[yc-kjh]

Incompatible with Free Will

The story is incompatible with free will. The only way the universe could be the way it is, with the one person living all those lives, yet always choosing such that the other people (him in another re-incarnation) also always choose as they (he) did, it would be necessary for free will not to exist.

But this would also mean that the "god" in this story also didn't have free will, because the man was "of his (god's) kind".

But if God does not have free will, he isn't the greatest possible being. The universe thus described therefore fails Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of God. The hypothetical God who is identical to the God in this story, with the exception that He DOES have free will, is obviously a greater being.

I conclude that this story cannot possibly describe Reality, as It actually Is.

[smsm42]

You keep using that word, "always". You understand this has a meaning only in temporal context, right? The narrator sequentializes the events in order to make them comprehensible, but that doesn't mean the Egg actually lived these lives sequentially on by one. Once you realize that, your argument about "always" disappears. Also the question of free will becomes much stranger than you put it. Imagine you filmed somebody and watching it later. Does the person on film lack free will because you can just jump to any place on the film and "predict" his actions? I think you won't make this conclusion. Imagine now somebody who does not perceive time linearly (we're in SF territory so we're allowed to). Would his existence mean free will does not exist?

[hobs]

With some specific FMRI tests, they have shown that your decisions are being made before your are consciousnessly aware of them, therefore what we would call free will is called into question as something that exists at all, and arguing our consciousness is not an artifact of many lower level processes is a hard sell. (to me anyway)

Additionally: I don't see how the ontological argument ever was correct, "god is the most perfect, therefore he exists because an attribute of perfection is existence" is about the most ass backwards way of trying to prove the existence of anything, much less the creator of the universe. I conclude the this story is about as accurate as any other non-evidence based argument for some sort of creator and how they(it/he/she) works.

[yc-kjh]

> your decisions are being made > before your are consciousnessly aware of them

Yes, I'm aware of these studies.

But they make the mistake of presupposing materialist reductionism a priori, as if it were actually true.

Those who assume materialist reductionism have an entire set of questions they are incapable of answering, such as:

1) How can teleology arise from non-teleology? 2) Whence consciousness? 3) How can something come from nothing?

There is a great deal of evidence that materialism is not the best explanation for Reality. If you want to see some of this evidence, read "Mind and Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel.

[nitrogen]

1) Show teleology is more than a human construction to explain the purposes we ourselves invented

2) Emergent behavior in the brain

3) Big bang

Treating these questions as unanswerable assumes a very weak form of materialism.

[yc-kjh]

> Show teleology is more than a human construction > to explain the purposes we ourselves invented

Your question itself is enough evidence that humans didn't invent teleology, but merely recognized its existence. You are asking for a reason why. You are asking a teleological question.

Two year old children do the same thing, constantly. They ask why.

It is natural to ask why.

It is very unnatural to deny the naturalness of asking why, or to try to suppress it, as if the desire to understand why didn't exist in all of us.

Indeed, the answer to the "why" question is one of the four causes Aristotle says we must explain to understand what a thing is. We must understand the why behind it. That is the final cause, or the purpose for the thing.

What you cannot answer is this: How can final cause -- purpose or motivating reason for something -- arise out of nothing? Indeed, the intelligent person recognizes that such an idea is non-sense, and rejects it out of hand.

You get purpose, or reason for being, from a priori purpose or reason. I work in order to have money. I want money in order to buy food and shelter. I want food and shelter to continue to survive. And so on.

You never get purpose, or reason for being, from nothing.

You think by asking me to show that teleology is more than a human construction, that you will bolster your evidence for reductive materialism -- especially if I can't provide an answer that meets your satisfaction. But in so doing, you are demonstrating teleology. You have a goal. You are driving towards that goal. And your goal is self-contradictory. Your goal is to establish that teleology is somehow not Real, not inherent in the universe, and not inherent in us. But goal-based action is what teleology is all about. So you are engaging in the very behavior you are seeking to prove doesn't exist, except as a figment of our imagination.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

[nitrogen]

What you cannot answer is this: How can final cause -- purpose or motivating reason for something -- arise out of nothing? Indeed, the intelligent person recognizes that such an idea is non-sense, and rejects it out of hand.

I can indeed answer this, and I will. Also, it strikes me as bad form to imply that someone who disagrees with you is unintelligent because they do not reject the ideas you want them to reject.

Now to my answer: purpose arises from lack of purpose because purpose itself is merely emergent behavior in the neurons of our brains, arising from the laws of physics.

You get purpose, or reason for being, from a priori purpose or reason. I work in order to have money. I want money in order to buy food and shelter. I want food and shelter to continue to survive. And so on.

You never get purpose, or reason for being, from nothing.

You still have to show that purpose, itself, exists in any form other than a chemical arrangement in our brains. For that matter, you have to define the "nothing" from which purpose is supposed not to have originated, before I can agree that, indeed, that sort of "nothing" is incapable of creating "purpose", or even agree that such a definition of "nothing" is tenable.

But in so doing, you are demonstrating teleology. You have a goal.

I may have a goal behind this comment, but behind that goal is an emergent phenomenon of the laws of physics, and as such, my "goal" is not incompatible with my claimed nonexistence of teleology.

[michaelhoney]

Anselm's ontological argument is, however, bollocks. Merely postulating the existence of a greatest possible being is irrelevant as to whether such a being exists, or whether free will is even possible. There's no evidence that it is apart from our feeling and wishing it were so.

[yc-kjh]

The ontological argument makes a lot more sense when you start from Augustine's viewpoint that evil is always a privation, a lack, and never a thing itself. In fact, it cannot be understood without Augustine's understanding of evil as a framework.

[admnor]

If you believe in free will, I'd be very interested to know your beliefs as to whence it derives. If the universe is bound by a set of consistent physical laws governing the behaviour of all energy/matter, then every interaction is predetermined by the combination of those laws and whatever the initial state was. Free will therefore requires a supernatural component that is not subject to those laws and processes. Even at a more macro level, every decision you make is necessarily based on a combination of genetics and the contents of your memory, i.e. the sum of your experiences, and the interaction between those elements.

What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.

[lutusp]

> If the universe is bound by a set of consistent physical laws governing the behaviour of all energy/matter, then every interaction is predetermined by the combination of those laws and whatever the initial state was.

Quantum theory disproves this thesis, and quantum theory is the best-confirmed of any current scientific theories, i.e. it's very likely to reflect a basic truth about reality. Quantum theory shows that, even though physical laws, and cause/effect relationships, still exist, outcomes aren't predetermined -- there is more than enough indeterminacy in outcomes to justify an argument for free will.

Someone might argue that, if quantum probability only allows a certain number of possible outcomes and one of those outcomes will be selected randomly, therefore free will is disproven by that essentially mathematical process. But if there are enough such outcomes in a timeline, the real difference between many stochastic quantum picks and what most people think of as free will, may seem academic.

> What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.

That may be true, but it cuts both ways. It can be used to argue for a purely mechanistic unpredictability with no involvement for conscious agents, but it can be used to argue for the opposite case (conscious choices, "free will") with equal justice. And we might never know which is true.