Philosophical Vegan Forum

I do not believe that it exists due to the fact that we are slaves to do what we want and have no choice to do anything other than that which is already pre-determined by our genetics and our environment.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: ↑Mon Apr 02, 2018 6:57 am I do not believe that it exists due to the fact that we are slaves to do what we want and have no choice to do anything other than that which is already pre-determined by our genetics and our environment.

It's funny, since if you go with a lazy definition of the free will "doing what you want", then your reasoning is self-contradictory. Anyway, it's excercise in semantics, even if we have a free will (whatever it means), you may frame it like this: "We are slaves to our (freely made, lol) decisions", so it's not very useful.
I'll go with "yes" with a load of asterisks, just because determinism is so scientifically outdated, but if there was an option "gimme a definition to work with", I would consider picking it

mkm wrote: ↑Tue Apr 03, 2018 4:33 am

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: ↑Mon Apr 02, 2018 6:57 am I do not believe that it exists due to the fact that we are slaves to do what we want and have no choice to do anything other than that which is already pre-determined by our genetics and our environment.

It's funny, since if you go with a lazy definition of the free will "doing what you want", then your reasoning is self-contradictory. Anyway, it's excercise in semantics, even if we have a free will (whatever it means), you may frame it like this: "We are slaves to our (freely made, lol) decisions", so it's not very useful.
I'll go with "yes" with a load of asterisks, just because determinism is so scientifically outdated, but if there was an option "gimme a definition to work with", I would consider picking it

Let us define free will as the idea that human beings are able to make any possible choice and as such it would have been possible for us to choose a path other than the one we have already chosen.

Are our decisions freely made when they have already been determined by things outside of our control? Do I have a choice in whether or not I eat a banana if it has already been determined by the fact that I do not like the taste?

And even if I do eat the banana in spite of the fact that I do not like the taste, this is already determined by my other desires (e.g. wanting to get Potassium, wanting to convince myself that I am truly free, etc.) outweighing the fact that I do not like the taste, which have already been determined, again, by factors outside of my control.

Imagine if I hypnotise you to have a desire to do nothing other than to be my slave and do what I ask you to do. Are you free? From your perspective, you are doing what you want to do out of your own free choice. However the fact is an external factor, the hypnosis, has already determined your fate. So why is it different when everything we do is already determined by what we want which has already been determined by factors outside of our control?

I do not believe that there is any way we could have chosen any other path than the one we have already chosen because of this.

Zzzzzzz (many zzzz),

I still see it as a lack of imagination. Let's say that I wake up in the morning and have to make a decision - tea or coffee? I drank coffee today, but I can imagine myself drinking tea without any contradictions. Clearly there waren't any physical or logical obstacles, and I can't see that anything other than my will determined the outcome. Or in other words - I believe that you could get a copy of our world, where the only difference is that I drank tea instead of coffee, and that world could be the one we live in as well.

mkm wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 6:03 am Zzzzzzz (many zzzz),

I still see it as a lack of imagination. Let's say that I wake up in the morning and have to make a decision - tea or coffee? I drank coffee today, but I can imagine myself drinking tea without any contradictions. Clearly there waren't any physical or logical obstacles, and I can't see that anything other than my will determined the outcome. Or in other words - I believe that you could get a copy of our world, where the only difference is that I drank tea instead of coffee, and that world could be the one we live in as well.

I don't believe that this is the case, there could have been a whole multitude of factors influencing your decision to drink coffee instead of tea.

Let's say that I wanted a snack, and I had a celery stick which I can put hummus on, and I also had a bag of crisps (or "potato chips" as they are referred to in Yank English), and I like both celery with hummus and crisps exactly equally, and am not concerned about the fact that the celery is healthier than the crisps. If, by choosing the celery, am I acting in accordance with my will which has a free choice?

I do not believe so. If I see the celery and the hummus before I see the crisps, I may have already started fantasizing about how wonderful celery and hummus tastes and how much I would love to eat it, that by the time my eyes dart to the bag of crisps, the very idea of eating anything other than celery and hummus seems incomprehensible.

Likewise, you may have seen your coffee machine and started fantasizing about how wonderful coffee is, so that even if you like tea exactly equally to coffee, you could not have possibly drank tea. Or there could have been any other reason you chose to drink coffee.

In short, I do not believe there is any possibility that you could have drank tea. A series of events had led up to today's morning that had already predetermined your decision to drink coffee, and that decision to drink coffee will influence everything you do from now on, adding to the fact that you, like myself and everybody else in the world, have no free choice and are essentially a robot whose destiny has already been programmed into them from the beginning.

Why is determinism scientifically outdated?

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 3:28 pm I don't believe that this is the case, there could have been a whole multitude of factors influencing your decision to drink coffee instead of tea.

Let's say that I wanted a snack, and I had a celery stick which I can put hummus on, and I also had a bag of crisps (or "potato chips" as they are referred to in Yank English), and I like both celery with hummus and crisps exactly equally, and am not concerned about the fact that the celery is healthier than the crisps. If, by choosing the celery, am I acting in accordance with my will which has a free choice?

You should propably starve to death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass , if you like both equally

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 3:28 pm I do not believe so. If I see the celery and the hummus before I see the crisps, I may have already started fantasizing about how wonderful celery and hummus tastes and how much I would love to eat it, that by the time my eyes dart to the bag of crisps, the very idea of eating anything other than celery and hummus seems incomprehensible.

Likewise, you may have seen your coffee machine and started fantasizing about how wonderful coffee is, so that even if you like tea exactly equally to coffee, you could not have possibly drank tea. Or there could have been any other reason you chose to drink coffee.

In short, I do not believe there is any possibility that you could have drank tea. A series of events had led up to today's morning that had already predetermined your decision to drink coffee, and that decision to drink coffee will influence everything you do from now on, adding to the fact that you, like myself and everybody else in the world, have no free choice and are essentially a robot whose destiny has already been programmed into them from the beginning.

You assume that everything should have a cause that is different from itself, e.g. that something pushed me to desiring coffee more than tea. In other words, you assume determinism and then argue that there is no free will. I agree, that with such an assumption you are right, but I don't see a good reason (not mentioning the proof!) to assume that. If there is no proof for one or the other (determinism vs non-determinism), I go with more pleasant one and I really like to think that I have influence on something.

Cirion Spellbinder wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 3:39 pm Why is determinism scientifically outdated?

Due to quantum mechanics. Consensus is that the fact, that probabilistic methods best describe what happens at a small scale, indeed reflects the probabilistic nature of things. So there is at least "determinism + random", whatever it means. You may want check EPR paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox). There are other explanations brought by Einstein, who didn't agree with quantum physics at all, for example theory of "hidden parameters", but it breaks other things, which physicist really want not to be broken
Anyway, pure determinism is too simplistic if you look at the current state of physics.

mkm wrote: ↑Thu Apr 05, 2018 5:28 am You assume that everything should have a cause that is different from itself, e.g. that something pushed me to desiring coffee more than tea. In other words, you assume determinism and then argue that there is no free will. I agree, that with such an assumption you are right, but I don't see a good reason (not mentioning the proof!) to assume that. If there is no proof for one or the other (determinism vs non-determinism), I go with more pleasant one and I really like to think that I have influence on something.

I believe that my assumption that something has pushed you to desire coffee more than tea is a rational one. The reason for this is that if I look at any event that I appear to have had a free choice in doing, I can find some reason for why I actually did it.

If you think back to today's morning, what did you drink? You may have drank coffee, tea, juice, something else or nothing at all. If you do indeed have free will, then you will not be able to find a reason for why you made that choice and you could have drank anything else just as easily. But was this the case? When I think back to everything I have ever ate or drank in my life, I can find a reason for why I did that. For instance, yesterday I had a vegan bacon sandwich. I was determined to eat this sandwich since my birth. I ate vegan bacon because I am genetically inclined to like the taste of bacon but I had vegan bacon instead of regular bacon because I am an ostrovegan, and I am an ostrovegan due to being educated by the cruelty performed on innocent animals by the meat industry, and I was educated on this due to meeting people without my life who are vegan or vegetarian both on the internet and in the real world, and I chose to accept their lifestyle due to being distressed that I am contributing to an industry which hurts innocent animals, and I was distressed because I was raised by my parents since birth to show compassion to all living beings.

So, here, we see just one example of how events long long ago which was almost certainly sparked by other events and outside of my control influenced what I had for my lunch yesterday. This is but one example, and I can not think of anything I ate or drank in my life, or even anything I have done in my life, that was not influenced by factors outside of my control. I do not believe that anybody else can.

Now, I understand you may still not be convinced. You may say "I had orange juice today and I could just have easily had grapefruit juice if I had so wished, and I can not think of any external factor which would have influenced me to have orange juice". If so, here's an experiment you can try tomorrow morning (and please feel free to amend it to make it more suitable to the sorts of beverages you might drink in the morning). When you go to get your drink, as you have picked the juice carton up and are about to pour yourself a glass of juice, ask yourself "Did nothing influence me in picking this carton over that carton?" and you may realize that you picked the carton up because it was the closest one to you, or for any other reason. And then you can do this with every event throughout the day! Try and see if you can find anything that you do that hasn't been influenced by some factor outside of your control.

Now, what I predict will happen is that you will find external factors for everything you notice yourself doing. Now, of course, this does not mean necessarily that everything you do will always be determined by external factors. However, it still provides overwhelming evidence for that very idea.

In short, to my knowledge everything anybody has ever observed themselves doing can be traced back to their desires, which in turn can be traced back to their genetics and environment. Because I have yet to hear from anybody who can recall an event in their lives which can't be traced back to their desires, or to experience such an event for myself, I must conclude that there can't be such an event, that everything that has ever happened is the result of things outside of human beings' control, and that humans are essentially robots with a planned path in place, programmed to do whatever it is they are destined to do. This is in the same way that if I flipped a coin many, many times and it always landed on heads, and if I spoke to many other people who flipped that same coin that it always landed on heads, I could easily conclude that the coin was rigged to always land on heads, and that there was no way it could have possibly landed on tails.

As I commented in other topic, the problem for making a choice is that it looks like for making a choice, you should first make infinite choices.

The reason I am writing this is because I wanted to! But did I want to want to write this? If I am to be free, I should have had the possibility to want to do other thing. But you can see that the regression goes to infinity. Did I want to want to want to write this? It is a huge problem of free will that I don't see how to answer.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: ↑Thu Apr 05, 2018 10:27 am Now, I understand you may still not be convinced. You may say "I had orange juice today and I could just have easily had grapefruit juice if I had so wished, and I can not think of any external factor which would have influenced me to have orange juice".

That is not my claim at all. I don't say that nothing influences my judgement, I just say that in many situations I think my will has a decisive role.

esquizofrenico wrote: ↑Thu Apr 05, 2018 11:52 am As I commented in other topic, the problem for making a choice is that it looks like for making a choice, you should first make infinite choices.

The reason I am writing this is because I wanted to! But did I want to want to write this? If I am to be free, I should have had the possibility to want to do other thing. But you can see that the regression goes to infinity. Did I want to want to want to write this? It is a huge problem of free will that I don't see how to answer.

I see it as a another reiteration of "abusing" cause-and-effect. If you assume hard version of causality principle (and you need it to initiate regressus ad infinitum), that everything must have its cause, you just assume determinism, and it kills free will. It shouldnt be surprising, that assuming the opposite of free will kills free will