quote: Originally posted by Spuzzter
With regards to your response to my animal comment..... If the animal doesn't have absolute freedom, it cannot have absolute free will. I don't confuse freedom and free will; rather, I think that one must have freedom in order to have free will.
I don't agree, freedom isn't a prerequisite in my view.
quote:
As to Spinoza, I never said that there are decisions that "just happen"...the aforementioned whims of the animal in the cage are still based on previous experience...I never denied that fact, although i may have not been explicit.
"There is no such thing as free will. The mind is induced to wish this or that by some cause and that cause is determined by another cause, and so on back to infinity."
-Baruch Spinoza
all right. i thought from what you said before that you conceded to Nehru when you said many times something similar to:
Spuzzter (10:12:51 PM): then it's the ability to determine for one's self
Spuzzter (10:12:52 PM): but nothing else
Spuzzter (10:12:57 PM): it's not free willl
Spuzzter (10:13:11 PM): leme rephrase that
Spuzzter (10:13:18 PM): it's the ability to make decisions
that we have the ability and not forced into it. But if you meant something different or wnat to shift advocacy i don't care
quote:
For me this makes sense. Earlier, we tossed around the idea of a fundamental truth to humanity, a "spirit" or "soul" that connects us to a greater whole. David, you yourself admitted to believing that man is nothing more than an extremely complex computer; operating on algorithms that are based only on real-life experience. In that sense, says Spinoza, we don't have free will.
i believe a human is a complex computer only on the subject we were talking about, learning. It's perception and process of information is just a computer, but unlike any other machine we have today there isn't anything that has to "command" the computer to make a human, regardless if it is a machine or not, make a certain decision. A human still has a choice to do whatever it wants, regardless if it operates on a basis of a machine.
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Let's go back to Jawaharlal Nehru (who David advocates)
"Though the law of causality, of cause and effect, functions yet there is a measure of freedom to the individual to shape his own destiny."
What is that measure of freedom? Is man born with an inherent ability to make independent choices? A soul, if you will?
Please clarify.
i'm actually just defending my definition and not yours, there is no soul involved. I'm saying an incredibly complex machine can be programmed with so many complexities that it can make its own decisions based on those algorithms and such.
The measure of freedom is regardless, if we isolate the choice that is always free. I don't think freedom is part of free will at all. going back to an example by Leo Tolstoy, a horse on a carriage can either trot with the rest of the horses, slow down and be whipped so it may speed up again, or it may stop and be dragged along by the carriage, but that choice of it being dragged is still its free will, regardless if it is restricted.
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To me, this is what you are defending, David; which runs in glaring contradiction to what you've been saying over the course of the year.
This coming from someone who said Leo Tolstoy had the second most true view of free will right after spinoza? hehe, nah i'm just playing i know you want them all to be 7's and Spinoza a 1. I got it, it just came to my mind haha .
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Last edited by PsychoSnowman on 11-12-2002 at 09:51 AM
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