Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Before defining free will, it would be useful to define the meaning of ideas and thoughts.

It's clear that an idea can be maintained in the brain despite all sorts of changes in the brain's composition and environment.

How can this work? If an idea is a physical arrangement of atoms and forces, surely it would be changed by the physical changes in the brain.

Kilkrazy:

The realism/anti-realism debate is independent of the question of free will. Let's not head off on a tangent.

Free will is presumably the ability to form and change thoughts of one's own accord, so the nature of what constitutes a thought would seem to be very relevant.

No, because presuming anything about free will prior to establishing a definition would be question-begging.

sebster wrote:
Sure thing. Which is my definition would be 'some element of decision making coming from something other than physical processes'.

Unless you're going to argue that free will doesn't exist, that definition is just going to run you right into the mind-body problem.

So to get things moving, I'm going to offer a working definition of free will that should probably be revisited and revised as the thread continues, but that makes no assumptions about the metaphysical status of free will:

An agent has 'free will' if and only if they are faced with some decision problems of two or more live options.

This is an appropriate definition for a question relating to existence of an otherwise unknown property related to agency.

Heck yes.


Oh wait, you meant Free Will, whoops.

As from what I've absorbed from this thread is that the mind works as an autonomous device reacting with its environment without accord or "thought" taken, making the actual event of process of thought actually more mechanical and less filled with meaning than expected. Although I'd like to argue upon the account that "people thinking/expressing emotion= existence of free will", the more I delve upon the very thought, the more I see it as something less-physical and difficult to grasp with my low standards of philosophy and understanding of the universe perceiving it as something non-existent.

Nurglitch wrote:
An agent has 'free will' if and only if they are faced with some decision problems of two or more live options.

Given that definition any universe that can be adequately described by a chaotic model would include free will and determinism if it could be shown that human decision making is unpredictable on a neuroscientific level.

I recall reading a paper on something similar a year or two ago, but I can't recall who wrote. It was in a journal of neuroscience, and the author essentially hypothesized that, while we might be able to determine a given individuals intentional stance at any given moment, it seems unlike that we will be able to determine what that intentional stance regards. As such, we can speak with some certainty that a given subject is feeling discomfort, and that he will be have in accordance with that state, but we will not be able to predict the specific nature of that behavior such that we could say he will scream, rather than cry. In that type of instance it would seem that 'free will' is being exercised with respect to the details of behavior, while still being bound by the realities of human biology.

dogma:

Sounds like epiphenomenalism on stilts.

Sort of, but I wouldn't eliminate the possibility for mental states to cause physical states, but then I might not even commit to the existence of purely mental states.

It really depends on the degree to which neural states can be 'coded' with respect to the possessor of that information; ie. there may exist characteristics of mental states that are perceptible only given excessively judicious context. Perhaps making them ineffable, though I'm not convinced of that.

I think you might want to have a crack at explaining encoding again.

Honestly, I should have explained it earlier, I haven't even tried yet.

I treat coding in the mind in much the same way that I treat coding in statistics. In statistics one codes variables according to what is going to be attempted to be measured. Similarly, I believe that we might code the information that we absorb in life according to information that we have previously absorbed. We measure our new experiences against our past ones.

A more direct example: I might code a negative intentional stance with pumpkin pie. As such, I will have negative responses to pumpkin pie in the future, and I'm likely to associate negative responses with pumpkin pie. This specific coding of the negative intentional stance may be ineffable, or at least nearly so, because the amount of data required to specify it may not be practically measurable. I mean, what is the generalizable neural state for "pumpkin pie" going to look like such that it will be discernible from, say, apple pie?

And, perhaps more importantly, does this sort of process entail a system that is sufficiently complex in order to escape the sort of specific determinism that requires one event to follow from another such that each successive event can be reliably predicted without duplication.