Philosophy - Page 22

On July 21 2010 16:18 KillerPenguin wrote:

There is no point to life. Animals exist because they evolved and survived by following internal programs that lead them to happiness, but that doesn't mean you should try to evolve or survive or grant yourself happiness. Many people come up with a reason for the point of their own life but that doesn't mean it actually exists or that their own meaning is the same meaning for someone else.


Many things, food, family, shelter, pictures of Megan Fox. Maslow created a pyramid that explains what helps give us happiness at different levels. All someone really needs to do is believe they are happy and they will be happy but it may be very difficult to make yourself believe you are happy without having things you want. I think understanding yourself and other people will help a lot and I know many people will disagree with me on this but in reality almost all other things can be bought with money so knowledge and money should get you pretty far.


This is vague, in order for something to be important you first need a goal so that you can assign weights to different values. Since life has no goal and therefore no value is more important than any other I guess I will pick the values that differentiate me from others and are positive attributes, which would be intelligence, treating others as I believe they would treat me, and being trustworthy.


The normal concept of good and evil do not exist because we live in a universe where only one future can happen due to hard determinism. In the absence of free will most will agree there is no good or evil. Since I still like to engage in discussions about the topic I often use a form of utilitarianism which defines good as that which brings the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people


Understanding how and why things work.


I like Spinoza, Einstein, and Hawking a lot because of their understanding about hard determinism and how the world really works which I consider like a pinnacle of a TOE although most people wouldn't consider Einstein or Hawking philosophers I find almost all very intelligent people have a certain philosophy and understanding of it. I like certain thoughts of a large number of popular philosophers.


I hope I don't butcher this but my favorite is from Nietchze "Now that God is dead and we have killed him there will not be a river wide enough to wash away all of the blood." I like it because Nietchze understood that people can be fragile and if they have already grown up with a social framework like do not kill because god doesn't like it and you do something to disrupt that pillar of beliefs like convincing to them god no longer exists they may fall into distress.

Here's a couple more
“I contend we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
- Stephen Roberts

"The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills."
- Bertrand Russell

On July 23 2010 22:45 catamorphist wrote:
Most of your post looks like a bit of word salad to me.

I would point out that it doesn't appear to be actually true that the physical world is deterministic at small scales.

I think you are trying very hard to rationalize a concept of "free will" that is unclear and unnecessary. Your line of reasoning is something like "since we must have free will, God must exist to give us powers outside of the physical universe." I sure don't see enough evidence for the former to justify the latter.

I am personally pretty satisfied with the anthropic principle as a reason why something exists rather than nothing, and I don't understand how postulating a God gives you a reason, since then the question just becomes why God exists instead of nothing.

On July 23 2010 12:27 Hidden_MotiveS wrote:

Nihilism is by its very nature sad, but its sort of countered by existentialism. Try reading about this.

On July 24 2010 00:43 ZapRoffo wrote:


I did try to address the fact that it is not necessarily purely deterministic, but is it incorrect to say (in an atheist framework) it is either deterministic or conditional on pure randomness? I still believe it's not compatible with the influence from any form of the self. It is still dependent solely on the movements of particles and chance. Reading some of the arguments, it seems to be often defined as moral responsibility that I'm looking for? The freedom to have moral responsibility?

How might one have the freedom required for moral responsibility without having an immaterial soul that is not built on a combination of determinism and statistics/probability alone?

Saying we must have free will is a problem, because thinking directly I am definitely not convinced this is true. That's one of the points I was trying to make about why we have to think more cleverly about it in my opinion.

I don't buy the anthropic principle as an answer to that question, to me it's a tautology (of the pointless variety in this context). Something exists because we exist to ask that question. That's what it seems like you are arguing. Instead of using the word why, I'll say what led to something existing? That's a more specific question that can't be answered with the anthropic principle. Asking why God exists is not the same as asking why something physical exists, because the something physical has to abide by certain rules. No one has answered "What led to something phsyical existing?" while staying in the physical laws of our universe as far as I know because the rules don't allow for anything to happen that's not due to the previous condition and the outcomes of specific chances. But since God by definition is outside the rules, there's no rule that says something existing has to lead to Him.

I've been raised as a scientist all my life. I know how dissatisfying and "cheating" using God as an explanation is to a lot of people, but when the alternatives, taken alone/individually, are equally flawed to me I feel like some outside the box thinking was sort of needed to reconcile the viewpoints. That's really my motivation with this.

On July 24 2010 00:36 Win.win wrote:
i don't know how anyone who understands the basic mechanics of the nervous system could believe in "free will". do you believe your thoughts are uncaused, randomly, spontaneously generating out of nothing?

On July 24 2010 00:43 ZapRoffo wrote:
I did try to address the fact that it is not necessarily purely deterministic, but is it incorrect to say (in an atheist framework) it is either deterministic or conditional on pure randomness? I still believe it's not compatible with the influence from any form of the self. It is still dependent solely on the movements of particles and chance. Reading some of the arguments, it seems to be often defined as moral responsibility that I'm looking for? The freedom to have moral responsibility?

On July 24 2010 00:43 ZapRoffo wrote:
I don't buy the anthropic principle as an answer to that question, to me it's a tautology (of the pointless variety in this context). Something exists because we exist to ask that question. That's what it seems like you are arguing. Instead of using the word why, I'll say what led to something existing? That's a more specific question that can't be answered with the anthropic principle. Asking why God exists is not the same as asking why something physical exists, because the something physical has to abide by certain rules. No one has answered "What led to something phsyical existing?" while staying in the physical laws of our universe as far as I know because the rules don't allow for anything to happen that's not due to the previous condition and the outcomes of specific chances. But since God by definition is outside the rules, there's no rule that says something existing has to lead to Him.

On July 24 2010 01:58 Robstickle wrote:


I think this is why Dualism is so popular, so that people can keep on thinking that they have free will.

On July 24 2010 02:30 catamorphist wrote:I feel strange having conversations about free will, because I'm never quite sure what the discussion is about. I operate under the assumption that my brain works according to the usual physical laws, and I wouldn't be surprised if, in fifty years, someone could simulate me on a computer or predict what I am about to do through inspection of my brain. However, I don't see how that removes any of my volition or control; I am the process on my brain that makes those decisions. If that's a (roughly) deterministic process, then so what? No reason I shouldn't be reliable.

On July 24 2010 03:37 Robstickle wrote:
I think that free will would have to be a decision making process which is both free of cause and affect and randomness. If your decisions are cause and affect then I feel that that means your decisions are simply being made by everything that has happened prior to the decision. If your decisions are random then someone may as well be throwing a die and having you act according to the outcome. Either way I don't think you could claim to have free will.

On July 24 2010 06:39 Hidden_MotiveS wrote:
If we take a really small particle like an electron, and we shoot a photon at some empty space, and that photon hits the electron, and bounces off, and goes into one of our instruments, the electron will bounce off in another direction. When our photon reaches our instrument that electron will be going on a different course, and will be at a different place than it was right before the photon hit it. That's all the heisenberg uncertainty principle says.

Despite popular belief I don't think it should be impossible to design an experiment to truly discover the location of the electron some time after the photon hits it. We just aren't there yet technologically.

What I'm saying is, if a photon hits an electron, and the electron goes to point b 1 second after getting hit.
And then we go back in time.
And the photon hits the electron again. That electron will still be at point b 1 second after getting hit. There is no random chance that can change this to make the electron go to point c. There is no uncertainty. It's just a misnomer.

On July 24 2010 08:53 catamorphist wrote:


I really don't believe you are at all correct. Photons and electrons don't "move" in the way that you're supposing they do. Their interactions modify the quantum state of the system they reside in, in a deterministic way. The way that we measure the quantum state afterward is by observing the physical results, whose statistical distribution is determined by the state. There's definitely no getting around the fact that the physical results are probabilistic, and not deterministic on the level of a single particle, unless you assume non-local hidden variables a la Bohm.

(Disclaimer: Not a physicist, but this is all pretty fundamental stuff; and my description is that of the realist interpretation.)

On July 23 2010 23:07 UFO wrote:
Why are you so sure about hard determinism ?

To prove hard determinism you need to understand the very first cause in the chain reaction of things . What if that cause was of free will that gave birth to the chain reaction of free will choices ??? You can try to prove this idea to be wrong all you like but I would say that it can`t be proved. I am of the opinion that this universe is guided by the pricinpal of free will. Though we unnecesarily steal each other`s freedom because we live more in the world governed by dollar than in the world governed by benevolence.

You are free to the degree you are able to co-create your life. This is dependant on many factors, possibly the largest one being your personal Wisdom.

On July 24 2010 06:39 Hidden_MotiveS wrote:
For some reason people think that the heisenberg uncertainty principle proves that it doesn't or they quote Einstein saying something like "god doesn't play dice"

On July 24 2010 08:53 catamorphist wrote:


I really don't believe you are at all correct. Photons and electrons don't "move" in the way that you're supposing they do. Their interactions modify the quantum state of the system they reside in, in a deterministic way. The way that we measure the quantum state afterward is by observing the physical results, whose statistical distribution is determined by the state. There's definitely no getting around the fact that the physical results are probabilistic, and not deterministic on the level of a single particle, unless you assume non-local hidden variables a la Bohm.

(Disclaimer: Not a physicist, but this is all pretty fundamental stuff; and my description is that of the realist interpretation.)

Why are you so sure about hard determinism ?

To prove hard determinism you need to understand the very first cause in the chain reaction of things . What if that cause was of free will that gave birth to the chain reaction of free will choices ??? You can try to prove this idea to be wrong all you like but I would say that it can`t be proved. I am of the opinion that this universe is guided by the pricinpal of free will. Though we unnecesarily steal each other`s freedom because we live more in the world governed by dollar than in the world governed by benevolence.

You are free to the degree you are able to co-create your life. This is dependant on many factors, possibly the largest one being your personal Wisdom.

taken alone/individually, are equally flawed to me I feel like some outside the box thinking was sort of needed to reconcile the viewpoints. That's really my motivation with this.