According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[DBT]

Ahem, the subject is not software development or computers (which, as you falsely claim, are not actually conscious)

Yes DBT, the subject IS about software and computation because consciousness is computation and computation is consciousness and all phenomena are abstractly "computation".

You even agreed up thread with Bruce in accepting that the language fits perfectly.

Rational decision making and related motor actions have zip to do with random events, unless there are random muscle spasms, which won't provide an argument for free will (just as compatibilist claim, and why they relate their definition to determinism.) If determinism is true, even apparently random events have their antecedents, that we don't know the cause doesn't mean that there is no cause.

If we say that memory function is the brains ''software,'' random glitches, interference, may not help in generating rational or reasoned response.

 

[DBT]

Yet the problem is still the same, that even adequate determinism does not permit alternate actions.

We’ve been over this too. Determinism is not the kind of thing that can permit, or fail to permit, or coerce anythig at all. It is not a force, it is not an agent, it is not even a law. It’s a description how things go in the classical world, Descriptions are not prescriptions. You persistently treat determinism as a prescriptive force. It would be like saying my watching the sun come up in the morning makes it come up. This gets the flow of truth-making backward. The sun coming up provides the truth grounds for my watching it do so.

Nobody is saying coercion or force. If determinism is true, it's just the way things must go. If determinism is true, we may go about our lives without feeling forced or coerced, feeling free, believing that our decisions could have been otherwise,, but of course that is an illusion. We make mistakes where a moment later we wish we had done otherwise, where what we know now is not what we knew then.

Our decision then was determined by our state in that moment in time, and the realization of an error came a moment too late, followed by regret as the system evolves.

That is the nature of determinism.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I find it fascinating that there are people who claim that a belief in absolute, unconditional and unqualified Determinism that would preclude the existence of Free Will is akin to a religious belief that must be rejected without empirical evidence or mathematical proof of its existence, while those same people cling to the fantastical notion that they have Free Will, which is equally unprovable

Yes, but why accept one claim over the other if, as you claim, both are equally unprovable? Personally, I don't, because both are unprovable (and irrelevant) since either idea has little bearing on how I live my life, much like the purposelessness of existence, which I regard as just as irrelevant to me.

 

[bilby]

We have been over it. Far too many times. Yet the problem is still the same, that even adequate determinism does not permit alternate actions.

Of course it doesn't. The only action permitted is the one I choose.

My freedom to choose doesn't require me to do something other than what I choose; That would be crazy.

How you 'choose' - the means and mechanisms of decision making - is the point at which compatibilism fails.

Is it? How?

Given determinism, what you decide is inevitable,

OK. I agree that I will, inevitably, do what I choose, rather than doing something else. And I also agree that I inevitably chose that thing, and would do so again given the exact same starting conditions.

Like Marty McFly's parents, I will not change any of the decisions I make, unless something changes. But any change, no matter how tiny, might have huge consequences.

We all understand this.

not willed, certainly not freely willed.

Why not? I am making choices. I can't not make choices; I am the kind of thing that makes choices, just as a rock rolls down a hill, because it's the kind of thing that rolls down hills, and it can't not roll down hill.

As it is a matter of the state of the brain

Which is "me",

and unconscious information processing

Which is also "me",

brought to conscious attention,

Which is "me" again...

it has nothing to do with free will or conscious will.

Why not? It is me, making choices; And then doing what I chose to do. It can't not happen that way.

It has to be that way, because I am a deterministic choice making system. Making choices, and acting upon them, is what I must, inevitably, do.

 

[Jarhyn]

We have been over it. Far too many times. Yet the problem is still the same, that even adequate determinism does not permit alternate actions.

Of course it doesn't. The only action permitted is the one I choose.

My freedom to choose doesn't require me to do something other than what I choose; That would be crazy.

How you 'choose' - the means and mechanisms of decision making - is the point at which compatibilism fails.

Is it? How?

Given determinism, what you decide is inevitable,

OK. I agree that I will, inevitably, do what I choose, rather than doing something else. And I also agree that I inevitably chose that thing, and would do so again given the exact same starting conditions.

Like Marty McFly's parents, I will not change any of the decisions I make, unless something changes. But any change, no matter how tiny, might have huge consequences.

We all understand this.

not willed, certainly not freely willed.

Why not? I am making choices. I can't not make choices; I am the kind of thing that makes choices, just as a rock rolls down a hill, because it's the kind of thing that rolls down hills, and it can't not roll down hill.

As it is a matter of the state of the brain

Which is "me",

and unconscious information processing

Which is also "me",

brought to conscious attention,

Which is "me" again...

it has nothing to do with free will or conscious will.

Why not? It is me, making choices; And then doing what I chose to do. It can't not happen that way.

It has to be that way, because I am a deterministic choice making system. Making choices, and acting upon them, is what I must, inevitably, do.

At this point, I think DBT is just as lost as Sayed on the topic.

Just because someone claims their nuttiness is secular does not make it so, or any less "nuttiness".

 

[Jarhyn]

I find it fascinating that there are people who claim that a belief in absolute, unconditional and unqualified Determinism that would preclude the existence of Free Will... Is religious.

Specifically the religious part is the belief that this would "preclude free will" in the first place, seeing as Bruce already agreed that it wouldn't preclude free will.

The religious part is that injection of the 'must' in the language of the sea battle.

As Pood and I keep pointing out, THAT is the origin of a contradiction, and one we reject because ultimately, religiousity is built on a contradiction.

I have been very specific with what I meant and why: that the belief in MUST in that language is itself a hidden belief in "the set of all sets".

Belief that the universe not just is some way, but must be some way... that's the moment religion enters into it.

I have pointed out numerous times how to see and understand the language I use, what it means, when, and why.

Nobody in history has ever done as much with fatalism, producing a system with any concept of "must"; every time someone tries, it is violated by another system next to it doing otherwise, by another part of the system itself doing otherwise.