Thread: Do we really have a free will?

Originally Posted by Sageous

For what it's worth, souls don't need gods.

It's irrelevant. If anyone's argument rests on a non-physical thing, they may as well not even say anything, coz you can't counter their points at all.

Seriously though, this topic has so much activity! I haven't seen a thread this active in a while. Crazy.

Originally Posted by tommo

Seriously though, this topic has so much activity! I haven't seen a thread this active in a while. Crazy.

Yeah, especially in extended discussion. I don't think DV will ever be as active and thriving as it was in that golden era that's passed us by.

It's quite sad, really.

Ok, one quick last attempt from me and I'll quit.

Of course, just like the light from a light bulb, thoughts feelings and memories depend on the physical housing in order to exist - they require the opening and closing of the neural switches to create the patterns - the story. But thoughts and memories and feelings themselves are not physical things. Just as a story is not a physical thing. A book is, but not a story.

But really that has nothing to do with my main point.

My main point is just that if the influences are a part of me, then how is it not ME making the decisions? Once I've eaten and digested some food, and it's become part of the cells of my body, isn't it now a part of my body? Not something separate from it.

The part of me that makes decisions - the THINKING part of me - is not a physical thing. You can't hit it with a hammer.

And nobody understands how consciousness arises from matter! If I could explain THAT, then I'd have a Nobel prize!

Sageous - I'm sorry. I was being kind of an asshat, wasn't I?

Sageous, my own belief system conforms exactlly with what you are saying. Many may be offended, but here it goes. 1) the nature of the world is a dream/ thought energy taken form. All the basic e=MC2 stuff. The rules are clearly defined regarding local gravity and such, but it is dream based. Old concept, a bit like the matrix. 2) One thing that can exist is an animal life form composed of nothing but chemical reactions. The reactions can appear like personality, likes, fears, and so on. Humans in this case can be such an animal. The animal is simply a construct of physics, but capable of intelligent behavor and personallity. 3) A seperate thing also can exist. It is the same as your 'sentience'. It appears to develop some how in animals. It can also be born into them. The idea is some humans are reincarnated entities, who choose (are forced/karma) to incarnate in the physical world. They can carry some element past death and start with a new body. Perhaps some may even take up residence in a body that is older, explaining the sudden development of 'sentience' or 'an entity.'

It leaves 3 options. the person you are dealing with may 1) be nothing more than a human animal 2) be an animal that is coexisting with an entity 3) a human animal somehow creates a new entity

I say some pretty weird stuff, but all the ideas are standard in some religions.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I'm not really trying to say thoughts transcend physicality. Of course, just like the light from a light bulb, they depend on the physical housing in order to exist But thoughts amd memories and feelings themselves are not physical things. They're qualia.

Right, and I made the point earlier that although there are plenty of things in the universe that seem to be more than physical, they are grounded in the material world. You don't seem to be arguing against the point that everything must have a material base in order to exist. But you keep saying that these things must be more than the some of their parts, which has implications you don't seem to be considering. If we look at the law of conservation of energy, it tells us that energy and matter can't be created or destroyed, only reused. You basically can't get more out than you put in. So to say that something can be more than the components that make it up, seems to violate some of the most fundamental laws of physics.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

My main point is just that if the influences are a part of me, then how is it not ME making the decisions?

I never made the claim that you don't make decisions. I've been saying all along that humans make choices. I was simply making the point that we can't realistically call our choices "free", since they are governed by factors we don't control. We might be the ones making the choices, but we're being forced into those choices by various forces that we can't fight against. There seems to be some inconsistency in what you have to say on this. On the one hand, you concede that there are countless influences that affect every decision we can make and that we have no way of escaping them, and on the other hand you say there are occasions when we can work around these influences and make free choices.

A quick cut and paste from wikipedia,,,... The law of conservation of energy, first formulated in the nineteenth century, is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time. For an isolated system, this law means energy is localized and can change its location within the system, and it can change form within the system, for instance, chemical energy can become kinetic energy but it can be neither created nor destroyed.


Energy can be transformed. You can work a lot of sci-fi theories about what forms energy can take. It leaves too much room for theoretical physics to be used. Just my take on the example.


I personally feelthat everything could be influenced by physical law we do not yet have means of detecting or measuring. In theoretical science people throw around the idea of things existing on different dimensions, or perhaps they use a term like seperate energy level. It allows an atheist to consider bizarre options like a soul, as an unprovable, but theoretically possable option.

Originally Posted by Heavy Sleeper

Right, and I made the point earlier that although there are plenty of things in the universe that seem to be more than physical, they are grounded in the material world. You don't seem to be arguing against the point that everything must have a material base in order to exist. But you keep saying that these things must be more than the some of their parts, which has implications you don't seem to be considering. If we look at the law of conservation of energy, it tells us that energy and matter can't be created or destroyed, only reused. You basically can't get more out than you put in. So to say that something can be more than the components that make it up, seems to violate some of the most fundamental laws of physics.

I don't know why you keep using terms I never used like More than physical or Transcending the physical. All I've said is that thoughts are not physical, not that they're more.

"You basically can't get more out than you put in."

Since I haven't used words like more and transcend, this argument doesn't apply to anything I've said. I was not trying to say that the mental Self is some free-floating independent entity that can exist without a body or anything like that, or that it's anything more than thoughts memories and feeling etc.

Keep in mind, when I posted this it was to demonstrate that my influences become absorbed into my mind and become a part of my Self, therefore cannot be called influences anymore, but parts of me, just as the food I eat becomes part of my physical body and is no longer food. It's Me now.

Originally Posted by Heavy Sleeper

I never made the claim that you don't make decisions. I've been saying all along that humans make choices. I was simply making the point that we can't realistically call our choices "free", since they are governed by factors we don't control. We might be the ones making the choices, but we're being forced into those choices by various forces that we can't fight against. There seems to be some inconsistency in what you have to say on this. On the one hand, you concede that there are countless influences that affect every decision we can make and that we have no way of escaping them, and on the other hand you say there are occasions when we can work around these influences and make free choices.

Ok, it's clear that you're talking about what I call the hardcore definition of free will. Ive already said several times that I totally agree with you on that, but that that definition fails to describe anything that's relevant in reality, so I then went on to discuss this definition: "The ability to make choices free from external forces".

Those forces that are internal are a part of me, so there's nothing contradictory about being influenced by them. What I am is made up of those internal things, so how could I ever make a decision not influenced by them? The only meaningful way to discuss free will is using the definition I just posted, free of external forces. And obviously people frequently decide to do things against external forces, driven more by their internal forces.

I guess that's the gist of my argument, that sometimes the internal forces override the external.

Yep, you can tell we could just go back and forth with this, repeating all the same stuff. For the sake of our sanity, it's probably best to leave it there. But as you said, we agreed on one definition, so at least we accomplished something.

I quite enjoyed our mental duel, Darkmatters. Good game.

Touche!! Well said Heavy Sleeper!! (Um - which one of us is offering his hand, and which one walking away? Lol!!)

But yeah, agreed. I think we're just going around in ever-smaller circles and will never get anywhere. I like the way Xei put it somewhere - probably earlier on this thread: "It depends on how you look at it - we live in a deterministic universe, but we do have the ability to make choices."

Good discussion everyone! I've thoroughly enjoyed it!

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

(Um - which one of us is offering his hand, and which one walking away? Lol!!)

I see myself as the awkward one trying to initiate the handshake, and you're the one that's all "Fuck that, I never let peasants touch me!"

But it's open to interpretation.

Well at least they both bowed! I offer this handshake instead:

I finally decided to look up free will online (not just the definition) and see what people have had to say about it in the past. Just from a quick Wiki browse it looks like my arguments are similar to Kant's:

Kant's argument turns on the view that, while all empirical phenomena must result from determining causes, human thought introduces something seemingly not found elsewhere in nature - the ability to conceive of the world in terms of how it ought to be, or how it might otherwise be. For Kant, subjective reasoning is necessarily distinct to how the world is empirically. Because of its capacity to distinguish is from ought, reasoning can 'spontaneously' originate new events without being itself determined by what already exists.

Originally Posted by Heavy Sleeper

Yeah, especially in extended discussion. I don't think DV will ever be as active and thriving as it was in that golden era that's passed us by.

It's quite sad, really.

Indeed, had some of the best discussions back then.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Because of its capacity to distinguish is from ought, reasoning can 'spontaneously' originate new events without being itself determined by what already exists.

Yeah see, I completely disagree with this. If you look at the history of invention, nothing astoundingly breakthrough has ever actually happened.
DNA? Already slowly built up research for a century prior.
Internet? It was basically just built on the concept of phone lines, it's just different data being transmitted.

If you look at planes, we basically just copied gliding birds and chucked an engine on to maintain momentum.

We really cannot come up with new things. Try to imagine what an animal would be like on another planet.
You can't. This actually was weird for me when I decided to try and do it, I thought I would be able to, coz creativity.
But you can't. I mean you can think or something like Sagan's floating-on-methane creatures, but it's basically just a jellyfish.
You could say it's like a some light-based being that communicates through energy, but that's basically just psychedelia.

^ Before human reasoning there were no engines, no phones, no internet, and no knowledge of DNA.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I like the way Xei put it somewhere - probably earlier on this thread: "It depends on how you look at it - we live in a deterministic universe, but we do have the ability to make choices."

You misspelled dutchraptor

Just to clarify one point I found interesting in your argument, you said the following

thoughts and memories and feelings themselves are not physical things

I think heavy sleepers argument against you was founded because by stating that they are not physical you are implying that they occupy a different state, what his post really came down to is what exactly you meant by stating that.

I can understand where you are coming from but I think I can show that thoughts, memories and feelings are truly physical entities. The confusion of assuming that a feeling is something non physical I think originates from the nature of human consciousness. As conscious beings we seem to divide the world up into the subjective and the objective almost as if they are two different worlds. When we think of a cup for example we think both of the cup how we experience and how it is in reality. However when we first analyze a feeling we notice that it is only seemingly present in our subjective world, objective reality seems completely indifferent to the feeling, it makes you question whether it really exists.

however thinking this way is flawed, (Not implying that you necessarily thought this way, it jut seems like it) the two worlds are not separate and by analyzing the nature of any human emotion or thought or concept you can see that they are all very much present in the physical world. All that is required is to simply breakdown the human experience wee are talking about it into its basis.
Let's use a memory as an example. A memory is actually a pattern too, it is the firing of neurons in such a pattern that it stimulates the firing of neurons in another part of the brain. What we interpret as a memory is actually just a certain pattern of events happening.
I can repeat this process for every example you have given, a story is actually a physical thing. When you say a story is not a physical thing, you mean the concept of story is not actually a physical thing. However like a memory the concept of a story is just a certain pattern of neurons firing that we recognize.

We are automatons, the laws of physics govern our every action and we cannot not abide to them. Humans have a very distinct and complex way of reacting to things but this doesn't refute the fact that every single one of our actions has a chemical nature and every thought we think of could technically been seen being formed in the brain if we fully understood it.

If you believe truly believe that there is no esoteric side to humans eg souls, then the idea of being an automaton in nature shouldn't worry you.

Sorry for long probably confusing post, just trying to have an interesting discussion

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

^ Before human reasoning there were no engines, no phones, no internet, and no knowledge of DNA.

And no Shakespeare, no Kant (or Neitsche, given tthe thread's context), no Decartes, no Plato, no Tesla, no Marconi, no Hendrix, or, (shifting gears) no farms, no plumbing, no electricity, no nukes, no quantum mechanics, no chance whatsoever of having a conversation like this at all, etc., etc., etc... the list of just the new ideas and the names of their holders could fill this thread, and still be incomplete.

Your post is very chilling, Tommo, and more than a lttle depressing. Yes, it may seem like there are no truly new ideas these days, but human progress is based on new ideas, and that includes hope for future progress.

To dismiss our ability to attach something new, something that never existed before, to our collective experience simply because it might take a few minds a few years to establish that something new is extremely short-sighted, I think -- and woefully pessimistic. Saying such things may sound deep and meaningful (especially at gatherings of like-minds) when uttered, but in the end a veritable and verifiable mountain of positive evidence about the new will always bury these statements -- if, of course, you care to look!

@ Dutchraptor - Was it you who said that? My bad! Your name takes a lot more neuron-firings to remember than Xei...

What I meant was something very close to what you said - I originally said (and Heavy Sleeper quoted me before I had changed it) that thoughts are qualia. But I changed it because I realized they're not entirely made of qualia, only partially. But in thinking more about it later (thats what I love abut these discussions - they cause you to consider things in new ways) I realized that what thoughts actually are is just information. To go back to a couple of my earlier metaphors, light bulbs firing in a coded pattern like morse code would carry information. Words on a page are a code that also carries information. Just like the binary code that arranges the pixels on a computer monitor into meaningful patterns is a code.

My thinking was flawed, but in a slightly different way than you said. What I meant at the time was that thoughts, memories etc are not physical things because you can't weigh them, or pick them up. If you break a person's head open and look inside you can't see them. In the same way, a story isn't a physical thing ether. But in thinking more about it I realize that the code that carries the information might not be strictly physical - for example morse code. It's not just the sounds, it's the intervals - the length of blips and of the pauses between them. The arrangement of those intervals. And a length of time is not a physical thing.

But I was wrong again - intervals of time are measured against the movement of a clock hand or something similar, which is physical. Tap the key, wait for the second hand to move 2 notches, tap it again.

So I agree - even the code that carries or stores the thoughts is something physical.

Then I thought "But something like a story conveys so many things that aren't physical - feelings, sensations, etc".

Well, some of this is qualia - the color indigo for instance. That might not be a physically quantifiable thing, but whatever causes qualia, it's something in our mental makeup that can be stored as a memory (pattern of neuron-firings) and then re-created later.

So everything that happens on the 'story level' is still something physically created, stored and re-created by the brain.

So I finally concede - thoughts are physical. Well, maybe that's not quite right, but thoughts are information that's entirely conveyed and stored physically.

I don't like the word automaton - well actually I do, but it describes something slow ponderous and lumbering. I'd be happier with a less negative term.

Man, I hate to add more to this already long post, but in the interest of not double-posting:

@ Tommo -

I don't think absolute originality is necessary. You're talking about the kind of complete originality that art students lament. The ability to suddenly and spontaneously invent something the world has never seen before. That kind of invention happens when we've made a new discovery in the world of physics or chemistry or something - that's why there were so many of them when science was still showing us new things at an alarming rate. Now all the big easy discoveries seem to be behind us. Now invention progresses at more of a snail's pace, small improvements to existing designs. New ways to do old things. There are essentially only a limited number of story lines, but countless different takes on them, each unique.

In one sense the internet is based on the telephone network, but in other ways it's something profoundly new, that's connected the world in astonishing ways. For something that's supposedly not an original invention it has changed everything like nothing has since the Gutenberg press.

Like Stanley Kubrick said, everything has already been done - it's our job to do it better. When you use the same old story line - let's say "Revenge may feel good but it destroys something human inside you" but create a new story you've made something that never existed in the world before.

Slightly better is still something new. This goes hand in hand with what I said earlier - that some people are basically saying "There isn't MUCH free will, therefore there's no free will". It's self-contradictory - if there isn't much that means there is some. Just substitute originality for free will.

So, I have a question for anyone supporting the strictly material nature of all things. How do you benifit from the belief, and what inside you causes you to settle with one belief, disallowing the likelyhood of concepts like a soul?

I am not asking for a dry 'never been proven' line of reason. What I am hoping for is some insight into what reason any of you have for choosing that outlook. For instance, agnostics get the pleasent feeling that anything could be possable, without the pressure to commit. A devote theist, probably gets various benifits, like a peaceful feeling that death is not the end. So, I am looking for 2 things,,, your reasons for believing ina 100% non-mystical/spiritual world of chemistry, and why you choose to accept that idea, being it is just as much an act of faith, as say, an act of faith.

No offense is intended at all, I honestly would be curious if someone wishes to share.

Originally Posted by sivason

So, I have a question for anyone supporting the strictly material nature of all things. How do you benifit from the belief, and what inside you causes you to settle with one belief, disallowing the likelyhood of concepts like a soul?

I am not asking for a dry 'never been proven' line of reason. What I am hoping for is some insight into what reason any of you have for choosing that outlook. For instance, agnostics get the pleasent feeling that anything could be possable, without the pressure to commit. A devote theist, probably gets various benifits, like a peaceful feeling that death is not the end. So, I am looking for 2 things,,, your reasons for believing ina 100% non-mystical/spiritual world of chemistry, and why you choose to accept that idea, being it is just as much an act of faith, as say, an act of faith.

No offense is intended at all, I honestly would be curious if someone wishes to share.

I'm agnostic, and I feel the rudiments behind it suits to my curiosity on things like this. Even if people have strong emotional gluing on what some other person said in their book, and treat it like a bible, I merely take the person's ideas as supplement of what I'm striving for. It's simply to make a progressive endeavor of adding more awareness to options available to me. I would be more than happy to find my own set of principles that makes me feel at ease or gives me solace and stability in this life. However, I don't want to have my emotions so glued on to them when I can explore much more. It's one thing to be minimalist and not want to commit, but it's another for people to be intolerable and have something absolute and irrefutable so far up their asses. As an agnostic, I see it as not being a defeatist and surrendering to a collection quotes from some set of people made in a book and just copping out from adding on to your own foundations.

If a person can become enticed and in love with mere quotes from what they consider intellectual and it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, then good! More power to you, but it doesn't mean I'm going to stand by some person's quotes as something absolute.

So for me, it's not really seeing this reality as a 100% non-mystical/spiritual world of chemistry, it's more of saying, "I'm getting there..." I don't know how I can make absolute principles like that without realizing that there's so many options for me to take and create my own "Religion" or "Belief System."

I personally believe people's dreary attachments towards books and making them Bibles and using them for most of their lives without updating their own schema of things and their faith in them is kind of depressing. It's natural for people to just stick by a few decent standards and call it a day. And anything related to being spiritual/mystical, whether it's:

- Finding Your Spirit/Astral/Otherworldly-Dimension Guide

- Akashic Records

- Tibetan Buddhist Philosophies on things like Dream Yoga, Tulpa, and other concepts

- Past Lives/Future Lives

- Third Eye Chakra

- The JuJu Monster Under The Sea

- Thor

- Zeus/Etc.

And other concepts I don't need to make a huge list on, I am more than happy to consider them, but I don't want to become a defeatist by making a strong emotional glue towards them. There's always more options for me to take, but at the same time, the concept of Free-Will and people trying to apply it to practice, it's impractical in some cases. For me, even if a person has a lot of experience and has been through life's lessons and all that, if they were still as narrow-minded as they once were years ago, it still categorizes them as intolerable towards change. I've picked my own bits of what I prefer from spiritual/mystical aspects, but I don't take them to absolute law, or use books as bibles to become attached to them.

I simply use them as supplements towards the potential that I'm just striving to be:

To just be an individual that tries to be humble and realizes eventually we'll want to have strong concepts that lets us have a consistent view of the world, but at the same time have the same subjective curiosity to go on a scavenger hunt and find other options, bring them back to my foundations, update it if necessary, and learn. The same goes for gathering other people's insights and just accepting that at times I may not be right in all cases, and the same goes for them. It's striving to not be a defeatist, to take some risks, consider the options, but not having an emotional glue on them; someone who's aiming to progressively evolve mentally, emotionally, and even towards transcendentalism (the aspect of it that involves analyzing and justifying the nature of experience).

"I don't know where this will take me, but I am willing to give it a try." It's something as simple as this that's just one of many reasons I have back-ups for attempting to have a consistent view on the world and the universe.

That's as simple as I can put it in my honest opinion.

I suspect the answer is the same for all materialists - basically that there's absolutely no evidence for anything like a soul, plus no need for it to exist in order to help explain how the universe works, plus it's pretty clear that pre-scientific beliefs about such things were devised by people who wanted comfort in the face of uncertainty, at a time when we weren't able to find more reliable answers through scientific investigation. The fact that a certain belief system gives comfort is nice, but it's kind of a security blanket pulled over the eyes. It's more about making people feel good or allaying their fears, rather than discovering what the actual facts are. Science is a way to examine things in a search for truth, by first stripping away those beliefs that can't be proved and that don't seem likely according to what is known about the universe.

When a pet dies for instance, they might tell the youngest children "Fido ran away to a place where he's very happy and can play all day with other dogs and there are no cats" until they're old enough to understand it and deal with it better, but then tell them the truth about it later. Making people feel better is nice, but there's also a great benefit to taking a hard look at the facts and facing reality. It allows us to develop technologies and systems that give us better control over our environment. As an example, medicine and surgery tend to heal people a lot better than faith healers do, though of course faith and positive outlook are very important in the process as well. Faith in the body's ability to heal and in the medicine - and I suppose faith in a God or whatever a person believes in can also supply a lot of help. But faith alone can't perform a lung replacement or remove a tumor.

Given what we know about the brain and the nervous system, there's absolutely no need for any immaterial soul to make it work - the biological clockwork actually does it all.

I don't mean to sound totally derogatory toward spiritual ideas - like I said earlier, I believe we have spirit and soul, but not a spirit or a soul. Some musicians exhibit a lot of soul, and a person can have school spirit or be in high spirits. Attitude is very important, but I don't see any reason to believe that there's any immaterial spirit that lives on somehow when the body dies.

Now just because I say there's no reason to believe it isn't the same as saying it's impossible. There's simply no reason to believe it's true, and it seems inescapable to me that all ideas about spirits/souls whatever are just thoughts invented by people. It's easy to see how wishful thinking could invent a way to never have to die, or to live on when the body dies. Knowing how easily people will believe in something they want to believe in order to escape having to face harsh realities makes it pretty easy to see that people would go to great lengths to devise belief systems to placate their fears.

But it's also clear that people mostly believe what they're brought up to believe. If your parents or peers (whichever influenced you more) believe in a certain religion then most likely that's what you'll believe in. If they're atheistic then you'll probably be atheistic, barring some event that causes you to change your mind later in life. The fact that a belief system benefits people individually by making them feel good does not mean that belief system is true. It's important to discover what's true, and only science can do that. I'm not saying there aren't truths science is incapable of discovering - there probably are - but I think an important first step to understanding is to try to shake off any belief systems that cloud our thinking and prevent us from discovering important truths.

I don't think there's anything wrong with individuals believing whatever they believe - I don't think it's important to 'convert' everybody to a scientific worldview - but I do think it's vitally important that a large percentage of people be realists. Otherwise important knowledge and understanding is lost and we can plunge into another dark age of unreason and religious persecution.

It's interesting that during the West's dark ages the Muslim world produced the world's most brilliant thinkers and gave the wold new systems of mathematics and science. Then as the western world grew into an age of reason the Muslim world sank into its own dark ages of religious oppression.

I'm not saying spirituality itself is anti-rational. But people who crave power use spirituality to create organized religions and tyrannize people's minds.

In the immortal words of the Michael Stanley band from Let's Get the Show on the Road: "The Lord uses the good ones, and the bad ones use the Lord".

Originally Posted by sivason

So, I have a question for anyone supporting the strictly material nature of all things. How do you benifit from the belief, and what inside you causes you to settle with one belief, disallowing the likelyhood of concepts like a soul?

I am not asking for a dry 'never been proven' line of reason. What I am hoping for is some insight into what reason any of you have for choosing that outlook. For instance, agnostics get the pleasent feeling that anything could be possable, without the pressure to commit. A devote theist, probably gets various benifits, like a peaceful feeling that death is not the end. So, I am looking for 2 things,,, your reasons for believing ina 100% non-mystical/spiritual world of chemistry, and why you choose to accept that idea, being it is just as much an act of faith, as say, an act of faith.

No offense is intended at all, I honestly would be curious if someone wishes to share.

I don't strictly support the material nature of all things, I am agnostic as I believe that nothing can be said with absolute certainty.

Despite it being illogical to believe solely in the possibility of a strictly material world (I don't see how you can refute a belief without any evidence to accept or deny it) I can definitely understand where the basis of the idea comes from....simplicity.

The largest part of my intuition that tells me that there is a low probability of souls existing or there being a god is the fact that it would be extremely difficult to integrate into our current scientific beliefs. We live in a world were almost 99% of all everyday things can be answered through our standard physical model. It seems unintuitive to add a whole new layer of complexity by involving such concepts.
What a lot of people, mainly in the scientific community really wish to see is a theory of everything, not just any though, but one in which everything in the universe is composed of some type of basic unit.
I think this idea pleases a lot of people who claim to believe in a 100% non mystical world, probably because it would solve many mysteries that would otherwise remain and it also carries an underlying sense of order, and anything mystical would just stand in the way of that simplicity.

At least that's what is the most appealing part to myself, if I were to believe solely in it.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

But it's also clear that people mostly believe what they're brought up to believe. If your parents or peers (whichever influenced you more) believe in a certain religion then most likely that's what you'll believe in. If they're atheistic then you'll probably be atheistic, barring some event that causes you to change your mind later in life.

To add on to that, I agree that the type of upbringing we were built upon is hard to climb over, especially when we usually don't consider what it would be like to have a Jewish upbringing, a Muslim upbringing, a Buddhist upbringing and so forth. I would figure that if a person was just questioning themselves and using comparative analysis for things like this, they would start realizing the rest of the concepts you stated from what I quoted you from.

Thanks for those answers. I still would like to hear from anyone else who views the world this way. The comment about simplifying things sounds familiar. I have always felt some forms of Christianity and others offer simplisity as the main benefit (not after life, just here and now benefit) as in, 'here is the only important truth' learn this and you are golden,,, p.s. it is short and easy. I mean no offense in this. I honestly think most people like the idea of life and the universe being simplified.

Here is an example, my own belief system gives reincarnation as an option. It is assumed that you can grow and prosper a bit at a time, life time after lifetime, eventually understanding and evolving. The concept is that with eternity, you can grow into anything. Link commented on how unlikely it was for someone to learn to act in free will considering the shortness of a lifetime. This is not the case if we assume a system of growth over hundreds of lives.
However, where is the selling point here? If I claim that I can transform you from an animal into an amazing creature with power and knowledge and spirit,,, oh,,, and it may only take 12-50 mortal incarnations.... Well, you can see how that is not very enticing.
So, guess what? You can now have Buddhism that claims they have fast tracked the system! That's right! For a limited time only, you can do the 'fast enlightenment' Buddhism and get to full-elightment THIS LIFETIME! Yay!
I do not mind my own belief that it may take 1000s of lives. I have time.
That was probably a bit too much rambling. Just saying, I see the value to most people in beliefs that simplify esoteric questions.


I have another honest question about the 'free will' and 'materialism' topic. If someone believes this, then what happens to questions of morality. For instance, does anyone feel that the only reason to not act on a desire (crime) is fear of getting caught? Remove all feeling that humans are anything but interesting meat machines, and the moral/social issues like rape, become curious. Any thoughts on that?

Although I don't strictly believe in determinism I'll go ahead and answer, since I do partially believe in it. I'm sort of a borderline determinist and materialist.

Well obviously one of the 'influencing factors' that control us would be ethics/morality. By that I'm referring to what you're taught - the cultural standards where you live. And as long as a person isn't a sociopath or psychopath they also have empathy for other people. Add to that fear of getting caught, fear of being shunned or despised by people you know etc, and why would anybody want to do terrible things? Of course sometimes the influencing factors might include desperation or extreme distress or blind rage, which are often factors in murders and similar crimes of passion. Also the overwhelming guilt they'd feel if they did something awful like rape or murder..

All of these factors are the same for everybody - whether you believe in determinism or a religion or a spiritual belief system.

Don't forget these 'meat machines' are human, with the full complement of human feelings and motivations - just because we sometimes refer to people as automatons doesn't mean they're bereft of anything any religious or spiritual person has. In fact, religious and spiritual beliefs would be simply another layer of 'programming' - more 'influencing factors' added into the mix.

True morality requires that acts be performed not for any rewards or for fear of punishment (such as rewards or punishments in an afterlife) but simply because it's the right thing to do. In other words, motive is more important than result.

But I don't think most people require any of these carrots or sticks in order to know what's right and wrong most of the time. They can be good teaching tools for children, who are naturally self-absorbed and still need to be taught to be considerate of others, and some people don't mature from that stage as well as others, or maybe they grow up in a chaotic environment where their sense of morality is twisted. Often for people like this the reward/punishment system is necessary to keep them in line to some extent.