“But you are responsible for helping or neglecting that person who needed help that you happen to come across. You are responsible for your own finances. You are responsible for speeding in your car or driving drunk. You can’t tell the officer that you had no free will. That excuse will not wash.”—proclaimer

of course.   The sort of brain th…[Read more]

“Are you free to actually believe the opposite of what you believe?”

“Over time yes. One small step at a time. A decision here and a decision there. Years later, bad decisions accumulate and the weight of them swings the pendulum the other way.”

Yes exactly!   So you understand in that moment with your brain in the state it was in at that tim…[Read more]

Ed.  Were you free to say the opposite.   Some people because of what’s in their brains can only agree, can only see it the way I do.  You, and many others can’t.  And you have no choice in how you see it.  You can’t simply decide to see this the way I do.  You simply don’t have those connections in your brain.

You were not free to say the oppos…[Read more]

Little bit off point or beyond what I want to discuss but:

was god free to say that love is bad, and hate is good.   Was he free to say that you should not help the poor one?   Was he free to say that rape is good?  Was he free to say that steeling is good.

Let’s reverse this.  Assuming you are married, could you have chosen to not ask your wife to marry you?  Was that option available to you?

Do you have the ability to choose the opposite of what you wrote?   Are you free to actually believe the opposite of what you believe?  Can you do that now, if only for a minute?   Can you actually believe the opposite of what you believe about free will?  Is there actually a choice.

“Free will just means when you need to make a decision you can”

I already gave this example but if you had to make the decision to come up with any city, to me that seems like there can’t be a freer choice. And yet when we look, it’s hard to find the freedom.  Out f the millions of cities only a few arose in consciousness.  You weren’t a…[Read more]

I like the driving analogy.  But I believe we are always on what you call autopilot.   You are simply not free to turn into traffic.  That “choice” isn’t there for you.  You can only “choose” to stay in the lines and do exactly as has been put in your head and not otherwise.

someone with a very different brain chemistry who is suicidal can…[Read more]

You begin by saying, if your heart is right you will generally make god choices.

I think what we call the heart is really a part of the brain.  Our brain of course is what is thinking and responding to the senses and ideas and input.  We are the sum total of everything in our brains.

there was a guy who never in his life had any desire of p…[Read more]

“You can choose the one you or the one you like less. Now imagine the one you like less is more healthy. Then you have a good reason to choose it now.”

I changed your “prefer” to want, only because it’s the word I’ve used in all these posts.  And as I’ve said in my posts, you are free to choose the one you want.  You aren’t free to choose yo…[Read more]

Accidental unconscious acts aren’t free.  So let’s look at purposeful.

There are only two reasons for which you will ever purposefully do anything–you are FORCED to or you WANT to.
(Example: Many people say they don’t want to go to the gym but they go anyway.  Is this an example of someone doing something freely and not because they want to?  N…[Read more]

What does it mean to say you do whatever you want, when you can’t control your wants? Rather than saying: “you can do what you want,” it’s perhaps more accurate to say: “you can ONLY do what you want.”
You can do whatever you want.  You just aren’t free to choose what you want.  And where is the freedom in that?

Another similar experiment.
Choosing chocolate ice cream or vanilla.
But, why would you choose one over the other?  Why would you choose vanilla over chocolate?  The answer: I would need to WANT it.  But, can we control what we want?  No. Imagine that you don’t want to punch your mother in the face.  Can you decide to want to punch her?  Thi…[Read more]

Thought experiment (not mine):

Think of the name of city.  Choose any city you WANT.  Pay attention to what this conscious process of choosing a city is like.  This is as free a decision as you are ever going to make.  You have all the cities in the world to choose from and I’m asking you to pick one.  Several cities have probably occurred to y…[Read more]

I wasn’t free to come to that conclusion as if to suggest I could come to another.   I was “free” to only come to that conclusion. And that’s not freedom.

Free will as most people think of it is an illusion.  I’m trying to think it isn’t but I don’t seem free to do that.

Hey Ed

ya it’s been a while.  I spent like a couple hours a day on here for about 8 years, but I basically switched to much shorter and even more frustrating conversations on YouTube about 5 years ago.

Im not the person I once was.  This website broke me.

Hey T8,

Been thinking about you and this forum in the last week or so.  Not sure what to say, but hope you are doing okay given what happened.

I have a friend that has the DJI inspire drone and it can go pretty high up.   I’m also co soldering getting the DJI mavic air.

Any way to tell of the earth is flat or round with a drone?

I’m in the boring middle of Canada.

Its not just that the same image isn’t seen.

It’s that if you take someone near the North Pole and someone at the same longitude near the South Pole, the moon will appear upside down when each person is shown the others image

If it is a globe, we would expect an upside down image of the moon when viewed at on…[Read more]