A very interesting YouTube video coming up.
If we have free will, then it's possible that for us to have a soul. Most physicists believe the whole world is based on cause and effect, including our minds, and so they argue that we don't have free will. They say we are biological machines that work on chemical messengers and signals, and this rules out the soul. Some scientists believe our minds have software part independent of the brain, and so we can have free will. I think there is something wrong with these theories, and that we are more than the sum of our parts.
Nicolas Gisin is a Swiss physicist and professor at the University of Geneva. He is both a theorist and an experiment physicist
LOL, if anybody here thinks they have free will just demonstrate that by “changing your mind” to instead believe “we’re out of money!”…
ReplyDeleteGo ahead…
Or all you anti war types here just “change your mind” to become pro war.,,
ReplyDeleteIt is true that free will cannot exist in a world with causality, i.e., cause and effect. Thankfully, there is free will because causality does not exist.
ReplyDeleteWhat we perceive as causality is actually what David Hume referred to as "constant conjunction". For example, most people believe that birds stay aloft because they flap their wings. The Qur'an would like to disabuse you of that notion.
Do they not see the birds above them, stretching their wings and contracting them? None upholds them up but the Beneficent. Surely He sees all things. —Qur'an 67:19
Al-Ghazali says the following about cause and effect:
The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary, according to us. But [with] any two things, where "this" is not "that" and "that" is not "this", and where neither the affirmation of the one entails the affirmation of the other nor the negation of the one entails negation of the other, it is not a necessity of the existence of the one that the other should exist, and it is not a necessity of the nonexistence of the one that the other should not exist. . . . Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not to its being necessary in itself, incapable of separation. -Ghazali (The Incoherence Of The Philosophers)
By the way, it was this idea that awoke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber". He would have been better off staying asleep. He made the mistake of thinking that he was arguing with Hume when in fact he was arguing Al-Ghazali, who had said these things centuries earlier. More on "constant conjunction":
Constant conjunction: Repeated observation of events of type A being followed by events of type B is called the constant conjunction of A and B. The critical philosophical question is whether observation of constant conjunctions of this type allows us to conclude that event A causes event B. To understand the issue, which is of central importance in philosophy of science, it is helpful to look at a few examples. According to a Wall Street Journal article, Juneau County in Wisconsin has voted for the Presidential winner in every election since 1980. Thus we have a constant conjunction - win of popular vote in Juneau County is followed by win of presidential election. But, it should be clear that this is not a causal relationship. On the other hand, every time we light a match and throw it onto a bundle of dry cotton, we will see that the cotton burns. This is a causal relationship -- we expect this sequence of events to hold all the time. It seems intuitively clear that we can distinguish between causation and correlation, and scientific laws depend on causal relationships. However, the question of how we can differentiate between the two types is the subject of great controversy and debate. David Hume argued that causation is just constant conjunction - after observing events of type A being followed by those of type B over a long period of time, we become convinced that A causes B. But this is a deeply problematic position. For example, if we observe sunrise follows crowing by a rooster for a long period of time, would we believe that crowing causes sunrise? Immanul Kant was motivated to develop his philosophy by this argument, which he considers as an attack on science by Hume -- see "Kant and Hume on Causality"
Constant conjunction
al-Ghazali had it right before Hume, Bohr and Heisenberg
ReplyDeleteNo free will, no agency, no volition... tell it to the judge.
ReplyDeleteKant and Hume predated Science Degree…
ReplyDelete