RUM HAM

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I've got big plans. ◊ Talking Blanket ◊ Yay, Butts! LOL!

i want to, but i constantly find myself drifiting into believing that i have absolutely no free will, and then doing anything becomes pointless, and the only noble or logical goal to have is to be happy as much as possible and live life to the fullest, even if goals in themselves mean nothing seeing as i would not be able to change anything, assuming of course, that i am right in believing free will is false.

side note, if one belives in an all knowing God, then logically you would have to believe that you dont have free will. if anybody cares i will explain

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side note, if one belives in an all knowing God, then logically you would have to believe that you dont have free will. if anybody cares i will explain

I'm atheist, but i always thought the theist side of that particular coin was:

"God gave us free will"

?

(btw, i am firmly of the opinion we have free will.)

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let's get dressed up in costumes and dance by the bar.

even a person in a cage has freedom to move around in its cage.














































Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2012 11:36AM by mike10k.

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mike10k
i don't think kids get fucked up by divorce. i think they get fucked up because they think they have a reason to have problems because of divorce.

I have to agree with this. Don't get me wrong, I think the circumstances of a divorce can often be traumatic for children, and sometimes some form of therapy is needed, but where the problem comes in is when people start making a child think that all of their emotional problems stem from one particular event. This is even, in some sense at least, true for all trauma. I don't know if I should talk about divorce though, because my parents will have been together for thirty-three years (I think) in August.

My girlfriend's younger sister has lived with us for about a year. She was living with her mom until it came out that the mother was abusing her. Now this has caused the sister to have understandable issues to work through, but I don't think it has helped that her therapist has gotten the idea stuck in her head that she is bipolar and suffers from PTSD. This may well be an accurate way to describe it if you look at the DSM, but I think she suffers as much from being categorized that way as she does from post traumatic stress itself. As my girlfriend put it, it's not good to tell someone who's brain is still developing that they should define themself by a particular disorder. I would add, worst of all a teenager, since as I remember it, it is terribly fashionable to be mentally ill in high school, so much so that the majority feign it. Once again, the abuse has left her with emotional scars certainly but I don't think labeling her as having a certain disorder and in effect giving her already fragile mind (because of the emotional scars and because of her youth) an excuse to wallow in reactions and overreactions to things is good or responsible.

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mike10k
in the end, everybody does exactly what they want to do.

that's either correct, or my opinion.

A lot of people here seem to agree with you. I've always thought it required so broad a definition of the word "want" as to make the word unwieldy to use. In other words I think, by the dictionary definition of the word want, that statement is obviously bullshit. I'm pretty certain that's just my opinion though.

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JesusChristILoveYouYesIDo
i want to, but i constantly find myself drifiting into believing that i have absolutely no free will, and then doing anything becomes pointless, and the only noble or logical goal to have is to be happy as much as possible and live life to the fullest, even if goals in themselves mean nothing seeing as i would not be able to change anything, assuming of course, that i am right in believing free will is false.

If free will doesn't exist, who cares? If it doesn't exist then it doesn't matter if it does. But more importantly, nothing has changed. If free will doesn't exist it didn't suddenly stop existing. It never has, so there is no reason to even ask yourself the question. The fact that we talk about it like this so freely makes me suspect free will does exist. Either way, it SEEMS to exist, right. Isn't that what matters.

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JesusChristILoveYouYesIDo
side note, if one belives in an all knowing God, then logically you would have to believe that you dont have free will. if anybody cares i will explain

It depends on your perspective on the omniscience of said God. If that omniscience is an innate quality no matter "where" God exists then it would be pretty logical to think there could be no free will, because in order for said God to know what you were about to do, it would have to be determined ahead of time. This is assuming that there is one set future in this God's mind. If however, something like multiple futures exist in which a waveform collapsing (for instance) determines which "future" you end up in (future in quotes because by then it would be the present) then God might simply be the ultimate physicist who sees all the probabilities and exists with knowledge of all possible futures. This still presents problems for free will, because it requires that all possible outcomes happen, meaning you make every possible choice, but to the individual in each "future" free will would seem to exist.

There is of course a simpler argument for free will existing in the face of an all knowing God. Say God exists entirely outside of time. In order for free will to exist, there must be linear time (and probably matter) because free will requires cause and effect. Humans exist in a universe with linear time, but God does not. Solves the problem completely. It probably requires that God is static and therefore It has no free will of Its own, but that is at least another problem. Actually it would explain a lot of the ideas monotheists have about God though, being unchangeable for instance, or Its ways being unknowable... the inability to stomach sin (sin being defined as something contrary to the nature of God). It may pose a problem for consciousness, but it certainly ties up a few other loose ends while leaving that one open.

I don't believe in any God in the strictest sense by the way (though I definitely wouldn't call myself and atheist and think it's just lazy to say you are an agnostic... duh, none of us KNOWS). These are just thoughts.




Also, to clarify the above, I stopped giving a shit about whether or not we have free will a long time ago. Finding a logical answer won't change anything. Either we do or we don't. If we do, we do and nothing has changed, but coming to the wrong conclusion might cause us to make mistakes. If we don't, we don't so it doesn't matter which conclusion we come to, that would be the one we were preordained to come to... and still it hasn't changed anything. Of course, one could argue that they can't help thinking about it, literally, but since we SEEM to live in a world where we have free will and the nature of logic and semantics is that they only make sense if free will is assumed, I'll say that I find that kind of thinking intellectually lazy. It's funny to watch people justify actions by not having free will though. It may be true that it's a justification. Maybe we don't have free will. And maybe the argument is then made because the person was predetermined to make it. But does it not seem logically awkward to anyone else to try and build a justification for WHY you did something when you believe you didn't have any choice, in the absolute most literal and strictest sense?

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[hackberrygarage.tumblr.com]
[eavesdroppingvulpine.tumblr.com]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2012 03:02PM by simonfox.

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simonfox

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mike10k
in the end, everybody does exactly what they want to do.

that's either correct, or my opinion.

A lot of people here seem to agree with you. I've always thought it required so broad a definition of the word "want" as to make the word unwieldy to use. In other words I think, by the dictionary definition of the word want, that statement is obviously bullshit. I'm pretty certain that's just my opinion though.

i can prove it.









































































































































you wanted to scroll down and see the proof i said i had. but unfortunately, i don't really have any proof. nobody does. about anything. i have always found though, that if i didn't want to walk into a wall i'd turn myself until the direction i was going in no longer had a wall in front of it. (also, now listening to "the wall."

That makes sense if what you are doing is running yourself into a wall. But that's not the cause of all suffering. It's a convenient thing to say when talking about first world problems. In such cases it may even be true most of the time. I doubt anyone would say anything like "you're exactly where you want to be" to a skin-and-bones child in a third world country for whom famine and drought are part of everyday life. No one would say this child wanted this and that's what it's happening. Which makes me wonder why it is something we spout to each other. When our problems are real and based on circumstances, it's the new age, pseudo-buddhist, The Secret thing to say that "All of your problems are of your own creation. You make things happen the way you want. You are where you choose to be. You are where you want to be. You only do what you want to do." Take a person who's just had a loved one die. You can't tell them they created this situation unless you believe that each individual has the godlike ability to shape the entire reality around them without even knowing they are doing it. If they hate the fact that the person is dead, you can't even claim they wanted that to happen. Then you could say they choose how they respond to it. Not to claim that science gives us all of the answers, but current neuroscience (and I would imagine personal experience) would suggest that you do not have complete conscious control over your emotions.

This is not to say I completely disagree that people quite often create their own problems. I would also not disagree that there is a point where you have a choice whether to wallow in your misery or dust yourself off and make some hard choices. These are basic truisms that anyone could tell you though. I happen to think it's a bit silly to try and argue anything past these truisms in the vein of people having control over their problems. Often, when people bang their head into a wall repeatedly, it's not because they haven't tried to turn around, but because it's dark and they don't have their bearings. Sometimes, no usually, there is too much that you don't know for you to make an informed decision about which way to go. You could just sit in the middle of the room, but maybe sometimes the one thing you can say for certain is that the floor is about to drop out and you must leave. Maybe you aren't even banging into the same wall repeatedly... maybe the next time you will find the door. Sometimes, people with a supposedly better view try to tell you that you keep doing the same thing, but more often than not they watching you from a room not much more well lit than your own.

In fact, I don't know if you've ever looked through a window late at night when there is a little light outside and tons in the room you are in. From certain angles, you can't really see what's going on past the window that well and the person out in the darker place can see much better. In fact, they can often see YOU better than you see them in such a situation. It's just like this... sometimes the people in the light can't really see properly into the dark and the advice they give you is less accurate than what you can figure out yourself. In fact, they can usually see you better than you can see them.

It's true that sometimes someone comes along and hands you a match. Sometimes you find it yourself. But I think telling yourself you are exactly where you want to be and do exactly what you want to do is mildly narcissistic and someone else telling you the same is mildly sociopath. That last statement is exaggerated, maybe, and inflammatory, certainly, but I only mean to make my point.

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[hackberrygarage.tumblr.com]
[eavesdroppingvulpine.tumblr.com]

i agree with your whole post.

it's too often that most people are smarter than i am!

-or-

it's just how things are.

well if you believe that God knew everything that would occur before He even created anything, as all the christians that i know do; i believe it even specifically says that in the bible, anyway if he knew everything that would occur before we were created, then people were created to exactly what God "already knew would happen" if you were to deviate from that path, then God would be wrong, and he would have lost control of his creation, and would therefore no longer be God. or in the very least, no longer infallible.
like i said earlier though, this doesnt apply to everyone who believes in God, only ones who believe that he is all knowing.

didn't he 'lose control of his creation' with the whole 'original sin' business?

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let's get dressed up in costumes and dance by the bar.

god's a little bit country; a little bit rock and roll.

the whole does a tree make a sound when it falls in the woods and there's nobody around to hear it deal is the same as does god exist if no one believes.

1: if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?
2: it depends on whether or not the tree falling in the woods makes a sound when it falls.

catch my drift.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2012 12:24PM by mike10k.

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betamax
didn't he 'lose control of his creation' with the whole 'original sin' business?

not if he wrote the story to go that way.

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mike10k
god's a little bit country; a little bit rock and roll.

the whole does a tree make a sound when it falls in the woods and there's nobody around to hear it deal is the same as does god exist if no one believes.

1: if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?
2: it depends on whether or not the tree falling in the woods makes a sound when it falls.

catch my drift.

i do not. how does it apply? (asking honestly, not trying to be funny or jerk-y)

1: if god exists and no one is around to believe it, does he exist?




wait a second.................

sorry, it doesn't apply.

lol, its just the idea of being a character in somebody else's book that's really hard for me to rap my head around, and how some people are totally fine with it, and also, those people still happily follow ambitions and such. i guess people who blindly believe something are not gonna be the most logical of people, but its a pretty blaring contradiction in my opinion.

and if you believe in God such as i stated above, then you would have to believe that he wrote specific "characters" to never accept him and then burn in hell for eternity.

this shit will get you down in the dumps, man.

Basically, humans could still have free will but it would require a couple of ingredients that I don't think most Christians would like:

1) Every possible future happens. God simply knows how all the infinite possibilities play out. This means the whole multiverse thing would have to be true AND it also means that, with infinite or nearly infinite possibilities, there would be a version of every human who ever lived that got to go to heaven.

2) The verse about God being the same through the ages would have to be absolutely literally true... this means God is static. God couldn't have any kind of consciousness as we know it, or have free will itself for that matter. You might ask how something with no consciousness could be all knowing. At this point you have to think we are talking about something in between Spinoza's God and the Enlightenment era Deist clockmaker version. God, in this equation is simply a blueprint for reality that existed before reality.

The difficulty then, you see, is not with an all-knowing God, but with an all-knowing God who is also a personal God, that is to say a God who cares (or can care) what you do and loves (or can love) its creations.

For about ten minutes after I heard the term "ignostic" I thought I had found a word to describe my position, but when I read up on it, I thought it smacked too much of logical positivism which I could get into my issues with, but it just seems a waste of time. Suffice it to say I prefer to think that there are no unfalsifiable statements rather than that statements which we classify as unfalsifiable are meaningless. You might say, "but what about something like 'red squares eat frowzy squigs.'" I think in the end, just because we can't figure out if something is true or not doesn't make it unfalsifiable. Humans are clearly limited in the area of discovering the veracity of shit we just make up out of thin air, but who's to say there is not a being or beings who can actually test a statement like that. One could say, "but squares don't eat and squigs aren't anything and I don't know what frowzy means so that's not a word." To which I reply:

1) If you claim the statement is unfalsifiable, then you admit you can't test it, so how do you know?

2) see above

3) Look it up... it most certainly is a word.

What all this has to do with God is that, I think we've spent so much time arguing over if "God" (or a god or gods, and this is part of the point) exists and not enough time talking about what we as individuals mean when we say "God" or "god" or "gods". Define the parameters, I say. Define and conquer.

Damn, mike, I hope you love how off topic this thread has gotten... or is it on topic. I have no idea.

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[hackberrygarage.tumblr.com]
[eavesdroppingvulpine.tumblr.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2012 11:48AM by simonfox.

its slightly on topic, because we were talking about the meaning of life.
You're right, i should have said personal all knowing God. and i totally forgot about the sci-fi explanation (just as valid as any) but your standard blind faith christain tries to dabble in the dark arts of science as little as possible, so i've never been called out on that before.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2012 06:29PM by JesusChristILoveYouYesIDo.

off topic or on topic, you guys are on fire. love reading the stuff you guys are posting.

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Wild Creature
if you are interesting text, telling an intriguing story, with photographs to illustrate the points you are making, along with links to useful resources, you should be content.

because good content has interesting text, tells an interesting story, has photographs to illustrate its points, and provides links to useful resources.

why do i most often only get your posts like, a long time after it's relevant to.

CONtent.

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clams on the half shell and roller skates; roller skates.

this was a fun thread. not.

but i think this article belongs in there.

it's fucking hilarious.

from the onion, of course.


Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

[www.theonion.com]

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clams on the half shell and roller skates; roller skates.

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mike10k
i'm in a limbo crossroads. i'm not somewhere. i'm inbetween wheres right now. i'm neither here nor there. i'm an unsider. an upsider. an outlier. an out and out liar. i gotta move. i need a new drug. i need a new job. i need a beer and a warm outside and some sunshine and a back step that i can sit on. i need to relax, get outta here. i'm stuck, in some muddy muck, and i'm not wearing sensible shoes because they're all packed up. nowhere to go, nothing to do, all fun no jack fun time no play here when there up beat goes when for there be no fine ball terry ball. just another normal day after day after day. just another great day. whoopee. i'm a complainer. hi human race, i've finally joined you!

but you'll never make me grow up!

man, this was a pretty great post. made me laff, made me cry.

made me bored!

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clams on the half shell and roller skates; roller skates.

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mike10k

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Mtn. Girl
ETA: In short, everything happens for a reason!

while i believe that everything happens, i've still yet to be convinced, by myself or otherwise, that there is a reason.

guess it doesn't matter.

everything happens.

shit happens.

does that logically make everything shit?

possibly.

but then, anything's possible.

anything, mind you. not everything.

so if everything is shit, that means that shit is not possible.

hm.

it's possible that shit happens.

pretty sure this was taken word for word from a calvin & hobbes strip.

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clams on the half shell and roller skates; roller skates.

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mike10k
this was a fun thread. not.

but i think this article belongs in there.

it's fucking hilarious.

from the onion, of course.


Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

[www.theonion.com]

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clams on the half shell and roller skates; roller skates.