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Permalink Reply by Berty on April 21, 2011 at 6:30pm

evolution can do something because of something else

 

if a random mutation causes something that on its turn causes (something else) less death then this mutation will be more likely to survive

 

so when you have a mutation that gives you a slight feeling of free will, and this causes you to get in less fights, you'll have a better chance of survival

 

you last paragraph is the something like: the eye could not have formed cause its to complex for 1 step: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEKyqIJkuDQ&feature=related

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Permalink Reply by Berty on April 22, 2011 at 4:17am

i agree on the natural selection part
for me its just a way of speech
but i understand that people (not you) that don't understand natural selection thorough enough could be confused by my way of expression

when you're drunk you have a weaker feeling of free will :p
you don't feel so responsible for your actions
and so you are a bigger danger for sociality

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Permalink Reply by Berty on April 22, 2011 at 6:47am

indeed, self-reflection is needed for the illusion of free will. i think the illusion of free will is more of a gradient. its not complete free will or none at all. the 2 extremes can be shown like this: max illusion of free will: humans, smallest illusion of free will: a robot following instructions. Now do you agree that some animals are closer to machines then others. for instance is the cockroach easier to replicate as a machine then a human? we know that computers don't have an illusion of free will and definitely no free will itself.

 

being drunk lowers the inhibitions, doesn't disable them completely. I think its the other way around, the illusion of free will is causing the inhibitions. so someone that is drunk might have just as much feeling of free will, but less inhibitions because he's less in touch with the world, so he doesn't feel very responsible when he does something wrong. so the inhibitions disappear because the brain is having trouble assessing a situation and determining if the outcome of an action will give him a bad feeling.

 

damn this stuff is getting abstract :p

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on April 22, 2011 at 11:03am

there's no gradient to free will within humans and that's what we're talking about.

humans feel like we have free will.

you're trying to explain that on evolution but, as Kasu pointed out, you'd need to explain what selection would act upon by steps to go from no feeling of free will at all to a feeling of free will. there's not going to be a single gene mutation that's going to poof a feeling of free will into existence and so you'd need to explain what the in-between steps would look like in order to get us there.

so what does half a feeling of free will look like? what are the intermediate steps?

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Permalink Reply by Berty on April 22, 2011 at 12:37pm

a person who has no higher brain functionality : no feeling of free will at all, just alive

a person with degraded mental capacity: slight feeling of free will

people with stronger feelings of free will, will be more likely to uphold there moral beliefs.
for instance: killers will have the urge to kill and have the feeling that they are not in control of there actions -> less feeling of free will.

lets just say that we disagree on the subject :)
we agree upon the notion of the illusion of free will (or am i wrong?)
but you don't think its because of natural selection that this came to be?
so how do you explain the illusion of free will?

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on April 22, 2011 at 2:22pm

we're talking about healthy people with normal brain function. a person that isn't a fully functioning person is always going to be an exception to a rule when it comes to neurocognitive features of human persons.

people with diminished capacity and schizophrenics aren't at issue.

 

due respect (totally not being a dick here. just saying. just discussing the subject), when you're not producing a cogent argument for the illusion of free will as the result of natural selection there's no agreeing to disagree. you haven't even made a coherent case with which to agree to disagree on. the case you have made and the defense you've offered of it after Kasu offered his objection evinces a deep misunderstanding of evolution by natural selection (or an equally deep misunderstanding of Kasu's objection at the very least). i say this because instead of explaining how natural selection would have acted on our ancestors to go from no illusion of free will to a quarter of an illusion of free will to half of an illusion of free will (whatever those would be. i have no idea) ultimately to an illusion of free will you've gone to talking about drunk persons, persons with diminished capacity, and schizophrenics. and these are irrelevant to the question being asked.

 

where the illusion comes from would take an essay all to itself. you'd have to touch on a whole host of issues from the cognitive sciences.

basically, it's a by product of our evolved brains. though not itself the product of evolution, a conscious free will is just what makes the most sense to us given other assumptions our brains make that are the result of evolution.

i'd suggest reading Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will and Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained.

Permalink Reply by Nelson on April 20, 2011 at 3:23pm

few things...

first, i don't think atheists say "god doesn't exist because he has no reference in time".

classical theism defines god as omniscient as a simple fact of his nature. if an atheist objects to the attribute of omniscience on some ground it's not because god has no reference in time. it's simply because omniscience is an attribute god has according to classical theism. god's omniscience is supposed to be a brute fact of his nature, not grounded in the fact that he's non-spatial and atemporal.

besides, the best that you could say about an objection based on the attribute of omniscience is that a god so conceived could not exist, not that A god, some god, doesn't exist.

 

so that means he knows what we will do

so he gave us free will

and then he will punish us if we do something wrong

but he already knows if we would do something wrong

this isn't a paradox. it's just a messed up thing for god to do. to be a paradox you'd have to add in that god is omnibenevolent, thereby leading us to expect that he wouldn't knowingly create us such that we would make decisions that would result in our doing something he doesn't want us to and then punish us for doing it. the paradox lies in the fact that his omnibenevolence leads us to expect that he wouldn't do such a messed up thing.

 

your evolutionary story of why we feel we have free will when we don't seems to be lacking an element. that we feel responsible for our actions doesn't necessarily mean that we'd feel guilty for them. consider the difference between the two statements, 1) i am the cause of this effect; my action brought about this result and 2) i feel guilty for having taken this action. this guilt is uncomfortable and makes me not want to take similar actions in the future.

it doesn't follow from the first statement that a person would feel guilty about an action that they had taken simply by virtue of their having acted.

anyway, if you're asking me if i agree that there's no such thing as libertarian contra-causal free will then i would say yes, i agree. 

physics and neuroscience has shown that much.

but compatibilism (or soft determinism) offers a free will that is compatible (hence the name) with determinism. we can say that we have the freedom of our choices as long as we allow that the motivations behind our choices are determined. and we actually want it to be this way because otherwise how can we be held responsible for our actions if those actions aren't determined by our beliefs and desires (which are determined by prior experiences)?

but we need not ignore the fact that we don't have free will. physics shows us that our actions are determined by prior states. that means that i have to act the way i do because of the way i acted previously. there's no need to pretend i actually have free will as i walk around day to day. 

but even a hard determinist has to act as if we have free will because we can never have enough knowledge about prior physical states to be able to determine our future actions. which means that the knowledge that we do have about prior states only tells us statistically what we're likely to do next. but that's the way everyone acts. we all know that we're statistically more or less likely to do certain things over others based on past experiences.

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Permalink Reply by Berty on April 21, 2011 at 6:20pm

ok some reaction:
1/ you cannot disprove God because he doesn't have a reference in time or any measure in our universe for that matter.
2/ indeed but feeling responsible is a condition for guilt, right?
3/ indeed, everything works with chances (quantum mechanics), you cannot predict what will happen

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on April 21, 2011 at 6:43pm

but he still acts to effect the world we live in within the universe. as such, we should be able to detect these effects. for instance, if god exists and answers prayers, regardless of his existing outside of time, we should be able to test prayer and see that it works. and yet we've tested it and found that it doesn't.

and regardless of god being outside of time we would expect pastors to live longer and to have fewer still-born babies and yet we find no such thing; pastors die at the same age as anyone else and they have still-born babies at the same rate too.

but, anyway, i wouldn't say that someone can absolutely disprove that a god, any god, exists somewhere. but regardless of whether or not god exists within or without time, since he still acts in ways that effect us, we can measure those effects. and when we do and we find nothing, this is strong evidence against the existence of god. and this is true even if god exists outside of time.

 

feeling responsible is a sufficient condition but not a necessary condition. it's more to the point of you stick with the necessary condition of guilt rather than muddying the waters with the sufficient responsibility.

 

well. but you could predict what would happen in principle, if you had all the information about past physical states. we just don't have that information.

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Permalink Reply by Berty on April 22, 2011 at 4:24am

1/ good point :)

2/ can you feel guilt without feeling responsible?
hmm maybe so, you feel guilty for people in Africa that are suffering starvation, but its not directly your fault, maybe we feel guilty because we can help them.
so i agree :)

3/ i think you're wrong here. Einstein had the same idea, perfect determinism if you have the exact state of the universe and enough computing power to calculate the future. But this seems to be invalid cause quantum mechanics states: you can only calculate the probability of a certain future, and because of that your prediction will get less and less likely when you go future in the future. So i don't think we can predict the future even if we had a perfect knowledge of our universe + a knowledge of how everything works exactly + unlimited processing power. We could however calculate a good probability for the near future, don't you agree?

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on April 22, 2011 at 11:14am

that's what i said in the post you're replying to. responsibility is the sufficient condition, guilt is the necessary one.

you can feel responsible without feeling guilty, but you can't feel guilty without also feeling responsible. but you never said anything about guilt. so i'm saying that your account, in order to be clearer and more directly simplified should just drop talk of responsibility and stick to guilt.

 

well. it's not my opinion that i'm stating. i'm simply relaying the latest physics. we live in a deterministic universe. opinions about whether that's true aside, it is true.

the fact of the matter is that if we could know enough information about prior physical states we would be able to say what the future would hold. the future is determined by prior physical states.

that we can in practice only calculate the probability of the future is what i said in the post you're replying to. but that we can only do so in practice due to our limitations regarding knowledge of prior physical states doesn't mean that it's impossible in principle. it's not. we know it's not from physics.

there's a difference between what we're able to do given our limitations and what it is possible to do if we didn't have those limitations. yes, given our limitations we can only talk about the probability of this or that future. but physics tells us that if we didn't have the limitations that we currently have, if we had enough information about prior physical states, we could know the future.

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