Do you believe that we have free will?

[IVONNE]

your thoughts

[Forestluv]

Could you start us off with your own thoughts and experience?

[Shadowraix]

Yes and no. 

Stop seeing the duality of free will vs predetermined and you'll see it collapses into the same thing. It is simultaneously both at once. They represent different perspectives of the same thing. 

[Rilles]

Environment -> Emotion -> Thoughts -> Action ad infinitum, there is no one in “there” choosing any of it, it just appears and happens

[tedens]

11 hours ago, IVONNE said:

your thoughts

Somobody ordered you to write this words?

[IVONNE]

Stop being so mean guys. Nowadays people only get happiness by destroying and hurting others. 

 

After all, the things we see on the news and what I have studied in my sociology class, I found out that we don't really have free will.

You can say things like 'we have rights in certain areas unlike other countries and places', but in reality, don't you think that we are all set up to follow a system ? when my lecturer asked us if we have free will no one put their hands up. I did. I also felt embarrassed but then he did also. then the entire class were confused. It opened eyes that 1% of the population has all the money whereas 99% are struggling and sharing.

-Get your degree or your seen as a bad person in societies eyes.

-Work long hours at a company and your guaranteed to have the best life (in other words, you could get the things you've wished for)

-We are all in conflicts because of classism. Poor people work in dangerous conditions whereas rich people only get richer as lower class people work for them.

-Norms and valued are set by society and so it makes people strive for 'normal' in order to feel accepted and respected 

 

This is brief here. I could go on for hours 

Edited February 19, 2019 by IVONNE

[tedens]

Answer is yes and no. And when you are talking about peoples egos... that is the sneaky thing.

Edited February 19, 2019 by tedens

[Joseph Maynor]

I think we have some free will but not as much free will as the Mind wants to think we do. And I think the wiser you get as a person, the more you take the Mind's agenda with a grain of salt and realize that until you do it, it's just a thought.

Edited February 19, 2019 by Joseph Maynor

[Enlightenment]

@IVONNE Sense of agency is an illusion

There is a big problem with how we define free will

What would it mean to have free will?

[Truth Addict]

Realising that there's no free will is the first step towards realising no-self.

It's a fact, it appears like something, but it is completely something else.

Edited February 19, 2019 by Truth Addict

[IVONNE]

@Joseph Maynor I totally agree with you. Our minds wants to internalise and wants to believe that we do.

Thanks for your feedback

[IVONNE]

@Rilles what do you means by nobady chooses it and that's things are there. I am sure conflict didn't just happened either

[SoonHei]

@IVONNE there is no person there to begin with... No person there as a separate entity to have or not have any free will.

That's what @Rilles is saying.

 

Kind of like how a character in a book makes an apparent choice... But the decision was not his, it was the author's (pre-determined) but from the POV of the story and the character, he made the choice out of his own free will.

In reality, there is no character beyond the story in real life.

[Joseph Maynor]

5 minutes ago, SoonHei said:

@IVONNE there is no person there to begin with... No person there as a separate entity to have or not have any free will.

That's what @Rilles is saying.

 

Kind of like how a character in a book makes an apparent choice... But the decision was not his, it was the author's (pre-determined) but from the POV of the story and the character, he made the choice out of his own free will.

In reality, there is no character beyond the story in real life.

And yet you still have some free will.  How do you explain that?  

Edited February 19, 2019 by Joseph Maynor

[SoonHei]

@Joseph Maynor @IVONNE 

@Joseph Maynor

That's why it's "apparent" free will. Innit?

[TheAvatarState]

7 hours ago, IVONNE said:

Stop being so mean guys. Nowadays people only get happiness by destroying and hurting others. 

Wait, did I miss the part where people were mean? I don't see it. 

[IVONNE]

@TheAvatarState you don't see it because it has happened to me last night where somebody 'Serotoninluv' reported me who is still replying 

But its always good to know  that not everyone is like that xxxx bye

[TheAvatarState]

@IVONNE well it sounds like I don't know the whole story... serotonin is a moderator and I don't think he reports people for nothing, nor would he actually need to. Not that I want to know, of course, that's not my issue.

9 hours ago, IVONNE said:

when my lecturer asked us if we have free will no one put their hands up. I did. I also felt embarrassed but then he did also. then the entire class were confused. It opened eyes that 1% of the population has all the money whereas 99% are struggling and sharing.

What do you mean by this? Are you saying your whole class knows they don't have free will? I don't buy that, this isn't common knowledge. And what's with the 1% having money and 99% struggling? This isn't related to the issue of free will at all, so was there more context that I'm missing behind that question to the class?

[RichardY]

The smartest man in the USA says people can have freewill, Christopher Langan, I agree with the reasoning in his essays. Argument from authority. You can of course choose to disregard that........

I've  generally felt that freewill was a metaphysical question, and not a psychological one. Some take freewill as a given, I do not.

If there's another supposedly smartest man in the USA I'd like to have a look at his reasons, for or against freewill.

[Forestluv]

2 minutes ago, RichardY said:

The smartest man in the USA says people can have freewill, Christopher Langan, 

Smartest by what metric?