Search the Community

The subject that currently interests me is omniscience, and the reason is that the common understanding of the word may be a contradiction. The word means "all knowledge", and is often referred as a pastiche of Bret Hart: knowing everything there is, everything there was and everything there will ever be. This implies determinism and a mechanistic universe that plays itself and abolishes the concepts of free will, morality, responsibility and such. That is because to hold someone responsible one would have to have the ability to do otherwise and in a mechanistic universe that simply is not the case. I instinctively recoil from this understanding of the word as it is in direct contradiction with how I, and everyone else, approaches life. It would also mean that God is the sort of monstrous puppet master who first creates beings He knows to mess up and then tortures them for shits and giggles while being the only one ever making a choice of any sort and thus directly and alone responsible for everything. You know, the sort of God atheists reject, and if it was real, Christianity, or any other religion, for that matter, would make absolutely no sense at all. So my question is: what if "all knowledge" cannot encompass the future, as it does not exist? Sure, one can calculate those things that depend on mechanisms, but not, say, what I shall eat tomorrow, for I have yet to decide that. Having all knowledge cannot mean having knowledge that is not there. This leaves open the possibility of having a free will, moral responsibility et al. It is also supported by our empirical experience of life. If the suggestion my question implies is correct, then God can be both omniscient and omnipotent without being omniderigent (ie. all-acting puppet master). And if so, the Bible would also make sense. PS. I do not subscribe to the usual attribution of God as omniscient, because the Bible strongly implies He isn't. He may well be voliscient (knows what he wants to know) and I'm perfectly ok with that. PPS. No wonder most atheists are so hell bent on determinism; their faux-moral rejection of God depends on it.

This is my argument The reason why people have a passion is because they believe that they can change something and that it is important. In fact, all emotions are true in such a way. Emotions are simply involuntary responses to our rational observations. A child observes what he is good at and that is how a passion develops. It is very obvious to a child. Everyone as a child had figured it out, but not many people actually followed their passion. Since all passions are rational, then if society is rational, following one’s passion will lead to prosperity. However, this is not the case with our current society. If I want to become a philosopher in North Korea, my prospects are very low or I will not make enough money to survive. This would never happen in a free society because passions are always valuable. However, state intervention prevents the pursuit of an individual’s rational self-interests. It subdues free will. There was a man who did a major in philosophy but who after regretted it because he hadn’t been able to make money from it. It as at this point that people break with their passions. He concluded that passions are not necessarily good and he implicitly accepted nihilism rather than recognising that evil was done unto him. It makes it hard for him to recognise it since sophism is state sponsored in philosophy departments. The majority of people share a similar story. Whether it is coercion from the state, or their parents, or their peers, an adult or child is in some way rejected for following their passions and the adult or child concludes that he cannot trust his emotions. This is the very essence of evil. It is why people did not trust the invisible hand of the free market for tens of thousands of years. Essentially, their self-esteem was so destroyed that they did not trust their own rational faculty. It is the greatest contradiction that ever existed. A virtuous man would find a work-around. He knows that his life is meaningless without passion. He knows that if he were to look back at his life without following his passion, he would regret it and wonder what could have been. There is no alternative for him. Every action we make is motivated by emotion. A person cannot simply think and do. They must think until they feel that they can do. An artificial line has been created between emotions and thoughts. Emotions simply are an expression of our deepest and truest thoughts that we may not even be conscious of. It is analogous to the arbitrary distinction between qualia and meaning. We see red because we associate it with everything else that is red. A person void of passion then, is a robot without free will, following the instructions of others without even being consciously aware of it. So, the virtuous man has no rational choice other than to find alternatives to the best of his ability. This does not mean that the virtuous man will be unsatisfied. The passion arises only from what can be done. If man finds that his passion is unreachable, his passion will naturally change. So, the virtuous man is a force that cannot be stopped by anyone or anything. It is as clear as sunlight what his objective is. A rock cannot turn into a tree, nor can man change his neurological predispositions, particularly once he becomes aware of them. Even if a man is destroyed for following his passions, he will never be the same. He will always be at ease, because he knows what must be done so he will inevitably build himself back up. He is the man who works. But if a man does not immerse into his passions, he will always live a shallow life not knowing what he could have been. “Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it” – Lao Tzu.

Physicalism (Materialism) Verifies Free Will Defining free will and physicalism The 'will' is the conscious experience of deciding and initiating human actions. Stefan Molyneux defines free will as the ability to compare an action to an ideal standard, but I will take a broader definition of free will which I would assume Stefan would agree with (without allowing for compatibilism): Free will is the ability to choose between possible actions independently of events that are external to a persons 'will'. That is, a person who decided to pursue action A at time X could have chosen action B under exactly the same external circumstances if he or she had 'willed' to do so. The opposite of free will is determinism which is: the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the 'will'. Another definition of determinism is that events including the 'will' are determined by previously existing causes, however, this definition will not be used because I believe it does not necessarily touch the core of the issue which is whether our 'will' can act undetermined by external causes. If we were to assume this second definition, then determinism would be compatible with free will. Physicalism (also known as materialism) is the doctrine that the real world consists only of the physical world. The contradiction between free will and physicalism In this section, I will play devil's advocate and suggest a contradiction between free will and physicalism. Stefan argues that it is self-evident that free will exists, i.e., that our will causes human actions, as anyone arguing against this is causing their human action of 'arguing'. Not only that, but they are assuming that the other person is in a sense causing their 'listening' or 'acceptance' or 'non-acceptance' of their argument, which are also human actions. An issue with free will that probably troubles the minds of others in this community is that if free will is self-evident, it is true. If it is true, then determinism is false. If determinism is false then physicalism is false. It seems if we accept free will, we must abandon physicalism and adopt mind-body dualism, that is, that the 'will' is real but is independent of the physical world. It seems that the physical world is synonymous with objective reality because all that is objective is in some way measurable and that which is measurable is physical. However, mind-body dualism would mean that reality consists of more than objective reality, which means truth is subjective. However, the statement that 'truth is subjective' demonstrates that truth is objective, which is a contradiction. We are left in a bind. Either determinism or free will is true. Determinism must be false because free will is self-evident, and free will must be false because mind-body dualism is self-contradictory. This is a contradiction. Defending free will and physicalism I believe there is an error in the above reasoning. It does not follow that "if determinism is false then physicalism is false". In fact, I will now argue that if physicalism is true, then free will is true, and hence determinism is false. The 'will', self, or consciousness exists and this is self-evident (cogito ergo sum; I think therefore I am). Therefore, physicalism would imply that the 'will' is physical. This conclusion is in line with physicalist theories of consciousness including Integrated Information Theory (IIT) which states that a system's consciousness is determined by its causal properties and is therefore an intrinsic, fundamental property of any physical system. If physicalism is true, then consciousness is a property of the causal links between neurons in a person's neural network. Then, consciousness is identical to the neural network. They are one of the same. If consciousness is the neural network, then our 'will' is also the neural network. Determinism would suggest that human actions are caused by this neural network but that human actions are caused by events external to our 'will': Determinism would suggest that the neural network itself is determined by external events such as non-conscious 'zombie' networks or neural networks connected to but external to the brain such as the peripheral nervous system. Therefore, if our brain determines actions and our brain is determined by external events, then our actions are determined by external events. However, it is not necessarily the case that external events determine our conscious neural network. According to IIT, the neural network is causally linked in such a way that the system is more akin to a positive feedback loop than a feed-forward system. That is, rather than external events causing consciousness causing action, external events play a role in consciousness (for example, I might say the reason I drank a glass of water is that I am thirsty) but that consciousness is caused by prior consciousness. Therefore, actions would be caused by consciousness, but consciousness would not be caused by external events. And because the 'will' is synonymous with our experience of consciousness, our 'will' has self-caused the action. It is not even that non-conscious processes cause our 'will'. It is that our 'will' and indeed our 'self' is composed in that integrated neural network that plays out causes and effects with itself. This is exactly what free will is, it is the freedom of the 'will' to act without being determined by external events, and because the ‘will’ is equal to the neural networks, the neural networks don’t count as external events. The best way to describe free will would be to say that it is an endogenous system. So we must conclude that physicalism actually demonstrates that free will is true and determinism is false. Looking at it from this perspective, it is completely, both ontologically and metaphysically accurate to say that 'I' convinced myself do to action A or action B. Conclusion The conception of free will I have suggested seems to dissolve much of the worries that people have about determinism. Some may worry that if determinism is true, then how can we ever be satisfied that we act rationally or are responsible for our actions? If external events determined that I would do something irrational or evil, how are we to expect any kind of integrity from ourselves. If we cannot expect integrity from ourselves, how can we say that we are really rational animals and how can we assign responsibility to ourselves and others? It seems that if determinism is true, then we are in a way doomed to a quasi-pathological life and we are fundamentally not in control of our own happiness. I believe this is the fundamental worry among free willers. The conception of free will I suggest solves this issue by suggesting that our self-integrity lies within the physical integrity (literally the integrated information) in our neural networks that retain a self-generating, endogenous system. If we look at free will with a physicalist lense, I believe we can preserve free will without compromising physicalism.

In FDR358 (Stef's wager) Stefan argued that it is better to believe in free will when lacking information to its existence. He calls this argument Stef’s wager. If you believe in free will but determinism is true then you were determined to believe in free will so you lost nothing. If you believe in determinism but free will is true then you lost your ability for personal responsibility which is worse. In this post, I will argue against the wager and utilise my argument against the wager to provide a case for, and to defend determinism. I will not cite all my paraphrases of Stefan for obvious reasons, but that is not a problem given that others may correct me if they believe I have misrepresented Stefan. Also, phrases with single quotation marks are quoting Stefan. Free will is defined as that which any person who possesses it could have chosen differently in a circumstance given that the circumstance is unchanged, hence choices being uncaused by any physical effect. Decisions may be caused by something non-material like a soul. Or they may be self-caused, as Stefan has favoured. This definition of free will is the same definition Stefan has used. No sane determinist truly believes that beliefs cannot be changed or that choice does not exist. No sane determinist truly believes people cannot be rational or cannot debate. So naturally, a determinist will probably not find Stef’s wager convincing given that the determinist had probably considered the ability to choose when they adopted their belief in determinism. A determinist will not believe that beliefs cannot be influenced. Therefore, I argue that a better wager would be to show the pragmatic consequences of a determinist morality vs. a free will morality. This is more in line with the original Descartes wager. Descartes did not argue that if you believe in God but God does not exist then you cannot have lost anything because then morality does not exist anyway and so free will doesn't exist and you could not have changed your mind. Rather, he weighed up the consequences of the belief without changing epistemological postulates. He said if you believe in God but there is no God then you have not changed much in your life. If you believe in no God but there is a God then you will go to hell. Nowhere in this argument are one’s epistemological beliefs challenged. The wager is a pragmatic rather than a philosophical argument. Speaking in pragmatic terms, the wager favours neither position particularly strongly. There are many changes that a person makes if they are committed to determinism, for which it would be costly if they didn't make if determinism is true. Firstly, you stop evaluating people based on the decisions they make and start evaluating them on their behaviour. This makes life much simpler because you stop judging your own desires about people. You don't try to convince yourself someone is worth your time because they are trying their best to be a good person. You don't feel guilty for being selfish with regards to your relationships. According to a study, 44% of trait conscientiousness is heritable. This study supports the claim that virtue is predetermined. Secondly, you become compassionate towards others. You understand anger does not appeal to their rationality. Given that you evaluate them on their behaviour, you can infer that they are not worthy of your time if they don't change their behaviour. You may call them stubborn without any need to grant them free will. Thirdly, you have a richer understanding of human nature. How anger could change someone even if free will is true is difficult to imagine. A much simpler approach is to understand our emotions do not necessarily have any moral content. Anger may be a fight or flight mechanism. Shame may be a way of keeping the integrity of a tribe. Hatred depends on subjective values. There is not necessarily an unconscious 'true self' that 'knows everything' and then the extra component of free will. Rather, we can understand how people think by analysing their biology and experiences. According to free will, brain damage may affect a person’s emotions or unconscious motives, but it should not be able to affect a person’s virtue or moral worth, which should be solely determined by free will, and free will not being determined by physical effect. However, a study found that brain damage can casually make changes in the way that people reason which can causally change moral beliefs. Fourthly, you become compassionate towards yourself. A meta-analysis found a large effect size for the negative relationship between self-compassion and psychopathology, r = − 0.54 (95% CI = − 0.57 to − 0.51; Z = − 34.02; p < .0001). We can come to understand that when we say ‘sorry’, we don’t really mean we are worthy of shame, but rather that we understand that we should change how we behave in the future compared to the past. We also stop comparing ourselves to others. Under the dictum that reason equals virtue equals happiness, we may feel compelled to compare our levels of happiness to others, or to compare our virtue to that of others. This is not a good approach. We can accept that we are not all dealt the same hand, and there may as well be things that determine our virtue for which are difficult to control. It is not to say that we ought not to strive for virtue, but that virtue should not necessarily be the determinant of self-esteem. What is more appropriate is to compare oneself in the present to oneself in the past. Stefan has argued that determinism is paradoxical because it presupposes that a person is capable of choice, that is, changing their beliefs, while at the same time asserting that choice is impossible. Determinism is the opposite of free will. So, determinism is defined as not being able to have chosen differently in a circumstance given that the circumstance is unchanged, hence choices being caused by physical effects. According to this definition, whether a person has actually made a choice remains untouched. So, the ability to choose and the fact that a person could not have chosen differently are compatible. Choice itself does not require free will. Choice is the ability to change behaviour in virtue of being rational. Rationality is simply conceptual ‘fidelity to reality’. This does not entail free will. Rationality distinguishes us from animals. Animals cannot think conceptually, and we can. Free will then is not required to distinguish human and animal thought. Stefan has argued that if a determinist attempts to debate because they believe others are 'inputs and outputs', then it explains why other people debate, but it would also mean the determinist is also an input-output machine. And therefore, a determinist has not chosen to debate with others and cannot attempt to debate in the first place which is a performative contradiction. To this argument I rebut. If free will does exist and we are watching two others debate, we can explain their behaviour without appealing to free will by labelling them as inputs and outputs much like philosophical zombies. A determinist simply takes that further to say that this is also a characteristic of the observer. We can still choose to debate even if it was determined. I am yet to have heard a philosophical argument from Stefan against determinism without him appealing to the argument of performative contradiction. If there is no contradiction with the belief of free will, we should look at the evidence and the simplest explanation. Stefan has acknowledged that determinism should be accepted only if it is non-contradictory given that it is simpler. The evidence overwhelmingly supports that determinism is simpler to free will for the following reasons. Firstly, everything else seems to be determined by all effects acting as also as all causes. Stefan has argued that we should not be surprised to find that the human mind possesses free will given that it is only the brain that possesses consciousness. However, I am not sure whether it's correct to assume that only the brain possesses consciousness. Consciousness cannot be objectively observed. If it were not for what we have observed in the physical human body and comparing it to our subjective experience, there would have been no way to know that consciousness resides in the brain. In fact, we still don't really know whether animals are conscious. In that regard, a rock could even be conscious in some manner, a position known as panpsychism. If a computer was capable of conceptual processing, it is likely that the computer would be conscious at a level similar to our own. Consciousness may have to do more with complexity and feedback loops than it has to do with the brain. I had a dream a while ago in which I saw consciousness and life itself arising from feedback loops, weird dream. Secondly, I do not know what it means to feel free. At least from my perspective, I see my thoughts as constant dialectics. I have said sorry enough times to my girlfriend where I really feel like I don't have much control as I thought I had. Do any men concur? Split-brain patients will often have opposing preferences in separate hemispheres. For example, one hemisphere may have atheistic leanings while the other has theistic leanings. Whether the person is actually theistic may have to do with what ever preference dominates consciousness as a unitary experience, but it does go to show the power of causality in the brain. Also, in my experience the biggest changes in my behaviour have arisen from changes in my environment rather than changes in my attitude. Thirdly, morality requires rationality but it does not require free will. Nowhere in the UPB framework is there a requirement for free will. If a person is rational, they will be moral by adopting universal preferences. Whether a person is rational may be predetermined. Fourthly, it is difficult to articulate what free will actually is. If you were asked to pick a random grass leaf from a field, it is difficult to claim you could have chosen differently. Every choice must depend on knowledge. Picking a grass leaf from a field is not an informative decision. You cannot for example say to have free will about whether to steer a ship east or west while in the middle of an unknown ocean at least without some scientific acuity. Likely, you will pick based solely upon gut feelings, or some kind of patterns of thinking or heuristics. Indeed, this is why neuroscientists can predict such behaviour before the person is aware of their decision. But even if a decision were to be more informative, like for example whether to watch this movie or that movie, there is nothing in your environment which informs you about what you ought to do. It is not intrinsically more rational to watch either movie. There is no ought from an is. Now, we can still say that morality exists. We can say it’s rational to be moral, for your behaviour to be universally preferable. However, choosing to watch a movie is not a moral decision. Subjective taste would largely determine which movie to watch, which arises from unconscious processes. If you are rational, unconscious motives will drive your specific behaviours. If you are irrational, unconscious motives will still drive your specific behaviours. Then, free will might not exist in the behavioural decisions per se, but rather in the choice about whether one acts rationally or irrationally regardless of what behaviour that entails. This is certainly what Ayn Rand believed. The point here is that free will how it is typically conceptualised as existing in every choice we make is unnecessary, and creates the problem of supposing some open system where we get inspiration or information from something that is neither in our environment or biology. To conclude, whether or not a person believes in determinism has significant effects on their life regardless of whether determinism is true. Determinism is not incompatible with the ability to choose. Therefore, it does not contradict how we act. Given that determinism is the simplest explanation, determinism is true. Determinism is defined as a lack of the ability have chosen differently. Free willers would argue the corollary to determinism is that choice does not exist. Conventionally then, determinism is also defined as the lack of choice. But I would argue that this belief is the idea of fatalism and not determinism. Given that morality exists and free will is an important concept in moral reasoning, I am in favour of compatibilism which states that free will does not contradict determinism if we define free will conventionally as the ability to choose and determinism as not having been able to have chosen differently. A person who is a compatibilist is still a determinist. I also wish not to do a disservice to free willers by abandoning the term known as free will used to describe the position of believing in the ability to have chosen differently, so I think it is appropriate to call that position free will while separating it from conventional free will.

Culture cultivates. What does it cultivate? Proximately, we can say culture cultivates that which is valued by the people from whom the culture arose, be it songs or smart phones. But these are phenotypes -- not replicators as are memes and genes. It is a popular cowardice to deny responsibility for the evolutionary consequences of our cultural choices -- to, in effect, declare all that happens is "natural" selection. This puerile denial of responsibility for consequences of our cultural choices results in phenomena such as "Being on the right side of history." when all that is promoted is the entropic indulgence of high time preference. They may as well say, "Being on the right side of entropy." But every choice we make that impacts the evolutionary viability of people in society is a consequence for which we bear moral responsibility. So what does culture ultimately cultivate? A race of people. It is in this sense that the cultural determinists are correct but for the wrong reasons and on the wrong time scale. Moreover, it is in this sense that cultural determinists lay claim to the moral high ground that belongs, not to them, but to the morally responsible adults in the room they accuse of being evil.

I read the short story „Story of Your Life“ by Ted Chiang last week after watching Arrival and the story stayed with me for a while. The thread talks about small spoilers regarding the theme of the short story. In the short story the protagonist ends up remembering the future and thus is not free to alter it. However, the story concludes that she has free will in that she follows through with a choice she already knows she's will make in the future. By choosing not to alter the future, she is creating it and actively affirming it. While she makes the choice to not alter the future, she also doesn't really have any choice but to go through with what she knows will happen. The author assumes that knowledge of the future would change you in a way, so you wouldn't want to change it. So basically the author says that free will exists in an deterministic universe in the form of not affecting the outcome of future events. But if you are not free to affect the future, how free can your choice to not alter that future really be? Or am I wrong in assuming choice is required for free will to exists?

I have been suffering from depression-induced cognitive impairment for a few months, so I apologize if I fail to get my point across, but this matter has been paramount for me for years. Two years ago, I came up with a concept. I failed to find a name for it wherewith I was comfortable, but it was the grouping of the individual desires that are present in all living things. It had something to do with instinct, but went further than just that, for it included humans’ desires that do not directly come from mere instinct. That… thing, materialized itself in the existence of all living things and in everything humans have created. Sculptures, paintings, malls, fashion, capitalism as a whole, laws, morality, forests, mushrooms… they were no more than the manifestations of that collection of desires. It was the noumenon of Life, if you will. [i use the term “noumenon” loosely, for I believe that it is a group of physical elements found in the body and DNA of all life forms.] Coming up with such concept made me question the possibility of such thing as a free will. “Is there any action at all without that [the noumenon of life]?” I asked myself, “if I created a robot with artificial intelligence, what would it do, apart from that which I, accidentally or not, programmed it to do?” What does it mean to be free, if you can do what you want, but you cannot choose what you want? Just as AI is programmed by humans, humans and other life forms are programmed by the billions of years of evolution that made their present existence possible. Even though Stefan and all of you are keen on free-will, I have never seen a rebuttal to that, to the fact that what you want is pretty much the same thing that all life forms do, although each individual pursues it differently—it’s not up to you, and it was decided billions of years before you were born, that the mere fact of your existence would intrinsically mean that you want to live and to reproduce, and that each of your desires is directly or indirectly related to that. The recognition that those desires are the noumenon of your existence would be the ultimate self-knowledge. All of that will be familiar to you if you’ve read Schopenhauer. I did, last year, as a 15 year old, and noticed how Schopenhauer had given the name of “Wille”—“Will” in English—to a concept very similar to mine; different, however, in that Schopenhauer attributed to it the phenomenal existence of all things, including those that had nothing to do with life. He also explored the concept and its implications much more deeply than I ever had, and I thought to myself—“isn’t that the ultimate truth—the ultimate ‘red pill’? The Will—our own desires—is the matrix we all live in, and it’s the source of all suffering.” “Meanwhile it surprises one to find, both in the world of human beings and in that of animals, that this great, manifold, and restless motion is sustained and kept going by the medium of two simple impulses—hunger and the instinct of sex, helped perhaps a little by boredom—and that these have the power to form the primum mobile of so complex a machinery, setting in motion the variegated show!” Schopenhauer also thought of something similar to my AI analogy, in regards to free will. In his prize essay on the freedom of the will, he points out how freedom is a negative. “The natural image of a free will is an empty set of scales. It hangs there at rest and will never lose its equilibrium unless something is laid on one of the pans. Free will can no more produce an action out of itself than a scale can produce a movement of itself, since nothing comes from nothing.” Just as an intelligent computer not programmed to do anything (if such thing could possibly exist) would be technically free, and wouldn’t do anything, humans and the rest of the life forms, if we weren’t programmed by years of evolution to have certain wishes, wouldn’t do anything, if such beings were physically possible in the first place. Our very existence and actions deny free will. “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.” [Man can do what he wills; he cannot, however, will what he wills.] I disagree with Schopenhauer on many things, but in this particular matter presented here and in what it implies I see nothing but the ultimate truth. Would anyone here rebut that? On a semi-related note, I made this meme which only people interested in philosophy would comprehend, here it is: >inb4 ad hominem >inb4 ad naturam strawman

My post on Donald Trump's position on eminent domain and the Kelo v The City of New London case started a dialog on voting for the lesser of two evils. I thought I'd start a thread here to continue that discussion. On one hand, the act of casting a vote for the politician you believe will do the least harm helps insure that the least harm will be done. On the other hand, low voter turnout demonstrates a lack of faith in the system and could be used in arguments for reform -- hopefully towards a more libertarian system -- or as a welcoming signal for new ideas. As far as presidential elections go, I've usually chosen the second option, except when Ron Paul or Gary Johnson were candidates. But in current events, I'm leaning more towards the first because the United States is drifting closer towards socialism. Do either of these positions have merit? What are their flaws? What's your position on voting and why?

Had started a topic elsewhere from the assumption that we don't have free will. The discussion of how much free will we do or don't have was so good I felt it deserved it's own thread. Plus lot's people know a lot more on this than me and I'd like to hear what you think. Personally I can't see how we can have free will. Our minds work like complex pieces of machinery that can be predicted and manipulated to an extent. Practically in the moment it doesn't matter, we have the illusion of free will and have to make decisions based on whatever we think is relevant at the time. And a little prediction, we hear people say 'we went to the moon and discovered the Earth.' In the future I think we'll say 'We developed Artificial Intelligence and discovered ourselves'. How much Free Will do you think we have?

For the past several months something has bothered me. I felt as if something Stefan was saying was self-contradictory. I called into the show twice to try and figure out what it was. I figured it out. I have written an open letter to Stefan detailing my thoughts. you can read it and comment on it here if you like. Enjoy.

I watched some of Stef's videos on free will, and he spends most his time arguing why it exists instead of giving it a clear and specific definition. Can someone help define free will for me? I am having trouble understanding what people mean by free will. *Edit* *Important* I am no longer allowed to post, I can only communicate through edits. I have been given no explanation as to why I can't post. Apparently FDR is a strong supporter of censorship.

So today while studying psychology I met this girl who said that she doesn't believe that we have free will. She said that we are like animals, only a bit more complicated. She also said that we can't really effect on what happens to us in the future, because everything we do is just a chain of complicated decisions made by our brains for us in search for happiness. This made me very sad and I can't get it out of my head... What if I really am just a brain and couple of other organs in my body. Perhaps I don't really think about things the way I believe, but am just being l controlled by a bunch of mindless instincts. It's really making me a bit nervous... Has anyone ever thought about this, or could share his opinions? I would like that a lot. Markus FIN

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this video is interesting from philosophical standpoint. Whole thing is quite good, but really tasty part starts at 5:48: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMb00lz-IfE#t=349 If it were possible to predict behavior of humans given all variables are known this would imply that entropy must be constant, which is impossible. If those quantum effects are totally random how then we can have free will which seems purposeful? Well, complexity and chaos gives purpose and order. In biology it's evident. Some random movement of particles made RNA and then DNA, which started long chain of evolution leading to us - new information was created. You can say that this isn't completely random, because evolution simply responded to the environment. This is false, because everything in the universe obeys basic quantum laws. So bacteria may only respond to the types of conditions on the Earth, but Earth itself is chaotic and complex system. This self referential loop is what gives order from chaos. How free will isn't just simply responding randomly to the environment then? Well sort of it is. But, free will only makes sense in interaction with other human beings. Brain is interacting with other brains. That creates constraints to the randomness of such complex system which makes a set of rules emerge (UPB). One more interesting point. Entropy of the whole universe increases with time. Given that free will requires complexity before some point in time, it was physically impossible.

Over the past few years, I have formulated my philosophy of life, a 13-page document that may be found at either of the following links:https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Byh6JnTg3RMecHhxV0pYeklqV0U/edit?usp=sharinghttp://www.scribd.com/doc/183418623/My-Philosophy-of-LifeIn the first half of the document, I present and defend the following positions: atheism, afterlife skepticism, free will impossibilism, moral skepticism, existential skepticism and negative hedonism. The second half of the document is devoted to ways to achieve and maintain peace of mind.I have found the entire exercise to be very beneficial personally, and I hope that you will benefit from reading the document.I am posting my philosophy to solicit feedback so that it may be improved. I welcome any constructive criticism that you may have.Enjoy!