Is free-will an illusion?

@FBM,

Indeed, the free will denialists have used a lot of needlessly emotive language (including insults in the case of Fil), have constantly ignored the basic fact that science requires reason and agency in order to mean anything (and they still ignore it...), and have turned a blind eye to the lack of scientific evidence behind determinism.

You guys are too invested in this issue. Chill out! It doesn't matter if you believe in free will or not. You'll still go to jail if you do something wrong, just the same as I will.

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@FBM,

You don't even know what my hypothesis is...

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@layman,

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All too often, people can't see that their glib arguments "prove too much," and that they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The logical positivists of the first half of the 20th century went on in this vein for decades before this deficiency in their thought was widely acknowledged.

It never ceased to amaze me how people can be totally blind to the logical consequences of their beliefs... Like a scientist will happily work for years to prove scientifically that he is not actually a scientist, but an automaton unable to do any science...

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

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Where did I claim that free will and agency are illusions?

And I never said I was dead certain about free will either.

You've sure been arguing intensely for it, though, eh?

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Your claim is that only scientific experiments can prove free will to exist or not.

Maybe this is the cognitive disjunct. This is not my claim. My claim has been that controlled studies tend to produce more reliable results than anecdotes and purely a priori reasoning. History and scholarship seem to support me on this. If you want anecdotes and mere a priori reasoning to carry the day, you'll need to come up with something that no one has been able to come up with over the past few centuries. You might be able to do so, and I'd welcome the chance to be a witness to it, but you haven't done it yet.

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My counterclaim is that science is itself based on the assumption that reason exist, that agency exist, and therefore that freedom of choice exist. Science will never ever prove that freedom of choice does not exist, because if it ever does so, it will destroy its own legitimacy and therefore its conclusions will ceased to be credible. QED

Sorry, but a bit short of QED. The sense of agency is well documented as an ongoing process of a few lobes of the brain working in conjunction. I don't know why you think reason itself hinges on this, as it doesn't involve the entire cerebellum, and the effort to derive experimental data has been to eliminate subjective bias as much as possible. Reason and will are not synonymous, and you'd have to do some work to prove that the one is impossible without the other. Not just a priori word salads, but genuine evidence. So far, you seem reticient to provide such evidence. That makes me curious as to your motivation. Is your position a result of surveying evidence, or just a gut feeling that you are loathe to abandon and will say anything to defend? Something else, perhaps?

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@layman,

Not bad.

BTW, I agree with you that we can orient our thoughts, even our unconscious thoughts, like in the example of waking up at a given time. When I was doing serious math, I used that trick of studying a problem just before going to sleep, in the hope that I would wake up with the solution the next morning. It worked most of the time.

My point was more about individual thoughts and how they can hardly be controlled. If I tell to myself that I shouldn't think of - say - pink champagne, sure enough I start to think about pink champagne right away...

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@FBM,

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You've sure been arguing intensely for it, though, eh?

Less intensely than you argued against it...

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That makes me curious as to your motivation.

I just understood a long time ago that science is based on the possibility of human agency, reason, creativity, etc, and therefore that trying to disprove those stuff from a scientific view point is a logical impossibility. If that's "word salad" for you then so be it. What do I care?

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@Olivier5,

How intense does one have to be to post peer-reviewed science journal submissions? Seems a lot easier than crafting convoluted a priori arguments based on emotion more than reason...

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@FBM,

You have to search them, copy them, then copy the url... Pretty intense. Of course, you don't actually read them in your case, but still...

That's one of the reasons I don't post scientific articles much, by the way. It's too much work for too little result. Layman posted scores of scientific articles and nobody ever commented on them... You least of all.

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@Olivier5,

I read what I post. Wish you would. Wish you would consider genuine scholarship and scientific evidence over word salads, one-upmanship and emotive rhetoric, too. But maybe I wish for too much? If you can muster up the energy, how about posting some scientific evidence to support your position?

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@Briancrc,

This guy does not understand what science is. Science itself is subjective, not universally agreed on, and don’t involve “truth”... It only involves falsifiability.

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@FBM,

Well, if you read those articles, you must have read them very very fast because you didn't learn much from them. I had to explain to you what they contained. I also had to point to you that nowhere did they prove that the pre-decision neuronal activity was unconscious. And when I did underline that FACT to you, you totally ignored it.

You are therefore quoting articles which you don't understand, nor even care to understand. That the problem with your data fetish: data mean nothing without some interpretation, but to you, interpretation is only "word salad"... So you dont even understand the data you post.

But I do, and I thank you for it. :-)

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@Olivier5,

FBM said:

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I read what I post. Wish you would.

You want EVERYONE to read as selectively as you do?

Ollie said:

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That the problem with your data fetish: data mean nothing without some interpretation, but to you, interpretation is only "word salad"... So you dont even understand the data you post.

True dat.

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@Olivier5,

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Science itself is subjective, not universally agreed on, and don’t involve “truth”... It only involves falsifiability.

If everyone understood that, then there would probably be no scientism. Then again, there are many who might well understand that, but know you don't, so they're quite willing exploit your ignorance as a means of convincing you that they have access to truth, but you don't.

The old "what I happen to believe is proven fact, but what you believe is merely subjective opinion syndrome." Some chumps (on both sides of that presentation) actually believe it, I guess.

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@layman,

I enjoyed teaming up with you on this one, Layman. You make a lot of sense, most of the times, Albert and his (?) relativity notwithstanding :-)

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@Olivier5,

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Albert and his (?) relativity notwithstanding :-)

Heh, Ollie, well, ya know, to claim that special relativity is "right" and other versions of relativity (which make equal or better predictions) are "wrong" strikes me as the kind of thing guys like FBM do.

The will rail on about how thoroughly SR has been "confirmed" (which they think means "proven"), without knowing, or even considering, that every experiment designed to "confirm" SR also confirms a considered theory of relativity which posits absolute, rather than relative, simultaneity

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@layman,

Let's not ruin it now.... :-)

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@Olivier5,

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Albert and his (?) relativity notwithstanding :-)

Btw, I like the question mark you put after "his." Very few people these days acknowledge the huge role that Lorentz, Poincaire, and others played in the development of "Al's" relativity. Few are even aware of it, if you're talking about the general population. That would apply to a whole lot of physicists, who are not historians by training, too, actually.

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@layman,

I must say I was totally ignorant of Einstein's debt to Lorentz and Poincaré before we had that conversation some time ago. 't was an eye opener for me.

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That one is for our friend FBM:

To doubt everything, or, to believe everything, are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
-- Henri Poincaré

By the way, FBM is usually a decent poster. I don't understand his aggressiveness here -- it's out of character.

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@Olivier5,

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By the way, FBM is usually a decent poster. I don't understand his aggressiveness here -- it's out of character.

Yeah, he is a "decent poster," regarding most things anyway. But, from what I've seen, his militant scientism is consistent and quite "in character." Otherwise I probably wouldn't be directing so many of my posts to him personally.

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Is free-will an illusion?

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