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24th January 2019, 09:45 PM | #41 |
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24th January 2019, 09:51 PM | #42 |
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So take that quantum equation and recalculate the wave by a factor of hoopty doo! The answer is not my problem, it's yours. Three Word Story Wisdom |
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24th January 2019, 09:51 PM | #43 |
I would save the receptionist.
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Who used his free will to begin God? Supergod? I wouldn't go that far. I'd say that the evidence does not show that he was right. I can't think of a possible way to test any of this, but perhaps someday somebody will. In the meantime, there is no reason to believe anything not borne out by evidence. |
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24th January 2019, 09:52 PM | #44 |
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What purpose beyond creating the universe does such a god serve? Does it intervene directly in human affairs? Did it create the universe specifically for humans to inhabit? Does it dictate laws that humans must follow, and does it provide a place for people who follow those laws to go after they die?
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So take that quantum equation and recalculate the wave by a factor of hoopty doo! The answer is not my problem, it's yours. Three Word Story Wisdom |
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24th January 2019, 10:02 PM | #45 |
I would save the receptionist.
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He's the guy who changes the menu at Burger King from breakfast to lunch at 10:30.
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Only insofar as it relates to Burger King.
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Yes. They can't order from the breakfast menu after 10:30.
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Yes. They can go to McDonalds, which now serves breakfast all day. |
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24th January 2019, 10:22 PM | #46 |
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24th January 2019, 10:26 PM | #47 |
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So take that quantum equation and recalculate the wave by a factor of hoopty doo! The answer is not my problem, it's yours. Three Word Story Wisdom |
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25th January 2019, 01:21 AM | #48 |
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What do Narwhals, Magnets and Apollo 13 have in common? Think about it.... |
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25th January 2019, 03:39 AM | #49 |
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Although Magrat gave the tl;dr answer, let's examine your premises point by point:
"Free will" is not part of this equation. "Determinism" and "indeterminism" form a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of all possible ways that events can come about. At best, "free will" is a subset of "indeterminism". ... or the universe has always existed. If it did. You are assuming that prior to the universe there was nothing. There is no objective evidence that proves such an assumption. Something may have existed prior to the universe. Same problem. See point 1. An assumption that has not been proved. Although many will claim that we could not create a sentient computer with free will, I am not convinced that this is the case since computing algorithms get closer to mimicking the structure of the human brain everyday. Since the previous statements can be called into question, this is by no means a foregone conclusion. In short: |
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25th January 2019, 03:51 AM | #50 |
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1. Suspect. There is no evidence whatsoever for free will. Indeed, all the scientific evidence so far gathered points against it.
2. That's true. 3. A moot statement, because everything can be seen as an event. 4. Broadly true. 5. Not true. It's an inherent attribute of the quantum world that events can occur without cause. 6. No, because of 1) and 5). 7. Again, there is no evidence for that. 8. No. And even if it were true, you're back to step 1: How did the being get here? |
25th January 2019, 05:04 AM | #51 |
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25th January 2019, 06:05 AM | #52 |
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25th January 2019, 06:33 AM | #53 |
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25th January 2019, 08:21 AM | #54 |
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Ok, you have doubled back on your definitions for determinism and indeterminism to the point you are left with nothing. Free will is in the same boat, and you have introduced being as something that may distinguish among determinism, indeterminism, and free will.
Care to try again? How do you define the three terms so they are pairwise disjoint while covering all possibilities? |
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25th January 2019, 09:18 AM | #55 |
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Actually, here's a thought that ought to scare believers: DOES God actually have free will, of the totally non-determinist kind? Do you really want him to?
Because a God who has that much free will and is totally non-determinist, could for example decide that you may have been good, but you're still going to Hell because he doesn't like your stupid face. I mean, if he can't do that, he doesn't have that kind of free will. Better yet, he could decide tomorrow that his previous commandments are boring, and he wants to see who does the most creative murdering this time. Even better yet, he could decide that he's founding a totally new religion. Even better, forget about this screwed up planet entirely: he's making a new and improved universe altogether, and care about THOSE guys instead of you. Etc. All of those are things that none of the religion proponents can actually deal with. Hell, they can't even really deal with Euthyphro: the moment God has the free will to have whatever the hell morals he wants, and to change his mind about those, instead of being chained to a set of rules, you have a big problem. In fact, most want a God who's totally deterministic and has no choice but to stick to the same rules, same morals, same promises he once made. So never mind the OP argument being total bollocks. Do you actually WANT a God who has the non-deterministic free will to maybe create another universe, and maybe not, and maybe destroy an old one on a whim, and maybe change his mind about what he said 2000 years ago, etc? Because it seems to me like then you have a bigger problem. |
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25th January 2019, 12:18 PM | #56 |
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Nice construction, however we don't know anything about where the universe came from our the conditions 'before' or 'outside' the universe, so it is also an overgeneralization.
Secondly in the universe we have QM, which may or may not be deterministic or somewhere in between. So that is big no on your trilogy. |
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25th January 2019, 01:40 PM | #57 |
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Free will, however defined, also requires an antecedent, so it must be ruled out the same way as determinism.
On the other hand if you say the free willer just exists uncreated, then why can't the antecedent of a deterministic.or random event just exist, uncreated? By the way, free will, however you are defining it will either be deterministic or indeterministic. Sent from my Moto C using Tapatalk |
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25th January 2019, 02:21 PM | #58 |
I would save the receptionist.
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I think most deists would be inclined to believe that their god, being perfect, created a perfect system right from the start. So, although he has the power to change things, he doesn't because he got it right the first time. I don't think that argument is either logically or experimentally worth the pixels used to type it. And, in fact, it brings up even more problems: Why do people pray for things? Why pray for a person's health or for some event to occur? If God made a perfect system, he shouldn't need to intervene. If God is willing to throw his whole plan away just because one person (or a million) prayed for some event, then why bother following any preset rules to begin with? The answer: I have no idea. |
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25th January 2019, 03:19 PM | #59 |
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I suspect you are a sandwich, metaphorically speaking. -Donn And a shot rang out. Now Space is doing time... -Ben Burch You built the toilet - don't complain when people crap in it. _Kid Eager Never underestimate the power of the Random Number God. More of evolutionary history is His doing than people think. - Dinwar |
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25th January 2019, 04:14 PM | #60 |
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Something can have a prior cause and yet be indeterministic, for example a photon fired at half silvered mirror and setting off a detector. There is only a 0.5 probability of it setting off a given detector, but it is still true that the cause of the detector going off was the electron being fired at the mirror.
I would have thought that 'deterministic' meant, as Ed Lorenz defines it "there being one and only one possible next state" |
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25th January 2019, 04:16 PM | #61 |
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25th January 2019, 04:26 PM | #62 |
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And also, a reasonable person would understand the sentence: "This damage was caused by a group of teenagers acting on their own free will"
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25th January 2019, 04:43 PM | #63 |
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Also, plug the definitions into premise 1, you get
Quote:
If yes, then it becomes, by the definition, determinism. If no, then it becomes, by the definition, indeterminism. |
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25th January 2019, 05:04 PM | #64 |
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If free will is to be neither deterministic, nor indeterministic, by these definitions then you are saying that it is not the case that there was a prior cause and also not the case that there was no prior cause.
But doesn't "not the case that there was no prior cause" just mean that there was a prior cause? |
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25th January 2019, 05:15 PM | #65 |
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And of course there is the fact that "free will" as we experience and observe it in the world is best explained as the higher level description of the combined action of lower level physical events.
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25th January 2019, 06:17 PM | #66 |
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There is also this problem: are you sure the universe 'begun' ? It's possible it was always here.
Also .. if there was God before universe, could we really say there it was 'before' universe ? Isn't God part of universe ? Doesn't universe mean 'all that is' ? |
25th January 2019, 07:01 PM | #67 |
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I'm going to build on the points raised by psionl0 and Robin (good to see you posting again, by the way).
Determinism and indeterminism is already a dilemma. Free will cannot be a third option. Whatever free will is, it must either is or is not deterministic. By making this three options, it's kinda like saying, "My neighbor's new pet must either be a cat, a black animal, or a non-black animal." The first choice just complicates things. The fact that you later go on to remove both options of a logical dichotomy is one hell of a problem.
Quote:
A rain drop lands on my forehead. What are the factors that led to this event? That question most certainly has an answer. Now for the free will version. I choose to eat a sandwich for lunch. What are the factors that led to this choice? Even if you have an extremely liberal view of free will, this question still has an answer: I was getting hungry. I like sandwiches a lot. This restaurant had some good reviews, etc. It's extremely difficult to deny that events affect our choices, and that choices are themselves just a different type of event. |
25th January 2019, 07:33 PM | #68 |
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25th January 2019, 07:50 PM | #69 |
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25th January 2019, 08:13 PM | #70 |
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25th January 2019, 08:42 PM | #71 |
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25th January 2019, 08:52 PM | #72 |
I would save the receptionist.
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Hey man, I wrote all that stuff first with my example of eating an apple. Get your own metaphor. Also, I wonder whatever happened to the OP. He hasn't really answered much, despite asking for our thoughts on his argument. And even then, he mostly said something like, "Open your mind to the possibility that illogical and self-contradictory arguments might be true and you'll discover that they actually are true in your heart." I may be paraphrasing. |
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25th January 2019, 09:23 PM | #73 |
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25th January 2019, 09:23 PM | #74 |
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I think maybe this is begging the question. Once you include "free will" in your premise, you are already positing dualism. If you are already positing dualism, you are adding magic to the mix. We'd say an amoeba does not have free will, right? Then where in the process of evolution did free will develop, and what caused that free will?
So you start your reasoning off with the premise that magic exists. It's not that I find materialism to be such an appealing philosophy, but it's more coherent than saying free will occurred spontaneously at some point in evolution. I don't even try to pretend I understand quantum fluctuations and the mathematics behind a universe from nothing. Yes, it violates my intuition, but my intuition is severely constricted by how much math and physics I understand. And I'd bet that at least 99 percent of people who philosophize about quantum mechanics are similarly constrained. Hell, probably a lot more than that. I'd be shocked if 1 in 10,000 people who are attracted to these ideas understands the equations and particle physics involved. |
25th January 2019, 09:35 PM | #75 |
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If that's "obvious" to you, you must be way better informed than I am. I mean, maybe it's obvious to Stephen Hawking, but without his actual knowledge it's far from obvious to me. So I wonder, how did you become well-informed enough to arrive at the point where it's obvious to you? What is obvious is that very smart cosmologists have concluded it could have happened, and obviously they know more than I do, and I trust them not to have ulterior motives, so it's obvious to me that I have good reason to trust them on this. But it's still trust driving me, not some kind of self-evident conclusion I arrived at independently.
I really would like to know how I can reach the level of understanding that allows non-physicists to speak confidently about what is a plausible origin of the universe. Is there a shortcut? How can I get there? |
25th January 2019, 09:40 PM | #76 |
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What I was getting at in the long-winded post responding to Wonder 234. As I asked arth above, how did you become well-informed enough in physics to make an independent judgment? All I manage to do is grasp clumsy analogies aimed at lay readers, put forth by physicist/mathematicians.
Yes, this. |
25th January 2019, 10:02 PM | #77 |
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Interesting question, as I regarded Wonder's assertion as being related to philosophy, rather than physics, with the failure being in construction of the claim and the logic applied.
Yes, I do have tertiary physics qualifications and my careers have required application of same - but I don't think I (consciously) used that knowledge in this case. If that was necessary, I'd be turning to others in the forum with much greater knowledge of that field than I. |
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25th January 2019, 10:42 PM | #78 |
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[quote= Robin (good to see you posting again, by the way).[/QUOTE]
Thanks, good to be back posting. Sent from my Moto C using Tapatalk |
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26th January 2019, 02:49 AM | #79 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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26th January 2019, 03:24 AM | #80 |
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The most famous version of this argument comes from Richard Swinburne, that wacky Oxbridge professor of philosophy who thinks that gay is a disease that needs to be cured.
Philosophers! Don't you just love them? Here is his version: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...7fDKpzuIPK9YsC Sent from my Moto C using Tapatalk |
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