Do you believe in free will?

[genkaus]

1-OK so we can agree that thoughts are part of a causal chain, real and intangible. Please define what qualifies as real for you.

Things which exist and can be perceived either directly or through effect.

2- I agree that contents of memories don’t change with time, only our ability to recall them. If you want to consider them temporal because the medium they’re housed in fine. I agree that the physical medium is subject to timeline merely by definition of physical. However I don’t consider sequential order the same as being part of the active timeline. The semantic memories have no time correlation and are a sum of the factual knowledge. They may be gathered sequentially, however they are readily recalled out of sequence for reference and are not attached with a “time stamp” if you will. I agree that episodic memories are much more temporal as are the mediums that both are housed on.

Read my argument again. I said that the content of the memory may be consider atemporal - but that does not mean they can exist without a temporal reality. While being atemporal in nature, they still are a derivative of the temporal reality.

3-glad we could reach a consensus on phenomena and noumena. Guess the question now would be are noumena real to you? To follow that, are they reliable?

Noumena as defined here - very much so. But reliable - not certainly. The noumena are created by the consciousness as a product of phenomena through the process of abstraction. There may be errors (or deliberate manipulations) in this process which leave it not completely reliable.

4-Some argue just that “the apple is” is declarative of its place in reality, regardless of the perception of said apple. Truth then doesn’t lose all meaning, but describing the objective truth of the apple’s existence is purely subjective. If existence is determined only by perspective, it’s only determined by consensus and that truth is relatively useless, no pun intended. However you have to first establish existence, then description, then filter as much bias as you can to get a useful perspective. Only then can you use logic, reason and recall to effectively use the object. While I agree that perception can be erroneous, that still leaves the question from 1 and 3.

This argument seems more or less correct. Does this mean you have conceded your previously held position that the identity is determined by perspective?

5-I do know what coercion means thank you, but I appreciate your concern. Unfortunately you’re only relegating it to a force against will, which I believe is in error. Coercion is the power to use force to gain compliance. You can, in our examples, use (apply force) coercion (of will) to change the agent (the I) against a subset of that agent being innate physical (or genetic, or learned, or programmed) nature.

Consider the definition you use - "force to gain compliance". Which means, compliance did not exist before. When talking about conscious agents and coercion - the non-compliance comes from its will. Non-compliance due to innate or programmed nature does not come within that purview.

For example, even if you are using physical force to get a child into a bath (and you are doing so in all the actions of picking it up etc.), it is not coercion unless the child doesn't want to take the bath - unless its against its will. With regards to coercion, the existence of contrary wills on both sides of the actions is necessary.

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This is wrong. Memories are to a large part synthetic - elements are added and removed to the extent that they may content things that were objectively not there, or the erasure of significant things which were.

Tack specified the difference with regards to semantic and episodic memories. For example, you recollection of a principle such as gravitational theory does not change with time.