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Post by Mitch_J on Dec 2, 2015 17:58:50 GMT -5
Quotes Disaffirming Free Will and Affirming Determinism by the Famous (originally on causalconsciousness.com): Clarence Darrow "There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other." Charles Darwin "Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws." Albert Einstein "Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." Peter Gill "The enormous value of the concept of free will in relieving parental shame and guilt is the only and overriding reason, in our opinion, that the lie of free will is well nigh universally taught to all children. If and when we can convince parents of total determinism, so they are freed from their own shame and guilt, they will no longer need to teach the vicious lie of free will to the world's children. A new world will be born." Stephen Hawking "The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate." (Baron) Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach “Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will being for any thing in these various states.” "You will say that I feel free. This is an illusion, which may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man, who thinks himself free, is a fly who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it." John Galsworthy “Life calls the tune, we dance.” John Hospers "Whether or not we have personality disturbances, whether or not we have the ability to overcome deficiencies of early environment, is like the answer to the question whether or not we shall be struck down by a dread disease: "it's all a matter of luck." It is important to keep this in mind, for people almost always forget it, with consequences in human intolerance and unnecessary suffering that are incalculable." Pierre Simon De Laplace "Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye." Herman Melville "Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity." H.L. Mencken "Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway." Marvin Minsky "Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws." Max Planck "The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry." Karl Raimund Popper "The metaphysical doctrine of determinism simply asserts that all events in this world are fixed, or unalterable, or predetermined. It does not assert that they are known to anybody, or predictable by scientific means. But it asserts that the future is as little changeable as is the past. Everybody knows what we mean when we say that the past cannot be changed. It is in precisely the same sense that the future cannot be changed, according to metaphysical determinism." Bertrand Russell "The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills." Arthur Schopenhauer "A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills." B. F. Skinner "To say that a man is sinful because he sins is to give an operational definition of sin. To say that he sins because he is sinful is to trace his behavior to a supposed inner trait. But whether or not a person engages in the kind of behavior called sinful depends upon circumstances which are not mentioned in either question. The sin assigned as an inner possession (the sin a person "knows") is to be found in a history of reinforcement." Baruch Spinoza "In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity." Voltaire "Everything happens through immutable laws, ...everything is necessary... There are, some persons say, some events which are necessary and others which are not. It would be very comic that one part of the world was arranged, and the other were not; that one part of what happens had to happen and that another part of what happens did not have to happen. If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that of destiny is absurd; but there are many people destined to reason badly; others not to reason at all others to persecute those who reason."
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Post by Mitch_J on Dec 2, 2015 18:27:32 GMT -5
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Post by Mitch_J on Dec 2, 2015 18:28:56 GMT -5
Some of my favorites: Sam Harris
-
We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our
brains process in each moment. Although we continually notice changes in
our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are
utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In
fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. By merely
glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are
often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are.
I
generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two.
This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to
know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to
have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The
choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious
witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence.
-
One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of
what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have
complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already
determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this
'decision' and believe that you are in the process of making it.
The
distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' systems in the brain offers no
relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate
events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will
always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that
kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if
there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their
underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or
intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental
state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?
- If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control.
-
How can we be 'free' as conscious agents if everything that we
consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not
intend and of which we are entirely unaware?
- Today,
the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a
compatibilist—because we know that determinism, in every sense relevant
to human behavior, is true. Unconscious neural events determine our
thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes of
which we are subjectively unaware. However, the “free will” that
compatibilists defend is not the free will that most people feel they
have.
Compatibilists generally claim that a person is free as
long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions that would
prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions. If you
want a second scoop of ice cream and no one is forcing you to eat it,
then eating a second scoop is fully demonstrative of your freedom of
will. The truth, however, is that people claim greater autonomy than
this. Our moral intuitions and sense of personal agency are anchored to a
felt sense that we are the conscious source of our thoughts and
actions. When deciding whom to marry or which book to read, we do not
feel compelled by prior events over which we have no control. The
freedom that we presume for ourselves and readily attribute to others is
felt to slip the influence of impersonal background causes. And the
moment we see that such causes are fully effective—as any detailed
account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would
reveal—we can no longer locate a plausible hook upon which to hang our
conventional notions of personal responsibility.
George Ortega - Refuting
free will is straightforward:(a) Everything is caused; (b) Human
thoughts are caused;(c) The antecedent causes to human thoughts regress
to before the person’s birth;(d) Therefore human thoughts are not
fundamentally attributable to a human free will.
- Why Free Will is Impossible
1.
Causality, or Cause and Effect. Because everything has a cause, every
human choice manifests a causal regression stretching at least as far
back as the Big Bang, or about 13.7 billion years.
1a. Even if
true randomness were possible in the strongest sense of "uncaused" at
the quantum level, (it is not, quantum uncertainty notwithstanding)
random decisions are certainly not freely willed, as the notion is
commonly and academically understood.
2. Our Unconscious.
Because the data upon which we base decisions is located in our
unconscious (it must be, because we could not store all of that data in
our conscious mind at any given moment) then that data must only be
accessible to our unconscious, wherein must therefore also reside our
brain's decision making.Friedrich Nietzsche -
For, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash
and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject which is
called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the
manifestations of strength, as if behind the strong person there were an
indifferent substrate, which is free to express strength or not. But
there is no such substrate; there is no "being" behind the doing,
acting, becoming. "The doer" is merely made up and added into the action
– the act is everything. People basically duplicate the action: when
they see a lightning flash, that is an action of an action: they set up
the same event first as the cause and then yet again as its effect.
(...) "We weak people are merely weak. It's good if we do nothing; we
are not strong enough for that" – but this bitter state, this shrewdness
of the lowest ranks, which even insects possess (when in great danger
they stand as if they were dead in order not to do "too much"), has,
thanks to that counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness,
dressed itself in the splendour of a self-denying, still, patient
virtue, just as if the weakness of the weak man himself – that means his
essence, his actions, his entire single, inevitable, and irredeemable
reality – is a voluntary achievement, something willed, chosen, an act,
something of merit.
-The desire
for "freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical
sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the
half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility
for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors,
chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be
precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull
oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness -
What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a man his
qualities,
neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself
(the latter absurd idea here put aside has been taught as "intelligible
freedom" by Kant, perhaps also by Plato). No one is responsible for existing at all,
for being formed so and so, for being placed under those circumstances
and in this environment. His own destiny cannot be disentangled from the
destiny of all else in past and future. He is not the result of a
special purpose, a will, or an aim, the attempt is not here made to
reach an "ideal of man," an "ideal of happiness," or an "ideal of
morality;" – it is absurd to try to shunt off man's nature towards some goal.
We have invented the notion of a "goal:" in reality a goal is lacking .
. . We are necessary, we are part of destiny, we belong to the whole,
we exist in the whole, – there
is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or condemn our being,
for that would be to judge, measure, compare, and condemn the whole .
. . But there is nothing outside the whole! – This only is the grand
emancipation: that no one be made responsible any longer, that the mode
of being be not traced back to a causa prima, that the world be not
regarded as a unity, either as sensorium or as "spirit;" – it is only
thereby that the innocence of becoming is again restored . . . The
concept of "God" has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence .
. . We deny God, we deny responsibility by denying God: it is only
thereby that we save the world. – - Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty – could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself).
Arthur Schopenhauer
- Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
- I can do what I will: I can, if I will, give everything I have to the
poor and thus become poor myself—if I will! But I cannot will this,
because the opposing motives have much too much power over me for me to
be able to. On the other hand, if I had a different character, even to
the extent that I were a saint, then I would be able to will it. But
then I could not keep from willing it, and hence I would have to do so.
- s little as a ball on a billiard table can move before receiving an
impact, so little can a man get up from his chair before being drawn or
driven by a motive. But then his getting up is as necessary and
inevitable as the rolling of a ball after the impact. And to expect that
anyone will do something to which absolutely no interest impels them is
the same as to expect that a piece of wood shall move toward me without
being pulled by a string.
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Post by chandlerklebs on Dec 2, 2015 22:11:49 GMT -5
All very great quotes. Some of the most famous people got the message!
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Post by Mitch_J on Dec 2, 2015 22:55:48 GMT -5
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-Goethe |
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Post by chandlerklebs on Dec 5, 2015 7:11:16 GMT -5
"Everyone has always believed that it is possible to train character; everyone has always known that alcohol or opium will have a certain affect on behaviour. The apostle of free-will maintains that a man can by will power avoid getting drunk, but he does not maintain that when drunk a man can say "British Constitution" as clearly as if he were sober. And everybody who has ever had to do with children knows that a suitable diet does more to make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching in the world. The one effect that the free-will doctrine has in practice is to prevent people from following out such common-sense knowledge to its rational conclusion. When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth, and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination." - "Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell (1957)
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