Free Will is an Illusion?

Hah, how funny. It seems like a natural evolution from politics to philosophy. Oddly enough, I got into politics because theology was my best subject in high school, and that in turn seemed like the next logical step. It all just blends together.

I imagine we didn’t touch on anything you haven’t already come across. We stuck primarily with the classics and modern philosophy, nothing really contemporary. Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and sadly I’m sure lots more that I’ve just blended together with my other classes and reading. It keeps getting further and further away, haha. One of my favorite topics in undergrad though was comparing Plato’s analogy of the surgeon with Machiavelli’s writing and discussing the implications of how a “Good ruler” was not necessarily a ruler that is good, but one who is good at ruling, which can in turn mean that, to be a good ruler, one must have the capacity to do evil. I actually felt my brain open up a little on that one, haha.

Stoicism doesn’t get applied too much to training, aside from how I react to injuries. I know that I have control over how I react to them, and in some cases that’s all the control I have. It’s the same approach I attempt with most of the situations I encounter. But, I’ve learned it can be irritating to those who want to see rage and sorrow.

Hillary?

(Sorry I had to)

Sam Harris has written some incredibly fascinating stuff about the notion of free will. He makes a good point that if the premise that free will does not exist holds true, then essentially rapists and murderers are on some level unlucky in the same way we look at people with traumatic brain injuries who because of their impairment act violently.

So even if locking people away who commit crimes is nescessary, it also poses interesting questions regarding labels such as evil. Makes me rather uncomfortable to be honest. I probably want to hold on to my black and white notions of these things.

Interesting to read nevertheless.

But if there was no agency to make that choice and the supposed choice between killing someone and not killing someone never actually existed, they didn’t make a choice so did not choose to commit the action.

Locking them away is unavoidable even if they didn’t choose to do the crime, to protect other people. but if they had no meaningful ability to chose to kill someone, then how can it be looked at as a choice.

Are they not just victims of biology and unlucky on a fundamental level?

The problems of free will seem very similar to the hard problems of consciousness and proving consciousness.

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Pardon me if I am misrepresenting the Christian or Jewish faiths (i take it based on your picture and username you are probably one of those faiths) but doesn’t your belief system require you to believe in free will?

Otherwise how could lucifer challenge god regarding Job if he didn’t have free will, how could the theology work without free will? For example isn’t a core belief of the great Abrahamic faiths that we have free will and our decisions lead us either to heaven or hell?

If it is proven free will isn’t real does that disprove your religion in your eyes ? Because if we don’t have free will and the universe was created by god and everything in it, wouldn’t that mean god created people who without free will, are basically programmed.

And then that would seem to show god programmed rape and murder etc as desires.

The righteous and loving god that for example christians believe would never do that, so is it a case of either free will exists or it does not and by extension god does not?

As a non believer I find it fascinating how believers weigh their faith with any new discoveries, especially hypothetical ones like establishing free will does not exist.

Depends on what one means by organised right? I mean nomadic societies and tribes were organised but not by the level of civilised agriculturally advanced systems or organisation and structure.

Seems that mutual aid always existed as it does in primates, but not organised societies because tribes and nomadic groupings are scattered and isolated from one another by definition.

Would you agree with that?

I do think you are right here, but when I read Lacan or Badiou it comes across as meaningless word salad. It seems like mere mental masturbation. Same with Zizek and pretty much every single self identified “post modernist”.

If you read carefully I said I think modern philosophy is crap. It is not grounded in reality, unlike a few hundred years ago and prior. Questions like “is free will an illusion”, for example, don’t have any implications to how anyone leads their life. I also don’t think people are smart enough to answer a question like that in the first place, but that is another issue entirely.

This summarizes why I don’t like modern philosophy:

You are free not to participate. If you are unwilling to consider evidence, you have nothing valuable to add to this thread.

Do you not want your freedom? You are free to be a slave, if you wish. You can renounce your freewill and live under somebody else’s, if you do not like it. Otherwise the answer is quite simple. What value is it to love, be virtuous, act kindly, do good, etc. If you do not have the power to choose not to? It is of no value. It means nothing. Giving creatures freewill is to give the creatures power and meaning, where without them they have none.

The Adam and Eve story is not so much a story of how man ‘got here’ as much as a story showing us who we are. Free creatures to choose or deny God as we please, without compellence.

Now, personally I would have preferred innate wisdom to a set of instructions, but that’s not how it works.

Ditto. It is the framework by which I operate. It helps me in all facets of life, because philosophy is life, or life is philosophy. Whatever you prefer.

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Maybe, my comments were vague. I believe in free will.

Well, there in lies the caveat. Logic and spouses, particularly the female spouse, does not compute. Logic cannot compete against the furious power of the she-will.

Much like the argument that ‘God’ is omniscient, but allows free will because he operates outside of time, women are illogical, but, in fact, logical because they operate outside of men’s ability to understand.

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Let us not feed the troll. Here already knows everything and has no need for philosophy. It’s for us lesser creatures to find out. You’re not going to convince someone, who is not willing to consider any evidence about anything. Obviously, what he said was bullshit but the conversation has near zero prospects of going anywhere save for a name calling contest and ‘Yo mama…’ insults.

Hence why a Phd means Doctor of Philosophy in ____________.

Eh. Sam doesn’t really break new ground, though he does break tradition with his more nihilistic comrades in the other 3 horsemen. He’s a utilitarian, seeking to maximize the greatest number of people with the greatest amount of well being. However, his arguments in their grounding, are hopelessly circular. He is my favorite of the 4 though. His insights outside of morality are useful. He does have something to say.

This is a common misconception about the faithful/ religious the godless commonly make. We are not, in any way, required to abandon our reason in order to be counted. In fact, we are encouraged to do the opposite. Seek, dig, find, search for truth where ever it may lie. There is no requirement to be deluded, vile, or stupid. Those are simply Dawkins\ Hitchens talking points with no grounding in fact, because they didn’t bother to look at fact. They are writers and scientists practicing a pseudo theology not having looked at theology in anyway other than seeking to disparage it.

Are you asking why evil is an option in the first place?
I would liken ‘evil’ to be an absence of ‘good’ in the same way that ‘cold’ is an absence of ‘heat’. (not my own thought, but a good analogy nonetheless)

But if it is proven free will does not exist, how could god of tested Job and had a bet with the devil?