I'm sure you have all noticed this from various comment boards to Reddit and 4chan. "I'm a Christian but (communist bullshit)" or "I was a Republican but (more communist bullshit)". It never turns out well, the atheists will still say youre an idiot as will progressives. Why placate them? Why does nobody stand up for their beliefs? Are we that scared of cancel culture or are we just that scared of possibly offending someone? Who will be the first to say, "This is what I think. Dont like it? Tough titties, now get out of my way".
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Lol
Notice how you had to cut off what I said?
Like I said, we behave as though we have free will even though it's entirely probable we don't.
I think Jordan Peterson even said something to that effect.
And that extent, according to you, is zero. So why even use the word "choose" in the first place?
I choose to believe that you have confused your own future time orientation with the existence of time-states other than the present, which means you are constantly judging events with the perfect knowledge of hindsight and then bizarrely imagining that this means something. It doesn't. You're like a scientist who thinks he has discredited the emotion of love because he has successfully isolated the chemical interactions that comprise it.
Brevity and convention.
Taking a step back...
Let's start with "will" (as Schopenhauer defines it). For the sake of this conversation it's sufficient to say that if there is free will, the will is what would exercise that freedom. Given a binary decision, the will would be what decides.
But what is the will?
The simulationists say that the will is remote. That you (or I) are a rational agent distant from the apparent body, directing the body by some means.
Normative religion calls the will the soul, which is an intangible thing which directs the body but has an existence apart from it.
I reject both of those interpretations. I do not believe the will is remote or has an existence apart from the body. The will is completely implemented in wetware, it is a chemical thing, an emergent behavior of a very complex machine.
Now, I mentioned a binary decision before. The will is presented with a choice, and the will is going to arrive at a decision on that choice. But the decision it is going to make is influenced entirely by preconditions. What the will has done before and what the results were.
Suppose the will decides to not decide, but rather to flip a coin.
This too is influenced by preconditions. There is nothing "random" about flipping a coin. Causality influences it in every tumble it does in the air. Our prediction about the future outcome is probabilistic, but when we flip the coin and it lands there was only ever one outcome that was going to happen and that's the one we got. Every flip it did, every molecule of air it bounced off of on the way up and down, all of that was deterministic.
I can't tell you the future in anything other than probabilities.
But I can tell you that there is only ONE future, the one that is going to happen.
In computer sciences we call this sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Pfft, sure thing, you must have some ground breaking insights from that in insurance.
Anyway, I don't make a habit of dropping my train of thought to answer every question put to me when I have something else to address, something something virtuous prudence etc., especially when they're a pointless question that essentially amounts to semantics. But since you've obviously got a bee in your bonnet about it, I prefer that as long as we all understand that the "I" process is running under hardware that is considered "me" then my thoughts are considered my own "free will".
And I'm still failing to see how blase fatalism interacts with the concepts of right, wrong or internally consistent logic that suddenly makes SJW hatemongers rationally justified by Christianity
"John Adams was a farmer, Abraham Lincoln was a small town lawyer. Plato, Socrates were teachers, Jesus was a carpenter. To equate judgement and wisdom with Occupation is at best... insulting." -Warehouse 13
You should. If you had answered honestly up front that you believe you have free will, I would have pointed out that I believe otherwise.
Which is why I asked you about fatalism in the first place.
Look since you're too dense to read between the lines, my thrust here is that your worldview and my worldview are so distantly far apart that we're basically not even talking the same language.
You exist in a world where you have free will, and where "christians" can hate without being hypocrites.
I comprehend that world view, but I don't share it.
Pretty sure Lincoln and Socrates knew better than to try to paper over their claims of wisdom with petty sophistry like misappropriating technical terms from another profession that have no benefit over the layman's term when removed from the technical context. It would be an issue understandable mannerism if you worked in the field and used it on a daily basis, but otherwise it's just shallow preening.
If I made a habit of blindly letting random idiots dictate the priorities of my thought processes then I'd surely end up turned around enough to maybe believe most communists mean well too, so no thanks.
You really don't comprehend the world view that pre-determinism doesn't annul the concept of internally consistent logic. Or the fact that if you believe in absolute pre-determinism you by default must believe in the idea of objective truth (what will be is true, what won't is false). You're just too prideful to accept that. Obviously, since you're apparently still struggling to even stop and notice it's not the non-SJW Christians I'm accusing of being hateful and therefore hypocritical.
Fun fact though, the same predetermined dance that lead to this exact conversation also lead the overwhelming majority of psychologists to conclude that dissociation from responsibility for your own thoughts is actually a pathology.