No Free Will?

[Guest Kingkong123]

3 hours ago, TruthSeeker said:

No, the Creator of the universe and all of reality is graciously willing me into existence at every moment. 

My ego has not created "my idea of God" its logical. Things cant make themselves...they have to me made by someone....If you saw a watermill in the desert...wouldn't you assume that someone made it....you would find it absurd if someone said that the water mill made itself...same thing with all the complex things in this world...there must be someone who is running the show and creating everything constantly. Pure logic

If, on the other hand you saw waterfall would you say someone made it or it made itself?

[Guest Kingkong123]

On 2/15/2016 at 6:50 PM, jjer94 said:

Check out Leo's video on free will.

The most fundamental basis is that free will requires an agent of will, and when you look in our experience, you can't find one. 

Here's another article explaining the problems with free will better than I can ever explain it:

http://www.uncoveringlife.com/free-will/

Even if free-will is an illusion create by the ego, does the placebo effect not have a very real effects?

[jjer94]

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Even if free-will is an illusion create by the ego, does the placebo effect not have a very real effects?

1. There exists no ego to create the illusion of free will. An illusion is something that appears to be there but doesn't actually exist. The ego and free will are both illusions.

2. I'm not sure what you mean here. Belief can be powerful sometimes. You can consider the illusion of free will to be one world-wide placebo effect!

[TruthSeeker]

9 hours ago, Hellsgunz100 said:

If, on the other hand you saw waterfall would you say someone made it or it made itself?

A person can spend his entire life studying the properties of water and live till 120 yrs and still not know everything about it. It could have only been created by God. Not even Google can make something like water. Here are some interesting facts about water to wet your tastebuds.

 

Quote

 

Anomalous Expansion of Water
Water alone is a mini-universe of amazing properties. Let us examine a bit (based on "Eye of the Needle", Coopersmith). If you ask any physicist, why is it that ice floats? He will tell you it's because the water molecules become denser as they get colder, until they reach 4 degrees above freezing, whereupon the molecules suddenly start to expand and get less dense due to the hydrogen bonds adjusting to hold the negatively charged oxygen atoms apart, creating a crystal lattice.

But why does the physics work that way? Why does water suddenly become lighter when it was previously getting heavier? And your friendly physicist has an explanation for that too. He will say, "Because it's an exception".

We have a different answer. G-d created the laws of physics. Now, G-d may not care if ice floats to the top of your soda cup, but He does care that ice floats to the top of a lake. What would happen if ice sank to the bottom? All plant and animal life in lakes and rivers would die, and when the ice defrosted in spring, the waters would be putrid and vile.

In the oceans, ice would form at the bottom (where it is colder, and summer warmth is harder to get). Such ice would not melt for millennia, creating perma-ice (similar to permafrost). Life would be possible only in shallow layer of water between perma-ice and surface. This layer would be very cold, cooled from the bottom by perma-ice. Needless to say, the consequences of this and more on earth life would be devastating. So G-d says, "I did not make a world to be uninhabited. In the case of ice, I'll just overturn the natural law and make an exception."
 

Some Other Unusual Properties of Water

• Universal Solvent - another unusual property of water is its ability to dissolve a large variety of chemical substances. It dissolves salts and other ionic compounds, as well as polar covalent compounds such as alcohols and organic acids without destroying them. Water is sometimes called the universal solvent because it can dissolve so many things. This is very important to animals for the dissolving of substances in the water of the plasma in blood, so as to get transported around the bodies and used by cells.
• Water has a very high surface tension. Besides mercury, water has the highest surface tension for all liquids. This property is essential for the plant transport system (in order for dissolved nutrients and mineral ions to travel up the transport vessels in plants without a mechanical pump)
• The water molecule is amphoteric. It dissociates almost completely into H+ ions and OH- ions becoming both a proton donor and acceptor. This ability of water to act both as a proton donor and acceptor makes it an ideal medium for the biochemical reactions in cells.
• Low Viscosity - water is one of the lowest viscosity liquids. This means it can flow through tiny tubes and not get stuck. This is very important for blood flow in tiny capillaries to transport products to and from cells.
• High specific heat - water has the highest specific heat of all liquids except ammonia. This means it takes alot of energy to change its temperature. This property is very important to warm blooded animals so as to keep their body temperature stable.
• High Heat of Vaporization - water has the highest heat of vaporization per gram of any molecular liquid. In order for water to evaporate hydrogen bonds need to be broken. This means a substantial amount of energy is used and this produces a cooling in the environment where the evaporation is taking place. This is especially significant for humans whose skin is exposed and allows them to cool down so as to maintain homeostasis of body temperature.

 

(Similarly...if you saw the inner workings of a wrist-watch in the desert with all the gears and twists...would you assume all those parts randomly came together...or was just there randomly ...or someone made and designed it? The eyeball is 10^100 more times complicated than water...just studying the eye alone one should think right away...someone must have designed this thing...Its too complex...insanely complex. )

 

Btw the way I think I have a solution to the whole free will debate...Ill write about it soon...

Edited February 18, 2016 by TruthSeeker

[zasa joey]

@Leo Gura can you blame them? its not in their control anyways right?

[Khin]

@TruthSeeker Agent of will means "I" as a soul, a controller.

[Woody]

I would recommend y'all to read about solipsism, which is a very radical way of thinking... and I think it makes everybody even more confused. Yet this is all about wisdom, the more you know, the less confidence you have about your knowledge... but making questions about existence is always the most exciting thing on the world.

[TruthSeeker]

On 2/15/2016 at 9:50 PM, jjer94 said:

 

The most fundamental basis is that free will requires an agent of will, and when you look in our experience, you can't find one.

 

27 minutes ago, Khin said:

@TruthSeeker Agent of will means "I" as a soul, a controller.

Oh...thanks...I had no Idea what he was talking about...

 

Why does free will require an agent of will...why cant there just be free will. No "agent"...No "I"...Just WILL...That, you can find.

 

[Khin]

On ‎2‎/‎15‎/‎2016 at 11:12 PM, TruthSeeker said:

He watches Leos health videos and it inspired in and the next day he DECIDED not to eat that thing. It was still hard for him and still a struggle but he overcame and used his free will.

So, something DID make him to DECIDE! When it comes to overcome part, we can't just say "Yeah, he did it." We have to research further on a basic level. Example, he might DIE if he eats that (fear of death), he wants to look good (desire), for his girlfriend (desire to impress) etc... Which means whatever is stronger will win. If all the desires I listed were stronger, then he'll overcome the desire of food.

 

[Khin]

4 minutes ago, TruthSeeker said:

Why does free will require an agent of will...why cant there just be free will. No "agent"...No "I"...Just WILL...That, you can find.

Does it still matter if there's freewill or not when there is no such as "I"?

Edited February 18, 2016 by Khin
edit one word

[jjer94]

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Why does free will require an agent of will...why cant there just be free will. No "agent"...No "I"...Just WILL...That, you can find.

If there is only will, then every action done by will would be totally random, since there's no entity that can choose one thing over another. Doesn't sound like the free will you're talking about...

[TruthSeeker]

http://www.creativitypost.com/science/has_neuro_science_buried_free_will

Synopsis

Why scientists should not jump to the unwarranted conclusion that free will is just an illusion.

Our commonsensical view holds that everything we do in life is a choice and we are totally free to choose between the options which we think are available to us.  Many scientists, however, see a fundamental problem with the conventional wisdom about free will and claim that it is nothing more than an illusion. 

After all, the adult brain is a 1.3-kg mass of jellylike tissue made up of billions of neurons.  And all those neurons consist ultimately of atoms obeying the exact same laws of physics as everything else in the universe.  Everything that happens- in a physical universe such as ours- must necessarily have an inevitable cause. This means that for any decision we make, we could not have done otherwise. So, we have no true choice. No free will.

Amen.

Since the cause-effect relationship is the fundamental tenet of science, if you are in one fashion or another defending free will, then you are wasting your time and giving in to this anti-scientific nonsense, saying that here is something which has not been caused. 

When talking about free will, the one thing that is almost invariably brought up by free will deniers is the famous Libet experiment.

Nearly three decades ago, a neuropsychologist by the name of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, performed one of the most thought-provoking and controversial experiments in neuroscience ever. Libet asked experimental subjects to perform a simple movement such as flicking the wrist or finger whenever they wanted to. Participants could watch and specify the position of a moving spot of light on a special clock when they made an arbitrary decision to move their wrists. Libet wanted to determine when participants became consciously aware of deciding to act prior to the actual movement by monitoring their cerebral activity using scalp electrodes. Libet's recordings revealed that the report of the conscious decision to act occurred about 350ms after the onset of an electrical signal in the motor cortex- the area in the brain triggering and preparing the muscle to move. 

What this means is that consciousness comes on the scene too late for it to play any role in initiating action. This hammered final nail in the coffin of free will as it provided "the much anticipated empirical evidence" in support of the you-have-no-free-will argument.  Libet himself has been somewhat careful in interpreting the implications of his experiments.

Many others, unfortunately, have certainly been certainly less modest. 

In the following years, others researchers produced results similar to the original Libet experiment. With its ever increasing popularity unmatched by any other brain imaging technique, it would be virtually impossible to imagine a neuroscience experiment not armed with fMRI- functional magnetic resonance imaging.  Indeed so, in a study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2008 by Chun Soon, participants were asked to push one of two buttons with their left or right index fingers anytime they wanted and Soon tried -using fMRI- to predict which hand a particular subject was going to use to press the button.

The brain activity that predicted which button would be pressed began 7 seconds before the subject was conscious of his decision. Although many of the limitations and intricacies of the technique were glossed over, most media outlets went bananas over the story, spreading it around the globe, either overselling or watering down the message.

The assumption behind all this empirical evidence against free will is that conscious decision takes place at an instant which can be compared with the neural activity corresponding to it. It is however very likely that- like many processes in our bodies- it is rather a smeared-out event, which can’t possibly occur instantaneously.  It would be like asking when a baby starts talking: there is no clear-cut, dividing line between the baby’s silence and speech. It is a process, a continuum.  For the experimental protocols that Libet and his followers used, relying heavily on awareness of actions and time estimation of accuracy, this is a crucially different definition.

Another fundamental aspect which is widely overlooked in these studies is that they provide no proof whatsoever that brain activity could happen without conscious decision taking place.  This is a critical point particularly because neural activity precedes the conscious awareness of the decision corresponding to it.  Understandably, it is not surprising that brain activity that takes place before the will has been historically thought as the source that leads to behavior.  Anything preceding an effect must be a cause. Not the tiniest shred of evidence exists, however, in favor of the idea that brain activity can occur without the corresponding decision-making. This is an argument piercing the veil of the fashionable you-have-no-free-will dogma that we are being told with religious certainty and confidence.

A methodological flaw that strikes me as odd is that these experiments always involve a test subject fully aware of the choice they are going to make. Is it surprising than that our brain would prepare for this decision? In real life, as opposed to the simple, binary decisions of Libet, we are faced with many complex situations where we have not a clue of the options available to us beforehand.  The volunteers in the experiment had no choice other than the timing of their actions. They could not decide among different action alternatives as the action itself was predetermined.

But more than that, in simple actions like  flexing your wrist only procedural memory is involved, whereas in typical free will situations, requiring a deeper assessment of the current situation in tandem with  memories of the past experiences in our cognitive toolkit, episodic memory plays a substantial role.  So, it’s very much doubtful that the experiment is telling us something about free will. If anything, the Libet experiment is nothing more than a very crude oversimplification which is very difficult to justify in terms of everyday situations that we all encounter in real world.  Instead, monitoring brain activity as we go around making more complex choices can be more interesting but this is no trivial task to accomplish. 

Aside from all these methodological criticisms and flaws, there is one fundamental assumption at the core of the scientific framework in which all these experiments operate. The view that there is no free will because the brain is made of atoms and molecules that obey physical laws is a great example of reductio ad absurdum. 

Let's take a water molecule- two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen- if you'll pardon the cliché.  When combined, they produce a colorless, tasteless and odorless liquid.  Can you take the hydrogen and the oxygen atom in isolation and predict that water will emerge from their combination?  A possible reply from a physicist would be that once we acquire all the necessary knowledge of the underlying physics, we'll be able to explain all the seemingly emergent properties which at the moment we can’t explain.  

But not every physicist buys this argument. Here's the rub: the Nobel prize winning condensed matter physicist Philip Anderson wrote a famous article entitled ‘More is Different’ in 1972  where he defended the view that the laws and principles he studied as a condensed matter physicist were emergent  and there are plenty of phenomena exhibited by macroscopic systems whose existences cannot be predicted directly from an underlying, microscopic theory.   In other words, the information obtained from the whole can’t be explained by the sum of information from each individual element.  Simply put, just because matter in the universe- including all atomic constituents in the human body- obeys certain physical laws, it really doesn't follow that the choice itself must also be bound by the same laws. There is a huge gap here which is not explained by this line of reasoning. This is simply bad logic.

Thanks to the seeming there-is-no-free-will consensus among some mainstream scientists who have espoused their ideas loudly enough with a great air of confidence, many others-scientists and lay people alike- followed and accepted their line of thinking uncritically.

For people, free will matters. So it's very important that the science shaping our understanding of free will is accurate.

Before I, for one, give up my free will, I’d like to await more persuasive hard evidence and avoid forming premature conclusions. Is that too much to ask?

[TruthSeeker]

I would like to add that another flaw with that guys experiment as I've repeated many times is that Free Will is only in a case where something is really hard for you. When your nature and basic instincts are urging you to do one thing and you Choose to do the opposite becuase you believe its write...these decisions don't come up so often but when they do you have the opportunity to make a free will decision. If you choose what you believe is the right thing to do, even though your basic nature and instincts are pushing you to do the opposite then it will feel good because you are very getting in touch with a very high level of yourself. 

The "moving the finger" experiment is not an example of free will because its not difficult to move or not move the finger..it requires no WILL...only something thats really hard for you and you have a really strong desire to do x and you choose y then thats free will.

Choosing to go against my nature is free will. Its very hard and requires well a lot of will power...Its possible that some of you claiming there is no free will have never made a free will decision. In that case I feel bad for you. You are missing out. You have never grown or changed. Free will means growing and changing and developing. People who don't grow and develop don't use there free will... they stay the same. 

Keeping a diet requires using free will because its hard...why do you think so many people fail keeping diets...because its hard...peoples base and coarse nature desires to eat a lot of non healthy food. Even if they really desire to look god and impress someone they cant stop eating that unhealthy food. The people who succeed are those who overcome there base instincts and nature and use there free will to decide that even though they really want the food that they are gong to abstain and not eat that piece of cake.

Anytime something is hard for you and you overcome and don't do that thing because your choosing what you think is right and better even though your base and nature instincts are urging you to do other...IS FREE WILL

 

[AlexB]

At a biological level I think the body pushes you into making changes in your life.

At a mind level it looks like you're making it, Im starting to buy into no free will lately and its pretty emotional hard to accept, I was doing an exercise to improve my emotional intelligence, with an alarm sounding like every 3 hours for the past month. I had to acknowledge and feel the emotion everytime that alarm rang.

But my realisation was even bigger because everytime that alarm ranged even at work I was becoming also self aware, and I was actually seeing how unaware I was until that moment, and after a few minutes or tens of minutes maximum its like falling back asleep again until the next alarm. 

Makes you feel like an emotional animal and a thinking machine. 

[TruthSeeker]

Have you guys ever tried fasting (No food or drink at all) for a full day.

 

I challenge anyone to thinks there is no free will to not eat or drink the whole day. Also don't shower or brush your teeth while your at it. Make sure you have plenty of food and drink in the house. Don't tell anyone about this fast...not even in this forum...just do it. 

You probably at some point notice your body naturally walking towards the kitchen or without thinking about it your hand starts to grab some food. Each time you stop your self from eating...you are making a free willed decision. This will get harder and harder as the day goes on. 

If you want a crazy hard challenge...while your doing all that fasting and no showering or brushing teeth...try standing the whole day as well. 

An even bigger challenge will be not to sleep for those 24 hours...as well. 

18 minutes ago, AlexB said:

At a biological level I think the body pushes you into making changes in your life.

AlexB if you take this challenge...you will see that it CANT be your body pushing you to do those things because in fact it will be quite the opposite...your body will really want to eat and sleep and brush teeth and sit down...in order to bypass those innate desires and overcome, you will be using your free will...

Be very aware of what you do throughout the day...what your body pulls you to do and what it takes in order to fight back against the body. 

 

 

 

Another thing you can do it to try not cursing for a week. You will probably fail. Its very hard. but at some point you might start to successfully hold your self back. And once you do so successfully for a while...you might get to a point where if you stub your toe and have a killer instinct to let out a big "F***" you will in a split second have to choose whether to let it out or not...If you succeed and don't curse even though your toe really hurts and nothing would feel better than to let out a big "F***" then you will have made a free willed decision. Even if you fail and you just let your base instincts and nature rule over you and you let the curse out...you still had a free-willed decision to make...you just missed the opportunity. 

 

I don't want to hear anyone else's opinion that theres no free will or why...until you've tried one of these challenges or both and tell me what happened. 

Enojy your exercise of free will

 

[Ayla]

@TruthSeeker ,

I've just finished a 7 days water fasting.... In fact, body very soon forgets about eating... Nothing prompts body to eat except emotional stuff coming up. There's a journal called water fasting in the forum if you wanna read about it. Once you're sitting with it and ask what is it that is being asked, body relaxes into the security of just being. 

I am not saying it was easy. I am saying that body knows absolutely nothing lol. It just receives demands from mind. 

Now if you have to link that to free will, you can, but you will not convince me of that one

 

[TruthSeeker]

No water is easy...try the things I said and then come back to this thread :)...your body will will resist a lot more and you will need to exert some serious free will to overcome

[vizual]

As long as you believe in your ego you believe in free will, it is the concept the ego lives by.

The funny thing is, 'you' will do what you will do regardless. The 'voice' just claims certain things as 'decisions' it made, but it had no part in arriving at that decision at all. As long as you identify with your ego, you will identify with the decisions it is claiming that it made. Now if you say, yes but I feel my ego is real therefor I have free will. In a way you are right, within the illusion of ego you have free will. In the eyes of Truth, there is no one who can have free will since no one exists.

[Pierre]

@Ayla Seven days, wow...respect. You must feel damn well.

@TruthSeeker Many spiritual seekers have imposed extreme trials upon themselves. It's not the way I would choose, but it's one. Push your free will till it bursts!

[Nathalie]

@TruthSeeker Maybe that's it : until one didn't experience that there is no self, it seems as unsane to say there is no I, no free will etc as to claim the opposit. Nobody has to believe anything, but to stay open for an infinity of changing possibilities. That makes live so lively, so to speak.