Do we have free will?

That depends on how much you fear the spooks, friend.

Attached: spooks.jpg (750x424, 179K)

The idea of a cause and a concomitant effect is part of the realm of objective knowledge, so for it to even have meaning as an idea there must be a subject to know it. In this sense the subject is "prior to" or "beyond" causality: determinism can never be perfected. But this subject beyond causality can also only know itself through its body, its mind, its empirical mental processes that are observable to itself. And through this it knows that all of its various desires and motivations are effects of certain reasons derived from its understanding of causes. In this second sense, it is subjugated to material causality.

On the one hand, the completely intellectual (i.e., non-empirical) subject as the basis of knowledge has value as just that: an idea without which the Western framework of scientific knowing would not function. On the other hand, according to this same framework, every personal motivation can be certainly derived from the causal relation between sense stimulus and the mental process of motivation. Free will and determinism regulate each other, one keeps the other from going too far off the deep end (metaphysical libertarianism and Basilisk determinism).

No, but we should act as if we do

I have Free Willy on vhs

I'm gonna have to think about this one. At least i've been made aware of compatabilism now, and more or less what it entails. Thanks for trying to explain user.

>I don’t believe in god but I act as if I do

That's what Peterson advocates

I'm in a more or less idealistic (as in Critical Idealism) framework, I guess I didn't make that clear. Basically, put the forms of perception (time and space) together and you must have matter, the content of time and space, which is also causality. Since time and space exist a priori in the human mind, the basis for the idea of causality exists in and comes from the human mind. Therefore any determinism that hopes to be complete would have to more or less ground the grounds, i.e. show how the ideas of time and space are causally determined as the forms of perception in the human mind. But these are the very basis for causal determination, as said above.

If you disagree with Kant as far as subject/object distinction and a priority go, you won't find this very convincing. It also smacks heavily of substance ontology because I stole these ideas from Schopenhauer. But he was mostly right about willing, free or constrained, with only minor additions from Nietzsche.

Attached: onehundred.jpg (500x375, 27K)

Nowadays there's a lot of bottom-up approaches to this. We have many empirical studies suggesting that what we consider to be a "decision" was already triggered inside the brain several microseconds before we even think the thought of taking a certain action. People like Sam Harris and Thomas Metzinger use that as a way of putting the whole notion of self aside and not only that of free will. Even thinking about yourself, they'd say, is a mere by-product of a complex system recollecting data about itself in an absurdly organized manner, which makes it seem like there is a single entity doing it (i.e the 'you').

This approach is still simplistic, and very insidious in spite of the field of complex systems being so developed for years now. Asking about free will or conscience as a yes or no question might not even make sense when applied to the kind of systems that our mind belongs to. There is a kind of self consistency going on with us where preconditioned stimuli is fed back to our brains in a way that for all intents and purposes can be considered "top-down" and not "bottom-up". In spite of all the utilitarianism, the modern atomizers can't see that it's not useful to merely try pinning down the constituents of a given collective response, without considering that the collective response itself can change its constituents through external preconditioned means.

For example, when you decide to go eat a burger, it might not be a useful or even pertinent question to ask whether or not it was a transcendental, independent consciousness that willed this, or merely a consequence of the complex relation of your body to the external ambient throughout all your life. Both things are always acting in a self consistent manner and simultaneously being the cause for each other's movement (where the transcendental consciousness of course can just as well or even better be described by the emergent effect of all your cells). With gravitation this seems obvious but it gets that much more complex when it's about brains.

There's also the matter as per that the very framework under which you are posing this question cannot really accept either answer wholeheartedly in a trivial manner.

Attached: 28ec8797a27472ae940ef2e32fcd3f17be70e1a5228dc6797ef51921a4f76d5e.jpg (433x400, 40K)

Too many words to express a relatively simple idea that barely even relates to the initial question.

Here's what was said:
>1. An incredible chain of events ultimately results in the thought one seemingly experiences
>2. [Some retardation about knowledge]
>3. What?
>4. [More shit that makes no sense]
>5. I'm a big dumb dumb but you're so intelligent so explain it to me
>6. In the chain of cause and effect, it is thought that precedes determinism, thus determinism is not very accurate. And that something that had the thought is reliant on its own reasoning faculties which cannot be substantiated but it is capable of seeing this causal chain. [Some more pseud shit about how coincidentally western philosophy got everything right]
>7. Wow You're so intelligent.

It's possible (likely, even) that the causes are deterministic but unknowable.

You decided to make this thread didn't you?

Right, we can assume they are deterministic because nothing in the material world escapes causality, but we can't definitely determine them at this point in time because they're outside of our knowledge language. It's like an asymptote: objective knowledge of the subject can be approached ever more closely but never reached completely.

Perhaps he was fated to make the thread

>Hasn't read Kant
If this is you, then your opinion on philosophy doesn't matter

It's not even a legitimate question. There's no dichotomy or distinction to find, it's an idea born from ignorance. Both yes and no are logically incoherent, misunderstanding the universe and biology. It's not a historical convention either because it doesn't have the nuance that it had back then, or rather nuances as the thinking existed in many different traditions, many different cultures.

A "particle" in a superposition has to choose where to be upon the collapse of the wave function.

only your mum has the free will of being a loser

>Do we have free will?
Yeah, but only on Tuesdays. The other days we are just philosopical zombies.

Treasure Tuesdays.