General subjects with a focus on philosophy, morals, epistemology, basic income, the singularity, transhuman
Am I responsible for this?
Published on April 1, 2007 By Phil Osborn In Philosophy
Here's the crux of the issue:

We know that the universe operates by strict causality. Miracles and other alleged exceptions, such as the Heisenburg Uncertainty Priciple, quantum mechanics, etc. simply extend causality to the "Spiritual" realm, or add additional facets such as extra dimensions whose workings may lie beyond our immediate ability to know. In the case of the Uncertainty Principle, it's not that there isn't strict causality, it's just that we are limited by the nature of our physical universe in knowing things beyond a set finite precision. And, in the case of quantum mechanics, causality becomes expressed in terms of probabilities, but the probabilities can themselves be known.

Lack of knowledge, whether due to forces and events beyond our means of perception, or due to inherent constriants, such as the fact that knowing anything in the real world requires interacting with it, is not a basis for free will, but rather ignorance. Ignorance is hardly a synonym for volition.

We are further constrained, however, by certain inherent assumptions:

We assume that existence exists, that we exist, that knowledge is possible. Try denying any of the preceding and notice that the denial itself implies all three. We cannot help but assume these and a host of other ontological and epistemological axioms and their immediate derivatives. Yet, what is knowledge without free will?

Note that in the case of the fundamental axioms of existence and consciousness, we effectively have no free will, if by the term we mean the ability to deny or accept any particular conclusion. We can say or type the words, "Existence does not exist," but the claim is self-falsifying.

Comments
on Apr 01, 2007
There are two possibilities. Either we have free will or we do not.

We have, ironically, the choice between believing in free or not believing in free will.

Hence, we have four possible outcomes.

If we do not believe in free will and there is no free will, things are fine.

If we do not believe in free will and there is free will, we are limiting ourselves.

If we do believe in free will and there is free will, things are fine.

And if we do believe in free will and there is no free will, we didn't have the choice of not believing in free will anyway.

on Apr 02, 2007
Free will doesn't make much sense to me, for reasons that I always have a tough time explaining. If I had free will and I chose to do something, why did I choose to do that particular thing. I was influenceds somehow, but if that's the case, do these influences determine what it is that I do, and if that's the case, wouldn't my will no longer be free?

If these influences have no impact on what I choose to do, then that wouldn't make sense at all, since that would mean that there's no point in trying to manipulate someone to act in a certain way, when it's been shown that people can manipulate others to do things (especially through reward and punishment mechanisms).

Now, since there are so many billions and billions of inputs going on into our brain, there's no way to predict what the output coming from our brain is going to be. Therefore, our choices are predetermined, but unfeasible to predict. Even with quantum mechanics, you can still have determinism, just with an inherient unpredictability so that you can fundamentally never know what the outcome will be 100%.