Free Will

[andrewducker]

Following an interesting discussion I had here I'm intrigued to see what other people think about Free Will:
[Poll #811650]

Comments

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I believe there is a reality, but I also believe that our perceptions of it cannot be wholly unmediated. I live in the same city as you, but I don't doubt that we could argue as to the truth of some facts about it because we perceive them differently and therefore the representation of Edinburgh in each of our brains (and that is real, too - as an atheist I don't believe that my memories and knowedge exist on other than a physical plane) is different. Not radically different, but different. For example, my experiences may mean that I perceive an area as threatening when you don't.

[andrewducker]

I believe there is a reality, but I also believe that our perceptions of it cannot be wholly unmediated.

So we do agree - I thought as much. There _is_ an objective reality, but we have no direct access to it, as everything comes in through our senses, which are flawed, and then are interpreted by our brains to produce our actual sensations.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

We sort of agree - I don't think it's possible to say perceptions are "flawed". They just are what they are. They alter things, certainly, and for the most part they do it for a reason - to conserve energy expended in perceiving (all that stuff about "seeing" actually involving a lot of outward projection from memory and presumption), or to conserve memory space (systematically discarding the actual words of a conversation in favour of remembering the gist). That, to me, as it relates to the equally objective reality of human capacity, isn't a flaw, but a fact of interaction.

[andrewducker]

I meant flawed as in "Is imperfect." not as in "Is bad." But other than that, yes, I agree :->

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I think it's reasonably fair to say that our perceptions of the objective reality are, in fact, wholly mediated or, rather, that reality is wholly mediated by our perceptions. There's a Hindu concept regarding knowing the nature of the divine called Neti neti meaning "not that, not that". As a concept it works as well for reality as for God and is (as I've just discovered) a negative theology, attempting to define God by what It is not. In essence, whatever you point to, describe, talk about, think about or experience is not The Objective Reality but just some distorted reflection. Intransients in physiology (from both an evolutionary and adaptive point of view, so the final result rather than how it originated) result in intransients in observed reality (which is the only reality we can ever know). Anything in this reality is only our sense of it and many arguments simply dissolve when you start talking in these terms. It is no longer "a chair" but "my sense of a chair". It is no longer "free will" but "my sense of free will", which is how I can also be a mechanist but say "yes" to the poll above.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Yep, wholly mediated, but only (probably) partly different from the next person's perceptions, and from the Venn-diagrammed consensus perception (presumably that's a reasonable definition of mental illness - perceptions that overlap with the consensus to a lower-than-threshhold degree).

And also, thanks for the link - iteresting concept. I still think, though, that the philosophical obsession with adding bits on to perfectly usable langage tends to miss the point - when people say "chair" they can only mean their perceptions of a chair, as they don't have anything else to use as referent, having only ever perceived. So why say "my sense of a chair"? That must, by the nature of it, be what you mean. It's cleverism and obfuscation.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I agree with your statement about mental illness. As to adding "my sense of" to every statement, I only really meant implicitly, but often you have to be explicit, at least once in a while. When you say "That must, by the nature of it, be what you mean" it's very often not what people mean because people often think that their subjective reality really is objective, enough so that even people that believe in consensus subjectivity instead of objectivity often presume that the person they're talking to doesn't, which can lead straight into arguments.