The old skool thread

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

You're sounding like a Augustinian predestinist. Are some premordially equipped and destined with the end already ordained? In other words, are people simply destined for greatness and are gifted to those ends? How much truly free will do we have?

Most follow the Aquinian view of predestiny as pertaining only to spiritual salvation, but I wonder sometimes if predestiny does not affect more than that aspect of life and death. I sometimes wonder if I am not the plaything of something larger and greater than myself. It would be wholy arrogant for me to believe that I am the highest being in the universe. Maybe it is a god. Maybe it is something else. I don't know.

What I do know is that I have had numerous occurances in my life that have seemed too fortunate to be purely coincidental. Is, therefore, the ultimate end of the free will argument simply that we don't have free will? If I think that it is by my own will that I type these words that is one thing, but if I am unable to see outside of myself to realize that I am coerced to do so is something else all together.

In any case, how can I truly know? Does one develop his abilities, or are those abilities decided before it all began? I have no idea.

That's some meaty stuff to get ones teeth into there Tak, and no mistake.

Well, here goes.

Some believe, and I am inclined to be one of them, that the essence of a creature is the soul, that little something of life that science just can't quite put its finger on. Our job on this Earth is to learn, not just things from school but things from life, to experience things, be it positive things or negative things, but things, that when we die the soul takes back to wherever it is that souls come from, be it some sort of cosmic atom (ala Carling) or a great river with many streams that come off it and meet back on it. Once we're done here, we can have a rest for as long or as short as we like since time has no meaning, and then we can come back again to experience something else, and some people say that we're given a choice, we're given like a movie trailer of our life, and what we'll learn and we say "Yes, I'll take that life, it looks like I'll learn a lot from it" and off we go.

So where does free will fit into that? Well, you could argue that it fits in that we have a choice on whether we take a life, and even if it's a tough one, we chose it, for whatever reason we had up there, which is not given to us here.
Alternatively you could argue that free will is a clever illusion, baked up to make us think that we have a choice when in fact it was already mapped out for us before we were even born.

Putting that spiritual belief aside for one moment, and tucking into the cold hard reality of the world, it IS hard to decide if there IS such a thing as free will. Certainly we have a basic level of free will, we can choose not to get up in the morning, we can choose what cereal we have, we can even choose what we say to people, however in the broader terms of the sense, the knowledge of the consequences that decisions would likely have, curbs our decision making process some what. For example, you could stay in bed in the morning, but then you would not go to work and could face being fired, you could have that cereal, but it's your wifes favourite and she'd be mad if you stole some, and you could tell that person where to go, but he/she's your boss and you'd be in trouble if you did.
So in that respect, some element of free will is robbed from you. Naturally this does not stop some people, I have witnessed people drift in and out of jobs and living life like it's one big party. These people usually have rich parents...
So, is that it? Is it money that determines how much free will we have? Perhaps, it certainly has a large influence on it and in some countries you can do anything you want, up to and including murder, if you have enough money. However in other countries you can find yourself with less free will, and indeed sometimes in prison or dead, if you have too much money...
So, perhaps it's society, that strange invisible force that influences our every move, even if we try to rebel from it, it still is there, guiding us and judging us. Mankind is its own worst critic, and also judge, jury and executioner.
It will be interesting to see, in another thousand years, providing we haven't blown ourselves into a new dark age, or had an asteroid or other natural event do it for us, it will be interesting to see what is taboo in the society of the 31st century. Will it be a society where sex and violence are the norm, or will it be 'Demolition man' style, where everything is conditioned, clean and non-violent, and dirty things like sex for non-procreative purposes are frowned upon. Given, however, that the free will of the 11th century had pedophilia, rape, and violence as the norm, then one thing is for certain, there is no certainty.