What the hell are you on? Who has responded to you this way in this thread? Man, you are some kind of bitter about something.
You know, when I was a kid at Vacation Bible School, one of the big kids picked on me a whole lot. I blame Jesus.
Not to speak for him but Dio will likely point out that you didn’t CHOOSE your level of inconvenience, your current level of desire to see your nieces or even entirely how close your relationship you have with your sister (obviously that’s partly up to her). You also don’t choose what reason your sister has to ask you in the first place. Your “decision” to babysit was determined by those factors, it just feels like you made a choice.
I’m trying to find some reference to a study that seemed to show that certain decisions seem on reflex, with the contemplative parts of the brain engaging AFTER the fact. The participants reported that they had made a concious decision, leading the researchers to believe people were automatically rationalizing their instincts (i.e. tacking conciousness onto it afterwards). Can’t find anything at the moment but if anyone else with better resources or Google-fu can I’d appreciate you helping my recollection.
But since the act of “choosing” is weighing up various factors that, if any one were different, might yield a different result or, even if they were the same, might yield a different result for a different person, it seems illogical to postulate that no “choice” is actually involved. Rather, it seems like back-formed logic – looking at the situation from after the choice is made, that choice is the only choice you could have made, because it is the choice you in fact did make, and therefore you did not choose. But looking at it from the time of choosing (or shortly before), I find no basis for saying that an actual, free choice is not about to be made. Again, to define the term “choice” to an absurdity as your argument appears to, means no one is ever “choosing” anything, it’s all pre-determined, you have no control of your actions, and no responsibility for anything you might do. This doesn’t add up, and I don’t mean as a matter of theology, I mean as a matter of definiting “will” and “choice” in a way that makes any sense and doesn’t render the concepts meaningless nullities.
Nice try, John, but I already used it on badchad.
If you’re defining it as merely a calculation based on uncontrolled variables, then the “choice” is dictated entirely BY those variables and there is nothing independent or “free” about the choice. It becomes a dependent variable. The only way it can be an independent variable is if its random.
[QUOTE=Contrapuntal]
Who has responded to you this way in this thread? /QUOTE]
That would be Jodi, dude. I think I referenced her “I don’t play dat cheek-turning shit” in my post.
[typical Christian whine] But you don’t KNOW me! [/t.C.w.]
This is the second time you’ve brought up “responsibility.” What exactly do you mean by that word?
I’m thinking of the old story *The Lady and the Tiger*. The factors underlying the princess’s situation, and the convolutions of her thinking, make it by the end of the story impossible to predictwhich way she will choose. She may choose one way, or she may choose the other. The decision is obviosly up to her, and no one else. She is not subject to any coercion. I fail to see how at that point in time – or at any point in time before the choice is actually made and known – it is possible to say that she is not exercising free will in choosing however she does. Removing apparent choice from the situation by theorizing she actually can only choose one thing (despite the evidence to the contrary) is just predeterminism in a new set of clothes.
[QUOTE=pseudotriton ruber ruber]
I’ve looked and I have not seen her say that. I certainly have not seen her say –
“I’m just as sassy and full of nastiness as I please–fuck this turning the other cheek bullshit.”
You really are just making this shit up. The closest she came to being nasty is saying you were either disingenuous or stupid, which made you complain the she was uncivil. Considering the bile that has been spewed against Christians in this thread, that’s pretty much a love letter. Dude.
Nonsense. It’s not a calculation, like adding up a column of numbers, it’s an evaluation. Each variable is given different weight, and a different evaluation, by a different person – heck, by the same person at different places, times, or situations. Every person will evaluate it differently. The same person may evaluate it repeatedly, and still evaluate it differently.
Responsible: “Answerable or accountable, as for something within one’s power, control, or management.” Responsibility: “The state or fact of being responsible.” What exactly do you mean by “determine” and “determinate”?
And how does your theory reconcile such concepts as “will” and “choice” and “volition”? Or do you just assert those concepts don’t exist in any meaningful way?
Actually, that’s the point: it’s not an evaluation. Outside world factors + physiological conditions = decision.
As an anology: a book teeters on the edge of a desk but it is not deciding whether to fall. So to teeter your thoughts.
Earlier today I dropped out of this GD thread because I realized I was getting snarky and very close to going over the line. Forget about whether I was being a “good Christian” – I was violating the first rule of Doperdom: Don’t be a jerk!
And now I find myself in The Pit, where a certain level of snarkiness is permitted. So I’d like to take a moment to say a couple of things I didn’t say in GD.
Renee asked whether Christians believed non-Christians were going to Hell.
Perhaps surprisingly, every poster who claimed to be a Christian replied roughly the same way: “I don’t personally believe it, but I know others who do.”
From that, one might logically deduce the answer is “some do, others don’t.” But this was a Great Debate discussion about religion, and as we all know, there can be no discussion of religion in Great Debates that does not rapidly turn into a big stinkin’ pile o’ train-wrecked shit.
Various verses were cited to show that the Bible does explicitly state that non-believers will go to Hell without passing Go or collecting $200. And some of us (ok, me) argued that taking every single word of the Bible as literal truth might not be the best way to go.
Aha! The skeptics pounce. What should or should not be taken literally? How am I, just a poor mortal, able to judge what should or shouldn’t be taken literally? If it’s all arbitrary, why should we take ANY of the Bible literally? Perhaps, badchad implied I was simply picking out things I want the Bible to say, and ignoring the rest.
Of course, maybe I’m not the only person on the Board to pick out things I want the Bible to say, and ignore the rest:
Guess what. Ever since the first set of stories was told around the fire, there have been people who will twist the message around for their own benefit. The Bible justifies slavery. God is a tyranical judge. Jesus was a hypocrite. Look! Here’s a cite that proves it!
Just because some ignorant, bigoted, venal people either willfully or inadvertantly pervert God to serve their own purposes doesn’t make God bad. Just because some people build bridges or dams that fall down doesn’t make engineering bad.
Prove there is a God, skeptics say. I can’t, okay? In the first place, if there is a God, how can a mere human comprehend it? In the second place, what constitutes proof? Cancer patients who undergo spontaneous remission? That everything in the universe seems to obey universal laws of physics instead of acting randomly? Something in between?
So why do I believe? Because nothing else makes sense. Science? Science is good at explaining what and how, but not so good at explaining why. Nature? Simply substituting one supreme being for another. Why Christianity? Because I read the ultimate message of Christ as one of hope and redemption, not judgement and condemnation.
My rationale doesn’t meet the standards of some. Tough shit.
Sounds like a calculation to me. Regardless, my point still stands that the “choice” is a dependent variable not an independent one. The variables determine the will. You said yourself that different variables will cause a different outcome. The choice can never be free. It’s dictated by the variables, including the variables which comprise an individual’s personality. motivations or mood. It’s all deterministic. It might be complex, bordering on chaotic, but it’s logically incoherent to say that it can be undetermined.
Answerable to who? “Accountable” to who?
Cause and caused. Specifically whatever “causes” a person to make, or intend to make “moral” or “immoral” choices. How can an individual “decide” to be immoral without already being immoral.
I’m using those words synonomously and I’m saying they exist only as illusions. If FEELS like we’re “choosing” but we never really are.
Jodi, In your babysitting example, at the point right before you made your decision, imagine a completely identical parallel existence. Does the other you necessarily make the same decision or could otheryou decide otherwise? If the two yous always make the same decision, where is the will? If not, how is this distinguishable from randomness?
May I suggest that it is our ego (if a species can have an ego) that drives us to separate ourselves from CarnalK’s book.
I meant to add that in our day to day lives it is necessary to behave as if we have free will. This is because the variables are too many and too complex to identify and measure*. The illusion of free will is a useful and, as far as I can tell, necessary.
*Actually, they can’t all be identified and measured but that’s a different discussion.
Good question!
::typing shakily:: Which font?
A typical salamander might be wayward but he’s hardly capable of equivocation. pseudotriton’s not dishonest, he’s just angry.
An individual entirely deprived of context (not that that’s actually possible, but play along here) cannot make a decision of free will because there is no decision that is possible to make; there is nothing to choose from, between, or for; there is no action that can be undertaken, or for that matter avoided.
So a consideration of context is necessary in order to contemplate free will as a possibility, and the existence of context cannot be used to disqualify the possibility of free will or else we’re just talking semantics here.
Determinism implies that one’s actions are caused by one or more aspects of context which may be deemed the causes of the behavior. If I jump every time I’m exposed to red cotton and don’t jump except when I’m exposed to red cotton, then red cotton is totally necessary and totally sufficient, an unusually compelling case for causality.
There is, of course, the possibility that some unknown variable is totally necessary for red cotton to exist but not always sufficient, and that the unknown variable, if tested for, would make me jump, in which case we would say that it is what actually causes me to jump. But as long as we’re playing make-believe let’s pretend that we can just magically know what the causes of an individual’s behavior are, and that we have the equally magic ability to repeat experiments, varying all kinds of other variables and observing the individual’s behavior until we’re all satisfied that, yep, the posited causal variables very dependably elicit the behavior, and in their absence no such behavior is elicited.
I will stipulate that determinism is an accurate description even if the causal variables are very very complex (e.g., huge chunks of history, culture, age, social strata, what was on yesterday’s history final, what the individual’s sister’s pet kitten is names, etc). But if, in order to reliably and dependably elicit the behavior, the causal variable has to be the sum total of the individual’s entire prior lifetime experience leading up to that very moment, that stipulation is erased, because at that point there’s no difference between the causal variable and the individual.
I posit that human behavior is subject to what the “chaos theorist” folk call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. In other words, yep, you’d have to repeat every single aspect and element of context to reliably & dependably get an identical outcome in our little imaginary experimental lab. Short of that all you’ll ever get is statistical likelihood.
Those of us who believe in free will — or, more accurately, who find the phrase “free will” to have better resonance and to do a better job of expressing our understanding of action and explanation — when we use phrases like “I did that because I intended to, not because my environment ‘caused’ me to”, the “I” to which we refer is not something we can describe without reference to context, it’s just that it’s also not something that can be accurately described with anything short of the unabridged context, right down to our hormonal and electrochemical state at the moment, our DNA and however it has expressed itself as personality, and the entire chain of events constituting our lives and our memories thereof and the emotions attached thereto.
(I was once incarcerated in an East Texas crazybin where the psychiatrist kept asking me to describe myself but if I referred to anything but me he’d interrupt with “No, I don’t want to hear about your friends, I want to hear about you…no, I don’t want to hear about what you think about ‘society’, I want to hear about you”…until finally I yelled “FINE! My feet are on the ground and my head is in the air!” To my surprise he didn’t say he did not want to hear about the ground or the air…)
If you’re going to say to us, "If you do what you do as a consqeuence of the sum total of everything that has ever happened to you plus everything physical that makes you you as it might impact on personality behavior perception and capacity to behave plus the entirety of all contextual factors that might be impinging upon you at this moment plus the contents of your conscousness including memory and ideation, well, then, hey dude, that’s determinism, … well, I can’t speak for the other people who speak of free will, they might respond differently, for, umm, obvious reasons ;), but I, at least, will say back to you, no, dude, that’s free will.
Which puts us in agreement with regards to everything except what to call it.
If you can’t repeat the experiment in order to demonstrate that I’d again behave exactly the same way without repeating absolutely everything prior to the behavior in question, you haven’t meaningfully distinguished determinism from free will.