What are the benefits of understanding our free will?

[dimreepr]

35 minutes ago, Bufofrog said:

What's the benefit of understanding our free will?

Just the obvious that we are responsible for our own actions.

Thank you for your insight, Dunning and Kruger have this sort of graph thingy that suggests the answer is rarely obvious.

[geordief]

34 minutes ago, Bufofrog said:

What's the benefit of understanding our free will?

Just the obvious that we are responsible for our own actions.

Would that be material  for a Jim Careyesque film  where instead of being omnipotent the main character  learns that he or she is not responsible for their own actions? 

 

They would have to convince their  company that this was the case -and that it applied to them too(because he had seen the light and was 100%  aware of this)

 

Are their  situations  where mundane  interrelationships would change as a result of 1,2 or more people being on board?

 

Would people ,perhaps carry chips on their person to indicate to their  companions whether or not a likely action would be carried out faithfully by the individual involved (if external circumstances did not intervene to much? Rather like medium range weather forecasting...)

[Bufofrog]

5 hours ago, geordief said:

Would that be material  for a Jim Careyesque film  where instead of being omnipotent the main character  learns that he or she is not responsible for their own actions? 

 

They would have to convince their  company that this was the case -and that it applied to them too(because he had seen the light and was 100%  aware of this)

 

Are their  situations  where mundane  interrelationships would change as a result of 1,2 or more people being on board?

 

Would people ,perhaps carry chips on their person to indicate to their  companions whether or not a likely action would be carried out faithfully by the individual involved (if external circumstances did not intervene to much? Rather like medium range weather forecasting...)

I have no idea what you're talking about.

[geordief]

 

16 minutes ago, Bufofrog said:

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Bruce Almighty

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Almighty

Or does the extrapolation  make no sense to you?

[Bufofrog]

55 minutes ago, geordief said:

Or does the extrapolation  make no sense to you?

Your entire reply doesn't make sense to me.

[geordief]

1 hour ago, Bufofrog said:

Your entire reply doesn't make sense to me.

OK

[Eise]

On 11/20/2023 at 2:34 PM, Eise said:

On 11/16/2023 at 3:44 PM, studiot said:

The first three names I mentioned, Plato in particular, wanted to strip philosophical analysis of all such experience and replace it with dreamt up  ideals.

Yes, and a mass that is twice another mass falls twice as fast. Aristotle said so, and he was (also) a physicist!

On 11/23/2023 at 9:41 AM, Eise said:

On 11/20/2023 at 6:52 PM, studiot said:

Is that incompatible with what I said ?

No. It is just as irrelevant.

20 hours ago, studiot said:

As irrelevant as what ?

Should be clear. Referring, and citing some ancient philosopher, even when it is Plato, has nothing to do with what present day academic philosophy is doing.

Your citation comes from Plato's Timaeus, and it is a difficult to understand explanation about proportionality. Why should you give a text of more than 2000 years old, as an example why philosophy is BS, useless or ununderstandable? So I gave an example from physics, showing that it is BS. But doing this with a view of a physicist from 2000 years ago is just as irrelevant as your citation of Timaeus.

And why citing Einstein, when at other places he suggests that physicists should also study philosophy, as he himself did, e.g. Spinoza, Ernst Mach or Kant.

Quote

Einstein believed that when trying to understand nature one should engage in both philosophical enquiry and enquiry through the natural sciences. Einstein believed that epistemology and science "are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme.

From wikipedia.

19 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Is the gulf between Dennett & Kane so vast? 

I'm sorry, I don't know Kane's ideas, but I know Dennett refers to him a few times.

19 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

For me, the immediate macroscopic environment contains more than enough entropy and non-linearity to stimulate ideas of as many alternate courses of action simultaneously in the mind as any compatibilist could wish for

I am inclined to think that entropy and non-linearity are not that relevant. Of course it makes predicting what somebody would do extremely difficult, and there are people who think unpredictability is an essential element of free will. The 'evolutionary' advantage would be that e.g. a predator cannot know in advance what his prey will do, and therefore not able to catch it. But I think predictability has nothing to do with free will. I do not feel that my free will is constrained because my wife knows me pretty well, and can predict (better than others, at least) what I will do. So why would I be disturbed by a neurologist predicting my decisions, choices and/or actions even better, as long as I am able to act according my intentions? Somebody who believes in libertarian free will would definitively be disturbed by it, compatibilists not so much.

As you probably know, Dennett has a kind of Darwinian view on what happens in the brain. Several strands of thoughts or feelings develop in parallel, and one of them in the end 'wins', meaning it catches access to motoric neurons, and leads to an action, be it a real bodily movement, or something spoken out. (Therefore he names his model the 'multiple draughts' model of the mind.)

19 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

If ultimate personal responsibility didn't exist, then I think it might be necessary to at least pretend that it did.

Ah, well, I am not in favour of the concept of 'ultimate personal responsibility'. For me that is a chimera piggybacking on libertarian free will (one could describe it as 'absolute' free will, the conceptual companion of 'ultimate personal responsibility'). In compatibilism 'personal responsibility', without the 'ultimate' is more than enough.

Edited November 24, 2023 by Eise

[TheVat]

15 hours ago, Bufofrog said:

Your entire reply doesn't make sense to me.

Did a beautiful princess kiss you?  You were probably hoping it would turn you into a handsome prince.  I had a similar experience, as my photo shows. (the princess has stuck with me anyway)

Regarding @geordief post, I wonder if he was getting at the social shift if strong determinism was widely held to be true.  Perhaps promises and contracts would be replaced by forecasts?

 

 

22 hours ago, dimreepr said:

Thank you for your insight, Dunning and Kruger have this sort of graph thingy that suggests the answer is rarely obvious.

That's not actually the point of the Dunning and Kruger research.

 

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.

[Bufofrog]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Did a beautiful princess kiss you?  You were probably hoping it would turn you into a handsome prince.  I had a similar experience, as my photo shows. (the princess has stuck with me anyway)

I noticed that my title is primate so I thought having a smiling amphibian was not proper.

[TheVat]

His title was also primate...

[geordief]

8 hours ago, TheVat said:

egarding @geordief post, I wonder if he was getting at the social shift if strong determinism was widely held to be true.  Perhaps promises and contracts would be replaced by forecasts?

Yes.I have difficulty** following  the arguments made in this and other threads and so sometimes I like to take simple scenarios and imagine how they might play out in conditions that are easier to imagine in physical everyday terms.

Could we imagine an episode of Startreck where Capt Kirk comes across a civilisation in the Bismarkia Galaxy where the population is under the impression that all individual decisions have to be assessed by a central decision processing system before they are allowed to  be acted upon?

That would make their society very unweildy  but might confer some advantages.

Obviously one of the more nubile  star farers  on board the Space ship could be caught  prisoner whilst  investigating the planet  and would have to be extricated somehow ,possibly by some kind of a mind hack  where the decision making  process of the captors was temporarily  short circuited  by some fancy piece of equipment  and so onto the next episode.

I think that might be  the  implication of the OP ,to find practical applications for philosophical questions /dilemmas

 

**because of my poor reasoning abilities.

 

[mistermack]

I don't think there's much to understand. Having a "free" will is like being a feather that falls off a high-flying bird. There are various forces acting on you, and your own characteristics affect how you react to those forces. If you had all of the information, you could accurately predict where the feather would land, but the whole system is so complicated, you would probably need a computer the size of a planet. 

We are much the same. We have forces acting on us, sometimes opposing forces, and our own characteristics are incredibly complicated. So the computing power isn't out there for a hundred percent certainty. But like the feather, you can make an informed guess and get a fairly accurate prediction. 

So to sum up, our will isn't "free", but it's not perfectly predictable either. 

What are the benefits to understanding that? Well, since it's in the realm of the bleedin obvious, we already have the benefits. 

[Alysdexic]

Free will is prevented by the readiness potential that determines motor cortical actions. Only if the will is to transcend nature does the will transcend nature or be free [of nature]; when the will is a superset of nature it cannot exist; therefore will cannot be free.

[dimreepr]

20 hours ago, TheVat said:

That's not actually the point of the Dunning and Kruger research.

 

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.

Indeed, it was a throw away line in reply to a throw away post, but still a legitimate comment, because 'anyone' who thinks the answer is obvious, really hasn't given it much thought. 😉

10 hours ago, Alysdexic said:

Free will is prevented by the readiness potential that determines motor cortical actions. Only if the will is to transcend nature does the will transcend nature or be free [of nature]; when the will is a superset of nature it cannot exist; therefore will cannot be free.

You seem very confused. 

10 hours ago, mistermack said:

What are the benefits to understanding that? Well, since it's in the realm of the bleedin obvious, we already have the benefits. 

Tell that to an inmate.

Just imagine the benefits of being understood, when you stumble into a gheto... 🙄

11 hours ago, mistermack said:

I don't think there's much to understand. Having a "free" will is like being a feather that falls off a high-flying bird. There are various forces acting on you, and your own characteristics affect how you react to those forces. If you had all of the information, you could accurately predict where the feather would land, but the whole system is so complicated, you would probably need a computer the size of a planet. 

We are much the same. We have forces acting on us, sometimes opposing forces, and our own characteristics are incredibly complicated. So the computing power isn't out there for a hundred percent certainty. But like the feather, you can make an informed guess and get a fairly accurate prediction. 

So to sum up, our will isn't "free", but it's not perfectly predictable either. 

Being unpredictable is an evolutionary advantage that, in our case, leads to being able to think of what is predictable and then defy what is natural.

Edited November 25, 2023 by dimreepr

[Alysdexic]

8 hours ago, dimreepr said:

You seem very confused.

no, you

[Bufofrog]

10 hours ago, dimreepr said:

Indeed, it was a throw away line in reply to a throw away post, but still a legitimate comment, because 'anyone' who thinks the answer is obvious, really hasn't given it much thought.

I have given it thought and we obviously have free will.  You have managed to confuse your self by silly philosophical arguments.

Of course I know what your response will be because you unfortunately do not have free will and will have no choice except to give a silly response.

[Alysdexic]

43 minutes ago, Bufofrog said:

I have given it thought and we obviously have free will.  You have managed to confuse your self by silly philosophical arguments.

Of course I know what your response will be because you unfortunately do not have free will and will have no choice except to give a silly response.

At best, some can parrot false premises they got from rote.

[StringJunky]

21 hours ago, Alysdexic said:

Free will is prevented by the readiness potential that determines motor cortical actions. Only if the will is to transcend nature does the will transcend nature or be free [of nature]; when the will is a superset of nature it cannot exist; therefore will cannot be free.

Can you elaborate on the bolded?

General: As far as I'm concerned, if an organism  can perform  an action  against a strong impulse to do otherwise, that's free will. Free will is having the ability to modulate subconsciously-sourced signals. The flow of signals is not linear, so talking about which level has temporal primacy means nothing because the subconscious and the conscious are part of the same whole organism. As an analogy: Where is the beginning/end of a circle?

Edited November 26, 2023 by StringJunky

[Lan Todak]

Hi everyone... Why Don't all of you talk about algorithm ( a set of instructions that allows a machine to be responsive). I mean why do AI look Like zombies to us although they are cooperative and responsive. What are the missing parts that weve overlooked. I think by discussing about this, allowing us to understand how unique free will is and why humans look Alive. 

I think it has something to do with yes-no process. You know what I mean.

[Alysdexic]

9 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Can you elaborate on the bolded?

Nature is a box. Everything real, including brains, exists inside this box.

Brains are deterministic; another brain, another personality.

Free will should and must defy this. It must be a larger box. This box includes nature and transcends it. To be "free," free will must exceed the brain's fixed, deterministic functions.

But everything is of nature. Nature refers to events or what happens, where na- means be born and -turus means -work or the concrete resultative of the verbal stem, as in -tio. Artifice is a subset of nature where the native or innate is a complement to artifice. Properties are also a subset of nature. The complement or opposite of nature is fantasy (the supernatural, which cannot be recognized; it is whatever you like). Thus anything that can happen or be must be natural.

Free will is contradicted in nature and reality by the readiness potential that determines motor cortical actions.

[Eise]

On 11/25/2023 at 3:03 AM, Alysdexic said:

Free will is prevented by the readiness potential that determines motor cortical actions. Only if the will is to transcend nature does the will transcend nature or be free [of nature]; when the will is a superset of nature it cannot exist; therefore will cannot be free.

Your argument is valid only against the concept of libertarian free will, not against the concept of compatibilist free will. 

On 11/25/2023 at 2:22 AM, mistermack said:

We are much the same. We have forces acting on us, sometimes opposing forces, and our own characteristics are incredibly complicated. So the computing power isn't out there for a hundred percent certainty. But like the feather, you can make an informed guess and get a fairly accurate prediction. 

So to sum up, our will isn't "free", but it's not perfectly predictable either. 

It would be nice if in the philosophy forum, arguments are exchanged, not just viewpoints. I gave an argument against the idea that unpredictability is an element of free will. So now I expect an argument for your viewpoint from you. Or an argument why mine is wrong:

On 11/24/2023 at 9:14 AM, Eise said:

I think predictability has nothing to do with free will. I do not feel that my free will is constrained because my wife knows me pretty well, and can predict (better than others, at least) what I will do. So why would I be disturbed by a neurologist predicting my decisions, choices and/or actions even better, as long as I am able to act according my intentions? Somebody who believes in libertarian free will would definitively be disturbed by it, compatibilists not so much.

 

On 11/25/2023 at 11:50 PM, Bufofrog said:

I have given it thought and we obviously have free will. 

So why don't you share your thoughts? What are the experiences that convince you we have free will? And what kind of free will? As said above, having an opinion about a philosophical topic is not philosophy. Having well-reasoned arguments, and present them, so others can understand your trains of thought, and evaluate them, that is what makes exchanges of ideas philosophy.

[StringJunky]

"Ummm... I'd love a cream cake". (determinism), but I'm not going to have one as I'm on a diet. (freewill).

True or false?

I constructed this to be analysed. 

[studiot]

20 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

"Ummm... I'd love a cream cake". (determinism), but I'm not going to have one as I'm on a diet. (freewill).

True or false?

I constructed this to be analysed. 

Cream cake ? Yes please. +1

[geordief]

21 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

"Ummm... I'd love a cream cake". (determinism), but I'm not going to have one as I'm on a diet. (freewill).

True or false?

I constructed this to be analysed. 

Mrs Doyle says "ah go on"

[StringJunky]

49 minutes ago, geordief said:

Mrs Doyle says "ah go on"

Like a good determinist.