Its a concept I have been thinkin about for sometime now. My theory is that depending on how we define "free will" a person may or may not have free will no matter if there is a creator or not. It is my assertion that with enough information we can always determine exactly what a person will do regardless of any number of choices he has. By merely lookin at a person utility we can always know exactly what a person will do.

what do yall think. Using this reason we can obviously include a creator in this argument as when we take the creator out we see that the choices will be the same.

You can include a creator in anything you want, its a non-falsifiable hypothesis, which is why there can never be a scientific proof of a creator.

Free will? Absolutely.

and you define free will as what?

the ability of a sentient being to make choices

and you would agree that everybody makes choices that lead to the highest utility for themselves correct? (utility is defined as whatever they feel is the "best" of the choices. It can be a wide variety of things but as long as it is the "best" then they will always choose it)

Your defninition of utility is circular. "everybody makes choices that lead to whatever they feel is the best of choices" is what results when you substitute your definiton of utility into your proposition (and correct the English)

So many choices are based on nothing more than a whim.

Take poker for example. I could play 50 tournaments and have exactly 4000 chips with 7 people left in every single one, be in the exact same position regarding other players stacks, etc, and get dealt 74 suited on the button in all 50 games, and it's folded to me. Probably 5 times out of 50 I raise there, and 45 times I fold. The 5 times I steal it is purely on a whim. Obviously I will always be doing a little stealing, but exactly when is based on the action level of the table, etc....but also on a whim. How could something like that be predicted acurately?

My guess is that he is trying to get us to agree that since all decisions will be those that maximize utility, and if we have a perfect "utility" matrix for the individual then we can predict exactly what he will do. But if it can be pre-determined then it isnt truly free.

The problem with this argument is, of course, that the "utility matrix" itself is changeable and subject to free will (as you said..maybe to be changed on a whim"), so the basic premise is faulty.

I also love the Newtonian based argument that there can be no free will because if the positions and velocities of everything are known then Newtons laws tell you where they will always be...ie no free will.

Even ignoring quantum effects (that I dont believe are applicable to matter big enough to be visible to us anyway), the positions and velocities of everything are only predictable when not subjected to external forces. At the brain chemistry level the act of making a choice instantiates an electrical or chemical force, disrupting whatever the predicted motions would be.

Those anti-free will arguments hold no water in light of our rudimentary but growing knowledge of brain function and the chemeical/electrical effects of thinking.

With arguments like this I gain more appreaition of those last two Matrix films every day.

Uh, are you forgetting Newton's second law? We can also know the acceleration of an object based on the forces acting on it. Of course we can predict the position and velocities of objects that are subject to external forces! How else would we ever do anything in science?

I'm not arguing that the motion of any chemical or neuron in the brain is in practice ever knowable, but in theory in a classical world it is. The argument is that if we can know the nature of all forces in the universe and the initial conditions (initial positions, initial velocities) of every object in the universe, we can in theory know the resulting positions and velocities throughout the span of the universe. Because we can know them in theory, then our future actions must be already determined.

Again, this is assuming a purely classical world and it assumes that on could ever know the exact nature of every force, the exact positions and velocities of every particle simultaneously (take that, Heisenberg), etc.

Personally, I waver slightly on the subject, but for right now I'd say that I don't believe in free will. I guess it's an illusion and more of an emergent behavior, but I'll just leave it at that.

Re the bold:

Only if you know the external forces. Since I am proposing that the "utility matrix" of decisions is always changing, sometimes just by whim, you dont know the specific forces that will act on existing brain "matter" in advance, and if you dont know the forces you cant predict the future positions/velocities.

The circular definition of "utility" (or more precisely the circularity of the hyptothesis that max put forth) is just one problem with it. It also makes the assumption that all decisions are rational (which they arent), ignores the possibility of equal utility, and ignores the possibility of incomplete information to determine utility. Layer quantum uncertainty on top of that (if the processes are small enough for quantum effects to prevail) and the hyptothesis has major problems.

There is a paradox (or self-contradiction) in a belief in no free will, which:

To accept that there is no free will ultimately breaks down to an "everything is illusion" argument, since we certainly live our lives under the "illusion" that we are making decisions.

But if "everything is illusion" and our exercise of free will is part of that illusion, then free will is part of that everything..ie there is free will.

By reductio ad absurdum we are back to there being free will.

I freely (pun intended) admit that the first proposition (no free will is equivalent to "everything is illusion") needs tightening, but I think ultimately it is supportable.

not sure what you are tryin to say here...that is the common definition of utility. It will be what makes a person better off though what that "better off" is will vary from person to person.

and i guess i should correct your spelling... defninition isnt a word, I believe it is definition

I highly doubt you do anything in poker on a whim. Your example is not a good one either for several reasons.

First off, You would only bluff if you felt you could win the pot. So thats not on a whim. It would be a calculated decision. And all we would need to know is your thought process and we coudl know your action well before you made it

Second off, If you did move in without caring, then it would be b/c there is some utility that is higher than being in this game. So again that is not a whim.



So it simply comes down to us being able to understand all that you "know" and we could always accurately predict your movements. Humans are random beings, we dont do random actions. its not very tough to see.

Take flippin a coin. Say it was heads 5 times in a row. Wouldnt you be more likely to say tails? knowing your thoughts would make it very easy to predict yoru actions

I assumed they were fully understood and knowable in my discussion. Of course, they are not fully understood (yet). And, even more damaging, those that are understood are fully quantum mechanical and therefore totally non deterministic (unless one can rig the dice that god uses to dictate motion).



I don't understand this step. Everything isn't an illusion, for there certainly must exist matter and energy somewhere in some universe for we to even have the illusion of free will. It is only free will and consciousness that are illusions.

while most of this is irrelevant to any sort of discussion we had going, I would like to point out the faulty reasoning you use. You say peoples utility changes over time and that therefore ruins my premise. That is in fact right and wrong. A persons utility does change overtime, heck it can change every minute if you would like. But that does nothing to prove anythign I have said wrong.

one minute from now you might learn something that changes your utility. But thats fine, you dont know the future so that line of reasoning is mute. You will still make a decision at this moment based on what is best for your utility.

I guess I should correct your word usage, it is not "mute", it is "moot".

The point on changing utility is that an external observer cannot know that utility in advance when it may change at the instant a decision is made. Your assumption is that you always know the other person's utility, and that faulty assumption is what destroys your premise.

I dont think its that you dont understand the last step, you disagree with the step before. As I said, that needs tightening up but the reasoning goes something like this:

The proposition is that there is no free will.

We perceive that we are making choices...that we have free will, but under the proposition that perception is an illusion.

If that perception of choice, which seems so real, is an illusion, then we cannot trust any of our perceptions.

If we cannot trust any of our perceptions, ie we cannot distinguish between what is real and what is an illusion, then no perception can be counted on as being any more than illusion, and we are reduced to operating under the assumption that everything may be illusion.

But an existence that suffers from the assumption that everything may be illusion provides us no more substance than one in which everything is illusion.

That brings us to the last statement, clarified somewhat:

Once our existence has no reliable substance, and can be treated as if everything is illusion, and free will is one of those illusions, then free will IS part of that existence, which contradicts the orignial premise that there is no free will.

I dont remember if Talbot discusses free will in "Holographic Universe". That is the best discussion of the possiblity that there is no substance, that our perception/interpretation of energy only provides the illusion of substance, that Ive read. After taxes I'll try and dig it out. He would be much more precise about it than I was.

Thanks, that actually helped a lot. How Descartes of you.

Your argument makes a lot of sense. Again, I said that I was still struggling with how I feel on the subject. Frankly, I'm not sure if it'll ever be possible to know for sure. I guess I can only see two ways of resolving the issue:

1) Scientists succeed in totally figuring out all of physics. They conclude that the laws of physics are finite and knowable. From this knowledge, they can determine whether or not free will is compatible with these complete laws.

2) We die, it turns out that there is a god, and we ask him.

Either way, I can't see us figuring it out in my lifetime.

"Here's what I want you to know:

1. Most hands your opponents play are at whim! That's because there are relatively few overwhelmingly strong or weak hands that dictate an exact tactic.

2. Some hands your opponents play at whim are the result of spontaneous decisions about whether to fold, call, or raise!

3. When you try to analyze poker strategy, you need to realize that you simply can't say how most opponents would play a hand or - in many cases - IF they would have played a hand. They often don't know this themselves until the very last second!"

- Mike Caro


Mike Caro knows more about poker than you or I.





You think you can predict whether I would call heads or tails on a coinflip? That's ridiculous. What if my thought process was that, hey it's been heads 5 times straight, it'll probably be heads again. Or, I always choose heads. Let's say you don't flip a coin 6 times, you only flip it once. What will I pick?

I guess the third way is some sort of divine enlightenment before death. But none of the 3 will happen soon.

actually again this does nothing to destroy anything merely shows you cannot get around the theory i proposed. If you notice I said that if the information could be known before hand. You are correct that if we internalized everything then no outside force could see it. But if knowledge coudl be known then no my point definately holds up

matt is a closet calvinist apparently

It holds up because it has to hold up the way you defined it...it is circular. You said If A then B. My bad, I thought you were asserting A was true. Understanding that A was merely a hypothetical still doesnt give your argument any meaning though.

Your proposition is equivalent to "If we know the utility matrix, and if decisions are always made in accordance with that utility matrix, then we can predict the decision." There is no room to "destroy" it because it is defined so narrowly it has to be true.

It is no different than saying "If we know there are no clouds that can reach us within 2 hours, and if clouds are the only way that rain can be produced, then we can say with 100% accuracy that it will not rain within 2 hours".

Sure would make the meteorologists job easy if he could define things the way you do.

I did not define the utility not to make it easier but merely b/c each persons utility will be different. I am sure yours is different than mine. Thats the sole reason I didnt define it. Thats why I defined what IT TELLS US.

Since we assume that A is what everybody is what everybody wants, we know they will always pick B that leads to it.

A being the utility can change every minute of the day but that is meaningless. The mere fact is that with enough information we could always know exactly what choice will be made simply by knowing A and then knowing the choices B.

Now of courses B could be considered infinite if you want to go really abstract but logically we can conclude that each choice isnt infinite as there are so many inferior choices that we can always exclude those and we are generally left with the decisions that each person usually has to decide with.

Wow. If anyone can make any sense out of what he's saying, please interpret for me.

sorry i thought you understood all that i was talkin about...let me re explain it in more detail

Let me define things for u:
utility - whatever makes us happy.
choices - set of choices that we have.

Now our decisions are always based on our desire to meet a specific utility. This can vary all the time but that is of no consequence. Every situation has a utility that we would most like to achieve.

Next we can look at our choice set for all intensive purposes this is infinite. There are millions upon millions of possible choices we can make but the great majority are either negative or unattainable with the means we have so they are tossed out. So we are in actuality left with just a few logical choices.

Now it is my assertion that if outsiders could see the knowledge that exists on our heads, they could easily deduce exactly what we will do every move. Why? B/c we always will move towards what gives us the greatest utility at any specific moment.

Following this line of reasoning, if this is true then we either do or dont have free will. You decide

obviously if the first paragraph is true we don't have free will, but there's already been 3 threads wasted trying to explain that to you.

BTW, while free will is an interesting philosophical issue, it is one of no consequence.

As noted in the OP, there can be free will with or without a creator, and there can be a creator with or without the existence of free will. So, there are no religoius consequences.

What about impact on our daily lives? Again, no consequence.

We live our lives making decisions, and it appears to us as if we have free will. If there is free will, then everything is consistent, and we go on making decisions the same way we always have.

If there is no free will, we certainly live under the illusion of having free will. If we wake up tomorrow and "decide" there is no free will we really didnt make that decision..it was predestined, as will every future decision. We cant even decide not to make any decisions, claiming that we have no choice so why bother, because we dont have the ability to decide not to make any decisions.
Therefore there is no impact on the way we conduct our lives, we will do what we were destined to do.

Now what if it is somehow PROVEN there is no free will. We ignore that fact, and go on the way were are destined to go on. Or we can recognize that since the illusion of free will was so strong, but just an illusion, that we cannot rely on the "reality" of anything..all may be illusion.

So what? We can stew over illusion vs reality as much as we want, but since we have no free will, we will just do what we were destined to do anyway.

In summary....free will or no free will? Who cares.

not in the least is this to narrow and all you did was redefine and actually narrow utility to what you want it to be. Still doesnt change anything



again you do nothing except change words that still mean the same. Have I ever said that i think we dont have free will? I believe we do have free will. I am merely showing that with or without a God the logic is still the same.



Your statement is false. People say that they "choose on a whim" but this really isnt true is it. There is always a justification for what they do. If you asked a poker player why he chose to play a hand or not to play a hand he will have reasons. Now we of course dont always analyze things before we do something but that doesnt mean that we havent already "preprogrammed" ourself to do that action.



so what if it is based on a condition? The condition merely supports the idea that if there is a God who is all knowing, then he always knows what your going to do. My theory supports the idea that we can have free will but also have a being that is all knowing. that is merely the point. That if we have enough information about anything we can "know" the outcome before it happens. So far all you have done is continued to support my idea.



whats ironic is that this is the conclusion you predetermined I was coming to based on faulty knowledge. If you had merely asked I would have told you what conclusion I was going for. So you in fact have again shown my thoughts to be correct b/c the conclusion you predetermined was false.

Thanks for playin

it's of vital consequence to the notion that the christian god is fair and just in judging us.

That presupposes that there is a god, that the god is far and just, and that god judges us.

If you presuppose those conditions you have also presupposed free will...free will is not a consequence of those conditions, it is inherent in them.

a decision may have a negative outcome..but that doesnt change the fact that it is the decision that will make you most happy. for instance if you admit that you cheated on a test. The outcome is bad but you will feel better b/c you chose to own up to it.



Not correct again. I think this is a case of you merely not having been around here long enough. There was a thread where free will came up in terms of God being all knowing. I am merely showing that we dont even need to have a God in the equation at all to see the same effect.



very wrong. and again I think its b/c you havent been around long enough. The general consensus on the board is that if God is some how all knowing then we cant have free will. I have shown that if we have enough knowledge about any one person, we can easily define his utility and what decision he will make based on that utility. I again left God out to show that He doesnt necessarily need to be in the equation for it to be true. As long as we have enough information we can always pick a guys correct path. Now of course we dont have enough information as people but thats not the point. If we did have the information it woudl be easy to know a persons decisions.



well then maybe that means my hypothesis is correct? That with enough information about a guy and his utility we can make his decision for him? You have yet to give proof of any reason for the hypothesis to be wrong. That must mean it is correct wouldnt you say?



wrong. you say my hypothesis is faulty merely b/c you cant prove it wrong. It is a correct hypothesis. Sure it is built on the fact that we need to have knowledge we wont normally have. But that doesnt make it faulty. Merely means that we generally wont have the knowledge necessary to fully understand a persons utility



actually your a secon half subsititute that missed the first half and has no clue whats going on...thats all

If I had to go to every other thread you have posted in to know all of your positions there wouldnt be enough time in the day for important things. If you dont want to take the time to present all of your arguments in one place, please dont waste ours by making us guess.

And I have shown your hypothesis to be faulty, since it includes the proposition that all decisions are made with maximum utility:

Many decsions are made without ample consideration of utility ("on whim"), many decisions are made that are believed to have no consequence (but more thought would have led to the realization that they do), and many decisions are made irrationaly (ie despite that they are recognized to have lesser utility).

I see examples of these every day, just because you deny them doesnt make that less true.

that's what i said. non-predeterministic christians must believe in free will (MATT!) or their beliefs are contradictory. in that sense free will is certainly of consequence.

I would contend that "on a whim" is a myth. You may make a decision without putting a bunch of thought into it but that doesnt mean you have already predetermined your decision long before this moment. Humans dont do random on our own. We can do random when we exhert external forces but all that does is switch the decision maker. We still arent random sorry. Your assertion though a good try doesnt hold up. You cant give examples of "on a whim" where some logical process was nonexistant.

Irrationality in the eyes of an outsider does not mean it is irrational to the person. A person who things he is seeing a ghost is irrational by our standards but he thinks he has this knowledge so even then we can logically deduce his actions.




I like how you speak for me crow. I have already shown that even without a God you can make the case that there is always one choice we will always pick. Therefore you can decide if thats considered free will or not.

That sounds circular also, if "non-predeterministic" means what it sounds like it means.."not believing in free will".

Whether or not it is of consequence then depends on whether the "non-deterministic" portion of their beliefs are of consequence to them. I dont see why it would be, since I would expect that "Christian" is by far the more important portion of their beliefs. Free will is more of a philosophical issue than a religous one, unless Im missing something.




Uhhh,. no. You have asserted that. You havent made the case for that assertion.

i was speaking at you, not for you.

if you can explain how we can possibly have free will when everything we do is inevitable i'll gladly shut up.

lol it means the opposite. predeterminism = you are not free to affect whether you are saved, god has already "predestined" you to be saved (calvinist doctrine).. or not.



it's of no consequence to a calvinist, but otherwise it's a huge religious issue when it comes to the more generally believed christian plan of salvation, which requires free will. otherwise if our choices are just illusional what's the point?

i think your first statement confirmed mine

ahhh on the second...forgot about the salvation angle, thats what i get for being a heathen. So I opt for the "otherwise"...either we have free will, or we have the illusion of free will and everything may be illusion, so whats the point.

Actually, if its all illusion, at least matt and his inability to apply the rules of logic and his lack of understanding of natural selection may be an illusion, which raises humanity a notch in my worldview.

I already did, and I will use the same example again:


Heads or tails?


Are you really telling me that the answer to this question can be determined from past experience?

I can't speak for anyone else, but yes, I do think, in principle, it would be possible to study every past experience that built up in your head and lead you to answer this question. The interesting thing would be to study whether your answer really was on a whim or not. Perhaps you chose heads because the last three times you chose tails and it didn't work. More likely there is a much more complicated pattern, but ultimately I think that by studying every single thought and nueron that has fired in your head, in principle one could determine the thoughts that lead to, say, "what the hell, I'll choose heads this time."

I guess it all comes down to whether you believe people can ever do anything "random." I tend to think no. However, as was stated before, this is completely irrelevant, since I am still acting and typing as if I have the free will to choose to, whether or not it has already been determined exactly what I will type.

Would it be random if someone said that they would choose heads or tails based on the outcome of a coin flip, choosing the result that came up on the first coinflip for the second one?

Monty

you misspelled Chemical... dumbass.

Well I could argue that a coin flip isn't really random... but I think that misses the point. What I will argue is that their choice itself isn't random, as their choice to base their decision on the next coinflip could be predicted if one had perfect knowledge of all past thoughts, etc. The idea is to be random, they are deterministically, so to speak, choosing to base their decision on another random process, but they themselves are not being random. The choice to use a coin flip to become random came from previous knowledge that coinflips are for all intents and purposes random and from past experiences at trying to be random, which I would argue could be perfectly predicted, again, given the ideal of perfect information about their past thoughts.

I may be misunderstanding your point, but here is what I gather:

Basically, you are saying everything can be traced back to a first cause though a long chain, and therefore, there are no random events, because for an event to be random it must not have a causal chain leading to said event. And, further, that our attempt to exert free will (Be RANDOM) is the same thing as the poker site's attempt to generate random seeds by using all of the user-input, etc. etc. etc. A massive amount of information gathered together to simulate randomness.

Let's take the dictionary definition of random:

ran·dom ( P ) Pronunciation Key (rndm) adj.

1) Having no specific pattern, purpose, or objective: random movements.

Your argument, I think, successfully defeats this definition of random. Even in trying to be random, the actor has a purpose or objective, and the manner in which he attempts to be random will probably have a pattern.

2) Of or relating to a type of circumstance or event that is described by a probability distribution.

This definition is unbeatable, but it's also a crappy definition. Our actor is random according to this definition, but this definition is basically: Something is random if it is random when we draw it on a piece of paper. Or even more simply stated, something is random when it is random. Useless definition.

3) Of or relating to an event in which all outcomes are equally likely, as in the testing of a blood sample for the presence of a substance. (Leaving aside the last definition's example as completely retarded)

This definition needs some more examination.

Before I go head over heels, is this all an accurate summation?

Monty

the fine complexity underlying our apparent free will may be irrelevant, because free will may be a coarse, scale-dependant *emergent* property - potentially something more than the sum of its parts.

Thanks for your valuable contribution to the thread.