Atheistic Materialism Automatically Disqualifies Free Will

Freewill by Rush

There are those who think that life is nothing left to chance,
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance.

A planet of playthings,
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive.
"The stars aren't aligned
Or the gods are malign"-
Blame is better to give than receive.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear-
I will choose Free Will.

There are those who think that they were dealt a losing hand,
The cards were stacked against them- they weren't born in lotus-land.

All preordained-
A prisoner in chains-
A victim of venomous fate.
Kicked in the face,
You can't pray for a place
In heaven's unearthly estate.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear-
I will choose Free Will.

Each of us-
A cell of awareness-
Imperfect and incomplete.
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet.

__________________
It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

Dear Scientists: Please Stop Bashing Free Will! By John Horgan

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• Alien (or "anarchic") hand syndrome
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• John Horgan
  
• John Horgan is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. He writes weekly “Cross-check” blog for Scientific American
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• Leading scientists have been questioning the existence of God a lot lately. As a lapsed Catholic turned agnostic and scientific materialist, I applaud this trend. But I am disturbed that some atheistic scientists are also questioning the existence of free will.
  “It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law,” the physicist Stephen Hawking writes in The Grand Design, his latest bestseller, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow, “so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is an illusion.” Similarly, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, contends in his new book The Moral Landscape that “no account of causality leaves room for free will.” He adds, “Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.”
  Researchers have certainly raised intriguing questions about the link between our choices and actions. Harris cites experiments by the physiologist Benjamin Libet, in which subjects pushed a button whenever they chose while noting the time of their decision as displayed on a clock. The subjects took 0.2 seconds on average to push the button after they decided to do so. But an electroencephalograph monitoring their brain waves revealed that the subjects’ brains generated a spike of brain activity 0.3 seconds before they decided to push the button. The conscious choice seemed to follow rather than initiate the action. More recent experiments have detected neural precursors of decisions as many as nine seconds in advance.
  There is also evidence that the neural circuits underlying our conscious sensations of intention are separate from the circuits that actually make our muscles move. This disconnect may explain why we so often fail to carry out our most adamant decisions. This morning, I vowed to write all afternoon rather than watch football, but somehow I ended up watching the end of the Jets game. These experiences recall Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Imp of the Perverse,” about a man who feels possessed by an evil other.
  Brain disorders can trigger much more dramatic experiences of this kind. Schizophrenics perceive their very thoughts as coming from malevolent external sources. People who have sustained damage to the corpus callosum, a neural cable that transmits signals between the brain’s hemispheres, may be afflicted with alien-hand syndrome, in which one hand reaches out and grabs things (including other people) without any conscious intent on the part of its mortified owner.
  Neurosurgeons preparing the brain of an epileptic before surgery can make the patient’s arm pop up like an eager student’s by electrically stimulating the motor cortex. The patient often insists that she meant to move the arm and even invents a reason why: She was waving to that nurse walking by the door! Neurologists call these erroneous, post-hoc explanations confabulations. Some scientists argue that whenever we explain our acts as the outcome of our conscious choice, we are engaging in a kind of confabulation, because our actions actually stem from countless physiological causes of which we are completely unaware.
  In his book The Illusion of Conscious Will, the psychologist Daniel Wegner notes that we think of will as a kind of force that initiates action. But according to Wegner, will is “merely a feeling.” One moment I think, “I’m going to watch the Jets instead of writing this essay.” A moment later, I press the button on the TV remote. My thought seems to have caused my action, but correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
  Both free will and the concept of a unified self (which is a necessary precondition for free will) are illusions, according to Wegner. He quotes the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s remark that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Because we cannot possibly understand how the fantastically complex machines in our skulls really work, Wegner contends, we explain our behavior—and that of others—in terms of such primitive, magical concepts as “the self” and “free will.”
  I choose to reject this conclusion. Yes, the mind can be hideously complicated, and divided, often working at cross-purposes. Ancient Greeks like Homer and Sophocles told us that. Yes, researchers have demonstrated that all our thoughts and actions are underpinned by physiological processes, but what else could they have found? Evidence of an immaterial soul?
  Science has discovered nothing that contradicts free will. To deny free will’s existence is to deny that our conscious, psychological deliberations—Should I ask my girlfriend to marry me? Should I major in engineering or art?—influence our actions. Such a conclusion flies in the face of common sense. Of course, sometimes we deliberate insincerely, toward a foregone conclusion, or we fail to act upon our resolution. But not always. Sometimes we consciously choose to do something and we do it. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but it often does.
  Moreover, free will must exist, if some creatures have more of it than others. My teenage daughter and son have more free will—more choices to consider and select from—than they did when they were infants. They also have more than our dog Merlin does. I have (on my good days) more free will than adults my age suffering from schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Try telling prisoners or paraplegics that there is no free will, and that choices are illusory. “Let’s change places,” they might respond, “since you have nothing to lose.”
  We also need the concept of free will, much more than we need the concept of God. Our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consign our fate to our genes or God. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society. Choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful.
  When people doubt free will, they are more likely to behave badly. After reading a passage from a book that challenged the validity of free will, students were more likely to cheat on a mathematics exam. Others were less likely to let a classmate use their cell phone. “Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is compatible with highly ethical behavior,” the psychologist Jesse Bering comments in an article on these studies, “but the present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that possibility.”
  Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a “God of the gaps,” who dwells within those shadowy realms into which science has not fully penetrated, such as the imaginary time before the Big Bang banged. In the same way, maybe we can have a free will of the gaps. No science is more riddled with gaps, after all, than the science of human consciousness.
  I don’t believe in God—at least, not a God described in any text I know of—but I do believe in free will.

Logic is relative - John Irving

Researchers Probe Whether, Why, 'Free Will' Exists


First Posted: 06/27/10 06:12 AM ETUpdated: 05/25/11 05:15 PM ET


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By Amy Green
Religion News Service


ORLANDO, Fla. -- Are people really responsible for all the things they do? Do they have what theologians call God-given "free will" to choose between right and wrong?
Those questions are at the heart of a four-year research project underway at Florida State University that aims to determine whether, and how, free will exists.
Funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the project will gather together scientists, philosophers and theologians around the question of what factors -- free will, genetics, environment, God or something else -- lead us to do all the things we do.
"Gathering evidence for it one way or another, it's quite possible," said Alfred Mele, a professor of philosophy at Florida State who will lead the project. "Scientists have been looking for evidence for and against free will since the early '80s."
The debate however, is much older. For instance: Do humans, through their own freely chosen actions and decisions, determine whether they will go to heaven or hell? Does an omniscient God already know how things will turn out in the end? Does God given humans the free choice
to turn away?
In the early 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment that found subjects' brains registered the decision to flex their wrists roughly 300 milliseconds before the subjects themselves became aware of their decision to do it. Libet concluded "conscious free will never is involved in producing a decision, and you can see how there's a quick road from there to 'there actually is no free will,"' Mele said.
The research led some to believe that brain processes traceable to genetic and environmental factors, and not free will, determine our decisions. Others think that while people might not be immediately aware of the decisions our brains make, they still possess the free will to veto these decisions.
But Mele, the author of two books and more than 170 articles on the concept of free will, doesn't discount the more common definition of free will -- one used by the courts in determining guilt and premeditation.
"There really is nothing more to it than sanely, rationally assessing reasons and then deciding on the basis of those reasons, as long as nobody is pushing you around or forcing you," he said. "In that view of free will, it's pretty obvious there is free will."
The "Big Questions in Free Will" research project will devote $3.4 million for projects around the world to explore the concept of free will from scientific, philosophical and theological perspectives.
Scientists will look for evidence proving or disproving whether free will exists. Philosophers and theologians, meanwhile, will seek a better definition of the concept, helping scientists to know precisely what evidence they are looking for, Mele said.
While it is perhaps difficult to reconcile concepts such as fate and destiny with free will, it is possible for an omniscient God to coexist with the idea of free will, said Kevin Timpe, an associate professor of philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho.
"There is a difference between knowing what someone is going to do and causing them to do it," said Timpe, author of "Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives." "I know what my wife is going to order when I take her to certain restaurants just because I know her very well. But I also think my wife is freely choosing to order."
What if researchers discover free will does not exist? Two studies portend a troubled future, Mele said. One found its subjects cheated more when they believed they were not responsible for their own decisions; another found subjects' behavior growing more aggressive when their belief in free will was suspended.
Norman Geisler, the author of 70 books including several on free will, said the idea that free will does not exist is incompatible with the Bible and the doctrine of original sin, which refers to the sin inherited from Adam and Eve's transgressions in the Garden of Eden.
If Adam's decision was not made freely, then that presumably makes God responsible for evil in the world.
"The Bible constantly affirms that man is free, that he can choose his destiny, that he's morally responsible," said Geisler, whose books include "Chosen But Free." "To say that we are pre-determined is to blame God for our choices. Secondly if all our actions are pre-determined, then why doesn't God save everyone? Because if he can save everyone apart from their free will and he if really loves everyone then he would."

Why can't you just condense all this into a single post? You look desperate for numbers.

I've said about all I want to say in regards to the no free will thing.

Sam Harris sums up everything best in his book, Free Will. I recommend getting it and reading it. It is everything I could say about this subject. It is my answer to all of your questions.

Free Will by Sam Harris on Amazon.com

I am disgusted by the reactions from people in here. Planet News is the most disgusting, but also the least surprising. I find him ignorant and not that intelligent. I also think he's ... well, bad things. I do hope he'll advance to something better someday as a human being, but I doubt it will happen. I am sorry he is who he is.

That's all. And remember -- there is no free will.

I could if Yoda didn't argue with me.

I like planet newss just as much as Powderfinger.

Yoda's position on his supposed logic is arrogance, like the religious who insist their God is the true God and all must follow him.

If his "logic" is truth, then where are are the overwhelming number of scientists who see the convincing truth in it?

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/DoyleOnDoyle1.pdf

I don't think you understand the questions. I didn't ask about exercising free will, I asked about when this special Free Will Zone is in effect. Whether or not the person is in a position to exercise their exemption from causality is irrelevant; the laws themselves are necessarily indifferent to that. So when does it stop, and when does it start? And since you believe in "limited" free will, how do you create an area that is only partially subject to causality? Do some of the molecules obey physical laws, and not others?

Shorter will: I can block Newton's third law of motion with my brain shield. Because future science.

This is already in some ways a true possibility. Newton's third law is no longer considered a law under our best theories.

That is the nature of the movement of science. What is impossible is shown to be possible.

If you're talking about quantum mechanics, that doesn't help the free will argument at all. It just replaces determinism with randomness.

i'm not talking about quantum mechanics. i'm talking about the movement between newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics.

the very fact that this happens shows how neither constitute a totality.

to look /within/ QM is just as misguided as looking within NM.

but to look between. this is exactly what i'm saying. don't think will is so different either even though you think he falls under your critique.

Hold up. You were just claiming that Newton's third law isn't a law. I don't know what you're talking about there, to be honest. Saying this implies that you're meeting the claim on its own terms--one of actual, empirical observation. But now you're talking abstractly again.

And this is, frankly, a recurring feature of our conversations: the contradiction of some hard science claim that, when elaborated on, ends up being a softer, theoretical argument.

'hard science' is inherently abstract. in fact, a great number of science deal with the same domain of empirical observations. but, in the end, they way those observations are made and entered into the theory are decided by the theory.

today, Newton's laws are considered abstract compared to what is commonly thought to be our best theories. this is because they are correct only in an extreme idealization of the objects of existence. in fact, nothing like those objects, motions, or laws exist in other theories. thought some of the objects are carried over in other theories, but certainly not all, and certainly not the three laws themselves unamended.

there is nothing soft about what i am saying. You cannot live in a dream world where science is a certain kind of beast. Science is what it is. And it's time you be honest with yourself about what kind of thing it is.

Saying you must apply abstract notions to hard science does not make it "inherently" abstract, except in the sense that absolutely any thinking about anything is abstract. And I already made the same general observation earlier, when explaining to will that you can't separate scientific observation from logic, because you apply logic to all empirical observation to draw conclusions. He didn't like that, by the way, offering up the breathtaking phrase "logic is relative" and suggesting we put it to a vote.

We know. Science is a religion.

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

logic, first of all, is relative.

but science is not based in logic. each science (a vast collection of many different theories about many different domains) is based in its own rules of deduction, and each science has its own procedures.

in fact, any thinking about anything is inherently abstract, and there is nothing wrong with that. it is important to realize that science is no different from the general continuum of human thought. it is also not trivial to point out this fact, since it is actually not obvious to most people just how science relates to being.

for example you. you seem to want to equate science with the laws of the being.

it should be obvious to you that you cannot do this, yet you try to ceaselessly in almost every post you make in this thread.

you cannot do this as it happens due to how science manifests itself. But also, I claim, you cannot do this even in principle. What you can do is look at how science functions and why it seems to work, and then you will find what I am talking about.

If it were, it would cease to be logic. And you really need to expound on this sort of thing the moment you say it. I suspect this is another this-is-wrong-well-no-wait-I-just-mean-I-use-the-word-some-other-way deal.

And we apply logic to draw conclusions from them. Necessarily. This happened when I did this, but not when I did that, therefore...yadda yadda yadda. And I don't know what it means for science to be "based in logic." I feel like you're talking past a good deal of what I'm saying now.

Yup. I totally just said this, too. See above about talking past things.

I think you forget who I'm arguing with, dude. Like any good argument, I'm meeting the claim on its own terms, which in this case are a schizophrenic mix of blind faith and selective empiricism.

I want to argue something. That should be clear. But it's not something I can just link up directly with what you're saying, so for a while I'm going to be at once provoking you and introducing new things without much of an explanation in a provocative manner. Don't dismiss it, I just need an honest response from you in order to gauge how close or far we are on certain issues.

Not really. Logic is a set of axioms. But, fundamentally, they are empirical axioms, specifically relating to the functioning of language. In other words, they can be amended by experience of different movements of language. There are many ways in which we talk. And there are likewise many logics. There are at least three highly developed formal logics today. And even more logics when we just think of all the ways in which we happen to reason through things. Not all of it is classical. In fact, classical logic is less relevant in today's world than ever. Today's world language might be better described through intuitionistic logic.

At one point it was thought that we could derive the principles of scientific reasoning from those of logic, but that effort failed, because science itself was too diverse and had too many of its own standards for determining things.

In other words, every science is very partial to itself and almost all of them violate the so called logical fallacies often cited in rhetoric.

Thus, it is not /logic/ that you can't separate scientific observations from but the standards of each particular theory. And those standards are always abstractions or idealizations of what is observed.