Thread: How free are we?

Key point: what have you ever wanted to do that you have been unable to?

Originally Posted by Xei

Key point: what have you ever wanted to do that you have been unable to?

Key point 2: would you be free, if you didn't know you actually weren't?

What if all the decisions we think we do freely are actually implented in our
mind by either a powerful PR or by our own bias through education, family and
peers? We'd gladly sign our death certificates and think it was a free choice.

On a different note: If I remember correctly, isn't neurologically speaking
free will not really existent anyway?

On the apparently macroscopic scale of neural activity I'm a soft determinist, so I think free will as a valid concept as such.

With regards to whether decisions are really free or not: I think so. I try to base decisions based on reason, not what people tell me to think.

It's a stretch to call the media's impact "mind control." What control we are under is not organized and top-down, but convoluted and lateral. We control each other. Certainly there is disproportionate influence from those whose main aim is to amass wealth and who are good at doing it, as well as greater influence from more widely distributed impulses, such as "Me want shiny pretty" and "Me want fuck." The media is at least as much a reflection as an influence upon us.