OK, we know who won (or: Does God exist?)

[Leaf]

Introduction...I'm not a debater; .....(organized arguements) .... I'm not a debater.....concluding statements.-bill

Could'a fooled me...


That's what we call a red herring Bill! Didn't work....

[erik]

The outcome of any choice you make will be known immediately after you make it, so if time exists beyond the Present there is no free will. By that logic there is also no such thing as life, or a soul, and everything is increasingly complex patterns and algorithms.

How does your first sentence imply your second?

[Henrietta]

Last XMas as a present, I got a tarot card reading at the Tremont Tearoom.

The psychic told me mid-October I would go on a trip, and as a result of this trip I would finally figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. She saw me filling out applications and she saw more school.

At the time, I said "That's silly, I really like my job and it pays the bills. I'm already in student loan debt more than I'd like to be. There's absolutely no way that's going to happen." But, she still insisted that's what she saw.

So, as it turned out I did go on a business trip to Houston the second week of October. During the trip I really did start talking to someone about what I'd <i>really</i> like to do with my life, and yadda yadda yadda... now I'm studying to take the GRE.

The question is: would I still be doing these things right now if she didn't tell me I would be doing these things right now? I really think she planted these seeds in my mind, and now I'm subconsciously (or conscious) fulfilling the prophecy she laid out.

[Leaf]

Just as an aside, I had a visitation when I was 13 years old.

That's a pretty brave story to put on the net my man!

When I was 6, my sister and I saw (and are still convinced) that we saw Santa's sleigh being pulled by reindeer through the sky. We were driving to my grandma's and our dad shouted "look guys!"... for years I'd ask him about that, and prick that he is he kept saying "you saw what you saw". Now, he STILL asserts that "we saw what we saw", and he saw it too. WTF?

Does this mean Santa Claus exists, because we think we saw a sleigh flying through the sky when we were young, impressionable children with vivid imaginations, and no concepts beyond those of 5-6 year kids?

I dunno.

Personally, I'm often thought it may have been a billboard, or something on someones' house, or maybe nothing...Dad was good at making us think things were their that weren't.

Another time we walked by a drain hole near a water facet at a provinicial park. He told us it was a grinch hole, and that a grinch lived in it, stuck his finger in it and said it bit him... and we bought the whole thing.


When I was 12, we had an ouija board and thought we conjured up Abe Lincoln's ghost.. I SWEAR I saw it.


On acid, I've had many close discussions with God, in fact, one day I WAS GOD. And every tree was a native american telling me to get off his land. (But I digress).

I could mention many other unuusal cases where what I thought happened probably didn't, but may have.

Your story reminds me of these and many other things... but most importantly, it makes me wonder if your house got broken into that night.

[the Jazz]

The outcome of any choice you make will be known immediately after you make it, so if time exists beyond the Present there is no free will. By that logic there is also no such thing as life, or a soul, and everything is increasingly complex patterns and algorithms.

How does your first sentence imply your second?

I suppose it depends on how you define the soul. If all of the past, present, and future is preordained and immutable, then I see two possibilities. 1) Something which is "alive" is different from that which is not merely my virtue of being the result of (and/or resulting in) more complex patterns and algorithms. 2) If events do not boil down to calculable cause and effect relationships, and the physical laws of the universe do not explain events down to the last detail, but all time and events are still immutable, then there must be some other force or being which is the cause of events occurring one way and not another. Either way, I cannot comprehend the existence of the soul without free will.

Assuming the lack of free will, is it passage of time (or one-directional travel from past to future in that dimension) which causes these delusions of life and the soul? But in order to have delusions, I must think; in order to think, I must have a soul, right? I keep dancing round and round with paradox.

[Adam!]

Bill: We'll agree to disagree.

"God... can... predict with 99.99% accuracy what you will five minutes from now or fifty years from now."

I like the definition of God as knowing all the outcomes of every choice you could make, but letting you make the choice. Also the 99.99% accuracy thing works as well. Like all the arguments I've seen against fatalism, they do limit God in some way.

In my little one act play (My Dinner With God) I was trying show a little thought experiment that avoids paradoxes. In my brain it goes like this: If God (or an infallible scientist) could demonstrate that they know all your future decisions ahead of time and, even with foreknowledge, you couldn't deviate from these predictions (a reasonable assertion, since doing so would make God fallible), it seems necessary that you don't have free will in a classical sense, that being the ability to affect your future. Now if God wiped your memory of the conversation, you would go back to feeling like you do have free will, and you would happily carry on with your life, making all the choices God already knows you'll make. In summary, I was demonstrating that if someone (God, scientist, whoever) has all of your future decisions (with 100% accuracy) written down somewhere then you are not free, whether you know about them or not. I was trying my hardest to avoid any Arnold Schwarzenegger paradoxes or exploding the heads of deities.

Assuming the lack of free will, is it passage of time (or one-directional travel from past to future in that dimension) which causes these delusions of life and the soul? But in order to have delusions, I must think; in order to think, I must have a soul, right? I keep dancing round and round with paradox.

Oh man, you so craaazy! Your definitely right that we must think, as reading this sentence is proof (perception -> consciousness -> thought). But why does only having one outcome to all your choices rid you of your consciousness? Maybe I just don't understand how the soul argument works.

Holy crap, I should really be doing homework.

[c hack]

In my little one act play (My Dinner With God) (

I hope you're making an oblique reference to My Dinner With Andre. That movie is the BEST.

[Adam!]

I was, and it is.

[roymond]

Just as an aside, I had a visitation when I was 13 years old.

That's a pretty brave story to put on the net my man!

Well, easier to be brave among friends. There are folks here laying out their spiritual beliefs out. I hardly see this as any more brave. I wasn't asserting that this was proof of anything, just relating an experience I had up close. True, there are very few people I've talked with about this, as it remains a mysterious thing in my life. I wondered if others have had what they felt were genuine encounters (whether or not they felt it was "real" or otherwise legitimate). And no, this wasn't a stranger who walked into the house. It seemed more a spirit in human form. That's all.

Otherwise, thanks for your heartfelt stories of your dad's pranks.

[c hack]

Just as an aside, I had a visitation when I was 13 years old.

I don't doubt it. I once knew a girl who swore she had prophetic dreams*, and I didn't doubt her either. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

It kinda bothers me that the Christian dogma completely ignores the idea of ghosts, while the Buddhists (and all sorts od Pagan-type ones) include them. Of course, things like Golems come from Jewish legend, and that's part of Christianity, so maybe it's just buried deeper.

I have to wonder if the comparitive lack of mystical events in modern times might have anything to do with people being less mindful of their surroundings (just the other day, I noticed huge banners of pictures of trains at the Porter Sq. subway stop, and I'd been using that stop for months now).

*what made her believable was that she would have them about unimportant things (the most monumental one being of her dog getting run over). Interestingly, she was able to change the outcome when it happened in real life.

[mkilly]

Here's a good article on the election results. Sort of a pick-me-up. (via Donkey Rising)

[the Jazz]

Apparently the exit polls were spot-on everywhere except the contested states that Bush won. I can't substantiate that, but I don't doubt it. And considering <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03 ... ">this,</a> I wouldn't be surprised at this point if Bush literally stole this one.

[the Jazz]

But why does only having one outcome to all your choices rid you of your consciousness? Maybe I just don't understand how the soul argument works.

I have a hard time putting it into words. What gives conciousness significance? The ability to observe of the world around it? Would it be possible to develop higher thought without the physical senses or a connection to the empirical world? Anyhow, that's a digression already in the second sentence – getting back on track...

Perhaps it's an innate solipsism that causes people to think that how they live their life matters to anyone or anything other than the purely subjective "I". Nonetheless, most everyone who isn't a pure nihilist thinks this to some degree, whether they admit it or not. With religion it's the idea of accounting, judgement, redemption (or not) after death; in science it's an unspoken attitude treating the existence of life as something great, mysterious, special, so that we split the world into "living" and "not living" as though the distinction were any more important than that between "hot" and "cold". (The point I am getting to here is that if there is no free will, what makes life any more special than not-life; and the property of a soul is rarely attributed to the latter.) What reason is there to infer the existence of a soul in the first place, beyond the purely subjective idea that if I can recognize my own existence (through the evidence of thought), then I must have a soul? We have no idea whether a computer or a paramecium or a rock "thinks" to itself. We look at them as merely consequences of mathematical and physical equations; we think that, knowing the state of a closed system of nonliving things down to the last detail at one point in time, we know also its future and past in the same detail because it is ruled by cold hard facts. The difference with "life", we think, is that we make chocies which are not governed by empirical facts and laws, due to the fact that we are alive and think abstractly. But how can you prove that the things we mark as "living" are not just the same, and that the level of sophistication in the cold hard fact by which we are governed is merely so much greater than that of things we call "not living" that we experience it as special and call it "thought?" *

In that case conciousness would be radically redefined as something other than what we think it is, and effectively destroyed thereby. The thing it would be instead needs a new word. Maybe it has one already, I dunno. In any case, free will is what powers our definition of being alive as opposed to not. And we don't generally attribute souls to nonliving things in western culture. I can't speak for eastern culture, I don't know much about that concept of spirits. But remember that I do believe in free will. Also, that I started this specific train way back here:

Here's an example: if you could go back in time to late 2003 and talk to Grady Little during Game 7 of the ALCS, you might tell him that you knew he would leave Pedro in for the seventh inning. And he does, because that's what happened. So does that mean he didn't have free will at the time? No. Because then even the concept of free will is impossible, given the objective existence of time in dimensions other than the Present.

And am now attempting to explain that the resulting conclusion (free will impossible) is not acceptable because it contradicts my position that I exist in some manner beyond the empirical. I may be wrong, but in that case I do not exist, so after I have recognized the fact that I may be wrong, there is nothing left but to approach the world as though I were right.

I hope I managed to get something across at least; I actually did some editing of this post, which is rare. It's hard trying to come up with all this essentially on my own, but I don't think there's any worth in adopting other peoples' arguments before you have formulated your own. If you and I live in separate rooms, each with a window to the universe, I may visit with you briefly and you may show me how it looks from your window, but I still live in my room, and must operate from my own point of view.

*In that way I suppose our own existence (transcendentally, not the existence of our empirical bodies) could indeed be a delusion without requiring that we exist to have delusions; rather, it would be an artifact of the system, a byproduct of the process. (Which is, I believe, the question explored in the manga/anime series "Ghost In The Shell.")

[Adam!]

Jazz: Firstly, fucking fantastic post. Very clear. To start, I’d like to explain my views:

What reason is there to infer the existence of a soul in the first place? We have no idea whether a computer or a paramecium or a rock "thinks" to itself. We look at them as merely consequences of mathematical and physical equations; we think that, knowing the state of a closed system of nonliving things down to the last detail at one point in time, we know also its future and past in the same detail because it is ruled by cold hard facts. [Some people mistakenly believe that] the difference with "life" is that we make choices which are not governed by empirical facts and laws, due to the fact that we are alive and think abstractly. But how can you prove that the things we mark as "living" are not just the same, and that the level of sophistication in the cold hard fact by which we are governed is merely so much greater than that of things we call "not living" that we experience it as special and call it "thought?"

Bang! There it is. Or, my opinions in <a href="http://www.songhole.org/~puce/songs/Puc ... .MP3">song form</a> (actually, this is a criticism of people who try to derive normative ethical principles from determinism. It's also Rap-Rock 8)). Cognitive psychology suggests that consciousness arises from us having a “front-row-seat” to the inner workings of our brain. Whether there is free will or not, your consciousness (from a neurological perspective) is your brain processing the information that is not rejected by your thalamus. I do not believe that depriving someone of freewill deprives them of consciousness. Reading your post I think our disagreement comes from differing definitions of consciousness: mine is “Having an awareness of one's environment and one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts.” This definition does not necessitate freedom.

The concept of free will is impossible, given the objective existence of time in dimensions other than the Present

Truer words have never been posted. We think of the past as set; we are not free to change it. If time is a dimension (which implies that the future has the same properties as the past, just as up has the same properties as down), then the future is set and we are not free to change it. I do not believe in the dimensionality of time as anything other than a convenient but inaccurate mathematical model. I think there is the present, and that’s it. The past exists only in your hippocampus. Time as classically defined just doesn’t make any sense to me, and I’ve never seen a good argument for its existence.

Aside: Was anyone else a little disappointed by Ghost in the Shell 2? I mean, it was good, but not as good.

[the Jazz]

[Some people mistakenly believe that] the difference with "life" is that we make choices which are not governed by empirical facts and laws, due to the fact that we are alive and think abstractly.

I wouldn't go so far as to say people who believe this are definitely mistaken, just that there is no empirical evidence to support that belief.

I have trouble defining conciousness to myself. I want so much for there to be an absolute truth which preserves meaning in my life, that I tend to force definitions which support or leave possibility for magic. Things like an immortal soul, God, ghosts, telekinesis, life after death, all these concepts which defy explanation through cold science. The closest I seem to get to a definition which is separate from the soul is "Having the power to observe;" but that's pretty vague. Although, it does allow for lack of free will without self destructing.

My big problem with a world where there is no free will (aside from the need for control) is that it pretty much annihilates the meaning that I'm searching for. If the past and future exist independant of us and are immutable, pretty much everything we know is wrong. There is no "motion". There is no "change". Cause and effect is preserved, but that's about it. I guess the good news is that "death" loses its power to terrify.

What do you think of the idea that time is most accurately modeled not by a fourth dimension, but an by entirely separate set of (at least) three dimensions? One of these being future-past, and the others representing alternate realities. For instance, if future-past is left-right, then a reality which is completely the same as this one but for one infinitesimal detail is infinitesimally up, down, in, or out (or perhaps a direction in "N" other dimensions) relative to us. There being, of course, some law governing in which direction and how far away one reality is from another. The end result is that anything which is possible is a reality, and that all exist simultaneously but can only be observed by us one at a time. Free will can also be preserved here as the conscious travel of the soul in the directions perpendicular to future-past; although this begs the question, how is a reality occupied by a soul different when the soul is not present? Any attempt to explain goes even more in the direction of supposition and fantasy; the more logical-seeming "answer" would be that all realities are occupied at all times by infinite souls, and therefore they do not travel. Which suggests again a lack of free will, and it might seem we have come around full circle; however, this model suggests a different interpretation of the world sans free will. Whereas before it was seen as being presented with multiple options and predestined to choose only one (the others no more than potential past or future choices), in this new interpretation every option is chosen, every path travelled, and every possibility explored, but each distinct soul experiences a distinct set of options which form its path through what could perhaps be referred to as the temporal dimensions, or the transcendental dimensions if I want to get cocky. There's really no difference between the two interpretations except in how you look at the problem, as in the illusion of one candlestick or two faces; but the second seems more pleasant, and eases my mind somewhat.

OT: My only exposure to Ghost in the Shell is through the manga, and now two episodes of Stand Alone Complex which is airing on Adult Swim. From your comment it sounds like I should go rent the movie.

Oh and by the way, interesting factoid: this post took me a full hour. [hypothetical "shocked" emoticon]

Interesting factoid #2: I just realized that your avatar is me, only with a few more years of growth and no glasses. Maybe I really am you when you're asleep. Does that mean that by staying up way too late, I am depriving you of your right to exist? I'd better go to bed! ["shocked" again]

[Adam!]

First, the important stuff: GitS Manga > GitS: The Movie > GitS: The Sequel >>> Standalone Complex.

Standalone Complex, though more faithful to the manga than either film, is IMO very, very dull. The movie, on the other hand, is stylish and more engaging.

Jazz: Elegant theory, but it forces us to make a lot more assumptions than existing theories about the nature of time that explain the same things.

You’ve obviously given all of this some thought, so a little more can’t hurt. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine yourself in a restaurant at 1:00 pm. You are deciding between dashing or paying the bill. You weigh all the factors (your morals, the price of the meal, whether you are in a hurry or not, etc) and quickly come to the decision that you will pay.

Now, let’s roll back the clock to 1:00pm again. You are faced with the decision just like last time. All the factors are the same, including the meal, your morality, your mental state, the state of your soul, etc. You again weigh all the same factors and you either A) again decide to pay for the meal, or B) ditch the bill this time. Now, let’s repeat this ad infinitum.

If A is chosen every time then this fits with the idea that we are decision making machines. We add up all the factors in a scenario (and this includes the soul’s influence) and make a decision; if all the factors are the same the decision will always be the same.

If we sometimes choose A and sometimes choose B, then there is some unknown factor at work, like a universal unpredictability or the influence of something non-physical. The problem is that if the scenario (and your mental state) is exactly the same both times, yet the outcome oscillates between the two options without cause, our freewill is reduced to a coin toss.

I can’t find freewill in either possibility. Further, this experiment can be applied to any decision. To me it seems pretty solid. Either that or I'm a nut.

[erik]

If A is chosen every time then this fits with the idea that we are decision making machines. We add up all the factors in a scenario (and this includes the soul’s influence) and make a decision; if all the factors are the same the decision will always be the same.

If we sometimes choose A and sometimes choose B, then there is some unknown factor at work, like a universal unpredictability or the influence of something non-physical. The problem is that if the scenario (and your mental state) is exactly the same both times, yet the outcome oscillates between the two options without cause, our freewill is reduced to a coin toss.

I can’t find freewill in either possibility. Further, this experiment can be applied to any decision. To me it seems pretty solid. Either that or I'm a nut.

You are using the phrase "without cause" when you should be using the phrase "without any apparent cause". The unknown factor could be free-will, as defined as "the ability to view the same set of data in different ways". Just because the set of factors remains the same doesn't mean we have to interpret them the same way every single time.

In your thought experiment.

[the Jazz]

Elegant theory, but it forces us to make a lot more assumptions than existing theories about the nature of time that explain the same things.

That's right, I forgot to put something in there. The development of an accurate model was not really my goal at the time (I formulated that large paragraph last night as I was typing, actually). The temporal dimensions model (for lack of a better term) is no better than H. G. Wells' classic linear model. I would say it's even more farfetched, but in this context a model is either correct or it isn't, and varying quantatative degrees of incorrectness are meaningless. Also, that last sentence was completely unnecessary and overly self-important, and should have been removed–and this sentence as well. But I'm a rebel! Woo!
>SLAP<
Okay, back to business. Thinking through that model led me to the other way of thinking about free will, and the real goal was the little peace of mind I attained thereby. I do not think it any less valid to assume all possibilities are realized than to assume that all but one are not. The stuff about souls and dimensions was an exercise which brought me there, although I only saw that in hindsight.

The exercise you present is very interesting.

The problem is that if the scenario (and your mental state) is exactly the same both times, yet the outcome oscillates between the two options without cause, our freewill is reduced to a coin toss.

The weakness in this argument is that the presence of time is an unsolved variable. If you were to make multiple coin flips, here are two possibilites I see: first, that the flips occur at separate moments in time, and thus the deciding factor in your decision may be in some way a result of your "location" in time; second, that the flips occur simultaneously, in which case it seems they either occur in separate realities (a la the "all possibilities realized" model) or as potential outcomes (a la uncertainty principle), unresolved during the Present and resolving only once the moment is Past.

Which is basically what 15-16 said, except that what is implied but not stated is the role time plays; here's how I would make it clearer:

The unknown factor could be free-will as a function of time, defined as "the ability to view the same set of data in different ways at different times."

[Adam!]

There is some unknown factor at work, like a universal unpredictability [randomness] or the influence of something non-physical [freewill]. The problem is that if the scenario (and your mental state) is exactly the same both times, yet the outcome oscillates between the two options without cause, our freewill is reduced to a coin toss.

The unknown factor could be free-will, as defined as "the ability to view the same set of data in different ways". Just because the set of factors remains the same doesn't mean we have to interpret them the same way every single time.

What I meant was that the cause of this indeterminism could be randomness or it could be "freewill". Both are without cause (freewill is necessarily without cause, otherwise it is not free) and seemingly without reason. If I can look at the same set of data and sometimes see it one way and sometimes see it another way that certainly makes me free, but I don't see how it makes me wilfully free. In this case my freedom comes from the unreliability of my perceptions and the unpredictability of my impulses. If I can "view the same set of data" in arbitrary ways lets assume there's some part of my brain (or my soul, if your into that sort of thing) that allows for this variance. Let's say you're in a restaurant thinking of skippin' the bill; suppose 99% of the time you see the set of data one way and pay the bill, and 1% of the time you see it another way and make a run for it. It seem that freewill boils down to either the unpredictability of our perceptions or the effects of random impulse; this is not my definition of freewill. Nor is it the legal definition: people who have clouded or variable perception or who are acting under the control of impulses are frequently found not (or less) responsible for their actions.

'Will' for me is the ability to think logically and clearly about something and come to a decision; if I am truly acting lucidly I should also be consistent. If I am consistent to the point of predetermination then I am not 'free'; however if I act unpredictably I find no freedom there either.

Jazz: Erm... I was trying my hardest to remove time as a factor. In case A and case B all the factors (the physical world, your mental state, the state of your 'soul' (this depends on your theology), and the time) are all the same. In this case parallel ('adjacent' is a better word) realities are a good way to look at this.

Funny, funny stuff.

[c hack]

I just got back from a weekend at a Zen Buddhist Monastery (Dai Bosatsu Zendo). One of the more interesting times was the Q&A session with the Vice Abbot there. One guy asked him if Zen Buddhists believe in a soul. He said (I'm paraphrasing) "We don't believe in anything. We find things out for ourselves. Science is the investigation of the external world, Zen is the investigation of the internal one. You ask 'is there a soul?' I say, 'Why don't you find out for yourself?'"

Very interesting, to say the least.

[Leaf]

Yes... although one could argue that by asking the fellow WAS attempting to find out for himself... sharing knowledge and opinions help one to grow... so that answer would have pissed me off. I'd respond by saying, hey you lazy ass, communicate! I care about your opinion on the subject. It may help me.


Or maybe I'd just "ooommmm'. One or the other.



I have a friend who does that with guitar. I 'll say "hey, how do I play x riff?" and he always says "you should practice reading jazz charts."

What a stupid answer. Of course I should, but that really isn't gonna help me if I need help RIGHT NOW on the gig.

[c hack]

No, it's like asking someone who doesn't speak english what time it is, when you have a watch on. They know what time it is, but they can't communicate it to you, and you probably wouldn't believe them anyway. Much better to point out that you're wearing a watch, look for yourself.