Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Ha! I was hoping for either the need to mug for physics Olympiad selection test or the want for more AAs to stop me from blogging, but I guess neither course of action were appealing enough compared to the joys of posting nonsense to show off my brilliance. Guess this inevitable outcome must be due to my ego. On second thought, maybe it is not so. The word “ego” is for those whose powers are lacking, and hence require alternate forms of self-confidence boosting (in the form of bragging, of course) to save them from despair. As for me, what I say and how I say it could hardly be labeled as even “pride”, much less ego, for the most vivid verbal descriptions do nothing but scratch the tip of the iceberg that are my immense abilities. But wait, icebergs are not so good for analogies either, for they are only finite in dimensions. Arrgh, guess it’s not easy to describe yourself accurately with mortal languages when you are a being such as I.

My chrono-psychic senses (reading thoughts off minds before those thoughts are even thought on those minds!) predict that by the time your eyes have made it thus far, the not-so-intricate-but-good-enough interactions of your nerve cells would have created the image of the letters “WTF” at the back of your mind, and set off a reflex to make you groan fairly audibly. So I shall be moral and cut my futile attempts.

Ironic is it that I should have mentioned “courses of action” unwittingly when that is the exact topic I am about to comment on.

In response to shida, the validity of premise 4 can be debated. It can be argued that by assuming premise 4, the possibility of a persons character traits affecting his perception and hence the “causes” to his decision has been neglected. Although certain character traits may be shaped by other events, the assumptions that there is no innate character trait that cannot be attributed to a cause seem to be problematic.

Furthermore, it seems to me unfair to assert spontaneous decisions without rational causes show absence of free will. It seems that the author of this argument has equated “free will” with “rational”. Let me simply provide a counter example. Say there is a grain of sand and a piece of rock. I can exercise free will by having a preference of one over the other. I believe that a conscious choice may not necessarily has to be a justified choice, nor does it have to be a rational choice.

The interpretation put forth by shida seems to be misleading as well, for it is not really an interpretation. Shida suggests a course of action, which is making do with what we have, and this directly contradicts the conclusion of the argument. If there is no free will, then there can be no course of action but one; hence all suggestions are useless for in the end, there is only one certain outcome. There is really no significance at all attached to anything we do. Such a worldview, which is the logical conclusion from the argument, is clearly nihilistic.

I propose an alternate prove:

Premise 1: Laws of Physics apply to all matter.
Premise 2: Man, his mind and body and soul, is matter.
Conclusion 1: Since decisions are the result of physical interactions in the brain with results that can be predetermined, there is no free will.

Which is actually only a simplification of the original prove stripped down to more fundamental assumptions. Apparently, the only assumptions here are the validity of modern science. It is then easily seen how the modern science necessarily leads to nihilism.