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are you a determinist or is EVERYTHING RANDOM

A

alcy42

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determinism- Hence "determinism" is the name of a broader philosophical view that conjectures that every type of event, including human cognition (behaviour, decision, and action) is causally determined by previous events. In philosophical arguments, the concept of determinism in the domain of human action is often contrasted with free will. The argument called indeterminism (otherwise "nondeterminism") negates causality as a factor and contradicts deterministic argument.


according to aristotle. the universe started with the first mover. and from the first mover, he lays out a concept of the universe following a set path that follows certain laws. so there is only one possible universe with an almost predetermined outcome. with this tidbit of the concept in your head, do you make your own choices by reason? or are your choices made because of the external stimuli given to you? is there free will? or is there destiny.

i find that the universe gives me signs all the time. one time i dreamt that a gym called me asking if i wanted a membership...when i woke up... my cell phone rang, and it was a gym asking if i wanted a membership...wtf?...... i havent thought about a certain girl in about 3 months..a girl im deeply in love with.. well i was driving on the freeway and listened to a song over and over again that reminded me of her, which i havent listened to in months.. i thought of her non stop.... NOT 42 seconds later did i all of a sudden drive passed her on the freeway... id like to think freewill exists..but more and more it seems like my soul has predetermined my physical existence.
 
I think both exist. Some things are determined by the free will of others or external events, but there are also things you determine yourself. On a deeper level I think everything has already happened and is known by a higher power, we just have the free will to experience it in this thing called time. Atleast that's just what I believe. I don't think anything is completely one way or another, everything seems to have a dualistic aspect to it, to keep everything in balance. But what the hell do I know :)
 
I don't know if I believe in Determinism, but I do believe that your consciousness or attitude directly influences events in your life. Your example of seeing the girl in her car or the gym calling you calls to mind Freud's idea of the "uncanny," but I'm thinking more along the lines of: thinking positive thoughts results in positive returns.

I guess we're bordering on quantum-physics and whatnot...
 
i'm a hardcore determinist. why do people think coincidences are random simply because they don't notice the source events? i don't think precognition means much. we have so many thoughts expressed and ideas rolling through our minds daily and in our sleep that it's just luck of the draw which one gets picked that has a relation to an event in reality. the gym would have called you whether or not you dreamed of it; you might not even have noticed passing the girl if you didn't hear the song. hell, it could have all been a false deja-vu, those happen too.

i like to think of the brain as a microcosm of the universe. i can't tell what planted me here, now, on this planet earth because the long, long, LOOOONG chain of events that catalyzed this moment are so vast and far-reaching it would take eternity to actually analyze all the decisions my great great grandfather made in a single day that could have affected me being born. that's not even to think about trying to trace my existence back to the stone age, or back to the primordial soup, or back even further.

im the same sense, a million years of real events is like a day in my brain because of the volume of information that flows through it. bits and pieces are retained because there is no way for anyone to actually store ALL the information received in a day. photographic memory? yeah, sure, whatever you believe 8) imagine an HD camcorder recording through a 28mm lens for 24 hours all the while a microphone is capturing all the sound. how many megabytes of information do you think that would be? a byte is 8 bits, and a bit is a binary digit, simply put it's something we can read and understand: 0 is off, 1 is on. so one bit is, let's say, about the same effort to remember as a phone number. now imagine 8 different phone numbers, then imagine trying to remember a few million. every day.

obviously you're gonna remember a couple zeroes and ones and put together low resolution images in your head while you sleep that may upon waking seem vivid and realistic but since the average brain can't store that much raw data (if it could then you'd remember what you had for breakfast on the last thursday of september) i believe the images are enhanced by a filter of emotion sort of like having the world downgraded from analogue to digital in our heads then having a codec that fills in the "gaps" in digital knowledge that take from the experience..

anyway i'm forgetting how i got started on this so i'll stop now
 
In a truly infinite universe, all things may be predetermined while still allowing for chaos, free will, and the unknown.
 
i was determinist, but it felt false. it felt incomplete. it is the only way a rational human mind can comprehend the universe as completely as possible, therefore it is unlikely to be true.

chaos, however, is just as much as a cop out as god. fill the unknown with a single word, my arse.
 
my views seem to be very deterministic.
to justify, or allow "free will" to have a place, i interpret it as "Will received freely", or "Direction received freely"... our "will" is "free". we don't have a, and don't need a choice.
it's saying the same thing, but not.
 
^don't worry, there are a few select topics which do a regular rotation here. i have no idea how many times i've seen this one. best not to fight the inevitable :)
 
Tromps said:
I think both exist. Some things are determined by the free will of others or external events, but there are also things you determine yourself. On a deeper level I think everything has already happened and is known by a higher power, we just have the free will to experience it in this thing called time. Atleast that's just what I believe. I don't think anything is completely one way or another, everything seems to have a dualistic aspect to it, to keep everything in balance. But what the hell do I know :)
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imo, so ecclectic as to be self contradictory
I think both exist. Some things are determined by the free will of others or external events, but there are also things you determine yourself
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sort of like the concept that each person gets one vote :P
original post said:
according to aristotle. the universe started with the first mover. and from the first mover, he lays out a concept of the universe following a set path that follows certain laws. so there is only one possible universe with an almost predetermined outcome. with this tidbit of the concept in your head, do you make your own choices by reason? or are your choices made because of the external stimuli given to you? is there free will? or is there destiny.
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our bodies seem to be entropy fighting machines, percieving reality "inside" the natural world, in a sense "stuck" in time and space* (i guess god is the guy who wrote DO, N = N + 1, CALCULATE_UNIVERSE(N), LOOP)

it doesn't seem to me that there is free will, and the way that our brains/bodies are stuck in spacetime (physical energy is in some sort of information exchange with our "perception" "energy") and the fact that our brains thus have the capacity to create our entire world that we inhabit, our brains are also capable of making that world seem magical

as dismissable evidence: i feel like, from my own "inner exploration", free will is simply a feeling (an illusion)

* time is very much like a spatial dimension; our universe could easily be represented as a mathematical object where one dimension represents time. somehow our perception of time is linked with continuously moving along that dimension, with said dimension being connected to the spatial dimensions (as are we). we'd need to refer back to "god" to move that program forward for us, or who knows what we'll find?

from modern physics, it appears there may be other spacetimes (branes) in a spacetime universe (bulk). these universes could have entirely different arragements, including the kinds of particles and laws. we keep expanding our horizons... who knows how this universe is set up.
 
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we all are tied to a body/system to direct. in a chaotic world of probabilities

but in an abstract sense we each have 1 vote (cept retards, 3/5 compromise i guess?), John Doe needs to be in the right place in the right time (and have led the right life) to become leader of Nationstate and we are all John Doe
 
Impacto Profundo said:
i was determinist, but it felt false. it felt incomplete. it is the only way a rational human mind can comprehend the universe as completely as possible, therefore it is unlikely to be true.

chaos, however, is just as much as a cop out as god. fill the unknown with a single word, my arse.
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what can possibly be incomplete in believing that every event is preceded by a chain of events that points to an origin?

seems to me like that all ties up perfectly. i'd rather accept that i'm never gonna known the origin of most events than derive some insane comfort believing that some things are just truly random.
 
chaos is order actually, its just totally incomprehensible to the human mind because of the infinite number of variables. everything is totally 110% predetermined. cause and effect, karma, its universal law and its inescapable. everything has already happened. for this moment to exist, right now, exactly as it is, everything thats ever happened since the second the universe came into existence had to happen exactly as it did. anyone whos ever experienced ego loss on a trip and glimpsed the higher order knows exactly what im talking about.
 
thujone said:
what can possibly be incomplete in believing that every event is preceded by a chain of events that points to an origin?

seems to me like that all ties up perfectly. i'd rather accept that i'm never gonna known the origin of most events than derive some insane comfort believing that some things are just truly random.
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i agree we are never going to know the origins of most events. that's part of the reason why i reject both random and determinism, they are both "knowns". determinism and chance both do play a significant role, but they hardly encompass all.
 
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