RE: Is free will real?
December 28, 2014 at 8:03 pm
(This post was last modified: December 28, 2014 at 8:06 pm by bennyboy.)
Awwwww, I thought the donkey thing would get a reaction, for sure. Maybe I'm wrong about you guys! 
Okay, so here we have a case where the philosophical idea is taken as true (or, maybe, that it is most likely true given the evidence). And yet, even knowing free will to be false can't make the instinct we CALL "free will" any less convincing. Or, even knowing that the sense of self, as we conceive it, is illusory, doesn't stop us from being fully immersed in that sense.
Is this really so different than acting as though a table is flat? A table IS really flat in a sense, because the density of particles along one side of a plane really is higher than that on the other side. Couldn't I say of my ideas and memories that SO MANY are related to this mythical, illusory "self" that this relationship is sufficient to say the self is real? That is, that the self is the keystone which holds all ideas about the world into a coherent web, rather than allowing every experience I've ever had to remain discrete, unrelated, and therefore useless as part of a greater system of thought?
Okay, so here we have a case where the philosophical idea is taken as true (or, maybe, that it is most likely true given the evidence). And yet, even knowing free will to be false can't make the instinct we CALL "free will" any less convincing. Or, even knowing that the sense of self, as we conceive it, is illusory, doesn't stop us from being fully immersed in that sense.
Is this really so different than acting as though a table is flat? A table IS really flat in a sense, because the density of particles along one side of a plane really is higher than that on the other side. Couldn't I say of my ideas and memories that SO MANY are related to this mythical, illusory "self" that this relationship is sufficient to say the self is real? That is, that the self is the keystone which holds all ideas about the world into a coherent web, rather than allowing every experience I've ever had to remain discrete, unrelated, and therefore useless as part of a greater system of thought?
