Self-ownership

[Conscentia]

aghnapiugbae[9bnae9tbnetgae[9ubneat9[ubnatugbjnateoubnauoenbaeobneatoibnaeboaenb
^Free will right there slamming my fingers on a keyboard. Beautiful, isn't it?

That wasn't free will, that was causality, we've gone over this already with Arkolon.

[The Liberated Territories]

aghnapiugbae[9bnae9tbnetgae[9ubneat9[ubnatugbjnateoubnauoenbaeobneatoibnaeboaenb
^Free will right there slamming my fingers on a keyboard. Beautiful, isn't it?

That wasn't free will, that was causality, we've gone over this already with Arkolon.

Actually casuality would of lead me to go to the restroom (I had to pee), but I CHOSE not to at the moment. If there were no choice, why would I be compelled to reject something that obviously had a heightened demand in my brain? We are clearly not animals here.

[Conscentia]

That wasn't free will, that was causality, we've gone over this already with Arkolon.

Actually casuality would of lead me to go to the restroom (I had to pee), but I CHOSE not to at the moment. If there were no choice, why would I be compelled to reject something that obviously had a heightened demand in my brain? We are clearly not animals here.

The red is evidently false, because it did not happen.
We are animals. That's basic biology.

As for the question, the conversation with Arkolon should cover it.

[Zottistan]

That wasn't free will, that was causality, we've gone over this already with Arkolon.

Actually casuality would of lead me to go to the restroom (I had to pee), but I CHOSE not to at the moment. If there were no choice, why would I be compelled to reject something that obviously had a heightened demand in my brain? We are clearly not animals here.

You chose not to because of the stimulus of having a point to prove, and the state of your brain making you act on that stimulus by trying to prove a point.

Why was your brain in that state at that moment? Causality. Why did you wind up online and looking at this thread? Causality. Why was Conscentia's post here preventing you from peeing? Causality. No matter what you do, it's just a reaction to the enormous network of relevant events leading up to that point.

[Arkolon]

Says who?

Causality.

Was that my destiny?

[Arkolon]

Doesn't that constitute making a choice? Making a choice is a chain of causes and effects resulting in my brain signalling my muscles to write the word "cheeseball".

As I've already said, choice refers to a range of possibilities from which one or more may be chosen. In reality, there is only one inevitability, not a range of possibilities.
You writing "cheeseball" was an inevitability, not a option among possibilities.

I actually flipped a coin, between cheeseball, dog, vending machine, and "I'm Batman". The coin said "dog", but I didn't think it proved my point well enough, so I used "cheeseball". I chose it. Me. My self.

If there is no external mind deciding my actions bar my own, then it is, naturally, a choice.

[Zottistan]

Causality.

Was that my destiny?

Uh, you could say that. It adds needless mysticism to it. It's more like clockwork than destiny. The only time the universe isn't deterministic is in quantum mechanics, and it's highly unlikely that we influence quantum mechanics to give ourselves agency to choose outside of causality.

[Arkolon]

aghnapiugbae[9bnae9tbnetgae[9ubneat9[ubnatugbjnateoubnauoenbaeobneatoibnaeboaenb
^Free will right there slamming my fingers on a keyboard. Beautiful, isn't it?

That wasn't free will, that was causality, we've gone over this already with Arkolon.

He could have written an infinite different number of things. Because he wrote that, does that mean that that was his destiny? Was there another external mind that made that decision for him? If not, then it was free will.

[Hindenburgia]

Causality.

Was that my destiny?

Causality isn't destiny.

Basically, it's the idea that, given a set of circumstances that fully define a situation, there is only one possible outcome for that situation. And then the same for that situation. And so on.

EDIT: Actually, Zottistan's analogy of clockwork is a pretty good one here.

[Arkolon]

Was that my destiny?

Uh, you could say that. It adds needless mysticism to it. It's more like clockwork than destiny. The only time the universe isn't deterministic is in quantum mechanics, and it's highly unlikely that we influence quantum mechanics to give ourselves agency to choose outside of causality.

A clock has a finite and restricted periodic movement pattern. Life doesn't.

[Zottistan]

Uh, you could say that. It adds needless mysticism to it. It's more like clockwork than destiny. The only time the universe isn't deterministic is in quantum mechanics, and it's highly unlikely that we influence quantum mechanics to give ourselves agency to choose outside of causality.

A clock has a finite and restricted periodic movement pattern. Life doesn't.

...So? A clock's movement is the way its gears turn. A person's movement is the way their body responds to their brain, which in turn is based on the way their brain reacts to stimuli.

Our brains are physical constructs; they act as physical systems. Like computers.

EDIT: All the universe is just matter and energy arranging itself and rearranging itself. It might help to think of it like that.

SECOND EDIT BECAUSE I'M STRUGGLING TO DESCRIBE THIS: Put the exact same brain in the exact same state in the exact same situation, and it will respond in the exact same way. Because the same physical actions will occur. There is no element of choice; just a response to stimuli.

[Hindenburgia]

Uh, you could say that. It adds needless mysticism to it. It's more like clockwork than destiny. The only time the universe isn't deterministic is in quantum mechanics, and it's highly unlikely that we influence quantum mechanics to give ourselves agency to choose outside of causality.

A clock has a finite and restricted periodic movement pattern. Life doesn't.

Except it does - everything in the universe is "finite and restricted" in ways we have formalized as scientific laws.

[Arkolon]

A clock has a finite and restricted periodic movement pattern. Life doesn't.

...So? A clock's movement is the way its gears turn. A person's movement is the way their body responds to their brain, which in turn is based on the way their brain reacts to stimuli.

Our brains are physical constructs; they act as physical systems. Like computers.

EDIT: All the universe is just matter and energy arranging itself and rearranging itself. It might help to think of it like that.

SECOND EDIT BECAUSE I'M STRUGGLING TO DESCRIBE THIS: Put the exact same brain in the exact same state in the exact same situation, and it will respond in the exact same way. Because the same physical actions will occur. There is no element of choice; just a response to stimuli.

Give me a choice between two identical cookies. One to my right, and one to my left. I have to pick one. This is still my brain reacting to stimuli, and I accept that, but because there was no external force or mind making me take one particular cookies, there is a choice, and it is entirely up to me.

[Hindenburgia]

...So? A clock's movement is the way its gears turn. A person's movement is the way their body responds to their brain, which in turn is based on the way their brain reacts to stimuli.

Our brains are physical constructs; they act as physical systems. Like computers.

EDIT: All the universe is just matter and energy arranging itself and rearranging itself. It might help to think of it like that.

SECOND EDIT BECAUSE I'M STRUGGLING TO DESCRIBE THIS: Put the exact same brain in the exact same state in the exact same situation, and it will respond in the exact same way. Because the same physical actions will occur. There is no element of choice; just a response to stimuli.

Give me a choice between two identical cookies. One to my right, and one to my left. I have to pick one. This is still my brain reacting to stimuli, and I accept that, but because there was no external force or mind making me take one particular cookies, there is a choice, and it is entirely up to me.

The point is that, given perfect knowledge of you and the environment around you before you make the choice, a sufficiently powerful computer could compute which one you are going to choose.

This is because your brain is a finite pattern of neurological states and activity, the output of which being dependent on both the input and the brain's own state.

[Arkolon]

A clock has a finite and restricted periodic movement pattern. Life doesn't.

Except it does - everything in the universe is "finite and restricted" in ways we have formalized as scientific laws.

You get to choose between five actions every hour for the sixteen hours that you are awake during the day. That's 152,587,890,625 different choices you can make, and there is a 0.00000000065536% chance you take one sequence during that day. That's limiting it to hourly periods and ONLY five actions an hour. It's limited, sure, but how limited is it? If you plug it in a scientific calculator, the answer reads infinity.

[Salandriagado]

Uh, you could say that. It adds needless mysticism to it. It's more like clockwork than destiny. The only time the universe isn't deterministic is in quantum mechanics, and it's highly unlikely that we influence quantum mechanics to give ourselves agency to choose outside of causality.

A clock has a finite and restricted periodic movement pattern. Life doesn't.

On the contrary, life does have a finite and restricted pattern. It's just fucking huge, and the restrictions are hard to see from the inside.

[Hindenburgia]

Except it does - everything in the universe is "finite and restricted" in ways we have formalized as scientific laws.

You get to choose between five actions every hour for the sixteen hours that you are awake during the day. That's 152,587,890,625 different choices you can make, and there is a 0.00000000065536% chance you take one sequence during that day. That's limiting it to hourly periods and ONLY five actions an hour. It's limited, sure, but how limited is it? If you plug it in a scientific calculator, the answer reads infinity.

Except that, given perfect information, one could predict with 100% certainty which choice one would make, since one's neurological patterns follow specific and finite rules.

[Salandriagado]

Except it does - everything in the universe is "finite and restricted" in ways we have formalized as scientific laws.

You get to choose between five actions every hour for the sixteen hours that you are awake during the day. That's 152,587,890,625 different choices you can make, and there is a 0.00000000065536% chance you take one sequence during that day. That's limiting it to hourly periods and ONLY five actions an hour. It's limited, sure, but how limited is it? If you plug it in a scientific calculator, the answer reads infinity.

Only if you've got a fucking terrible calculator. The fact that it's enormously large doesn't change anything. The point is that in principle, given total knowledge of a situation and sufficient processing power, you could predict its future for an arbitrarily long period. (I say "in principle" because this isn't actually possible: your computer would have to be so large that light would take longer to propagate across it than the situation you were modelling)

[Arkolon]

A clock has a finite and restricted periodic movement pattern. Life doesn't.

On the contrary, life does have a finite and restricted pattern. It's just fucking huge, and the restrictions are hard to see from the inside.

Literally one post above yours.

[Arkolon]

You get to choose between five actions every hour for the sixteen hours that you are awake during the day. That's 152,587,890,625 different choices you can make, and there is a 0.00000000065536% chance you take one sequence during that day. That's limiting it to hourly periods and ONLY five actions an hour. It's limited, sure, but how limited is it? If you plug it in a scientific calculator, the answer reads infinity.

Except that, given perfect information, one could predict with 100% certainty which choice one would make, since one's neurological patterns follow specific and finite rules.

No, it could not. If I get you to choose between five different identical cookies once every hour for 16 hours, the cookies are, 100%, your free will and of your own choice. That's 152.6 million different patterns you can take, through sixteen different sets of cookies A, B, C, D, and E, but knowing exactly which cookies someone could take? Are you into palmistry and crystal balls, too?

[Arkolon]

You get to choose between five actions every hour for the sixteen hours that you are awake during the day. That's 152,587,890,625 different choices you can make, and there is a 0.00000000065536% chance you take one sequence during that day. That's limiting it to hourly periods and ONLY five actions an hour. It's limited, sure, but how limited is it? If you plug it in a scientific calculator, the answer reads infinity.

Only if you've got a fucking terrible calculator. The fact that it's enormously large doesn't change anything. The point is that in principle, given total knowledge of a situation and sufficient processing power, you could predict its future for an arbitrarily long period. (I say "in principle" because this isn't actually possible: your computer would have to be so large that light would take longer to propagate across it than the situation you were modelling)

There's your problem, and this is why deterministic "destiny" pseudophilosophy is more often than not taken up by religious nuts.

[Hindenburgia]

Except that, given perfect information, one could predict with 100% certainty which choice one would make, since one's neurological patterns follow specific and finite rules.

No, it could not. If I get you to choose between five different identical cookies once every hour for 16 hours, the cookies are, 100%, your free will and of your own choice. That's 152.6 million different patterns you can take, through sixteen different sets of cookies A, B, C, D, and E, but knowing exactly which cookies someone could take? Are you into palmistry and crystal balls, too?

Your actions are the output of the neural network that is your brain, which has a finite (though very large) number of states. Because of this, if one were to model this neural network and the inputs to it, they could create a perfect representation of "you", and predict your choices with 100% certainty, simply because there is nothing there to cause it to differ.

[Salandriagado]

Only if you've got a fucking terrible calculator. The fact that it's enormously large doesn't change anything. The point is that in principle, given total knowledge of a situation and sufficient processing power, you could predict its future for an arbitrarily long period. (I say "in principle" because this isn't actually possible: your computer would have to be so large that light would take longer to propagate across it than the situation you were modelling)

There's your problem, and this is why deterministic "destiny" pseudophilosophy is more often than not taken up by religious nuts.

That's not a problem at all. For any given situation, there already exists a system that has total knowledge of that situation: the situation itself.

[Arkolon]

No, it could not. If I get you to choose between five different identical cookies once every hour for 16 hours, the cookies are, 100%, your free will and of your own choice. That's 152.6 million different patterns you can take, through sixteen different sets of cookies A, B, C, D, and E, but knowing exactly which cookies someone could take? Are you into palmistry and crystal balls, too?

Your actions are the output of the neural network that is your brain, which has a finite (though very large) number of states. Because of this, if one were to model this neural network and the inputs to it, they could create a perfect representation of "you", and predict your choices with 100% certainty, simply because there is nothing there to cause it to differ.

100% certainty, first of all, is impossible. Secondly, my brain has not already chosen which cookies it would take if I was in the situation I described, so if you model a replica of my brain and put it in that situation, then try and put my actual brain in that situation, there is a 99.999...34464% chance that we will have differing patterns.

[Arkolon]

There's your problem, and this is why deterministic "destiny" pseudophilosophy is more often than not taken up by religious nuts.

That's not a problem at all. For any given situation, there already exists a system that has total knowledge of that situation: the situation itself.

The situation is self-aware?