Do you believe in free will?

by sleepy 33 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  sleepy

  Do you believe in free will?And if you do can you explain how it works?

  I can't see how free will could work.Our motivation for doing things good or bad seems to come from a mixture of genes and enviroment, and through a long and complicted process cause us to perform all the actions we experience in life.When we feel a prompting to do something ,eat sleep have sex etc, this is accomplished by our body using chemicals in our bodies to give us a feeling that we then act upon.The degree to which these chemicals prompt us is related to genetic makeup and environment.

  So some people have a bigger desire to eat than others because they lack the chemical stimulation that tells them to stop eating.Or some will eat less (often when ill) because the chemicals that prompt you to eat are lacking.In normal life lots of over factors will be involved to like say an important phonecall at lunch time .If your brain feels the information from that call is important enough it will send out different chemicals that will cause you to attend to that situation first if serious enought.

  Knowledge can modify how our bodies react to certain situations, for example a child may see an icecream van and run into the road because his body has yet to learn of the danger of running into a road.When taught how foolish this by a nasty experience or hopefully , taught about the dangers by its parents, then the body will send out a meesage to look at the road first.

  Our bodies tell us which ideas are good and bad according to the information it holds and we react accordingly.We can fight desires but the will to do so is caused by other desires which are prompted by the body.

  To have true free will neither our genes or enviroment could effect what we decide to do.

  We have to be able to do things irespective of what promting we recive from our bodies or what information we have learnt and has thus modified our bodies response.

  Maybe there are but I can not think of any situation where or actions or reactions can not be explianed by genes mixed with environment (often in a very complicated way).Nor can I understand how free will could work,unless free will is just a random action which could not be free will in the true sense.

  If there is no free will then if there were a God and we are judged on what we do then this is entirely unfair as we really have little say in what we do in life.
• 

  gumby

  To have true free will neither our genes or enviroment could effect what we decide to do.

  Which is impossible

  We have to be able to do things irespective of what promting we recive from our bodies or what information we have learnt and has thus modified our bodies response.

  Which is impossible

  Maybe there are but I can not think of any situation where or actions or reactions can not be explianed by genes mixed with environment (often in a very complicated way).

  There isn't

  Nor can I understand how free will could work,unless free will is just a random action which could not be free will in the true sense.

  It can be involuntary or caused by our deliberate actions to choose.

  If there is no free will then if there were a God and we are judged on what we do then this is entirely unfair as we really have little say in what we do in life.

  The sad part is....man usually funtions on involuntary actions without enough thought to choose.

  Good thread sleepy!

  Gumby
• 

  DanTheMan

  It feels like I have choices. It feels like there is a non-material ghost in the machine that is unaffected by the physical. But of course that is unprovable supposition. Strict and total determinism seems more provable than free will, but adopting that viewpoint isn't helpful, because that isn't how it feels.
• 

  BluesBrother

  If we really have "Very little say in what we do in life", due to genes and chemicals in our brain , then I guess that no one is responsible for anything that they do. The sex abuser is fuelled by his unnatural desire, that the rest of us do not have, so do we just forgive him because he "Cannot help it"?

  In fact we do judge others by their actions . It is tough if background or genetics makes it harder to do what society believes to be the right thing, but we cannot take away the measure of personal responsibility that all of us bear

  This strange old world does not provide a level playing field for all of us. I guess that we have to make the best of the hand we are dealt
• 

  Phantom Stranger

  OK, I gotta weigh in on the side of free will here.

  1) Two things that make humans different from other animals are our intellectual capacity and our ability to pause before an automatic response.

  2) Our intellect does not run the show. Even though we have a dramatically increased mental capacity over other animals (dolphins possibly excluded:), it has been shown over and over again that our emotions and our survival instincts run most of our reactions, most of the time. The amygdala, a tiny part of the brain at the top of the spinal cord and the part that is focused on physical reaction to attacks, is one of the biggest culprits. It's actually not that different from the brain of a crocodile, yet it ends up contributing in our lives an awful lot when we don't really need it (i.e., when physical threats are not present).

  Indeed, with most people, our intelligence spends most of its time justifying and rationalizing what "automatic reactions" we have already acted on.

  3) We are not slaves to the neurochemicals in our bodies. There seem to be some in the population that have trouble producing certain neurotransmitters and such, and there seem to be drugs to help them, but the bottom line is that those chemicals are produced in response to our thoughts, and if we control and manage our thoughts, we can be our own masters. It's not our bodies that some of us are in enslaved to, it's our minds, and the thoughts we give life and credence to that do not serve us.

  Even if our body has a tendency to come up short with one chemical or go heavy on another, many studies have shown that how we think has a huge influence on how our bodies do when we are struggling with such conditions - and how we train ourselves to think, and the thoughts that dominate our lives. This specifically applies to depression, where severe depressives have been found to react much better to a combination of talk therapy and drugs than to drugs alone. If it were all chemical, this would not be true.

  4) Buddhism has some "religious" elements, but it also has many psychological elements. There have been several conferences where Western mind scientists have gathered to learn from Buddhist monks (including the Dalai Lama) about the Buddhist models of mind and consciousness. Buddhism has a focus on "being in the moment", as opposed to how many people react to situations by going into their past. In fact, most of our "automatic reactions" aren't in response to the immediate situation - they are responses to some past situation where we got hurt, and which vaguely reminds us of what's in front of us. By using "mindfulness" techniques (which many Western psychological treatments and stress reduction programs now use) many people have learned how to be more "in the moment" and less in the past.

  So, to sum up: we are not slaves to our chemicals, we participate in what chemicals our body creates as far as behavior goes. If we take responsibility for our "re-actions" (responsibility - able to respond :) and we discipline ourselves to deal with the actual situation in front of us in the moment (rather than projecting our fears onto wheat we see before us) we can choose the right action (another idea that Buddhism works with a lot, coincidentally).

  You've described a meat robot pretty well, sleepy, but I don't think you've addressed consciousness at all - not that voice in your head, etc. There are several models out there, and I won't try to pick one, but I suspect that that's where your question will guide you.
• 

  DanTheMan

  we control and manage our thoughts

  So, who is the "we" in this statement? Who or what is doing the controlling and managing here? Is it something outside of the physical realm? Or is the "we" our chemical, physical selves?

  Lets take BB's example of the child molester. If Joe, due to whatever genetic/environmental factors, is sexually attracted to children, is this attraction in itself an act of free will? Let's say that Joe decides not to act on this impulse, due to the fact that he has a well-developed sense of empathy and so realizes how destructive this would be to the child. When you boil it down, isn't this "decision" really just the empathy chemistry in his brain winning out over the impulse chemistry? If Joe has an underdeveloped sense of empathy along with overpowering impulses and so acts on his impulse, once again is there something invisible inside of Joe, apart from his physical self, that "made a decision" to act on the impulse?

  I don't know.
• 

  Phantom Stranger

  Dan, I won't attempt to define who the "We/I" is (fascinating discussion, don't have "the answer", definitely different thread), but speaking to the example:

  1) Someone who acts in a way that they "know" is bad and "wrong" has a psychological need that they are trying to fill.

  2) When a psychological need gets so unmanaged and out of control (often this includes "untreated") that it becomes a compulsion, such as Compulsive Sexual Behavior, then the experience of the pedophile is that they cannot stop themselves. Because of our understandable and deep emotional reactions to pedophilia, we tend to not react to it the same way that we do other mental illness. (Please note that I am the adult child of a pedophilia victim and I am not insensitive to or marginalizing the victim's experience in any way.)

  "Disagreement exists as to whether CSB (compulsive sexual behavior, of which pedophilia is a component) is an addiction, a psychosexual developmental disorder, an impulse control disorder, a mood disorder, or an obsessive-compulsive disorder."

  3) Mental Illness can be defined as "biological brain diseases that can critically interfere with a person’s ability to think, feel and relate to other people and the environment".(National Alliance for the Mentally Ill). If a person is mentally ill, then they are an invalid example in a discussion of free will in the "normal" population. Some obsessive-complusives "have to" repeat certain behaviors until they hurt themselves - do they have free will? No, their psycho-physiological mechanism is broken, malfunctioning, and the goal of treatment is for them to get that free will, that agency, back.

  Pedophilia causes strong emotional reactions in almost all of us... but when viewed as a mental illness, and when changing the conversation to be about mental illnesses as a class, I think the conversation becomes clearer.
• 

  maxwell

  I have to vote for free will also. Humans have instinct (for example breathing), desire (for example, desire to eat, sleep, have sex), and the ability to reason. Reasoning allows us to override our instinct and desires in situations where we feel that it is necessary. Animals have instinct and desire also, but they don't have the reasoning capacity to make a moral judgement. A cheetah can't for example say, well I'm not going to hunt in this area because I know the population of my prey is starting to get near extinction. The carnivore's intinct and desire will cause it to hunt until there is no food and then go somewhere else. Neither can it make moral judgements such as thinking in fairness it should share some of its hunting territory with another cheetah (That's just a rough example, I'm not a biologist or zoologist). Humans on the other hand suppress desires almost everyday. I desire that cake, but my reasoning tells me that I don't need it. Or I might decide that I will take the consequences of overeating. But it is a decision that is up to me.

  Certainly environment and genes are big factors. Genes may give one a predisposition to certain desires or even instincts. Environment gives us the knowledge we can use to reason with. Still I think 90% or more of what happens to me now is really up to me. I can't see placing responsibility on someone or something else.
• 

  Phantom Stranger

  Maxwell, it's worth noting that scientists estimate that 95% of our reactions, responses, habits, and actions are learned before we are 16 years old. (Half of that is before you're 8!)

  So about 5% is from your current knowledge and understanding, and 95% is automatic, unconscious. If you had a bad experience when you were 8, you could very well develop a habit that you manifest for the rest of your life that's based on the emotions and intellect of an eight-year-old! And then, we use that response, whether it's appropriate or not.

  Unless you try to expand how much of your life you spend "in the moment". Expanding that 5% is a worthy goal... but I think that many of us humans spend the 5% justifying the 95%:)
• 

  shamus

  I can go out today and kill someone if I wanted to. I choose not to, because of my free will.

  Any questions, please re-read.