I think we all realize that argument, but it’s just not that practical a way to view the world. We can attribute all circumstances in all areas of human existence to the natural lotteries of life.
There are people I went to high school with who still live in Blue Springs, MO and post liberal shit on FB. I’m always surprised when it happens, but it does happen.
To some degree it’s all tribalism, but you make decisions on which tribes to join and which roads to go down.
I disagree with this.
I don’t agree with this either.
Honestly it’s probably way more likely now with the internet.
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I moved from KC to SF, was I not exercising free will on changing my tribe?
Even among everyone who stayed in KC, the more open-minded, ambitious people tend to move to the urban core, while the dullards who make up Trump’s base tended to stay put in Blue Springs. Those were choices.
You made a decision to be on this site, and you made a decision to be in the lefty sub-tribe within the tribe.
Can I interest you in there’s no objective reality?
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He seems like one of those Sam Harris “free will doesn’t exist” thinkers. Best not to waste your breath.
I agree that free will doesn’t technically exist. If you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, and every other hidden variable, you could predict everything that ever happened and everything that ever will.
But you don’t - so it’s a semantic distinction.
Or maybe there’s true randomness - which is up for debate. Then you do have free will.
But either way you effectively have free will because you have no idea what you’re going to do next, even if it was pre-ordained.
If I don’t have free will, then everything was preordained, so my decisions don’t matter because that choice is an illusion. Therefore, I act as if I have free will because the alternative is irrelevant.
The physics is pretty clear at this point that there is true randomness, or at least that true randomness is the best anyone has been able to come up with despite considerable scrutiny from those who want to insist it isn’t there. Also, we can’t know precisely position and momentum at the same time for all these particles.
Guys got me all excited with all these new posts and it turns out it’s a thought exercise on nihilism.
Who cares about free will. If it feels good, then do it.
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This is the type of post that really adds to the forum experience.
I don’t think I’ve listened or read more than an hour of Sam Harris material.
Go back to flipping out at people in the NBA thread. You give us more entertainment there Skip.
True randomness doesnt create free will either.
Choosing something exacyly because of a predictable complex set of previous events is no different with the element of randomness.
Like you toss a quantum dice and order pizza if it comes up 6. Its not free will that made you order it.
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Yeah. That’ll work.
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We can’t observe them because we fuck up the ether or knock off the pilot waves or w/e. IE - shit we can’t understand and can never know because it involves also measuring the position and momentum of all other particles in the universe at the same time to predict. At least I read that’s what we’d have to know to make any useful predictions - if quantum mechanics were actually being guided by pilot waves. IE - functionally the same as what we observe.
But if they could be known we could predict their behavior - maybe.
https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-really-believe-in-true-randomness/
Here’s a pretty interesting discussion about randomness. I tend to side with the “hidden variables we don’t know” POV.
I don’t believe in randomness myself, and the idea that two “identical” experiments side-by-side are exactly the same is ridiculous. Can you confidently say that the atomic counts in the bounds of each experiment are identical? We truly believe that the angles we are measuring are -exactly- the same (down to atom-sized accuracy)? Let’s not forgot the fact that we have two experiments going on at different points in time, at different places in the universe (yes, perhaps only inches apart), and we’ve got dark matter potentially floating all around us, which we don’t yet understand and can’t see. I’m sorry, to me the idea that we have eliminated all hidden variables and have proven that cause and effect does not really exist is laughable.
But again - it all seems like semantics. Is the universe functionally random? Yes.
Instead of getting defensive you could elaborate on whatever you were trying to say.
Were you being metaphysical about free will, or something more down to earth like everyone’s clique is determined by where they were born (as I assumed)?
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True.
The frame of reference I was thinking about was whether or not the universe is deterministic. If it is, then we know there’s no free will, since God would have known everything that will ever happen before it happened.
If the universe is not deterministic, it leaves some wiggle room in my mind. Although I haven’t really thought that one through.
And again none of this matters because functionally if I hit myself in the head right now, I decided to do that, and my life plays out the exact same afterwards, whether I had free will or not.
To me the term free will ceases to make sense when you look at it from the infinite universe’s POV instead of the individual, rendering the argument pointless. Do I have free will to make decisions? Yes. Could God have predicted all those decisions ahead of time? Maybe.
Even if you don’t understand why you are making decisions they can still matter.
I might have to mute this thread just to keep myself from wondering who died every 5 minutes.
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