 |
|
Rogan Josh
|
|
Of course free-will is a religious concept. It is incompatible with science, has no experimental evidence for or against it and cannot be proven. How more 'religious' could it be?
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Kuciwalker
|
 |
of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Oncle Boris
I think you guys have been uselessly picking on Ramo. No, anything non-physical is not necessarily religious. Free will, however, clearly and definitely doesn't fit into maths or any other a priori science. Ramo's statement may have been too short and prematurate, but it was obviously right at its root. Free will is a religious concept, as it is based on the existence of a non-physical, immortal soul. Is that so hard to understand? |
1. science is, by definition, not a priori, since it deals with EMPIRICAL fact
2. free will can be deduced a priori, thus it is a priori, as much as math
3. free will != immortal soul! Why do I have to keeps saying this! Free will = I make my own decisions.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ned
|
 |
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Not if you're looking at where the idea originates.
Ned:
You have the relentless ability to annoy everybody when you post.
If you look at the Judges who ruled in favour of R v. Wade, would you classify any of them as conservatives? |
Well, the Judge who wrote the opinion was a Republican!
Republicans, as I said, value liberty. The right of privacy is an essential aspect of Liberty. The farther right one goes, the more one wants the government to dissappear and leave one alone. Libertarians are on the extreme right.
Liberalism has always valued equality over liberty - and the source of this ethos is Christianity.
The label conservative is applied to the American Right who are a both ideologically Libertarians and religious. This puts them in internal conflict when it comes to abortion, drugs, etc. The American Left, though, have the same problem. They value equality over liberty except when it come to personal liberty.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ned
|
|
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
|
|
Well John T., the Republicans are constantly being criticized for being inconsistent. They say they value liberty and less intrusion by government, but this seems the only apply the things economic and not things social. This is a valid criticism, in my opinion. The source of this inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, is the fact that most Republicans also seemed to be religious. The far right, the Libertarians, are at least consistent because they extend their concepts of right and wrong to personal liberty as well.
The left in the United States also has the same problem, but in reverse. They seem to want to have the government involved in all aspects of our economic life, but when it comes to personal liberties, they want the government to leave them alone. Further, the left advocates the Christian ideals of equality, but they are antireligious. They deny that Christianity or religion in general has anything of value to offer humanity.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ned
|
|
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
|
|
Also, I find it interesting that is almost "common knowledge" today that only Democrats are in favor of civil rights. My wife, who does not come from this country, was shocked and surprised to find that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. Many, perhaps even some on this forum, believe that Earl Warren, the man behind Brown v. Board of Education, was a Democrat. He was not. He was a Republican appointed by Dwight Eisenhower. Brennan, the man who wrote Roe v. Wade, was a Republican. It was Senator Dirksen, a Republican, who led the fight in the Senate for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was Richard Nixon, a Republican, who began Affirmative-action.
And, as I have pointed out before in other threads, the Massachusetts Supreme Court that just gave as the ruling in favor of gay marriage, is composed of six Republicans and one Democrat.
All this goes to show is that Republicans can be and in fact are in favor of civil rights and equal treatment of all. But more than this, Republicans have been in the center of fundamental change in this area since Lincoln.
Why? Because Republicans are on the whole religious and because of this truly believe in the equal rights of all.
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Oncle Boris
|
 |
Once in a brown moon
Aug 2001
time: 00:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by skywalker
1. science is, by definition, not a priori, since it deals with EMPIRICAL fact |
That depends on the definition of science you use. Most would believe maths to be a science.
quote:
2. free will can be deduced a priori, thus it is a priori, as much as math
|
It can't. No one ever was able to put a definite, rational argument to prove it. Even Kant admitted it. The only thing we can know is that we have to ASSUME we have free will if we are somehow to act.
Your caps are not helping you. No philosophy teacher would ever say that 'making a decision' is sufficient to believe in free will. I won't argue that we are 'making decisions'- that is a truism anyway.
Say there are two parallel universes, at the state of day 0 (big bang). They are exactly identical. Do they evolve in a different way?
(BTW, I know there can't be two universes. This a mere abstract hypothesis).
quote:
3. free will != immortal soul! Why do I have to keeps saying this! Free will = I make my own decisions. |
The whole point was to say that since free will appeared at a time where humanity had no idea at all of the brain functions, it first originated as a religious concept, which stipulated we had a metaphysical, immortal soul.
No one believes in that anymore. You can still try to defend free will from a scientific, physical perspective, but most scientists are not wasting time doing it, because determinism is becoming increasingly plausible.
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Urban Ranger
|
|
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by skywalker
READ MY FRIGGING POSTS - I'VE F***ING PROVED THAT I HAVE FREE WILL
FREE WILL = I MAKE MY OWN DECISIONS
I MAKE MY OWN DECICISIONS
I HAVE FREE WILL
HOW F***KING HARD IS THAT TO UNDERSTAND? |
Stop yelling.
No, you have proved nothing. Freewill is the concept that we humans can somehow make decisions contrary to (deterministic) physical laws. Mainstream Christian theologicans since Thomas Aquinas have been arguing for freewill because that is the only way to make the idea of "sin" stick*.
Let me explain this a bit further. There is no reason not to believe that your decisions cannot be predicted with sufficient knowledge of you. For example, you probably can guess what sort of decisions your friends are going to make, and the better you know them, the more accurate these predictions are.
Ultimately, then, with a 100% knowledge of somebody and all the sensory inputs this person receives at any moment in time, a sufficiently fast computer can predict, with 100% accuracy, what this person is going to do the right moment.
In other words, your decisions are determined by your phyiscal self and the aggregate of your sensory inputs. Thus, you are just a very sophisticated computer running a very complex algorithm.
Where is this freewill?
* If this world is entirely deterministic, with the Christian god as the first mover, all our actions would be completely out of our control. Without the ability to hold humans responsible for our actions, we cannot commit any sin whatsoever.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Agathon
|
 |
Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by skywalker
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Don't be deliberately obtuse. If we want to know how an idea came into being and reached its present form we look at its history.
Free will doesn't make sense given the scientific world view. We can have a view of free will where my decisions are caused by my beliefs and desires, but that's not the kind of freedom most people associate with free will. Historically, some people have posited an immaterial soul to explain why our desires and decisions are not subject to ordinary causality. |
Well, that's pointless, because ANYTHING is either subject to causality or not subject to causality. If it isn't subject to causality, it is probabilistic, if it is subject to causality, it is deterministic. I don't understand how my definition of free will isn't the one most people hold - making their own decisions. |
But making free will probabalistic doesn't solve the problem either, because then you are no more free than a radioactive particle as I pointed out in a previous post. Your decision making is still subject to physical laws. Most Free will theorists think that having free will is incompatible with any sort of deterministic physical theory, even a probabilistic one.
However, there are others, like Aristotle, who are compatibilists. They believe that free will is compatible with determinism because we mean by Free will a certain kind of causal determination rather than a lack of causality.
quote:
quote:
And ordinarily that means punishing the person whose beliefs and desires caused him to commit the crime rather than someone who did it out of ignorance or under duress. It's valuable to be able to distinguish causes in this way because we don't end up killing or locking up people who are not likely to do bad things in future. |
If you say so... |
Don't be a cretin. This is the best explanation of how the notion of responsibility came into being. It is beneficial to the community to be able to sort out cases of bad character from accidental cases. Anything else requires appeal to mysterious entities or transcendent forces like free will.
quote:
quote:
It is one thing to give that account and another to suppose there is some magical thing called free will which removes my decisions and mental states from causality. |
Where have I stated that free will is not subject to causality? In fact, I believe I specifically stated that it was... |
Then you, like me are a compatibilist, And that means that you reject the incompatibilist view of free will which is that which religious people hold.
quote:
quote:
The former is consistent with a "deterrence" view of punishment, the latter with a "retributivist" view of punishment. Conservatives are almost all retributivists. |
That's a stupid, blanket statement, but it brings up a good question - what's wrong with retribution? |
It doesn't make any sense. That's what's wrong with it. Have a look at the last death penalty thread to see why. Retributivism requires incompatibilist free will to work. That's why most retributivists are Kantians, because Kant correctly surmised that you needed free will (in the incompatibilist fashion) to make it work, because you, and only you cause your decisions(as I said before, he also pointed out that this view of human agency required God to make sense of it - he was a smart guy).
On the compatibilist view, your beliefs cause your decisions and your beliefs are in turn caused by perception, thinking (a causal process), and social conditioning (a causal process). That is anathema to retributivists because their justification of punishment is that the criminal chose to do his crime freely and without any external cause and that is what entitles us to do the same to him. Without an incompatibilist account of free will, this justification of punishment cannot be mounted since there are many things which cause people to commit crimes. The deterrence theorist doesn't have to worry about this, since he only cares about the consequences (as I pointed out the in the previous post.
quote:
quote:
No. I argue that they came up with it because it is required to solve certain problems that theism creates. That is not an ad hominem argument. |
You are using it to say that free will is religious (which is an attack on free will and the arguments supporting it, IMO  ) by attacking those who posited it. |
No. I've pointed out that Free Will in the sense in which most modern people think of it, only really became of concern with the Christian notion of divine judgement. Earlier worries along similar lines (i.e. the Stoics) were also caused by problems with God; but these weren't as pressing since they didn't have any practical import, whereas the matter of divine judgement does for Christians. Ben got this straightaway, why didn't you.
Secondly, I've argued here and elsewhere, that conservative attitudes towards responsibility implicitly accept the Christian view of free will. But that view rests on some sort of metaphysical extravagance (the idea of supernatural causes, souls, or exceptions to the physical laws of the universe) which is at odds with contemporary science.
So I'm pointing out two things. (1) Incompatibilist Free Will (i.e. what conservatives assume about it) is not compatible with the contemporary scientific world view.
(2) It is compatible with the Christian world view and developed historically from that view. So whether they know it or not, conservatives are using a concept that really only makes sense within the religious world view.
Now Ben picked up on this immediately and sees that it is a double edged sword. He can now use free will to argue for the Christian world view. So both Christians and atheists benefit from this argument.
A subsequent argument is that, because we live in a secular state, religious doctrine should not in any fashion infect the law. Hence certain kinds of laws that rest on the essentially religious view of free will, should be repealed. Of course, Ben will disagree on this one.
quote:
Ok, I don't know about that. A lot of my knowledge of philosophy comes from Sophie's World and philosophypages.com |
And it shows.
quote:
quote:
Do your beliefs and desires determine your actions? If so, what determines them? Are you a physical creature subject to causal laws? If so, how do you fit free will in (the old Quantum mechanics argument doesn't work because then your free will is no more under your control than the decay of a radioactive particle is under its control). |
Yes, physical laws, yes, my mind is controlling my actions. |
Then you are a compatibilist - conservative views of free will are incompatibilist.
quote:
quote:
Free will is a ridiculous concept. If our will really is free then why aren't we surprised by our own decisions? How is it that we can largely predict what other people are going to do? |
Free will != spontaneity. Free will = control over your own actions. |
But if your actions are the result of physical processes in your brain and these processes are determined by physical laws, then your decisions are subject to physical laws and there is no real spontenaity, other than possibly the same sort of spontenaity that radioactive particles have, and we do not call that free will.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Caligastia
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
What happened to the "free marketplace of ideas"? |
That's just it - it's not a free marketplace. Conservative groups are discriminated against by college administrators.
|
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:33.
Apolyton Time is 00:33. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
14-02-2004 14:01
. What suffers there is the fire service... see where I'm going with this? 
.
|