Is still wanting. Just because the reason you want it is gone doesn’t mean you don’t still want it. And the bit about different parts of the brain, well, yeah that does get hairy.
Well, I don’t believe in free will, but it seems to me that it’s non-falsifiable.
And if this is a restatement of the obvious, why do people whine and moan about things they “don’t want to do”?
Of course not, because your definition defines everything I do as falling into one of two categories; 1) things I ‘want’ to do and 2)insane or random, motiveless actions.
You might even be right when we dig down to the deepest levels of psychology, brain chemistry and cause and effect, it simply isn’t a very useful definition of ‘want’, is all.
But how do you perform an insane, motiveless action?
With style and grace.
A person could perform an insane or motiveless action by reason of being insane and/or by accident.
I think I could succesfully argue that an insane person might really really NOT want (in every sense of the **Strinka
** definition) to harm himself, but might do it anyway, because he is insane and unable to stop himself.
And I think I would be quite safe arguing that someone could accidentally cut off their fingers with a bandsaw without wanting (in the **Strinka
** definition) to do it at all.
You’ve all been dancing around the core concept here: All behavior is socially learned. TonyF almost had it when he said:
The only thing missing here is that All Motivations includes the motivations imparted to the individual by society. In fact, there is no “self” as we commonly believe there to be, only a composition of social forces. You, me, everyone else is the sum of social interactions which comprise our lives. How does this connect back to the OP? It’s correct, but it’s not the whole picture. No one does anything that society hasn’t given them impetus to do.
First, I can choose not to pay income taxes, but I can’t avoid taxes altogether.
Ang again, wanting to do something and wanting to avoid the consequences of not doing that thing are different beasts. To me, wanting means I would do it barring outside compulsion. Taxes? Not something I want to do. Charity? Something I do though not compelled.
If I weren’t forced to pay taxes, I wouldn’t pay taxes. I am not forced to give to charity yet I give to charity. Both involve money leaving my wallet, but not in the same way.
I want to be useful. I am compelled to work in a job that pays the bills. It happens that my desire to be useful is met by working, but if I didn’t have to work, I’d find another way to be useful. Sometimes the wants and the externally compelled actions overlap like that, but not universally.
jsgoddess, you’re use of “want” in the above post is entirely proper. The OP’s analysis is also perfectly intelligible. When I said “you don’t have to pay taxes” I was teasing you a bit, illustrating my earlier point that both sides of this argument depend upon some platonic ideal of the “real” meaning of a phrase, and that language doesn’t work that way.
Ah, but this would simply move the payment, in the actor’s mind, from the rote payments made to the government to the later restitution and jail time. Thus the taxes remain paid in all probability.
But again, the OP says nothing.
I have school. I can’t post twenty-four hours a day.
You’re completely right. I can’t imagine that I missed accidents. Luckily, I don’t have to since I somehow actually didn’t think of them. Maybe that’s what I couldn’t put my finger on. How about “No one intentionally does anything they don’t want to do”?
Well, it seems quite obvious that “Nobody truly does anything s/he doesn’t want to do” is not true using any other definition of want than the one we’ve been using here. The question is, using that definintion, is there anything wrong with it? Mangetout poked one hole in it. Are there any others?
But it’s not your decision to go to jail. It would be your decision to go docilely, but if you didn’t they would force you. And by force here, I don’t mean they would say “do it or else” I mean they would physically restrain and move you. If someone steals your money, you’re not paying them.
Who is this “we,” kemosabe?
Your definition of “want” is circular. Anything you do you wanted to do because you did it because you wanted to because you did it.
I’ve come to this conclusion from a different angle in the past. I want to be happy and to be happy I have to feel that I am a good person. To feel that I am a good person have to buy (with money earned through personal effort or similar) rather than steal the things I need. Therefore though I may hate my job and not want to deal with another stupid customer my want to be a good person and earn my way means I want to do it.
This theory always ends up for me at: Everything is a choice, in that one can always choose to die. You can only be forced as far as you want to live or can be tricked. Oh what story was that “I prefer not too…” gah… help me. Early American author, about the scrivener…
Herman Melville’s Bartleby. Sorry, but it isn’t a highjack, this is just an illustration of where this can go.
Many of us here it would seem.
I don’t think so. I would say ‘to want’ means “to have a desire for”. I believe the peculiarity of how I’m using it is that I am summing wants. I am not defining ‘want’ as “what you did”. But it seemed that logically that is necessary based on that definition (excluding Mangetout’s now obvious exception). An analogy: Using the definitions of sine and cosine I can mathematically prove that sine[sup]2[/sup]x=1-cosine[sup]2[/sup]x, which is true in all cases despite the fact that that is not in the definition.
by Strinka
Ah no. Your original post says nothing important, not you specifically. You’re defining your terms in such as way that it is always true from your perspective.
Put another way, it simply says that “people don’t do things without having a halfway good reason for it”. While not always and entirely true, it’s accurate enough. However, in and of itself it says nothing interesting or important. I still don’t understand what tyhe actual debate is; nothign seems to have been said here.
Yes. So? My point was that you’re essentially just transferring the pain of paying taxes into a risk based guess that you won’t get caught cheating on the taxes and sent to jail or fined a much more. Unless you have really good lawyers.