Is there a God?

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Nov 07, 2011 5:38 pm

sabs wrote:Wait since when is God Not, "The All Seeing All Knowing, All Powerful God?"

There are only really two solidly definitive infallible attributes of God. The first was revealed to God to Moses, "I AM." The second was revealed by the Spirit to Paul, "God is Love." Everything else are just nice ways of saying how realy great God is. Everything else is constrained by the above two notions.

violence in the media · Mon Nov 07, 2011 6:12 pm

tzor wrote: Now in a couple of minutes I am going to invoke an act of free will. I will enter a cafeteria and I will determine from a random menu of stuff which food I will order. The choice will be freely made and determined by the conscious subject at the time. That's free will, don't think about it too hard.

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black." Is your will still your own if the cafeteria is seemingly always out of everything but Your Second Favorite Food and external constraints make it impractical (or impossible) to go elsewhere or bring your own lunch?

More seriously, how severely must someone or something manipulate one's perceptions and options before one can say that one no longer has free will? It's one thing to say "I can choose X" is evidence of your free will, but what if you've unknowingly chosen X in accordance to my will and possibly against your own interests?

Is at all possible for someone to pull The Game or Arlington Road on someone else? Would doing so subvert someone's free will enough to render it nonexistent or irrelevant? If so, how does God possibly avoid doing that to people?

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Nov 07, 2011 6:28 pm

violence in the media wrote:
tzor wrote: Now in a couple of minutes I am going to invoke an act of free will. I will enter a cafeteria and I will determine from a random menu of stuff which food I will order. The choice will be freely made and determined by the conscious subject at the time. That's free will, don't think about it too hard.
"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black." Is your will still your own if the cafeteria is seemingly always out of everything but Your Second Favorite Food and external constraints make it impractical (or impossible) to go elsewhere or bring your own lunch?

The line was too long; I went to Blimpies.

I had the roast beef / provolone
It was 6" long
It was on whole wheat bread
I had letticue, tomatoes, pickles, sweet peppers and mayonase

All of that was a result of my free will.

External constraints on choices does not impede on free will. You can only have free will on those things where there are choices.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Nov 07, 2011 6:38 pm

violence in the media wrote:If so, how does God possibly avoid doing that to people?

It's actually a lot easier than you think. You have to work hard to limit choices. To blindly throw in an additional choice is easier.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Nov 07, 2011 7:57 pm

Grek wrote:It doesn't evaluate options, make choices or decide anything. Humans do that

The point isn't that evaluating options/making choices/deciding things doesn't happen, the point is that evaluating options/making choices/deciding things is functionally identical to mechanical devices doing mechanical things. There is nothing that happens inside your brain that doesn't happen in a lightswitch. There is just more of it, and it's a lot more complicated, and we use different English words to describe it, like "brain" instead of "circuitry" and "neurological" instead of "mechanical." But the underlying fact holds: the only thing special about you compared to a lightswitch is you're built out of lots and lots of lightswitches.

Grek wrote:Choices are mental things, and only physically exist in terms of neurons firing in your brain.

Any distinction between mental and physical things is immediately flat-out wrong. Mental things are physical things. The only thing mental actually means is "physical, but happens in your brain instead of anywhere else." There is nothing special about being a process that occurs mentally, because all mental processes are purely physical. And that means choice is physical.

The ability to "evaluate options" is meaningless because it doesn't change the fact that the evaluation occurs exactly in the same way a lightswitch decides whether or not to turn a lightbulb on: there is some input, and then based on current state and that input it produces a result. The idea that you "evaluate" anything at all is an illusion caused by the fact that you aren't aware of your own deterministic outputs (because you haven't reached them yet). You are a decision machine evaluating a decision tree. That's it. End of story. If you think that's free will, then you've defined free will into meaninglessness because we've been writing AI's with free will for decades. Also, we can probably show a correspondence between decision trees and various other mechanical artifacts to start showing that anything of sufficient physical complexity has free will.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Nov 07, 2011 9:43 pm

violence in the media wrote: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

[Derail]
Ford never actually said that. Furthermore, you couldn't get it in black when it was first released. The choices were, IIRC, white, red and green. And blue for Britain (only blue).
[/Derail]

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Nov 07, 2011 10:12 pm

If the internet is to be believed, Ford at least wrote that he said it it, but he didn't exactly mean it in the way it's usually construed:

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/182100.html

The actual biography it comes from is in the public domain, so you can use search to judge context for yourself:

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7213/pg7213.html

It seems to me more a remark about the economies available from standardization of product and telling marketing and critics to piss off.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 3:19 am

DSMatticus wrote: There is nothing special about being a process that occurs mentally

Yeah. I said that in the paragraph I quoted. You even quoted the bit where I said it and everything. It doesn't matter. If we're refering to anything at all by the words "free will" we're refering to something that exists, not something full of magic and unphysics that doesn't.

The entire content of your arguments boils down to "Nuh Uh! Free Will and Determinism CANT coexist because, uh, hey look Grek said something that sorta sounds like he thinks mental events are magic!" Even Tzor is less terrible than that.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 5:25 am

Grek wrote:If we're refering to anything at all by the words "free will" we're refering to something that exists, not something full of magic and unphysics that doesn't.

Unicorns. This shirt is blue and not blue.

Yeah, you can totally use words to say things that don't exist and make absolutely no god damn sense. Why would you assume "someone said something, it must have some intelligent and non-contradictory meaning?"

Grek wrote:The entire content of your arguments boils down to "Nuh Uh! Free Will and Determinism CANT coexist because, uh, hey look Grek said something that sorta sounds like he thinks mental events are magic!"

DSM wrote:The point isn't that evaluating options/making choices/deciding things doesn't happen, the point is that evaluating options/making choices/deciding things is functionally identical to mechanical devices doing mechanical things.

DSM wrote:You are a decision machine evaluating a decision tree. That's it. End of story. If you think that's free will, then you've defined free will into meaninglessness [because that is a description of anything doing anything].

That was a whole lot of missing the point. The actual argument is that free will boils down to a deterministic, mechanical process. Which we seem to agree on. But nobody who says free will means that, because it's stupid; once you admit it's a deterministic, mechanical process, what properties do you have that make you have free will and not a lightswitch? Complexity? Is the only difference really quantitative, not qualitative?

Or fuck it, let's just go back to the broader view:
You sound like a compatibilist. You (seem to, correct me if you think this is unfair) define free will as "free to act on your will," then recognize that the will is deterministic. But being free to act solely based on the outputs of a deterministic system is exactly zero freedom. If the will is deterministic, it cannot simultaneously be free.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 7:12 am

Grek wrote:If we're refering to anything at all by the words "free will" we're refering to something that exists, not something full of magic and unphysics that doesn't.

So your answer to the question "Does God Exist?" is "Yes, he must, because if we are referring to anything at all it is something that exists, and not something full of magic and unphysics that doesn't exist"?

Because that's a really dumb answer.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 8:28 am

@Kaelik: That was inelegantly phrased. It should have been "Something that could exist, not something full of magic... that couldn't exist." If we're going to define words like "God" and "free will", then we don't get to define them in an obviously stupid way in order to support our favorite side of the argument.

@DSM: You know, fuck it. At this point, there's no arguing with you about "free will" as you are too busy shoving your head up your ass shitting preconceptions down your throat about what the term means to actually read what I write. Instead, I'm going to make up a new term, "flothish" which means "able to decide to do something and then do it without any outside agent forcing them do so something other than what they decided" and use that.

Humans are deterministic and flothish, and that is not a contradiction.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 9:52 am

Grek wrote:@Kaelik: That was inelegantly phrased. It should have been "Something that could exist, not something full of magic... that couldn't exist." If we're going to define words like "God" and "free will", then we don't get to define them in an obviously stupid way in order to support our favorite side of the argument.

If you presuppose that the universe is deterministic and that there isn't any such thing as free will, then you are saying there is no such thing as free will. It is not helpful to anything to claim that the people arguing for free will are actually arguing for something else.

The God botherers are literally arguing that their actions are chosen by a non-material soul that is not of the same substance as their material bio-electrical brain. You may think that that is "obviously wrong", but that simply means that you think they are wrong - it doesn't mean you get to redefine their position as something you agree with in order to get more people on your side.

Free Will means that choices and fates are chosen freely and nondeterministically. That is what it fucking means. If you think that is obviously wrong, that means that you don't think Free Will exists. Period.

-Username17

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 11:15 am

That is the entire thing we're arguing about: "Does free will exist?"

You don't get to say "Presuppose that free will does not exist. Ergo, free will does not exist, debate over." You also don't get to say "Presuppose free will is mutually exclusive with determinism. We both agree that determinism is true, ergo no free will."

So far, all DSM has done is repeat that second "argument" over and over again. At this point, I've come to the conclusion that the term "free will" is too loaded down with soulist baggage to be salvagable, since people read nondeterminism into it where there isn't any. It's just like trying to use "gnostic" as the opposite of "agnostic". Even though that's what the term fucking means, it isn't worth the effort to try to use it because people will ignore your actual position and talk to you as if you were a 13th century monk who'd used the term.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 12:45 pm

On the non-deterministic free will angle, I don't think it matters.

As long as the will is fundamentally unpredictable in advance, which it seems likely to remain in any specific case (despite good statistical measures across any large population) then the deterministic mind model will remain indistinguishable from free will.

Sure, they're different concepts, but the difference isn't meaningful IRL. It's all angels on the head of a pin anyway.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 1:22 pm

NueroPsych disorders, and mood altering drugs put into serious question the idea of free will.

If a chemical imbalance can alter your personality so badly that you do things you wouldn't normally do. How the hell can you turn around and say there is Free Will?

Severe Cases of OCD.
Some of the symptoms of Autism.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 2:21 pm

Grek wrote:That is the entire thing we're arguing about: "Does free will exist?"

You don't get to say "Presuppose that free will does not exist. Ergo, free will does not exist, debate over." You also don't get to say "Presuppose free will is mutually exclusive with determinism. We both agree that determinism is true, ergo no free will."

No. Actually that is exactly what you get to say. Because that is what Free Will MEANS! Here, let me wikipedia that shit for you:

Wikipedia wrote:Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long been debated in philosophy. Historically, the constraint of dominant concern has been the metaphysical constraint of determinism. The opposing positions within that debate are metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus that free will exists (or is at least possible); and hard determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus that free will does not exist.

If you believe in Determinism, then you by definition do not believe in Free Will. Because the two concepts are literally and exactly mutually exclusive. If the universe is in fact deterministic, then Free Will is an incoherent concept. If there is a fate and prophesy is possible, Free Will does not exist.

There are non-deterministic models of the universe where there also is no Free Will, but there are no deterministic models of the universe where there is Free Will. Now, stop being a sophist who claims that we can't define words to mean the things they actually mean.

-Username17

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 2:28 pm

Grek wrote:I'm going to make up a new term, "flothish" which means "able to decide to do something and then do it without any outside agent forcing them do so something other than what they decided"

For fuck's sake. This is the issue I have been addressing. The point is that the process of "making a decision" is not some special, magical fucking process that means anything. It's a purely mechanical phenomenon of the exact same type as "flip a lightswitch." Just because a human being 'made a decision' is not something we should get up and dance about it because the decisions they make are a function of the input they receive over their life and therefore they have no control over them.

Suppose I write a program that evaluates a decision tree, and then selects an option based on some goal parameters. Does this thing have free will? Because that is seriously something we can do. We write programs that evaluate the environment, make predictions about what effects their actions will have on their environment, and then choose and enact actions based on those evaluations. How is this different than 'being a human being?' Or would you like to say we have been creating artificial entities with free will (or flothishness) for years?

Frank wrote:If you believe in Determinism, then you by definition do not believe in Free Will. Because the two concepts are literally and exactly mutually exclusive.

Compatibilism is a belief that exists, but it's fucking stupid because it defines free will as "free to act according to the deterministic model beyond their control." So while I agree with you, not everyone will.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 3:58 pm

Grek wrote:@Kaelik: That was inelegantly phrased. It should have been "Something that could exist, not something full of magic... that couldn't exist." If we're going to define words like "God" and "free will", then we don't get to define them in an obviously stupid way in order to support our favorite side of the argument.

I was directly quoting your stupid statement about free will and replacing it with God. The inelegant phrasing is your fault.

The part that you are missing is that we are not defining these things in obviously stupid ways in order to support our position. We are using the definition that other people mean when they talk about it, and also, that they meant when they were invented.

God really does mean a magic super being who created the world and has a personality, not "Gravity." Likewise, free will really does mean being a robot and making the choices you were programmed to make, it actually means having some magic ability to make decisions separate from being a computer that takes in inputs and gives outputs.

If you can admit that when people talk about God it is possible they are talking about something that doesn't exist, then you must admit that it is possible when people talk about free will, they could be talking about something that doesn't exist, and so your statement about how they must be talking about something that exists is wrong.

They really are talking about something that doesn't exist, and you can tell by looking up the actual definition people use, instead of just making one up when the subject comes up.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 11:52 pm

Grek wrote:That is the entire thing we're arguing about: "Does free will exist?"

In Frank's world, free will cannot exist because you can't really tax something that is "free," therefore will must have a value and therefore it can be taxed.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Wed Nov 09, 2011 12:08 am

tzor wrote:In Frank's world, free will cannot exist because you can't really tax something that is "free," therefore will must have a value and therefore it can be taxed.

What.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Nov 09, 2011 12:57 am

RadiantPhoenix wrote:
tzor wrote:In Frank's world, free will cannot exist because you can't really tax something that is "free," therefore will must have a value and therefore it can be taxed.
What.

Pun + liberals want to tax everything joke. Isn't it clever?

Count Arioch the 28th · Wed Nov 09, 2011 3:24 am

I don't know if there's such thing as free will. Sure, in theory I could do whatever I want, but most of them involve money or free time or skills I don't have.

Is it possible for the universe to be free-willed, but society to be deterministic? I honestly don't know.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Nov 09, 2011 5:43 am

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I don't know if there's such thing as free will. Sure, in theory I could do whatever I want, but most of them involve money or free time or skills I don't have.

Is it possible for the universe to be free-willed, but society to be deterministic? I honestly don't know.

Personal Freedom is a very different animal than Free Will. Personal Freedom is the thing where society will let you do what you want to do without prejudice. Free Will is the metaphysical property to behave nondeterministically. It's entirely possible for there to be Free Will and for you to have little or no Personal Freedom, or for a deterministic world to have no Free Will and still afford you a great deal of Personal Freedom.

There are also Compatabilists, who believe in Determinism and then use the term Free Will to mean Personal Freedom. That is fucking retarded. Firstly: we already have the term Personal Freedom. Secondly: it does not resolve the argument between Catholics (who are metaphysical libertarians) and Calvinists (who are fatalists) at all. It takes the word Catholics are using and redefines it as the scenario that Calvinists are talking about, and then both Catholics and Calvinists are confused and offended.

-Username17

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Nov 09, 2011 5:53 am

You, Frank, if you read a bit further, it goes on to say this:

Both of these positions, which agree that causal determination is the relevant factor in the question of free will, are classed as incompatibilists. Those who deny that determinism is relevant are classified as compatibilists, and offer various alternative explanations of what constraints are relevant, such as physical constraints (e.g. chains or imprisonment), social constraints (e.g. threat of punishment or censure), or psychological constraints (e.g. compulsions or phobias).

I honestly have no fucking idea what the article goes on for the first paragraph as if determinism and metaphysical libertarianism are the only two valid stances and then contradicts itself by mentioning the compatablist stance. Maybe whoever wrote it was an idiot. But regardless of why, you can't just define a valid philosophical stance on the issue out of existance.

The basic crux of compatablism is that being free to do what determinism says you will do is exactly as free as you would be under a non-deterministic model of the universe. In either case, you're only going to ever do one thing, and that thing will be based on your preferences, knowledge and who you are. The outcomes are all the same, so there is no change to free will from switching between determinism and nondeterminism.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Nov 09, 2011 6:03 am

Grek wrote:In either case, you're only going to ever do one thing, and that thing will be based on your preferences, knowledge and who you are. The outcomes are all the same, so there is no change to free will from switching between determinism and nondeterminism.

That... is stupid.

If you're only going to do one thing in a given situation, you are deterministic. That's what determinism means!