/lit/ - Literature

>>13654801
Anything relating to "I" is unknowable through any forms of self-reflection whatsoever, and any scientific theory is an approximation, where the margin of error could always be said to partly account for the "free will" factor. Therefore, the question of freedom of will is unanswerable in principle, and trying to ponder over it, is simply a waste of time.

>>13655023
Based pragmatist however you can flip the line of reasoning the other way around: The assertion that the self is unknowable, if not separate from the self, will inevitably end up being self-defeating as it is an assertion regarding the self too.

>>13655106
The belief IT, the entity I call "I", exists, and the way I imagine it it being, are two separate things. The latter, concrete ways I imagine "I" being, always, on a closer inspection, pertains to something else instead.

The nature of the first one, that "it exists regardless of however I imagine it", however, as of now, is unclear to me. It's neither imagination nor memory. I cannot therefore comment any further upon that subject as of right now.

Bumb

Maybe somewhere but we are a reactionary species as is all form of life by virtue of being built off DNA

The typical problem with the question of free will is that the self and free will are usually poorly defined. If one defines the self as their ego then limitations imposed by the body surely impose on ones free will but is it not true that if that same person breaks his arm, he considers that a part of him? Now if we consider the self to include ones body and all it contains, would it having free will not mean allowing it can experience negative emotions should it want to even at the determent of the ego?

Now we come to free will. If you choose to define free will as the ability to do anything (fly, gain wealth, etc) then we don’t have it but if it’s the ability to choose how we react to a situation even if it’s wrong/evil then we do to a large extent.

People who deny free will are those that just want to shift responsibly away from themselves. Maybe everything doesn’t go our way and we often act against ourselves but at the very least we have influence of our actions and the ability to increase said influence.

>>13654801
Hi anon. My rough definition of free will is

>the ability, right up until the point I did X, to have done non-X instead

My argument for it is:
>(1) If there are any true moral claims, then at least some people have free will some of the time
>(2) But there are true moral claims (e.g. You shouldn't throw a baby into boiling water just for the fun of it)
>Therefore...

I defend (1) by saying that claims such as
>You shouldn't throw a baby into boiling water just for the fun of it
aren't false so much as meaningless if we don't have a choice in the matter. It would be like telling stones they shouldn't fall.

I defend (2) by appealing to the intuition that there is no possible world in which
>You shouldn't throw a baby into boiling water just for the fun of it
comes out false. I say it's straightforwardly true, and isn't a disguised preference or whatever. This is a pretty weak defence, I admit, but there you go.

It's a question that doesn't appear to matter.

>>13655772
Yeah it's a brainlet tactic to say determinism justifies hedonistic and shallow behavior. The people who espouse this rhetoric don't see that rationality and the experience of free will can come as a product of deterministic rules.

>>13654801

>Incompatibilist perspective: free will as being unaffected by anything; absolute freedom. [Popular view within Philosophy]

- Existence-in-itself is incompatible with free will since Being can only be in correspondence to how it can be, and it cannot be without corresponding to how its possible to be.

>Compatibilist perspective: free will as not being affected by congenital factors, emotional factors caused by external factors such as someone coercing someone else, et cetera; freedom pertaining to Locke's Room, that is, freedom was the autonomy to do what is naturally possible to do. [Popular view in Law]

- Freedom is possible as long you're able to act upon your feelings and emotions, or as long your agency isn't limited by others' will.
The compatibilist doctrine is the original. Lucretius created the concept of free will [liber voluntas] in the Rerum Natura. Each view has its uses.

>>13654801 (OP)

>Incompatibilist perspective: free will as being unaffected by anything; absolute freedom. [Popular view within Philosophy]

- Existence-in-itself is incompatible with free will since Being can only be in correspondence to how it can be, and it cannot be without corresponding to how its possible to be.

>Compatibilist perspective: free will as not being affected by congenital factors, emotional factors caused by external factors such as someone coercing someone else, et cetera; freedom pertaining to Locke's Room, that is, freedom as the autonomy to do what is naturally possible to do. [Popular view in Law, especially in Criminal/Penal law]

- Freedom is possible as long you're able to act upon your feelings and emotions, or as long your agency isn't limited by others' will.

The compatibilist doctrine is the original. Lucretius created the concept of free will [liber voluntas] in the Rerum Natura. Each view has its uses.

>>13655902
Define free will

Free will does and does not exist depending on your definition.
You as a biological system can make free decisions, but obviously you haven't created that brain. People can only do what the brain wants to do, which is not a bad thing and since for all practical purposes you are your brain you are still free as a biological creature. There is however no supernatural homunculus that can make decisions independant from your physical body.

That doesn't really imply much in terms of morality either, you can still be a very moral person but it all originates from a physical body. People who think they transcended their physical body or their human nature really just used a certain part of their brain and culture or education.

>>13655916
I did define free will, and I did it twice: free will pertaining to compatibilism, and free will regarding incompatibilism. Do you not understand my explanation?

The main problem in discussing free will is that in the last 300-400 years, conceptual definition has become completely synonymous with the discursive description of phenomenally given "entities." In less pretentious terms what this means is that when modern philosophers and scientists think of giving an account of something (say, a conscious subjectivity), they always already think in terms of an entity, existing in space and time, which can be discursively (linguistically) defined with properties and predicates.

The problem with this is that, as Kant put it for example, ANY entity posited as existing in space and time (as the transcendental forms of intuition, including "mind's eye" intuition) always already presupposes determinate relations of cause and effect, and ANY entity described discursively must necessarily obey logical laws, like the principle of sufficient reason, which always already gives its objects as ENTIRELY determinate by definition. Again in less pretentious terms this basically translates to: if modern philosophers and scientists describe or envision anything, they already presuppose that the "thing" is determinate. If the philosophers and scientists are caught up in this presupposition, as one of the unconscious assumptions of the age, then the average joe is just as unconsciously caught up on it, but even worse off when it comes to becoming self-conscious of it.

So the proper domain of the inquiry is first to determine whether this presupposition is in fact justified. Right off the bat we can discard all the thinkers who simply operate within the presupposition without thinking it, because they are at best concerned with shallow pseudo-paradoxes and logical casuistry, e.g., attempting to describe a determinate entity as behaving indeterminately in some way. Again: the a priori form of our conception of entities in general is determinacy. Any compatibilist "elbow room" within this is only heuristic or apparent elbow room, which is why all consistent thinkers arrive at hard determinism, even if they go for a quantum mechanical pseudo-solution.

So like I said, the proper domain of the inquiry is the questioning of the presupposition itself, which immediately requires not just conceptual analysis but a deconstructive analysis of the a priori, tacit presuppositions of the discourse. Like I said, you have to go back several hundred years and trace how logical determinacy (sufficient reason) in the realm of ideality (res cogitans) and mechanical-phenomenalism (essentially deterministic crypto-atomism) in the realm of nature (res extensa) not only intertwined and became unquestioningly united, but gradually excluded other conceptions of knowledge and being while doing so.

>>13655987
It's precisely THOSE conceptions that need to be analysed if you want to think seriously about the free will problem. But the trick is: those conceptions are precisely what is excluded by the tacit presuppositions of our age. You need to analyse the conditions of your thinking about thinking which are precisely the conditions normally preventing you from thinking about the conditions of your thinking. The best example of this is when Fichte talks about how ANY account of the world that begins with (grounds itself in) "things," i.e., as they are ALREADY given in our (modern) forms of intuitive and discursive representation, will necessarily be ontical, thus necessarily determinate, because that is the a priori / always already condition of our modern forms of representation. No matter what ground you start with, you will always terminate in a dead, utterly determinate account of the "world," as a space of determinate things that follow determinate patterns of interaction and even development. And Fichte (apparently rightly) says that you can spend a lifetime doing this, "looking out at" these determinate descriptions of determinate entities and trying to find a possible source of indeterminacy in a space whose condition of existence is determinacy, without ever thinking: "But what is the 'thing' that's doing the looking? What am 'I'?"

Kant is more sceptical about whether an act of self-intuition is really an INTELLECTUAL intuition, that is to say a direct noetic grasping of the essence of the "I" (the freedom of which, remember, we're currently trying to figure out, so it would be pretty handy to be able to see, understand, and thereby describe it). For Kant, we manifestly do not see our "self" directly, any more than we see the objects of the external world directly. But Fichte thinks we are getting something like an intellectual intuition of the "wellspring" of free/creative positing when we really turn, by an act of the living will (and not of sense-perception or the understanding), toward ourselves so that the "I" intuits the "I."

>>13655994
This is where those other possible conceptions would come in handy, unfortunately now forgotten and buried under 300-400 years of tacitly assumed but metaphysically unprovable anti-metaphysical mechanicism/atomism with regard to nature, and determinism with regard to thought. If there are other possible forms of knowledge, for example through metanoia or anamnesis, we would naturally have to recover their possibility BY MEANS OF acts of metanoia or anamnesis, the possibility of which cannot be foreclosed from within a system of assumptions that obviously excludes their possibility (i.e., ours). For example maybe Fichte's intellectual intuition of the self by itself is akin to what Christian and Platonic thought used to call a "mystery," so that the immanent transcendence of the "I" in its own self-perception is actually just the tail-end of something greater, existing at a higher level which can only be reached by growing to encompass it or by an initiatic act of self-destruction and self-creation. If that's the case, Fichte's description of the "Spinozist" who never thinks to look at his own act of looking is correct: someone with a weak or submerged will can spend his whole life elaborating completely determinate Spinozisms, which naturally "prove" to him that the world, as given in a Spinozistic determinism, can never give anything other than Spinozist, determinist accounts of itself.

What this all means, more or less: The modern scientist/philosopher who takes the world to be an utterly determinate thing (Fichte's "Spinozism") can only gesture at this world-picture and invite you to "see" its truth. He can't prove its presuppositions from WITHIN its presuppositions, obviously. Likewise, you can't prove to him, within determinate discursive reasoning, that non-determinate, non-discursive forms of knowing and being exist. You can only "look" for them somewhere other than discursive-determinist accounts, and if you find them, you can only "show" him where to look. To me, the very fact that we are constantly drawn back to such "higher" conceptions of conception itself points to the fact that our current, immanent and determinate conception of conception is impoverished - a system shouldn't point beyond itself. But that's the best I argument I can give within discursive description to describe why discursive description is incomplete.

>>13655994
>>13655987
>>13656014
Interesting posts, but irrelevant to the topic at hand.

>>13656043
The nature of the subject (the "I," ego, Ich) is at least partially its freedom, which is what is in question. I guess I should have been more explicit about that.

Essentially, the self has to become a mystery for itself (at least potentially). Freedom literally can't be cognized in any way we know or can give an account of, yet we're all familiar with freedom, possibly more familiar with it than with anything else (if it's actually our essence). Even the concept of "essence" is substantial and determinate and not adequate to freedom, or what we "mean" by freedom, despite somehow not being able to give an account of it (an argument for anamnesis).

Basically, to understand the subject might actually require an Aufhebung of Becoming and Being, which opens all kinds of Neoplatonist, Hegelian, metaphysical (in the Guenonian sense), etc., possibilities not encompassed in, actually excluded by, the modern framework of knowledge.

>>13654801
>>13655812
Here's another pro-free will argument before I go to bed:
>(1) If no one ever has free will with respect to any of their actions, then it is not appropriate to blame people for their actions.
>(2) But sometimes it is appropriate to blame people for their actions
>Therefore...

(Again) I define free will:
>I have free will with respect to my action X iff I was able, right up until the time I did X, to have done non-X instead
I defend (1):
>If no one has free will with respect to any of their actions, then their actions are not up to them
>If their actions are not up to them, then it is not appropriate to blame people for their actions
>Therefore (1)
I defend (2) with examples: murder, cheating on your wife, torturing puppies. I say intuitively we *should* blame people who do this kind of thing.

By 'blame' I mean specifically the attitude of judgement we have with regard to some action or other. I don't mean punishment, which your determinist can justify on the ground of deterrence.

This argument isn't going to convince many people (who don't already accept the conclusion), because it appeals to intuition and takes some kind of straightforward moral truth (rather than emotivism or something like that) for granted. But it's good enough for me.

Also, no appeal to divinity, so I'll take my bonus points.

>>13654801
Materialism is Occam's razor and under materialism free will is impossible for obvious reasons.

>>13655822
It shouldn't matter to oneself personally, but without free will the justice system and general accountability would have to be understood very differently.

>>13656082
Seems that this logic concerns itself more with what is useful than what is actually true.

>>13656109
The premises are false?

>>13655987
>>13655994
>>13656014
Interesting replies, thanks for posting. I'm getting heavy gödel vibes from your reasoning, with which I somewhat agree with. However the efficacy of modern "science", rigorous thinking, logic, empiricism or whatever else you want to call it leads me to want to believe these, even if considering said efficacy is distinctly a part of the movements themselves.

The leap of faith toward Being is easier, because it's self-affirming once you're in it whereas intuiting knowledge, taking what is at face value isn't. However I guess were one truly rational in the philosophical sense one should consider both ideas as equally likely, and all the concepts and proofs they hold within them as exempt from reasoning when considering which one to believe in.

>>13656043
No, they're more relevant than you think. The self is that which judges and if it has no basis to judge by then it's meaningless to talk about it in the sense that we're currently discussing it.

>>13656128
I think the logical structure of the argument is actually correct.
So I guess you could say the premise is false, I think point (2) is not correct.
It is not necessarily appropriate to blame people for their actions. It makes sense legally, but that doesn't mean that there was absolute free will. Maybe we simply judge them because it's an emotional reaction.

I am simply a materialist, I think that people have free will, but it isn't free in the sense that it is above the body. In that sense it makes sense to judge that physical person who made that decision, I do that as a physical person. But I still think that in the end his actions were predetermined.

>>13654801
If you have it, you have it.
If you don't have it, then you still need to act like you have it.

Ergo, who gives a shit?

Concerning oneself over abstract free will is useless. "Freedom" is expressed in the after-image, it is a relative measure, and obviously so because absolute freedom, or the naive concept of free will, could only be the free will of a god. Holding the idea of free will itself produces new paths; it closes others. But ultimately whether you hold that idea or not, like other ideas, other habits, is not up to an abstract, molar ""you""

>>13656287
That's fair enough. I agree that blame is an emotional reaction. Don't you think it's ever justified, though?

>I am simply a materialist, I think that people have free will, but it isn't free in the sense that it is above the body. In that sense it makes sense to judge that physical person who made that decision, I do that as a physical person. But I still think that in the end his actions were predetermined.
Why do you think materialism implies determinism?

>>13656342
>Don't you think it's ever justified, though?
I think it's justified from a practical and intuitive point of view, but I don't think it implies absolutely free will.

>Why do you think materialism implies determinism?
That comes from my understanding of physics. Basically from my understanding all natural things follow the law of cause and effect, just like a object will fall in a predictable manner, so will the electrons in our brain move, or the chemical reactions in our brain take place.
I know that there are also quantum effects that seem to be truly random but even then we don't control that randomness. It is just a law of nature that controls our bodies and since I think my mind is a product of my body, it also controls that.

>>13656397
>I think it's justified from a practical and intuitive point of view, but I don't think it implies absolutely free will.
Can I ask what you mean by 'absolute' free will?

>I know that there are also quantum effects that seem to be truly random but even then we don't control that randomness. It is just a law of nature that controls our bodies and since I think my mind is a product of my body, it also controls that.
If you allow the indeterminacy of quantum randomness - radium decaying at time 1 rather than time 2 for no good reason, or whatever - then why not allow the indeterminacy of free will? Aren't you begging the question by assuming the only kinds of events are either determined or indeterminate (random), with no room for indeterminate (chosen)?

>>13656302
This guy gets it.

>>13656457
>Can I ask what you mean by 'absolute' free will?
Actually I can not imagine such a thing. But as a first step I would say something that is independent from the physical body, a soul that existed before we were born.
There is this line of thinking that we are basically souls that control this body of flesh and the soul itself is free from physical influences, that might be true but I believe that really all our thinkig is produced by the brain.

Why I said it's hard to imagine is, that even if we had such a supernatural soul, I think that that soul would react in certain ways to certain things.

>If you allow the indeterminacy of quantum randomness
My problem with that is that I dont know where that chosen action would come from. I see my body as a part of this natural world, therefore all thoughts that this body produces are subject to those natural laws.
It seems to me that in order to produce a thought or decision that doesn't follow those laws a part of me would have to exist that is not part of this material world and I don't see it.

I think my thinking alligns relatively well with the materialist philosophy, but maybe that philosophy itself is flawed.

I will also drop one Schopenhauer quote while I am at it:
"You can do what you want, but you can not want what you want"

>>13655987
>>13655994
>>13656014
>>13656078
do you have a throwaway email?

>>13656561
I'm not sure free will implies the existence of soul (not sure it doesn't either...). Like I said, I define free will something like

>Person P has free will with respect to P's action A iff P was able, right up until the time he did A, to have done non-A instead

All this commits me to is the existence of persons and their actions, which looks innocuous enough. I'd run into trouble as soon as you asked me to define 'person' though! I'd have to say person is a conceptual primitive: you either know what it is, or you don't. And if the best way of denying free will is to deny the existence of persons, maybe there's something to free will after all.

>My problem with that is that I dont know where that chosen action would come from.
I think you hit the nail on the head right there. All that quantum randomness stuff makes me think some events are undetermined, so not every event needs to be explained by appealing to a chain of prior causes. But then either my decision to do A has a cause or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then A was in no sense 'up to' me and I don't have free will with respect to it. But if A does have a cause, then how am I responsible for it? The best I can think of is to go down the route of 'agent-causation' and say the cause of my decision to do A is... me. Events might have causes, but not every cause is an event: some are persons, or agents, or whatever. But again what is a 'person'? Maybe we could just say it's a network of neurons or something like that, and allow that some of this network's decisions can't be explained on the basis of prior states or outside forces. But this sounds like bullshit.

Anyway, it's long past bongland bedtime. Good night!

>>13656755
cu bong anon. Currently living in the UK too, I should hit the sack soon.

>>13654801
a thread like this is for tiny little babies who wear diapers

>>13655987
>>13655994
>>13656014
this guy could save us all but will probably commit sudoko because of guys like this >>13656043

>>13655987
>>13655994
>>13656014
this guy could save us all but will probably commit sudoko because of guys like this >>13656043

>>13654801
Just read William James' "Pragmatism" in particular his chapter on Metaphysical Problems. For Example:
>So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent the ‘imputability’ of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be ‘agents’ only, not ‘principals,’ and where then would be our precious imputability and responsibility?
>But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists. If a ‘free’ act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent CHARACTER that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton and McTaggart have recently laid about them doughtily with this argument.
>It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you, quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise. If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts we shall punish him — anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether the acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in a strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of ‘merit’ is a piteous unreality — God alone can know our merits, if we have any. The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic, but it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which had made such a noise in past discussions of the subject.

bump

Bump

>>13654801
You should know that it’s poor form to inb4 as op.

>>13655812
>>13656082
Tl;dr

Free will is a prerequisite for moral claims and attitudes. Unless (at least some) people have free will with respect to (some of) their actions, then claims of the form 'You should(n't) do X' are meaningless, and gratitude and blame are irrational.

>Yeah well fuck you morality is meaningless and gratitude and blame are irrational
Nothing trumps the edgelord card.

>>13657847
don't worry bro, he's on a higher level and plebes like >>13656043 cannot possibly have any influence on him at all.
The only thing he needs to fear is the wavering of his own will.