Are you saying that “I” am capable of making the choice free of circumstances? Am “I” actually able to say “No, I will not type.” even if all of the causes leading up to that point say that “I” will make the decision to type? If so, I have no argument with you, but I don’t think you’re really a determinist.
“Free” is a relative term …
It means nothing on its own.
If you had so wanted to not type, then you wouldn’t have. However you did, so you did.
I would say I am a compatibilist. I see no reason why free will and determinism cannot co-exist.
I think we use cause and effect to explain certain things, but that there’s not necessarily a causal chain which persists through everything perceivable. I mean, if I throw a ball through a window then I caused the window to break. But if I say that someone made me feel bad, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they did, I might just be an oversensitive douchebag, so my feeling bad could be a result of my own retarded state, and not caused by some perfectly normal thing that someone might say to me. Who knows man?
Yes, okay, but what caused you to be an “oversensitive douchebag”? A history of incidents?
Smears, love how you end many of your post with “I dont know” or “who knows” It compeletly undermines and reinforces your point at the same time. Tells a little about you personality too.
It might be a history of incidents, or it could be a complete accident of DNA. I mean really, who can prove either?
If we didn’t choose to be born and we didn’t choose to die, how can we expect to choose while we live? Its a big big asumption.
But who knows, why even create a thread about it, why even speculate on anything?
I think that we do have choices. The only things that are determined are so by way of natural laws. If we stay within them, then everything else is a choice. If we break them, then we didn’t really break a natural law, we just proved it not to actually be one.
I’ll grant you that we can’t choose birth, but we can choose to die, indeed many do. Determinism is simply the way the world is. But it doesn’t imply we don’t have choices. We choose which causes to act on. In choosing to end our lives, we choose to act on the causes that make us want to.
heres a cookie for y’all, because we can never predict which choice we will choose, the underlying reasons why we chose what we chose are of great indifference!
That’s a good way to put it.
Even though they are contradictory.
Why is judgment not a product of forces beyond our control? Why does judgment stand uncaused?
I don’t believe they are. Show me why the are.
It doesn’t. There cannot be an uncaused thing. But free will is not being uncaused.
“Correlations help us predict, and they restrain the illusions of our flawed intuition. Making choices* correlates with (and therefore predicts) actions**. But does that mean choice causes action**?”
-from my psych textbook, changed “watching violence”* and “aggression”**
In fact, I read somewhere that the part of our brain that controls movement lights up BEFORE we’re aware we’ve made the choice to move, (citation needed) which seems to suggest that its possible choice has less to do with things than we like to think.
A scene in the second Matrix movie makes this point rather nicely.
It can (and has) been argued that what causes us to choose what we choose is largely irrelevant: probably a huge complicated web of cause and effect is involved. However this determinism does not undermine the predictive advantage of (the illusion of) choice.