I'm going to revive an old, much intriguing concept of living. This concept was born on the day philosophical ideas were created. This topic of conversation fired up both the science side and the religious side of the world at the same time. It's "Mobius-Stripped" answer engages not only the philosophical thinkers, but even normal people, such as myself. Even with all of its complications, it is perhaps the most fundamental question of all.The hotly-debated topic is, my friends, free will. Do we affect our future? Do we really matter in society? Or even, does the omniscient exist?
Sorry, you can't believe in god and in free will at the same time. In fact, even though free will is not yet proved, it refutes the idea of god. God is supreme, all-knowing; S/he knows what you are doing at the present and what you will be doing. However, if someone already "knows" what you are doing, doesn't that mean that your future is already determined? Thus, if you believe in god, then you also believe that your future is laid out for you.
Not only there are religious complications, but there are also scientific complications. Do you believe in time travel? Well, if you travel back in time, and made changes in the era, then you are creating an another path of the future to live in. However, without free will, then you have "no another path" to choose from ...
There are many forms of free will, but I believe in the kind where chance and determination both affects the outcome of the future. You can cause something to happen, but an event can also happen because of randomness.
However, there are other (religious) people that does not believe in free will, and they believe that everything is set out in front of us. Everything is caused by a chain of events. Everything causes everything else. They believe that the butterfly affect is carefully calculated and the high-strung outcome can be determined. I think this is a bit of a stretch because nobody knows if I'm going to swivel my chair next or not. In fact I, myself don't even know.
Anyhow what do you think? Do we have the right to choose our fate? Or are our rights limited? Are you believe in God? Or do you think somebody that knows our future is just a bit creepy?
If free will is nonexistent then the meaning to life is nonexistent ...
Your God argument is very interesting. Can this supreme being choose to relinquish the knowledge of what we are going to do? Can he build a system that even he cannot predict? Essentially, the iffy part I have with scenarios like this is that the argument reduces to a version of, "God can or can't defeat himself." So suppose we step away from the supernatural and instead approach the world from a scientific perspective?
ReplyDeleteFirst, I give an argument supporting the deterministic view. We will show that all events are nonrandom. Consider the earliest random event. But the events before it led to this event, and this event is then determined by the events prior. Hence, this event is determined. Contradiction!
Why does this argument seem to make randomness trivially vanish? The answer is in the "and this event is then determined by the events prior". This is not true; a counterexample is randomness in quantum physics. Physical constructions have been given at the quantum level that show that one cannot determine exactly the state of the particle given the initial conditions.
And, shifting gears from a purely scientific argument to more of a hand-waving one, is there not something special about intuition, about creativity, and about society? Is it really possible that our way of viewing the world, our way of breaking it into parts, and our way of solving problems, is in fact just arbitrarily defined by some molecule called DNA? It certainly seems there is something special, something right, about the way we see the world. But this can't be proven, and it relies on our perception of how we see the world, which is questioned by the free will problem.
So ultimately, the answer is that we simply cannot tell. We can study our bodies physically, culminating in an understanding of our brain, but we lack true insight into the mind. We can analyze moods and personalities and connect them with chemicals in the brain, but this sheds no light on what it is to be human. The paradox lies in that we are examining ourselves from our perspective, not an objective perspective. To determine whether our perspective is objective for this purpose requires an objective perspective, culminating in circular logic. In conclusion, this human essence, which seems to us to be far more than a certain genetic code, or a certain appearance, or even a certain perspective, is something we all understand at a level deeper than we can comprehend. So in studying our true selves, as individuals and as a society, and more importantly as humans, we cannot make any concrete statements.
Quantum theory states that for something to be "true," it must be observed...
ReplyDeleteIt scares me to find out how much we cannot observe and how little we can affect that of the unobservable.
Yes. But venturing from the realm of quantum physics to a more theoretical realm, if we cannot observe something or its effects on other things, then does that thing exist? We know emotions exist even though they are invisible because we observe their effect on people. We know there is some sort of matter out there, some "dark matter", not because we have seen it but because we have seen the effect of its gravity on the universe. But what if there is some invisible thing that doesn't affect any observable thing at all? Does this make it nonexistent?
ReplyDelete