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To become other-oriented requires an inner impulse to reject our instinctive behaviors.
On what basis do we freely choose?.....
Without an impulse to reject it, we cannot be persuaded that our instinct to be selfish is disordered. To become other-oriented requires an inner impulse to reject our instinctive behaviors. Christians call that impulse God's grace. All of us have that grace whether we are believers or not. We freely choose to accept the grace or reject it.
The only instinctive impulse we have by nature is that inherited selfish gene.This certainly seems circular. If I may... I'll just change two words.
"To become other-oriented requires an instinctive impulse to reject our instinctive impulses.
The argument is not that there's no free will because all our decisions happen on a sub conscious level. A lot of them do, but a conscious decision doesn't equate to free will. We may well know why we decide on something. At an obvious level, we hand our wallet over to prevent being shot. That's obviously determined. But you may say that that's not a choice because you were compelled.Can we change a determinate, subconscious process into a conscious, free will process simply by being aware of, and consciously compensating for that process?
We're not a blank slate when we're born. But what we become is a combination of nature and nurture. That's a given. If you have two sisters and one has a different mother then half their genes will be different. That will affect them to a significant degree. Have one mother drug and alcohol free and the other a regular drug user and borderline alcoholic and their brain development in the womb will be different. Give one a good diet as she grows and the other a bad one and it will affect their mental health in different ways. Bring one up in Gazza and one in Sydney and you'll end up with people with different views and different outlooks. Give one a good education and the other not and one is going to be able to make better decisions about her future because she'll have more options.What do we inherit and what do we acquire that give us out affections and attitudes?
I would add.... in a given moment we are the inheritors of every inclination we have, be they genetic, environmental, consciously pursued, or even by Gods grace.....What do we inherit and what do we acquire that give us out affections and attitudes?....
And I haven't had breakfast yet so my blood sugar is quite low.
The argument is not that there's no free will because all our decisions happen on a sub conscious level. A lot of them do, but a conscious decision doesn't equate to free will.
Yikes! I had 22 to lose. 15 down, 7 to go.Then again I'm the only person that I know of that has actually fasted for forty days. I just wanted to see if I could do it, and trust me, I didn't have any extra body fat to begin with. Got down to 102 pounds. For years I fasted one day per week. I even went three months eating just one meal per week. I'm the type of person that just loves a challenge.
I might clarify that. If you lose all you memories then there will still be a person 'in there' wondering where they went. But you won't be 'you' in the sense of the person you were. You won't know where you live, whether you have a family, whether you are a good guy or not.Here's where you and I have a slight difference of opinion. I'm not convinced that my memories equate to 'me'. Memories can be very fleeting things, but even without them my awareness of 'Me' still persists. My memories serve to give context to me, and they are what I think of when I think of me... but they're not 'me'. "Me" is that thing which contemplates what it means to be me.
This is simply dualism. That there's another you apart from the person formed by your genetics, your upbringing, your education (even your blood sugar level) that is separate from everything. But isn't that 'you' governed by your beliefs? Your culture? The physical make up of your frontal cortex and amygdala? Is it not affected by your low blood sugar?To me... "Me" is that thing which contemplates its own existence, and is aware that it's aware. The memories of me, and you, and everything else are just things that give context to me... but they're not me. So to my way of thinking, there may come a point when that contemplative part of me supersedes all of those 'external' influences and simply acts according to its will.
And all of those influences, all that went into making you as a person...you can operate independently of them? I won't leave that as an open question. I'll answer it myself. No, you can't. It's because you are the product of a million and more different things that you can't. If you say that they all go to constitute what is 'you' then you can't separate yourself from 'you' just to make a decision.So you may be right, I may be the product of a million different things, but those million different things constitute me, and in spite of all of those subconscious influences I have the capacity to override them...
It seems like it to me as well....because that seems like free will to me.
And ... ? It seems your definition of inherited conditions equates to all of those things that happen to us. We seldom if ever have a choice as to what may happen to us. I agree.All those conditions are what they inherited. They had no choice over any of them.
All goodness comes from God. In the moment of choice involving a moral act, God provides the actual grace to choose the good. Conscience -- reason, illumined by Omniscience, informs my free will. We are free to accept or reject His grace. To reject grace is to sin.I would add.... in a given moment we are the inheritors of every inclination we have, be they genetic, environmental, consciously pursued, or even by Gods grace.
What I'm looking for in "free will" is the capacity to act out of anything other than our inherited self - because we cannot change that. It was formed in the irrevocable past, right up to "just now". And if we cannot change those inclinations upon which we now act, then how are we "free"?
At that moment when you decide whether to accept or reject that grace, you are dependant on all the factors I mentioned, which accumulate in an irrevocable past, for the impetus to make that decision. There is no other basis for decision making aside from the nature of the person you have become, and thats already set at that moment.All goodness comes from God. In the moment of choice involving a moral act, God provides the actual grace to choose the good. Conscience -- reason, illumined by Omniscience, informs my free will. We are free to accept or reject His grace. To reject grace is to sin.
At that moment when you decide whether to accept or reject that grace, you are dependant on all the factors I mentioned, which accumulate in an irrevocable past, for the impetus to make that decision. There is no other basis for decision making aside from the nature of the person you have become, and thats already set at that moment.
So where's the actual freedom in that?
So there's two of you. One that is a composite of all the conditions that served to form your personality. And the other one that can ignore all the ticks and traits and impulses and desires, needs, wants and preferences. One that sits above all these all too human characteristics and manages to make decisions in some sort of of personality free zone?And ... ? It seems your definition of inherited conditions equates to all of those things that happen to us. We seldom if ever have a choice as to what may happen to us. I agree.
However, we always have a choice as to what comes from us. While we are affected by externalities and, by some, even affected physically, our choices are not dictated by either.
Thats similar to where Im at. But the determinist would say that the decision to pursue avenues of rational thought and your capacities to do it are also entirely dependant on the nature of the person you are at that moment. And there is no independant meta-you who can jump outside you and change that.I'd aver for the idea that one form of freedom is realizing that there may be treks of discovery, or of rational thought, that have yet to be engaged and explored. Upon that realization, one can then make an authentic choice to engage those other treks that have been avoided, neglected, or simply unknown. Pascal would aver for this approach. So would Rolfe King.
I'm with you here too. But this is an intuition I hold rather than an argument. And I'm looking for a solid argument. The closest I have is: we simply dont know enough about human consciousness to be making such strong statements at this point - which is not an argument either way but more of a call to stop arguing for now.Personally, as an existentialist, I'm very suspicious of Absolute Ideas, especially indefinite ones, being passed off by anyone as absolutely irresistible forces in our lives, but I think a huge problem in the tension between free-will and determinism is that both of these ideas suffer from the same exaggeration and hyper-inflation of imputed meaning, which neither of them clearly have.
So you didn't consider these particular paths of investigation before. But now you do. So you've now added them to the list of factors that will determine your decision. That monstrously large list of factors that was doing that in the first place has simply got slightly larger.I'd aver for the idea that one form of freedom is realizing that there may be treks of discovery, or of rational thought, that have yet to be engaged and explored. Upon that realization, one can then make an authentic choice to engage those other treks that have been avoided, neglected, or simply unknown.
So there's two of you. One that is a composite of all the conditions that served to form your personality. And the other one that can ignore all the ticks and traits and impulses and desires, needs, wants and preferences. One that sits above all these all too human characteristics and manages to make decisions in some sort of of personality free zone?
And what do you end up with? Do you end up deciding what you personally prefer to do? What you want to do? Of course. And were these decisions random? Of course not. They were based on you what you wanted.
But did you skip breakfast? Blood sugar levels, as discussed earlier, will affect your decisions. You have no control over that. You wouldn't even realise it's affecting you. Was your mother depressed for some reaon when she was carrying you? Maybe she didn't tell you. But it would have affected the growth of your amygdala. And you'd have no idea if it has been affected and no control over the results or how it would affect you and the decisions you make.
'Prenatal maternal depression is associated with structural changes in the amygdala, which in turn, is predictive of an increase in behavioral problems.' Larger Amygdala Volume Mediates the Association Between Prenatal Maternal Stress and Higher Levels of Externalizing Behaviors: Sex Specific Effects in Project Ice Storm - PubMed
Was she stressed at the some point when you pregnant?
'Neurobiology studies indicate that prenatal maternal stress can significantly affect the structure and function of the prefrontal cortex due to the rapid brain development during pregnancy and due to the high density of glucocorticoid receptors in the prefrontal cortex.' Maternal perinatal depression and child neurocognitive development: A relationship still to be clarified.
Yet...
'Human studies also suggest that maternal sensitivity and higher socioeconomic status may attenuate the effects of prenatal stress on established neurocognitive and neuroendocrine mediators of risk for psychopathology...' https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322322018534
So whether she was or wasn't will have had a direct impact on your ability to think clearly and make decisions.
You think you are making decisions free from any influence at all. But the more you examine the circumstances of your life and how you have been brought up you'll discover some of the monstrous number of factors which were entirely beyond your control and unknown to you determining what you do.
So you didn't consider these particular paths of investigation before. But now you do. So you've now added them to the list of factors that will determine your decision. That monstrously large list of factors that was doing that in the first place has simply got slightly larger.
Y'know, Bradskii, I don't think we have to subscribe to absolutist language in order to promote, even robustly, the inherent idea that there needs to be, that there SHOULD BE ethically, a lot more empathy put forward by various people of the sake of those who, like some of us, struggle so much psychologically in this world.
While I generally like the direction that Sapolsky is pushing for where empathy and social reform in treatment of other people is concerned, especially since I've already been reading Bessel Van Der Kolk for the past year, I don't think we have to semantically gerrymander the meaning of "determine" --- especially when it's an amorphous term to begin with----in order to do push for this reform. Doing so might have a rubber-band effect in the attempt to denote the whole of neuro-science in the way that Sapolsky is doing.
What flavor of free will are you referring to?.....More specifically, I've never really believed in free-will as it is so described by so many.
What flavor of free will are you referring to?
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