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GEddie
Guest
Interesting. Why did he say that?
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Lucretius
Guest
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Lucretius
Guest
But isn’t it possible to have multiple possible outcome for that same exact conditions? To use a statistic term analogically, that the conditions give the will degrees of freedom?
Christi pax,
Lucretius
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oldcelt
Guest
Well put.
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Bradski
Guest
I think that it would.
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ThinkingSapien
Guest
I don’the know if what I am thinking about came from him, but I remember someone arguing rewinding the tape and changing a small thing could result in humans never existing. Such as if a specific organism with a mutation that in a gene that is common in humanity now had never gotten a chance to reproduce then we would be very different. It’s thought the further back in time that a small change is made the larger the differences that it would make in this new timeline.
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Bradski
Guest
But he allowed for small changes. Which, over countless years have enormous implications. If you think about your millions of ancestors, it would only need a single one of them to die before they mated and you wouldn’t be reading this.
“Gould’s suggestion in Wonderful Life that if the tape of life were rewound to the time of the organisms found in the Canadian outcrop known as the Burgess Shale, dated to about 530 million years ago, and replayed with a few contingencies tweaked here and there, humans would most likely never have evolved.” http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/shermer_contingency.html
Again, don’t confuse having more than one option with free will. You ALWAYS have more than one option even if the second one is ‘do nothing’. But I’ve yet to have anyone explain why the exact conditions wouldn’t result in the exact same choice.
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Lucretius
Guest
Thank you for the citation. My point is that Mr. Gould thinks that biology isn’t certainly determined.
The easy response is to point out that we have no direct evidence of whether the exact conditions would produce the exact choice. Therefore, I can simply say that the conditions wouldn’t result in the same choice, because the will can freely choose between them. The choice can change because of free will. You could say that because the evidence can go either way, I can choice between which way I can interpret the free will experience.
But I think that path is a dead end. What I say is that there is not contradiction between someone making the same choice every rewind, and he making that choice freely. If a free will is a will that isn’t compulsed by the passions, but rather guided by reason, then choosing the same option is expected. That is, when your will isn’t blinded by sin, and possesses perfect knowledgable, the will will choose the same option, every time (this is actually why the Saints can never sin in sight of the Beatific Vision: they posses enough knowledge of God that sin becomes impossible to choose).
I guess you could say that St. Thomas’ thoughts transcend the different modern positions on free will
Here’s some thoughts on the matter:
thomism.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/interior-dialogue-on-free-will/
thomism.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/free-will-and-electrodes/
Christi pax,
Lucretius
B
Bradski
Guest
I think that you are correct to a certain extent. But how do you respond to the situation regarding a re-run film?
Imagine that you were shown a screen which showed someone making a decision. It is rerun time after time. They make the same decision each time. If it’s a film, then they cannot do anything else. You cannot run Thelma and Louise a number of times and then one time see them decide to give themselves up.
Then someone tells you it is not a film. It is actually a time machine which enables you to view the same sequence of events multiple times. Exactly the same thing would happen. (spoiler alert!) Thelma and Louise always drive off the cliff. Because the conditions are EXACTLY the same. We all make choices which are governed by conditions at that time. Rerun exactly the same conditions and you will make exactly the same choices.
I don’t see that as being a definition of free will.
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Lucretius
Guest
All I have to say is that the analogy doesn’t apply: fiction doesn’t necessarily follow truth. In this case, I would simply say that the situation where you go back in time and see the same conclusion every time wouldn’t occur in real life. It’s not like we can test this out for real anyway (unless you got yourself a time machine!!?!
:extrahappy::dancing: :bounce: :bowdown2
But I’ll look at this more deeply tomorrow (I’m pretty…tir…ed…no…w…ZZZ…Goodnight…ZZZ)
Here’s more thoughts:
thomism.wordpress.com/2009/12/29/ramble-on-free-will/
thomism.wordpress.com/2008/12/24/determinism-as-a-cause-of-free-will/
thomism.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/free-will-as-free-choice/
Christi pax,
Lucretius
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the_universal
Guest
Sorry…I still don’t see the problem of free will from the atheist perspective. If I’m an atheist, wouldn’t I still want to live morally (at least according to the morals I like)? I don’t see why they would have a problem with being told they are living an illusion? If I’m an atheist, I still have some self-interest in getting what I want from this one life, so I act in certain ways to make it self-gratifying until my death.
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Bradski
Guest
I don’t see it as a problem either. Although if there is no free will, there does seem to be a problem in that a person doing good seems to have no more control over what he does than a person doing evil. In that case, one could not really blame the evil man for his deeds any more than you could praise the good man.
But actual deeds are what we might call first order acts. There are second order acts where we accept, or not, the validity of arguments that relate to morality. These are the same as beliefs. You have no choice whether you believe or not - you simply decide whether the available facts are acceptable or not. If free will does not exist, then it could be said that having accepted the information and therefore have automatically formed a belief, you act on these beliefs. They determine your actions.
The same with morality. If you accepts certain information with regard to moral facts, a second order act, so that you automatically develop a moral viewpoint, then this viewpoint determines your first order acts.
What we class as a good person is someone who is more likely to accept information that automatically develops beliefs and a sense of morality that would lead to acts that we would describe as good. If we tell someone that stealing will lead to distress, then a good person would accept this. His sense of empathy leads him to believe this to be true. And this belief determines his actions.
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