No Free Will
 

Trying not to hijack blarrob’s journal

I knew you’d have a response like that

The way you’re thinking about it with sensory delay and all that shows how far you have to go.

Whatever “option” you “choose” you “chose” because of your predisposition to do so. Every outside factor works the same way. A meteor in space, a photon, an electron, my fingers, neurons... Science has proven it. It’s proven every time you drop something and it lands where it lands. Cause and effect.

If you believe in any kind of free will you believe in ghosts.

Any AI we create is going to do what’s going to do. Not what we want but just like us if it thinks it’s making a decision that’s just an illusion of evolution.

It’s a tedious thing to try to get people to understand. The simple and obvious truth that chemicals never make decisions. You’re not a magic set of chemicals that make decisions collectively or whatever ridiculous delusion you’re clinging to.

I know how you are. You’ll come up with better arguments than me. Most people will agree with you. But it’s like evolution which is only cause and effect I don’t even like to entertain arguments to the contrary because the matter is entirely settled except from people who grasp at straws because they don’t like it.

I'm on board with OH on this one.

Even if we decide to reprogram our brain so we automatically make different choices than the ones we've always made is a decision that you are only able to make if you have received the sort of information in the past that would give that as an option, and you would only choose that option if your brain already has compelling reasons to do so.

I don't blame a little kid for choosing to run around and hurt themselves when the option to not do so was also on the table because I understand that child is not developmentally in a place to recognize NOT running and getting hurt as an option, until the proper blanks have been filled in their new brains.

I had this argument with a friend and he just blathered at me, and I asked him to give me an example of something that doesn't have free will and he told me ants. He said that ants react to pheromones that the queen lets out and ants act according to them and if the queen dies the ants just sit there and die off. Now, not only does that not prove free will exists for reasons you already stated, but it's also complete and total bull**** he pulled straight out of his ass because I googled that ****.

He also said that the meaning of life is that when we all die we go to something called 'the collective consciousness'. I don't like talking to this dude about anything that takes any considerable amount of thought.

Source please. Restating an unfalsifiable claim with more force doesn't make it truthier.

How does that negate free will? Whether you made a choice in the past doesn't mean that you couldn't have made a different one, but then again how is it possible to know that for certain?

Is it okay if I change the title of the thread to "Ad Hoc Reasoning Is Scientific Law"?

Eh, change it to whatever you want, I'm not invested enough in this argument to comment much more after this.

This reminds me when you started that stupid thread about what could happen to disprove evolution

seeing that I’m not writing for a scientific journal I don’t need to include a nuanced footnote for every conceivable concern with what can be proven

without any nuance I’m doing you a favor by telling you you’re not there yet intellectually and I reject that I need to mire myself in the minutiae of the matter

Dismissing my stance based on thought experiments I've done in the past and projecting your own emotional attachment to your stance is a weak cop out.

If anyone has a source I'm still interested.

lol @ the idea that every discussion has to follow your rules

Very compelling.

You’re making progress. Give it a couple decades. (Actually you don’t have any choice anyway)