovreignty, which are almost parallel to determinism and free will. One holds that God is in active control of each event, and that our free will is only an illusion; the other says that He usually only controls the general direction of things and allows us to make our own individual choices. The latter view would say that while God could control every event, He is powerful enough to work around (and in spite of) individual choices and still accomplish His will.

To draw an analogy from chess--I am an aggressive player. I can push you this way and that, and leave you only one option. I have enough skill to beat you, but that's about it. That's the first view. The second would be if I were, say, a Grandmaster (ha, yeah, right) playing a novice. I wouldn't have to force you into submission. I could sit back and let you do what you want, and still subtly direct the play how I wanted it to go (control of the center and all that). Or maybe it's like a chess engine at 100-ply thought playing one at 1-ply thought--there's a difference in perspective there.