t_w said:
Not off to a good start. Free will is a thing. Therefore, by saying it exists, you are required to provide evidence for it. If I see no evidence, I should reject your concept of free-will. It is blindingly obvious the burden of proof is always on he who posits the existence of an entity, not on he who rejects it. The deafult position is to reject all propositions. You already reject 'the pink elephant lives on the moon'. The burden of proof is not on you to prove there is no such elephant on the moon. I hope you can grasp this, or the discussion is doomed...
Actually... I think we can all agree that we perform certain actions. The default view is simply that we perform certain actions. That's the simplest answer that's supported by the evidence. There is no reason to go on to postulate that there was a cause for those actions. But even if there was, there is no evidence of that cause. Adding an unnecessary and unevidenced cause means that you are violating occam's razor. Thus, the default view is one that says we ourselves are choosing our own actions, not that there is an additional cause.
t_w said:
LOL!!!! There is NO free will is a negative statement. It is not a positive statement. A positive statement is 'there is free will'.
It's a semantics thing. We can reword it if this is your big hang-up in the discussion. The point is simply that determinism suggests something beyond free will -- it adds an extra, unnecessary, and unevidenced variable into the equation. Therefore the default is still free will, and the burden of proof lies with the one claiming determinism is true.
t_w said:
There is evidence your actions are caused. For example, someone slaughtering your entire family would almost certainly cause you to cry. The action of crying is clearly caused by the death of your family.
I'm afraid that's very poor reasoning. But we can test it better. Surely you would say that our hunger causes us to eat. So all we have to do is find someone that can not eat. If hunger causes people to eat is a claim, then it's falsifiable by a hungry man not eating when given the opportunity.
t_w said:
No-one I have ever spoken to on the matter has ever thought such a thing. Do you have a link backing up your claim?
A number of people define free will as the ability to do whatever (similar to what the common definition of omnipotent says). And then also a number of people believe that omnipotence means that God can do illogical things, such as make a squared circle. I'm just making people understand that I'm using the more common version of the notion of free will and not suggesting that someone with free will has the ability to "jump over the moon".
I'm sure you can google and find some people making this claim. It does pop up here now and then.
t_w said:
You think that because something is unusual it is unpredictable. You do know that if I had a deterministic model of your brain, and knew all information about it, and all information about external factors that could influence you, I could completely predict what you say or do(excluding random causes, which are contrary to free will anyway).
I understand you believe this... it's just a baseless claim. And there is just extremely poor evidence to back it up.
But again... I'm claiming that the cause of the action starts with the people (as is the default view). You are suggesting that there is an additional cause, which means you are burdened with provided evidence for that claim.
As for your one example of the fact that I may cry if you murder my family... my view, that the cause of the action originates with the person performing the action, also supports the idea that people may cry if they learn about that act. My view also supports that they may laugh, they may dance, they may ask how much money can they get, they may act in a completely random and unpredictable manner. If my view is correct then we'll expect to see that wide variety of behavior -- and sure enough we do. But my view certainly supports the idea that people can have common desires, feelings, and so forth. So if most people cry, then it is still perfectly within the middle of my view. If
all people break down and cry the instant they here about their family being murdered, then the evidence in this case would support your view.
I remember a discussion on this forum I was having with someone about a year ago on free will. He also was suggesting that our actions are caused by forces outside of ourselves. I asked him to say something strange like, "That chicken tastes like a poptart". And he indulged me and said it. And then sure enough he claimed that I caused him to say it. It was pretty funny to me.
The deterministic view also fails (to me) for a less scientific and yet stronger view that's simply harder to describe. And so of course I'm not going to describe or debate it very much here. But to keep it short, I will simply say that the facts simply don't seem to add up when someone says that the devil made them do it. Similarly, the facts don't seem to add up when someone says that the video game made them do it. And I say it's less scientific, but in reality, it's far more scientific but not as formal in it's methodology for how we come to those conclusions. If video games really cause kids to harm others, then we should see virtually all kids who play video games out there beating up and shooting up schools. If someone wants to claim that if you add this chemical to that chemical then this reaction will take place, then that's great because we can test that. If we try it a number of times and it doesn't happen, then we've just falsified the claim. It's a similar thing to when people suggest that something has caused some person to act a certain way. We need to see it almost always happen in order to reasonably happen. If someone cries that it's too complex to predict, then that's fine, but they need to understand that it's as plausible as me saying that I can cause it to rain, but it's just too complex to measure. The deterministic view has a serious credibility problem. Someone can claim its their fate to do such and such all they want and that they had no choice in the matter... but it simply seems to disagree with every bit of evidence I see in my own life and in the people around me. And virtually everyone talks as if we did have free will. Before I could reasonably believe in determinism, I would first have to someone come to believe that everyone is under some grand illusion first. It's like coming to believe that we're inside of the matrix.
