Animal rights and freedom

[PunkMaister]

Exisiting for existing's sake and having no purpose at all are 2 entirely different things and you know that.

Oh but it is. You either exist just to exist or you have some purpose you cannot have the 2 tossed around in the same sentence as it means the same thing because they decidedly do not. Either you have a purpose. In the case of us humans those are usually goals whether short term or long term. You cannot tell me that you dream of becoming a musician and you do it for the sake of existing because that makes it irrelevant, you might as well just become a drug addict or commit suicide and it would be all the same because you just exist anyway...

That is not a higher purpose. That's just existing. Being part of a food chain is not a higher purpose.

No it is not it is very much a purpose. The purpose of predators in nature is not to inflict death and destruction of their prey animals but to keep their populations in check. A few centuries ago in Europe they killed off all the wolves and the result was that the prey animals such as deer their populations surged out of control and they literally ate every plant they could consume. The forests became ecological disasters and Deer died of famine by the millions.

This narrowmindedness you're spouting is something you need to stop. Things are either one thing or the other with you. A higher purpose or totally meaningless. And despite my explaining it, you still can't even write correctly what I've said.

It is totally meaningless if we have the same value as shrimp or Amoebas...

Since you are incapable of comprehending what I wrote before, I will say it bluntly. I am no damn nihilist.

The views that both you and Arbour are defending here are in essence Nihilistic. Why? Because if we have the same value as shrimp, algae and amoebas is all in essence meaningless...

I never even said anything about shrimp or amoebas.

I'm sick of this crap.

*Sigh* Neither you or Arbour directly mention any of them but as sonofccn pointed out it is the logical progression of your claims in this thread.

[Who is like God arbour]

I do not have the time to respond to all what was said here in the meanwhile. What I have found is that neither PunkMaister nor sonofccn are willing to debate that topic honestly. They have their opinion, a opinion that makes humans superior and they are not ready to consider arguments that would question their alleged superiority.

I have never said, that there is no difference between different species. Quite the contrary: I have always said, that there are differences between all species. That's what makes a species unique. The question I have asked is why the uniqueness of a human is supposed to be objectively considered special compared to the uniqueness of other species. The question why the uniqueness of humans is supposed to make them objectively more valuable is not answered. Problematic questions as if the humans have indeed such thing as free will are simply ignored.

It's not as simple as PunkMaister or sonofccn think it is if one really starts to think. But that's exactly what they don't want to do. I have hoped that I could get them to do it by asking some questions. But they have refused to answer them - maybe because they have felt that the answers could shake the foundations of their beliefs or convictions.

Because I have not the time to do more, I will only copy and paste text from somewhere else. Please consider that this text is only the summarisation of different positions of professors of law, philosophy, bio-ethics and political theory. Thhese are all very intelligent persons and it would be wise to take them and their arguments seriously.
That does not mean that they have to be right. But one should listen to them and really consider their arguments. As fas as this summarisation may be too cursory, it is recommended to read further in other sources. It is okay if one has another opinion and the necessary arguments to defend this opinion.

• 
  
  Main philosophical approaches
  
  • 1. Overview
    • Further information: Consequentialism, Deontological ethics, and Teleological ethics
    There are two main philosophical approaches to the issue of animal rights: a human-centered or anthropocentricapproach, and a life-centered or biocentric approach. Debate within the mainstream anthropocentric camp focuses primarily on two philosophical approaches: a utilitarian approach and a rights-based one. The former is exemplified by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, and the latter by Tom Regan, professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University. Meanwhile, the biocentric camp presents a more radical viewpoint, exemplified by John Rodman and Paul Shepard, professors of political theory from Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University in California.
    
    Their differences reflect a distinction philosophers draw between ethical theories that judge the rightness of an act by its consequences (called consequentialism, teleological ethics, or utilitarianism, which is Singer's position), and those who judge acts to be right or wrong in themselves, almost regardless of consequences (called deontological ethics, of which Regan is an adherent). A consequentialist might argue, for example, that lying is wrong if the lie will make someone unhappy. A deontologist would argue that lying is wrong in principle (though one need not be an absolutist, maintaining that one must never lie, as a pluralist position may be taken instead).
    
    Within the animal rights debate, Singer does not believe there are such things as natural rights and that animals have them, although he uses the language of rights as shorthand for how we ought to treat individuals. Instead, he argues that, when we weigh the consequences of an act in order to judge whether it is right or wrong, the interests of animals, primarily their interest in avoiding suffering, ought to be given equal consideration to the similar interests of human beings. That is, where the suffering of one individual, human or non-human, is equivalent to that of any other, there is no moral reason to award more weight to either one of them.
    
    Regan's philosophy, on the other hand, is not driven by the weighing of consequences. He believes that animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," who have moral rights for that reason, and that moral rights ought not to be ignored.
    
    However, for many environmental ethicists, positions like Singer's and Regan's do not go far enough. They argue that for both philosophers, the environment is still a 'backdrop' to those organisms which can feel pleasure and pain or are intelligent "subjects-of-a-life". Other organisms are still only valued as long as they are useful. Furthermore, some argue, what is going on here is a valuing of things which are nearly, but not quite, human. Organisms with human-like characteristics, on this account, are valuable; those which are not, are not. And since value is assessed on how like humans an organism is (how intelligent, how conscious, how sentient), non-humans will always fall short, always be seen as like a human but lacking the full value of humanity. To some thinkers, this is not an adequate approach to environmental ethics; it fails to recognise that a being may be unlike humans and yet still valuable. John Rodman captured this by writing: "Is this, then, the new enlightenment - to see nonhuman animals as imbeciles, wilderness as a human vegetable?... It is perhaps analogous to seeing women as defective men who lack penises, or humans as defective sea mammals who lack sonar capacity…" (Rodman, John (1977) 'The Liberation of Nature' Inquiry 20 83-145)
    
    
    
    2. Utilitarian approach: Peter Singer
    • • Further information: Act utilitarianism, Animal language, Animal Liberation (book), and Preference utilitarianism
      2.1. Equal consideration of interests
      
      Singer is an act utilitarian, or more specifically a preference utilitarian, meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by its consequences, and specifically by the extent to which it satisfies the preferences of those affected, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. (There are other forms of utilitarianism, such as rule utilitarianism, which judges the rightness of an act according to the usual consequences of whichever moral rule the act is an instance of.)
      
      Singer's position is that there are no moral grounds for failing to give equal consideration to the interests of human and non-humans. His principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment, but equal consideration of interests. A mouse and a man both have an interest in not being kicked down the street, because both would suffer if so kicked, and there are no moral or logical grounds, Singer argues, for failing to accord their interests in not being kicked equal weight. Singer quotes the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick: "The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other." This reflects Jeremy Bentham's position: "[E]ach to count for one, and none for more than one."
      
      Unlike the position of a man or a mouse, a stone would not suffer if kicked down the street, and therefore has no interest in avoiding it. Interests, Singer argues, are predicated on the ability to suffer, and nothing more, and once it is established that a being has interests, those interests must be given equal consideration. The issue of the extent to which animals can suffer is therefore key.
      
      
      
      2.2. Animal suffering
      
      Singer writes that commentators on all sides of the debate now accept that animals suffer and feel pain, although it was not always so. Bernard Rollin, a philosopher and professor of animal sciences, writes that Descartes' influence continued to be felt until the 1980s. Veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were taught to ignore pain, he writes, and at least one major veterinary hospital in the 1960s did not stock narcotic analgesics for animal pain control. In his interactions with scientists, he was often asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" evidence that they could feel pain.
      
      Singer writes that scientific publications have made it clear over the last two decades that the majority of researchers do believe animals suffer and feel pain, though it continues to be argued that their suffering may be reduced by an inability to experience the same dread of anticipation as human beings, or to remember the suffering as vividly. In the most recent edition of Animal Liberation, Singer cites research indicating that animal impulses, emotions, and feelings are located in the diencephalon, pointing out that this region is well developed in mammals and birds. Singer also relies on the work of Richard Sarjeant to support his position. Sarjeant pointed out that non-human animals possess anatomical complexity of the cerebral cortex and neuroanatomy that is nearly identical to that of the human nervous system, arguing that, "[e]very particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own. To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity; it can easily be shown that many of their senses are far more acute than ours."
      
      The problem of animal suffering, and animal consciousness in general, arises primarily because animals have no language, leading scientists to argue that it is impossible to know when an animal is suffering. This situation may change as increasing numbers of chimps are taught sign language, although skeptics question whether their use of it portrays real understanding. Singer writes that, following the argument that language is needed to communicate pain, it would often be impossible to know when human beings are in pain. All we can do is observe pain behavior, he writes, and make a calculated guess based on it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein argued, if someone is screaming, clutching a part of their body, moaning quietly, or apparently unable to function, especially when followed by an event that we believe would cause pain in ourselves, that is in large measure what it means to be in pain. Singer argues that there is no reason to suppose animal pain behavior would have a different meaning.
      
      
      
      2.3. Equality a prescription, not a fact
      
      Singer argues that equality between human beings is not based on anything factual, but is simply a prescription. Human beings do, in fact, differ in many ways. If the equality of the sexes were based on the idea, for example, that men and women are in principle capable of being equally intelligent, but this was later found to be false, it would mean we would have to abandon the practice of equal consideration. But in fact, equality of consideration is based on a prescription, not a description. It is, Singer writes, a moral idea, not an assertion of fact.
      
      He quotes President Thomas Jefferson, the principal author in 1776 of the American Declaration of Independence: "Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property or persons of others."
    
    
    3. Rights-based approach: Tom Regan
    
    Tom Regan argues in The Case for Animal Rights and Empty Cages that non-human animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," and as such are bearers of rights. He argues that, because the moral rights of humans are based on their possession of certain cognitive abilities, and because these abilities are also possessed by at least some non-human animals, such animals must have the same moral rights as humans. Although only humans act as moral agents, both marginal-case humans, such as infants, and at least some non-humans must have the status of "moral patients." Moral patients are unable to formulate moral principles, and as such are unable to do right or wrong, even though what they do may be beneficial or harmful. Only moral agents are able to engage in moral action.
    
    Animals for Regan have "inherent value" as subjects-of-a-life, and cannot be regarded as a means to an end. This is also called the "direct duty" view. His theory does not extend to all sentient animals but only to those that can be regarded as subjects-of-a-life. He argues that all normal mammals of at least one year of age would qualify in this regard.
    
    Whereas Singer is primarily concerned with improving the treatment of animals and accepts that, in some hypothetical scenarios, individual animals might be used legitimately to further human or non-human ends, Regan believes we ought to treat non-human animals as we would human beings. He applies the strict Kantian ideal (which Kant himself applied only to human beings) that they ought never to be sacrificed as a means to an end, and must be treated as ends in themselves.

I don't deny, that there are other opinions. But their adherer are able to reason. They argue and don't play

• • 

[sonofccn]

I do not have the time to respond to all what was said here in the meanwhile. What I have found is that neither PunkMaister nor sonofccn are willing to debate that topic honestly. They have their opinion, a opinion that makes humans superior and they are not ready to consider arguments that would question their alleged superiority.

I would be glad to consider arguments to the contrary should one be presented. We are 4 pages in and you have asked a lot of questions but have not offered anything besides the tests showing chimps are comparable to a 3-5 year old. PunkMaister and I have both pointed out the differences between Man and lower animals, now if you disagree with our criteria or our interpretation of it provide evidence to support your opinion.

I have never said, that there is no difference between different species. Quite the contrary: I have always said, that there are differences between all species. That's what makes a species unique. The question I have asked is why the uniqueness of a human is supposed to be objectively considered special compared to the uniqueness of other species.

If every one is unique then no one is. So either some are more important then others or all are the same. So I ask what criteria do you use to decide who is more important between a human and a shellfish or a human and a goat, or a human and a bear etc.

Problematic questions as if the humans have indeed such thing as free will are simply ignored.

That is the sort of question only you can answer for yourself. It can not be answered unless we discover the computer controlling this simulation. I know I have free will for instances, that my fate is decided by me.

It's not as simple as PunkMaister or sonofccn think it is if one really starts to think. But that's exactly what they don't want to do. I have hoped that I could get them to do it by asking some questions. But they have refused to answer them - maybe because they have felt that the answers could shake the foundations of their beliefs or convictions.

We answered all the questions that have answers to the best of our ability. You've asked for definitions for being self-aware, being sentient etc I answered to you as I honestly see them. You asked why these things are important and I've answered them. I would say based off of this it is you who appears to have an iron forged Opinion that will not be altered. Any response that doesn't fit what you wish is ignored or asked again and again.

Because I have not the time to do more, I will only copy and paste text from somewhere else. Please consider that this text is only the summarisation of different positions of professors of law, philosophy, bio-ethics and political theory. Thhese are all very intelligent persons and it would be wise to take them and their arguments seriously.

If I may ask with position do you agree with?

[sonofccn]

Main philosophical approaches

1. Overview
Further information: Consequentialism, Deontological ethics, and Teleological ethics
There are two main philosophical approaches to the issue of animal rights: a human-centered or anthropocentric approach, and a life-centered or biocentric approach. Debate within the mainstream anthropocentric camp focuses primarily on two philosophical approaches: a utilitarian approach and a rights-based one. The former is exemplified by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, and the latter by Tom Regan, professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University. Meanwhile, the biocentric camp presents a more radical viewpoint, exemplified by John Rodman and Paul Shepard, professors of political theory from Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University in California.

Their differences reflect a distinction philosophers draw between ethical theories that judge the rightness of an act by its consequences (called consequentialism, teleological ethics, or utilitarianism, which is Singer's position), and those who judge acts to be right or wrong in themselves, almost regardless of consequences (called deontological ethics, of which Regan is an adherent). A consequentialist might argue, for example, that lying is wrong if the lie will make someone unhappy. A deontologist would argue that lying is wrong in principle (though one need not be an absolutist, maintaining that one must never lie, as a pluralist position may be taken instead).

Within the animal rights debate, Singer does not believe there are such things as natural rights and that animals have them, although he uses the language of rights as shorthand for how we ought to treat individuals. Instead, he argues that, when we weigh the consequences of an act in order to judge whether it is right or wrong, the interests of animals, primarily their interest in avoiding suffering, ought to be given equal consideration to the similar interests of human beings. That is, where the suffering of one individual, human or non-human, is equivalent to that of any other, there is no moral reason to award more weight to either one of them.

Regan's philosophy, on the other hand, is not driven by the weighing of consequences. He believes that animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," who have moral rights for that reason, and that moral rights ought not to be ignored.

However, for many environmental ethicists, positions like Singer's and Regan's do not go far enough. They argue that for both philosophers, the environment is still a 'backdrop' to those organisms which can feel pleasure and pain or are intelligent "subjects-of-a-life". Other organisms are still only valued as long as they are useful. Furthermore, some argue, what is going on here is a valuing of things which are nearly, but not quite, human. Organisms with human-like characteristics, on this account, are valuable; those which are not, are not. And since value is assessed on how like humans an organism is (how intelligent, how conscious, how sentient), non-humans will always fall short, always be seen as like a human but lacking the full value of humanity. To some thinkers, this is not an adequate approach to environmental ethics; it fails to recognise that a being may be unlike humans and yet still valuable. John Rodman captured this by writing: "Is this, then, the new enlightenment - to see nonhuman animals as imbeciles, wilderness as a human vegetable?... It is perhaps analogous to seeing women as defective men who lack penises, or humans as defective sea mammals who lack sonar capacity…" (Rodman, John (1977) 'The Liberation of Nature' Inquiry 20 83-145)



2. Utilitarian approach: Peter Singer
Further information: Act utilitarianism, Animal language, Animal Liberation (book), and Preference utilitarianism

2.1. Equal consideration of interests

Singer is an act utilitarian, or more specifically a preference utilitarian, meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by its consequences, and specifically by the extent to which it satisfies the preferences of those affected, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. (There are other forms of utilitarianism, such as rule utilitarianism, which judges the rightness of an act according to the usual consequences of whichever moral rule the act is an instance of.)

Singer's position is that there are no moral grounds for failing to give equal consideration to the interests of human and non-humans. His principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment, but equal consideration of interests. A mouse and a man both have an interest in not being kicked down the street, because both would suffer if so kicked, and there are no moral or logical grounds, Singer argues, for failing to accord their interests in not being kicked equal weight. Singer quotes the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick: "The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other." This reflects Jeremy Bentham's position: "[E]ach to count for one, and none for more than one."

Unlike the position of a man or a mouse, a stone would not suffer if kicked down the street, and therefore has no interest in avoiding it. Interests, Singer argues, are predicated on the ability to suffer, and nothing more, and once it is established that a being has interests, those interests must be given equal consideration. The issue of the extent to which animals can suffer is therefore key.



2.2. Animal suffering

Singer writes that commentators on all sides of the debate now accept that animals suffer and feel pain, although it was not always so. Bernard Rollin, a philosopher and professor of animal sciences, writes that Descartes' influence continued to be felt until the 1980s. Veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were taught to ignore pain, he writes, and at least one major veterinary hospital in the 1960s did not stock narcotic analgesics for animal pain control. In his interactions with scientists, he was often asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" evidence that they could feel pain.

Singer writes that scientific publications have made it clear over the last two decades that the majority of researchers do believe animals suffer and feel pain, though it continues to be argued that their suffering may be reduced by an inability to experience the same dread of anticipation as human beings, or to remember the suffering as vividly. In the most recent edition of Animal Liberation, Singer cites research indicating that animal impulses, emotions, and feelings are located in the diencephalon, pointing out that this region is well developed in mammals and birds. Singer also relies on the work of Richard Sarjeant to support his position. Sarjeant pointed out that non-human animals possess anatomical complexity of the cerebral cortex and neuroanatomy that is nearly identical to that of the human nervous system, arguing that, "[e]very particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own. To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity; it can easily be shown that many of their senses are far more acute than ours."

The problem of animal suffering, and animal consciousness in general, arises primarily because animals have no language, leading scientists to argue that it is impossible to know when an animal is suffering. This situation may change as increasing numbers of chimps are taught sign language, although skeptics question whether their use of it portrays real understanding. Singer writes that, following the argument that language is needed to communicate pain, it would often be impossible to know when human beings are in pain. All we can do is observe pain behavior, he writes, and make a calculated guess based on it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein argued, if someone is screaming, clutching a part of their body, moaning quietly, or apparently unable to function, especially when followed by an event that we believe would cause pain in ourselves, that is in large measure what it means to be in pain. Singer argues that there is no reason to suppose animal pain behavior would have a different meaning.



2.3. Equality a prescription, not a fact

Singer argues that equality between human beings is not based on anything factual, but is simply a prescription. Human beings do, in fact, differ in many ways. If the equality of the sexes were based on the idea, for example, that men and women are in principle capable of being equally intelligent, but this was later found to be false, it would mean we would have to abandon the practice of equal consideration. But in fact, equality of consideration is based on a prescription, not a description. It is, Singer writes, a moral idea, not an assertion of fact.

He quotes President Thomas Jefferson, the principal author in 1776 of the American Declaration of Independence: "Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property or persons of others."



3. Rights-based approach: Tom Regan

Tom Regan argues in The Case for Animal Rights and Empty Cages that non-human animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," and as such are bearers of rights. He argues that, because the moral rights of humans are based on their possession of certain cognitive abilities, and because these abilities are also possessed by at least some non-human animals, such animals must have the same moral rights as humans. Although only humans act as moral agents, both marginal-case humans, such as infants, and at least some non-humans must have the status of "moral patients." Moral patients are unable to formulate moral principles, and as such are unable to do right or wrong, even though what they do may be beneficial or harmful. Only moral agents are able to engage in moral action.

Animals for Regan have "inherent value" as subjects-of-a-life, and cannot be regarded as a means to an end. This is also called the "direct duty" view. His theory does not extend to all sentient animals but only to those that can be regarded as subjects-of-a-life. He argues that all normal mammals of at least one year of age would qualify in this regard.

Whereas Singer is primarily concerned with improving the treatment of animals and accepts that, in some hypothetical scenarios, individual animals might be used legitimately to further human or non-human ends, Regan believes we ought to treat non-human animals as we would human beings. He applies the strict Kantian ideal (which Kant himself applied only to human beings) that they ought never to be sacrificed as a means to an end, and must be treated as ends in themselves.

Okay a little lopsided. I assumed there would be a difference in opinions or positions but they all were identical more or less.

The only argument regarding animals position in the universe I saw that wasn't baseless opinion was Peter Singer 2.3 regarding equal rights. It is an interesting point all humans are not equal in factual terms. Athletes could out run me without breathing hard and Stephen Hawkings has a better grasp of space-time in his sleep then I could ever hope for. The question then is why am I granted equality to these other obviously superior people. The accepted reason is because I can reason, I am self-aware, and I am sentient. Since I am debating you on this topic I can safely say that I am all these things just like I assume you are sentient as well. My argument is and has been that barring possible higher evolved apes no other animal qualifies. They can feel pain, they have memory, they can be taught tricks, cellularly they are constructed very similarly to me but in the end I can debate my existence but a *insert animal name here* can not.

[sonofccn]

If you surgically removed an ape's thumb, it wouldn't make its brain go kaput.

I didn't say it did??? All I was saying is that Apes are an interesting issue and that they do a lot of things that we'd expect from a human in a similar scenario. The ability to fasten tools or even stockpile rocks to throw as one ape was observed doing are signs that some thought runs through their mind.

[Who is like God arbour]

If you would have carefully read that thread, you would have noticed that I have only asked questions and have stated a few facts. You will nowhere find an opinion of me.

I have explicit stated that I'm only playing devil's advocate.

Do you know why?

Because, although I have very intensely studied that problem, I have no opinion I could really defend. The more I have studied that problem the more I've found that I don't know enough to form an educated opinion. That's why I was so surprised that you could so easily state your opinion as if there is no problem.

How has PunkMaister said it:

• »You cannot possibly apply the same human rights to Animals or plants. Animals and even plants could get at best some minimal rights to be protected from abuse, unlawwful cutting of forests etc. that sort of thing but there is no way to rationally apply human rights to either. Anyone that even proposes such a thing is a Nutjob in my opinion.«

He has to be more intelligent than all these professors and, what's not quite so difficult but, considering his displayed intelligence here, in my opinion still improbable, more intelligent than I am.

I can only say that I don't know what is correct and what is not correct. For me that means that I prefer to err on the side of caution than to be responsible for unethical behaviour.

For example: You have freely claimed that you know that you have free will and that your fate is decided by you. Animals don't have a free will and that's one main reason why you are superior to animals.

The following is again the summarisation of the opinions of very intelligent persons. (I think it is easier for you to read that than my gobberisch English)

• Free will in science
  
  Many, but not all, arguments for or against free will make an assumption about the truth or falsehood of determinism. The scientific method holds out the promise of being able to turn such assumptions into fact. However, such facts would still need to be combined with philosophical considerations in order to amount to an argument for or against free will. For instance, if compatibilism is true, the truth of determinism would have no effect on the question of the existence of free will. On the other hand, a proof of determinism in conjunction with an argument for incompatibilism would add up to an argument against free will.
  
  • 1. Physics
    
    Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. Current physical theories cannot resolve the question of whether determinism is true of the world, being very far from a potential Final Theory, and open to many different interpretations.
    
    Assuming that an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, one may still object that such indeterminism is for all practical purposes confined to microscopic phenomena. However, many macroscopic phenomena are based on quantum effects, for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals.
    
    A more significant question is whether the indeterminism of quantum mechanics allows for the traditional idea of free will (based on a perception of freewill - see Experimental Psychology below for distinction), when the laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles regardless of whether or not free will exists. Under the assumption of physicalism it has been argued that if an action is taken due to quantum randomness, this in itself would mean that traditional free will is absent, since such action cannot be controllable by a physical being claiming to possess such free will. Following this argument, traditional free will would only be possible under the assumption of compatibilism; in a deterministic universe, or in an indeterministic universe where the human body is for all intensive neurological purposes deterministic.
    
    Robert Kane has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom in his The Significance of Free Will and other writings.
    
    
    
    2. Genetics
    
    Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior. The view of most researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories. This point of view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions. Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of "genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of explanation with exculpation". Responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, as long as behaviour responds to praise and blame. Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.
    
    
    
    3. Neuroscience
    
    It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain (in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether the readiness potential corresponded to the felt intention to move. To determine when the subject felt the intention to move, he asked her to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position when she felt that she had the conscious will to move.
    
    Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that she had decided to move. Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of her will was only due to her retrospective perspective on the event. The interpretation of these findings has been criticized by Daniel Dennett, who argues that people will have to shift their attention from their intention to the clock, and that this introduces temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand. Consistent with this argument, subsequent studies have shown that the exact numerical value varies depending on attention. Despite the differences in the exact numerical value, however, the main finding has held.
    
    In a variation of this task, Haggard and Eimer asked subjects to decide not only when to move their hands, but also to decide which hand to move. In this case, the felt intention correlated much more closely with the "lateralized readiness potential" (LRP), an EEG component which measures the difference between left and right hemisphere brain activity. Haggard and Eimer argue that the feeling of conscious will therefore must follow the decision of which hand to move, since the LRP reflects the decision to lift a particular hand.
    
    Related experiments showed that neurostimulation could affect which hands people move, even though the experience of free will was intact. Ammon and Gandevia found that it was possible to influence which hand people move by stimulating frontal regions that are involved in movement planning using transcranial magnetic stimulation in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain. Right-handed people would normally choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. In a follow-up experiment, Alvaro Pascual-Leone and colleagues found similar results, but also noted that the transcranial magnetic stimulation must occur within 200 milliseconds, consistent with the time-course derived from the Libet experiments.
    
    Despite these findings, Libet himself does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will—he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds. According to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject (sometimes referred to as "free won't"). A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing a club several times before striking the ball. The action simply gets a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond. Max Velmans argues however that "free won't" may turn out to need as much neural preparation as "free will".
    
    
    
    4. Neurology and psychiatry
    
    There are several brain-related conditions in which an individual's actions are not felt to be entirely under his or her control. Although the existence of such conditions does not directly refute the existence of free will, the study of such conditions, like the neuroscientific studies above, is valuable in developing models of how the brain may construct our experience of free will.
    
    For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary", because they are not strictly involuntary: they may be experienced as a voluntary response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must eventually be expressed. People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics to some extent for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control which can be exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.
    
    In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful behaviours without the intention of the subject. The clinical definition requires "feeling that one limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor activity" (emphasis in original). This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will.
    
    Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.
    
    Also, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other compulsive behaviour, such as compulsive overeating and addiction, may be linked to a lack of free will. And only hints, or degrees, of this may be linked to a lack of totally free will.
    
    
    
    5. Determinism and emergent behaviour
    
    In generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is assumed not to exist. However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behaviour from the interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist. In this picture, even if the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so will be simpler than just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations.
    
    As an illustration, some strategy board games have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice rolling) occur in the game. Nevertheless, strategy games like chess and especially Go, with its simple deterministic rules, can have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, "emergentists" suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior would become predictable.
    
    Cellular automata and the generative sciences can model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy.
    
    
    
    6. Experimental psychology
    
    Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will. In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will[88] Wegner summarizes empirical evidence supporting the view that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner observes that one event is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met:
    
    1. The first event immediately precedes the second event, and
    2. The first event is consistent with having caused the second event.
    • For example, if a person hears an explosion and sees a tree fall down that person is likely to infer that the explosion caused the tree to fall over. However, if the explosion occurs after the tree falls down (i.e., the first requirement is not met), or rather than an explosion, the person hears the ring of a telephone (i.e., the second requirement is not met), then that person is not likely to infer that either noise caused the tree to fall down.
      
      Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior, and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior. However, Wegner has been able to manipulate people's thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two requirements for causal inference.[88][89] Through such work, Wegner has been able to show that people will often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have in fact not caused, and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors that they did cause. The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument for free will, Wegner has asserted that his work informs only of the mechanism for perceptions of control, not for control itself.

As you see, it is not as simple to prove that you have a free will, to prove that animals have no free will or to reason that because animals have no free will, they are less valuable than humans.

And I recommend to read that text carefully. Because, if you claim that the professors in the text above have all the same opinion, you create the impression that you have not really read that text because their opinions how to approach that problem are totally different. And that is exactly the interesting thing: That with different approaches they get the same outcome. That could be a sign that they can't be too wrong.

And yes, I understand the problem you may have. It is difficult to accept that one is not the navel of the world - as we say in Germany. That's why such considerations have a huge opposition. But feminists did also have a huge opposition and today we all know that they were correct.

[sonofccn]

If you would have carefully read that thread, you would have noticed that I have only asked questions and have stated a few facts. You will nowhere find an opinion of me.

I have explicit stated that I'm only playing devil's advocate.

I'd suggest any evidence that made you go on the fence. Asking questions only goes so far after all.

Because, although I have very intensely studied that problem, I have no opinion I could really defend. The more I have studied that problem the more I've found that I don't know enough to form an educated opinion. That's why I was so surprised that you could so easily state your opinion as if there is no problem.

I can do because I have seen no evidence to the contrary to suggest a dog is sentient. I also prefer black/white responses with as little gray as possible so I tend to either be for something or against it even if means correcting myself later.

He has to be more intelligent than all these professors and, what's not quite so difficult but, considering his displayed intelligence here, in my opinion still improbable, more intelligent than I am.

I can not speak for PunkMaister of course but just because a professor has an theory on something and I disagree with him does not make me smarter then he is. The most intelligent man in the world can still be mistaken.

I can only say that I don't know what is correct and what is not correct. For me that means that I prefer to err on the side of caution than to be responsible for unethical behaviour.

Ah the infinite diversity of man.:) I can see your position but I of course fall into I assume I'm right until proven wrong category.

For example: You have freely claimed that you know that you have free will and that your fate is decided by you. Animals don't have a free will and that's one main reason why you are superior to animals.

Free will is the only thing that makes any life valuable. If we are not but drones what value is life?

The following is again the summarisation of the opinions of very intelligent persons. (I think it is easier for you to read that than my gobberisch English)

Don't sell yourself short. Your English appears quite good. :) I'll try and digest the data you presented.

[GStone]

If you surgically removed an ape's thumb, it wouldn't make its brain go kaput.

I didn't say it did??? All I was saying is that Apes are an interesting issue and that they do a lot of things that we'd expect from a human in a similar scenario. The ability to fasten tools or even stockpile rocks to throw as one ape was observed doing are signs that some thought runs through their mind.

You were talking about opposable thumb having to manipulate their environment as an indicator, but if you remove their thumbs, it doesn't change how their brains are structured. Dogs don't have thumbs, as don't birds, but they both have mouths that they use to move things around. Octopi have tentacles that can be used to grasp objects, much like a person can.

[sonofccn]

If you surgically removed an ape's thumb, it wouldn't make its brain go kaput.

I didn't say it did??? All I was saying is that Apes are an interesting issue and that they do a lot of things that we'd expect from a human in a similar scenario. The ability to fasten tools or even stockpile rocks to throw as one ape was observed doing are signs that some thought runs through their mind.

You were talking about opposable thumb having to manipulate their environment as an indicator, but if you remove their thumbs, it doesn't change how their brains are structured. Dogs don't have thumbs, as don't birds, but they both have mouths that they use to move things around. Octopi have tentacles that can be used to grasp objects, much like a person can.

Manipulate thier enviroment as in bend it to thier will. A dog nor an octopus have not been observed using tools as apes have.

[PunkMaister]

How has PunkMaister said it:

• »You cannot possibly apply the same human rights to Animals or plants. Animals and even plants could get at best some minimal rights to be protected from abuse, unlawwful cutting of forests etc. that sort of thing but there is no way to rationally apply human rights to either. Anyone that even proposes such a thing is a Nutjob in my opinion.«

He has to be more intelligent than all these professors and, what's not quite so difficult but, considering his displayed intelligence here, in my opinion still improbable, more intelligent than I am.

I have never, nor will ever make such a claim however as sonofccn have stated even the smartest people can be wrong sometimes. The theories of one man as you presented doesn't make it true. Is just a hypothesis. Not long ago I read about some scientists that thought Bipedalism was the worst possible evolutionay end that mankind could suffer. Well is just too bad they did not give their Email addresses because I would have loved to tell them to start walking on all fours from then on!

And yes, I understand the problem you may have. It is difficult to accept that one is not the navel of the world - as we say in Germany. That's why such considerations have a huge opposition. But feminists did also have a huge opposition and today we all know that they were correct.

Navel of the world? Is that like center of the universe? It sure sounds like it and it is, neither sonofccn nor I have made such a claim, being a planet's dominant species is not same as being "The center of the universe"

The comparison between feminists and animals again points to at the very least a quasi Nihilistic point of view despite what you say to the contrary of not having an opinion.

Further more provide proof that somehow Ants are the dominant species as you have claimed before. Because if what you go by is numbers then Mosquitoes and microbes are the dominant species by that logic. But there is only one species that have tamed it's surrounding environment wherever it happens to go as we have.

[GStone]

I didn't say it did??? All I was saying is that Apes are an interesting issue and that they do a lot of things that we'd expect from a human in a similar scenario. The ability to fasten tools or even stockpile rocks to throw as one ape was observed doing are signs that some thought runs through their mind.

You were talking about opposable thumb having to manipulate their environment as an indicator, but if you remove their thumbs, it doesn't change how their brains are structured. Dogs don't have thumbs, as don't birds, but they both have mouths that they use to move things around. Octopi have tentacles that can be used to grasp objects, much like a person can.

Manipulate thier enviroment as in bend it to thier will. A dog nor an octopus have not been observed using tools as apes have.

They don't have hands. They've got a paw and a tentacle. The physical structure at the end of an appendage is not that good of an indicator. The miocene midget is the earliest ancestor we've known to be the one that would lead to the bipedalism of anatomically modern man. Its hands were much like the modern gibbon, where the thumb is not designed to oppose the fingers. Their fingers are elongated and curved, so they can better help them swing from branch to branch. With such curved fingers, they are able to pick things up. The paws of a dog are bent back, so they can provide support for the whole body.

By your standards, they can manipulate their environment, similar to how we can today, but also by your standards, they don't have the mental capacity close to what we have. They are not sentient, self-aware, etc.

[sonofccn]

You were talking about opposable thumb having to manipulate their environment as an indicator, but if you remove their thumbs, it doesn't change how their brains are structured. Dogs don't have thumbs, as don't birds, but they both have mouths that they use to move things around. Octopi have tentacles that can be used to grasp objects, much like a person can.

Manipulate thier enviroment as in bend it to thier will. A dog nor an octopus have not been observed using tools as apes have.

They don't have hands. They've got a paw and a tentacle. The physical structure at the end of an appendage is not that good of an indicator. The miocene midget is the earliest ancestor we've known to be the one that would lead to the bipedalism of anatomically modern man. Its hands were much like the modern gibbon, where the thumb is not designed to oppose the fingers. Their fingers are elongated and curved, so they can better help them swing from branch to branch. With such curved fingers, they are able to pick things up. The paws of a dog are bent back, so they can provide support for the whole body.

By your standards, they can manipulate their environment, similar to how we can today, but also by your standards, they don't have the mental capacity close to what we have. They are not sentient, self-aware, etc.

Once again a sign of intelligence is being able to use a tool to your advantage. I don't care if you use your toes, fingers or tongue. The fact that ape manipulate thier enviroment is important because of hte brain in thier skull okay? I don't see why you keep acting like I said it was thier hands that made them special. The hands are relativly unimportant beyond how they use them. Do you get it now? This side rant about hands vs dogs or what not is pointless, and immaterial to my comment. If you don't happen to believe Apes are sentient that's fine, I personaly don't feel they are but I can understand the debate.

[sonofccn]

1. Physics

Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. Current physical theories cannot resolve the question of whether determinism is true of the world, being very far from a potential Final Theory, and open to many different interpretations.

Assuming that an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, one may still object that such indeterminism is for all practical purposes confined to microscopic phenomena. However, many macroscopic phenomena are based on quantum effects, for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals.

A more significant question is whether the indeterminism of quantum mechanics allows for the traditional idea of free will (based on a perception of freewill - see Experimental Psychology below for distinction), when the laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles regardless of whether or not free will exists. Under the assumption of physicalism it has been argued that if an action is taken due to quantum randomness, this in itself would mean that traditional free will is absent, since such action cannot be controllable by a physical being claiming to possess such free will. Following this argument, traditional free will would only be possible under the assumption of compatibilism; in a deterministic universe, or in an indeterministic universe where the human body is for all intensive neurological purposes deterministic.

Robert Kane has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom in his The Significance of Free Will and other writings.

Ah physics not my strong suit and at a level several degrees above my pay grade. Standard egg head over thinking in my opinion. The gist of it appeared to be that since in theroy all possibilites could be predicted before hand we truly do not have free will, if I understood the gibberish correctly.

2. Genetics

Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior. The view of most researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories. This point of view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions. Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of "genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of explanation with exculpation". Responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, as long as behaviour responds to praise and blame. Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.

Ah genetics at least I can grasp the concept. Basic gist is concering the effects of our genes have on our behavior. All in all it is just a cop out to excuss devient behavior. We are not animals and genetic errors can be overcome except in extreme cases.

3. Neuroscience

It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain (in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether the readiness potential corresponded to the felt intention to move. To determine when the subject felt the intention to move, he asked her to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position when she felt that she had the conscious will to move.

Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that she had decided to move. Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of her will was only due to her retrospective perspective on the event. The interpretation of these findings has been criticized by Daniel Dennett, who argues that people will have to shift their attention from their intention to the clock, and that this introduces temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand. Consistent with this argument, subsequent studies have shown that the exact numerical value varies depending on attention. Despite the differences in the exact numerical value, however, the main finding has held.

In a variation of this task, Haggard and Eimer asked subjects to decide not only when to move their hands, but also to decide which hand to move. In this case, the felt intention correlated much more closely with the "lateralized readiness potential" (LRP), an EEG component which measures the difference between left and right hemisphere brain activity. Haggard and Eimer argue that the feeling of conscious will therefore must follow the decision of which hand to move, since the LRP reflects the decision to lift a particular hand.

Related experiments showed that neurostimulation could affect which hands people move, even though the experience of free will was intact. Ammon and Gandevia found that it was possible to influence which hand people move by stimulating frontal regions that are involved in movement planning using transcranial magnetic stimulation in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain. Right-handed people would normally choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. In a follow-up experiment, Alvaro Pascual-Leone and colleagues found similar results, but also noted that the transcranial magnetic stimulation must occur within 200 milliseconds, consistent with the time-course derived from the Libet experiments.

Despite these findings, Libet himself does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will—he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds. According to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject (sometimes referred to as "free won't"). A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing a club several times before striking the ball. The action simply gets a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond. Max Velmans argues however that "free won't" may turn out to need as much neural preparation as "free will".

Basic gist that under lab conditions the brain appears to make a decision before the conscious mind. If I understood the excerpt correctly it was more of a rapid response unit, the concionus mind still exercises control.

4. Neurology and psychiatry

There are several brain-related conditions in which an individual's actions are not felt to be entirely under his or her control. Although the existence of such conditions does not directly refute the existence of free will, the study of such conditions, like the neuroscientific studies above, is valuable in developing models of how the brain may construct our experience of free will.

For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary", because they are not strictly involuntary: they may be experienced as a voluntary response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must eventually be expressed. People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics to some extent for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control which can be exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.

In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful behaviours without the intention of the subject. The clinical definition requires "feeling that one limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor activity" (emphasis in original). This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will.

Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.

Also, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other compulsive behaviour, such as compulsive overeating and addiction, may be linked to a lack of free will. And only hints, or degrees, of this may be linked to a lack of totally free will.

Gist refers to how people with damaged mental systems uncontrollable do things. All it seemed to prove is that some people have faulty wiring, some due to no fault of thier own and others self-inflicted. I see no argument against free will anymore then a person with a broken spine would be.

5. Determinism and emergent behaviour

In generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is assumed not to exist. However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behaviour from the interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist. In this picture, even if the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so will be simpler than just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations.

As an illustration, some strategy board games have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice rolling) occur in the game. Nevertheless, strategy games like chess and especially Go, with its simple deterministic rules, can have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, "emergentists" suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior would become predictable.

Cellular automata and the generative sciences can model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy.

Similar to the quantum theroy. All events could be predicted before they occur by knowing all variables etc. I still don't quite understand the relationship. You can have the probability I will do something but that is all. The will to act or not to act still rests with me.

6. Experimental psychology

Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will. In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will[88] Wegner summarizes empirical evidence supporting the view that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner observes that one event is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met:


The first event immediately precedes the second event, and

The first event is consistent with having caused the second event.



For example, if a person hears an explosion and sees a tree fall down that person is likely to infer that the explosion caused the tree to fall over. However, if the explosion occurs after the tree falls down (i.e., the first requirement is not met), or rather than an explosion, the person hears the ring of a telephone (i.e., the second requirement is not met), then that person is not likely to infer that either noise caused the tree to fall down.

Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior, and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior. However, Wegner has been able to manipulate people's thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two requirements for causal inference.[88][89] Through such work, Wegner has been able to show that people will often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have in fact not caused, and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors that they did cause. The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument for free will, Wegner has asserted that his work informs only of the mechanism for perceptions of control, not for control itself.

Basic gist is the altering of perception. All this proves is our senses are imperfect and that our mind can be exploited.

As you see, it is not as simple to prove that you have a free will

I already told you, I know I have free will. If you choose not to that is your choice but I alone decide my fate.

to prove that animals have no free will

They don't. They are slaves to thier instincts.

to reason that because animals have no free will

The emperical evidence of zero point zero lower based animals displaying reasoning ability precludes them from being able to reason regardless of the existence of free will or not.

they are less valuable than humans.

They are less valuble as we all have shown. A human is self-aware, can reason and at the very least has the simulation of free will. The animals have not.

And I recommend to read that text carefully. Because, if you claim that the professors in the text above have all the same opinion, you create the impression that you have not really read that text because their opinions how to approach that problem are totally different.

The previous text did all have the same opinion. That animals and humans are equal they just had slightly differnt methods are reaching the same destination. All based upon the same faulty assumptions. As for these texts they cover a wide range of of opinions and fields and no they do not have the same opinion mostly because several of them have nothing to really do with free will.

And that is exactly the interesting thing: That with different approaches they get the same outcome.

Actually they range from this might mean there is no will if my theroy which we can not yet verify is correct to I can alter the perception of my test subject to some people curse against thier will. This is the evidence that swayed you?

That could be a sign that they can't be too wrong.

The work you cited does not collaberate that statment when they don't even know for sure what thier results mean.

And yes, I understand the problem you may have. It is difficult to accept that one is not the navel of the world - as we say in Germany. That's why such considerations have a huge opposition. But feminists did also have a huge opposition and today we all know that they were correct.

I truly do not know what to say. You appear to have fully jumped onto this theroy without thinking it through, despite basing it in part on predicting the future you appear blind to what this theroy would mean if it was in fact correct. The destruction of the human race as thier existence becomes a bad joke. Why work or do anything? Your fate is preordained from the cosmos if something is to happen it will happen. Humanity would shuffle off the mortal coil binging on every vice and leave nothing but bloated corpses in thier wake. The really sad part it still wouldn't make a person equal to a *spit* animal. Do you really think a dog spends vaste sums of money, time and resources proving that life is a mirage? All you have done is proven how we are superior to our four legged friends which I find deeply ironic.

As I said WILGA in the end each man must answer the question for himself. This isn't something a scientist can help you with, much less with unconfirmed theroys regarding a possible interpation of the data. When you look into the mirror to shave every morning and you look into the eyes of the man staring back you decide. Embrace your life WILGA or assume it is all an illusian to trick you but only you can. I couldn't live not being the master of my fate but if you want that I hope you can.

[sonofccn]

Not long ago I read about some scientists that thought Bipedalism was the worst possible evolutionay end that mankind could suffer. Well is just too bad they did not give their Email addresses because I would have loved to tell them to start walking on all fours from then on!

Well to be fair being biped is a very difficult arragment but it was the one that allowed us to take control. It may be flawed in a looking backwards sort of way, where eggheads ignore survival threats or other factors while designing their "perfect" organism that could never had developed the tools needed to become the human race as we know it, but I think the trade offs are worth it.

[Who is like God arbour]

• Wow, your arguments are so conclusive, I don't know, why I haven't seen this before. I don't know how I or one of the other professors could argue against such well founded theory. Theory? What the hell - that's not only a theory, it's fact. There is no doubt any more that your opinion reflects the truth. After all, if it wouldn't be the truth, the philosophical consequences for the status of mankind would be devastating - and that's not something we would want and reality has to adhere to our free will.
  I have no choice than to concede that I will never convince you and bow before you in humble adoration. Thank you that you have let me partake in your wisdom. Hallelujah, I'm enlightened.