Post by Sidhe on Mar 3, 2006 11:12:34 GMT -5
This forum is dull as dish water lately so I thought I'd inject something debatable into it? I may be wrong but there seem to be plenty of philosophers around the OT section.
This philosophical debate has always fascinated me, but I was talking on a thread on another forum and I came up with a theory of why predeterminism cannot exist.
We are somewhat dictated by our genes as to how we act think and behave. But I personally think the one redeeming thing about humanity is its ability to overcome its own programming. If I am for example tempted to great bouts of violence say because I have an extra y chromosome, or my DNA produces too much of a precursor to testosterone or whatever. I can with time learn to adapt to my anger and to become a calm individual. I think it's the same for every characteristic I posess if I don't like it I can change it. If you accept that humanity have been changing there ingrained characters since societies began then you also accept that this ability to change your concious reactions is ingrained in the DNA itself.
Environmentally speaking an individual that spends too much time doing counter productive things both to himself and his environment is not an evolutionary viable trait thus the ability to change according to situations or to adapt is a favoured trait, thus human beings have say over their earlier ancestors the ability to view situations and to adapt. Thus Homo sapiens. Wise man. This of course could be just programmed behaviour, you make change a favoured characteristic and it explains the human species dissatisfaction with the norm. The constant quest for improvement or for stimulae. The many futures scenario doesn't exist under predeterminism since the future is cast in stone and cannot be changed. Every human being is bound to act in a predictable way consistent with his genetic make up. But hold on a minute haven't we already said that a human being can change his make up, can act differently to the way he is programmed can pass on the ability to conflict with his nature as a favoured trait. So where does that leave the robot of the predetermined? Answer nowhere, evolution favours no predeterminsim. Not free will as such just that evolution in humans is the antithesis of predeterminism, since our success can be shown to derive from our very flexibility to change our behaviours at a simple level to promote adaptability and to change our concious behavior at a fundemental and more complicated level to improve once again our viability.
Materialism is a nonsense, it is simply not born out as viable in evolution, there is no reason to assume our make up dictates our behaviour any more than that our make up dictates precisely what we will do next, this is preposterous and fits in with no reality I can think of. Even the feedback loop of the concious is subject to random outside influence, it becomes viable therefore to be able to react to the random and to adapt.
Throughout humanities existence it has been showing that an ability to think outside of the envelope to walk around a problem to adapt natural behaviours to challenge tennants, to be ingenius and most importantly felxible is key to our survival, so key in fact that it lead to our frontal lobes increasing in size to promote an ability to think to predict and to identify solutions before the situation even arrives. If we are predetermined to make just totally programmed decisions then at a fundemental level it should become possible to let the concious know of these decisions we are already going to make. To become prescient and somewhat self aware of every urge and desires origins. Why then are we not aware of this subconcious realm, since analysis of our own behavioural subconcious would be an advantage and by using that knowledge we could formulate better ways to tackle situations. I will have to move to drink at some point in the future. I will have to stand because my leg aches. I will have to control my iritation at the sequence of my behaviour. Knowing this would allow us to plan for our own behavioral actions. Why are we not aware of this?
Quite simply because our subconcious doesn't know exactly what is going to happen with regards our concious. We may chose to scratch our foot we may not, so telling someone of a sequence of events that may or may not happen is pointless untill it becomes necessary to do so, all these superfluous decisions are best left in the realm of the subconcious.
Our subconcious is cuer it cues us to possible scenarios but only makes us aware of them if they are likely to happen. That's a mighty clever bit of kit. It functions totally independantly of the concious but relies on feedback. However it cannot fathom anything as being predetermined so it lives in an environment of constant chaotic random and unpredictable input(lucky we're not made aware of this subconcious angst, we'd go nuts, I would imagine) Anyway the subconcious tries to cue us to anything that ceases to be chaotically unpredictable. And the concious leads us to make a decision based on this mess of virtual possibilities. Our conciousness appears to work on the will over the chaotic. But of course since we are aware of all the fleetingly stupid thoughts that pop into our head at times we tend to ignore silly fancies and fantasies. Not that they aren't useful because sometimes those fancies lead to leaps of intuition we might not otherwise make.
In conclusion predeterminism is not viable for evolution, so predeterminism is dead, long live non-predeterminism. Physics at a fundemental level tends to support this notion too, it does not necessarily say that free will exists merely that predeterminism is hocus pocus both at the funemental level and at the macro level, within a concious framework it cannot promote adaptability to be programmed by your DNA. Fortunatley conciousness can reprogram the DNA, which is how we got instinct in the first place and in fact how we got our great flexibility, also our speech can reprogram others actions and learning can too. Evolution favours that it itself is not always subject to evolutionary benefit at a purely physical level but that the animal itself can change its viability to a situation and those gain dominance over evolution itself.
Evolution may have come to this state by trial and error, but in the scale of things it was inevitable, not predetermined as such but inevitable that predeterminism was hoisted by it's own petard
Having the ability to make choices and to defy your own nature in conclusion is beneficial to evolution, having to follow your nature blindly is of no benefit comparitively as it does not in and of itself promote change or flexibility. So in simple terms if you can chose to defy your own programming you can make adaptation easier than if you are merely a slave to you programming and thus, evolution has favoured us with said abilities through trial and error, even the predetermined non will of DNA eventually leads to non predterminism, what would it take for this to be an example of free will?
Having the ability to make choices and to defy your own nature in conclusion is beneficial to evolution, having to follow your nature blindly is of no benefit comparitively as it does not in and of itself promote change or flexibility. So in simple terms if you can chose to defy your own programming you can make adaptation easier than if you are merely a slave to you programming and thus, evolution has favoured us with said abilities through trial and error, even the predetermined non will of DNA eventually leads to non predterminism, what would it take for this to be an example of free will?
I have noticed a few holes in this theory myself after I wrote it. The question is do you think We are pretermined controlled by fate or that we have free will, try to refrain from saying we do because God says so unless you want to use that to make a philosophical argument. How would our portrayal of conciousnees change if we acknowledge either that predeterminism is king or Free will or even that neither exist?
This philosophical debate has always fascinated me, but I was talking on a thread on another forum and I came up with a theory of why predeterminism cannot exist.
We are somewhat dictated by our genes as to how we act think and behave. But I personally think the one redeeming thing about humanity is its ability to overcome its own programming. If I am for example tempted to great bouts of violence say because I have an extra y chromosome, or my DNA produces too much of a precursor to testosterone or whatever. I can with time learn to adapt to my anger and to become a calm individual. I think it's the same for every characteristic I posess if I don't like it I can change it. If you accept that humanity have been changing there ingrained characters since societies began then you also accept that this ability to change your concious reactions is ingrained in the DNA itself.
Environmentally speaking an individual that spends too much time doing counter productive things both to himself and his environment is not an evolutionary viable trait thus the ability to change according to situations or to adapt is a favoured trait, thus human beings have say over their earlier ancestors the ability to view situations and to adapt. Thus Homo sapiens. Wise man. This of course could be just programmed behaviour, you make change a favoured characteristic and it explains the human species dissatisfaction with the norm. The constant quest for improvement or for stimulae. The many futures scenario doesn't exist under predeterminism since the future is cast in stone and cannot be changed. Every human being is bound to act in a predictable way consistent with his genetic make up. But hold on a minute haven't we already said that a human being can change his make up, can act differently to the way he is programmed can pass on the ability to conflict with his nature as a favoured trait. So where does that leave the robot of the predetermined? Answer nowhere, evolution favours no predeterminsim. Not free will as such just that evolution in humans is the antithesis of predeterminism, since our success can be shown to derive from our very flexibility to change our behaviours at a simple level to promote adaptability and to change our concious behavior at a fundemental and more complicated level to improve once again our viability.
Materialism is a nonsense, it is simply not born out as viable in evolution, there is no reason to assume our make up dictates our behaviour any more than that our make up dictates precisely what we will do next, this is preposterous and fits in with no reality I can think of. Even the feedback loop of the concious is subject to random outside influence, it becomes viable therefore to be able to react to the random and to adapt.
Throughout humanities existence it has been showing that an ability to think outside of the envelope to walk around a problem to adapt natural behaviours to challenge tennants, to be ingenius and most importantly felxible is key to our survival, so key in fact that it lead to our frontal lobes increasing in size to promote an ability to think to predict and to identify solutions before the situation even arrives. If we are predetermined to make just totally programmed decisions then at a fundemental level it should become possible to let the concious know of these decisions we are already going to make. To become prescient and somewhat self aware of every urge and desires origins. Why then are we not aware of this subconcious realm, since analysis of our own behavioural subconcious would be an advantage and by using that knowledge we could formulate better ways to tackle situations. I will have to move to drink at some point in the future. I will have to stand because my leg aches. I will have to control my iritation at the sequence of my behaviour. Knowing this would allow us to plan for our own behavioral actions. Why are we not aware of this?
Quite simply because our subconcious doesn't know exactly what is going to happen with regards our concious. We may chose to scratch our foot we may not, so telling someone of a sequence of events that may or may not happen is pointless untill it becomes necessary to do so, all these superfluous decisions are best left in the realm of the subconcious.
Our subconcious is cuer it cues us to possible scenarios but only makes us aware of them if they are likely to happen. That's a mighty clever bit of kit. It functions totally independantly of the concious but relies on feedback. However it cannot fathom anything as being predetermined so it lives in an environment of constant chaotic random and unpredictable input(lucky we're not made aware of this subconcious angst, we'd go nuts, I would imagine) Anyway the subconcious tries to cue us to anything that ceases to be chaotically unpredictable. And the concious leads us to make a decision based on this mess of virtual possibilities. Our conciousness appears to work on the will over the chaotic. But of course since we are aware of all the fleetingly stupid thoughts that pop into our head at times we tend to ignore silly fancies and fantasies. Not that they aren't useful because sometimes those fancies lead to leaps of intuition we might not otherwise make.
In conclusion predeterminism is not viable for evolution, so predeterminism is dead, long live non-predeterminism. Physics at a fundemental level tends to support this notion too, it does not necessarily say that free will exists merely that predeterminism is hocus pocus both at the funemental level and at the macro level, within a concious framework it cannot promote adaptability to be programmed by your DNA. Fortunatley conciousness can reprogram the DNA, which is how we got instinct in the first place and in fact how we got our great flexibility, also our speech can reprogram others actions and learning can too. Evolution favours that it itself is not always subject to evolutionary benefit at a purely physical level but that the animal itself can change its viability to a situation and those gain dominance over evolution itself.
Evolution may have come to this state by trial and error, but in the scale of things it was inevitable, not predetermined as such but inevitable that predeterminism was hoisted by it's own petard
Having the ability to make choices and to defy your own nature in conclusion is beneficial to evolution, having to follow your nature blindly is of no benefit comparitively as it does not in and of itself promote change or flexibility. So in simple terms if you can chose to defy your own programming you can make adaptation easier than if you are merely a slave to you programming and thus, evolution has favoured us with said abilities through trial and error, even the predetermined non will of DNA eventually leads to non predterminism, what would it take for this to be an example of free will?
Having the ability to make choices and to defy your own nature in conclusion is beneficial to evolution, having to follow your nature blindly is of no benefit comparitively as it does not in and of itself promote change or flexibility. So in simple terms if you can chose to defy your own programming you can make adaptation easier than if you are merely a slave to you programming and thus, evolution has favoured us with said abilities through trial and error, even the predetermined non will of DNA eventually leads to non predterminism, what would it take for this to be an example of free will?
I have noticed a few holes in this theory myself after I wrote it. The question is do you think We are pretermined controlled by fate or that we have free will, try to refrain from saying we do because God says so unless you want to use that to make a philosophical argument. How would our portrayal of conciousnees change if we acknowledge either that predeterminism is king or Free will or even that neither exist?