Lack of free will as an objective disproof of Mormonism

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I debated this with folks over at the MAD board on occasion, asking what would lead two individuals living in the presence of God to make different choices of such wild degree? If in this life we can all see how nature and nurture affect a person's path through life, how does one account for an individual making bad choices whose nurture is equal and practically perfect across the board except by something within their nature? And if it is in their nature, is it really an act of justice if their "choices" might not be quite so free as the simple Sunday School explanation suggests? I mean, the Book of Abraham even says the intelligences had varied quality to them. So isn't the nurture/nature debate resolved to just nature in the pre-existence by point of doctrine?

Those debates typically devolved in to dismissing the idea choice wasn't entirely libertarian and it wasn't worth thinking about any further. Everyone knows what it means to choose, and everyone has experienced making bad choices with knowledge the choice was "bad". Stupid honorentheos. But every so often someone would get it, and that was when it got interesting. The few who did eventually decided the plan of salvation was eugenic in nature. It wasn't just because everyone had their freedom to choose. It was just because it was filtering out those unable to obtain godhood.

Of course, I bumped them in that direction, so make of that what you will...

Back when I was a faithful type, I had given this as much consideration I could given my upbringing and 20-something cognition. I settled on the unhappy idea God created all of ‘this’ for the very small amount of people who were designed to become gods in Super VIP heaven, because it was apparent to me at the time very few people could actually navigate all the hurdles that are in place to ensure celestial exclusivity. Bummer.

On a different note, and back to the topic, I wonder how ‘probability’ could play into free will vs determinism? Like, as your microsystems begin to mesh and scale up, along with environmental pressures, at some point I wonder if complexity creates ‘odds’ or ‘chances’ that are something like:

Action A has a 90% chance of happening

Action B has a 7% chance of happening

Action C has a 3% chance of happening

My mind tells me that it’s almost like the slit experiment with light photons. 90% of photons will hit dead center’ish. And then to varying degrees and varying amounts photons will hit further outward. This sort of seeming randomness might be what gives us a sense of free will. I dunno. I’m trying to find some wiggle room in there somewhere, but I’m not hopeful. Everything that makes sense to me is causal and deterministic.

- Doc

[honorentheos]

I debated this with folks over at the MAD board on occasion, asking what would lead two individuals living in the presence of God to make different choices of such wild degree? If in this life we can all see how nature and nurture affect a person's path through life, how does one account for an individual making bad choices whose nurture is equal and practically perfect across the board except by something within their nature? And if it is in their nature, is it really an act of justice if their "choices" might not be quite so free as the simple Sunday School explanation suggests? I mean, the Book of Abraham even says the intelligences had varied quality to them. So isn't the nurture/nature debate resolved to just nature in the pre-existence by point of doctrine?

Those debates typically devolved in to dismissing the idea choice wasn't entirely libertarian and it wasn't worth thinking about any further. Everyone knows what it means to choose, and everyone has experienced making bad choices with knowledge the choice was "bad". Stupid honorentheos. But every so often someone would get it, and that was when it got interesting. The few who did eventually decided the plan of salvation was eugenic in nature. It wasn't just because everyone had their freedom to choose. It was just because it was filtering out those unable to obtain godhood.

Of course, I bumped them in that direction, so make of that what you will...

Back when I was a faithful type, I had given this as much consideration I could given my upbringing and 20-something cognition. I settled on the unhappy idea God created all of ‘this’ for the very small amount of people who were designed to become gods in Super VIP heaven, because it was apparent to me at the time very few people could actually navigate all the hurdles that are in place to ensure celestial exclusivity. Bummer.

On a different note, and back to the topic, I wonder how ‘probability’ could play into free will vs determinism? Like, as your microsystems begin to mesh and scale up, along with environmental pressures, at some point I wonder if complexity creates ‘odds’ or ‘chances’ that are something like:

Action A has a 90% chance of happening

Action B has a 7% chance of happening

Action C has a 3% chance of happening

My mind tells me that it’s almost like the slit experiment with light photons. 90% of photons will hit dead center’ish. And then to varying degrees and varying amounts photons will hit further outward. This sort of seeming randomness might be what gives us a sense of free will. I dunno. I’m trying to find some wiggle room in there somewhere, but I’m not hopeful. Everything that makes sense to me is causal and deterministic.

- Doc

I stopped caring about the free will debate years ago when it seemed apparent to me that A) It was unlikely we had true freedom of will, B) we wouldn't behave differently if we did, though, and C) the idea we DO have the capacity to choose is essential to societal function. It's difficult to see how a society could respond to determinism in an effective way that doesn't either become tyranical or dysfunctional.

That said, I've wondered if the key to it lies in consciousness which we aren't able to really explain. If consciousness is an emergent quality of the material brain that isn't fully explicable through materialism is it possible that choice occurs in the functions of conscious thought? It's a God of the gaps idea, of course, so it isn't much other than a musing. But if there is anything like free will then I suspect it would be a result of different parts of the brain vying for position. Maybe, just maybe, observing that debate within might allow the option to weigh in, if ever so slightly in whatever sense that differs from determinism? Don't know. It's unlikely, too.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the first season of Westworld for reasons related to the topic (ignoring the following three), and particularly the layered ways the illusion of will was presented. I'm for making peace with it, anyway.

[Physics Guy]

I wonder if the term "free will" can be the same as determinism if the former suggests things could have been otherwise had all inputs and conditions been the same? If by saying there is no meaningful difference, one means our experience is no different since we perceive ourselves being involved in selecting the outcome, fine. Free will being an illusion is different from saying it does not exist, and I agree.

Free will cannot mean that things could have been different even if all inputs and conditions had been the same, because the intention of the free will has to be counted as one of the inputs and conditions. Why would you not count it as one of them, when it's supposed to be a significant factor in determining what happens?

In saying there is no difference between free will and determinism, I am not just saying that there is no difference in our experience. I'm saying there really is no difference at all, as far as I can see. I have never heard any version of free will which does not amount only to this: that among all the deterministically causal factors, there is a subset which we are naming as "free will".

Some people want that "free will" subset of causes to be located outside the physical universe, somehow. I don't see how that would make the whole free will scenario any less deterministic. Even if the "free will" set of factors don't obey the laws of physical nature, they had better still be deterministic in some way, because if in one instant the deepest desire of your heart of hearts could be one thing, and in the next instant your most fundamental intention could abruptly become anything else whatever, then that wouldn't be freedom. It would be slavery to chance.

[Physics Guy]

You would find that investigating human nature or why humans take actions would be immediately debunked and a false premise because they are unbound by past actions. We’d find that your childhood predicted no behavioural outcomes as an adult. Mental health issues would become untreatable as you either are capable of willing yourself out of them or you are not effected by the cause and effect of medication. I could go on for a while about each avenue of life but it literally breaks science to imagine a true free will.

The fact that you can't leap to the moon doesn't mean you don't have leg muscles. Free will isn't omnipotence. To believe in free will is to believe that free will is a causal condition which affects what happens, not to believe that it is a sufficient condition all by itself to make all possible things happen, regardless of other conditions. That's a straw person.

[Physics Guy]

I think people get carried away with the term "illusion". If one calls something an illusion, one sounds all hard-nosed and fact-facing, but often I think it's actually just being naïve.

Is a wave an illusion? The wave moves sideways along the surface of the water, but if you put floaters in the water to track how the water itself is moving as the wave passes, you discover that the water itself is only moving back-and-forth and up-and-down a little, very much like the people in a stadium who are "doing the wave". So is that steady sideways motion an illusion? No, it's a completely real wave.

If you thought that the wave was a single hump of water that was sliding intact across the surface of the lake like a hockey puck scooting over the rink, then, yeah, that was an illusion. The wave itself really is something, however, and it really is moving. It's not one lump of the same water, like the water in a bucket being carried along, but it's a pattern in the surface height of the lake water and that pattern really is moving steadily sideways across the surface. It doesn't just seem to be moving that way. The pattern of water height really is moving that way, even though the water itself isn't.

A naïve moving-hump-of-water theory of what a wave is would be an illusion, but the wave itself isn't an illusion or just an appearance or a subjective experience. To call it an illusion, just because it isn't really a moving hump of water, would be being naïve about how complicated the world really is. Refusing to count anything except moving lumps as real is like insisting on speaking without using verbs.

The world is full of things like that wave—literally, every cubic millimetre of space is full of patterns and waves and things. Even a single electron isn't actually just one little point of mass and charge. It's a coherent pattern of little points of mass and charge spread over a Compton wavelength or so, and exactly what the electron is depends on how closely you look at that pattern (#renormalization). If we call everything an illusion if it appears more complicated when you look at it closely than it did from a distance, then the word "illusion" becomes meaningless because everything is an illusion, by that definition. It's illusions all the way down.

[honorentheos]

Free will cannot mean that things could have been different even if all inputs and conditions had been the same, because the intention of the free will has to be counted as one of the inputs and conditions. Why would you not count it as one of them, when it's supposed to be a significant factor in determining what happens?

In saying there is no difference between free will and determinism, I am not just saying that there is no difference in our experience. I'm saying there really is no difference at all, as far as I can see. I have never heard any version of free will which does not amount only to this: that among all the deterministically causal factors, there is a subset which we are naming as "free will".

Some people want that "free will" subset of causes to be located outside the physical universe, somehow. I don't see how that would make the whole free will scenario any less deterministic. Even if the "free will" set of factors don't obey the laws of physical nature, they had better still be deterministic in some way, because if in one instant the deepest desire of your heart of hearts could be one thing, and in the next instant your most fundamental intention could abruptly become anything else whatever, then that wouldn't be freedom. It would be slavery to chance.

Free will being "something" that is contained inside determinism just leaves determinism. Arguing for a special status for free will is a trick. Some might call it an illusion.

[Dr Moore]

As a believer taking courses in physics, quantum photonics and microelectronic structures, I actually did find myself comforted by thinking of free will as something that exists beyond our universe. Beyond our ability to see, anyway - inside of the randomness of the infinitesimally small. I reasoned that that is the best place of all for spirits to operate -- sort of a "quantum realm" as AntMan would say -- like a purely intelligent plane of existence out of reach to our physical instruments, protected by the veil of indeterminacy, or the uncertainty principle. Further, I found Joseph Smith's comment that spirit was more fine than regular matter to not only support this view, but to have been prophetic in terms of seeing the limits of physics well before those limits were understood.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I wonder if the term "free will" can be the same as determinism if the former suggests things could have been otherwise had all inputs and conditions been the same? If by saying there is no meaningful difference, one means our experience is no different since we perceive ourselves being involved in selecting the outcome, fine. Free will being an illusion is different from saying it does not exist, and I agree.

Free will cannot mean that things could have been different even if all inputs and conditions had been the same, because the intention of the free will has to be counted as one of the inputs and conditions. Why would you not count it as one of them, when it's supposed to be a significant factor in determining what happens?

In saying there is no difference between free will and determinism, I am not just saying that there is no difference in our experience. I'm saying there really is no difference at all, as far as I can see. I have never heard any version of free will which does not amount only to this: that among all the deterministically causal factors, there is a subset which we are naming as "free will".

Some people want that "free will" subset of causes to be located outside the physical universe, somehow. I don't see how that would make the whole free will scenario any less deterministic. Even if the "free will" set of factors don't obey the laws of physical nature, they had better still be deterministic in some way, because if in one instant the deepest desire of your heart of hearts could be one thing, and in the next instant your most fundamental intention could abruptly become anything else whatever, then that wouldn't be freedom. It would be slavery to chance.

Ref the highlighted bit above, wouldn’t the prior inputs and conditions shape the moment when “choice” is executed? Wouldn’t the sense that we’re making a choice simply be the result of the infinite causal steps leading up to that moment, and all those little tiny steps being executed leading to the next set of conditions being executed then setting the stage for the moment you make a choice that is just the result of prior results?

Where is the gap where will, free of all the autonomous processes taking place inside and outside your being, can exert itself? Where is the little driver manipulating the machine?

- Doc

[huckelberry]

Free will cannot mean that things could have been different even if all inputs and conditions had been the same, because the intention of the free will has to be counted as one of the inputs and conditions. Why would you not count it as one of them, when it's supposed to be a significant factor in determining what happens?

In saying there is no difference between free will and determinism, I am not just saying that there is no difference in our experience. I'm saying there really is no difference at all, as far as I can see. I have never heard any version of free will which does not amount only to this: that among all the deterministically causal factors, there is a subset which we are naming as "free will".

Some people want that "free will" subset of causes to be located outside the physical universe, somehow. I don't see how that would make the whole free will scenario any less deterministic. Even if the "free will" set of factors don't obey the laws of physical nature, they had better still be deterministic in some way, because if in one instant the deepest desire of your heart of hearts could be one thing, and in the next instant your most fundamental intention could abruptly become anything else whatever, then that wouldn't be freedom. It would be slavery to chance.

Ref the highlighted bit above, wouldn’t the prior inputs and conditions shape the moment when “choice” is executed? Wouldn’t the sense that we’re making a choice simply be the result of the infinite causal steps leading up to that moment, and all those little tiny steps being executed leading to the next set of conditions being executed then setting the stage for the moment you make a choice that is just the result of prior results?

Where is the gap where will, free of all the autonomous processes taking place inside and outside your being, can exert itself? Where is the little driver manipulating the machine?

- Doc

As best as I see, the driver, the will, is all the prior inputs and conditions within a living organism in a real moment of time. There is no gap, no driver manipulating the machine. Well there are senses, nerves muscles, a whole organic system demanding action and coordination.

I am pretty sure I am agreeing with Physics Guy and his well stated comments. In my exchange with
honorentheos it seemed we actually agreed but at the same time were completely misunderstanding each other. He commented about LDS doctrine of preexistent choices determining who was born in poverty and who had African ancestry.Well he didnot include the African thing but that sss was what I was taught. I can see that those kind of ideas demand a sort of history of decisions hard to account for . Perhaps the idea that we eternally judged for decisions made in this life makes little sense when our decisions are shaped by so many limiting factors.I think it is better to think of this life as a growing and sharing process.

Honorentheos asked in previous post what does it mean for society if determinism is correct. I think it means society has to take seriously teaching young people, seeking to be better examples of better action. Society must be self critical to improve on what it teaches. It needs to seek ways to be less injurious to some people and opening opportunity to those lacking it. It needs to forgive mistakes as well as recognize some actions injurious to other must be punished in so way that changes behavior. Individuals should be doing the same. All of this assumes that decisions are made by humans as a result of learning, experience ,example, desire, imagination. It is hardly a crank the wheel and out pops a result. It is all of what we are as a human in action in a particular space of time.

//
indulging myself,

I was considering what it would mean if I told someone I went on a walk at 3pm yesterday and was asked if I dis such a thing of my own free will. I would think to myself well nobody came and forced me by threat to leave my home. I was not dragged down the street by a bear. It was my decision. I could also think It was a lovely day, one hard to stay inside for. I felt impelled to up and take a walk. In fact it would be hard to resist the desire. Would it make sense for me to see that desire as alien to me like a bear? Well in comedic mode I might actually consider the image but even then I would feel the desire was me and in calling it a bear I would be making an image of an aspect of myself.

There are times when desire circumstance and understanding result in a choice of action that works out poorly. It may even be something that I find myself wishing was not me. How could I have been shortsighted and selfish? Mean? But those determining processes which created the bad decision are in fact me. I would like to repent of some things but to do that I must accept that the linked determination chain is me. New actions, new recognition of better possible actions also become part of me and change the patterns of those past aspects of me. It is clear that a lot of these dimensions of me were received with out my asking. Some of this composite which I am I may be grateful for others are a problem. Still I think life opens up in accepting that this composite me is the real me I may live more completely.

[honorentheos]

In my exchange with
honorentheos it seemed we actually agreed but at the same time were completely misunderstanding each other.

I don't think anyone on this thread is arguing for libertarian free will. I think the camps generally fall into a handful of categories:

You and Physics Guy place "free will" within determinism as dependent on prior conditions, but keep the concept of free will to refer to the contributing priors that seem to originate from within us.

Skipping over other potential positions, I personally don't agree with you and Physics Guy. As you note, we generally agree on the outcomes and the nature of priors. Where we disagree is on terminology. I don't privilege free will as a subset of priors. I argue doing so is hanging onto an illusion. If we agreed that what you both reference as free will is an illusion, and there are plenty of reasons to play along with that for reasons, then fine. But we don't. So we disagree.

We agree there was never a truly libertarian divided where our going down one path rather than another could justly be called a "choice" as we would have to change the priors to make that outcome happen. Suppose as an example we exchange "wanting" with "compulsion" and examine the idea our compulsion to go down the given fork is going to continue in that direction unless it encounters priors that sufficiently overcome the compulsion and force a change in direction. We then take the other fork. We still don't consider that "choice", right? We didn't choose the one fork over the other. Conditions conspired to realize the outcome. Full stop. It is the same in fact as if our compulsion was a marble rolling down an incline due to gravity. So using terms such as "choice" or suggesting that there is value in having fallen down one fork over the other inherent in the process of the marble rolling down is simply entertaining an inaccurate fantasy about what is going on. So my compulsion to continue calling it an illusion is undeterred by PG's argument. A child's understanding of what a wave is doing is just that, even if the terminology used to describe the more accurate motion and energy involved continues to be called a wave. But explaining the difference demands acknowledging what a child perceives to be occuring is an illusion.