I do not know. It was really late and I was reading all sorts of comments here and I just kind of had a "Moment."

I believe that every choice we're able to make exist in the confines of what we're allowed to do. We step out of that line, society may praise or revile us. Our choices, unless we're completely alone, are always subject to scrutiny or praise based on constructs designed by the human imagination!

While it may seem like we can choose to do anything we want to, everything we could possibly think of is already paved by what is and isn't already acceptable.

I feel like i'm treading a fine line though and I may sound like I'm saying, "We don't have free will because I can't rob walmart without getting into trouble."

I'm not... although I would get how it sounds like that. It's an interesting subject and I'm not sure I'm convince of either outcome. I thank you for entertaining my thought though.

Not really. We just don’t have enough data to conclusively make a claim like that. Especially since historically when claims of true randomness have been made, they’ve turned out to not be the case. It would be interesting if it turned out to actually be the case, though. Once we actually start relying on it functionally, we’ll know for certain if it’s really the case.

I see what you mean, in general, but that would lead us to basically not being able to say anything is something, wouldn't it?

I agree that having a fallacy in a premise doesn't cause the following conclusion to be false but it still detracts from the relative truth of the argument. Some fallacies are unavoidable like adhere to authority or straw man but doing our best to mitigate fallacies is one of the defining factors of rationality. Refusing to hold political debates to the same standards as high school debates is what has led the US political scene to be so irrational.

Hate it or not, that’s very likely the case. If QM events turn out to actually be random, it’ll be the first truly random event we’ve ever observed.

What do you mean by “responsible for their actions?” If a machine is faulty, we don’t absolve it of blame for creating sub-optimal output conditions. If a person murders someone else, the murder still happened and they still committed it. We would still react deterministically to this event, whether by demanding capital punish enemy, imprisonment, or rehabilitation. You then can look at the conditions this murderer emerged in and see if patterns emerge. If mitigating those environmental conditions reduces the occurrences of murder, then what other conclusion could you draw?

That doesn’t even go into the myriad of data that decision making processes occur prior to conscious recognition of the decision. That is, fMRI data highly indicates that the “sub-conscious” structures of our brain make decisions and then what we call our “consciousness” is informed about it.

Then you have the fact that chemical and physical alterations to our brain structure cause behavioral and psychological changes to a person. For instance, chemical hemisphere separation creates two personalities with two narratives. If a blinder is used, and the one hand gives the other hand something, when prompted the person will make up a story about how they received it. Without separation, the person says they handed it to themselves.

Once you look at things beyond individual decisions, it becomes pretty clear that there’s nothing special about the human brain that could possibly separate it from natural determinism. There’s no “soul” to override our physical brains.

Saying it is truly random has a higher burden of proof than saying it appears random. Sure, it may truly be random, but currently we just don’t know enough to say one way or another. If it really is random, it’ll be our first discovery of a truly random event.

Sometimes I like to reply seriously to a post that's obviously a joke.

Quite. A flawed argument will not convince me that some proposition is true, but it also won't convince me that it is false. It just remains unproven (in this context).

Proving something isn’t the same as something being true. I agree you can’t prove something with flawed logic. That doesn’t make the statement true or false though. That exists independently of a persons ability to prove it. The laws of nature are going to govern the world whether or not anyone can prove that they exist.

We need to be careful not to confuse proving something with whether or not something is true. I agree with the article’s point that someone can make a statement that is truthful whether or not they used proper logic to come to that conclusion. Where I differ from the article is that I don’t believe that the person is guaranteed to be right about anything else, nor would I believe that their logic is valid.

It’s good that we live in a probabilistic universe, id hate to live in a universe where your fate is sealed before it even happens

I was being sarcastic both with the glasses joke and the deterministic worldview of the glasses man.

Oh I know. Was both poking fun at the glasses and the deterministic view most people who argue against free will hold (and yes I am aware free will could be an illusion in a probabilistic universe as well)

What does "predetermined" mean in this context? It sounds like you're positing hidden variable theories, but those have been categorically debunked thoroughly enough to earn a Nobel prize.

Link doesn't open for me.

Fallacies of formal logic should be taken seriously, but in arguments and everyday talk we're not supposed to only make points that 100% follow from one another.

For what it's worth, my mother gave me a copy of Thouless' "Straight and Crooked Thinking" when I was around 10 to 12 years old (my memory fades on the precise date), and it has guided me these past 55 years. My position is that you can't prove a point by using fallacious arguments, but that without arguments you can't prove anything.

The Cartesian self aware self is self evidently unified in time and place, the experiencing self

Right, first of all your position isn't that your view is a possibility, it's that it's a fact. You aren't approaching it from a point of debate, there is no room for "I disagree" so there is effectively no point in engaging you.

That said, your take on it seems to be even more extreme than the interviewee, which runs up against the same problems. The interviewee himself acknowledges the problems inherent in the view. If we assume there is no free will, then no one is responsible for their actions, so there is no point punishing someone for any action or taking measures to prevent it. Guy shoots up an elementary school, tough shit, nothing we could do about it, he was always going to do that. Likewise, there is no point in praising great actions. A man invents a new method for clean, cheap energy and gives it away for the good of the planet instead of for profit. Who gives a fuck, he was already going to do that.

In addition to that being one of the most boring and passive "I'm just here waiting to die" takes on life, taken to the extreme it goes from an unimaginative, milquetoast viewpoint to detrimental to society as a whole. It's also no different than believing a higher power (God) controls all actions and outcomes regardless of human input, everything will always go according to His Plan, a belief that many philosophical individuals would consider small minded and naive.

If the theory of evolution by natural selection is the inevitable result of ancient chains of cause-and-effect, stretching back far into the Big Bang, and the hardcore biblical creationism is the inevitable result of ancient chains of cause-and-effect, stretching back far into the Big Bang, why should I "rate higher", ""consider more reliable/correct/true" the first one

Indeed this is a great point - my last sentence was poorly worded. A better way to phrase it might be that the whole free will debate, while philosophically interesting, is ultimately moot from a practical perspective, and we should all just pretend we have free will?

That is true, however you could say that about any scientific theory. As long as there is no sign of it not being true and the theory withstanding every known test, it might as well be true. The philosophical standpoint could be that we never know the truth but only get better models, which fit our observations, and I would agree, but I don‘t see how that is helping anyone and what to learn from it.

Maybe I‘m just not made to discuss with your philosophical standpoints, being heavily biased with a masters degree in particle physics. This is my first time reading some comments in this sub and actually commenting, so I‘d love to hear what you think and why. :)

Sure. Why not? This is like saying people choose who they’re attracted to or choose what they believe. Sure, one could speculate about them deciding to be attracted to things they aren’t or believe things they don’t. The reality is that we really don’t actually control either of these things.

When you get down to it, we don’t really control anything. We may soon discover that what we call consciousness is just the communication between our multiple brains. That is, our consciousness is an observer of the brain’s decisions, rather than the controller. In other words, what we consider “self” could just be along for the ride. Purely output from the brain.

We don’t understand QM well enough to know if they’re “truly” random. They appear random, but that doesn’t mean they are random.

The entire idea that false or bad logic means the conclusion reached is inaccurate is in and of itself a logical fallacy. People need to understand that. However, to say that “logical fallacies” (or pointing them out) is bad for society is also flawed. It’s an outright attack on rationality and logic.

Logic is the set of rules by which the universe operates. Discarding those rules turns the world on its head and allows for humans (or at least those with high power) to define reality. Humans by there very nature are evil (or at minimum highly self centered). Building a system that provides the potential for others to take advantage of their power by defining reality is dangerous and should be considered carefully.

A better solution to logical fallacies and the fallacies that fall into place when using them would be to better educate the people on formal logic and rationality. Just because people can’t be responsible with something doesn’t mean it should be forever removed. Education rather than revocation should be the mantra. If you teach people self control and self sufficiency it follows that you will need less centralized control and aid towards sufficiency. Society is better off when people can be independent rather than dependent. The more you increase dependency the more you increase a tyrannical persons ability to gather power.

Hi, does anyone have experience in using structural existential analysis to analyse qualitative data? I am conducting my doctoral research on the experience of being cyberbullied from a phenomenological and existential perspective...