- Yes
- No
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voters
I have come to accept that salvation may not be for the likes of me. But still I hope.
3 Likes
I paradoxically believe in both free will and determinism.
9 Likes
r u ok pfm
21 Likes
It exists… unfortunately there is only ever one choice.
4 Likes
it exists yet there are constraints that narrow the possibilities of what one can and may do (still a lot of options though)
4 Likes
Of course! You can unlock it once you break six figures financially.
8 Likes
No.
28 Likes
Our consciousness/souls have already made the decisions, but regardless of your choices the ultimate outcome has already been determined. So, yes, in a sense, I agree with hian. Its more like your decisions no matter which you make will lead to only one end result. Our perspectives are just skewed because we are being subjected to space and time. Multiple planes of reality.
It’s a bit complicated, but it’s more along the lines to put it into a comparison easily understood, that we are playing a video game. Our spirit sits outside of the console/tv and has already entered all the commands and we are watching the game play them out in real time from a first person perspective through an avatar (the player character).
So, tldr, free will exists, but it’s difficult to summize from our perspectives being altered through the lens we are viewing it from, but at the same time it all ends up at the final boss/ending one way or the other, no matter how we deviate along the route.
2 Likes
I’ll give a serious answer to a meme question.
I believe the perception of free will is a side-effect of what was selected for over the course of evolution in humans, which is being able to communicate past personal experiences to other humans for their mutual benefit. You can’t tell a story to someone else if you can’t tell the story to yourself. I hate to say it, but it seems like a sort of determinism is our reality, but not in the hard way we think. It’s more like what happens are the most probabilistic outcomes cascading from the multitude of quantum fluctuations of fields and particles.
But I’ll continue to live as if I have free will because it’s the best way to live.
Edit: I’m pretty sure you asked this before because suddenly I remember posted the same thing on E4 before. Maybe it was in the discord though.
3 Likes
That is not correct “John”, you of all people should know that context matters. We freely choose our own desires, do we not. In fact I once read something you wrote… “The will, being inseparably attached to the nature of man, did not perish, but was so bound to wicked desires that it cannot strive after the good.”
I have also heard it argued that if you did not have a choice but to have that nature did you really choose. To that I would say while we did not choose our nature we choose to obey it.
Where I would agree with what you likely were meaning by answering “no” is we do not likely have the capacity to choose God.
1 Like
woah hold on a sec
Yeah I asked there too
3 Likes
Sounds like the grow and spores are yielding excellent results, bravo
mfs voting no as a way to excuse their poor Pokemon-related decisions as unavoidable
13 Likes
it depends
2 Likes
1 Like
To anyone who voted no: did you freely choose to vote no? 
4 Likes
Pfm, you sound like a JRPG villain right before the final boss battle.
9 Likes
No, absolutely not
Your genes interacting with your environment & culture determine your behaviour, personality and actions
You neither get to pick your genes nor your environment you’re born and raised in.
Example: If you’re born in Afghanistan, Statistically you will be +95% a muslim, born in armenia, +95% a christian, born in thailand +95% a buddhist.
All of these people had no free will in what they believe in. It was determined by the culture they were born in.
Physically, psychologically, neurologically, socially, everything points to no free will.
but does this mean evil does not exist?
An explanation of evil due to causal chains does not mean justification. You need to lock up people for pragmatic practical reasons but yes even the worst kind of people have no free will. What you call psychopathy is usually anti social personality disorder, massively genetic.
Low empathy and dark triad genes used to have and do have evolutionary benefits, thats why they exist. Then there is the environment. Example: Often times (not always!) People who abuse kids got abused themself as kids and this correlation has psychological reasons. The cycle of abuse is a hard and well studied documented phenomena. Poverty massively conditions evil actions etc but again explaining something does not mean excusing it.
Tldr: Every piece of actual evidence we have sits on this side: the laws of physics, biology and evolutionary psychology, brain scan mapping during thought, twin studies, brain lesions changing personality, hormones changing behavior, culture predicting belief and tons other things
1 Like