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The best thing I came to realize in life is that free will is an illusion and simply it doesn’t exist. Thus, life has never been worth living because we’re simp
by sysbin 7y ago
The best thing I came to realize in life is that free will is an illusion and simply it doesn’t exist. Thus, life has never been worth living because we’re simply forced like a victim sent to prison and whatever we experience is not really our own. Good or evil is simply an illusion as well because of the preceding. I wish I had been educated about this young.
- lolptdr 7y agoI don't understand. You say you can't experience anything that you own, but you are making a choice to decide that you can't have a choice. This is a circular dependency of logic.
- sysbin 7y agoEverything is just cause & effect. It’s impossible to make a choice or decision that’s truly one’s own. Nobody can make a choice or decision without being effected by what encompasses them and with all the external forces being inflicted upon them as well. Even a death like suicide is thus a natural death when it happens because it couldn’t have been different. People assume it could have been different by desiring everything was a choice of our own but in reality we don’t have choice that’s our own.
- bigbluedots 7y agoHow did you decide whether or not to post this comment?
- sysbin 7y agoI didn't, all the preceding events (external forces exerted upon me) made it so.
- bigbluedots 7y agoDoes it give you comfort to hold that view? i.e. if everything is completely deterministic then you cannot be responsible for the consequences of your actions.
- sysbinn 7y agoI don't see how that would give me comfort in a society that is conditioned and even manipulated to think contrary. I see people in prison and even if they're innocent (in the traditional sense) of the crime. Your rhetoric is typically voiced from people assuming it's not good to understand reality and I typically think what nonsense. I guess similar to how some people preferred everyone assuming the world to be flat. Simply, assuming it's better to think contrary doesn't make reality not so.
- bigbluedots 7y agoI'd suggest that there is no way for either of us to know whether we actually have free will or not. So you are free to go on acting as if we don't, and I'm free to go on acting as if we do.
- sysbin 7y agoWell there is research that shows that we don't have free will. Nothing has shown we might have free will. Neither of us are free to think anything.
- pixl97 7y agoWhy cant you be held responsible? It seems as if determinism has already aligned and demands I hold you responsible.
- mistermann 7y agoDo the preceding events (external forces exerted upon you) allow you to realize you are working with a theory, not a fact?
- Emma_Goldman 7y agoPhilosophy of mind has little to no understanding of consciousness and the will. Most people who have a considered opinion are 'physicalists' who think that the mind is reducible to the physical activity of the brain, but this belief is not based on an especially compelling neurological research programme but on the ontological expectation that all phenomena are reducible to physical processes. That is, they believe the mind must be of this quality because most everything else studied by natural science is. What the true nature of the mind is - and it may simply lie beyond human understanding - makes no difference to the phenomenological experience of being a first-person subjectivity, and the struggle to live that we all must lead. Do you confront the world without a predetermined purpose? Yes. Then for the existentialists you are radically free and, inescapably, have to choose who you want to be.
- sysbin 7y agoThe mind could only be free if independent from what encompasses it. That’s simply impossible and even if our mind had some quantum physics thrown into the equation. Anyhow this all is a difficult subject unless understanding determinism and processing life with the knowledge for awhile. In either case fate decides the outcome but I wish I knew earlier in life. Maybe I’ll live the same life over but the universe will allow that to happen but that would arguably not be my own doing as well because this life made that desire. All nifty cause & effects...
- Emma_Goldman 7y ago>"The mind could only be free if independent from what encompasses it." No it could be an emergent property that arises from physical processes but is not reducible to them (emergentism). It could be that the mental and the physical are not independent substances but different elements of the same thing, and thus one does not need to be reducible to the other (neutral monism). Or you could be a dualist and claim that the mind really is separate from the physical world. Or, more sensibly, you could be agnostic because we lack any solid grounds for belief in any theory of the mind. And again, as I just said, this ontological problem is separate from the phenomenological problem with which the existentialists were concerned. For what the mind is, ontologically, makes no difference to our subjective experience as radically free beings without a predetermined essence.