Is free-will an illusion?

@Olivier5,

O5: "These distinctions are fundamental to WHAT exactly? I hope you don't mind me asking..."

Fundamental to comprehension of things with respect to the point at issue, which is to say the nature of meaning and all that this touches upon.

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@puzzledperson,

Quote:

O5: "These distinctions are fundamental to WHAT exactly? I hope you don't mind me asking..."

Fundamental to comprehension of things with respect to the point at issue, which is to say the nature of meaning and all that this touches upon.

Any discussion of free will is gunna inevitably end up as a "philosophical" discussion, Ollie. PP happens to be of the solipsistic stripe. In my view solipsism makes the same mistakes that scientism does, only in reverse.

In the "real world," subjects interact with objects. The Skinnerian can say it's all in the object. The solipsist can say it's all in the subject. Both are just trying to make a part the whole.

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@layman,

layman wrote: "I aint been, and aint now, talkin about messages or text. I'm talkin about information."

We (by which I mean myself and the originally participating parties) began by talking about whether "text" exists independently of its recognition by someone as such. You then introduced what you characterized as an illustration of the point at issue by introducing the theme of a "message" in a bottle.

Now you're claiming to have been talking about something distinguishable from both, which you call "information". But from your message in a bottle illustration, it's clear that you're using the term "information" in it's colloquial sense, not in the technical sense that Claude Shannon used it: else you wouldn't have said that your written text in a bottle is a "message" whether anyone pulls it out and reads it, but that your delusionary "gibberish" was not a message (i.e., in your new terminology, not information).

And incidentally, there are problems with Shannon's usage also.

Please don't falsely accuse me of changing terminology midstream, only to actually do that yourself.

By "category error" I meant the misclassification of something as belonging to one logical category when it actually belongs to a different category.

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@layman,

I'm a solipsist with respect to my environment. As I've said I consider this to be a fake world, a figment of the imagination in one sense or another.

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@puzzledperson,

I'll say it again, PP. YOU, not me, claimed a categorical error was made about "information" (not text, not message, not anything else you may have talked about before). I asked YOU about YOUR claim. You didn't respond, so I addressed it myself. I never referred to "text" or "messages" because that's not the part of YOUR claims that I was addressing.

Quote:

else you wouldn't have said that your written text in a bottle is a "message" whether anyone pulls it out and reads it, but that your delusionary "gibberish" was not a message (i.e., in your new terminology, not information).

I don't recall ever using the word "message" in my example. To my recollection I used the term "information." Are you looking at something I said that indicates otherwise?

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@puzzledperson,

Quote:

else you wouldn't have said that your written text in a bottle is a "message" whether anyone pulls it out and reads it, but that your delusionary "gibberish" was not a message (i.e., in your new terminology, not information)...Please don't falsely accuse me of changing terminology midstream, only to actually do that yourself.

OK, after making and eating a couple of sandwiches, I went back and looked at my posts. As I remembered, I didn't use either the term "message" or "text" even once. I did, however, repeatedly use the word "information."

Since you misread "information" as "message," I don't know if you even have any idea of what I was saying now.

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@layman,

Have it your way. You said (in the version of text now available to me) that if you wrote the date, a plea for help, a statement that you're stranded on an island, and location of your island using longitude and latitude on a piece of paper, then sealed it in a bottle and tossed it into the sea,that it would still contain information even if nobody ever saw it again.

That's a "message" by any other name. You're playing semantic games.

You also said (and I'm paraphrasing, but accurately) that if you were gaga and just scribbled some loony nonsense that it wouldn't contain coherent information because it wouldn't mean anything to anyone.

So clearly by information you meant a legible message capable of proper construal by yourself, if nobody else.

If you wrote that legible message ("coherent information") using a one-time pad as I described, but you subsequently ceased to exist without communicating with anyone, it would be accurate to say that it WAS a message (for you) because you recognized it as such. But it would be inaccurate to say that it IS a message for anyone who found it after your passing into oblivion and attempted to read it, because there IS nobody who recognizes it as a message.

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@puzzledperson,

puzzledperson wrote:

O5: "These distinctions are fundamental to WHAT exactly? I hope you don't mind me asking..."

Fundamental to comprehension of things with respect to the point at issue, which is to say the nature of meaning and all that this touches upon.

I'm not particularly interested in endless hair spliting for the sake of deciphering the meaning of "meaning", sorry. This discussion is about free will.

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@puzzledperson,

P.S. I'll forego quibbling over whether your deranged scribbling could be a message if you intended it to express your plight, but simply failed in the execution of conventional script. I'll also forego quibbling over whether if someone found completely incoherent nonsense that you scribbled while wholly out of your mind, that coincidentally looked like an outline of your island, and the illiterate Polynesian who found it recognized the outline and paddled his canoe to your rescue, was a message to him because he recognized it as such, even though you never even intended it as such.

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@puzzledperson,

Quote:

As I've said I consider this to be a fake world, a figment of the imagination in one sense or another.

So you're talking to a figment of your imagination right now? Sounds like an interesting endeavor...

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@puzzledperson,

Quote:

That's a "message" by any other name. You're playing semantic games.

I think you are. What do you think I'm calling "information?" The piece of paper?

Quote:

So clearly by information you meant a legible message capable of proper construal by yourself, if nobody else.

Clearly I did not.

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@puzzledperson,

You also made the claim that "information cannot be transmitted," then went on to say that electromagnetic waves can be transmitted, or something like that.

That further indicated to me that you had no real clue about what the biologist what correctly saying about the nature of "genes." You still have no clue. You don't ask me what I mean, you tell me. Just like you told him, I guess.

I also asked you HOW he made a "categorical error." You haven't addressed that either. When you made that assertion, I had to wonder if you even understood what he was saying.

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There is no better argument for Determinism as understanding the nature of Information...
For some this abstract concept is very hard to define and grasp....
Information is the by product of the order of events and their correlational functions...
Bet most of the thread clowns didn't quite get the point...go figure speaking of information in a free will thread...one can't help but smile big time...
Back to sleep now...keep having fun grasping at straws.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Thanks for the laugh, Fil. Your illusion of grandeur always crack me up.

Care to comment on whether it'd be a good idea to live in a country/world which would not consider freedom a human right? After all, if free will is an illusion, why should states be bothered with maintaining such an illusion for their citizens, at great cost?

Your illusion of infinite wisdom is required at this point.

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@puzzledperson,

P.P.S. Yet another quibble I'll forego: What if your message in a bottle was found by an idiot savant who was able to read your statement that you're alone on a desert.island and read your coordinates too, but assumed that (like him) you went there deliberately to shun company; and read your plea ("Send Help!") literally but in a different way than you intended: and a few days later a small plane flying overhead drops a parachute package containing a videotape copy of the famous Beatles movie.

Now I'm going to forego to bed because if I read any more comments now I might be compelled to reply.

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@puzzledperson,

Quote:

What if your message in a bottle was found by an idiot savant who was able to read your statement that you're alone on a desert.island and read your coordinates too, but assumed that (like him) you went there deliberately to shun company; and read your plea ("Send Help!") literally but in a different way than you intended: and a few days later a small plane flying overhead drops a parachute package containing a videotape copy of the famous Beatles movie.

None of the would have anything to do with the information, that's what.

The process of "conveying information" (which you said can't be done, as I recall) would entail a message. But the message aint the info.

You might try to convey the information by letter, by phone, by TV set, or some other means. But, McCluhan notwithstanding, the medium is NOT the message. Much less is it the information. The info is not words on a piece of paper. Don't confuse the coach carrying the messenger with the messenger himself. Don't confuse the messenger with the message. Don't confuse the paper on which the information is recorded with the information it carries (as the horse-drawn coach carries the messenger). Don't confuse the question of whether the messenger "knows" what's inside the envelope he bears with what IS inside it.

You throw all those in a bag and then start making claims which sound very muddled, PP, pulling one or another out of the bag, seemingly at random, to "demonstrate" your point.

And if you clearly don't understand a person's meaning, you think he's playing semantic games. Certainly whatever meaning YOU IMPUTE to his words is what the true meaning is. What else could a solipsist possibly think? Truth is what you say, what you create. There are no other people who could have a different meaning that you do. Other people don't even exist.

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@layman,

When I say "information" you insist that I used the word "message." When that doesn't quite work out, you tell me I meant message, not information.
When I tell you otherwise, you say I am playing word games. I'm not the one trying to distort another's words and meanings in an effort to make them into what I want them to be, instead of what they are, eh?

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@layman,

Some people want to argue for the sake of arguing... Unlike you and I who are the most agreeable posters ever to see the light of day. ;-)

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@Olivier5,

Heh, Ollie, very astute, sho nuff. These crazy-ass solipsists don't even seem to realize that they're only arguing with their own damn selves, eh?

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Is free-will an illusion?

We do not really know, do we?

It may be an illusion.

It may not.

EVERYTHING we suppose exists...may exist only as an illusion.

There doesn't seem to be any way to get to a better answer than "we do not know" using logic, reason, or science.

But the speculations shared here are interesting...even the ones that are posing as truths being revealed.

1 Reply

Is free-will an illusion?

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