Life doesn't suck. As the spirit desires so it has — Gregory

I lost my husband 3 years ago to MS. The last couple years of his life were very difficult. At one point, as he was having a lot of trouble making a transfer, I said to him, "Tired of this life?"

He replied, "No, this life is good. It's this body I am tired of."

Determinism is debatable even in physics. Complexity theory, uncertainty and stochastic calculations all serve to undermine the supposed Newtonian notion of determinism.

What free will is, is also mercurial. It is clear that an intentional act is free when it is not coerced by some else; and that an act's being free is considered essential to the agent being responsible for the consequences. It's less clear what it means for an act to be free rather than physically determined.

It's also clear that free will is used by theists in order to overcome the problem of god's responsibility for evil.

And that's the usual motivation for the need to give an explanation of free will.

So discussions such as this are often veiled theology.

He replied, "No, this life is good. It's this body I am tired of — Questioner

Well I'm not going to argue with that

I lost my husband 3 years ago to MS. The last couple years of his life were very difficult. At one point, as he was having a lot of trouble making a transfer, I said to him, "Tired of this life?"

He replied, "No, this life is good. It's this body I am tired of." — Questioner

That's an excellent reply.

As the spirit desires so it has — Gregory

You get what you desire? So that if you get poor outcomes, it's becasue that is what you desire?

And I suppose that those who say they did not desire mishap, misadventure and disability are denying what they really desired? True Scotsmen, one and all?

Pretty shitty reasoning.

Pretty shitty reasoning. — Banno

Then you won't get far. The past doesn't exist

The past doesn't exist — Gregory

Layered shite is still shite.

You get what you desire — Banno

Yes

So that if you get poor outcomes, it's becasue that is what you desire — Banno

There is no such thing as a bad outcome. It all depends on how you take it. Every second is a past but the present remains

Every second is a past but the present remains — Gregory

Gobbledegook, attempting to make an excuse to not be responsible for one's choices.

Gobbledegook, attempting to make an excuse to not be responsible for one's choices. — Banno

All my choices have been right in my view. How about your's to you?

You're trying to shift the ground. Your claim was that what you get is what you desire. showed that to be incorrect.

showed that to be incorrect — Banno

I dont agree that life and desire work in that "logical" way

I dont agree that life and desire work in that "logical" way — Gregory

Yep. You have difficulty with logic.

Believing that folk only ever get what they deserve requires great faith.

Well you have the mind of a doubter. Won't get you far

you have the mind of a doubter — Gregory

Thank you.

Note the passive voice: everything in nature is determined. Determined by what? If human behavior is determined then it needs to be determined by something other than ourselves, or else it is determined by us, which entails free will.

:up:

To get around this determinists often posit an abstraction of ourselves to be the determiner of our actions.

Yes, or they point to brain regions, neurons, hormones, etc., as if these are not part of us and as if these would not have to be involved if we were doing any thinking/deciding. Sam Harris thinks to think all proponents of freedom are 17th century substance dualists.

I am reading Sapolsky's "Determined" because it seems to have been somewhat influential, but so far it is just layering on tons of empirical findings (some incredibly weak, like the unreplicatable "Lady Macbeth effect") instead of tackling any serious philosophy of free will. This is an unfortunate tendency in popular science, avalanches of citations substituted for clear argumentation.

But I can see how this might come about. A lot of analytical/legal work on free will is incredibly narrow and seems to miss the point to me.

Here would be my proposal: people are free or unfree. This isn't a binary, it's a sliding scale. We can be more or less self-determining. We might describe intentional versus unintentional actions, and free versus unfree acts (these will overlap, and arguably relatively unintentional acts can be free is they involve a freely chosen habit). However, this level of freedom will be parasitic on the freedom of the person. The analytic fixation on "free acts" and not "free people" is unhelpful.

I also don't get the desire to split off political freedom from freedom tout court. They are deeply related.

It sounds absurd to me that those things have no truth value at all. If that were the case, then why does science work? — Brendan Golledge

Science works now and then, more or less. It works best when the conditions tested match the metaphysical underpinning best, e.g. materialism and reductionism. The further you get from those conditions, the less precise and the less definite the results you get.

My background in biology has me taking the side that says all is random. In nature, there is no such thing as a closed system. There are always random events that impinge upon and influence the outcome of any "cause" in producing its "effect." — Questioner

In this case, it is effectively random because we don't know the information. But if we knew all the information and if quantum mechanics didn't make a difference, then in theory, it would all be determined. This is the same way that a die is technically determined if you do the physics equations to predict how it will fall.