Submitted by philosophybreak t3_117z7oh in philosophy
Reply to comment by loopsataspool in Often mischaracterized as a rather debaucherous, hedonistic philosophy, Epicureanism actually focuses on the removal of pain and anxiety from our lives, and champions a calm ‘philosophy as therapy’ approach in pursuit of life’s highest pleasure: mental tranquility. by philosophybreak
I don’t see how random deviation of atoms would cause free will. It would break determinism, but only so to cause random behavior. Not any that is freely willed. I genuinely don’t understand why people are always trying to fit free will into their theories or philosophies, like it’s some innate thing that is self evident. I have seen videos where otherwise very intelligent people explain some mind blowing physics concept and then they’re like “well, that would be the case, but we know it’s wrong because it leaves out free will.” I thought it was just an axiom for the theist, but why then do scientifically inclined individuals still hold out hope for the discovery of free will? I just don’t understand it, and it seems frustrating.
I've started to believe that free will is simply a bad concept. It doesn't even make any sense. Its not that we have or don't have free will, but that it simply is a made up idea that doesn't actually refer to anything real.
The problem is that the self is itself an illusion, and free will is trying to determine if the the main cause of behavior is from within the self or not. Therefor any claim of free will - or no free will - will be completely arbitrary.
> The problem is that the self is itself an illusion,
As someone who firmly believes in the same notion, it is a pretty wild thing to just assert it as a known fact. Thousands of years have passed debating this very concept, and the roots of consciousness still evade us to this day.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m on the “self is an illusion” team, and being born in the land of the Buddha, we’ve had some interesting variations of this notion. But it isn’t established knowledge. If it were the question of “will” would dissolve away entirely.
>The problem is that the self is itself an illusion
I've found these claims largely come down to how the self is initially conceptualised, someone might say the self is some "inner entity" within experience, upon which someone else may say no it's not, therefore it's declared illusory (similar to how Harris argues for the illusory self). Someone else may simply define self as not a "thing" one has but a "thing" one is, i.e talk of "self" is just talk of the human being I am, not talk of some "self" I own/have. It can largely just come down to linguistics & how we define "self" etc, it's an extremely jumbled topic & can also be conflated with maintenance of personal identity, which is largely a different philosophical discussion. Overall though, I don't see that there is any genuine "problem" of the self, rather just countless linguistic confusions & various moves people make. See here -
Yeah, I agree with this take. The self is just a mental conception that is used by the human animal to set a boundary between what he is directly responsible for and what is the outside world. While the self is a real, definite thing that all humans construct, I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment, yet it is optimal to operate as if that is the case for survival.
>I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment
It's not clear to me why that should be an illusion, I don't see why individuation can't exist via certain boundary conditions, for example I can't access your mind, you can't access my mind, we're located in different spatial coordinates etc. Unless there's some ultimate "one" solipsistic mind which we are all fragments of, I don't see anything much illusory regarding individuation.
I personally believe in extended mind theory. I would consider your distance to me the only real thing that prevents your mind from not being accessible to me. But the people around me they go have their own life experience, and then I probe them for their perspective when I require it. Sure I don’t have access to their entire mind, just like I don’t have access to the entire internet (for example, it would be impossible for me to watch every YouTube video) yet I can still answer virtually any question I have through researching via this extended mind. Your personal thoughts like what constitute your identity or your feelings towards a girl aren’t really useful to me, so it’s not so bad if they get filtered before reaching the societal mind. But the people around me I would certainly consider their minds, at least what they are willing to communicate to me, as an accessible part of my own mind. But that muddies the boundaries for my self concept. But my self concept still remains, whether it’s boundaries are muddied or not, I still will use terms like me and I, and that is just a concrete fact that this mental system exists. The illusion is that these boundaries must be set where we have traditionally set them. I am of the opinion I have responsibility to maintain not only my own life, but the life of the people I care about. If my best friend were to die, it would genuinely feel like a part of my own self died; like I lost a piece of my own mind. When I dropped my phone in a lake while kayaking, I lost a part of my mind, many ideas I chose to store on it rather than in my brain or on the internet, and now they’re gone.
Also to add, one does not get to choose what their own preferences are, so there cannot be free will. Our preferences come from genetics and knowledge passed down to us from generation to generation /culture. No where is there an individual deciding all these things.
>I don’t see how random deviation of atoms would cause free will. It would break determinism, but only so to cause random behavior.
It's easy to take random noise and turn it into meaningful results. Look at Perlin noise generators or how video games use seeds.
I can happily believe that true random 'swerve' of simple elements can be exploited by evolutionary processes to lead to a sort of 'weighted decision maker'. Couple that to consciousness and you've got free will.
How are we to judge those deviations to be free of anything? Deviations from what we expect, but suggesting that is the same as deviating from causality suggests also that we have a perfect grasp on all things down to the most basic and miniscule of scales, and that we understand 100% all things and their infinitely interconnected causal relations. I do not believe we are that all-knowing.
>How are we to judge those deviations to be free of anything?
We can't.
Remember, I'm responding to the 'what if' of 'what if there was truely random swerve'. If there was true random swerve, then I could see how evolutionary processes could exploit that. I'm not say we can determine whether or not atoms have truely random swerve.
You seem to redefine free will here. Even a ‘weighted calculation’ wouldn’t amount to free will. That’s just another bias our brains would use when making calculations. Free will would require that against all odds, you still possess the ability of choosing your future out of multiple possible futures. That the responsibility of the situation you’re in lies mostly on yourself. That at any point in your life, you could have made a decision differently via unbound will. If you replayed a choice in your life like chocolate vs white milk at lunch, say you chose chocolate, determinism would say that you could replay infinite times and you would choose chocolate every time. With your suggestion of the weighted calculations based one random quantum probability, if replayed, and the quantum probability was like 70% odds chocolate, 25% odds white, 3% odds strawberry, and 2% you don’t take a milk, then when replayed an infinite amount of times over, your behavior would match that spread. Where is the free will in that? It happened according to a mathematical function that existed well before and after your existence. Just laws of a universe much bigger than the individual self.
True randomness is just as inexplicable as free will. What determines the outcome? A mysterious thing called the will or nothing at all? An undetermined yet somehow concrete outcome sounds pretty paradoxical.
The point is if an outside observer cannot predict the outcome, it's impossible to say anything further about it, either declaring it random or an act of will.
Lol you’re arguing that quantum uncertainty “could be random, could be god idk”
Well, yeah
Maybe in some sort of obligatory defense of the status-quo (conscious or subconscious); ultimately even science is limited by institutional structures, presumably. Kind of lays to rest the idea that anyone and everyone can pull themselves out of any given societal/socioeconomic condition with enough personal responsibility.
Though I’ve been reading a lot of Marx lately, so I might be a tad influenced/biased with this take.
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