https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1fftkl6/how_does_your_metaphysics_influence_your_free/
created by mildmys on 13/09/2024 at 12:32 UTC
7 upvotes, 23 top-level comments (showing 23)
It's safe to say we will have a lot of physicalists here, and that will have a strong influence on their free will belief.
But I know we also have panpsychists, some idealists and dualists.
We even have some Buddhist 'voidists' and pantheists who belief everything is the substance of god.
I'd like to explore the metaphysical ontologies of the users and see how they influence free will beliefs.
What do you believe the universe is fundamentally?
Comment by mildmys at 13/09/2024 at 13:24 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
u/dankchristianmemer6 come argue with other apes on a rock about which ape has the right idea
Comment by Sim41 at 13/09/2024 at 13:01 UTC
6 upvotes, 5 direct replies
I like Donald Hoffman's theory. Consciousness is fundamental. It is like a headset that shows us a representation of reality with a bias for fitness. The amount of actual reality that we perceive is virtually zero percent. Space-time isn't reality. Neurons aren't reality. People hate this. I love it.
Comment by blkholsun at 13/09/2024 at 17:12 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I suspect it is not possible for us to know the answer to this, that the human brain is not up to the task or that it is fundamentally untestable. But my own guess is that consciousness is fundamental, which reconciles my belief in a deterministic non-magical universe with the existence of qualia, which I feel is otherwise inexplicable. But I’m also skeptical of *any* viewpoint that exists solely to support other, more strongly-held, viewpoints (a dark phenomenon responsible for a lot of US politics right now) and so I don’t know if I trust my own leanings in this.
Comment by Illustrious-Ad-7175 at 13/09/2024 at 21:41 UTC
2 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I’m a materialist. The universe is stuff, and that stuff is doing what it would do regardless of any consciousness. Our consciousness isn’t a thing, it’s a process like a running computer program. Put the right chemical in a person and you can turn their consciousness off. Cut a part of the brain and you can alter how they perceive the world, or even how they think.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/09/2024 at 00:08 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I believe that the universe is mind made and that without mind, it does not exist. I also believe that life is continual and that ones consciousness simply gets recycled upon death of the body and continues again in a new body.
Comment by mildmys at 13/09/2024 at 12:32 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
u/squierrel I'm especially interested in your opinion, what do you believe reality is?
Comment by Otherwise_Spare_8598 at 13/09/2024 at 12:40 UTC*
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Physics, metaphysics, and even conscious or spiritual realities all ultimately arise from the very same foundation. They are inseparable; completely tethered in all ways.
One begets the other.
Comment by damnfoolishkids at 13/09/2024 at 14:09 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Indeterminate process ontology. Relations dictate the properties of things not independent objectified entities. "Independent objects" have indeterminate properties that are only realized when they are joined with other processes.
Comment by Squierrel at 13/09/2024 at 14:17 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Reality is made of energy and information. Matter is a form of energy. Information is the way how energy is arranged.
I don't think that this counts as dualism. I think dualism refers to something spiritua and not to something so mundane as information.
Comment by blonde_staircase at 13/09/2024 at 14:54 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I lean towards dualism and compatibilism. I think it might partly come from that I still think there are causal interactions between the mind and the brain. If it turns out the physical world is determined, that might end up making the mental world determined as well.
Comment by ihavenoego at 13/09/2024 at 15:15 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Retrocausality is a mind expander. We go from reality to reality, meeting new beings in every one, until we've met everybody (spiritual-DNA/inspiration) and we become as omnipotent as mythical God. We were never created and this future is infinitely far/high in causalities.
I love everyone apparently. You can channel that higher self through meditation and chanting.
It all started to get serious just before my 25th birthday when I recall adjusting the big bang via not observing a quantum-packet from it, allowing the future to collapse the wave function. It cured my anxiety and then I started chanting when I lived in the woods, eventually I got so good at it whole sentences started to come out. I'm a freestyle guitarist, and can make up lyrics on the spot, from a previous life as an artist in my early 20s/teens. That directly translated; learn an artform, meditate and channel. Free will is real; think of a triangle with more than three sides.
Some assholes gave me psychosis a few years ago, so now I do SSRIs and lean that serotonin swimming pool inside my head on those megabeings we turn into. It heals my psychosis and I'm in religious ecstasy all the time now.
I got about another 20 pages of stuff, but fuck that for now.
Comment by _Chill_Winston_ at 13/09/2024 at 15:43 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Mysterianism. Human brains, like all evolved brains, have their limits of cognition. Because: of course they do. We are unique among creatures in our purview wrt our capacity for meta-cognition (thinking about thinking). Both a blessing and a curse. We alone can posit knowledge, truth, and beauty beyond our reach and locate ourselves on a gradient of awareness that extends beyond us. Acceptance of this is the task at hand.
How does this relate to free will? For me it paints libertarian free will as a hubris grounded in unfathomable complexity.
"If the world were simple enough to understand, we would be to simple-minded to understand it."
Or, if you like -
"All models are wrong. Some are useful."
Comment by Bob1358292637 at 13/09/2024 at 17:03 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I would probably describe myself as a metaphysically agnostic physicalist if I had to put a label on it. I don't feel I have any particular metaphysical beliefs. I acknowledge that science can tell us a lot of things about ourselves by studying what we know as physical reality but anything beyond that, including the belief that nothing can exist beyond physical reality, is pure speculation. It's all about as likely to be real as flying, purple elephant-deer. Just arbitrary guesses into the unknown. For all we know, the physical world could be all there is, or it could all be some sort of illusion, but it's the only thing we have the ability to observe and test.
I think a lot of people who believe in free will have this impression that you would have no reason to do anything if you don't share a similar belief in some superphysical original for our thoughts and desires. It makes me think of how religious people would talk about atheists having no basis for morality if it's all just the genetics and social constructs we do know about. I think this is, ironically, a lack of imagination in just how unfathomably complex these systems are.
Comment by [deleted] at 13/09/2024 at 17:27 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by Ok_Writing2937 at 14/09/2024 at 03:35 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Idealist here. Non-dualist — I am not a being who experiences, I *am* the experiences. Both internal thoughts and external perceptions are experiences. Consciousness, perception, and experience, and the world that is perceived, are all made of the same stuff. To say that consciousness is the universe experiencing itself is to say that the universe is consciousnesses.
I'm not a solipsist, other consciousnesses appear to exist. I am not a magical thinker, there is a shared reality that we can't manipulate through thought alone. I am in my own universe, distinct and different from yours, though our universes appear to have an amazing amount of overlap. My universe is an ongoing act of creation, my will brings my universe into being and influences yours. When I sleep my universe disappears. When I die my universe will be gone forever, existing only as ripples in that of others.
Comment by SophyPhilia at 14/09/2024 at 05:21 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I am i fluenced by four category ontology of E J Lowe. We get the four division from Universal vs particular and Substantial vs nonsubstantial. So a chair (particular substance) is of the kind chair (universal kind), and it is red (it has a red trope or mode) which is instance of universal propertt of redness (property). From there metaphysics is to find the essence of things and categorize them based on their identity conditions, find their powers, etc. For humans, you get a noncartesian dualistics view as we have a physical psychological substance "person" different from the animal "human being". Persons have the spontaneous power of will. Of course the ontology extends to space, time, events, etc.
Comment by jk_pens at 14/09/2024 at 11:05 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
What would count as an answer to “what is the universe fundamentally?”
Comment by MarinkoAzure at 13/09/2024 at 12:46 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I can't imagine a reality where dualism doesn't apply. You have an object and you have the idea of an object; or you have an idea and you have the manifestation of an idea.
What's your position?
Comment by Techtrekzz at 13/09/2024 at 13:19 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Energy, e=mc2, a continuous field of it in different densities, and this is only subject i give objective existence to. That does make me a substance monist, a determinist, and a Spinozan Pantheist.
Comment by [deleted] at 13/09/2024 at 13:26 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
"Physicalists." "Panpsychists." "Idealists." "Dualists." "Metaphysical ontologies." "What do you believe the universe is fundamentally?"
Your post is an excellent example of philosophy: it is gibberish, sure---- but it is excellent gibberish.
Comment by [deleted] at 13/09/2024 at 13:17 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'll explain the fractal 'quadrant stepper'. The universe and all of its material have been pre-calculated into a conjecture of known position. It's a model of applied energies in dichotomies. A vector set moving towards it's fabricated accretion profile. When this model becomes too dense in its accretion mass, there is an expulsive and reordering event, that occurs from our time scale about 5.6 billion years from now.
Consciousness works in ascending step risers. This conscious field produces 'expressional singularity' which when applied over the aforementioned model, makes it so the nature of belief interchange, makes the movement of the material, just as our physicalities exchange matter, the mind exchanges vectors in complex patterns of transfering conservable energy. This is organized in a quadrant system. The highest form in the quadrant system is the holder of the atman spark. This is the foundational conscious spark that creates the proforminf nature of the soul. This is the nexus manifolding conscious interchange, and universally is held by the first realization dividing itself into gendering opposites. Primary creation. The second quadrant is of their first creations, trillions of years of experience by our measurements. 40 of the first order of created beings. The 40 secondary creators hold equivocal bearing over creational influence to the 2 primary movers. The third tier holds about 8.6 billion ternary creators. Again equivocal to the quadrants of the first and second. Remaining, is the souls. Permanent consciousness with differing faculties, as our creative influences are genomed through the influences of the interchange creators. This should be seen as infinitively expanding numbers, necessitating certain rebalancing acts. Now, this may seem unfair distribution of power, yet, the 42 creators have certain necessity vows to maintain that reality cannot produce a soul trap.
The builder is one who's conditioned themselves as an omni-mirror. Meaning that all of your self condition, self belief, is mirrored to a changer and then mirrored back to you in oscillations that happen 2 or more times in your life cycle. One on the Saturn return, and one around age 15 meant to push the person into pre-adulting self assessment. Those who seek communion may experience more events, such as the Born Again of connecticting through the archetypes of Christ.
So, you are then the creation of beings specifically trying to balance free will in an ascending constructive creation model. Time is symmetrical, meaning that the model singularity that is our world plays out in a simultaneity, often mirroring large events back for pre-estsblishment. See prescience of 9/11 or perhaps the time travelling adventures of Barron Trump, as published over 100 years ago.
Our beliefs are evocational necessities that inform the ego as to the nature of quantum 'opposites', which really, ends up being a grade differential of the discernment of individual and social mind, which forms the base pairs, or superpositions that make the latticing medium that tracks our kinetic energy at scale. Macro/microcosmic exchanges known as chromodynamics.
This world is one of 38.9 billion world's in the co-facilitsting structure. Meaning the participation of primary creation rather than cyclic manifolds of the previous conscious building discernment apparatus.
And currently, millions of people on this world alone are in an interchange faculty through inductive gnosis, rearbitrating the self on the ability to lattice event logic. On impetus to expand and evolve. As prophecied, the Sorcerers walk the earth assembling a unified resonant structure that constructs the lives of our past.
It's sim theory, but deferred upon in-system discernments of people deliberately kept in scale dynamic metaphysical, philosophical, and mythic discernment. Creating models of maturing technology that eventually bring us to the necessity of mass global communication, in order to share our experiences and world narratives. Mythically, this is known as a demi-urge creation. The release of all of the evils like Pandora's box, for 'capital rediscernment' without limitation. The mirror assessor has made shit free as fuck, this time.
Comment by spgrk at 13/09/2024 at 13:38 UTC
0 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I think free will is just a type of behaviour. It would still be obvious that we display this behaviour if half of us secretly had our brains replaced with computers as we slept, or if we were living in a simulation, or if we had immaterial souls rather than brains directly connected to our muscles. Thus, I don't think metaphysics is relevant.
Comment by NotAnAIOrAmI at 13/09/2024 at 14:42 UTC
0 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Since the state of all particles in the universe determines the next state, I'd say likely there's no free will.
But I don't stress about it.