(May 16, 2025 at 12:15 pm)Alan V Wrote:

(May 16, 2025 at 9:15 am)The Architect Of Fate Wrote: That's not remotely the message of superhero movies at all you just don't get the genre 

Nowhere does the movie remotely teach us that only the powerful can save us.

To me superhero movies seem a lot like professional wrestling: superheroes fighting super-villains, but with special effects.

I enjoy them anyway.  Taking them too seriously misses the point altogether.

Come to think of it, superhero movies are very similar to religions too: superheroes fighting super-villains.

Yes there is a  professional wrestling element to it and indeed overthinking them takes away from the fun I won't deny that but there are messages there and I think good ones

(May 16, 2025 at 11:40 am)Angrboda Wrote: @John:

This is rather off-topic, but I'm curious what your views on free will are?

I began studying psychology around the time when Sam Harris was popularizing his free will arguments. So, his arguments were my first steps into the field. Looking back, I think very few things about the mind make sense in the absence of free will. You have to lean heavily into the idea that half of your experience is an illusion in order to reject free will.

Your brain is at least set up as if it needed an internal free agent to make choices. We use terms for it like the central executive, selective attention, awareness, arousal, all of which are connected to conscious experience itself, as if consciousness was a key ingredient in the choice making and decision process. In graduate school we read Libet's paper (also popularized by Sam Harris) in a human cognition class. The conversations we were having about it at the time leaned towards something like "free won't" meaning that the brain had many competing subsystems that present decisions to the central executive, and the executive simply has a kind of veto power to inhibit impulse rather than create them. So there's many ways to think about it.

So in conclusion, I think most of the philosophical arguments against free will are too simplistic, and don't actually explain much of what's actually observed. We have to imagine that what we're seeing isn't actually what we're seeing and that anything that seems like free will is actually an illusion, or worse, a delusion. And that's just scientifically problematic.

You never studied Psychology

Free will is a great context to explore what propaganda is. Let's say we have this free will stuff. Cool. Christian propaganda will tell you that your free will is effective where it is not and consequential where it ought not be in it's pursuit of getting more people to adopt particular beliefs and behaviors.

(May 16, 2025 at 11:24 am)Nay_Sayer Wrote: One of the benefits of this thread is to see Johnny be so wrong all the time, lying, doing, running scared from the scrolls that undo his entire life ethos.

The gift that keeps on giving.

So say we all

(May 16, 2025 at 12:29 pm)The Architect Of Fate Wrote:

(May 16, 2025 at 12:15 pm)Alan V Wrote: To me superhero movies seem a lot like professional wrestling: superheroes fighting super-villains, but with special effects.

I enjoy them anyway.  Taking them too seriously misses the point altogether.

Come to think of it, superhero movies are very similar to religions too: superheroes fighting super-villains.

Yes there is a professional wrestling element to it and indeed overthinking them takes away from the fun I won't deny that but there are messages there and I think good ones

Movies generally have messages or themes, though they vary from movie to movie.  I'm not so sure that superhero movies as a genre have an over-arching message common to all.  They just have narrative similarities for their genre.  For instance, "it takes a superhero to fight a super-villain" isn't really a message per se, at least IMO.

Superheroes and super-villains having fistfights is just one among many forms of conflict to drive a story forward.  The good guy wins, the bad guy wins (back and forth with rising stakes), until the good guy wins.

In Christianity, the fate of the world and the future state of human souls are said to depend on Jesus winning -- those are just ways to raise the stakes in the story, to make it engaging.

The Gospels were early fan-fiction.  People attending churchs are living in their imaginations, just like many other people do in different and more obvious ways.

(May 16, 2025 at 1:45 pm)Nay_Sayer Wrote: You never studied Psychology

But "studied" is such an innocent little term! Even I've "studied" psychology. I even passed that elective! I suspect that John is "based on real events".

(May 16, 2025 at 9:35 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 16, 2025 at 8:04 am)Belacqua Wrote: The finding that adolescents actually suppress (if that's the right word) memory in order to explore the world more widely makes a lot of sense to me. Certainly I became more exploratory at that age (my parents would use a different adjective). And it fits nicely with what we've been saying about the dynamic nature of people's beliefs. It appears to be natural -- almost biologically demonstrable -- for people of that age to move away from the ideas they had taken for granted in childhood. Which works against the theory that children brainwashed as toddlers will be unable to deviate from their indoctrination later on. 

Yes, exactly. So, think of a schema as your general knowledge about scenes and events. And then distinguish this from your specific memories of having been in those scenes and events. You can both describe what houses look like as a category and also remember what your particular house looks like. And so, these two things are always in tension, but that tension is different depending on your age. Children are just trying to get their foot in the door, beginning to form schemas and memories. But in adolescence, your brain starts to suppress those schemas. In other words, it's allowing the brain to explore more freely and gather as much unfiltered information as possible. And then once we reach adulthood, we begin re-developing the connection between our schemas and our memories, optimizing the two.

This is also interesting in light of this conversation because we wouldn't survey 12-year-olds on the nature of the universe and take their answers as meaningful—but internally, that's what we do. Adolescence, not childhood, is when we first start forming and testing our own beliefs. And by early adulthood, we solidify our teenage beliefs. You are more likely to hear that someone questioned their religion as a 12 year old than a 40 year old, for example.

I'll take it that you don't need any further examples now that they have been made so well? You two are hilarious, but I really hope that the kids take after Bel.

(May 16, 2025 at 3:19 pm)Alan V Wrote: The Gospels were early fan-fiction..

My fan-fic is suing for defamation.

(May 16, 2025 at 12:42 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: Your brain is at least set up as if it needed an internal free agent to make choices. We use terms for it like the central executive, selective attention, awareness, arousal, all of which are connected to conscious experience itself, as if consciousness was a key ingredient in the choice making and decision process. In graduate school we read Libet's paper (also popularized by Sam Harris) in a human cognition class. The conversations we were having about it at the time leaned towards something like "free won't" meaning that the brain had many competing subsystems that present decisions to the central executive, and the executive simply has a kind of veto power to inhibit impulse rather than create them. So there's many ways to think about it.

So in conclusion, I think most of the philosophical arguments against free will are too simplistic, and don't actually explain much of what's actually observed. We have to imagine that what we're seeing isn't actually what we're seeing and that anything that seems like free will is actually an illusion, or worse, a delusion. And that's just scientifically problematic.

Emergent materialists typically agree with this assessment, but with the qualification that free will is by no means absolute.  There is both top-down (free will) and bottom-up (material) causation, rather than everything being bottom-up (strict determinism).  That means there are limits to free will causation, and several of them are the constraints which conditioning, propaganda, and indoctrination place in our thinking until we actually do the work to sort them out.  This is different than the Christian conception of free will, as Grand Nudger pointed out.  Christians depend on word-magic, which doesn't work and so often leads to hypocrisy. I think there is plenty of room in modern psychology for the emergent materialist perspective, but not so much for the Christian message.

So are you a psychologist or a Christian, or are you trying to be both without success?