Free will? I dont think so

[stoplooklisten]

Then tell us all what happened on your fifth birthday. Who was there and what they said to you. No, let’s make it easier. Give us a verbatim report of the events of your birthday just five years ago.

I can remember quite a bit. I’m sure that you can too. Giving the correct prompts, we can remember quite a bit. The human powers of memory and recall are amazing. This is one reason why there must be a Designer and Creator. Blind random mutations and natural selection could never create such amazing powers of memory and recall.

Beyond those natural powers, there can also be supernatural powers such as the Holy Spirit that could have brought knowledge of the word of Jesus Christ. Who else ever spoke such remarkable words as the Sermon on the Mount?!

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Your problem is to show that if the tape was rerun you could make a different decision if the conditions were exactly the same.

That would be your problem.

Why is that my problem? I say that you can’t make a different decision. You’re the one who says you can. On what basis do you say that?

As I said, if you could change your mind for no reason, then any jury decision you’d make would be worthless. How do you answer that?

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Then tell us all what happened on your fifth birthday. Who was there and what they said to you. No, let’s make it easier. Give us a verbatim report of the events of your birthday just five years ago.

I can remember quite a bit. I’m sure that you can too. Giving the correct prompts, we can remember quite a bit. The human powers of memory and recall are amazing. This is one reason why there must be a Designer and Creator. Blind random mutations and natural selection could never create such amazing powers of memory and recall.

Beyond those natural powers, there can also be supernatural powers such as the Holy Spirit that could have brought knowledge of the word of Jesus Christ. Who else ever spoke such remarkable words as the Sermon on the Mount?!

So where’s the verbatim report? You said you could remember discussions when you were three. I just want a discussion from five years ago. You can either produce one or admit that you were wrong in saying so.

Not that we could tell if you were correct in your recollection or not. But I just want to see you attempt it. Unless you suffer from hyperthymesia, we all know it’s not possible.

 

[Gorgias]

But it is. You discard the claims about other religions - on the basis that they are insufficiently substantiated and I discard your claims on the same ground.

Except that (wait for it…), you’re mistaken.
I discard claims about other religions because I hold that Christian claims, themselves, are sufficiently substantiated, and therefore, those that conflict with these claims are in error.

You only have hearsay testimonies about Jesus, the Muslims only have hearsay testimonials about Mohamed. No difference!

Keep telling yourself that. It’s one of those “lies we tell ourselves” which you mentioned in another thread.

Only IF the experience is necessary to achieve the end result.

No. It might be contingent (rather than necessary), but still affect the result. Example: I don’t need to add vanilla extract to the cake I’m baking, and it will still be a cake whether I add it or not. But, the addition (or lack thereof) will affect the end result.

Heck, we don’t even have to go that far: we can talk about the addition of ingredients to dishes which aren’t perceived in themselves, as such, but which add to the end effect. (I’m thinking of small amounts of cinnamon in red meat dishes.)

Experience affects result. Pretty straightforward.

So we are back to focusing on the memory of the experience as the one thing which is contingent upon experience since as I pointed out, God cannot produce a memory of an experience within you that you have never had.

We are not. The ‘memory’ is not the only effect.

Again…only if an equivalent end result cannot be achieved without the experiences.

Here’s the problem with this assertion: it’s patently unable to be substantiated. So… it doesn’t really help. At best, we could play “what if” with that assertion.

I think you would agree that a human’s perception of experiencing something and thereby evolving their person through its effect is limited like our awareness of time in that we see the future as not existing yet.

Not sure what you mean by “limited” in this case. Does my ‘eating a chocolate cookie as lunch’ cause me to be a mass murderer at dinner time? Is there no limit to the effect?

That’s rather irrelevant. What is relevant, I’m asserting, is that my choice of action does have impact on me. As such, a life without experience – without action – is not equivalent to that life, with its lived experiences.

 

[Gorgias]

Yet the future exists and has no potential.

You’re mixing frames of reference, it seems. My contention is that, for us as humans, there is no vision of the future, and so, in our frame of reference, it is not ‘actual’ until we encounter it an actualize it ourselves. From God’s frame of reference, He has no such limitation – it is – and so He knows it.

Is it the experience itself?

I would say that the experience is part of the equation!

I would say no since experiencing is a present condition which eventually ends resulting in a condition which is not the experiencing itself but the resultant effects that experience produced.

The experience creates the resultant (subjective) effects, though, whatever they may be.

There hasn’t been presented yet any reason why we could not replace the process of experiencing by man with Gods will.

In other words, “why not just a brain dump – a la the movie ‘Matrix’ – rather than actual, real experiences”?

I think that one’s easy: the latter is real and true, and the former is merely a lie. God is not the God of deception.

if you end up in heaven a healthy, happy, perfected person, you need the experience of misery to get there

I’m going to have to interrupt you again: you keep on insisting that life is “misery”. I reject that assertion. And, I think that this perspective is coloring your approach here (and skewing it).

How does adding evil to good produce a greater good?

Romans 8:28 – “We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

 

[o_mlly]

Why is that my problem? I say that you can’t make a different decision. You’re the one who says you can. On what basis do you say that?

Looks like you did not read my post. Ignoring it just won’t do.

You wrote:

My point is that every decision we make is ultimately based on conditions external to our thought processes. What we think is a reaction to the external world.

Assuming that this fat man’s country did not experience a famine, his refrigerator did not break down, etc. (that all externals are constant) then the change in his size is due to his changing his free will from being an over-eater to eating healthy.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

As I said, if you could change your mind for no reason, then any jury decision you’d make would be worthless. How do you answer that?

One can change their mind for a non-external reason, i.e., self-reflection. And self-reflection is not limited to the fat man above walking by a mirror. Introspection that brings about a decision to change one’s future choices can only come about if one has free will.

 

[porthos11]

I think a lot of the difficulty stems from the fact that most people think of God as existing as we do: with a past, present and future. That God “knows the future” before it happens.

That is not the case. There is no future for God and so God does not know future events before they happen. To him, they are happening, since God is an eternal Now. So for God, nothing is “pre-” determined. Everything that to us has happened, is happening, and will happen, are all present to him in a single Now. That includes the choices we make out of our own free will.

 

[whatistrue]

therefore all logic and rational analysis does not apply

That to me is the sticking point. Logical and rational according to you, which are not the only possible logical and rational. I am out - I don’t react well to “you are stupid and only I know truth”.

 

[whatistrue]

Granted, no actual name-calling. But when you reject any possibility of an argument against your position (God’s knowledge makes free will impossible) using the terms you used implies a lack of ability on the part of your opponent. I have said my piece and you have rejected it and made it abundantly clear that you will not accept any argument that doesn’t fit your assumptions, so no, I will no longer be tilting at this particular windmill. Muting thread.

 

[Gorgias]

The question was ‘do you consider rationality to be integral to the posession of a soul?’. As in: Can they exist separately?

You never responded so I had to assume that you do indeed consider them to be inseparable.

Let’s make sure you’re asking the question you think you’re asking (because, in the way you’ve asked it, the answer is clearly “no”). I think that the question you want to ask is:

is ‘rationality’ integral to the possession of an immaterial, immortal human soul?

Is that the question?

If so, then yes, Catholic theology considers rationality to be part of the definition of the human person, in a way that excludes rationality from non-human physical entities.

Jesus is quoted quite a lot in the bible. Who was taking all the verbatim notes?

Why are “verbatim notes” necessary?

Moreover, you’re ignoring the ways that memorization was utilized in cultures that were illiterate (are at least largely so). ‘Memorization’ atrophies in cultures in which written accounts become the way to ‘record’ history.

Why do YOU get to make up the definition of “outside our temporal framework”?

He’s not making it up. He’s reporting what God has shared in his self-revelation.

Then tell us all what happened on your fifth birthday. Who was there and what they said to you. No, let’s make it easier. Give us a verbatim report of the events of your birthday just five years ago.

If we were an illiterate society, we would have precisely that kind of well-developed and often-exercised retention of memories. Of course, that doesn’t imply that we’d attempt to memorize everything, but just the things we considered worthy of such effort.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Why is that my problem? I say that you can’t make a different decision. You’re the one who says you can. On what basis do you say that?

Looks like you did not read my post. Ignoring it just won’t do.

You wrote:

My point is that every decision we make is ultimately based on conditions external to our thought processes. What we think is a reaction to the external world.

Assuming that this fat man’s country did not experience a famine, his refrigerator did not break down, etc. (that all externals are constant) then the change in his size is due to his changing his free will from being an over-eater to eating healthy.

As I said, if you could change your mind for no reason, then any jury decision you’d make would be worthless. How do you answer that?

One can change their mind for a non-external reason, i.e., self-reflection. And self-reflection is not limited to the fat man above walking by a mirror. Introspection that brings about a decision to change one’s future choices can only come about if one has free will.

‘Changing his free will’ simply means changing one decision for another. You have a reason for the original decision and then something happens to cause you to choose another option. And there would be a reason for that.

And self reflection has to relate to the external world. You are contemplating how you interact with the world. Maybe you should be more humble. More forthright. More caring. More thoughtful. Everything that you internalise has a connection with the external world. And what happens in the external world gives you reasons to ‘self reflect’. People’s reaction to you, either directly or indirectly.

Your fat guy had a reason for being overweight. And then something happened to cause him to change his mind. There was a reason for that as well. Maybe medical advicd. Maybe he couldn’t tie his shoe laces. But there is always a reason for all the choices we make. And if you had exactly the same conditions then you would have exactly the same reasons for making exactly the same decision.

As I have said on a couple of occasions, if you made a choice not governed by reason then you’d be a useless member of any jury. What you are suggesting is that you could hear all the evidence in a case presented in exactly the same way under exactly the same conditions and come to a different decision.

How do you explain that?

 

[Freddy]

Catholic theology considers rationality to be part of the definition of the human person, in a way that excludes rationality from non-human physical entities.

Freddy:

Jesus is quoted quite a lot in the bible. Who was taking all the verbatim notes?

Why are “verbatim notes” necessary?

Moreover, you’re ignoring the ways that memorization was utilized in cultures that were illiterate (are at least largely so). ‘Memorization’ atrophies in cultures in which written accounts become the way to ‘record’ history.

Then tell us all what happened on your fifth birthday. Who was there and what they said to you. No, let’s make it easier. Give us a verbatim report of the events of your birthday just five years ago.

If we were an illiterate society, we would have precisely that kind of well-developed and often-exercised retention of memories. Of course, that doesn’t imply that we’d attempt to memorize everything, but just the things we considered worthy of such effort.

Re the first part…I needed to know your definition to save me completely wasting my time trying to convince you of something that by the very definition of ‘rationality’ that you hold to, I had no chance of doing so. Would have been good to get a heads up on that rather than be asked to to go on a fool’s errand.

And I use the term verbatim because Jesus is quoted in the bible verbatim.

And if your answer as to how we have verbatim quotes is ‘they just remembered it’, then I guess that’s all we’ve got. Except for studies of course. See following post:

(contd)

 

[Freddy]

(contd)

"Previous research has found that illiterate people generally perform less well than literate people on conventional neuropsychological memory tests including wordlist learning and recall (the task used here), but also on story learning and recall, verbal paired associates, digits backwards, letter-number sequencing tasks, and complex figure drawing (see [4] and references within). The performance of illiterates seems to approach that of literates only in object memory and wordlist recognition memory [4]. According to Ardila and colleagues [19], such differences in recall between literate and illiterate people can be explained because illiterate individuals have inefficient encoding and retrieval strategies or poor organization of the material to be memorized, which makes it difficult to support a relatively active and effortful cognitive process such as free recall. Our data do not support such findings, as there were no differences between literate and illiterate participants except for in primary memory.

The difference can also be due to low levels of literacy (even many literate informants have difficulty reading a short sentence). However, an important implication of our finding is that, in the studied populations, differences in verbal working memory performance should be attributed to school attendance per se, and not to literacy." Schooling, Local Knowledge and Working Memory: A Study among Three Contemporary Hunter-Gatherer Societies

So most findings are in direct opposition to your claim. And this paper suggests no difference, but only when related to schooling and not illiteracy.

 

[o_mlly]

‘Changing his free will’ simply means changing one decision for another. You have a reason for the original decision and then something happens to cause you to choose another option. And there would be a reason for that.

And self reflection has to relate to the external world. You are contemplating how you interact with the world. Maybe you should be more humble. More forthright. More caring. More thoughtful. Everything that you internalise has a connection with the external world. And what happens in the external world gives you reasons to ‘self reflect’. People’s reaction to you, either directly or indirectly.

Your fat guy had a reason for being overweight. And then something happened to cause him to change his mind. There was a reason for that as well. Maybe medical advicd. Maybe he couldn’t tie his shoe laces. But there is always a reason for all the choices we make. And if you had exactly the same conditions then you would have exactly the same reasons for making exactly the same decision.

As I have said on a couple of occasions, if you made a choice not governed by reason then you’d be a useless member of any jury. What you are suggesting is that you could hear all the evidence in a case presented in exactly the same way under exactly the same conditions and come to a different decision.

How do you explain that?

One would hope that a change of attitude or disposition has a reason but that change can also be rooted in emotion.

The point is that externalities cannot, in themselves, change attitudes, i.e., our internal dispositions. We are not simply blown about by the wind, responding to the laws of nature, or driven by unchanging instincts. If we did not have a reason to change, we may be called whimsical. But that does not alter the fact that absent free will, even the whimsical could not change attitudes.

The direct cause of any change in disposition is internal. Anyone not living in a vacuum may have indirect external causes but indirect external causes are neither necessary and, most certainly, insufficient to effect an internal change. Only a free will can explain one’s ability to change an attitude.

Your characterization of self-reflection as always relating to the external world misses the point. We are not blackboards upon which others write our story. We internalize all our experiences through self-reflection, i.e., the act of freely deciding what to keep, what to ignore as our own. If you read this post, you’ll do just that, self-reflect and freely decide. If you didn’t have a free will, well, you’d be following the advice of the last person you listened to.

Your jury example merely re-expresses your same false argument that because what has been will always be, so therefore, we do not have free will. It’s a non sequitur fallacy. The argument says nothing about the state of free will in the moment in history, only that one cannot change history.

 

[Freddy]

We internalize all our experiences through self-reflection…

Couldn’t agree more.

 

[o_mlly]

Couldn’t agree more.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

RCIA classes online are currently registering candidates. Check your local listings.

 

[Hume]

So determinism is true. And decisions, if not arbitrary, are based on reasons that depend on that which has gone before. And you are obviously, by definition, making a decision. But that’s not the equivalent of having free will.

Very well and concisely put.

 

[Hume]

Hume:

It created “In the Beginning” at the same time it created the most grisly things to have ever occurred.

May I start calling you “it”, too? Some respect for the God we’re discussing (and in which your interlocutors believe) would be appreciated, please.

I’m normally one to let stuff like this go. However, here I can’t help myself, so…

DODGE!

 

[Hume]

Appreciate the links, but I’m sure I’ve covered most of it in secular uni philo classes or in my time around seminary. It’s been some years, but the ideas aren’t all that complex.

Time has moved on. Nature and essence has been outmoded by chemistry. Act and potency has been outmoded by physics. These are just better, more observable, quantifiable ways to describe the universe.

This stuff is history, not current affairs.

 

[Gorgias]

So most findings are in direct opposition to your claim.

Hang on a second, though: you’re not refuting the claim I made – you’re refuting a different claim that I didn’t make! I didn’t say that “all members of illiterate societies” were the ‘by-memory’ historians of their societies! I said that this is how illiterate societies kept their important information / histories / etc! So, it’s not that, in literate societies, everyone is a doctor and a lawyer and a candle-stick maker – rather, these roles are fulfilled in society. Same thing here: the claim is that those who acted as ‘historians’ in illiterate societies did so through the use of well-honed memories. Not everyone (which is what you just addressed).

I’m normally one to let stuff like this go. However, here I can’t help myself, so…

DODGE!

No idea what you mean. So… “FORD! CHEVY! DELOREAN!”