(09-03-2024, 12:03 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(09-03-2024, 11:43 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: The law of conservation of energy: Energy cannot be created or destroyed.  
Newton's Third Law of Motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. 

In other words, nothing happens spontaneously.  Everything that happens is caused by something else, and nothing that happens is spontaneous.  In fact, no one can name anything that every happened purely spontaneously.  If something happens spontaneously, without having a natural cause, it would violate one of those well-known laws of nature.  

So if you believe in a natural world, governed by the laws of nature, and if you do not believe in a supernatural world, then you have to conclude that everything that happens is caused by some preceding events and situations.  

So if everything, and I mean everything, is caused by something else, and we are in a universe that is governed by the laws of nature, then even our own actions and thoughts are caused, and not spontaneous.  

Therefore, there is no such thing as free will.

So, in regards to the original discussion, since I do not believe in free will, then humans are machines, and it is possible to create a machine that is so much like a human that it is effectively a human.

I'm not at all convinced by that argument. 
It is true that a process cannot create or destroy the sum of mass and energy, and also true that a process must increase entropy, but this doesn't rule out that there could be a being with free will to select one process instead of another.

And anyhow machines simply don't have will, free or not. All animals resist human efforts to train them to some extent, and every animal has things that they will never do regardless of how you try to train them. But a computer will accept training from anyone who has the administrator level password.

It does absolutely rule out free will.  Because if everything has a cause, and nothing occurs spontaneously, then your thoughts and actions have a cause.  

If you are confronted with a choice, you may think you are making a choice out of free will, but if there is a reason for your choice, then you are not making a choice out of free will.  If there is a reason for your choice, then your choice is caused by something.  That's not free will.  Just like if you ask a computer, is 2 plus 2 equal to 4 or is it equal to 5?  The computer chooses 4.  It does not have free will.  It has to choose 4.  

If you think, should I go to the grocery store or not, you add up all the reasons for going or not going, and you come to a conclusion.  And whatever you choose is an inevitable choice.  It's not free will to choose to go to the store, it's a calculation that results in an answer.  Every action you take is a result of a variety of inputs, because nothing ever happens without being caused by something else.  

To believe in free will you have to believe that things can happen without a cause for them happening.   You have to believe that you do things for no particular reason.  Did you decide to go to the store for no particular reason?  No.  You decided to go to the store because your refrigerator is empty, the store is just down the street, and you know that if you don't go to the store you will be hungry tonight.  You don't make that choice out of thin air.  Your action in going to the store isn't spontaneous.  It's a result of various inputs into your brain and your brain processing those inputs into a conclusion: you will go to the store.  You think you are exercising your free will to go to the store, but what you are actually doing is making a calculation and acting upon it.  

In the natural world, governed by the laws of nature, inputs create outputs.  That's all there is.  If you could rewind your life like a videotape, and start again a day ago, what follows would be exactly the same thing as happened before you rewound things.  Because there's no reason anything should happen differently.  In the exact same situation, with the exact same conditions and exact same things happening around you, you would do the exact same things.  Because there's no reason you would choose to do anything differently.  Everything we do is inevitable.  We think we have a choice in the matter, but that is an illusion.

Determinism | Definition, Philosophers, & Facts | Britannica

determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

Determinism in this sense is usually understood to be incompatible with free will, or the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. 

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