This gets me everytime. Ms. Hunt had already talked about the idea of how well can brains study brains and also how we could be a brain in a jar somewhere that its being stimulated by someone or something. How can we measure how much of our own influence we can have over ourselves anyway? It is incredible how I spend so little time thinking about this, I feel pretty sure about how I make my own decisions about everything in my life, but now that I started thinking about it, I am not so sure anymore.
The concept of free will is probably what most people believe in. Isn't that the beauty of being a human though? To be able to make our own decisions and affect the whole course of the universe by doing whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it. I feel like I could choose not to this homework right now... But taking the idea of how everything we know including us and every atom in our bodies obeys the laws of physics then our whole lives are predetermined, therefore I did not choose to do this blog entry. I was going to do this anyway. Determinism is very confusing to me, and I cannot really make anything out of it, I guess it is very hard to imagine myself as a puppet that obeys the laws of physics and has a predetermined future, and there is nothing I can do to change it.
I have researched about the topic, and I still cannot find anything that makes me understand it so I can't make up my mind about if free will does exist or not. For quite some time in the last month I could not think about something else, and I felt really frustrated. But as said before, there is no way to prove the existence of freewill, and even though we might actually act like robots and not choose anything we do ever, it shouldn't really matter should it? If it does or does not exist we will still live our lives making our own choices about everything. We might be making them freely or we might have the illusion we are, but either way the we will have to wait to see what happens as we cannot predict the future.
Pietro, im not exactly sure what your point of view really is, but what you talked about is super interesting. I guess to some extent I accept how confusing the topic is. Its very strange to imagine all the decisions and actions we make might not be entirely our will. They may very well be the product of some unknown source or a predetermines fate, and we may never know, and continue to live under the pretence that we are the drivers of our life. I think furthermore, an interesting topic to discuss is all the conflicts and disputes throughout mankind over freedom and liberty. It seems to be defined as the overarching human right. And has been the main source of several wars. Whether it be ancient civilizations, religious crusades for freedom of practice, colonial wars and the abolition of slavery around the world; freedom has been fought over since the beginning of time, and will continue to be an issue. The point of contention from this is the question of if we truly are fighting over something that is under our control. If free will is false and we all have a predetermined future regardless of our decisions, what is the result and point of all the fighting. All the efforts are instead wasted, under the guise of having control of ourselves.
ReplyDeletePietro and Thiago, it's clear you've got hold of the tiger by the tail, but you're going to need some skills and some tools if you're going to tame it. I really appreciate the ways your mind is searching for ways to answer this question, one of which is reasoning, which is the approach taken by philosophy. But you have other tools as well. What do your subject areas have to say about this? Do you have enough knowledge in those subject areas to apply to this question? I would also suggest that you look both for errors in fact and fallacies in reason when trying to answer this. For example, in the comic, the second and third frames feature claims that are highly debatable. To reason from them would be unwise. And finally, Pietro, I think your knowledge of psychology can help you approach this question from another point of view. Good work!
ReplyDeleteOh, also, I reminded of Thiago's question the other day in class, which was something along the lines of whether or not everything can or should be answered by science. It's a terrific question. Looking at your second paragraph, Pietro, I see that you think this is a physics question. If it is, first check to see if your physics is accurate. If you think it is, then ask yourself why you reject the answer that physics reaches. Is there something else that's not being accounted for? This is where I would dig.
ReplyDelete