Free will

[Sirius]

 

As I said I answered all your questions but you will never accept it

[Nerb]

I answered all your questions

Ever heard the phrase: "Casting Pearls before Swine"?

Accept the unacceptable my friend. The energy shoud be yours instead of casting it to the void.

[Nerb]

Free will: The ability to make choices without outside influence.

Control: The ability to make educated choices without outside influence.

Knowledge: The ability to understand facts, regardless of influence.

Control: The ability to make educated choices without outside influence.

Power: The ability to excercise Free Will with no negative influences.

Strength: The ability to have influence without effort.

Control: The ability to control beyond the Self.

Success: The ability to conrtol in a position of respect.

Evolve: To become more than the self over available time.

Control: Rinse and Repeat. For Decades and a Lifetime. Sooner you start the better. Greatest lesson in Life.

LIFE = momentum + potential over time.

Applicable to everything and anything, prove me wrong. It's EVERYWHERE!

Free Will made this place. I enjoy that liberty, that control, that Evolution, that Power, that projection of empathy to facilitate LIFE AS IT IS.

Hail FREE WILL.

[Nerb]

We must surely be missing some third alternative...

Something along the lines of:  The 'choice' can only be illusion, if the end is fixed.

The binary nature of differential analysis as a thought modality...
renders, by intent, all things down to "either/or." 

Live The Trinity. Always remember that YOU are the third part of ANY dilemma of two things. Once those three things are connected, it/you SPIN in orbits of energy, analysing the "thing".

Spin that thing in your head and orbit it. Centrifugal force isn't just a physical force, it's metaphotical too, so "thinking" about things is that elusive third point of a triangle of influence that expands the circumfrence of influence (learning), the most basic energetic function in the universe, and that third point (you) has no fixed point. Weeeeeeee!

Travelling is fun. Amazing how things just "fit" once you learn to see beyond eyes, and realise that OUR vision of what we encounter can affect the outcome. The "Double slit experiment" is a classic example.

Have faith in where your mind wants to go, NEVER be afraid, regardless of the rest of human nature and the stereotypical mainstreams.

Basically, life is about "manifestation". Some are good at it, some not. Some need little , some need a lot.

Enjoy the ride, don't get unhappy. And "cigars" are for non smokers who wish to project an image.

[Ignorant]

As I said I answered all your questions but you will never accept it

You either didn't, or I didn't understand your answer. Doesn't that make you want to explain? Aren't we here to try to understand each other?

[Bootless]

This tends to be an entertaining subject, in my experience.

So, free will. What is it, and do we have it?

As entertainment, I say "BOO!" to putting the words Free and Will together in such a way. That's absurd.

To farm a quote from Wikipedia: "Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events." That is absurd.
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Imagine a man looks at a map of his local area. He sees a river marked and named on the map. It isn't far off. He determines that he will hike over there and jump into that river, since he hasn't jumped into that particular river before.

He dresses himself in the manner he determines best suited for the trek. He determines that he won't bring swimming trunks, since he expects no one to be around.

So he hikes to the river, strips, and jumps in. But: due to the draught, there is no water there. He has, in fact, jumped into a dry river-bed.

It becomes then a matter of definitions and semantics as to whether or not he has in fact fulfilled the task he had determined: to jump into that river. Is a dry river-bed a river or not? 
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Since the absurd idea of Free Will is juxtaposed to Determinism, I will henceforth take any discussion of the topic to be Self-determined vs Externally Determined. I have so determined.

To answer the question: Do we have self determination? Yes.

[Ignorant]

As entertainment, I say "BOO!" to putting the words Free and Will together in such a way. That's absurd.

Are you saying absurdity can't be entertaining?

[Bootless]

Are you saying absurdity can't be entertaining?

No. That would be like claiming comedy does not exist.

It was merely the only way I could think of to voice my objection. Chalk it up as a deficiency of imagination.

[Bootless]

Just now, I formulated a hypothesis:

The term free will was coined by Theists in order to explain human relationship to God in such a way as to find God blameless even though he hates and kills his creatures. That's why I hate the term free will. It is meaningless without that God vs Human paradigm.
 

To test this hypothesis I googled origin of the term free will . Surprise surprise! Wikipedia provides evidence in support of my hypothesis: 

 

The term "free will" (liberum arbitrium) was introduced by Christian philosophy (4th century CE). It has traditionally meant (until the Enlightenment proposed its own meanings) lack of necessity in human will

wikipedia: Free_will

So without belief in God there is no need to use that phrase. Seriously: the premise is that God created man with free will. Man violated God's command. Man is doomed. Doomed man can now either use free will to get back in good graces, or man is so corrupted that only the will of God can re-implant the will to be right with God.

Without the God - Man - Sin paradigm the term is meaningless.
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At some time in the evolution of animals, they (animals) discovered cause and effect. That's how they hunted or avoided predators. Reflex and choices mattered a great deal.

Fast forward: Man has discovered laws of physics, cause and effect. But man has also branched out in knowledge with separate fields  of study, like psychology, physiology, math, etc.

Guess what happens if you try to make psychology obey the laws of physics? Absurd debates!

And: The freaking Christian apologists use the confusion as an opportunity to lend credence to their creed.

Animals are not pool balls that must follow the physics of getting hit by the cue stick, cue ball, or the banks on the table. Biology is ever so much messier than that. 

[Sirius]

You either didn't, or I didn't understand your answer. Doesn't that make you want to explain? Aren't we here to try to understand each other?

07-17-2025, 05:12 PM
Precognition is not difficult to grasp once you accept that you don't have free will
https://denyignorance.com/Thread-Precogn...0#pid57780

07-17-2025, 08:27 PM
This tends to be an entertaining subject, in my experience.
So, free will. What is it, and do we have it?