Predestination or Freewill?

What is your viewpoint on this hotly debated topic, are you a realist or a "religionist" or a combination of both.

 

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Freewill is a fraud.

/thread.

 

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Well no one can truly be a realists for the reality we perceive is limited by our imperfect senses. Someone who practices religion forgoes this notion and claim we can know the ultimate truth despite our limited brain capacity compounded by books written by men thousands of years ago with knowledge inferior to our current knowledge.

 

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It's obviously prestidigitation, not predestination...

 

Somewhere in between.

Does the flap of a butterflys wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

 

im talking from the vantage point of human senses, im not calling them perfect

 

heres somthing for you to think on, and i would like to hear your thoughts. freewill is the ability for us to think and act based on our likes and dislikes, our perception of the situation, and perception of how we should act based on that situation. Let me give you an example. A man murders a child and we ask ourselves why did he commit that act? We come to the conclusion in our minds that, that man did the action based on freewill, he had the ability not to commit the offense but did so willingly, he acted based on his own "freewill". But why was it him in that mindframe and not someone else? Why was he born with the instinct to kill senselessly and not the next person?

 

I will assert a predestined outcome. Consider the philosophical question of whether God could have or should have made Creation work differently. Neither God nor Nature are extraneous: we are as we are because that is what the Universe determines. Look at the Universe itself as a single event and the notion of predestiny becomes apparent. Any freeze-frame you take from within the event is such that whatever you see is exactly whatever you are supposed to see. That is, if things were supposed to be different, they would be.

As long as a cosmic balancing act is maintained, yes, there are variable outcomes within applicable parameters, but the notion of predestiny falls apart when we realize that calculating the future requires far more factors than our brains are capable of quantifying. We haven't the capacity to even write the equation for a computer to crunch.

In the moment you choose, perhaps it seems like free will, but retrospect will show clearly how limited the choice really is.

 

From what I know personally and what I know from a lot of wise people I would say we have freewill at the very least to some degree, even people who seem to have predicted future events say that it is not 100% positive because of our freewill and they are warning us so that we might change for the better.

 

A combintion of both. God (the universe, what ever you want to call it) puts opportunities befor us, what we choose to do with it is our free will.

 

Only a new-born infant, less than a few minutes old, has "free will".

Our social training and experiences in the world will always determine our actions. I.e., you learn things that you shouldn't do, thus are swayed by those teachings and experiences ....so decisions are not really "your" decisions, but are determined by other outside forces.

Baron Max

 

Shame it can't control it's actions. :itold:

 

I have freewill, not that what I do does not have a lot of things that cause it but my freewill can be taken away so I must have it.

 

It is a shame. But by the same token, it has "free will", don't it? Perfectly "free will".

Baron Max

 

If you know anything at all about "right n' wrong" or "good n' bad", then you don't have free will. Those very teachings control most of what we do and say. The only way you can have free will is if you don't know anything!

How can anyone or anything take away what you don't have?

Baron Max

 

Freewill is like Newtons first law; a body in motion will tend to remain in that state of motion unless acted upon by an external force.

Predestination relegates the external force to the supernatural.

 

human action is probabilistic, not deterministic. The illusion of free will comes from the constant neuronal roll of the die. It takes 4 firings to build an action potential of some particular neuron. But that last firing wasn't strong enough. Didn't count. So that dendrite is sitting at 3, waiting for another. And the difference between a registered firing from a neighboring axon can be nanovolts. Just a handful of chemicals. Down to the quantum level where random shakes upset the balance.

Skinner's dream of a knowable brain-state will never be realized. 4 firings needed in the span of a microsecond, or no action. The fourth comes right at the cutoff point, firing or no? It is like balancing a razor on its edge, perfectly poised in a vacuum, and wagering on which way it will fall. It is brownian motion on an atomic scale which determines. And how can that be deterministic?

Can you do anything with this illusion of free will? No. Only those things which have non-zero probability. When I get cut off in traffic, there is a 3% chance that I will flip that person off. A 72% chance that I will do nothing. A 25% chance that I will honk my horn. And these percentages are not fixed. They rely on what sort of day that I have had. There is a 0% chance that I will overtake and cut the driver off, because the back of my truck is currently loaded with topsoil. If I wasn't listening to my jazz album, the 3% would be 18%. And there are those action potentials, balancing on edge like so many razors in a vacuum.

Sometimes we surprise ourselves, and free will seems certain. Most of the time, we are automatons, responding to stimuli in our environment with all of the false complexity of an anthill.

 

"Originally posted by Barron Max
How can anyone or anything take away what you don't have?"

Say I wanted to choose something, and someone or something else makes it impossible to make this choice , my freewill is gone because I can not choose what I would like.

 

Our actions are influenced by outside forces - not determined.
You always have the choice to act against whatever conditioning may otherwise predict.

 

So, in other words, if you know something is wrong, then it is impossible for you to do it?