Freewill and Determinism

[awesomov]

I've always been under the impression that determinism most definitely exists under some form. After all, for instance, if you grow hungry, your first impulse is to eat. However, I've been trying to think of ways freewill really can exist, and I'm having a bit of a hard time with that. I'd need something hard, so don't get discouraged if I say something negative about your idea, but feel free to help me out anyway.

[alikakadri (deleted)]

`warning, the following is one of my mini novels and i make no apology for it
seriously, gotta support your ideas with plenty of substance or the idea just falls flat.


correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't determinism the determination to accomplish what others (or even sometimes yourself) gives up on because it's too difficult or too much of a bother? I'm thinking of someone who is missing hands and learns to do everything with their feet when they could just give up and have someone else do everything for them. Or someone who build a multi-million $ empire from nothing at all.

Free will, the decision to be a part of the norm or be part of any other group, or of no group at all, the ability to see lies or mind-control out of the media, the ability to say no when everyone else says yes, but not just because they say "yes" and you wanna be different, but because "yes" is the answer you came up with all by yourself with your own thoughts, independently of said mind-control/lies (or the wish to just be oppositional defiant). The hermit who decides not to be a part of the social norms, the teen who rejects smoking/drugs, the person who is told all their life they should be one thing and choose to be something/someone else.


maybe my answers aren't scientific, too simply put... but they are what they are.

I like to think of myself as both determined and making full use of my free will, on my own terms. There are always occasions when free will is removed or limited, but it's still there. When a gun is pointed to your head, most people would choose to obey and live, it seems like the better choice... so people would do horrible acts with the reasoning that a gun was pointed to your head. I'm not so sure that's true. You still have the choice to fight back, and the choice to die with your inner-being intact because you refused to do said horrible acts even though they were dictated on you by the gun pointed at you. The idea that you don't have any choice because a gun is pointed at you is only an illusion... granted none of the choices are very pleasant, but they are still choices.

in the same line, determination can be great enough to break any sort of mind-control, if there's enough of a reason/will to do so. That too is a choice, allow yourself to be blinded or reject it from day 1, or break free of it at some point (probably harder than the other two).

and then, there's also the choice to see the mind-control and still choose to be a part of society, although there's always the reminder that you are different and will never "fit in" because you aren't blind like other people are and so any interaction has to be part-pretense or you can be a leader by rejecting that pretense and so be somewhat lonely because others think you're weird.

I always laugh bitterly when i hear so-and-so cheated because it's ingrained in genetics that guys have multiple partners or whatever... or that competition is good for sperm so a woman should cheat for a greater chance at pregnancy.
With enough determination and free will, any pre-existing condition can be overcome. Same as hypnotism, somewhere in there even under that condition no one can force you to do what you don't want to do, consciously or unconsciously. If you did something while under hypnosis, it was that some part of you, no matter how small or hidden, wanted to do it. People choose to quit smoking with various rates of success. how strong is their will vs how addicted they have become. it's easier to say i quit after 1 or 2 than after years and about a million cigarettes, isn't it? Those who claim to wanna quit but end up smoking again just haven't been determined enough, and yeah, from my side it's easy for me to say that knowing i never smoked, except i've defeated my own issues through determination, free will and strength of will. Everyone has that potential. I'll skip the offensive lecture about tame sheep in the pasture vs survival and freedom. I'm sure I'd offend too many people and that's just not my intention... Instead I'll jump to choices increase with knowledge and experience... thus, so does free will. You have more chances of choosing to do what you're told if a gun is pointed at your head if you know nothing about self-defense. But if you've gone through it, then you're more likely to like the "fighting back and surviving" choice because your knowledge just made that option more likely to end in the result you want: surviving. And of course there's the insane person or the one that has nothing to lose by choosing death or fighting back with the most likely result being death, but those are rare (but prove the free will theory all by themselves). Where as if you have no knowledge/experience you're probably just going to go along with what you're told because you want to survive and are pretty convinced that's the only way you will. Survival becomes your choice. That may or may not be free will but instinct of survival that give you that choice, so let's explain this a little.

free will is that which makes you say "wait a minute, this isn't right. So what are my options?" The moment the question is asked, you have free will. Now said free will is definitely influenced by knowledge, experience, moral values that may or may not be self-imposed based on your life so far. The moment the question is asked, you stop just reacting to what's happening and start thinking for yourself. who, what, when, where, why, how, become your own evaluation of the situation. They lead you to think, to question, to make assessments, to weigh options. The moment the question is asked, you have removed the blindfold and are trying to see through the fog to what is really going on. Thus leading you to having free choice/free will of choice.

There is no free choice independent of your life, your experiences, your values, your knowledge, because they mingle to form who you are and also what you want to be. They are added to the core "self". But the fact that all of that is linked together doesn't make it any less a free choice.
However most people are limiting themselves by jumping in with both feet and not bothering to question much of anything. They shrug off that free will and place their lives in the hands of others only to be given the illusion of free will (will i choose the fashionable blue mini skirt or the wilder leather mini skirt... both being overly offered as an option by the media as "fashion" while other options are discarded as "unfashionable", thus you are being led to think you have free will when really rejecting the media's idea of fashion, or beauty, or right and wrong and making up your own mind would be true free will).

to have free will (as opposed to the illusion of free will), you have to start by questioning what you're told and what you see and begin finding your own answers, right or wrong, and correct them when you learn new info (because sometimes a small new bit of information can change a world of what you thought was fact or truth). To do this you have to open your mind to things you might never even normally consider.
You have to reject other people's reality and substitute your own, so to speak...

I dunno, am i making sense or just rambling on and on? XD

[alikakadri (deleted)]

`ok i need to add that free will makes others view you as a threat and they react by labeling you insane so they can cope.

now see what over-thinking does to you? :/

but then there's good insane and bad insane lol those are dictated by your core self.

[awesomov]

`Determinism is more along the lines of things like destiny, cause and effect, outside control, etc. Freewill is the opposite of that (choice, personal control, etc.).

Still, doesn't mean your post isn't thought-provoking. However:

"Now said free will is definitely influenced by knowledge, experience, moral values that may or may not be self-imposed based on your life so far."

That is why I tend to think it's all, or at least mostly, deterministic (cause and effect). Even small things that may seem like are under your control can be argued as not being so, so this is why I wonder if it ultimately exists at all.

[alikakadri (deleted)]

`okay, got my terms mixed a little...

again, starting with the simple obvious... and then moving on to the more complex...

Every single choice made brings a set of possible effects...
you choose to bungee jump for example... many results can come from that choice, some good, some bad, some in between. That should be obvious though so I'm not going to write the small novel that would normally follow lol

outside control... :/ well... that one is also proven a lot by life itself... let's pick the example of a relationship... you can control what you do, what you say, some of how you react/feel/think. But some parts of that relationship are controlled by the partner and their behavior, their thoughts, their actions, their views. Some might try to be controlling, but really you can't control what the other person does or does not do except if they allow you to, whether by thinking that you can force them or by denying themselves the options that would make controlling them impossible.

Another example would be you can control the car you drive, but you cannot control that another driver might run a red light or a stop sign and crash into yours. You can attempt to react if you notice it in time, but you cannot control what the other person chose to do.

Now if you think it was pre-determined and that there's nothing you could have done, then do you react or do you let it happen?
Either choice is unlikely to prove either theory since it's impossible to check for an alternative choice because this is one situation, and that situation is unique to that moment. We'd have to be able to go back in time to check for different result, and I'm also not going to enter time-travel theory lol

faith and destiny are tricky that way, but some things do seem to fit under the category of being pre-planned by the universe... we just can't prove it without being aware of any greater plan existing... at least at this time. "I guess we'll know if/when the world ends in our lifetime lol

Anyway, if I pick up your answer of cause and effect, I would have to point this out...

you can teach a child, you can guide them into a specific path, you can lead them to experience certain things to lead them on that path, but in the end, can you really say "he/she will absolutely do this" and be 100% right every time, using the same teachings, the same methods, the same guidance on various children?
I can tell you that no, that would be impossible to be 100% certain every time because each child is different, no two children are the same. So even if say, you treat all kids exactly the same, teach them exactly the same and control their environments to get the same experiences, eventually, you'll encounter at least a few who will not choose the same path, who will react and think differently.
Same thing if you make a computer program and run it on all computers, you should get the same result every time, but what makes you think you'll get the same result if you run it on a regular computer and then run it on an AI with the ability to learn from experience, the software is the same, but there's a difference in hardware, thus the result may well vary.

I think people are the same as that AI, if all people were cut from the same block, so to speak, they would mostly likely to act/react the same, no variation in the software, no difference...thus they would be like the regular computer... but what if people tend to be more like that AI, something was made somewhat different about each system which makes it choose a different path, different choices even in the same society, the same "programming"... now multiply that AI by a billion, all with a unique way of processing and you get something like humans. Now think of one of those AI evolving enough to re-write their own program into something new that you could not predict, and leading others to do the same but with various results from various skills. You end up with everything having grown out of the pre-controlled status, thus no longer subject to the same. Imagine the creator of those AI having a sense of humor and throwing a glitch here and there that might give bizarre results with some of the AI's, then you get a mix of the bizarre from those few select AI's mixing with the non-bizarre AI's to change at least some of the AI's results, then you get your mainstream AI's, your bizarre AI's and pretty much any "shades of gray AI's that are neither fully mainstream nor fully bizarre, but all at different levels. Now the program is beyond anything you might have foreseen, however it was planned into growing the way it did.

Even a pre-determined set of events would have to contend with individuality. Individuality by definition is unique, it may or may not be predictable. For it to be pre-determined sets of events, you have to know they aren't going to react any other way. So people say that humans are creatures of habit. I disagree with that to some extent because there are people who are very much unpredictable out there, the insane (remember my above mentioned of good or bad insane? well everything has shades of gray and those shades of gray, or the line that separated the two extremes good insane and bad insane, can shift or blur to various degree).

thing is, whether you believe there is one or many God(s) out there, or even none, the fact remains they can throw a set of pre-determined conditions out there, from a specific situation, specific participants and universal rules that can neither be challenged nor broken, but because there's individuality and that spark... or even if you think about those computers, what if there's a glitch? No program is perfect, humans are imperfect, thus even pre-determined events won't work all the time, even if everything is controlled precisely, whether they "throw us a curve" or not.

So you might say that even if there is such a thing as Determinism, it cannot account for everything. I don't know if I lost anyone who might be reading this or not (I think I lost myself somewhere lol), but determinism and free will would go hand-in-hand and mix to become something greater than the sum of it's parts.

you can set up rules for a specific game, you can select specific players so that there's no cheating, you can even try to control game-play and game time, but there is always the possibility that there is someone who will change the wanted outcome. Thing is, you can hope for a different outcome, or you can make it happen. For that you'd have to know the mind of the person or people who set up the game and be more clever than they are, otherwise you're just a pawn in said game. But it's not impossible, just very difficult, especially if you can only guess at the type of person/group who set the game in motion in the first place.

Okay, long enough novel lol I don't wanna give anyone headaches

make what you will of my insane opinions XD but may it help clear the fog (or create new fog to explore, that works too lol)

[willdkay3]

If you deconstruct the question to the foundation the real question is do we as individual have any control in our life. To that question I believe the answer is, it doesn't matter. The reason I think that is the answer is either yes or no but we don't have any evidence of that being true or false or what the plan is. No matter what the answer is it ends up with either we have the freedom to choose, or we think we do but we don't and we don't realize it, or we are not sure but can never prove it without divine intervention. So in the end it really doesn't matter until some outside force declares otherwise, but if I where to put in my two cent I think we are free though I admit it is only because it would be depressing otherwise.

[razielatreides]

I believe the limitations on our free will is directly determined by the amount of knowledge we consume and preserve also the presence of self i feel has a lot of impact on free will. The more you learn and keep the more options you will have also you'll understand the impact of those actions which will lead to more informed decision making, risk management to me is a huge factor of free will if you get hit by a car and you never knew cars existed you would feel as though "god" himself had seen it fit to end your life therefor making your choices null and void, however you know cars exist so you don't walk in the street for fear of getting hit managing your risks and exercising your free will. The only time in your life where you have no free will and no choice at all is the day your born and the day you die (assuming you don't die do to some dumb s--- you did).

[levitatingfrog (deleted)]

`There is no freewill. Our actions are controlled by deterministic/probabilistic brain activity. Just because we are consciously aware of the thoughts that caused an action does not mean that we have some kind of spooky control over it.