Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[ipecac]

Personally, I've come to believe he's right in those principles: we are all merely aggregates of atoms, behaving deterministically by physical laws, free will is an illusion.  That's not a popular opinion societally and it's actually refreshing to see Yang openly advocating it.

I believe in this myself (though I never went on to the lenghts of thought to defend it phiolosophically and with proper method) and it seems to me like a very simple thing, to the point that I'm surprised to rarely find people that believe in it as well.

The average person would never dream about this position, because the most real thing to them* is social relation.

*excepting maybe emotions and sensations like hunger and pain

[Bacchus]

I follow this argument, though it doesn't seem you're saying anything different.  I agree that to define the universe as subdivisions of a Big Bang singularity is equivalent to defining it as the aggregate of the smallest particles.  Either is still deterministic.  (Quantum randomness is still a thing, and is where the symmetry-breaking from the singularity originated; but that's not relevant for my points, my definition of determinism includes behavior that resulted from quantum randomness.)

I haven't been arguing against determinism or materialism though, as I have been saying from the start, I'm arguing that your 'bottom-up' approach at causality, where particles necessarily 'define' higher-order phenomena, rather than the other way around, is an additional argument to determinism, not included in determinism or materialism themselves.

Your argument against free will, as stated in the same post, is explicitly predicated on the 'bottom-up' approach to causality, not on determinism per se. There is a fully materialist counter-argument to your position, and it's not that you can't follow through the movement of particles and figure out where they will end up, the counter-argument is that the will is a real phenomenon that has causal power, which is expressed in the particles moving the way they do. Much like the pattern of the initial symmetry break in the singularity is expressed in the formation of space and matter, or like evolution is expressed development of particular organs, made of particular tissues, which are ultimately made of particular atoms. There is nothing special about a particle-based view of reality, nor about particles themselves, when you look at particles sometimes you are just seeing higher-order phenomena at work.

Where is the stopping point to define that a result was a conscious choice rather than the result of chemical influence? I posit that there is none, and I think the burden of proof rests on claiming otherwise.

There is no 'stopping point' because there is no starting point. A choice can't be 'half-conscious'. Conscious choice is a particular faculty we have -- either it operates, or it doesn't. Proof that we have the faculty at all? Well, it's immediately observed from first-person experience. Demarcation of when the faculty is operational vs when it isn't? Again, you know full well when you moved a part of your body consciously, and when you didn't -- from a nervous tick, or a reflex, or whatever.

We can actually be quite refined about this demarcation -- if you consider learning any physical skill, like riding a bike, martial art, or anything at all that develops 'muscle memory' -- you start by making each individual sub-movement consciously, until, one day you just 'get on a bike' or 'ride', and you are not conscious of the sub-movements at all. There is direct, practical meaning in saying that a novice enacts the same movements through a different faculty than an expert. How can the faculties then not exist? The only answer is that faculties don't exist at all, only particles, but that returns to the above, and is not a position of determinism or materialism.

[Bacchus]

In terms of definitions, 'free will' is a clunky and awful historical term. For one, it seems to presume that there is something like 'unfree will', but no-one stops to think what that would entail. It's also not at all clear what the will is supposed to be free from. Actually, this is one of the ways T-Hawk says a trap for himself -- he wants the will to be 'free' of particles, but if everything that exists can be interpreted as a collection of particles and energies, then the only way for the will to be 'free' is not to exist at all. Particles constitute just what a thing is, and you can't meaningfully demand anything to be free of itself.

To me, the most meaningful gloss on "Do we have free will?" is "Can our conscious choices meaningfully be said to be the causes of the actions we choose to perform?" or, simpler "Can we act by choice?" T-Hawk's answer is "No, the question is meaningless, neither actions nor choices really exist as such".

T-Hawk's ontology, as he has made clear, precludes the existence of any higher-order phenomena -- chains, hearts, evolution, nevermind free will. In fact, for free will to exist in his picture, some sort of special allowance would have to be made for a macroscopic phenomenon of this sort to exist. Which only now helped me realise why he kept saying 'There is nothing special about X' -- because in his picture nothing at all exists until special provision is made. Except for particles, of course, particles are granted that provision on the view of their 'fundamentality', or whatever.

[darrelljs]

These conversations, while fun, are destined to be inconclusive.  Until we *know*, we each have faith that our personal belief makes the most sense, and nothing more .

Darrell

[Modo]

Actually it's more than just fun, it's the basis of pure research. We'd never end up knowing unless we start by speculating.

[darrelljs]

Yeah I'm pretty sure this isn't getting solved on an RB forum .

Darrell

[ipecac]

The average person would never dream about this position

Another thing is the inconsistency that the adherents have. The most famous living adherent is maybe Richard Dawkins, who also embraces that as a consequence of 'there is not free will', morality is meaningless. Yet one minute later, he can be found railing against the evils of religion.

But over and above all this, we have minds or consciousness asserting that they don't exist, a philosophical version of self-annihilation. Thus we reach to the verdict of madness.

[ipecac]

In terms of definitions, 'free will' is a clunky and awful historical term. For one, it seems to presume that there is something like 'unfree will', but no-one stops to think what that would entail. It's also not at all clear what the will is supposed to be free from. Actually, this is one of the ways T-Hawk says a trap for himself -- he wants the will to be 'free' of particles, but if everything that exists can be interpreted as a collection of particles and energies, then the only way for the will to be 'free' is not to exist at all. Particles constitute just what a thing is, and you can't meaningfully demand anything to be free of itself.

Yes, circularity is a big trap here.

T-Hawk's ontology, as he has made clear, precludes the existence of any higher-order phenomena -- chains, hearts, evolution, nevermind free will. In fact, for free will to exist in his picture, some sort of special allowance would have to be made for a macroscopic phenomenon of this sort to exist. Which only now helped me realise why he kept saying 'There is nothing special about X' -- because in his picture nothing at all exists until special provision is made.

That sort of ontology is a "narrow circle" as Chesterton put it - constricted, closed, narrow-minded. Everything spiritual or transcendental is ruled out almost axiomatically, by definition.

[ipecac]

Nobody's responded to the evidence I presented a few times, that we know human behavior is influenceable through chemical means.  Alcohol, depressants, antidepressants, hallucinogens, neural parasites.  All of those when applied to brain chemistry cause different actions in humans.  How is that reconcilable with free will?

You might as well say that we don't have free will because we can't will ourselves to levitate upon the willing of it.

[ipecac]

Yeah I'm pretty sure this isn't getting solved on an RB forum .

Darrell

This sort of determinism is quite easily settled.

The position holds that there is no higher meaning beyond particles, not least that words have no meaning. So the position declares itself to have no meaning, dissolves itself: self-annihilation again - the self-consuming snake, the ouroboros, a narrow circle.