Maybe your senses aren't genetically functional to recognize God.

You believe those who have an experience of God are delusional which isn't exactly scientific as much as it is an opinion, unless this opinion you have is supported by clinical trials or empirical evidence.


If I didn't believe in you, and insisted you meet me on my terms only before I did, would you do so? then multiply that by the number of non-believers.

Did your parents always agree to meet you at your level or did they encourage you to rise above childish attachments when you passed puberty?

Is your experience of life now the same as it was when you were 5? Are you now more open minded about things being possible or is it open only to the evidence of clinical authority? Do you see innocence as a genetic dysfunction?
How about telling children about Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny, is this delusional?

I support this somewhat, although wrt the data it is early days - http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Storie...be_genetic.html What, you haven't heard the one about love (has a broad crescendoing definition) as a mechanism for pairing prior to copulation, and its reinforcement as a mechanism for parental care - both having evolved to enhance the prospects of survival?Could do, there are many similarities.

But your own are - what else would I expect?So now you want clinical trials and empirical evidence? Please, out of courtesy, you go first. Oh, all right then, for some insights search God at: http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/god-experiments/?page=1Both. Now we've gotten personal, did your parents abuse you?I could provide you with evidence that I exist. And I'm a mere human, not a god.No. I am much more open minded. But I have also learn to recognise bullshit when I see it.Having some experience of your approach I imagine that this is a loaded question. But no, I'll stick to my first response, and say no. Now get to the point.Yes, unless of course the characters are humans in costumes and attempt only to reference historical absurdities that are cosy for children. Children have always been more shrewd than given credit for. I mean, do they actually believe that moles and frogs live in furnished houses and go on holidays down the river? Its cosy escapism even for children. Then the stories end, and they see the road kill and how that is explained is much more important.

ps We should get back to the original point. Or I could move this to the religion boards.

I'd like to pitch my bit on the concept of love. It seems to be the binding aspect of our species, this is nothing new. But in regards to free will, we don't choose who we fall in love with.

There is evidence that we are attracted to people with as much diversity of genes as possible, some information we are unable to detect is passed in pheromones. This is pretty interesting stuff, especially when discussing free will.

To me the love aspect is the bond between humans, and in essence it is no different whether its love for your family or love for your partner. The problem with a strong bond is it can be devastating when it breaks. As already mentioned above, divorce is the least painful method, with crimes of passion and suicide the other side of the scale. Families often have turbulent relationships within them, not because of a lack of love, but because the bonds are so strong they perceive them safe and unbreakable. Most people agree that people treat their families worse than their friends or lovers.

My personal experience of this:
My brother broke his back twenty years ago, they said he'd never walk again. He was determined to walk and within six month he walked out the hospital on crutches. When he got home his wife had taken up with some scally from around the area. The affair wasn't out in the open, this "intruder" was in his family home where his kids were, demanding my brother "make the coffee cripple". He sharpened a knife and stabbed him thirteen times. Extreme for sure, uncommon, probably not.

I myself have a strong jealousy problem. My first relationships were pretty stormy and screwed my trust. When this jealousy strikes, i may as well be possessed. The images and torture you put yourself through, minutes dragging on for hours, imagining people laughing about your naivety, at what you dont know. It really is horrible and extremely difficult to control. Many times I've felt words on the forefront of my mind, itching to be said. Often those words have tumbled out of my mouth.

Are all these things evidence against free will?

Does a personal point of reference in beliefs and experiences set the rule for all of humanity?
Why does one person suffer from symptoms that are benign to another?
Genetics?..That would be like describing God as a person in the sky.

Joesus, as a moderator I have begun to delete your posts as they are beyond my tolerance and are verging on personal abuse. The odd jibe keeps one on one's toes but your behaviour hints on obsession and fanaticism and is a misuse of this forum. I hope you do not go the way of RtB. Maybe you could reflect on his fate here at BM.

Gah! Mindless dribble just destroys the impact of my post and subsequent possibilities for a discussion.

"Does a personal point of reference in beliefs and experiences set the rule for all of humanity?
Why does one person suffer from symptoms that are benign to another?
Genetics?..That would be like describing God as a person in the sky."

Does any of this actually forward the discussion? Do you normally answer a question with three more? Do you understand my point?

Isn't the best way to discovery thru self discovery?
If you relied on someone to tell you everything you believe in then your beliefs are not your own but just passed down from one mindless vessel to another.

An adult thinks he understands the world so much better than a child because he thinks the child cannot comprehend the truth of reality but then the adult leaves himself no room for anything beyond his own comprehension and insists on forcing everything into presupposed boundaries.

Do you have to get frustrated every time something doesn't fit in the box? Can't you be more flexible than that?

Glad to see you've calmed down and can make a sensible and dynamic reply.

I really don't know why I bother...

I deleted J's last post. Please do bother. We need all the help we can get to deal with these difficult philosophical issues.

Because you can?

The last 8 posts or so aren't even relevant to the discussion, or to my post. Trying to put the topic back on track has ended up lost in posts like:

"God is all, your talking BS"
"No I'm not"
"Yes you are"

He's BEHIND YOU! lol. Pantomimes suck dudes.

So-called "free-will" is merely (very) complex reflex action.

Sounds to me like the jerk had it coming. If I were on the jury, I might have l acquitted your brother. I hope he walked.

Having the urge to do something and then deciding whether or not to do it is the paradigm of free will, not evidence against it. I thought that question had been settled way back there on page three or so.

Decision making - an illusion, hallucination and/or choice of an action from a preconstructed library?

@Rick, he got 4 years in prison. He may have got less given the circumstances but when asked if he had anything to say before receiving his sentence, he said he wished he'd killed the c*nt. My brother gave up on life after that incident, a few chairs tipped over in his attic and he lost the odd marble or two. Shame, he was a very intelligent and fit body builder who was going for a UK title.

I brought this up mainly to show how the magical bond of love, when its extremely strong, can be devastatingly destructive. When these bonds break, the shockwaves can be felt throughout families.

I shall check if the free will debate was settled with a reread through, seems highly unlikely though.

In my opinion religion in it self is just a few pieces of text in a book. Its down to personal belifs that determen your free will, how fare are you willing to accapt free will ?

The notion of the heroic in Western culture is founded on the value of autonomy... The hero from before the Greek world onwards has always been defined by his capacity to control and order the world. The eating of the apple by Adam and Eve was an act of autonomy, which bestowed upon them the knowledge of good and evil, the moral knowledge or the capacity/power to make independent moral decisions.
The whole pattern of human history appears to be a choice between autonomy and obedience. The concept of the heroic Gibborim is based on human autonomy, the power or capacity to control and order one`s life and one`s world without restraint. Yet True Gibbor gains his power from obeying God and Laws of Nature.

In the Eastern Traditions the Hero is the awakened individual. The one who has returned to innocence or to the state of being prior to the creation of Adam and Eve or the duality of human consciousness before it became split by the notions of duality in male and female, light and dark, knowledge of good and evil.
Union of body and spirit is in the mind that is centered between the two and standing in both at the same time.

Free will allows us to travel in any direction within the knowledge of natural law or outside of it in the imaginings or the knowledge that is created through imagination and delusion.

Of course the debate has been settled. If the gods (which don't exist) are free, then man is also free. If man is not free, then the gods are not free, which is an absurdity.

" The wise do not regard themselves as doers or non-doers -- they merely go along with Tao."

"If you want what fate wants, then nothing can happen against your will."

"Do not push the flow nor lag behind. Respond intuitively to the uniqueness of each moment."

"The difference between the Taoist sages and the rest of us is that they are willingly carried by the flow of Tao, while we engage in a futile struggle to force the flow to follow our own agendas."

" If you think you can have good without evil, right without wrong, order without chaos, you understand nothing about the laws of the universe. Yin and Yang only exist together."

"Harmonize Yin and Yang in every situation. Something too hard snaps. Something too soft folds."

Joesus wrote: "In the Eastern traditions the Hero is the awakened individual..."

The English word Hero is derived from the Egyptian Heru... The world`s oldest scripture -- Pert em Heru, or The Book of Coming Awake ( Coming Forth Awake ) is about how to attain the state of full awareness, how to awake the Eye of Heru.

"Thy cakes shall come from the Utchat
Thy ale shall come from the Utchat "

Excellent definition!

Btw Hey Hey please return to the forum.
The bulwarks of reason need your support!

If reason doesn't stand on its own merit it would stand through the support of its believers, or at least until they change their minds.
In this case reason left because he had another reason.

I'd say that was just a choice, not because of any lack of choice.

If his leaving was a complex reaction, It was emotional, probably not that complex.
If it was complex and he didn't know why he left then he might not ever know whether he really had or has a choice.

I think an objective point of view might observe a choice tho...and that his choice involved a reason that wasn't so complex.

I didn't know true reason had believers.

EXCELLENT reasoning skills also, Joesus. You really do make me laugh!

Hey Hey abstains from posting here of his own will. Free or not, he chooses daily. His own argument, I suppose (but I don't want to misrepresent him), is that he cannot do otherwise than what he decides to do. I still think he is free. The freedom is in the deciding. He didn't convince me.

Rick, IMO, free will, like freedom, is not free. It's cost is eternal vigilance and all that goes with it.

please spare us the platitudes! Particularly after we have all agreed that free will is an illusion.

I don't recall agreeing that free will is illusory. Daniel Dennett, one of the best known philosophers in the USA, is on my side:

http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=...&topic=complete

I suggest listening to the whole interview. It's quite illuminating. Dennet is not perfect, however. He misses a slam dunk proof that consciousness is not epiphenominal, and he falls for the old trap justifying religion.

Sad indeed.

Free will an illusion? You mean like a lucid dream?

consciousness is real, but the interpretation in terms of free will is erroneous. As has been pointed out, no-one is able to specify precisely what they mean by free will. It's a meaningless term that belies ignorance of the causes underlying our choices.

Similarly, no one has been able to define what they mean by not having free will. As Dennett notes in his books and interviews, free will is independent of determinism.

of course they have. Not having free will means everything is causally determined. I.e., everything has a cause.

No. Determinism is insufficient for slave will. By the Church-Turing thesis, there exists no algorithm that can predict the behavior of every (deterministic) algorithm. And that's just for computers we can understand! Any truly intelligent robot will have free will.

Or one could investigate that we merely have the perception of choice, but in reality, we have no control over our biology whatsoever.

Obviously, unless I am being compelled by nature and/or nurture to write this response, some of us are free to offer our thoughts, eh Dinah? Those who chose to are even free to say all is determined.

Of my own free will, I choose to say nay to determinism, certainly in any absolute form.

Is there degrees of free will, or something like that? Because, whatever it is that I enjoy right now in my relation with reality doesn't feel like free will to me. Is there a god free will and then a human free will? Because that's the kind of free will (god's) I'd be interested in. Not this one.

I'd say you are obviously being compelled by the the nature of you to make a choice to respond.

I want to assure everybody that, if it has been determined that I am a robot, I must be one with the mind of an onniscient, omnipotent and infallible computer. Because of this, I feel compelled to assure you that I have everything under control, under control, undeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrcontROOeoooeOOOeoOOOooooolllllllllll.........

so what? It's still the case that everything has a cause. I never said everything was computable. But if you're equating free will with non-computable processes, then that means suddenly a lot of rather ordinary systems, like a falling leaf, acquires free will. Do you think a stone flying through the air has free will? It does according to your definition since turbulence in the air will make the exact trajectory non-computable. What do you think the stone is thinking, that it's flying through the air of its own free will? Clearly this definition for free will reduces to absurdity.

that's the problem most people have with accepting that free will is an illusion, that they believe it reduces them to robots. That's not the case at all. Like Rick pointed out, there are many processes that are non-computable, which means we would never be able to follow all causes underlying the process. I'm not saying human thoughts (including decision making) are necessarily non-computable, though it may turn out that they are. Right now, we don't know how predictable human thoughts are because we still are in a state of infancy regarding the understanding of underlying causes. But that doesn't invalidate the fact (or inference) that everything has a cause. We cannot make sense of things that do not have causes; hence some people's need to invoke God as the causeless One who makes everything possible. However, this divine invocation is often premature and more often than not the sign of a lazy mind that does not want to expend the effort required to understand the causes underlying everything.

that's OK, Lindsay, since determinism does not require that you accept it in order for it to be universally valid.

this view is certainly not incompatible with universal causality. However, the inquiring mind will want to know the causes of their thoughts... why this particular thought rather than another? Why this mental association rather than another? Do you think thoughts are causeless things that pop out of nowhere? Every thought has its basis in neural activities in your brain. That is the cause of your thought (or at least of the form of your thought).

Of course you can be in states of mind where causality conceptually does not exist, but this does not invalidate it. Out of mind does not imply out of existence in this case. Causality is there whether you consciously acknowledge it or not.

Free will comes about because the agent actively modifies the environment it acts in, resulting in a non-computable feedback loop, a kind of self-modified determinism or self-determinism. That is not to say that there are not uncontrollable constraints in the environment. The more power an agent has, the fewer operational constraints it confronts, and the more free it appears to be.

As I wrote before, currently, I am reading a book "The DISAPPEARANCE of the UNIVERSE" by Gary R. Renard. It is based on the controversial "Course In Miracles", which I studied in the 1970's. Who has heard of the CIM?

Interestingly, it says that the universe as it appears to human beings was not created by God, but by us. It is an illusion created by our collective ego. At this point, I am not sure that I understand what this all means, but I kind of agree with this point about the nature and creation of things. It fits in with how I conceive of GØD.

CB reminded me that Shawn began BrainMeta with this in mind. Perhaps is will be helpful if we quoted what Shawn wrote http://www.brainmeta.com/ : Does this mean that the cosmos, according to Shawn, is the end result of the collective human will; that, in effect, we are getting the kind of cosmos we deserve? Does this also mean that, using our free will, it is up to us to bring order out of the chaos?
Exactly the point made by writers such as Gary Renard. Shawn continues
The good news is Imagine! If this is true, collectively speaking, we--like all great philosophers, scientists and artists--have available the power, the knowledge and the freedom to choose to separate ourselves as arrogant, egotistic and totally destructive maniacs who choose to live in hell; or, we can choose the heavenly experience. That is, we are free to choose an existence which is "a thing of beauty and a joy forever" (Shelly).

Flow with the river of awareness, or drown in the descending layers of ignorance and unawareness. We have this choice, and the realization of this it what gives birth to free-will.