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Post by ignorantianescia on Jan 8, 2011 22:48:20 GMT
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Post by krkey1 on Jan 10, 2011 16:12:31 GMT
However it seems to be very hard to explain free will in a materialistic views of origins.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2011 22:34:31 GMT
However it seems to be very hard to explain free will in a materialistic views of origins. Robert Kane, one of the leading philosophers on free will, and who wrote perhaps the best introductory textbook about the subject (which I can't commend enough), gives an account of libertarian free will that is made from an assumption of physical monism. I'm not saying he's right, but one shouldn't decide a priori that a physical mind possessing libertarian free is an oxymoron. And if we presume substance dualism, that wouldn't bring us close to having free will. A nonphysical mind might be outside of the physical world and therefore immune from natural law that govern physical events, but he can still be determined by prior mental events. A dualism must still account how a person could do otherwise given the same mental circumstances. With mind-body dualism you don't solve the problem of free will; you just move it on another level. |
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Post by elephantchang51 on Jan 11, 2011 10:18:37 GMT
Just curious,how would believers in free will answer the post by Arnold Karr,(5th down in the letters section)?
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Post by bjorn on Jan 11, 2011 11:01:22 GMT
Just curious,how would believers in free will answer the post by Arnold Karr,(5th down in the letters section)? It goes like this, for those who doesn't have the will to check: "<Quoting Horgan> 'When people doubt free will, they are more likely to behave badly. After reading a passage from a book that challenged the validity of free will, students were more likely to cheat on a mathematics exam. Others were less likely to let a classmate use their cell phone.' "<End of quoting Horgan>
These two sentences alone are enough to undermine the notion of free will since, if the students in question possessed genuinely free will, their "choices" after reading a passage on free will would be no different statistically from those they had made beforehand. Just as unsophisticated theism uses a "god of the gaps" to explain natural phenomena for which we think their is no naturalistic explanation, free will is employed to fill the gaps in our understanding of human decision making. Not to worry, though: the Copernican model of the solar system hasn't stopped us from appreciating sunrises that don't occur and we'll continue thinking we do things because we want to."Quite the opposite. This is a strawman. One better way (IMHO) to interpret these data is that the students, after having heard they had no free will, chose to became more cynical and sinister. As they had learned they weren't responsible for their actions anyhow, and were not really to blame for any misbehaviour they could as well misbehave if they could profit and get away with it. Choices are rarely done blindly in a vacuum, they tend to be influenced by input and what we believe. We choose from options, often based on reason and beliefs. |
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Post by himself on Jan 14, 2011 17:48:20 GMT
ifthe students in question possessed genuinely free will, their "choices" after reading a passage on free will would be no different statistically from those they had made beforehand. I'm sorry the commentor was compelled to post that by the impersonal forces controlling his acts. Obviously, these impersonal forces misunderstand the whole concept of free will. Why on earth would his impersonal forces presume that people would not choose actions based on their best available information? Free will does not mean: - Random choices
- Unpredictable choices
- Unmotivated choices
- Uncaused choices
- Unreasoned choices
- Unconstrained choices
- Successful choices
It's meaning is very simple if we go back to the original Latin: the term we translate as "free will" is liberum arbitrium, which means "free judgment." (See Summa theologica, Pars I, Quaestio 83) Ever since the triumph of the will, we have gotten the will confused with concupiscence and have forgotten that it once meant part of a rational act. The will is the appetite for products of the intellect. You cannot want something that you do not know. But we do not know things fully and completely, therefore there is "play" in the will -- wobble, wiggle. The will is not determined to any one thing insofar as the intellect does not know it completely. This is implicit in the psychological tests in which a subject is presented with a set of symbols and told to "choose one." It is not implicit in the word "choose," but rather in the word "one." Which of the presented symbols is designated by "one"? The corollary is that if we once know things clearly and not as if through a glass darkly, our will would be determined to that thing. We would know we had no other choice but to desire it. Leastwise, that's how I understand it.
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Post by unkleE on Jan 16, 2011 7:44:59 GMT
Just curious,how would believers in free will answer the post by Arnold Karr,(5th down in the letters section)? Judging solely by bjorn's quote, I thought there was nothing to answer. I think the reality is that no-one can prove or disprove free will, but everyone assumes it at some times, if not at others. As John Polkinghorne says: "there is an implausibility in those who seek to reduce parts of such experience to the status of epiphenomenal, an implausibility repeatedly exemplified by our inability outside our studies to live other than as people endowed with free agency and reason." |
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