On May 22, 12:49 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote: > > > In addition to approving of one presented option and disapproving of > > another, > > Approved for a reason or approved for no reason.
right > > > free will allows us to nominate our own option for approval. > > Nominated for a reason or nominated for no reason. Wrong. I am doing the nominating. I have many reasons, feelings, whims, etc. but it is not necessary for me to choose any of those or not choose any of them. I can create a new course of action which synthesizes some existing elements and projects forward my own novel intention which cannot be reduced to 'for a reason or no reason'. > > > I don't see much of a difference between 'will' and 'free will'. > > The meaning of will is clear and its existence beyond dispute, I want to do > some things and don't want to do other things. But free will "means" that > simultaneously something happened for no reason and that same something did > not happened for no reason; this is not even nonsense because there is no > sense for it to be opposite to. The stories of Lewis Carroll are nonsense > but they are not gibberish, the "free will" noise is gibberish. You are defining free will as an a priori non-sequitur and then insisting that anyone other than you is defining it that way. When you say "I want to do some things and don't want to do other things" how is that not free will? You can argue that this feeling of wanting to do things is an illusion as far as it being truly causally efficacious in our body and the world, but that leaves the problem of what would be the point of such a feeling to exist in the universe that is purely deterministic. It's not that free will is ambiguously deterministic and non- determistic, it's that it is orthogonal to determinism. Why? Because our initiative is on the same level as the ground of being. There are laws of physics and we represent some of them personally. We are the Sheriff of voluntary muscle movement in our body and of executive functions of our central nervous system. We interpret and execute the law personally. There are laws we are compelled to observe and preserve, but the way we choose to do that, what we emphasize and let slide, those are actually up to us as individual people and nobody else. > > >They are both colloquial > > Translation: Shallow. Not thought through. Vague. Ignorant. Not at all. Informal, popular, useful, general rather than technical or academic. > > > terms that don't need to be put under a microscope. > > Philosophers have been studying these terms for thousands of years without > the use of modern tools like microscopes and logic and the scientific > method, and that is why they have made precisely ZERO progress in all that > time. All your posts could have been written by any philosophically minded > well educated man living in 1000BC, but the thing is the human race has > learned far more good philosophy since then, but not from philosophers. How is that really working out for us though? http://thismodernworld.com/archives/7012 Maybe it's time to take our hypertrophied objectifying minds and give subjectivity a fresh look, you know, without the chip on our shoulder. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
