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pauladaballa777
Who says it's a big concept? You control your own actions. Seems pretty simple to me. You can be influenced by past experiences if you let them influence you. You have a pessimistic view of human nature. I just chose to drink chocolate milk instead of orange juice even though I know that orange juice is better for me. Chocolate milk sounded better. I feel like I had some control over that decision.
All of our lives have been pre determined since the beginning of time
This is a scary thing for folks and "the establishment" to accept
pauladaballa777
Who says it's a big concept? You control your own actions. Seems pretty simple to me. You can be influenced by past experiences if you let them influence you. You have a pessimistic view of human nature. I just chose to drink chocolate milk instead of orange juice even though I know that orange juice is better for me. Chocolate milk sounded better. I feel like I had some control over that decision.
ChaoticOrder
reply to post by g146541
This is a scary thing for folks and "the establishment" to accept
On the contrary, I'm sure the establishment would love us to believe we have no free will.
if people truly knew they could not stave off fate, they would become emboldened.
You are free to live your life unafraid!
captainradon
reply to post by Skaffa
I am no expert on this, but it seems to me that free will is usually associated with moral choices, that is, Right vs. Wrong, or consideration of others over the Self.
Maybe the Good/Evil decision is actually the only true choice that humans can actually make of their own volition, ie, freely. This ability may even be the divine spark which sets us humans (and other intelligent beings) apart from the rest of nature.
Of course, there are many external forces which try to influence the final decision either way, but if you peel these away, you get to a point, deep in the psyche, where the brain has to make a totally balanced, knife-edged choice: to do Good, or to do Bad.
Is this final choice already determined ? - triggered by a sort of "butterfly effect" welling-up from the subconscious, where the butterfly in this case is some random quantum fluctuation in some neural connection somewhere in the brain?
ChaoticOrder
reply to post by Skaffa
All of our lives have been pre determined since the beginning of time
So in your opinion everything you have written in this thread was determined at the moment of the big bang or perhaps before that? You do realize if that's true then we cannot technically blame rapists and murderers for their actions because they were destined to do the things they do? Fortunately though, physics says you are wrong. Quantum mechanics is acausal, meaning things can happen without a direct cause which led up to that thing happening.
I wrote a thread very much related to this subject not long ago:
Determinism and Consciousnessedit on 20/12/2013 by ChaoticOrder because: (no reason given)
ChaoticOrder
reply to post by g146541
You are free to live your life unafraid!
If I knew I had no power to change the things that were going to happen to me I would be extremely paranoid about those things and extremely disheartened that I had no ability to change them.
Free will could be real, but i think it would only represent a tiny fraction of the cause,
barely having any effect.
But you do! And most likely you will change them.
The only difference is that you will never actually make a choice.
ChaoticOrder
reply to post by Skaffa
It doesn't matter how large or small the degree of our free will is, if we have any free will than that allows us to make our own decisions to a certain extent (regardless of how much our decisions are being influenced by other factors).
This is another contradictory statement. If I cannot make free choices then I cannot change anything because my entire future is set in stone and there's nothing I can do to change it because I cannot do anything I wasn't predestined to do.
his free will would have had very little say his actions.
How could you not change anything? could you not eat an apple?
ChaoticOrder
reply to post by Skaffa
As long as he has enough free will to stop himself from doing what he knows is wrong then that's enough. And I think we do have enough free will to prevent ourselves from doing things we know are wrong. We just need to pay attention to that part of us which allows us to think before we act, instead of just listening to our instincts and emotions.
ChaoticOrder
reply to post by Skaffa
If I have no free will than I ate that apple because I was destined to eat that apple from the start of time. You said it yourself. If I can choose to do something which was not determined at the start of time then that means I have free will.
You are talking about knowing, thinking, instincts and emotions.
All these things are only affected by experience / predetermined human behavior.
Where lies the problem? Is destiny really such a bad thing? Why?
Free will / Causality.. Does it really change anything?