Is free-will an illusion?

I gave you an honest answer. If you want to call me a liar and ignore me, help yourself, chump.

Just like the past is one, the FUTURE, as D. Dennet put it, is "what happens next", equally one and one thing alone !
You and Olivier seem to be utterly ignorant of the fundamentals to even start debating a position you might have, you straight out lack proper information to have a position worth analysing. Worse, you ashamedly display your ignorance (or is it plain stupidity ?) for anyone around to see. Address my question or I will quit on trying to come to terms with your word salad.

I am often willing to say what I am NOT, however.

I can tell you one thing that I definitely am NOT, to wit:

A mystic like Parmenides who claims that all motion and all change in general is illusory.

Anyone who believes, with absolute and utter certainty (like you), that would be prone to believing virtually any absurdity, I figure.

Ignored. Have a nice life !

Yet another demonstration of the sad fact that you risk alienating a person if you disagree with their religion, eh?

Kinda funny that the narrator of the video about Parmenides you have embedded immediately characterizes the positions he held as both "absurd" and "preposterous," eh?

Go figure.

"Thinking" is an expression of Being...The ILLUSIVE "allowing of possibilities" is itself an expression of Being. Understanding that we don't have free will nor are that different from rocks clarifies why Parmenides got it right in the first place. Like this video shows people continually fail to get the depth of his thought process.

Once again, kinda strange that Raymond Tallis, a huge admirer of Parmenides, says that Parmenides WENT WRONG when he precluded "possibility" from being real, eh?

Why don't these experts agree with you, I wonder?

You are already on ignore by I have one last word for ya :
Stoooopid !

Congratulations! I can't think of any more powerful and indisputable proof that you have convincingly advocated your case and won your argument than this insightful "last word," eh?

Even more indicative of unqualified victory when you couple your "last word" with the physical act of covering your ears with your hands, ya know?

This disagreement is even more surprising in light of the fact that Tallis is also a highly trained scientist (an M.D. specializing in clinical neurology) and an atheist. He, of all people, should know better than to write a book called " Why the Mind is Not a Computer: A Pocket Dictionary on Neuromythology."

There's gotta be something wrong with this guy. How could someone with his training POSSIBILY write "extensively about the misuse of scientific language and concepts to explain human experiences"?

"Neuromythology!" Only a complete fool could come up with a term like that, can't ya see?

Of course similar conclusions could drawn about any fool who doesn't instinctively see that you are right and adopt your position without any further explanation and without any need or desire for explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis

Let's suppose I get lost in the wilderness and come across a path that has obviously been taken by other people before me. One way may lead back to "civilization," and the other may just lead deeper into the wildnerness.

I have already been born. I have DNA. I have been through a multitude of past experiences, most recently including the experience of getting lost in the wilderness. Whether any of this is in any way "accidental" or not doesn't even matter now.

Which way do I choose to go? Do I really have a choice, or has that decision already been made for me, at the instant of the Big Bang?

Coming back to Raymond Tallis for a minute, in 2007 he published a book called: "The Enduring Significance of Parmenides: Unthinkable Thought." A whole book, mind you.

I haven't read it, but according to one review:


The old "false dichotomy" rears it's head yet again, eh? Something either is, or it is not, and there no other possibility (such as "neither is nor is not").

Many thinkers (including even Hume) have approached the topic of determinism with the same absolute disjuncts, claiming only one of two extremes can be true, with no middle ground, to wit:

1. Absolute, mechanistic undeviating determinism in every aspect of existence, or

2. Utter Chaos, where all events happen without the least bit of reason or predictability.

I don't buy it.

Best possible case for "free will" by the current number 5 world top thinker Daniel Dennet:

In any case, only cause to effect relations are required, not determinism... Don't be thick. You know there's something in between pure order and pure chaos. A mix. A synthesis. Life as we know it. Half predictable, half not.

Edit: I'm just like Karl Popper was. A realist.

Thanks to Layman once again for bringing up Buridan's Ass (some time back - I'm busy these days), a thought experiment aiming to defend the existence of a freedom to act indifferently, and thus to defend free will.

In the thought experiment, a determinist donkey with no free will starves to death because it has no reason to choose between a pile of hay and a bucket of water, equidistant and equally tempting. The ass is faced with two desires of equal strength, on one side thirst, on the other hunger. No desire being preeminent, he can't choose and well, he dies. Sad, really.

What would a human being do, faced with two desires of equal strength? Our intuition tells us that he would choose to satisfy one desire and then the other. With no particular preference, he would still be able to choose.

I know what any REAL donkey would do in the circumstances... No mad scientists could foresee this donkey's choice 6 seconds in advance on their screen no no no, whatever the electrodes they use 'cause the ass won't take half a second to RUSH to drink first and eat later, or vice versa, INDIFFERENTLY... proving that donkeys are smarter than some philosophers.

Jean Buridan was perhaps the most influential Parisian philosopher of the fourteenth century. He studied under William of Ockham and spent his career as a teaching master at the University of Paris, lecturing on logic and the works of Aristotle, and producing many commentaries and independent treatises on logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics... (yawn)

Buridan' Ass is nowhere to be found in Jean Buridan's writings. The best explanation of its association with Buridan is that it originated as a parody of his theory that if faced with two courses of action of apparently equal chances of success, one could always choose inaction, and defer or ‘send back’ for further consideration any practical judgment that is not absolutely certain.

In behaviorist linguo, the operant Buridan Ass cannot choose between two responses because their relative rates of reinforcement in concurrent schedules of reinforcement is equal. See Herrrrnstein and Flunxfsch (1970).

A tid bit more of Dennet for the ones interested enough to care:

In this (second) video Dennet talks about what he calls, disparagingly, "hysterical absolutism." It's been seen around these here parts.

I like his joke: "We know it's possible in practice, we're trying to figure out if it's possible in theory." Parmenides would be proud of those willing to reject all experience in favor of so-called "reason." Very few are that alienated from themselves, but a few are, with emphasis on the word "few."