I don't take offense. That is a highly brave action. The picture is so iconic that it even looks 'beautiful' even though it's very tragic.
But I don't see how it relates to free will. And it's unlikely I'll reconsider it since it's one of my 'specialties' for more than a decade! In fact I consider it a fact that both science and philosophy have proven, quite independently of each other, that there is no free will. It's just a remnant of our belief in the soul, basically. Once you understand that everything is material, and our brain is made of matter, and consciousness entirely depends on it, then the rest follows. Maybe a stone has no feelings and a human has feelings, but with determinism it's different: there is no sum that is greater than its parts. If material particles have 0% free will, then it doesn't matter how many of them you stack together and in what order, you will never get something that has 1% free will. There are some things that all material objects have in common, like having a position in space and time for instance. One of those things is being 100% determined.
There are famous free will experiments in psychology that you probably read about, but recently there was a new one (of the same kind) that a friend posted on fb:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-brains-reveal-choices-aware.html
If you regard science as fixed and set and not as with an open end, then according to this logic every scientific knowledge and application should freeze in its temporal emergence and be seen as fixed. The sciences themselves are also subject to different approaches and empirical experimental possibilities, in fact they are divided into faculties that prove free will to be non-existent just like others that prove free will to be existent. I think we would both find numerous treatises on both if we tried. I have already heard about that one which is postet on fb.
But you have already summed up what it is all about: identification:
I can't possibly ask you to give up an identification any more than you can ask me to do it the other way around. Each of us has found his way of what it looks like to deal with this topic, but different and with different emphases. Until some time ago I might even have proved you right, or would have tended to argue in favour of an "open end", i.e. that there is a free will nor that there is none.
For the fact that you are of the view that there is no such free will, you argue surprisingly strongly what seems paradoxical to me. :-D
Will you let me assume that you are controlled by said other forces and that it is these factors - after your free will is excluded - that make you hold this view? And to the extent that I am also controlled by other elements, are two people talking who don't know exactly why they are having this conversation? LOL
Here's what I suggest: I am leaning on the latest science in the study of neuronal processes associated with meditative practice and would put both you and me in the category of those who operate mostly with a Default Mode Network. Based on the fact that most people do not have sufficient meditative practice, the illusion of reality is probably more the order of the day than the exception.
But I hope that this will change with the integration of meditative practice into my morning ritual. I practice mindfulness in my professional work, but have not yet made it a daily habit of my private time. Except that I try to stay with it and not be elsewhere with my thoughts when I do something, whether cooking, showering, walking or driving.
P.S. I heard the sentence different: "The sum that is other than its parts"
Which faculties prove free will to be existent?
Science is open, always up to revision, open-ended etc. But if something cannot be investigated causally/deterministically, then science cannot study it. Think of any science—chemistry, biology, engineering, whatever—all it does is study what causes X, and tries to use that to its advantage (if I do Y, X will follow).
I don't understand why you find this funny! :P It seems that you think that if we don't have free will, then we can't do anything? Or you find very puzzling the idea that we believe something because of everything we know + whatever our biology is? So if I take a child and raise him to believe in God, in a country where 98% of the population believes in God, and teach him all the books about God, and teach him nothing about science, and create emotional and intellectual connections to the idea of the existence of God, and then in his thirties this former child argues against an atheist, you will find funny the idea that he is arguing so strongly because he is determined to? And if someone presents valid atheistic arguments to this person, you think this person will assess them fairly, because he has 'free will'?
Whether you are a monk or a regular person, you are as determined as a rock. A monk spends all his time meditating (rehearsing certain ideas put into his head by other people, and mostly ignoring everything that the rest of the world is learning—I remember when the monks were first contacted by Westerners, they refused to believe in airplanes, they found it impossible to believe that humans created machines that can fly).
If reality is an illusion it can be proven using logic, not something that sounds more like brainwashing. What most monks do is an escape from reality, not an acceptance of it, and it's actually written in their dogma: life is bad, nirvana is permanent escape from life, never to return, escaping the wheel of samsara.
I want you to explain free will to me because so far I haven't gotten a definition from you, even a loose one! Since you like monks, take the example of the monk who put himself on fire. You argue this is a perfect example of free will. So I have some questions about that: You believe there is no reason the monk set himself on fire? If you believe there is a reason, for example he believed something so strongly and he inured himself to pain so much and trained himself mentally so much that he could put himself on fire, that he decided this course of action was the best to do to perhaps teach the world something—if that is the case, did those opinions and beliefs of his come from nowhere? If we study where this person was born, will it be shocking to us that he became a Buddhist? You believe that if science knew everything there is to know about this person's past life, it would be impossible to predict that he would set himself on fire? You think it's equally likely that another monk could put himself on fire instead of this one, that there is nothing connecting this action to all the prior impressions that occurred in this person's life? His action was a result of 'free will' (whatever that is), and definitely not a result of everything that happened in his life and the way his brain is constructed? (By the way, you do know there is a medical condition where a person doesn't feel pain, right? I don't know about this specific monk, but I can't help but wonder...) I'm just asking all this to understand exactly what you mean by free will. You don't need to answer all the questions, they are just examples to give you a sense of what I'm trying to understand. Oh and one last sci fi question! :P If we abducted this monk before his action, removed his brain, made a copy of it, erased the events after the abduction, put this new copied brain back into the skull, and released him...you think now this person with the exact same brain would have equal chance of burning himself? Less chance? More chance? You think what he did has nothing to do with how his brain is wired and all the impressions and past experiences it had?
Sorry for the long post! Have a good day.
As it looks to me, you seem to believe that such fairness does not seem possible due to predetermining factors. I don't know how fair or unfair someone is to someone else. I can only say that when I'm involved, in the interaction between the two of us. Whether or not I perceive a sense of fairness also depends on how our reasoning proceeds overall. If, for example, I were to close this thread of conversation angrily, who could predict what the future would look like? Could you say with absolute certainty how a story will continue? We can operate with probabilities, but absolute certainty we could not proclaim for ourselves.
Yes, in fact I understand your argumentation in such a way that we cannot do anything, since it seems that biology, socialization, etc., is so strong that "what is left is random", while my bill said that "the rest is free will". I did not say that it was easy and I tried to explain that free will is best measured by the contrast of what one is willing to do against one's own resistance. For example, to act against social conditioning: an extremely difficult undertaking. How can this be " random " when I decide to do it intentionally?
So if you think that we can do something after all, then I don't see any difference at all between the two of us. Then what is your point?
I told you at the very beginning of my explanation of free will that the larger you draw the time frame, the smaller a free will can be identified. When you put history, peoples, etc. into context, it is clear that people decide and behave as their location and the system and past events in which they find themselves dictates.
Has nobody so far surprised you or behaved really so unpredictable that you were impressed by it?
Is what you are saying, that a person cannot change - again on a level where all the other things already are subtracted?
How comes, Westerners like Matthieu Ricard, who had a Ph.D. degree in molecular genetics, decided to leave a shiny career and chose to become a monk?
Before I came to Steemit, I had a much more one-sided idea of science. But since I've read many articles (including yours) something has changed. I am much more willing to accept less free will than I have ever accepted before in my life. I force myself to read scientific texts that are contrary to what I was inclined to believe. I have come to the conclusion that, for the most part, there is a great overestimation of free will in my culture and in societies similar to my culture. For example, the exchange between you and me has made me think and make concessions. I would not have set up the above formula like this before.
From what I think that the self immolating monk did, is the following:
He chose to burn himself. I cannot imagine how a person can even prepare for this act. He knew that fire hurts, he knew that a human body usually wants to escape physical pain, he knew that instincts would kick in and he obviously knew what to do about it. Even if you think he drugged himself, even if you think of a biological constitution to be immune to pain, would that be a convincing thought to you realizing that you were about to set yourself on fire? Do you think the monk would not want to resist the fire?
When you do something for the first time in your life, how can you be certain of the outcome? Than, you must conclude, that this monk must have been utterly crazy and overestimating his action. Yes, normally that would also be something I would think. Setting oneself on fire because overestimating once endurance to deal with it shows in other cases of self immolation acts where people run around wildly because of the pain.
I have a different interest, you see. I am not so much caring for the chances but for what happened to this particular monk and what happens in other particular moments where I identify moments of free will.
You seem to think that there is only one either-or question to answer here. I agreed with you long ago and at the very beginning that a person cannot take himself out of context. What I say is:
Yes, everything that led to his decision is also the result of past impressions and it connects from moment to moment with what I call free will. Instead of the "or" I used an "and". I'm taking the "definitely" out.
Some more thoughts & questions:
What do you get from determinism? I don't understand the motive for it. Would it then be necessary to change the law and treat criminals differently? Do you have an uncle in prison? :-D
What is your point of view, what do you do with it? Or do you think that by predicting people's actions, you can stop certain activities? Something like "Minority Report"? Super-humans?
Yes, evidence: They want to be produced, and yet I would say that nobody has proven what we are debating here. In fact, I am correcting something: there is no evidence, but desires, the one one tends towards, may one day be proven - though one can find numerous scientific papers and studies serving this or that opposite taste.
And the ultimate wish that everything can finally be proven if you only have the right measuring instruments. In my new blog you can see the integration of some studies that set out to prove something that I don't think is really provable, because you can only poorly work with something that has no materiality. Consciousness is such a phenomenon, just like free will. But I find it interesting that especially those who have really very convincingly demonstrated their evidence against "free will" actually revealed the impossibility of their intention. Sorry, I cannot give you an English source as I was searching for a scientifically written critique on determinism in the neurosciences in my own language as I wanted to understand the contents correct.
On the other hand, I would very much like to raise the philosophies (i.e. insights of Emanuel Kant) to the same solid level as the natural sciences. To present human experience and phenomena merely as "scientifically impossible to investigate" and at the same time to discredit consciousness/self-consciousness as irrelevant, I consider wrong.