I wanna argue against free will. I will argue to you instead that free will is an illusion. Whether you’re religious or not, I have something here for you. So entertain me, my thoughts, and my energy on the subject.
Religion (Higher power) argument
Everybody feels anxiety, everybody feels guilt. We can argue from one person to the next about which make us feel more or less of these, as well as what deserves a response from anger, sadness, malice, or love. One thing unanimous however, is that we all feel these. Some have argued that because we feel these, because we each have different causes for the emotions and feelings, that we are free. What if instead, our emotions act as a cage, controlled by a higher being/power, used to direct us towards an end we’re meant to walk towards. Every time you feel impatient and speed, every time you feel sadness and fall onto alcohol, drugs, sex, music, ranting, or any other type of release, we’re acting a little differently than the person next to us may act in the same situation.
Imagine instead a chess board. Each piece moves differently, has different strengths, but can be predicted by your opponent because due to the individuality of each piece, the choices are limited. By being “unique”, we eliminate various moves that we would otherwise be capable of performing were we a different “unique” piece. Not everybody will be able to say the same words, in quite the same manor to pick up a girl. Nobody can wear the same clothes and look attractive to the same person. By being unique, holding our own individual thoughts and ideals, we limit ourselves to a predictable set of “moves”. I’m sure everybody has seen a friend finish a sentence for another, or predict what a person will do, say, or how they’ll react to something. All of that is done from within the mess, living at the same level as the person. What if we went a step away though, from a divine being’s perspective, we would be similar to a dog. Set out food and the dog will come. We are more complicated, but to an even more complicated being, a being so powerful it could create/shape us, wouldn’t we be more like a bunch of dominoes standing up in a line, where once a single domino is tipped, all the rest fall in a predictable fashion, each one hitting another, possibly creating ripples in all sorts of directions as one domino hits two, three, or more in a single fall.
Non-Religious Argument
Assuming there is no god playing our lives out like a game, knowing our choices and setting up a chain of events before we’re even aware we have a decision to make, we still have our bodily restraints. At birth, we are influenced by our body temperature (comfort level), our hormonal balance (our tendency or ease towards various emotions), the difficulty on exiting our mothers (pain), how sensitive our senses are upon exit, and brain development. How we act at this point has nothing to do with who we are, it has everything to do with our genetics, development, and environment.
As we grow up we observe our parents, adding onto our previous experiences and development, we begin to emulate them and make silent note of how they’re acting to things. Besides our parents, we’ll also imitate bugs and animals around us. Trying to experience everything is what a child does. It doesn’t matter if it’s capable of doing what it’s “attempting” to emulate, it will try anyhow. By trying everything, what is futile and what is more successful will begin to become clear. How soon that happens, and our reactions to it once again will fall back to how quickly/easily we become irritable, falling back onto everything else that has happened to us in order to develop how short our irritability is at this point.
Entering school, interacting with new people outside of the family, adds to the influences: we begin to be introduced to drama, ideas of equality, and people of similar size and development. Each stop from here on is a result of everything that happened previously in our lives. We are born with tendencies and abilities, then based on observations we’ll imitate. From there, we grow in similar manors. We are simply building upon the events which have led up to a single point in our lives, and reacting the only way we can, according to everything else which has happened to us. The only thing that can stop that, is another person acting the only way which they are capable of based on their own experiences (such as a person tackling you for kissing his girlfriend). It’s a chain of events and influences, which stretches to things as small as the colors we perceive out of the corners of our eyes. Colors act as stimulants for our feelings. Keeping things simple, warm colors are more active stimulants, where as cool colors are more likely to calm us.
This is the chaos theory, the idea that everything that happens or is done, effects something else, which effects something else…so on and so forth. If you hit a person, who was standing still, they aren’t going to fly through you, in the opposite direction you punched them; they will fly in the direction of the punch traveled. Things react in the only way they are able, there is no mistakes, everything which happens is going to happen, and you have no control over it or how you will react. Simply by reading this, you are going to act differently, for the rest of your life, without ever realizing what would have happened if you didn’t. I have just had an effect on your life. There is no way for you to reverse that influence, just by altering your train of thought and any emotional change, even if you forget everything you just read, your “status” has changed.
For those of you interested in the implications
Our emotions color how we perceive everything that happens, things that alter your mood even a tiny bit, greatly alters how you’ll remember the events at that moment, and even alters your memory of things you did year in the past. If you learn to love a person, your momorys of everything involved with them, since before you were going out, will become far more special to you. Similarly if you are angry and irritated, what could have been a chance for a free pie may end with the pie in your face instead (via a cruel/short reply).
Our eyes don’t actually “see” every second we are looking, instead our minds can fill in blanks and insert information into our memories which we never truly saw/perceived. Similarly, we can create entire memories that we really never experienced, or altered memories of events which actually happened very differently than we “chose” to remember them.
I’ll give you some cool links now related to how much of an influence our minds have on our “perceptions” and how emotions can color things.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html
^^ Blindspots our eyes don’t “really” see, but our mind says it does.
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~pmerikle/papers/SubliminalPerception.html
^^ applies my idea that things we don’t even “realize” we are seeing, are influencing us
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~pmerikle/papers/Merikle.JConsStudies.1998.pdf
^^ mental awareness without physical awareness
http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/synesthesia.html
^^ Cool article. Not very related, talks about a unique disorder of overlapping perceptions.
Religion (Higher power) argument
Everybody feels anxiety, everybody feels guilt. We can argue from one person to the next about which make us feel more or less of these, as well as what deserves a response from anger, sadness, malice, or love. One thing unanimous however, is that we all feel these. Some have argued that because we feel these, because we each have different causes for the emotions and feelings, that we are free. What if instead, our emotions act as a cage, controlled by a higher being/power, used to direct us towards an end we’re meant to walk towards. Every time you feel impatient and speed, every time you feel sadness and fall onto alcohol, drugs, sex, music, ranting, or any other type of release, we’re acting a little differently than the person next to us may act in the same situation.
Imagine instead a chess board. Each piece moves differently, has different strengths, but can be predicted by your opponent because due to the individuality of each piece, the choices are limited. By being “unique”, we eliminate various moves that we would otherwise be capable of performing were we a different “unique” piece. Not everybody will be able to say the same words, in quite the same manor to pick up a girl. Nobody can wear the same clothes and look attractive to the same person. By being unique, holding our own individual thoughts and ideals, we limit ourselves to a predictable set of “moves”. I’m sure everybody has seen a friend finish a sentence for another, or predict what a person will do, say, or how they’ll react to something. All of that is done from within the mess, living at the same level as the person. What if we went a step away though, from a divine being’s perspective, we would be similar to a dog. Set out food and the dog will come. We are more complicated, but to an even more complicated being, a being so powerful it could create/shape us, wouldn’t we be more like a bunch of dominoes standing up in a line, where once a single domino is tipped, all the rest fall in a predictable fashion, each one hitting another, possibly creating ripples in all sorts of directions as one domino hits two, three, or more in a single fall.
Non-Religious Argument
Assuming there is no god playing our lives out like a game, knowing our choices and setting up a chain of events before we’re even aware we have a decision to make, we still have our bodily restraints. At birth, we are influenced by our body temperature (comfort level), our hormonal balance (our tendency or ease towards various emotions), the difficulty on exiting our mothers (pain), how sensitive our senses are upon exit, and brain development. How we act at this point has nothing to do with who we are, it has everything to do with our genetics, development, and environment.
As we grow up we observe our parents, adding onto our previous experiences and development, we begin to emulate them and make silent note of how they’re acting to things. Besides our parents, we’ll also imitate bugs and animals around us. Trying to experience everything is what a child does. It doesn’t matter if it’s capable of doing what it’s “attempting” to emulate, it will try anyhow. By trying everything, what is futile and what is more successful will begin to become clear. How soon that happens, and our reactions to it once again will fall back to how quickly/easily we become irritable, falling back onto everything else that has happened to us in order to develop how short our irritability is at this point.
Entering school, interacting with new people outside of the family, adds to the influences: we begin to be introduced to drama, ideas of equality, and people of similar size and development. Each stop from here on is a result of everything that happened previously in our lives. We are born with tendencies and abilities, then based on observations we’ll imitate. From there, we grow in similar manors. We are simply building upon the events which have led up to a single point in our lives, and reacting the only way we can, according to everything else which has happened to us. The only thing that can stop that, is another person acting the only way which they are capable of based on their own experiences (such as a person tackling you for kissing his girlfriend). It’s a chain of events and influences, which stretches to things as small as the colors we perceive out of the corners of our eyes. Colors act as stimulants for our feelings. Keeping things simple, warm colors are more active stimulants, where as cool colors are more likely to calm us.
This is the chaos theory, the idea that everything that happens or is done, effects something else, which effects something else…so on and so forth. If you hit a person, who was standing still, they aren’t going to fly through you, in the opposite direction you punched them; they will fly in the direction of the punch traveled. Things react in the only way they are able, there is no mistakes, everything which happens is going to happen, and you have no control over it or how you will react. Simply by reading this, you are going to act differently, for the rest of your life, without ever realizing what would have happened if you didn’t. I have just had an effect on your life. There is no way for you to reverse that influence, just by altering your train of thought and any emotional change, even if you forget everything you just read, your “status” has changed.
For those of you interested in the implications
Our emotions color how we perceive everything that happens, things that alter your mood even a tiny bit, greatly alters how you’ll remember the events at that moment, and even alters your memory of things you did year in the past. If you learn to love a person, your momorys of everything involved with them, since before you were going out, will become far more special to you. Similarly if you are angry and irritated, what could have been a chance for a free pie may end with the pie in your face instead (via a cruel/short reply).
Our eyes don’t actually “see” every second we are looking, instead our minds can fill in blanks and insert information into our memories which we never truly saw/perceived. Similarly, we can create entire memories that we really never experienced, or altered memories of events which actually happened very differently than we “chose” to remember them.
I’ll give you some cool links now related to how much of an influence our minds have on our “perceptions” and how emotions can color things.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html
^^ Blindspots our eyes don’t “really” see, but our mind says it does.
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~pmerikle/papers/SubliminalPerception.html
^^ applies my idea that things we don’t even “realize” we are seeing, are influencing us
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~pmerikle/papers/Merikle.JConsStudies.1998.pdf
^^ mental awareness without physical awareness
http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/synesthesia.html
^^ Cool article. Not very related, talks about a unique disorder of overlapping perceptions.
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