I personally don't believe in "free will". I think we have a capacity for will, but to claim that we have "free will" kind of assumes that we are capable of being or doing something different based on a decision and I believe that notion just will not hold up to scrutiny. It sounds good in pep talks, but there are too many things to point against free will. If you are honest, where does your next thought come from? Do your thoughts arise in your consciousness, or do you think your thoughts before you think them? That may be hard to follow, if you are currently stoned, but try this, imagine you are driving down the road and for some reason your memory of something you regret, or something you love just pops up into your consciousness. Imagine you are driving down the road listening to an audio book and all of a sudden you realize you haven't been listening for the last 5 minutes. If you can't control what your next thought is going to be, how much control do you have? How about what we do? How many of you have wanted to play the guitar, or the piano and tried? It's not equally easy for everyone. How does free will hold up to learning to be a musician or a professional athlete or anything else?
No. For instance.....sometimes when I'm driving down the road and someone is driving like an idiot....sometimes I WANT TO.....I THINK ABOUT.......getting out and beating the out of them and then driving off.....but instead, I politely flip em the bird...which is the action i free willed to take
I think the answer to that is different for EVERY PERSON.......some have greater control over their actions than others
I've been accused of worse. If you don't have free will I can't hold your insult against you, it wasn't your choice, right? You either have free will and are responsible for your own actions or you don't have free will therefor you are not responsible for what you do or say.
Time exists all at once and we are just traveling through it, because consciousness can only experience time linearly. Free will is an illusion. Your future is set, because it's already happened. Just my opinion, you understand.
You don't think we can consciously surf the possibilities? The reality of me being a murderer and a keyboard warrior are both 'out there', but I am not to keen on experiencing the reality of me being a murderer... so I surf in another direction.
It's essentially a paradox, in that, we both have complete free will in respect to our experience, and also on the atemporal dimension of existence, everything is predetermined. It's just temporal experience and subjectivity that provides the complete illusion of free will. Yet that illusion itself is complete, so the experience can be considered real in so far as our experience of it is real. pickledpie, Dec 21, 2017 Said it best.
I don't believe all possibilities exist. One path is all we get, and it's set from before we're born. Don't want to be a murderer? You don't have any choice, if that's what you're destined for.
You "don't become a murderer" by................well not murdering people.....THAT is a choice left up to each individual
Interesting but I never looked at it that way. I figure I may not have immediate control over my next thought but if I make decisions to stay away from the darker things in life, I can pretty much bet that my next throughs will, at the least, be somewhat positive. Does that make sense? My dad used to say "Garbage in, garbage out." I read that as if I fill my head with shit, shit will probably come out of me either through eccentricities, anger, sadness, fear or some other unhealthy trait. Maybe all of them together. As far as getting things done, playing an instrument, learning something new... I figure what I do now is setting me up for memories when I'm an old geizure that can't get around anymore. I say the more we do while were young, the happier we'll be when we're old. And we'll ALL get old one day.