Wisdom

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Over and over again this nonsense of free will arises. Humans are built of the stuff of the universe and all this stuff is constrained totally by cause and effect. The only way any living thing can maintain its existence is by being structurally in conformation with the forces it was designed to confront and utilize. This requires a capability to predict effects from causes and successful life does so and reacts appropriately. Each decision a person makes is the best one it conceives to be (whether or not it really is the best one possible). This is strict cause and effect. The alternative is total random such as tossing a coin and that very quickly leads to non-survival if maintained as a standard reaction.

Is it really so mysterious? "True" usually means "existing in reality". Most people of religious faiths and such believe that their creed exists in reality.

No, it's not mysterious, but by your definition, merely totally variable over the whole of humanity. So you see, truth is obvious.

Umm.... truth, well, the issue is that if you prove that someone is false by their own standards, they often get embarassed, and change the nature of their stance so that they are not proven false. So, truth is something that really seems to matter, as if we believed without regard for truth, then being proved false would result in absolutely no change in stance, not even superficial change.

Thereby is not truth merely a transient facade for emotion which is the actual basis of belief?

No. Because truth is held to the standard of epistemic validity. Emotions just subvert what we think to be true. Identifying the nature of truth with emotions, however, seems problematic because people will denounce emotions as a good reason to think something to be true, and instead uphold epistemic validity in many cases.

Where is this evidence and what is it? I'm no supporter of free will but if someone claims evidence against it, then it should been shown and examined, otherwise it would be nothing more than an assertion.


Actually that statement seems to support free will more than refuting it.

That doesn't seem to follow, as civilization does not control nor manipulate people, but rather can be seen as emerging from human actions. This can be seen with things I think I've suggested earlier, that laws were not seen as created by kings, but rather were written down statements of what has always been believed.

But the standards for truth are different for different paradigms. Scientific truth is distilled out of a very formal procedure whereas many of the truths for faith based philosophies have an entirely different formality for validation. At end it is usually emotion which constructs the preferences for validation. And even here much of the acceptance is very individual as standards vary very much on personal preferences.

We do have control over our own minds. There is no excuse for being totally ignorant and oblivious to what is going on around us. You either believe you have free will or you don't.
If you don't then you probably don't. There are many great people who learn how to break out of the mold and free themselves from conditioning. When that happens, that is evidence of free will at work.

No. It is evidence that there have been influences, either submerged and emerging or external that penetrated previous conditioning to change its functioning. Nothing is totally spontaneous without some cause. Because if there were something that would mean the mind is out of control. Your own remark that people have to learn to break out indicates you accept that external influences are involved

Last edited by Sand on 08 Mar 2009, 4:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Civilization is human Order in the face of entropy.People are fundamentally selfish and self-interest AND civilizations do not distribute wealth equally. So if you want people to accept that there are other who get more than they do you have to come up with a way to justify it that they find agreeable. Its called cooperation .How could you have a social order if people were incapable of cooperating with a system that applies the rules differently to different people? Im thinking of the Law Code of Hammurabi which he authored but presented in a way that convinced his people that these laws corresponded to the will of the Gods.Societies rules are justified by the claim that they have the natural order on their side. You were talking about religious conservativism in another thread and I thought I'd point out that "religious conservativism" has a 6,000 history. Pagan civilizations of antiquity proclaimed that their rulers were either chosen by the Gods OR were a living God themselves.
Ancient egyptian pharaohs were believed to be the offspring of the Gods such as Ra, Horakhty, and Ammon and Wasir(Osiris).
When Jesus of nazareth proclaimed himself to be of divine origin and did so in a way that was convincing enough to get 12 people to believe him(and MANY more following his death and alleged resurrection)what ultimately ensued was social upheaval of sufficient magnitude that it compromised the social order both of the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Judea.

Last edited by Haliphron on 08 Mar 2009, 4:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

well, I can say to be agnostic about free will, and those who claim certainty against it, should be able to prove it somehow, though I find that very difficult and very unlikely to achieve, as any claimed evidence and proof will be questioned and debated, from both sides, which in my opinion it wouldn't seem to lead to anything, other than mere perspective and bias.

I agree that there is variation, but the variation isn't about truth, but rather the way of finding truth. Yes, emotions one can argue that emotions control a lot of the preferences for validation, but still, the validation is usually about what is external to the individual. I do like your argument though.

Jesus is a good example of someone who used his free will. He believed he was the son of God and now look at what became of him. There are many examples of people using their free will to redirect their lives in spite of great odds and difficulties.

Many people just accept things the way they are. They believe that they should be the way that they are told they should be. Many of us do not reach our full potential because of subconscious beliefs and not just because of conscious beliefs from cultural conditioning or instinctive barriers.

You cannot separate truth from the way it is validated.Truth is a product of validation. The two words, emotion and motivation, are similar for a very good reason and the motivations for discovering truth are motivated by emotion, whatever the formalities.