Free Will or the Illusion of freedom.

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

That make any sense?


More than one might think.

a reply to: Abednego

You have free will to accept, reject evaluate/study and come to conclusion of the reality you have been taught or told about.
And how you will respond to it...

The exterior observer(s) of another individuals reality can only produce subjective analysis of the observeds actual or objective outcomes within objective Existence.

NAMASTE*******

originally posted by: Plotus
Abednego

I am curious, what are your thoughts ?

I think that everything is already written, but (there is always a but) there are instances in where we can break that. Is like a game, the outcome of the game is based on the choices you made. But if you know the "code" of that game you can win.

The only way we have free will is if we live on an Island by ourselves. I do not have free will, I live in Society, I am married, I have kids, We own cats. I have taxes to pay and insurance to pay for, I have to shovel the snow and plow if I want to go anywhere. Even nature trumps our free will. Even microbes have control over what we do.

Free will is a joke. Even on the Island I mentioned, we are still forced to eat or die which means we have to fish or grow something to survive. Our only choice with free will is our choice of living or dying. I kind of like living, it is interesting, I will have plenty of time to be dead later on.

i think every choice you could make you have already made and your current experience is just one out of an infinite number of experiences you are experiencing right now. to me free will exists in a way yet it's not about individual choice but more that you've made every choice possible. all of us are a single entity experiencing ourselves infinitely without awareness while in physical form, imaging reality for our own eternal amusement within the infinite void to pass the time.

originally posted by: the2ofusr1
a reply to: Abednego

I think suicide is the greatest expression of free will .

Not if you are memory wiped by something and sent right back to the same life by something. Until you find a better way.
Seems controlled?

Karma & common sense.

Jesus said "Do to others as you would have them do to you."

Choice: do nasty things to others and hell comes to collect nasty souls. Justice.
Treat others kindly and that kindness will come back 10-fold.

a reply to: Abednego
Quite possibly. The current trend is the use of algorithm's to predict behavior and suggest areas of behavior.

Something I posted somewhere else a while ago....

I am 100% convinced that free will is just an illusion and that all existence is predetermined. As I fall a sleep I occasionally think of weird little ideas and instead of going off to the land of nod I often find myself deep in thought experiments for an hour or two.

On one of these occasions I was contemplating life and intelligence, as any normal sane person does at 2am in the morning and that is when I had the brain fart!.

Now this will take a leap of imagination and would most probably need a million more years of technical evolution to prove, but just close your eyes and imagine.

Imagine that you have a camera, only this cameras is so advanced that it can take a snapshot of all existence at that very split second. You could zoom into the image taken to such a degree that you would be able to see the exact placement of the electron as it spins around an atom.

If you were to take two snapshots with this camera a nano second apart and you would be able to extrapolate the movement, direction and state of all matter in existence.

Now imagine we had a computer that was capable of processing all the information within these two images. This computer is so powerful it can calculate where all matter will be in the next step from the two images. Using the software on this computer we are able to speed up the steps past the point of the present and we are now able to tell where all matter will be at any given point in the future.
So what's the gist of all this? It means, to me anyway, that we are nothing more than a chemical and electrical reactions that started at the beginning of existence.

We may think that we can alter the path of matter by just simply changing our mind and walking in the opposite direction or just staying home when we were meant to go out, nope sorry. All those decisions that you think you make and have influence over are really not freewill at all. They are just the result of chemical and electrical reactions within your brain that were set in motion at the beginning of time .

We are just a little bunch of matter that has come together for a brief moment in time as it continues to follow the path set out for it during the big bang..

Ha ha ha.......then there are those that suppose this is all a simulation...

originally posted by: Subaeruginosa
a reply to: Abednego

Free will and destiny are two different things, imo...

Case in point, I'll personally always be miserable and will never succeed in life... that's my destiny... But, I have the freewill to either just give up now, or just do my time on this little blue dot and ride it out till the end...

My freewill gives me the ability to say, "I don't care if I'm welcome or not"... because I choose to stay til destiny decides to take me out and I literally collapse from cancer or some other horrible illness.

You are right they are different.
But still they are govern by the choices you made. So in some sense our lives are predetermined.

a reply to: Tagz

I Like That... yet I still think we are 'Sentient' ..... able to produce independent thought.

a reply to: Tagz

I would not have said better.

a reply to: Plotus

I'll give you an example. And is just an example. Have nothing to do with religion.

God said to Adam and Eve you can eat from every fruit in the garden, except from that tree. But still he put the tree in there. So God knew the possibility of them eating the fruit was real. Even thought He said "DO NOT EAT FROM THAT TREE", He gave them the option to eat from the tree right at the moment He decided to put the tree in there.

Even without the serpent telling them to eat the option was there.

And yes we can be sentient.

a reply to: Ophiuchus 13

Sounds like Shintoism. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

look, you got what, 70 odd years on this world?....you have a brain, so get off your ass and make your own world, don't let others try and define the way your going to live, or the way you should feel.....be confident in your own intelligence.

originally posted by: the2ofusr1
a reply to: Abednego

Your title has "free will" and freedom in it . These are two different things . When someone holds a gun to your head they probably give you a choice to make . "wallet" or die .

From where I'm from, if someone put a gun in my head, I'm already dead even if I give them the wallet.

The thing is that to get into that position a series of decisions were made. When? same day, 2 days ago, a week before. Who knows.

originally posted by: jimmyx
look, you got what, 70 odd years on this world?....you have a brain, so get off your ass and make your own world, don't let others try and define the way your going to live, or the way you should feel.....be confident in your own intelligence.

Sound advice

originally posted by: Abednego
a reply to: Plotus
Even without the serpent telling them to eat the option was there.

Well, unless we are to believe that "god" is more feeble minded than your average mortal human being... Then he already knew full well that the serpent would tempt them with that forbidden fruit and he also knew full well that adam and eve would enviably accept it... he also would have been well aware that they would be hitting that forbidden fruit intravenously, within the month.

We humans are weak and predictable like that... lol.

a reply to: Subaeruginosa

Just a matter of time.