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Logical Fallacies, Valid, or just opinions?

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Original Question

What do you make of the following argument which was a response I got regarding the Free Will debate:


 



There's no such thing as free will. Like all myths, there is no direct evidence of its existence and it is simply an assumption which has been passed down through the generations. The Uncertainty Principle is a quantum theory with no perceivable effect on the everyday world, and it has absolutely nothing to do with free will. As your extract explains, it concerns the fact that certain data pairings in quantum physics cannot be accurately measured.


Conversely, Einstein's theory of general relativity outright refutes the idea of free will, because it necessitates a universe where time is not absolute, but rather local to the environment. This means what you think of as the present is actually the past to another random observer, and since we know that past events cannot be changed, their outcome must already be determined. 



I think there is a possible strawman here as well as the implication that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence. And I feel there may be others. What do you see? BTW, the reasoning for the strawman was because of this excerpt I point out:



Uncertainty principle, also called Heisenberg uncertainty principle or indeterminacy principle, statement, articulated (1927) by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, that the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory. The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature. www.britannica.com/scienc. . .



 

Comments on Question

It depends on what you take as a series of claims, and what as an implication of claims, that is, as a representation that one claim follows from another.
The second paragraph, related to Einstein, is not clear to me, and abounds in vague terms used in a particular context determined by the author.

Answers

4

In the Free Will debate, I almost always see equivocation fallacies being made due to confusion about what the other is defining free will to be. Because there are many different types of free will such as Compatibilism, Hard Determinism, Libertarianism, and Hard Incompatibilism to name a few. 


So, I would make sure that you both define what you mean by Free Will first, as a lot of misunderstandings can derive from there. 

Sounds like pseudo-intellectual. A bunch of Technical things strung together to make the person seem smart and know what they are talking about.



  1. "The Uncertainty Principle is a quantum theory with no perceivable effect on the everyday world, and it has absolutely nothing to do with free will. As your extract explains, it concerns the fact that certain data pairings in quantum physics cannot be accurately measured."

    I'm not a physicist (I'm an electrical engineer) but in the university we had a (light) course about quantum physics and from what I remember the above argument is valid. Actually it's those who use Quantum Physics to support pseudo-science who are fallacious, i.e quantum physics fallacy Again from what I remember, the "uncertainty principle" is what britannica briefly states. So no fallacy there.Usually I hear using the quantum entanglement from "spiritual" people who try to convince us that people can influence one another by the power of thought only and that if you think something then others will think the same or behave the same or something (they never really clarify what those people say).


  2. "There's no such thing as free will. Like all myths, there is no direct evidence of its existence and it is simply an assumption which has been passed down through the generations."

    You only can prove that something exist, not that something does not exist. But I think it's the same as saying "There's no such thing as Zeus or Superman". Science has never proved that free will exists, so I think the claim that "there is no direct evidence of its existence" is true. The rest "it is simply an assumption which has been passed down through the generations." is a possible historic explanation about why that belief is still present to our day. I think that explanation is as valid as any other claim of something being a myth that is still believed by some people.


  3. "Conversely, Einstein's theory of general relativity outright refutes the idea of free will, because it necessitates a universe where time is not absolute, but rather local to the environment. This means what you think of as the present is actually the past to another random observer, and since we know that past events cannot be changed, their outcome must already be determined." 
    This I guess would be the scientific reasoning that would disprove the "free will" concept. Again from university, we had some exposure to the SPECIAL Relativity theory which as I remember measured how time is translated in relation to the speed of the system (I don't know much about the GENERAL Relativity though) and as with quantum physics it is too fucked up to really grasp it and be logically convinced about its validity, but physicists are certain that it is - actually it is mathematically consistent, and I know it has been verified by the fact that clocks in satellites (which they move in high speeds relative to us) show a different time (as if the time slows down as the speed increases) than the clocks here on earth. Just I said, these theories are against day-to-day experience and they seem crazy but have been proved and accepted by the scientific community. Now, since I don't know what "free will" is and I don't have a firm grasp of the general relativity theory, I cannot evaluate the argument. BUT that doesn't mean it is invalid or that the arguer is trying to trick us with scientific jargon. Simply these theories are not easy to  explain, they have very difficult math behind them and they are actually counter-intuitive.


Let’s see here. I usually start by checking your premises, so you don’t get ahead of yourself. The first sentence here is the first premise: “There’s no such thing as free will.” That kills everything based on this premise. 


Any attempt to refute free will requires its use. Ask your friend how he concluded there is no such thing as free will without using free will. 


The issue goes one step further. Knowledge is the correct identification of the facts of reality. If one cannot identify facts presented (no free will), then knowledge is impossible—including his claim there is no such thing as free will.


As to fallacies, I at least start with argumentum verbosium, Dunning-Kruger, Ad Fidentia, moral high ground fallacy (he “knows” there is no free will, while you do not know what he knows), onus probandi (he declared the proposition there is no free will, he now bears the burden of proving it—and further unsupported allegations are not evidence), and the Gish gallop should be on your list.  

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