Saturday, May 20, 2006

Pessimistic Incompatibilism

Do humans have a free will? Quick answer: No!

I am one of the proponents of determinism (read more)... And asserting determinism can lead to one conclusion: We don't have true free will! Our actions are the effect of past incidents, that's all! Our thoughts are the natural consequence to the experiences of our past; Nothing is original we are only living the consequences of the past...

We don't have a free will, we have a naturally-dictated predetermined will...

But what this entry is about to add is that even if determinism was false, and indeterminism was actually true, this doesn't mean that we'd have a free will, it simply changes from a predetermined will, to random will... But never free will!

This view is called pessimistic incompatibilism! Pessimistic incompatibilists generally view that the term "will" itself is nonsense...

6 comments:

Tala said...

i agree with determinism, if we have enough enhanced super computers and enough memory, we can predict what exactly will happen with small errors. The Future is Numerical Analysis

The ruling factor is Time.

hmm free will, well determinism surely frames you. but to some extent you still have enough space. well, i don't want to admit it. i would want to think that im more than a moving particle :)

Note: Thx for the nice Topics

Devil's Mind said...

I think its funny how we have the (limited) freedom to do what we want, but not the ability to want freely!!

Its asking for the freedom to do what we have no choice about!

Tala said...

i'm sure there is a little window we didn't see yet ;) errors do exist its not perfectly sealed!

Tala said...

there is an experiment my uncle told me about:

you know tiny fleas that crawl on animal's body. you can't catch them, they jump everywhere. once they got thousands of them and put them in a glass rectangular box, the fleas kept on jumping and hitting the ceiling being trapped, after leaving them for two weeks. the took the cover off, and the insects didn't go out of the box. they got used to the hight and stopped jumping higher.
.end

Devil's Mind said...

Interesting observation... I think in a sense, many people give up their freedom if it was held from them for a long while... They get used to limitations; And more or less, conservative people follow this stereotype... Some people even get confused if you give them more freedom than they are used to!

This is pretty much why you find so much oposition to liberalism!

My definition for freedom and free will are pretty much different...
Mainly freedom is ability to try to do what you want.. But free will questions how much what you want is an independent will, rather than an echo to previous states...

I think people have way much more freedoms than they are given...

Alex Varga said...

I've been a pessimistic incompatibilist for about a year now and only just learned it was a thing with a name. The universe feels slightly less lonely now, but googling the term yields little more than this blog...

Also, Tala, there is one "super computer" that can predict the future (with small errors), and that is the universe itself. Parts of information theory say that there are systems that are too chaotic to predict without just running it and seeing what happens. Throw in a bit of quantum indeterminism and you may have yourself a universe.