You don't have Free Will.

Originally posted by TheBandit795

Originally posted by Cabin
The only way to not be influenced is by simply being extremely analytical and rational, taking everything by numbers and nothing more,

That's a conscious decision, which is inferior to a subconscious decision. Your conscious will to do anything, any action will almost always be overpowered by your subconscious will. It's just a lot more powerful.

Why inferior. If you can change things with your conscious decision it doesn't matter if it is inferior or whatever.Conscious decision is your free will. Subconsciously your body wants to keep you alive as long as possible.You can do nothing against it when you are unconscious. You can still commit suicide when you are conscious. If this is not your free will than you tell me. The same with habits, addictions, perceptions.

Originally posted by sulaw
reply to post by TheBandit795

 

Sure 1 day doesn't make a trend. And it takes the average human 7 times before one fully understands. Layman Example: Upon burning there hands on the griddle over and over after the 7th time that person realized "HEY" that's hot don't do that"

Wow sulaw! I am not kidding, I heard a Catholic apologist on Catholic radio say the same thing Monday. I am not going to feel bad or frustrated anymore repeating the teachings of the faith and stating again the benefit of prophecy at ATS.


God bless you,


colbe

I am with those who believe God gave us Free Will. This may be my third or fourth post saying the same.

Look, Our Lord says it here in a recent message from Heaven.

www.pelianito.stblog.com...

April 21, 2013

...The hour of mercy has been prolonged for the sake of sinners, but it will not be extended indefinitely. In fact, it is almost at its end. Now is the time to re-double your efforts at prayer and sacrifice. The time is coming when all mankind will have to choose—are you with me or against me? Pray my children! That day will be wonderful and terrible. If you knew, you would not stop praying. Give me souls! I thirst!...


p.s. Jesus is referring to the divine "awakening" (Rev 6:15-17, ! Cor 3:13). Catholics know it as the Great Warning. Every soul on the earth is going to be shown the Truth by God. Everyone will experience as part of this "awakening", a NDE like life review. Don't wait, do it now. First, examine your life if it has been a long time (use the 10 Commandments as a guide). Ask God the Holy Spirit to help you. Then with true contrition, confess the serious (mortal) sins of your life to God. Catholics have to go to Confession.

We will not feel the pain of seeing CONFESSED sins during our life review.

Originally posted by TheBandit795

Originally posted by applesthateatpeople
reply to post by TheBandit795

 

I said that with a title like "you have no free will" it is you that has explaining to do.

Which I already did in the first sentence in the post.

I also said I was unimpressed with what you had so far.

You really had problems understanding my post.

And reading it.

reply to post by applesthateatpeople


I didn't bother commenting on that, because I couldn't care less if you were impressed or not.

reply to post by TheBandit795


You failed to respond to my previous post.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


Patience, I don't have the time to be posting often.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by TheBandit795

 

So the conscious mind doesn't constitute as free will? Especially given that the majority of the cases provided in the article you linked were a result of subconscious sabotage, I think you'll have difficulty proving your case on that one.

Not by itself, it needs the cooperation of the subconscious mind to act freely. For example. Without cheating or lying to yourself. Close your eyes and visualize the letter "A" for as long as you can. Unless you're very well trained, it won't take long for you to be thinking about something completely different than just the letter "A". If we had complete free will from the conscious mind only, we should be able to see the letter "A" and nothing else in our mind for hours on end.

Additionally, just because there is an antagonist doesn't negate the existence of a protagonist. Free will exists whether resistance exists or not. You seem to be suggesting that just because free will doesn't always win out over psychological programming, we may as well count it out completely.

No we can't count it out completely, but we should conclude that it doesn't only depend on the conscious mind.

No. It doesn't work that way. Sometimes free will operates exactly as we expect it to, and sometimes our blindspots get the best of us. This doesn't make free will any less effective given the right circumstances and psychological stimuli.

We've seen plenty of examples of people being presented with two equally hefty choices. And when it was easier to do the wrong thing, they did the right thing and ended up changing lives. Wouldn't you call that free will?

It depends, they still need cooperation from the subconscious to "do the right thing".

Another thing: Is it possible to make conscious, rational choices during a "fight or flight" response??

reply to post by TheBandit795

Not by itself, it needs the cooperation of the subconscious mind to act freely. For example. Without cheating or lying to yourself. Close your eyes and visualize the letter "A" for as long as you can. Unless you're very well trained, it won't take long for you to be thinking about something completely different than just the letter "A". If we had complete free will from the conscious mind only, we should be able to see the letter "A" and nothing else in our mind for hours on end.

Interesting. Allow me to pose a question to you: your computer, while you are using it, acts by the influence of your decisions. Its functions are determined by your interests. This could be compared to the conscious mind, as these processes are visibly running and interacting as you engage in your various activities using the device. You are aware of these processes, and you are controlling them.

Now let's focus on another aspect - the background processes. At any given moment during your browsing, there's at least a dozen or so processes running in the background that enable the programs you are utilizing to function effectively, as well as monitoring the condition of the programs and the hardware and various other utilities necessary to keep your services available to you. While these processes are not running as a result of your effort, nor are they at work by your bidding, they are a part of the computer in that without them, the chances of malfunction or unaddressed difficulties increases substantially.

Are these background processes a necessary supplement to your activities on your computer, or are they a mechanism with an entirely different purpose perhaps contrary to your intentions? While they may not exactly operate parallel to your activities, their function is to ensure the preservation and management of your computer's "conscious" processes.

Is this not a fair assessment of the function of our subconscious?

It depends, they still need cooperation from the subconscious to "do the right thing".

Another thing: Is it possible to make conscious, rational choices during a "fight or flight" response??

Some would argue that our gut instinct is our subconscious telling us to do the right thing. As to your question, see my above response.

Originally posted by Xaphan

Originally posted by galadofwarthethird
Yes but there are other factors at work. Such as the factor that the justice system is not really there to dispense justice but more so there as a means of eliminating and containing those that do not fit the mold. So in the overall scope of things its just protecting the overall illusion.

Yeah, that's a good point. But my point was more to do with the fact that western civilization has become/is becoming so politically correct and liberal that whenever somebody did something that defied convention it would just become a shouting match of "But it wasn't my fault! Science says so!"

Instead of pleading 'insanity' people would just start pleading 'lack of free will'.

Only if they had free will they would be able to do that. However they do not, the point is mute the very existence of courthouses in fact of this world refutes the theory of free will. People do what they will do, there are variations there in, but that is all. You are free to chose, but you are not free to not choose, you must choose one or the other so in essence you are not free and do not have free will, you but have some choices to make on the paths that were set out before you.

reply to post by Mizzijr

Yes, yes you are right. But that doesn't mean you can not become a 'mover' in this big game of "Cause and Effect". If you become a 'causer' you become a ruler of other people or things in your OWN space.

Yes you can! You can even move heaven and earth to suit your will. However what makes you think even doing that means you have free will?

You, my friend can cause a revolution. You can cause anything you want, although you must obey the law and the law must be used on higher planes of causation in order to cause anything to be effected on the lower. You must climb the ladder. Remember, we are within the All, although too.. The All is within us.

Like I said it just depends on what you call free will. All that you said can be interpreted as proof of free will, but it can also be interpreted as prof that there is no free will.

Now I may be completely missing the point. If everybody here is talking about doing things on a whim at any moment. Then no, we are not free. We are all bound by natural laws within the All. How can we be any more free while escaping death at the same time?

A question that many before have had...How to escape samsara? or life? or death? or whatever you want to call it, or better yet how to escape the law of cause and effect of this existence? I am pretty sure I know how, and there are some who have escaped this place, the only question is why? But for the majority death is freedom, but even death may be an illusion.

So ya free will! Well its kind of like that freedom thing written on a piece of paper some are always going on about...Merely and illusion and interpretation, it practically just goes in circles and arguing about it is an exercise in futility. If you have to make rules that say your free that just means your not free, and if you have to make rules to convince yourself that you have free will, that to is just prof that you do not have free will. Yet at the core it is the question many and all have tangled with.

How can we be more free while escaping death at the same time???? Many have escaped death, very few have escaped life... And of those that have even fewer came back. But I think the question you want to ask yourself is.

How can we be more free without constant trampling on others freedoms, so as to not cause the constant turmoil brought about the causes of those effects?

reply to post by galadofwarthethird


You are complicating it. If you are able to pick your nose should you choose to do so, you have free will. If you decide to throw open a window and scream obscenities at the world, and you follow through with doing so, you have free will. If you decide to empty your bank account and toss it all at the feet of the first bum you come across, and you do so, you have free will. If you decide to take your great grandfather's service revolver from the attic and put it to your temple and pull the trigger, and you do so, you have just exercised your last act of free will.

If you have a choice, and you exercise your power to make that choice, you have free will. It's that simple.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


Sorry for taking so long. (Mother's day, family outings, chores etc... )

I semi agree with you about the subconscious resembling the underlying processes and services of an operating system. They are a necessary component, and without them the user cannot do anything on the pc. Let say you want a program to communicate online, you have a network card (physically) installed but the program is not working because the driver has malfunctioned. You would either have to reinstall the driver or upgrade to a better version.

That sounds similar to psychological reversal. Yet the pc does need a conscious operator (a human) to do the installation or at least to click on the .exe or .msi file. Perhaps it's the same with the conscious mind. Perhaps there is a part of us that goes beyond the conscious and subconscious. Who knows.

reply to post by TheBandit795


I understand what you're trying to suggest, but I think that that alone does not invalidate free will, it just suggests underlying complexities we are not familiar with. In other words, free will does exist, it's just not as simple as we imagine because our mind is not as simple as we imagine. Millions of messages exchanged every hour...and just like a computer, if we had to consciously manage all of those background processes, we would be zombies because we wouldn't be able to spare any time for actually moving around and talking.

Obviously, if given the choice, we wouldn't want to stop our biological functions, so there's no need to worry about having a choice there. So to a certain extent, we have to dedicate certain tasks and functions to a particular section of the brain for automated management, allowing us the FREEDOM to focus on more conscious tasks like walking and talking. And that's where our free will comes into play.

reply to post by TheBandit795


Thank you for info.

reply to post by AfterInfinity

Not overcomplicated in the least, in fact it is merely the simplistic version. In fact in this thing like in everything else it is merely a matter of perspective an overall grasp of the situation. In free will you have it as long as your ignorant of the above and overall aspect of it, and you do not have it if your knowledgeable of the above and overall aspect of it all.

And people tend to see what they see, that is...Simple people see everything as simple, complicated people see everything as complicated, trustful people see everything and everyone as being trustful, and deceptive people see a deception in everything and everyone. It is merely and outlook on things brought upon by there perspectives a mirror to there souls. Free will is pretty much the same sort of thing, sure you have it. Just don't cross the boundaries laid out in front of you or then you just may have to put your theory to the test. And if and when that happens, I am afraid your theory will fail.


But again, it all just depends on what you call free will. In none of those examples if it came down to it, doing any of them would be constituted as free will. Choices ya, and even in that you would have little choice. But free will, that may be the wrong word for it. In error.

If you are able to pick your nose should you choose to do so, you have free will.

OK that makes little sense. But how about this lets say you got a really big bugger and its sticking out, now you have the choice of picking it, or you have the choice of leaving it there for you and everybody to enjoy looking at it...Which choice and exercise of free will...Will people chose? Will they chose to let it hang out so everybody can see it while they go about there daily routines, or will they pick and remove it if they could? If anything if they would want to break the mold and exercise there free will away from what the normal would be they wont pick it and walk around the whole day with a big ass bugger sticking out there nose. In that case 99.999 of people will pick that bugger if they so could. In that situation like most it would be instinctual, habitual, and unconscious gesture brought about by social group outlook on hygiene.

If you decide to throw open a window and scream obscenities at the world, and you follow through with doing so, you have free will.

You could, so why don't many people do it? Because there is no need, or because they don't want to sound nutty, in both or any case they really do not have any choice in it. And if they chose to scream out there window for the fun of if, well go ahead. In fact go out to your window right now and do it, scream as loud as you can. Free will and all...In fact do it film it and put it on youtube, just so you can prove you have exercised your free will.

If you decide to empty your bank account and toss it all at the feet of the first bum you come across, and you do so, you have free will.

Unless your supper rich and have a few bank accounts, and decided to do that, but the majority of people not only will not, but can not. After all they got bills to pay and such. In fact even if your supper rich and could afford to lose a bank account you still will likely not do it. Saying you have free will to do all of that or any of the above is like saying you could win the mega millions...Sure there is a chance, but there is also a 1 in a 10 million chance that it wont happen. The majority of people living on paycheck to paycheck can not afford to do that, and those that can...Well not likely that its going to happen lets just say.

If you decide to take your great grandfather's service revolver from the attic and put it to your temple and pull the trigger, and you do so, you have just exercised your last act of free will.

OK, well then do it. Go find a revolver and pull the trigger exercise your right to free will. Then we will see how far that whole free will thing gets you. In fact if it came to that then chances are it is most likely not under your own will that you would be taking your own life.

All that you said has absolutely nothing to do with free will, it was just a bunch of gibberish you put down in sentences. I mean it could be an expression of free will. But then again under what categorization and specification and circumstances? Now you have two choices you have the choice of responding back to this post, or the choice of not responding back to it...Exercise your free will as you so choose.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


I think you summed up my whole point in this sentence..

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by TheBandit795

 

In other words, free will does exist, it's just not as simple as we imagine because our mind is not as simple as we imagine.

reply to post by TheBandit795

Originally posted by TheBandit795
reply to post by AfterInfinity

 

I think you summed up my whole point in this sentence..

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by TheBandit795

 

In other words, free will does exist, it's just not as simple as we imagine because our mind is not as simple as we imagine.

No, I don't believe I did. Your point was:

We don't have free will.

My point was:

Free will is complicated.

One point denies the existence of it, the other point supports the existence of it. I disproved your point. Big difference. Not to be a jerk about it, but in all technicality, that's exactly what just happened.

I always ponder on this.

I mean, for me personally, the argument for no free will seems fairly logical right? Think about it like this; from the moment you were born you had 0 control over the course of events that ran after that, and even by the time you had 'consciously' developed enough to seem to make decisions - the past many years of conditioning that happened subconsciously will make the decision for you when you have an apparent choice of 2 or more options.

Even if you did have full control over the decisions, you often have almost 0 control over what the actual question of choice is, and its usually a product of a long chain of events that at any individual moment did not seem to be leading to anything. Just the fact you woke up at a certain time on a certain day decides in a way where you will be the following year (for example), if you get what I mean.

How many times in your life did you look back a year, or even 6 months, and think why the # did I do/say/act like that? Just the fact that feeling happens suggests at that point in the past you may have thought you were completely conscious of your actions and decisions but in retrospect you really weren't.

Recently though, I've been thinking of it in a slightly less deterministic way. I believe different people operate on different levels of consciousness, i.e some people are more driven by this unconscious ego-based decision making system than others. I also think some substances (like pot) have the capability to actually LIFT YOU out of this ego-based way of thinking temporarily and allow you to analyze yourself, your actions, your thoughts and even your past in a completely new way - it is often high that I get those past flashbacks and moments of retrospective illumination. This is also why people who smoke TOO MUCH can completely 'fall out' of the 'flow' of life, because they become so conscious of all their actions and desires that it becomes almost unnatural in a way and you become too introspective in relation to others around you.

I also think KNOWLEDGE opens your mind to this complex, and the more you are aware of the way your own brain works, the way you are influenced e.t.c the less it will work and the more you will WAKE UP in terms of understanding your ego and your own true self (the observer, the master). Our consciousness is meant to RULE this body and have complete mastery over it - that is almost like the point of us as humans in my opinion - whether by intent/chance of nature or by intent/chance of an intelligent designer, the possibility for a 'soul'/consciousness to experience this universe via an extremely refined and optimal tool we call our bodies.

I honestly believe that we are not all DESTINED to be controlled by our subconscious auto-pilot ego and a massive part of today's problems with society is the fact that not only have we all been part of a massive campaign to keep us in the ego-driven flow of living but to also manipulate coverly what our ego desires/wants and how it acts in certain situations. This is probably the basis for many of these MSM/NWO theories - because its bloody evident if you've met enough people in your lifetime to see which are operating almost like robots and which aren't, and you then see patterns in those that are like robots and realise they are really moulds.

So yes, while I agree and like this post massively, I believe there is more to it still. Perhaps, at any given time we exist on a calculated timeline based on the sum of all our actions and personal events - in relation to space AND time, and thus our specific fate is determined for as long as we stay on that path, but when we become more consciously aware of ourselves and our lives and choices we can through sheer will change the pathway we exist on drastically. This way of thinking gets tricky here though because then other peoples actions would have to change in relation to yours to keep your new 'fate' in tact everytime you did accomplish this act of changing your deterministic fate through an apparent act of 'free will'.

A lot of people still believe in complete free will though which surprises me. When I say this to people they often respond with 'but when I have two options I consciously choose one' yet miss the point that those two choices and their decision was pre-determined by the cumulation of their past. It's very counter-intuitive I guess.

I definitely think we can achieve a higher mastery over our actions though, and one thing that makes me sure of this is the fact that I see many people say on Facebook and such; "I can't sleep because the voice in my head won't shut up". Everytime I see this is scares/worries me slightly because from my perspective I have (now at least) an almost complete mastery of my thoughts, my thoughts are ONE with me, I think my thoughts and I stop thinking or change what I'm thinking about at will - I don't 'listen' to my thoughts - that is a massive suggestion that your own ego or subconscious is running you rather than you running it.

Peace

The knowledge to the exemplar of freewill are circumstances where your will to act and impedences are apparant - if you cannot swim and you are in deep water - to the obvious fact that you are aware that swimming is possible, you know that you cannot swim although if you could you would make a choice as to the alternative.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


If you look only at the title of my thread, then you can say I flat out denied that we have free will.