RE: Do you believe in free will?
March 14, 2012 at 11:08 am
(This post was last modified: March 14, 2012 at 11:19 am by The Grand Nudger.)
LOL, always happy to oblige Whateverist. We have provided no such thing. Further, we don't have to provide evidence against something just because alot of people believe it or experience it, que Christ. Effects aren't good enough to establish that something "is", or the worm and the plant have free will as well. Again, everything about our consciousness seems very much to be an effect of that big lump of nerves between our ears. We do create useful illusions, the universe we live in does appear to be a deterministic one. These aren't assumptions, this is not an argument. It is an observation made from available evidence. To me, it would seem reasonable to explain something like "free will" by way of the known, and not by way of the unknown, or by fuzzy definitions.
@ Genk Again, are you generating internal stimuli, or are you one of those things that has been generated? Am I being unclear here?
It is tricky btw, as far as our laws and social conventions are concerned. Of course, everytime we've discovered something like this about ourselves there have been those that worried that something important or integral to us would collapse if we simply accepted the evidence we had. Thankfully, we're still here, still plugging away. We don't defer to god for justice, for example, but somehow we still manage to operate systems of law. It may be that these criminal things that we do are on shaky ground with regards to responsibility, but that won't change the notion of compensation (in all of it's forms) for the victim one bit, will it? It might change how we handle punishment, what we feel is acceptable to do or leverage against the convicted for any given crime..but I'm willing to bet we'll still do something about it.
@ Genk Again, are you generating internal stimuli, or are you one of those things that has been generated? Am I being unclear here?
It is tricky btw, as far as our laws and social conventions are concerned. Of course, everytime we've discovered something like this about ourselves there have been those that worried that something important or integral to us would collapse if we simply accepted the evidence we had. Thankfully, we're still here, still plugging away. We don't defer to god for justice, for example, but somehow we still manage to operate systems of law. It may be that these criminal things that we do are on shaky ground with regards to responsibility, but that won't change the notion of compensation (in all of it's forms) for the victim one bit, will it? It might change how we handle punishment, what we feel is acceptable to do or leverage against the convicted for any given crime..but I'm willing to bet we'll still do something about it.
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