pcmcgeer (07/31/82)
This argument is beginning to resemble one of the more abstruse of medieval theological discussions. I can play, too. I say five angels can stand on the head of a pin, four if one or more has been doing rather too well on the manna recently. Otherwise, has anyone thought that questions of free will vs determinism are meaningless? First, note that determinism requires a god. Then note that any God capable of creating the Universe is capable of predicting any decision we make and predicting the way His Own Dice fall. Therefore, such a God can permit us free will. Therefore, it's easy to have both determinism and free will. Note, incidentally, that the question resolves itself nicely. If you are an atheist, you clearly believe in Free Will. If you are an agnostic, you're confused (sorry, can't help everyone). If you are a Christian, it doesn't matter. The Jewish or Moslem faiths presumably solve the problem as easily, I wouldn't know. Cheers, Rick McGeer.
jagardner (07/31/82)
It is ridiculous to say that determinism requires a God to make
it work. Cosmology has many models of space-time in which the
whole may be extrapolated from a single three-dimensional slice,
in much the same way that you can use a Taylor series to extrapolate
the behaviour of a function everywhere from its behaviour at a single
point. If our universe actually is like this kind of model, physical
laws dictate everything you will do. You can predict what you will do
tomorrow from looking at the state of the universe three seconds after
the Big Bang.
Now, is there really such a thing as free will? I find it
odd for someone to say that being an atheist means you believe in
free will. Most atheists do not believe in a soul or any sort of
spirit that transcends the bio-chemical body. If this is the case,
all one's decisions are made by a very rigorous set of physical laws
controlling one's synapses, fluid flows, and so on. This system
seems highly antithetical to free will. Throwing in random quantum
effects may make the resulting behaviour more unpredictable, but it
certainly doesn't seem anything like free will. If there is something
in humans that constitutes free will, it has to be something that is
not subject to mechanistic predictability. Since I have no intention
of opening up the PSI controversy again in net.misc, I shan't go further.
--- Jim Gardnerfelix (08/01/82)
sed on physical laws, but what rules the way your brain acts (i.e. thinking) ? I tend to disagree that you can gain the knowledge of what you will going to do tomorrow by just looking 3 seconds after Big Bang. We don't actually know if there was a Big Bang, even if we assume it did happen, can Mr. Gardner tell that there would be an insignificant planet (named Earth by its dimwitted occupants) formed in an insignificant corner of the Universe so many seconds after Big Bang based on a model of Cosmology? If such a model *actually* works than we should be able to tell precisely how the Universe looks right at this moment, how many planets have inteelegent beings, what will they do, etc. Even I can tell this is totally rediculous, let alone that we all know extrapolation is risky and generally unreliable. So after we have that out of the way, determinism can only be acheived by a supreme being, or what we called God. In that case, free will will be nil, since what we have which is totally useless is as good as nothing. To Mr. Gardner, why would you think free will does not exist? Does it has anything to do with your bodily functions? Do you think what are you thinking right now is not controlled by yourself (i.e. free will) ? Does your everyday life not controlled by your very own will? Free will and determinism may coexist, but they contradict each other. Say, if God correctlly predicts your will and shape your furture according to it, than it *is* free will, not determinism, since if what you do affects the furture, it is not determinism at all. On the other hand, if your choice is predetermined, than it is not free will, even you think it is. Regards, Felix Luk
rlr (08/02/82)
I don't believe that determinism requires a god at all. Determinism (to me, anyway) means that all the actions that take place in the universe are fixed *only* because of the ultimate extrapolation of "cause-and-effect". This applies to living things taking action "of their own initiative" and non-living things moving, changins shape/form, etc., due to physical laws. (Actually, the two are one in the same.) And now, a ridiculous example: A rock falls down from a mountaintop (let's assume 'natural' causes), killing the parents of a young man. Having been very close to his parents, he becomes extremely despondent. He fails to eat properly, takes to drinking (alcohol, that is), as a result becomes mentally unstable and shoots the person living next door to him. OK, where was the free will? Did he choose to become despondent, or did he do so because his upbringing/genetic material/chemical composition cuased (read 'caused') him to be despondent? Did he choose to eat poorly and start drinking, or did his background/chemical makeup cause him to behave that way, and in turn, did these factors cause these eating/drinking habits to promote his mental condition?? And why did he shoot his neighbor? Was it something the neighbor said that triggered the man's anger? Why did the neighbor say that particular thing? What was he doing there at that time? The same "cause-and-effect" rationale can be used to describe the neighbor's actions. My point is not to prove that determinism wins out over free will. (I don't think I did a very good job of that.) What I'm trying to point out is the lack of a need for a 'god' in such a system, just an initial action (the creation of the universe?) to trigger the "effect-casue-effect-..." chain that follows (I can't seem to spell 'cause' right more than two times in a row). Rich Rosen pyuxjj!rlr
rlr (08/02/82)
Everything I tried to say (and very badly), Jim Gardner said much better.
rew (08/02/82)
Just to continue the discussion, may I assert that a belief in determinism does NOT require a belief in a god. Those who think that it does often believe that if things are determined then there is some cause of those things, and (ultimately) that there is some FIRST CAUSE that set everything off. This, of course, assumes that there is (was) some beginning to things and eventually will be an end. For a moment, let's assume that any sequence of events (including future events) is fixed but that no causation is involved. That is things happen in an order that is completely predictable but not because of any interrelation between events. Beginnings, ends and causes are all human attempts to understand the sequence of events. Now that we have that straight, how about the idea that sequences are just an order imposed on random events by human consciousness? Bob Warren cbosg!nscs!rew