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Originally Posted by tisonlyi
And you're the chooser? The one that sits inside your head and pulls the levers, eh?
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I am familiar with this criticism: Ryle's
The Concept of Mind.
Witt asked "How do I move my arm?"
Also he asked: "Where do thoughts come from?"
In either case, the answer is nothing.
Hence the massive importance the Existentialists, the major philosopher of freedom, at least of the last century, put on the word nothing.
You are nothing. Thus you are free.
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Human beings are very much more of a pattern-reflection device with added narrative creation for dissemination of said patterns, successful or otherwise.
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No doubt, but you will have to spell that out more clearly, I am not familar with your thinking, so it's hard for me to be sure what you mean here, how you use the words, etc.
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Choice requires decisions.
A decision requires information over situations and options, which at some point the decider decides is sufficient, and then you can decide to decide... etc.
Each 'decision', when you look at it, contains an unending recursion.
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Is an "unending recusrion" an Infinite Regress? If so, it obviously does not help the determinist cause, since it means that a chain of causation is impossible to assemble.
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That's without even thinking about left brain/right brain differences, etc.
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Good plan to avoid that. What does left-right brain have to do with this?
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For me, the process is about exposure and response.
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If you think of the problem from the objectivist line, naturally you will come to this conclusion.
My interest in entering this thread is to point out that it contains a false or dumby choice: between nature and nurture: both of which are scientific, rational, and objective criteria. It is sort of like asking which is better Coke or Pepsi, and not considering that some people prefer spirits, fruit juice, etc.
The objective line: determinism, and the subjective line: free-will, are both true. Something very few ever grasp. They are equal and opposite, simultaneous: each is a perfect contradiction of the other.
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The whole DECIDER who DECIDES seems rather silly.
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Silly is a powerful argument, google for the fallacy: "Appeal to ridicule".
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Even to the point of our language... There are languages, most Asian languages for example, where the whole idea of free will and absolute individuality is utterly ludicrous from within the world view engineered by that language...
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How many Asian languages can you speak?
("ludicrous": google for the fallacy: "Appeal to ridicule".)
Unfortunately you are trying this on someone who speaks several.
That some Far Eastern languages use the plural first-person pronoun and not the singular, says something about culture: not about metaphysics.
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This is a very Western-centric preoccupation/disease.
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Looking at every problem from the perspective of objectivity, science and rationality? Your right, it is.