free will (?)

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Kaome Sky Deathand
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Re: free will (?)

Post by Kaome Sky Deathand » Mon Jul 28, 2008 12:54 pm

Perhaps a better understanding then with images you can grasp.

Existence is random. It has no pattern save what you imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what you choose to impose. This rudderless world of ours is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children, not fate that butchers them, or destiny that feed them to the dogs. It's us. Only us.

We live our lives lacking anything better to do than devise reason later.
Born from oblivion, bear children, hell-bound as ourselves go into oblivion.

There is nothing else.

~Exitus Acta Vorago
Cruor Vult

Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion,
simultaneously the source of our greatest strength, and our greatest weakness.

Soon we shall be One...joined in the Word.

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Merlin
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Re: free will (?)

Post by Merlin » Mon Jul 28, 2008 5:05 pm

For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Existence isn't entirely random. It is the total sum of a series of naturally selected, random events.

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The Colonel
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Re: free will (?)

Post by The Colonel » Mon Jul 28, 2008 7:50 pm

As merlin said, existence is far from random. We see many things of this world as random, but that is because we do not yet understand what causes such things to behave like thus, and because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Theory, we might never know. Everything has a cause and effect, a star across the universe can cause the difference between a plant's creation, or otherwise. We would need to see every cause, every action taking place, to see every effect, but because of the above theory, we can never know.

For those of you who don't know the Heisenberg Uncertainty Theory, it deals with subatomic particles. To find out information about these particles, such as speed, direction, etc, we must observe them. Observation requires us to hit it with a another particle. However, if we use the observation particle to find, say, the speed of the particle we're watching, we can then never know it's direction. (Simplified greatly to not be a huge wall of text)

Patterns are what make up this universe, we are just to ignorant at the moment to see them all, but luckily, our ignorance is slowly fading.


To go slightly more on topic, I suppose everything we do is predetermined, we just don't know what determines it.
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Obvious_Illusion
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Re: free will (?)

Post by Obvious_Illusion » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:51 am

... Atheism is the lacking of a religion or belief in religion that would allow you to be considered a christian, or some other religion... not a belief-based viewpoint. Atheism is no common group of people. (though there may be atheist groups)

No two atheists have the same complete beliefs, so I don't know why you've (the starter of the topic) referred to the example belief as an 'atheist's viewpoint'. No offense meant, but if you've gotten the idea that atheism is a group of people with a common dogma/belief, then you've obviously been sticking around forums with badly self-proclaimed atheists for too long.

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Rising_Dusk
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Re: free will (?)

Post by Rising_Dusk » Mon Aug 04, 2008 2:38 pm

Where do our thoughts come from? They come from synapses firing between axions in our brain -- What, you expected something metaphorical? The concept of free will is as ubiquitous with life as anything can be, it's not something we as humans have that other animals don't. Au contraire, en facto. Every animal has free will, every living organism has free will, even the bacteria we so despise. To what extent do you quantify free will as 'free' is the line that you have trouble drawing. How can you decide when you're truly in control of what you're doing as opposed to being guided by the hands of fate? This is where faith to some level comes into play, but faith in what? I'm an atheist, I guess you'd say, but I believe in fate stronger than any religious person I know.

I am the entire opposite of Kaome in this regard, though. The world strives to become chaotic and nonsensical through processes such as in ever growing systematic entropy, but the world itself is kept ticking and running through absolute perfect order. This is what I consider the origin of the devil and the angel -- Beings of humanoid or animal shape that we as people can relate to in order to quantify the concepts of chaos and order. Nature keeps things ordered properly, keeps pi as 3.14159 no matter what, keeps the laws of Newtonian, Hamiltonian, and Lagrangian physics the same throughout the universe so long as we can find ourselves in an inertial and inherently ordered domain. People quantify the existence of a God because they cannot fathom how nature can seek to keep itself ordered and 'tidy' without some guiding hand watching over it, but that's not true. Just as energy always flows from reservoirs of higher energy to reserves of lower energy by the zeroth law of thermodynamics (As implied), the universe works properly. To believe that the world is formed by chaos is akin to giving up on both yourself and your universe. The world is formed by order, chaos is just the lose cannon that order is formed from.

Regardless, free will is a consequence, not a precedent. It is the result of nature working as it does, not the starting point for nature to work as it does. It is by this belief -- for that is all it can ever be -- that there could never have been a 'supreme being' such that had the mental capacity to create with any form or shape. What set or defined the laws of physics, you then may ask? We, humans, did. We did so in answering the far more interesting question of 'How' as opposed to the ever-elusive question of 'Why'.

Questions about the origins of free will are undefined, unquantifiable, and nowhere near fulfilling. The purpose of 'this' life, be it the only one or be it one of many, is to live, not to merely exist. I suggest, therefore, that you live rather than wonder about why you exist.
"I'll come to Florida one day and make you look like a damn princess." ~Hep

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Metaphorical
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Re: free will (?)

Post by Metaphorical » Sun Feb 08, 2009 6:17 am

Someone say my name?

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