Do they pray for evil and evil people to be allowed to live and be saved?
Perhaps i missed that somehow…
Detrop…where ya at dawg…
Help a brother out will ya?
Have you heard from Dunamis lately?
i rather miss him and his big words sometimes…LOL
So, if we are just an illusion to ourselves, does that mean that the world we see around us is just an illusion? Sounds to me like this is the only choice you’re presenting us with. 
David R:
Doesn’t exactly answer my question- it was a mere curiousity. Do you really know a lot of people who pray for ‘the destruction of all evil’, or the destruction of everyone who disobeys God? In my personal experience, people are busy praying for sick relatives, financial security, and wisdom in difficult moral situations.
Whether or not you believe free will to be an illusion depends on your philosophical stance.
I’m much more inclined to take a logical positive stance on the construction of the mind. The mind is merely the collection of previously acquired mental perceptions that we have accumulated since we became “conscious” at some point in the womb. Indicators of this are the fact that infants still in the womb can register what is occuring outside of the womb and these perceptions affect choices in later life. This is why people grow up to “become like one’s parents”. One’s personality is an accumulation of everything one has experienced since birth. You’re an athiest/Christian/Muslim/whatever due to 1) religious/irreligious upbringing or 2) pro-/anti- religious experiences. I’ve found that a lot of people only believe what they believe due to the emotional attachment they place on it. One can be a Christian because of the emotional attachment one places on the title due to past experiences, not due to reasoned argument. This comes all the way down to someone refusing to be a Christian because when they were 13 they decided to be “different” and learn all they could about “some cool crazy chap called Nietzche”. Don’t tell me you don’t know people like that.
So this basically boils down to some kind of psychological determinism, that our personalities were in a sense predetermined due to the familial and social situations that we were born into or that we move through later in life.
I think this extends to free will, in so far as it is entirely illusory. I find there is a massive amount of evidence for the existence of a “subconscious”, a level of mental processes unavailable to conscious thought that register sensory perceptions and store them for use at a later date. I think this is the basis for what we call “free will”. This can be as simple as someone refusing to vote for a political party due to a latent anger concerning the actions of a previous leader, possibly over twenty years ago, that has lodged itself into the subconscious and affects relevant decisions now. It is all about associations: the memories that someone attributes to current situations which then affect the choices they make.
Due to my logical positivist leanings, I find it hard accepting something that can’t be properly defined, and the idea of free choice is one of them. Either it doesn’t exist and can be explained as being illusory, or it is impossible to to define in itself and can only be explained through its effects. The latter is like saying “free will exists because clearly I can choose to eat a sandwich or not”. That does not stand, because you are only explaining the effects of “free will” and not “free will” itself. Thus, I can’t accept “free will” as existing in any sense other than an illusory one.
TheAngryElvis
I like your invocation of the subconscious to attack free will, it’s something to think about. I set up an argument against solipsism in much the same way.
I think the above stands just fine as an argument for the acceptance of free will- I'm not at all a logical positivist, though, so I don't think something needs to be rigorously defined in order to be believed. We have a 'good enough' definition of free will to at least enter into the discussion. If we start talking about determinism vs. free will, we both know the kinds of sittuation in question- those situations where it seems we must pause, think things through, and ultimately select one action from a range of options. To say that these situations are an 'illusion' is to say that something about them is false- an apparence only- and we both know what that something is. For an outline, think about your breathing. Once you think about it, you have to consciously will yourself to breathe for a few minutes, until you stop thinking about it again, and the process resumes it's being automatic. Whether or not we can 'define' free will, we can easily point to examples of it, and the discussion is about whether the percieved difference in those two kinds of breathing (for example) is a real difference, or perception only.
If free will exists, then our perception of it may be a sort of faculty, and none of our faculties is definable in terms of the others- we cannot give a rigorous accounting of vision referencing only the other four senses, for example.
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If somebody broke their leg and it wasn’t set properly, does that mean they would probably limp? Yes. However, does that mean they are no longer free to walk (and/or limp) down to the store? Perhaps free will is most evident when things are in a state of balance or equilibrium … in other words functioning properly.
This analogy seems questionable, because surely this relies on the idea that it is possible for someone to make a conscious choice not to breath and suffocate themselves on a whim?
Again, an improper analogy for what I’m saying. They are obviously still ABLE to walk to the store however badly injured they are. Hell, he could drag himself along by his teeth. I am talking about what induces this chap to move to the store. Or what induces him to believe whatever it is that he believes, what induces him to make life-changing decisions and, the most obvious, what induces him to hold opinions about certain things. The power of associations between a proposition and a previous experience is incredible - this is how I believe free will to be illusory. How many people on this forum hold their views due to the associations they subconsciously carry with them? I was once a Christian and I can now no longer call myself that. Did this happen because of the things I associated with being a Christian - say, certain painful experiences associated with it? Does the prospect of athiesm seem more attractive to me subconsciously, and so I have moved away from Christianity because of this? How many idiot teenagers do you know who believe what they believe because it’s cool or controversial? Loads. I could be one of them.
I don’t see how: all I’m giving is examples of situations a person can point to for alleged cases of free will, and compare it to it’s absence. Breathing seems to be a perfect case of a situation in which we can see ourselves choosing to do it sometimes, and see it happening on it’s own other times. A person can choose not to breathe until they pass out, and then it stops becoming voluntary.
The purpose of my example was not to say “Here is proof of free will,” but just to show that we can talk about and (dis)believe in free will without rigorously defining it, so long as we have these shared experiences.
TAE:
Someone who believed in free will, like me, could say you are equivocating on the word ‘because’ here. Yes, a teenager makes the choice to drift away from Christianity, and their decision was based in part on a desire to be cool or controversial. Whether or not this is the same ‘because’ as ‘the rock fell because I dropped it’ is the very thing being discussed.
Yes; good read, short and sweet.
You choose what to worship; this is your relative freedom of will. This is agreed, and this is enough.
If you choose to reject a movement toward an ideal; an ideal that might not exist in the here and now as something you can arrive at but, still exist in the fulness of Being as something you can move toward; is that not a free choice? look; biology is a rock falling and the sun is a wind that blows the rock back up; chlorophyl is one of the sails, reasoned consideration another. Consciousness can stop the rock from falling and, the wind just keeps blowing; that’s the inevidability of trancendance for those who try. You just have to try.
Yes, you are free to jump off the edge of a cliff if you like. However, you are also free to be restricted to a wheel chair for the rest of your life. And, while we may ask how restrictiveness applies to free will, the restrictions don’t begin to apply until after we’ve made the choice and, lose a piece of our “functionality.” So, the choice here it would seem, would be not to do stupid things.
Does anyone here believe that I could control everyone else on the planet?
yes, no?
sometimes it’s better to let sages speak for us.
Why can’t the two co-exist?
They cannot coexist.
Fate=no matter what I do the end result will be the same (the means will always find the same end)
Free Will=I have the will to control where I end up, and who I am (the means to any end are unique and controlable by each individual)
I have a feeling it has to be one or the other.
But what about the question I asked in my last post…
Then I promise I will let you guys move on to bigger and better things
they can co-exist, you have the free will to change your fate.
if you have enough might, you can control anyone.
then it’s not really fate, is it? I thought fate was immutable
hrmm…yeah that’s exactly what I was going to try to prove…so you agree then, that I could?
fate is immutable unless you change your behaviour. As a philosopher don’t get too caught up in “mere existence”. Duality is a part of humanity. You can have one foot in heaven, while having the other firmly planted on earth. You can be controlled by fate, while at the same time controlling your fate.
That you could? No. You are not mighty enough.
What if I accumulated enough of the world’s weapons of mass destruction and used them? I could kill everyone. Would that not be controling them?
And you don’t think I have the “might” to do this?
duality cannot be proven, and how can you change the absoluteness of fate? it doesn’t make sense that fate is whatever you want it to be, I thought the point of fate/destiny is that you cannot change it…?
if you killed everyone you wouldn’t be controlling them, you’d be killing them. And no you don’t have the might to do that. The first bomb you dropped, would get the hezbollah kicked out of you.
sure it can. It’s light and dark right now on earth. It’s day and night. Good and evil.
What is fate, but a series of choices that lead to some predetermined conclusion? If you jump off a bridge without a parachute, you’re gonna die. You can choose NOT to jump off the bridge, or do so with a parachute.
Each choice has a consequence, good or bad.
think of it this way… we know that Action A + Time/place B = Situation C. If you change A or B, C changes.
yes, your logic is correct, but by definition fate is an unchangeable “C”
therefore the values of A and B do not matter, they will equal C because they were designed to
I don’t know if we’re going to be able to agree on this one…
I thought that by “duality” you were referring to the theoryof dualism–that mind and body are seperate, just as heaven and earth are seperate, in fact if anything it’s been proven that the mind is created from the same matter as the body, monism