You are not going to improve the life of a single person by not buying something.

"Free Will"??? There is nothing to give up here.
When I make a decision, or act in any way it is determined by who and what I am; and through my needs, motivation and volition.
I would rather I determined my own fate than be free of myself, as that makes no sense whatever.

None of these things have given any money to the Chinese government in any way. — Pseudonym

Keep your naiveté. The servers you use to write your post contribute to the Chinese economy as they are full of components.
If you want to be pure you'd have to stop contributing to this Forum.

↪charleton I image that that laws are not fully deterministic or else that they apply over a limited scope. Is it even logically possible for full determinism to produce more than one outcome? — Perplexed

Perplexed by name; perplexed by nature. Seems you want to keep your deterministic cake but want to eat the free will topping too.
Who or what decides when determinism leaves the room?

I can't see any point of disagreement here; other than the pedantic one concerning the idea of the sun rising. — Janus

Sometimes posts are designed to agree.
Surely it does not always have to be confrontational.
Since we are discussing induction it is worth pointing out that the common sense perception that the sun rises was thought to be true for thousands of years, yet clever application of skepticism and induction has given us the heliocentric hypothesis.
So far from being flawed, it is worth pointing out the value of the scientific method.

Is there a special prayer that the Laws of Nature — Rich

I don't know. But its not me that believes in magic. That would be you.

You ask what reason we could have for thinking the sun will not rise tomorrow — Janus

As you know full well the sun does not rise, has never risen and never shall. Inductive knowledge has furnished us with the truth that the appearance of the sun rising is the result of the earth's rotation.
And it is that persistence, not only of the patterns of nature but the persistence of human observation and recording of those observations that has painted or knowledge with what we like to call laws.

Are you suggesting that the Laws of Nature work in such a manner that they give the real scoop about the nature of choice — Rich

Are you suggesting that humans are able to act against the laws of cause and effect when the rest of the universe has to comply with it?

Single celled organisms probably.
What's the "free will" guys answer?

So please have a listen to the lecture when you have some time, and post your thoughts. — Agustino

This is a lecture version of fake news.
This is a towering straw man of bollocks.

The determinist position is that there is no choice. — Rich

This is not the case. Determinism is an explanation of choice which is completely lacking from those who propose free-will.

The self is not static. Like all things it changes and evolves. The physical world is matter in motion; action and reaction.

So do you say that to be free is to act only from internal forces? How does one begin the process of disassociating from external forces in order to follow internal ones? Would this change not violate determinism? — Perplexed

The compatibilist position finds that all acts are determined. "Free" acts are determined by the self, which is itself determined.
So - no.

I hardly buy anything made in China, — Pseudonym

This is false.
Open up your computer, your fridge, your TV, your DVD.... ad infinitem

Wales and Scotland were both independent nations before the Imperialist Englishman invaded them. — René Descartes

A common enough misconception.

I can't carry on a conversation with the void. it's just not possible. — Jon

Well there is what science has shown us, then there is your imagination.
I think the latter is more like a void.

Science is as confounded as it ever was about origin so taking any position is merely personal impression and nothing more. — Jon

A bold, empty and unsubstantiated position.

I believe this would depend on your metaphysical assumptions. It sounds like you are taking a nominalist position which would reduce deduction to the abstract rules of description. — Perplexed

No. logicians agree that deduction offers no new information, only clarify that which is know. Take the standard syllogism, we already know that Socrates is mortal since he was a man.

Does this mean that you believe free will to be incompatible with determinism? — Perplexed

Only if you accept that free will is defined as not compelled to act from external forces.

Yes me too, but somewhat less vacuous than your suggestion.

I just can't believe that cells made of particles somehow just randomly created entire biological systems. — CasKev

Why not? What other examples have you got?
The chemical pathways are well understood and can be replicated in a test tube.

What happens is that you become a disembodied mind drifting invisibly somewhere in the dim, — Bitter Crank

What we call in the UK: bollocks.

Cyprus is divided between the Greek south and the Turkish north.

What value is sectarianism? How about Catalonia, Wales, Scotland - what next? Cornwall, Texas, Shelwig-Holstein? Where does it stop?

. I believe that Tibet should be self-governing but I would like to hear other peoples opinions on it. — René Descartes

Kurdistan, Palestine, East Timor, Cyprus, South Ossietia, Hawaii, anymore for anymore????

Facts or propositions that the mind deals with depend either on the nature of the external the word or logical relations. So for example Paris is the capital of France and 2 + 2 = 4 are facts regardless of which state the brain is in. — Andrew4Handel

I'm puzzled by this. Do you think these are facts if there were no human brains at all?
~If so how?

So you think it is material to the argument whether a person sees the illusion of purpose as survival, or whether they see it as morphological conformity? Id really like to know how. — Pseudonym

No I do not that THAT. I said what I wanted to say and not your straw man version.
And No the choice is not between the illusion of purpose or "morphological conformity" - that is your phrase not mine. [Whatever the hell you what that to mean.]
The choice is between thinking that the living world is designed or not. Without the details I mentioned (which you seem to think are not relevant), such as natural, sexual, and domestic selection it is possible to fall into the illusion of purpose. However, when you have to details of the process of evolutionary change it becomes perfectly clear how absurd is the illusion of a purposefully and intelligently designed universe.
It's an illusion that persisted for thousands of years in the absence of those details that you have told me are of no importance.

Capitalism is the American nightmare, which has crushed all the dreams of ordinary Americans. It's just a pity they don't know it.
To maintain the so-called American Dream requires an intercessionry government bound to the values of that dream, and capable of creating the environment where the dream can be realised: NOT a government in the pockets of big money and corporate interests who conspire to place the burdens of the maintenance of that society on the people and away from themselves, even though they reap most of the rewards.

Is there anything wrong with rewarding people for what they accomplished purely or almost purely by luck? — czahar

So if a person wins the lottery they ought not deserve the payout since they only won through luck?

Since you don't like any of my answers why don't you tell me what evolution means literally? — Jon

As I said , it is of no importance the LITERAL meaning of evolution.
In the context of the thread we are interested in the entire body of theory which points to the apparent design through automatically, rather than intelligently guided development.
This is not a lesson in the origin of words, but the origin of species.
The literal meaning gives a completely false view point.
When you unroll a scroll you are revealing what is preordained by the fact that the text is already written. Evolution is about the way species respond from changes in the environment via variation and mutation to produce novel adaptations and new species.
If they were LITERALLY evolving they would just be showing us what was already intended, as by God for instance.

The 'purpose' I was referring to in that sentence — Pseudonym

YOU SAID
Whether the purpose is survival, or conformity to a sexually selected morphology is immaterial to the argument.

I disagree for the reasons I said.

Disagreement would be two people with identical points of view getting different results. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

No disagreement could be two people with the same POV having different reactions, or two people having a different POV and disagreeing for that reason.
It is conversely possible that two people with different POVs could agree, as well as two people with the same POV agreeing.

At the same time one should at cosmology as an evolutionary process and at the self-organizing patterns of nature (from a Platonic or final causes perspective). — prothero

I think you mean Aristotle's fourth cause ortelos.
It's interesting to note that Darwin explicitly credits Aristotle in Physicae Austcultationes for pointing out the accidental nature of physical properties. Specifically that teeth were the result of accident, and do not have a purpose to chew any more that the rain's purpose is to make the crops crow!
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?keywords=aristotle&pageseq=20&itemID=F385&viewtype=text

The accidental purposeless universe crowd has more to explain than they like to admit. — prothero

Indeed NOT.
All the work has to be done by the crazy crowd that thinks the most complexity pre-existed the start of the universe - since an overall design has to be conceived by an intelligent designer/s who/that has to be at least as complex as the universe.

I don't think you're looking for the actual meaning of the word evolution but rather it's common usage which is partly defined as "the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form." — Jon

Etymological and semantic arguments are not relevant here.

YOU SAID

Whether the purpose is survival, or conformity to a sexually selected morphology is immaterial to the argument. — Pseudonym

This is not correct, since in order to examine the question of ID we have to be able to offer explanations about the APPARENT purpose to human eyes, with the theories given us from Darwin and others.
i.e. Very material to the argument.

Whether the purpose is survival, or conformity to a sexually selected morphology is immaterial to the argument. — Pseudonym

Thepurpose is material in that there is none. There is no goal here. Brute forces of nature simply and indifferently "conspire" to make living things evolve.
Asserting ANY purpose is to assert intelligent design, which is of import to the thread.

No, I wasn't wrong. We still use Newton's equations, and not Einstein's when we build homes. It works — Agustino

When we build homes????

How does nature change?

1) Newton codified gravity 332 years ago
2) He asserted that the "law" was universal and maintained by the action of God
3) He was wrong on many issues as we now know due to Einstein.
4) Whatever Newton OR Einstein say nature remains unchanged, but the LAWS which are human constructs DO in fact change.
So to get back to the thread point, you were wrong.

Evolution is not random, it selects from favourable attributes and rejects those which are unfavourable. — Pseudonym

This is not exactly true.
"IT" does not select anything. Nature and the forces of the environment RESULT in the selection of more successful and "fit" living things. The EFFECT is evolution. The process is called natural selection. There is also sexual selection, and domestic selection, in which the criteria of 'fitness' of other than direct survival.

Stop rolling out your turd, and find out what it really means.

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was written in 1686
Check your basic arithmetic!

When Einstein said "God does not play dice" he was affirming the utter deterministic nature of the universe, and denying any miraculous or antirecessionary god.