Timeline for answer to Is free will even experienced? If not, can this be evidence for epiphenomenalism? by Chris Sunami
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Post Revisions
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 7, 2023 at 20:52 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @deceze - I guess you guys really can't help yourselves... | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 20:12 | comment | added | deceze | ”since it's impossible that they could change my mind, since my own responses are not willed” - Au contraire. You’re a product of billions of years of evolution, arguably of everything that’s happened since the Big Bang and whatever came before it. You’re constantly shaped by your surroundings. These very words may very well lead you to change your mind. Lead you to change your mind helplessly. Because you can’t decide to change your mind, it just changes. Probably not today. But maybe in a few years. And these very words may have been the seeds of this change. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:38 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | @ChrisSunami I may or may not post an answer. I may or may not vote on yours. I also may or may not have an ice cream, and I may or may not play a video game, and I also may or may not watch a movie. None of that, however, has any bearing whatsoever on the validity of what I said (beyond those being choices... which you'll probably strawman again). | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:33 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @NotThatGuy There's nothing--other than a billion years of evolution and a bunch of processes too complex to contain in these simple comments--stopping you from posting your own answer, or from voting on mine. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:28 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | @ChrisSunami "you're just a passive observer" + "it's impossible that they could change my mind" - both false, and they represent a complete and total misunderstanding of the topic at hand on your part. I'd suggest you spend at least a minimal amount of time learning about and trying to understand something before trying to refute it, because otherwise you just make yourself look silly, like you're doing here. Also, here's a tip for constructive discourse: rather than telling people what they believe, I'd suggest asking them instead. Then you're less likely to be wrong, if nothing else. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:20 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @NotThatGuy "Hard"? No, impossible, according to your framework. It may have seemed like I was making a gratuitous attack, but I was actually illustrating a point. Your body acts in intentional ways. And the time and effort you're putting into these responses is meaningless from your point of view, since you're just a passive observer of them, and since it's impossible that they could change my mind, since my own responses are not willed. // My responses are consonant with my beliefs, but given your beliefs, it doesn't make sense for you to even respond in the first place. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:15 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | @ChrisSunami It's hard for me to not feel sorry for you, given that you posted an answer to disagree with something, despite you apparently not understanding what you're disagreeing with on even an elementary level, and you just instead resort to attacking strawman upon strawman, and you try to use personal attacks instead of logical reasoning in response to criticism. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:10 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @NotThatGuy - It's hard for me to not feel sorry for you, forced to watch passively as your body helplessly fires off response-after-response to these arguments. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:08 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | "if I watch a movie, I can get caught up enough in it that I think I'm the main character. I experience his choices as if I were actively making them, but in fact, I'm merely watching them" - this is a pretty good rebuttal of your own argument, in that you have the illusion of free will, yet the choices you experience making have in fact been fully determined and you're incapable of deciding something other than what will happen (much like in reality). How the movie came about is irrelevant to whether you can have the illusion of having choice when you don't. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 12:01 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | @ChrisSunami I didn't miss anything. There are billions of years of processes involved in the explanation of why your fingers typed this answer, which is a bit much to detail in a comment. You mentioned "randomly" twice, yet only some of those processes are random. Those processes have independent supporting evidence. Your "simpler" explanation is to not explain anything at all, and to either reject the existence of those billions of years of processes, or to try to insert free will at some undefined point inside that, or to try to fit free will around that somehow. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 11:54 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 229 characters in body
|
| Sep 7, 2023 at 11:51 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @NotThatGuy & slondr: I've edited my answer, since you both seemed to miss that the the difficult thing to explain is not the mechanism of my behaviors but rather their pattern. It's as though you're explaining a book as ink on a page, and missing the fact that the words printed in it have a meaning. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 11:47 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 229 characters in body
|
| Sep 7, 2023 at 9:59 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | If you mean libertarian free will, then that seems to be the much harder (poorly-defined/incoherent) explanation. Because "the neurons in your brain fire so as to send signals to your fingers to move (and those neurons firing is ultimately a result of your biology and environment)" is a far more concrete and evidence-based explanation than an appeal to some vague concept of "free will" with no insight into the mechanisms involved, and no insight into how that interacts with the mechanisms we know influences it. | |
| Sep 7, 2023 at 1:53 | comment | added | slondr | By this logic the fact that apples fall from trees is evidence that the Earth has free will. | |
| Sep 6, 2023 at 20:29 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @thinkingman I have edited the answer to remove the misleading references to consciousness. | |
| Sep 6, 2023 at 20:26 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 16 characters in body
|
| Sep 6, 2023 at 19:56 | comment | added | user62907 | “For instance, why would my fingers randomly type out this defense of consciousness if consciousness doesn't actually exist”. Epiphenomenalism doesn’t state that consciousness doesn’t exist. The rest of your argument amounts to “I can’t imagine consciousness without free will. Therefore consciousness requires free will.” That’s an argument from incredulity. | |
| Sep 6, 2023 at 16:23 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 1 character in body
|
| Sep 6, 2023 at 16:08 | history | answered | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 4.0 |