Makaze

0_0 Eek. I was afraid someone would ask.

I just switched from my laptop to my tablet (because my laptop is dead), and unfortunately, I have none of my stocks saved on here.

Is it okay if I give you the link tomorrow?


PS: This is far from the original. I added a lot of textures and color features to this. The stock was quite ugly.

I'm just going to concede here. You're right. Barring the existence of God, there is no basis for the existence of free will of any sort. I believe in God, you don't, and there's no point in having that argument because neither of us are going to get anything out of it.

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Forgoing scientific basis; this is a logical conclusion, not a scientific one. A scientific approach would try to analyze what those factors are. Logic argues that no matter what they are, a person has control over neither their experiences nor the impulses that cause them to react to their experiences in the way they do. There is no logic in support of choice, but there is logic against it. You believe that you are unfettered by your body? If you do not (I would guess not, believing in 'the sins of the flesh'), then on what basis do you think you can separate one wish from another wish? On what basis do you separate one choice from 'the body' and leave the others up the body's flaws? They are all from your nature. I would like to hear any counter you have beyond an idealistic notion of the soul; logical reasoning for a soul, maybe.
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Any logical reasoning I have for the existence of a soul would be based in Christianity anyway, I'm sure I'd just be boring you.


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Your belief contradicts itself. When last I checked, playing carrot and stick was called sadistic. I want you to show that you love me. I put your favorite cookie on a table and tell you not to eat it. If you do not, then I am happy. If you do, then I reveal that I poisoned that cookie. Surprise! All your fault, right?
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Except God told Adam and Eve that the cookie was poisoned (If you partake of the tree, you shall surely die)


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I would especially lead you to definitions one, two and three of 'free'. They refer to 'being free of restraints' or 'limitations' regarding completing things that one wishes to do. To limit is to restrain, to shackle, and to restrain is to take away freedom. If you honestly believe that whatever the one above you gives you is freedom, then I pity you for your submissiveness. You are as a slave unto anyone who gives you ultimatums.
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Yep, I look pretty silly right now. I have no idea what compelled me to say "The limited will we have is still free," that doesn't make any sense. But still, I'd argue that we have limited will.


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Yes. Now, the question is... If we have limited will, on what basis do you believe that we get to make choices at all? Logic and science both point to the idea that you do not make choices but instead are led to take actions by impulses that you were born with and impulses that you developed over your lifetime to help you survive in the world in which you live. While you include the word 'will' in the sentiment, it is closer to the oxymoron than an existing concept. Will is to limitation as freedom is to slavery.

A slave is free... To do things within the reach of his chains (but only things the master says if he does not wish to be punished). A man's will is free... To choose things within the limitations a god gave him (but only things the god says if he does not wish to be punished). Do you see the similarity?
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Yes I do see it and it's actually a very good analogy for what I believe is going on here.


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Once again, one can, say, wish to breath under water, but this is not possible. Even within the scope of choices that we have, there are limitations that make the window of 'choice' smaller and smaller. Another example is touching fire. No matter how much you may wish to touch a hot stove top and keep your hand there, your body will recoil from the pain. You get no choice in that action. At what point do you not get to say, "I was led into wanting to do this by things I did not initiate"?
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You are led into wanting whatever you want by things you did not initiate. There are no exceptions to that. You still have a choice whether to give into those things you want, or not to do so.


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Now, let's review; specifically the underlined bit. Why would a god want to leave senses like those but forgo billions of others? Even by your standards, in which we have a choice, wouldn't having more factors make the choice more free?
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I don't know. I am not God. Yes, having more factors would make a choice more free. Why not give us more factors? I don't know. There are potentially thousands of reasons. There are potentially no reasons. We can't know that.


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To use your own wording, let us say that God made a kid and gave him the brain process that led him to choose to slap himself in the face. I will assume for the sake of this example that he is led to literally slap himself in the face, in the sense that the hand that he believes he controls comes into contact with a face that he believes he controls. There were no genes to speak of to lead him to it—there was nothing, in fact—so God gave him that instinct from scratch. Similar to the instinct that would engage if a mosquito landed on his face. Then the god blamed the kid for slapping himself in the face.
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It's not similar to the instinct that would engage if a mosquito landed on his face. Of that matter, he has no choice. Of willingly slapping himself in the face, he does.

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There is no sense to be made of it. We have your notion that this is somehow a good idea or that it demonstrates 'choice' and my notion that a piece of analog machinery slapping itself and getting punished for it is rather senseless. Those are the two options being gathered from the evidence.
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But for this you have to believe we're made of only analog parts, and I would again argue of the existence of the soul.

http://www.kh-vids.net/showthread.php?118107-Truth-or-DARE!!!!!&p=3619407&posted=1#post3619407

I kind of don't want to have this discussion in the Spam Zone. But if you want, we could bring this over to the Discussion section. I find the topic to be pretty interesting.


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Which did you mean? Hm. Indeterminism as I understand it, especially as the absence of determinism, would necessarily argue that events can happen randomly without previous causes.
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Well you got the gist of it, I guess. I'll flesh it out a bit. Indeterminism is the concept that events (certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or, to be more specific, not caused deterministically by prior events. It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance .

Causality and indeterminism aren't mutually exclusive though. I don't deny that causes exist. I just maintain that the only causes that exist are of a type that does not constrain the future to a single course which determinism implies.

If we were to look at causation deterministically, then that would mean that if A causes B, then A must always be followed by B. But we don’t know that for certain. For example, I could punch you right now. Now what would your response be? You could retaliate; you could walk away; you could yell “Why the **** did you punch me?!”; etc. The fact that these other options are open shows that things aren’t set in stone like determinism would have you believe, no? We only know that A probabilistically causes B if A's occurrence increases the probability of B. It is possible for everything to have a cause but that doesn’t mean that every cause leads to a single inevitable effect.

Might add more later. Today's been meh. I'm not really motivated at the moment. xD

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Ah, late at night. /yawn
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This is an incredibly busy time for me, more than I've ever really been, so I will mostly be replying to you/coming to this website at all late at night. Furthermore, due to the fact that it will late at night, I will probably more incoherent than usual, which I must apologize for and commend you for dealing with.


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Listening to it from 24:00 on, he makes great points, including one that helps my argument. He expresses a basic principle of 'reductionism'. He expresses how people love to believe that atoms have color because molecules and objects have color, though this is not true. Furthermore, they would like to think that cells are alive though none of their parts are alive. And then people would like to think that animals are conscious while their parts, their cells, are not. He says that you can create consciousness from parts that are not conscious, those being cells, just as you can create living things from things that are not alive, and things that have color from things that do not. Creating consciousness with analog parts; isn't that very similar to the AI you mentioned below?
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I'm afraid I don't have time to the link you posted (Really I should be sleeping right now) so I'm just going to assume you've covered its main points: Yes, consciousness can be created from analog parts- that doesn't make it less real. Yes, it's subjective, but that doesn't make it less physical. It's there, it's a part of your brain, it cannot be ignored, that's all I was trying to say. Your disbelief in individual minds is another matter.

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I am not making that argument. I am arguing that choice cannot exist for a subjective consciousness. They do not have free will. We are exactly like AI in videogames. We just have many, many more factors.

We do not have that choice. All of our thoughts, including rebellion against what we perceive to be our nature, are by definition 'in our nature'. You say that we choose, but what led us to choose? You cannot choose not to let your experiences shape the way you are. In 'choosing not to let them shape you', you are reacting to their existence, and they have already shaped you; they have shaped you into rejecting them. Your choice to reject them was defined by a mix of your nature and previous experiences. If this is your first experience, then the only thing that guides your choice is your 'natural' impulse. Someone without either an impulse to avoid (pain) or an impulse to pursue (pleasure) will have no reason to act at all.

Your choice is made through either internal factors (natural preferences) or a reaction to external factors (experiences or the environment itself). Internal and external covers all of the bases. If you have inborn morality, then that is your nature. If you also experience pleasure by breaking that conscience, that is also in your nature. If you fear external consequences for seeking the pleasure, that is nurtured. When you make a choice on one side or the other, it is a result of your natural factors and your nurtured factors compromising and overpowering each other. Regardless of which one wins, you did not create any of them. What do you think the third influence is?
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I would argue that, similar to how objects with color have parts without color, a person does not necessarily have to be only the sum of his parts. That person may be shaped by nature and nurture, just like objects are shaped by atoms, but the end result, the sum, has the ability to act freely or abstractly from those parts. Of this argument, I would have no scientific evidence, only the biblical belief in the soul, God's promise of free will, and my relative sureness that I made the decision to put on pants this morning.


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Okay, so you do not counter me on the fact that God set it up so that we would sin and set up the consequences for it. Thus, you acknowledge that God is a sadistic **** if he exists. At least we agree on that.
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You misunderstand, I do believe that God exists and I do not believe he is a sadistic fuсk. I do not believe that God set it up so that we would sin, but that God wants to be loved, and giving people no choice but to love you would not be real love. Thus, he needed to give them a choice, and yes, he needed to have consequences in place for what would happen if the wrong choice was made. And it was.


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However, this range is not free; it does not cover all possible choices. We do not have 'free will'. Your argument that God had to allow rape in order for us to 'have free will' has failed because there are choices that he has not given us the ability to make.
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It covers all possible choices within the world that God made for us, and the sinful nature we made for ourselves. Yes, free will is limited, but the limited will we have is still free.


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Did I miss something? I was under the impression that it did not matter whether he 'did not create them' or 'took them away'. The question was one of whether he gave us one choice and not the other, and why he gave us one and not the other. The question had nothing to do with which came first. It had to do with his results. His design started from nothing either way, correct?

You completely ignored what I said. I demonstrated that God made it impossible for us to choose more things than he gave us the ability to choose, particularly with senses. You are being blinded by the statement, 'he didn't take it away if he didn't make it in the first place'. Not making it is the same as taking it away. Freedom means "no limits". For the purposes of this discussion on "free will", we will assume that he started with "free" will and anything that we do not have was taken away from it. You brought this subject up, so please keep up.
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If you want to use this definition of free will (And I'll admit that it's a fair definition), then you're correct, it cannot by any means be argued that we have free will. I guess the best term would be "Limited will". The keyword is "Will".


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Worse, you contradicted what you said earlier in the post. God planned out the punishment ahead of time. You just acknowledged that. Let me quote you again. "Mankind's punishment for Adam and Eve's acts is that we have to live in the sin they created. For God to disallow certain sins would be counterproductive to this punishment." Now you say that we made the punishment. Did God plan out what would happen when he gave us the choice or not?
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It would basically have been a joint effort. God's punishment for us was to basically just toss us into a miserable world, and let us make the punishment for ourselves by living in our own sin. Like a "Time out" for a naughty child, except on a much larger scale. The parent sends the child to time out...if the child chooses to slap himself in the face while he's there, that's on him. Yes, mankind is basically a kid slapping himself in the face.

This page contains links to plenty of studies. At the very least, it can be verified that the human mind does have a conscious mind in addition to an unconscious mind. Therefore your statement that "I don't believe in 'consciously'" Disregards quite a bit.


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Free will cannot exist because a person has no control over either their nature of their nurture. This is true whether a god created you or you were the result of random events. You cannot expand beyond your current parameters, and you did not create your own parameters. Every decision that you make is a result of your parameters causing you to react to the input they are given, such that if you repeat the same circumstances over and over, wiping your memory each time, you will always make the same decision. How exactly do you get a choice in all of this?
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You seem to be making the argument that randomness = choice. That isn't true. AI in video games will make different choices if they are put in the same situation over and over again, but do they have free will?

We don't have control over our nature or our nurture, but we have the choice not to let those things shape who we are.


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So, your argument is that God did not plan for the contingency of or have any way to stop his clock from malfunctioning? When last I checked, God created everything that factored into the creation of sin, and it was by his hand that suffering extended to the rest of the world after Adam and Eve disobeyed.

Furthermore, when God introduced pain into the world and explained the rules to Adam and Eve, he would have known then that rape was going to happen and he made it possible, unto editing the whole of creation such that it was along with creating pain in childbirth and other harmful things. This was the purpose of the tree. The 'choice'. He had the whole lineup of 'ifs' and 'thens' planned out when he gave them the 'choice' of the tree in the first place. Why give them the choice if he had not planned for what would happen if they made the wrong one?
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Mankind's punishment for Adam and Eve's acts is that we have to live in the sin they created. For God to disallow certain sins would be counterproductive to this punishment.


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I could easily go back into the 'senses' argument. A man who sees cannot explain sight to a blind man, nor can one who hears explain sound to a deaf man, and so on. This being the case, what other senses could we simply not be able to comprehend, not having them? God made it impossible for us to not only experience but conceive of the world with any of the other senses that could exist. We assume that the five are the only ones that could exist, and yet we know that higher physical dimensions can exist outside of our experience. With the senses we have, we are told 'to gauge out our eyes should they lead us astray', or something close to that. This is based in choice. However, what of the other senses? I am not given a choice to gauge out my sixth, seventh and eighth sensory organs. God has limited my choices and indeed my will to either experience or not experience five senses alone. This is an extreme limitation on my range of choices.
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It's more of a limitation on your abilities. The human body is simply unable to comprehend those other senses, I imagine it was this way even before original sin. And the point stands- however limited, you do have a range of choices.


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Rape is the same. God could easily have eliminated rape instead of a sixth or seventh sense and we would not be able to choose to rape. Why is there an inherent difference between the two? Why should I be given one choice and not the other, and how exactly is my will 'free' if I may choose to rape but have a vast store of senses taken away from me?
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That's the thing though, we don't know if God "Eliminated" those senses, we might never have had them in the first place. The inherent difference is that man created rape, God created the other senses. God gave us a world and bodies, we made rape. Him limiting our own creation is something he is shown not to do. God is only shown to highly disapprove of our sinful creations, and to punish us for them, but limiting our free will by making them impossible is just something he doesn't do.