Worthy of worship, free will?

[bennyboy]

*biggest facepalm ever*

I forgive you, since you had no choice in saying that, no matter how juvenile or trollish it was. I should add, however, that you forgot to include either the Star Wars or the kitten meme necessary to properly reinforce such a strong statement of contempt.

You chose the snickers bar for reasons you had. You had motives. And where did those motives come from? Perhaps more motives and reasons you had, but somewhere along the line the causes stretch back beyond your motives and reasons and the buck never stops. It goes back to the beginning of the universe the causal chain never ends until we reach the very beginning of time.

To identify with the self at all is delusional in this sense. Our ideas about self, about others, and about our relationships are almost entirely symbolic, and have relatively little to do with the physical realities of Mom or America, or that dick honking his horn for no reason, or whatever. It's not just free will that suffers from reductio ad absurdum: at the foundation, it's all just wave functions, isn't it? And under that. . . who even has an inkling?

But the problem with all your reduction boils down to a simple word: experience. You can talk about the meaningless of Mom in absolute terms, but your vision of Mom, positive or negative, is most likely one of the central points of your world view and what it's like to be you. To live in the "truth" of physical absolutism isn't so much to be a human free of delusion, but not to live as a human at all. I accept that experiences are self-validating: they have an intrinsic truth that cannot be assailed-- the "what it's like" to have them, aka qualia. However, to inferences and views derived from experiences I wouldn't extend this same status.

Libertarian free will is completely incoherent. Free will isn't even an illusion because if you pay attention to the "illusion" you're not even seeing or feeling the freedom you think you are. Libertarian free will is not only completely impossible but a universe can't even be described where it is possible.

Your problem is that you let ideas inferred FROM experience subsume the experience itself, which is an inversion. The fact is that whatever beauty is, it is-- and whatever free will is, it is. We can debate WHAT it is, but not so much WHETHER it is-- because Snickers Bar selection is not just a mechanical process but the expression of my humanity at my moment-- and if that isn't real, nothing else about my human experience is, either.

Including spending time typing to the imaginary friends who live inside my computer monitor.