Thats just it the illusion of free will. Just cause a magician make a woman disappear does not mean it is real magic. And just because we feel that we are weighing moral decision does not mean the outcome of our actions were not pre determined.
So do you think that every single action, thought, discussion, etc is predetermined? Or just big events, such as where we will live, how we will die, etc?
That's such a cop-out, such a last ditch safety blanket to say that it's all predetermined.
It gives you leverage to be pathetic. To say "My station in life is what it is because it's supposed to be that way." It splits the way you view things depending on that station. If things are generally good for you, you end up with an entitlement complex (a la royalty), and if things are generally bad for you, it's a cheap excuse to be lazy and not do anything.
No situation is immutable.
Besides, if it's predetermined there are really only two options. 1: It's predetermined by physics or 2: it's predetermined by a God. I don't think physics can accurately make predictions about me, and the God framework doesn't really blend either.
We can't but you don't think that the ability to know all those at the same time exist. Everything that we know about universe is based solely on our little corner of it. We don't know what is out there. And yes I believe all thought and actions and feelings are predetermined by the previous interaction of the atom in our bodies. I am not saying that they are controlled or willed by some great deity but that they are predictable and unstoppable.
Seems to me this thread's discussion can be boiled down to "Free will's a myth, the starting state of the Universe/God determined every action from the moment the whole thing started." vs. "Determinism is for pussies who don't want to take responsibility for their actions."
Functional free will and determinism are not incompatible, and being a determinist does not make one a fatalist. Determinism simply says that all effects necessarily have causes, but makes no claims about whether or not we can know them. Unless one believes in some sort of transcendent spirit, free from this physical universe (the nature of which, I would suspect, is still subject to some other set of causal factors), then we must be the same as any other physical system in this world.
So then why should human action not be subject to the same cause-and-effect logic that we apply to everything else in the universe? We do seem to have absolute free will, and we feel as if our choices a somehow uncaused, but the way things seem and the way we feel have never been good guides for what is true.
Everyone should agree that the actions of a stone are fully caused. Imagine we generated a million identical universes with the same laws of physics and containing only a bunch of stones. After a given amount of time, we would check the progress of each universe and see that they have unfolded identically (ignoring quantum effects, since they provide no solution for free will). So we should agree that stones are fully determined. What about fluids? They're harder to predict, but we should also agree that they just as caused as stones. What about more complex systems? Planets, stars, galaxies, local groups, etc, continue to be more and more complex and difficult to predict, but they are still made up of the same components and governed by the same rules.
So then we come to living things. Are these different in kind from rocks, fluids and stars, or are they only different in degree? They are certainly more complex, and even harder to predict, but they are made of the same stuff and governed by the same rules. There is no point along this continuum of complexity where we would expect humans to detach from causation.
None of this makes fatalism true. Fatalism must either be based on a supernatural intervention, which acts to counter any deviation from our set path, or it must be based on having perfect knowledge and ability to perfectly predict behavior. The former claim is just silly, and I'm not going to bother with it, and the latter claim fails because perfect knowledge of one's own fate would compromise the prediction simply by knowing it.
The first one, in a mathematical sense, this discussion equals out to zero. Hear me out. Usually as people discuss this it becomes this odd wave of logic. It starts with Free will, then someone says yeah but (insert explanation{genetics}) caused that to happen. Next person says yeah but (insert explanation{that person chose to do this}). Next person says yeah but(insert explanation{The universe already unfolded this way}). And so on pretty much to infinity[sorry if I lost you]. This goes on and on each argument having exactly one counter argument before that is also counter argued. Through mathematics these either cancel each other out... or it leaves your probability of being the correct one at 50%. A complete and random equally balanced coin toss.
Second view, I never can explain this right, so you may just want to ignore this. If you look to the past you can always argue the fate side of things. Since the past has already occurred in exactly one way it is easy to say that fate caused this. But few people tend to look the other way, into the future. For this it is slightly easier to argue the free will idea, there are a million possibilities that could happen and we have no idea. So depending on how you view the world, more historically, or more whats going to happen next, you will be tempted to choose one way over the other, even though its impossible to say who is right. Again you would expect approximately half the population to be each way(huge logic fallacy but I got nothing) so it is futile to argue.
Philosophy always makes me feel like a pompous prick who can't pick a side.
yes i beleive fate seems like you are but a character in a story but arent we all.... some of us have happy stories some have bad stories.... and depending on how we act on life we can change our story to fit our benifits (karma), and i find that through Fate we are all connected.
fate is the illusion. we are not in the best of all possible worlds as Candide would like to believe. fate just seems more plausible because of history textbooks which present events as inevitable, instead of opening our minds to the personal drama.
This is one of the areas of philosophy I've studiously stayed away from, because it's one of those deeply unanswerable questions, and it all comes down to what you want to believe. Personally, I prefer to have some form of meaning in my life, so I've stuck with the free will side of things. Personal responsibility, moral judgements, even just feeling like you have some sort of personal identity all hang on choice, and in a fatalistic framework, none of these things I value have any meaning, so I don't accept it.
I think every man is what he makes himself. With a really rigid framework, you'd just be an actor following directions. Which is so pointless it wouldn't even make sense. Even without a creator it wouldn't make much sense, and in the context of providing a heaven and a hell, that would just be all the more cruel.
"So you raped, in your lifetime?" "Well, yes." "Oh that's too bad, you're doomed to hell." "But you said everything I do you made me do?" "Yeah, life's a bitch isn't it?" "You're an asshole."
Certainly wouldn't make sense if there's a benevolent God. And dear He I sure hope there is
Yeah, all my discussions with Calvinists have gone along those lines at one point or another, it's a pretty big block to acceptance for me. I'd like to think God's sense of justice isn't so alien from our own that he holds people responsible for things they were forced to do from before they were born.
Being a Christian, and it kills me to take the middle road like this, I believe that all of mankind has their own conscience and free will, free will being decision making, but God can also make our desicions for us when he sees fit.
But on the other hand the world is not a lonely, floating mudball with us crawling around with our three pound brains, God turning a blind eye, not intervening at all. He plays a roll in desicions, that i find to be undenyable, people choose to believe or not, we all do it in our lives. im sure that, since He can do whatever he pleases, being all powerful and all knowing, can choose to make direct desicions regarding the outcome of certain actions or events and has many times before. He is beyond our way of thinking, so we cannot say that He must choose to fully intervene or none at all, or only at certain times.
Now when i say this arguement to myself, i think, "then why didnt he just stop the Fall of man?" it would make sense for him to from our perspective since we were on a good path till then, being happy in paradise for all of what? a few months?--But that is just my point, we would stop it, but He has something else in mind that doesnt make sense to us.
The definition of "free will" being tossed around in here is a little too shallow for me.
A person's life is almost entirely dependent on factors outside of his control: how his parents raise him, where they live, their financial standing, his social environment, his genetics, brain development, bone structure, etc etc. Not to mention pure dumb luck.
How could we ever have true free will if our choices are handpicked by these uncontrollable factors? It certainly creates the illusion of free will, but at the end of the day fate is still holding all the cards.
A person's life is almost entirely dependent on factors outside of his control: how his parents raise him, where they live, their financial standing, his social environment, his genetics, brain development, bone structure, etc etc. Not to mention pure dumb luck.
There's no doubt that there are factors outside of your control, but free will intrinsically doesn't apply to that which is outside your control.
And is it fate or just circumstance that leads you to be where you're born? I could've just as likely been born in England, and now could be speaking with an English accent. Plus, many f the things you listed are modifiable. You can influence how your parents raise you, you can influence your social environment, your brain development. Hypothetically you can even modify your skeletal structure if you really wanted (which is requisite for life anyway so wouldn't really have anything to do with free will).
I have very little doubt that the insane amount of reading I did as a child enhanced my intelligence and affected the way I think.
Sure, if you want to call our circumstances fate, then you are right. But people being born rich or poor, and all the other variables has been a factor in human life for EVER. Those variable have not changed for anyone, we don't get to 'choose' where we are born and stuff, if we could then we'd all be rich in California imo.
So that form of fate is irrelevant, we make free willed desicions based off our circumstances.
I don't want to get too personal, but what influenced you to read so much as a child? I don't know how young you were, but personal choice as a child isn't too realistic without an abnormally developed brain in the first place. From what I've seen, a kid's environment is usually behind something like that.
I'm not sure what influenced me into reading so much. It was something I liked to do. Hell I potty trained myself and dressed myself at a young age.
I also disagree that a child making personal choices is not realistic. Try to feed a toddler some asparagus, broccoli, carrots, or other vegetables and then try to feed him applesauce.
Humans express preference and choices at early ages.
I think it's not one hundred percent correct to lump it all on my parents. They were facilitators but they never forced me to do anything I didn't want to. I wanted to know why they were reading the paper, so I'd ask my mom what each letter was, which developed into words. It was my own choice to learn. And then I just wanted to learn how everything worked.
While that may sound like parental influence, I would say it's about as close to a null you're going to get with a human. Granted, there were things they wouldn't let me do (things injurious to me/others), but I really got to choose what I wanted to do and they would allow me to do it or help me make it happen. Ex: Playing baseball/soccer, etc.
That said, there were limits to things. I really wanted to play hockey but we were broke ass po' so that was right out.
