[Naeem]

Lately, I've thought about this lots.
The kind of person we are, to an extent, depends completely on the very family we're born into. That in itself is chance and circumstance. A situation if you'd like...
The very first factor is wealth. If your family is wealthy, you have an advantage and a needed resource. Then comes love. Then comes the family's focus on education, morals, and all the things dealing with life.
Now, as you grow and go out into the world, you use what your family has taught you. But you won't always be a brick wall, and you will conform at times from society. Almost every decision you make, is based on something else you've experienced before. Unless something really drastic happens in your life that wakes you up and asks you to change your way of thinking completely, your current way of thinking will evolve or stay the same until your very last day with world.


My point; You don't even have that much of a choice which isn't biased off feelings, no matter what you say. Every decision you make is based on a previous experience. Why not touch the flame? Becuase it hurts. Why not talk to that girl? Because you learned your lesson. For some, why not steal? Because it's fun, or you don't have moral fiber, or the lack of money.

It's just, I think free will isn't really free will. It's just.. logic/reasoning, watever. That you lose your will the day you're born or the day you begin to take in your surroundings. Yes, we're given choices everywhere. But those choices are pre-determined by an experience or decision previously in your life.


I was bored so I decided to write this . Confused myself a bit, but yeah.
[/u]
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[[Shizo]]

You are correct.

[gLitterbug]

I just wonder, what's your point?

[Yarik]

Your wrong. So your saying logic isn't logical. And morals don't exist. And right can be wrong? lol. Your logic is illogical.

[Naeem]

as i said, i confused myself.
i'm just saying, we use reasoning based on previous experiences at almost all the time. not free will. that free will doesnt really exist.
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[eyewoo]

If we only used reasoning based upon previous experience then the great discoveries would not have happened. The great art would not exist.

Most of us are greater than the sum of our experience. That is how we move ahead and succeed in life. Certainly experience is a big part of each person's makeup and motivation... but as a teacher, guide and point of departure, not as a dictator.

Anyway... that's how I see it...
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[gLitterbug]

Free will is only an illusion to some people. It starts to be that way if you think that way. Blame the world and others and you have taken the first step to give them power over you. Know when things are your own fault and you have the power to change them.

This connects very well with your other threads. While one might have a bad starting point in life due to your past and things you can not influence, it lies in your hand to shape the future. Frazetta lost his drawing arm and switched to his healthy one. A person with a weak will would've blamed the world and drifted into the abyss.

Of course nobody can prove that. I could be all fate and written down in some book on the other end of the universe. In the end it doesn't matter, because when it is like that you can't change a thing, but on the other hand if it is not you can only win by having the belief that you are the master of your own destiny.

[balistic]

Annisahmad, you're exactly right. People who say "you create your own reality" have never been dealt a bad hand by reality. The universe is an awesomely huge tangle, and we're just tiny specks on its webs. The difference between success and failure comes down to chance as often as skill.

[Nilwort]

It sounds like you are thinking annisahmad. This is good. But it is also possible to think too much. If you think too much, you can miss out on the present moment, which is all we really can be sure of.

You've got to find out what feels right for you. If you like partying all the time and going to a job that doesn't challenge you, then go ahead and do it. If you want something more out of life in the way of education, go for it. If you like making elaborate sculptures out of Oreo Cookies, by all means, go for it.

One word of advice, stop seeing yourself as a victim. It might be tempting, but this habit of thought leads to nowhere but self-pity, which can be a friend in the lowest of times, but still goes nowhere. You've got to open up your eyes to the world around you, find something you are passionate about, and go for it with all you've got. We determine where we go in life and what we live for. It is never too late to start.

[balistic]

[gLitterbug]

I didn't claim all that happens is due to yourself or influence-able. What I tried to express is that if you totally dismiss the belief that you can make a difference with what you do it only hurts yourself, while when you accept that there might be bad things happening which you can not change but still can make the best out of it you can only win.

Of course if the meteorite hits again we are all royally fucked.

[balistic]

Hopefully if it happens, I'll be someplace with a good view
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[Naeem]

glitterbug> i'm 50/50. i had a heated debate with my friend who supported what i said. however, i wanted to play 'devil's advocate' and gave him the reasons pretty much close to what you said. I'm not sayin that there's a mighty hand somewhere that has written down my life, and that all i do is to no avail. No. I'm on the side of Balistic. Where life is just complete randomness... but yet still with order. And I think that if you really really want to, you can make a difference. However, that does not happen with everyone.

You make choices, but you use reason for those choices. You use your 'will' to benefit you, and in the end, to appease yourself. If helping others makes you feel better, you do it. If seeing others happy is what you like, then you do it. But every choice you make, in the end, is intended to benefit you. Why give up your life for someone you love? Because there's a bigger cause in your mind, and you make that choice because of the person you are. You can 'choose' to walk away from that, if other circumstances have occurred in your life. Would you give up your life if you had known that person would never give up their life for you if all depended on it? You probably wouldn't, because of that circumstance. Your 'choice', however much you have of it, would be biased by your hurt feelings, and in hope for emotional preservation. Yet, you can rise above that situation, because you really do love that perosn no matter what they think or say. What circumstances set you off to that conclusion? Could the circumstance be that they're the reason you live, and that since they've given up on you, it's okay? I'm using this as an example, and mean all of this in no personal offense if any is taken by any means.

All I am saying is that every little thing that happens around you, adds up to the big picture of you. Honor, nobility, regret, etc. These things gnaw at you to make a good 'choice'. But yet they are the limiting factors, and do not let you rise up to your true self.



Nilwort> . I don't see myself as a victim, and I never have. I like knowing that I am in control of my life to whatever degree. I don't blame the world for anything, because others have it much, much, much worse. And hopefully, i will make a difference one day as a decent if not great artist .

balistic> thanks. thats exactly it.
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[gLitterbug]

[[Shizo]]

annisahmad, i came to the same conclusion about 3 years ago. So far it proved itself to be true. This conclusion also helped me become more balanced in terms of accepting things and people as they really are. Good and bad doesn't exist. There is only action and reaction.

[Mikko K]

I believe that there's only thing you can really choose. You can choose what you're gonna TRY to do next. Whether you succeed or die in a car crash before accomplishing anything is not your choice to do.

If you live in a country with a socialistic system you understand why I'm obsessed about this idea of self determined future.. The culture here is based on mutual backstabbing and no one really has ever encouraged my stupid art fantasies at all. I'm not saying I believe life is what you maketh out of it, or that there's a treasure in the end of a rainbow or anything.

But I do believe the worst thing you can do is not believe in yourself because no one else ever will either..

[Gort]

[Capt. Fred]

Gort: this change is a result of his background. he never learnt ambition, or the importance of hardwork (having always had everything provided) or some other sort of thing. Rich parents don't equal good parents.

I haven't read all the other posts, but I totally agree with the ideas in the first post, along the lines of: when you are born, your parents are the gods that created you, and they literally program the workings of your mind. And as time goes by the metaphorical gooey brain hardens and sets into an essentially unchangeable mind.

I don't see that this infringes on free will in anyway. It doesn't mean that any decisions made later in life have been predetermined. That's like saying becuase I don't like celery, and would not choose it if given the choice, that free will has been tampered with or taken away.

You can make the same choices and decisions as anybody else on the planet. It's just very difficult, and requires a lot of strength a self-discipline to make decisions that scare us or "feel wrong" or unnatural. But as soon as you stop challenging the decisions and feelings which come naturally to you, you stop trying to improve yourself, and you remain as you are at that point for the rest of your life. This is why you see so many middle-aged fully-grown people that act like petty, over-competitive, tantrum-throwing children, becuase they never bother to try and become better.

[Impaler]

Hate to break it to all you autonomously ambling rollin' stones out there, but free will is an illusion. What's worse, your mind doesn't even exist!

Now, your central nervous system, your brain, spinal cord, millions of nerve endings, they're all real enough. When I talk about your mind, I'm talking about the Old World definition. I'm talking about Cartesian mind-body dualism: "Cogito, ergo sum." (I think, therefore I am.) For whatever reason, this idea has propagated itself for the last 350 years, despite its blatant fallacy. First, the concept of a mind separate from the body violates the law of conservation of energy. If your mind were separate from your body, then all the energy that orders your muscles into action would come from basically nowhere. That's impossible. Furthermore, modern neurology thoroughly discounts dualism; disable or impair specific parts of the brain, and you can impair biological functions. In short, we're thinking blobs of carbon and water.

So who's doing the driving? In a word, memes. In a society like ours, there are two self-replicating units of evolution: genes, and memes. Genes decide how you look, defects, strengths, etc. Memes decide how you think. They're the most basic unit of cultural transmssion: ideas.

Let's go back in time. Way back, all the way to caveman days and the very first human meme: language. It starts like this: caveman A sees a delicious mammoth over there, and grunts something about that to caveman B. Voila! Now, a meme has to reproduce itself with a fair degree of fidelity, so the next time caveman A sees a mammoth, he grunts exactly the same way to caveman B. Caveman B teaches this to C, and it spreads all the way down the alphabet and throughout caveman culture. Over time and repeated use, the grunts become more sophisticated. More and more contextual clues are encoded into these grunts: BIG mammoth over THERE behind TREES. Over the generations, the language becomes more and more complex. 50,000 years later, you have Shakespeare and Javascript. Now, language (and English itself) is no longer a meme; it's become something bigger called a memeplex. A memeplex can be then split up into smaller memeplices and eventually back down into memes. So, the hierarchy would be something like Language --> English --> Dialect (American) --> Region (Western) --> Slang (gangsta) and so on and so forth. Each stage represents another level of evolution (or mutation..) and refinement. Religion is another memeplex. No one's a Christian anymore; they're a Reformist Southern Baptist. Art and literature and fashion all the big cultural edifices are all memeplices.

So where does the part about free will come in? Well, you, me, everyone, we're all products of memes. Billions, maybe trillions of memes come together to constitute your entire existence. There are too many to count, and with all the possibilities, it's easy to assume you act under free will. Trust me, you don't. Why else would this entire thread be in english (or finnish or hindi or whatever language you can think of)? Why did you get up today and wear pants instead of, say, a dress? Why is this thread in Random Musings? Why do so many people draw like Craig Mullins? Why does Craig Mullins draw in a neo-impressionistic academic style? Why do so many people believe in God?

Remember the Dave Chapelle mania of one year back? Maybe a hundred million of people were quoting that show, even though the ratings show that less than quarter of that number actually saw those episodes. Napoleon Dynamite is another good example. Some postulate that the internet may be the ultimate meme vector (a medium for transmission). Who can forget All Your Base? Most of the stupid headlines on fark have been passed around so much that they've taken on a meaning of their own. I've actually seen people misattribute "And I for one would like to welcome our alien overlords"'s origins to Fark or slashdot instead of the simpsons. Any email with fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: in the subject is another meme. Just the fact that you guys understand what I mean by "fwd" is more strong evidence for the existence of memes.

So, back to the topic of the thread. Is it all just random circumstance? Are we all products of random chance and our parents? Yes and no. It can be random which memes you absorb, but the real answer is perhaps more complex than any of us can ever know. Kick back, relax, and let society take the wheel for a bit.
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QED, sort of.

[Naeem]

imapler> thanks a bunch for the info. the meme explanation explains what i was trying to say. that you don't really have 'free will' but rather you act by taking things from society and what you've been taught
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[eyewoo]

[Nilwort]

[eyewoo]

Well done Nilwort... I look forward to your writing.

[gLitterbug]

Didn't even need to write up another reply, Nilwort expressed it quite perfectly I'd say.

[Tzan]

Nilwort:
I think you are still trying to seperate aspects of life/thinking from the physical brain.

The physical processes of the brain contain everything you have mentioned. Love, hope, faith, creativity, spirit of wonder, all these are coded into our physical brains and are highly valued by it. If these things were worthless to the brain they would not exist.

So you asked what is the point of doing all these things if we are just blobs. Well the word blob is a very negative term and makes the question sound like it has the obvious negative answer. The answer to the question is in our brains of course Our brains value life and has hope for a better future programmed in, we cant help it but continue to try and struggle forward with hope.

The brain has a need to explain everything, this gave rise to science. We absolutley need to have an explaination for everything its part of us. Its also the reason why this thread started. We want to understand even the things that are hard to understand. We want to really believe that humans are more special than other animals. We want to think that those items like hope and wonder exist in some way beyond ourself, because they seem so special that no biological machine could contain them. And yet it does, in very complex ways that are certainly hard to understand, but must be. Otherwise we wouldnt even be able to express those abstract concepts.

[Impaler]

I understand where you're coming from, nilwort. I felt the same anxiety when I stopped believing in god. It felt like this cruel machine of science was snuffing out my soul, my very essence of being. It's an intensely lonely thought to think that heaven and hell don't exist. that when you die, you simply cease to be.

But after a while, realizing that there's no deity breathing down your neck can be a very liberating thought. Your existence suddenly has more meaning than to simply be a pawn for a jealous god; you're an individual being, responsible with your own life, capable of creation in your own right. It's the same way with memes. This Third Industrial Age of ours can be intolerably cruel. What's the point of free will? To end up squarely in the rat race? To spend 35 years of your life in middle management? Free will has this quirky habit of isolating you from the rest of the world. Sure, your decisions affect other people, but ultimately the burden of being falls squarely on you. Has anyone ever felt that your existence has no bearing on the species as a whole? Like it's you versus 6 billion other people? Memetic theory posits that you, as a meme vector, have a very real material effect on society. You're responsible for refining ideas and introducing new ones. In short, you're charged with changing the world.
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QED, sort of.

[gLitterbug]

Ok I just scraped my third lengthy reply that I wrote.

Guess the only thing I need to say is that this starts to look a lot like it is slipping from a discussion about free will into one of belief in god or not. Also I just had to revise my opinion about science bound people being less endangered of getting their brain tangled up when someone doesn't seem to agree.

@Impaler - I think we need to talk this one out over aim again, as I am not happy with your reply like I understand it.

[Reidar]

Impaler, I agree with what you're saying. You explain in an intelligible way how thinking in this way can be liberating, which is something I've had troubles doing.
Eyewoo, I don't think what Impaler said is in conflict with your statements. i.e I can belive that free will doesnt exist and still feel like I have a free will. this maybe sounds contradictory, but imo your thoughts can coexist..

[eyewoo]

[Tzan]

Its not pointless. If life was truely pointless we would all sit down and starve to death.

The thing is you need to understand what the point is. The point isnt what happens after death but what happens between birth and death. Remember that saying: Its not the destination its the journey.

The point of life is living it. Not something that might or might not happen at the end.

I really tried to avoid God and things being pre-determined and just talk about brains. Because if you can accept that your feelings of love etc.. are in the brain, thats the first step. No need to absorb it all in one go.