Lack of free will as an objective disproof of Mormonism

[huckelberry]

Honorentheos it is possible you are thinking of a question I am missing. I am afraid fairly simple responses are what come to my mind.

We might be responsible to a spouse, boss, friend, ones self. Depending upon context we might have different sorts of responsibility to all sorts of people though to oneself might be the most persistent.

Value? it is better not to make lousy decisions.

Perhaps we then need to identify what it means to make a decision in this context?

Honorentheos, I am sorry but I have not been considering any particular subset of things which might be called decision so have no response to this. I think if there is an aspect of the question you wish to pursue you could perhaps clarify what sort of meaning you wish to consider or focus on and why.

[honorentheos]

Perhaps we then need to identify what it means to make a decision in this context?

Honorentheos, I am sorry but I have not been considering any particular subset of things which might be called decision so have no response to this. I think if there is an aspect of the question you wish to pursue you could perhaps clarify what sort of meaning you wish to consider or focus on and why.

The idea we make decisions suggests agency. How do we make those decisions if determinism says that is an illusion where the "decision" is just the effect following the prior causes?

[honorentheos]

To expand a little, earlier you suggested there were conscious and subconscious processes involved in what may be seen as the exercise of will. To my mind this does not really differ from what is generally considered a form of free will even if it may be more constrained than libertarian free will.

Free Will: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.

Libertarian Free Will: According to the Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion (InterVarsity Press, 2002), libertarian free will is defined as “in ethics and metaphysics, the view that human beings sometimes can will more than one possibility. According to this view, a person who freely made a particular choice could have chosen differently, even if nothing about the past prior to the moment of choice had been different.” In the libertarian free will paradigm, the power of contrary choice reigns supreme. (My emphasis added)

Determinism: the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will.

Compatibilism: If free will is an ability to do what one wants, It is therefore plausible to conclude that the truth of determinism does not entail that agents lack free will since it does not entail that agents never do what they wish to do.

Compatibilism, as I believe Physics Guy has argued for it, simply accepts that the outcome of doing what one "wants" is the expression of will, and if one can do so, one had the freedom of will to realize what they wanted. Even though they really couldn't have chosen otherwise their freedom is realized in the outcome aligning with their desire. Libertarian free will claims a person had the ability to make alternative choices. This isn't compatibilism and it is a rejection of determinism.

When you inserted the concept of decision into this, it implies the agent could make different choices and thereby finds value from the results of choosing one path over another. That sounds very much like libertarian free will to me.

[honorentheos]

To divert slightly, my view of free will is that it is like color. To borrow from an article about a documentary on the topic:

We live our lives in Technicolor. Our world is one of green forests, blue skies and glowing orange sunsets — but all those beautiful, vibrant shades are an illusion. Living Colour, a documentary from The Nature of Things, delves into our vivid vision to uncover the secrets of colour. Here are a few things we learn in the film.

Colour is an illusion, not part of the real world
We think of colour as being a fundamental property of objects in life: green trees, blue sky, red apples. But that’s not how it works.

“What colour is not is part of our world,” says neuroscientist Beau Lotto. “Every colour that people see is actually inside their head … and the stimulus of colour, of course, is light.”

As light pours down on us from the sun, or from a lightbulb in our home, objects and surfaces absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. “The ones that are reflected then land onto our retina,” says Lotto. There, those reflected wavelengths are transformed into electrical signals to be interpreted by our brain.

So we don’t really “see” colour, but reflected light, as interpreted in our brain. “It’s a useful perception of our world, but it’s not an accurate perception of our world,” says Lotto.

The illusion of freedom of will is certainly something we experience. And as a society I think we have to behave as if we have this freedom to maintain social order for evolved social reasons. But we should also be both humble and charitable in realizing the illusion is what is real, not will itself. Or, perhaps better said, the illusion is what we mean when we discuss having freedom of will.

So saying it is better to not make lousy decisions can be read as saying we actually have options and make a decision that could have been different. Or it could just mean there is more of a value judgment where we acknowledge certain outcomes are more likely to result on positive impacts than others, so it's better our actions lead to those positive results. The "decision" is just terminology.

So I hope the above demonstrates why I found this statement curious:

I think of these things not to try and create free will which I view as a straw man but to point to the personal value our decision making process has.

If there is a process, what is that process and how does it result in differing value a person would derive if not due to libertarian free will? Which, again, I dispute exists.

[huckelberry]

Honorentheos, In past years I have invested enough interest and study of art to have reflected on the matter of color. I suppose calling it an illusion may invite a person to look deeper into that matter. I think it very much a halfway point to call it illusion. If one looks with any attention one sees that color is a light event. We live in a complicated environment which interacts with light in ways that reveal a lot and to which eyes are adapted to observe. The shifting patterns of light dark red yellow blue are real events in a real world. Some other creatures may see those patterns somewhat differently than our color perceptions but the underlying pattern would be there.

Maybe if I was smarter I would not see my decision making as trying to negotiate a clumsy vehicle. It sputters and sometimes stops part of me pushes, part of me pulls. I remember pieces of ideas as they come popping into my awareness. I am constrained by somebodies comments. Even though I review possibilities and logically lay them out I know this is not all happening with the clarity I wish. My machine labors. But time is a task master and one thing or the other is chosen,( move the knight. Four moves later see that did not work well, learn anything? see any new hope?)

Chess could be a focused subject for decisions. I have avoided the game which once fascinated me for a long time now. I taught my younger brother who has become good at it. He is teacher now. Still basics, review immediate possibilities of situation,threats and opportunities, look for extended possibilities and plans. consider well known strategies, structural values, respect intuition. You have to move....

[honorentheos]

I think it very much a halfway point to call it illusion.

Blue is typically the last major color to be named by a culture because there is not a need to add that degree of differentiation between the greens and light blacks that are perceived in that range until the culture can produce it artificially. Insects and flowers that appear blue do not have a pigment that can be extracted and used as a dye, and they are rare as well. Instead the diffusion of light waves that reflect to produce the perception of blue are often caused by the structures of the flower's or insect's cells that reflect only light in the 380 to 500 nm wavelength range. But those structures are not maintained when the structure is damaged so creating "blue" is one of the more difficult things a developing civilization may do. This is because "Blueness" isn't a property of those cells. 420 nm lightwaves aren't "blue". They're light. It isn't a halfway point to say our perception of things being blue is an illusion because the property of being blue is no different than our perceiving a drawn perspective as having depth. The drawing may have "depth" but it isn't three dimensional. Our minds interact with the light as received and the perception creates the color. Period. Now one could say that may be, but the properties of the things reflecting the light differ in material ways that are in a pattern that, while not "color", at least define the differences between those surfaces so we can say that is real. But that's not the reality of it, either. Our optic nerve doesn't transfer the information that our brains faithfully interpret for us. Rather, our brains take the inputs and "create" the perception. Your experience as an artist certainly informs your knowledge of color and how adjacency affects color perception, light value affects color perception, etc. But our brains also take our assumptions and modify the perception to adjust for what we assume the color ought to be so a yellow banana in bright light still looks yellow, for example.

For reference:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14421303

Maybe if I was smarter I would not see my decision making as trying to negotiate a clumsy vehicle. It sputters and sometimes stops part of me pushes, part of me pulls. I remember pieces of ideas as they come popping into my awareness. I am constrained by somebodies comments. Even though I review possibilities and logically lay them out I know this is not all happening with the clarity I wish. My machine labors. But time is a task master and one thing or the other is chosen,( move the knight. Four moves later see that did not work well, learn anything? see any new hope?)

Chess could be a focused subject for decisions. I have avoided the game which once fascinated me for a long time now. I taught my younger brother who has become good at it. He is teacher now. Still basics, review immediate possibilities of situation,threats and opportunities, look for extended possibilities and plans. consider well known strategies, structural values, respect intuition. You have to move....

I don't think this explains what I asked. Is there more than one possible outcome that the person involved would "decide" to take? Or is that process just part of the cause that was going to yield the effect based on prior conditions?

[huckelberry]

honorentheos ,
"We think of colour as being a fundamental property of objects in life: green trees, blue sky, red apples. But that’s not how it works."

no I think of color as primarily what portion of the spectrum the majority of light reflected by or transmitted by something or some area is , and is in a particular situation. I thought I was clear that our mind interprets the nerve signals from our eyes. If you want to call that an illusion I do not know a law to prevent you.

////you noted:
"I don't think this explains what I asked. Is there more than one possible outcome that the person involved would "decide" to take? Or is that process just part of the cause that was going to yield the effect based on prior conditions?"

I agree that the process is part of the cause that was going to yield the effect based on prior conditions.

I think learning from the feedback loop of results of decision is important but of course when taking effect they all have become part of prior conditions.

Just to elaborate if I am watching a chess match and the black king is put in check I might see a possible interposition of a bishop or the simple choice of moving the king. As a spectator there are multiple possibilities. As a player considering the situation multiple possibilities are important to recognize but only one can result.The player will take some time in the decision process. An all knowing eye if completely all knowing of the mind of the player would know which choice must result for that particular player.

[honorentheos]

no I think of color as primarily what portion of the spectrum the majority of light reflected by or transmitted by something or some area is , and is in a particular situation. I thought I was clear that our mind interprets the nerve signals from our eyes. If you want to call that an illusion I do not know a law to prevent you.

The light isn't the color. Even if there is correspondence between light of a given wavelength range being perceived in a certain way, the brain can interpret the same light wavelength as being a different color. The link shared examples that show the illusion.

To the OP, everyone has personally experienced "choice" and has considered what it means to decide something. But it's precisely that subjective experience with supposed freedom of will that interferes with understanding how illusory that freedom actually is because our minds are amazing explainers of inputs...and they lie A LOT.

I'm calling color an illusion because it is. It is a perception that only exists in our minds in the same way a 2D perspective has depth. And in similar ways to how our freedom of choice involves actual choice.

But the parallel also extends to the utility of that illusion. We perceive color for very critical evolutionary purposes. Just because color or freedom of will are illusions doesn't demean them. It just helps to understand them in ways that should, when acknowledged, give us more charity in how we engage with those who have differing perspectives or make different choices than we might.

[honorentheos]

I also wanted to revisit something related to the OP regarding free will and Mormonism. One of Mormonism's primary arguments against the problem of evil is that the condition each individual experiences in mortality is really a result of their own choices in the pre-existence. Being born into poverty in a third world country isn't chance but the result of choice. The trials we face as mortals are, at least in part, reflective of how much someone progressed in the previous "estate" and how much they needed to gain to obtain the next at the highest degree of glory.

To the simple, this seems like a good solution. Life circumstance is not just due to the wisdom of God; it's due to God's just nature, too.

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...

[huckelberry]

I also wanted to revisit something related to the OP regarding free will and Mormonism. One of Mormonism's primary arguments against the problem of evil is that the condition each individual experiences in mortality is really a result of their own choices in the pre-existence. Being born into poverty in a third world country isn't chance but the result of choice. The trials we face as mortals are, at least in part, reflective of how much someone progressed in the previous "estate" and how much they needed to gain to obtain the next at the highest degree of glory.

...

A line of thought which I find repellent. A probable breeding ground of morally defective vanity.