The illusion of Free Will

[Sexyeccentric1]

DON'T CLICK THIS VIDEO AND WATCH OR ATTEMPT TO WATCH IF YOU HAVE AN IQ LESS THAN 90. IT WILL BE OVER YOUR HEAD..LOL

This video is actually about 1 hour and 18 min long. Sam Harris talks about the myths surrounding "Free Will" and gives an eye opening talk about it.

Free Will Sam Harris video

[WTF]

Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

DON'T CLICK THIS VIDEO AND WATCH OR ATTEMPT TO WATCH IF YOU HAVE AN IQ LESS THAN 90. IT WILL BE OVER YOUR HEAD..LOL

.

Free Will Sam Harris video

90 IQ. How about a requiremnt of having all your teeth and knock out the other half of the Tea Party from watching!

[JD Barleycorn]

Who is the Tea Party? Mean langauge and stupid comments aside, the Tea Party is made up of Americans. Don't believe me? Argue with Gallup; http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Te...ographics.aspx

[joe bloe]

It's impossible to have free will without having a soul or spirit that is not material in its nature. Without a soul, we are essentially highly complex robots. If there is no ghost in the machine, then we are just machines.

Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA and an avowed atheist) in his book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis" proposes the idea that consciousness or self awareness is generated completely by the brain and is not grounded in a soul. This view almost has to be shared by all atheists.

Truthfully, I haven't watched the video yet. But I do understand atheist's reluctancy to acknowledge the existence of free will because of its association with the spiritual.

[IIFFOFRDB]

Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

DON'T CLICK THIS VIDEO AND WATCH OR ATTEMPT TO WATCH IF YOU HAVE AN IQ LESS THAN 90. IT WILL BE OVER YOUR HEAD..LOL

This video is actually about 1 hour and 18 min long. Sam Harris talks about the myths surrounding "Free Will" and gives an eye opening talk about it.

Free Will Sam Harris video

My IQ is way over 90. I am smart enough NOT to let some liberal garbage in my head. SO FUCK YOU.

[Sexyeccentric1]

Originally Posted by IIFFOFRDB

My IQ is way over 90. I am smart enough NOT to let some liberal garbage in my head. SO FUCK YOU.

Such an inteligent and close minded reponse. But I would expect no less from you.

[Sexyeccentric1]

This by the way is a philisophical talk and is not political as you IB seem to want to make every discussion or thread turn into. I seriously question your IQ at this point...LOL

[joe bloe]

Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

This by the way is a philisophical talk and is not political as you IB seem to want to make every discussion or thread turn into. I seriously question your IQ at this point...LOL

I know when I have the urge to discuss philosophy, I always go on whoremonger websites

[waverunner234]

1 hour 18 minutes? No thanks, too long.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by joe bloe

I know when I have the urge to discuss philosophy, I always go on whoremonger websites

[JD Barleycorn]

It is just one of those things. When you discuss atheism most of the practioners are on the left fringe. It is undeniable that leftys walk in lockstep or else you get punished. It was like that with Trayvon. A young black man was killed by a "white" guy. You knew where any lefty was going to come down on the issue regardless of the facts. Gun control, Gitmo, war on terror, Bush, abortion, biased journalism, etc. All leftys have to support the cause.

Like John McCain, the left loves you when you attack your own party but heaven (sorry, atheists) help you if you cross the democratic party. It is almost as bad as deciding not to be a Muslim anymore.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn

Like John McCain, the left loves you when you attack your own party but heaven (sorry, atheists) help you if you cross the democratic party. It is almost as bad as deciding not to be a Muslim anymore.

Uhhh, the right wasn't to kind to McCain when he crossed them. That is how politics works. That is why folks in the center matter. The idiots on the left cancel out idiots like you on the right.

Folks that always come down with their so called party.

You are exactly like the folks you find so vile.

[Sexyeccentric1]

Since you may not have the have time or the will to watch the video I thought I would place some excerpts from the book and his talk here for you to read. Sam Harris is a Neuroscientists and has a background in psychology. I find what he is saying totally fascinating. His book is a very short read maybe 90 pages and gets right to the point.
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The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment— most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have. Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes— perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment— what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this. The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false. But the deeper truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us— and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.

The Unconscious Origins of the Will We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment. 1 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. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness— rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used
These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. 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? Imagine a perfect neuroimaging device that would allow us to detect and interpret the subtlest changes in brain function. You might spend an hour thinking and acting freely in the lab, only to discover that the scientists scanning your brain had been able to produce a complete record of what you would think and do some moments in advance of each event. For instance, exactly 10 minutes and 10 seconds into the experiment, you decided to pick up a magazine from a nearby table and begin reading, but the scanner log shows this mental state arising at 10 minutes and 6 seconds— and the experimenters even knew which magazine you would choose. You read for a while and then got bored and stopped; the experimenters knew you would stop a second before you did and could tell which sentence would be the last you read.

It is important to recognize that the case I am building against free will does not depend upon philosophical materialism (the assumption that reality is, at bottom, purely physical). There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events. The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature— and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions. But even if the human mind were made of soul-stuff, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does. If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control. This is obviously true in all cases where a person wishes he could feel or behave differently than he does: Think of the millions of committed Christians whose souls happen to be gay, prone to obesity, or bored by prayer. However, free will is no more evident when a person does exactly what, in retrospect, he wishes he had done. The soul that allows you to stay on your diet is just as mysterious as the one that tempts you to eat cherry pie for breakfast. There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, of course, but it does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, whereas an involuntary action isn’t. Needless to say, this difference is reflected at the level of the brain. And what a person consciously intends to do says a lot about him. It makes sense to treat a man who enjoys murdering children differently from one who accidentally hit and killed a child with his car— because the conscious intentions of the former give us a lot of information about how he is likely to behave in the future. But where intentions themselves come from, and what determines their character in every instance, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises.

[Sexyeccentric1]

Please if we can stay on topic of this subject it would be most appreciated. This isn't about politics this is simply a philosophical discussion on Free Will.

[joe bloe]

Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

Please if we can stay on topic of this subject it would be most appreciated. This isn't about politics this is simply a philosophical discussion on Free Will.

Everything is about politics.