- If two hermaphrodites marry, are they able to do their taxes “Married Filing Jointly”?
- If God is omniscient and omnipotent (meaning knows-all and all-powerful), how can free will exist? We’re all part of his plan, so he must already know what we’re going to do. And since he made us all, we’re only doing what he made us to do? So how can I be blamed if I’m only becoming what God made me? Basically, how can free will co-exist with an all-powerful God?
- We need a third political party with clout, line-item veto in the white house, loser-pays tort reform with damage caps, legalized drugs and prostitution, and parental liability for their children’s actions, in my humble opinion and no particular order.
- Life is a sexually-transmitted disease which is 100% fatal.
- True Story: Family Feud, head-to-head buzzer part. Question is: What is the worst thing you’ve left upon the top of your car when you’ve driven away? First person answers: my drink. That’s the #2 answer, so the other team can steal. Second guy answers: MY CAR KEYS
- Oil is mined from far-away countries, from deep in the earth, put into barrels, shipped across oceans, refined into gasoline, then shipped across the country to your gas station, where you pay $2.25 a gallon for it. Contrast this price per gallon to milk and water, which is much easier to obtain.
- When you look at the exploits of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Christina Aguilera, could you possibly be a good parent and let your kids ever be in TV for Disney? Who will fall next: Amanda Bynes, Raven, or Hannah Montana? And I feel like a dirty old man for even typing this.
- First kid: Congratulations!!! Your life is gonna change. Second kid: Congratulations!!! Now it gets hard. Third kid: It’s a tie between a) Was this planned? or b) Are you crazy? Here comes the zone defense
- For the 4,756,443th time last night, Thomas was able to warn the signalman to change the points and save the new station from the runaway trucks, Swiper was prevented from swiping, Jeff fell asleep, Lofty thinks they can fix it, Larry reminded Bob he has no hands, and no I didn’t watch Heroes Or the Office last night thank you very much!
- Of the 4 major pro sports, only one team who led their league in payroll has won the championship during the past 5 years: the 2001-2002 Detroit Red Wings. Money can’t buy you love or championships, it seems.
My $.02 Weed
thoughts
Well, God can be omniscient and omnipotent without actually having a plan. Therefore, you’re free to do whatever you want, and God knows that you’re doing it. Just because God knows what you’re doing doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s making you do it, or that you couldn’t possibly have done something else instead.
Personally, I believe that God is omniscient but NOT omnipotent. I think that there are certain rules in the universe that even God must play by, one of which is free will.
— Ben
I agree,Mostly
I wonder if God is even omniscient…but I agree with what you’re saying. But a lot of religion’s view of God don’t allow for him/her/it/they to be anything less than all-knowing/all-powerful and a bag of chips. Saying God is less than that angers them.
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This does not include the enlightened believers who frequent this blog. Rowan and Justin, please cease and desist immediately. 🙂
My $.02 Weed
Theodicy
This is actually a philosophical/theological problem that has been around for about 300 years, called theodicy.
The argument goes something like this:
If God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (all-good, all-loving), how can evil exist? (In other words, how can an all-powerful God who supposedly loves us all allow bad things to happen to good people?)
One popular answer to this is “God has a plan.” But that trips up your free will argument. If my suffering is simply part of God’s ineffable plan, would I suffer no matter what I did, therefore negating the idea of free will?
Another answer is that if something bad happens to you, you must have deserved it. (This is my mother-in-law’s position.) You get AIDS because you’re gay, for instance. This is, of course, ridiculous.
The long and short of it is that, in any logical universe, God cannot simultaneously be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. It’s a paradox.
My personal belief is that “s**t happens.” Bad things happen to good people because that’s the way the universe works, and if God were to mess with it, everything would get all screwed up.
— Ben
Simple answer…
Simple answer: Prior to the 1600s, God was not commonly associated with omnibenevolence. If such a creature exists, if you accept that although it is all-powerful and all-knowing, it doesn’t actually have your best interests at heart, but its own interests and reasons for doing what it does, it sorts it out 🙂
Of course, such a view, if taken to its logical extreme, obviates the necessity of worship…
—
Matthew P. Barnson
“STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This
“STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This does not include the enlightened believers who frequent this blog. Rowan and Justin, please cease and desist immediately. :)”
I seriously think you should make this your new signature. 🙂
more thoughts
I agree, God is not omnipotent. Omnipotence is an illogical concept, as a problem could be posited that would require constraining the omnipotence, making it impossible to exist. (Classic example: make a rock too heavy to move yourself.)
Omniscience seems impossible as well, given what we know about the universe. To be omniscient, you must know the spin of every electron and the flux of every electromagnetic field in the universe. This would require interaction with everything at all times, and faster-than-light transmission to your brain. Which would have to be large enough to hold all of that information, i.e. your brain would have to be larger than the universe.
But, even with a more-capable-than-me, smarter-than-me, logical God, I don’t necessarily buy free will. Why do you think there’s free will? Because you “feel” it, I presume. As I see it, there’s plenty of evidence that free will, if it exists, is subconscious, with your conscious mind acting more like a story-teller to itself to explain its actions. This is demonstrated in neurological (not psychological) conditions where a partially paralyzed individual will “refuse to move” because they’re “tired” or they “don’t need to prove they can move.”
Free will (as it is traditionally discussed) posits the existence of an uncaused actor–“me”–which can do whatever it wants. So here’s a thought experiment: suppose you had the opportunity to trigger a time loop, let’s say for 5 seconds. Let’s say you’ve just asked your friend’s opinion on the best color for your new car. He says gray. You hit the time loop. Will he say something different this time? No. Why would he? He favorite car back in high school was still gray. He still remembers that blue car that almost hit him. Etc. All of our decisions are the result of previous inputs that have built the values and opinions in our minds.
So, in short, I have to reject omnipotence, omniscience, and free will.
There was a waiter I worked
There was a waiter I worked with once who believed much the same thing; about the lack of any real free will. He was a hardened determinist.
On one particularly cold winter evening, we were discussing the issue, and he asserted something like because there is no agency, there is also no moral accountability. There’s no such thing as morals, really, because no one is really in control of what they do. I said, “That’s interesting,” and drenched him with a full cup of ice water. After which I raised my hands apologetically and said “Sorry… not in control.”
I give the man serious credit, he stuck by his guns. He just narrowed his eyes and said “Dammit… you’re right.”
Good guy.
PS Not entering this as any form of argumentative statement. Just thought it was an applicable and entirely true story.
morals persist
I realize that many people take this step, which I find unfortunate. It suggests that the values you hold have no value. I don’t think murderers act as an “uncaused agent” — they are the result of genetics and billions of inputs over the course of their life. But the result is a broken, or “bad” brain, which I (and people who share my values) don’t want to have around. So we lock him up or (in extreme cases) kill him. I don’t blame an apple for rotting, but I don’t eat it, either.
The non-judgemental alternative seems to mashs determinism and dualism together, as if an “uncaused agent” shouldn’t be held accountable for the deterministic actions of the brain. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Who’s The :Punisher
Deterministic actions of the brain…hmmm. Meaning that if all conditions are equal, the brain will choose the same action every time. My problem with that is that you can never, ever, ever have the same exact set of conditions exist more than once. You can try to repeat existing conditions, but you’ll always fall prey to that agent of chaos: time.
That’s what I like about the Deists (or Naturalist) theory of morality: our morals evolved in conjunction with the rise of our civilization. In order to further the cause of the species, we determined what actions helped the species better itself and what actions undermined the species’ best interests. Free will or not, you have to live with your fellow man. If you start doing whatever you want, screw how it affects others, eventually you will be dealt with.
My $.02 Weed
problem?
Why is that a problem? That’s the nature existence, not a problem. Your brain is like one of those air-blower lottery ball dispensers (times 100 million). You can never hope to know the balls that will come out in advance, but you also would never claim that the machine has “free will” in the sense of the uncaused agent–that the machine is somehow “choosing” the next ball. No, if it were possible to know the velocity vector and mass of every ball, the energy flow to the blower motor, the humidity and density of the air, etc., you could calculate the next nine balls in advance. But you could never really know all of that…
Making it more interesting, if you put a ball-reader on the machine, and then a thin “conscious” layer over that, then asked the “conscious” layer for a number, the machine would think it “chose” the number. Even the most ardent advocate of dualism has to admit that the subconscious mind is acting on our conscious minds, and in a way that we do not understand in the moment, no? Well, I guess they don’t have to…
Rocks and Burritos
I prefer the other version of that old koan: Could Jesus nuke a burrito too hot for him to eat?
I agree with you, although I don’t have the same problems with omniscience. My concept of God is closer to The Force from Star Wars than the bearded old man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Therefore, it’s conceivable for me to imagine a deity who is in all places at once, and therefore aware of everything at once (if not exactly “all-knowing”).
You’re right that free will isn’t exactly free. But neurological predispositions don’t negate the idea of free will. I could choose to do something entirely out of character – I’m just not likely to do so.
— Ben
Time Frame
If you limit it to such a short time frame as 5 seconds, then 99.99% of the time he will say gray. But what if the phone rings 1 time out of 10,000? 100,000? 1 gazillion. This distracts him and he says red, because he has a cool red phone. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that someone, somewhere, somehow will decide to call him in that 5 second interval.
Rephrase your argument, but instead of 5 seconds, go Groundhog Day and say a time loop of 1 day. Will it be gray every day you replay? Probably not. Free will involves thought, and not much thought can occur in five seconds. I think it’s a bit tautological to say our decisions are the result of all the previous inputs in our lives. Your actor will say gray the overwhelming majority of the time, even with the short 5 second time limit, but you cannot say with 100% certainty he will always say gray.
Even if I grant you we don’t have free will from an outside observer standpoint, the important thing is we think we have free will from our own standpoint. Because it’s all about our point of view. You’ll never ever ever know what it’s like to experience someone else’s point of view. They can do a good job of describing it via written word or music or art, but still, it’s there description of it to you. You may see strong similarities, but in the end, it all boils down to how I perceive the world. To you, it’s how you perceive the world. Free will is a perception. Blue is a perception. There 6 billion different human perceptions running amuck on the earth right now. None of them are the same. All the only thing that is important is how the 5,999,999,999 other perceptions affect mine. Or yours to you.
This isn’t to say what you think or feel isn’t important to me. It’s just that what you think of feel is important to me only in how it makes me feel. No one is totally altruistic: they do good things to make themselves feel better. I’m nice to you because then you’re nice to way and that makes me feel good. Plus, I feel good being nice to you, because I’ve been taught to value being nice.
What these last two paragraphs have to do with anything I’m not quite sure. But it’s allowed, since the title of the post is “Random Thoughts With Weed” 😉
My $.02 Weed
Time, time, time…see what’s become of me
Why would it? Whatever forces didn’t lead up to the phone call the first time won’t lead up to them again.
Then we’re in deterministic agreement. Because it all boils back (for you) to experiences you started having as a baby, when your actions were basically instinct. And those instincts, and your biases in reacting to external stimuli, came from your genetics, which you didn’t choose either. You just popped out with your brained wired to do what it does and started screaming. Somebody reacted–your brain put it in short-term memory and kept on reacting–stopping crying once it had received its preprogrammed gratification of food and/or warmth. It’s just been continuing from that point forward.
Free will is a great model, but somewhat faulty, in that we can get very judgemental of people with addictions and such. We just say “oh, that person is choosing to act that way” as if they could have simple chosen the alternative. I say, all things being what they were, they couldn’t have. The apple doesn’t choose to rot, it just rots. But a human mind, unlike an apple, can be cleaned and made edible, which is what we are trying to do to ourselves and those around us. (But we’re not, ironically, choosing to do this independent of the fact that we were raised to value this or had some other experiences in life that showed us that this is a good thing to do!)
And yet, all of them are the same. Understanding that the quale of happiness and pain are identical for homosapiens is fundamental to moral reasoning. Erase this connection at the peril of your humanity, for the “difference” between blacks and whites, women and men, Jews and Christians, Japanese and Chinese, etc. has been the justification for great evil in the past.
Different, yet same
This is accepting your time loop premise. So I grant you that if you had a time loop machine, yes, the situation would repeat itself over and over again, provided you, as the agent operating outside time, didn’t affect the situation. But some physics principle I won’t bother to look up says you cannot observe anything without affecting it. So, the 3,544,684,345,645th time you ask the question, your voice inflects funny, and it cues him to say something funny.
Splitting hairs, yes, but nothing happens in the world where a situation exactly repeats itself. Deterministic or not, every choice in our life only gets to happen once, and once only. Science fiction aside, time moves in one direction and one direction only…forward.
So if you boil it down to the instant, yes, it’s pre-determined. If you could gather all the data from a person’s life, what has affected them for every single instant up to a certain point, then yes, you could predict what a person would do. But that’s impossible, and the joy of time is that you’ll get other chances to make choices.
Basically, what I’m saying is that at a basic level, you’re correct in that your choices are deterministic, but in reality to think of it that way is tautological and doesn’t help you with making those choices. There are too many variables to possible keep track. It’s like moving 1/2 the distance towards a target each time. 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16…. will never equal 1. But for a carpender, it’s close enough.
The apples doesn’t choose to rot at all. Outside forces cause it to rot. Worms and bacteria make it rot. To say a person should have avoided a bad situation by choosing differently is perfectly logical. Saying a person’s life led them to make a bad decision is a cop out. I understand we’ve all done it, but we all know we could have chosen different. We made the easy choice. I could understand saying you have to make those bad choices first before you can make better ones, but you always have a choice. You can always stop right before the moment of choice and choose to sing “Spoonful of Sugar” and walk away. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.
I’m not saying our perceptions aren’t very similar, or valuing any one’s perception over another. What I’m saying is that any one person will only ever experience their own perceptions. This leading to the point that my set of perceptions in my life up to a certain point will always be different from yours. They may be very similar, but will always be different.
In another post, I stated how we learned what actions helped the civilization advance, and what actions harmed it. This is the basis for our moral code. So I’m not advancing the fact that our differences don’t mean we shouldn’t work together. I’m just saying we’re all different, but alike enough to get along.
My $.02 Weed
Daniel, you’ve provided a
Daniel, you’ve provided a strong summary of the theory of determinism. And it makes a powerful lot of sense. Logically, determinism holds water as an idea (in that all the things it proposes are possible, barring the potential empirical discovery of this “agent.”)
However, while it makes for a good competitive theory to that of Free Will, as of yet I see no reason why one is any more likely than the other. There’s no evidence for an agent, I grant that. On the other hand, there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that someone who is put in a time loop will respond the same every time. Or that the only thing making choices for us is our subconscious. Yes, we do have empirical proof that outside forces affect our decisions, but it’s a big leap from that to say that they’re the only thing that make our decisions at all.
And I know, this sounds a lot like the old “God (or in this case, the agent) must exist because you can’t disprove Him” argument. It’s not. I believe in evolution over the 6000 year old Earth precisely because there’s overwhelming scientific evidence to back that up. As of yet I see no such evidence for determinism OR Free Will.
So given that, I fall back on Occam’s Razor. And to me, the concept of *choice* is so natural to our way of thinking, such an integral part to our way of being, that to me it seems like the simpler explanation.
Though, at the end of the day, as others here have said, it doesn’t make a lick of difference whether we’re determined or free-willified. It’s all the same from where we’re sitting.
what if we were only given a
what if we were only given a certain amount of words when we were born… and once we have used our quota, we cant talk anymore? What if drugs just open up your mind to things that you normally wouldnt see or feel but are still there. What if when you smoke weed and you get all these really random thoughts and they are actually true but you forget them before you remember. What if some people can see into your soul?