YzermanS19

This is more random than I think I've ever posted here. No rhyme or reason, and its a little long. Bear with me, its significant (I think).

I saw the film "Waking Life" a few months ago, and it most certainly changed my life. It's just a completely different aspect on everything. The most creative movie I have ever seen possibly.

I found a website: Waking Life

That has the entire transcript. Don't read this if you haven't seen it.

but specifically in one scene of the movie.... this is a quote:

Now, alone, that is an amazing thought. But I saw Ghost in the Shell again tonight. A deeply significant and symbolic movie I must say.

I can't really say I have a point to this thread. I wanted a deep and thoughtful discussion about life...but thats been done before. Dreams have been discussed too.

So what I propose is that we discuss the fact that through evolution or creationism that we have created a consciousness. If all our senses are created through electric and chemical responses, how can we have a personality and a consciousness?

Those (chemical and electricity) are things with distinct laws, bound by seemingly unbreakable laws of the universe. Can we have a free will and a consciousness if we are made from things that don't?

That leads me to another thought....do we have a free will, or does fate govern our lives?

Opinions, thoughts, feedback, whatever.

__________________
the light that burns twice as bright
burns half as long

and you have burned so very, very brightly

JNshorty

umm thats some deep stuff you got there..... I think we have a free will the same way we can make characters in a computer game "seem" to have a free will..... our version is just soo advanced that you cant tell..... and everyones program is a little different... personal opinion

__________________
"Good Times, Good Times"

impirius7

waking life is an excellent movie, i love the part where the guy sets himself on fire. about the fate/free will thing... i think we are led to believe that we have free will, but through the choices we make and paths we take we ultimately end up where we are supposed to, thus fate is victorious. maybe fate is always one step ahead of us, "free will" is the mechanism by which we arrive at our destiny.

*Nikki*

I agree with impirius.

Free will is something we allow ourselves in order to attempt to escape the destiny that is already planned.

While our minds are capable of just about anything, the path that our lives take is already predetermined in my opinion.

ARTelevision

as we create everything from nothing every instant, there is nothing but free will. the problem is this keeps us from seeing everything is perfectly as it is at all moments. the things we create with free will are illusions just like everything else. and that is always perfect and unchanging.

__________________
create evolution

Glory's Sun

Can our future be clearly shorn
from a life to which we are born?
Is each of us a creature free-
or trapped at birth by Destiny?
Pity those who believe the latter.
Without Freedom, nothing matters.

NotMinus

I want to belive im more then a mass of bound molocules and electricity. Iv heard people talk about chemistry as a major leap to understanding ones own self but I just can't see it that way.

YzermanS19

Excellent point. I want to believe I'm more than just a reaction to inanimate objects. I guess thats where religion fills in with the soul/spirit.

guccilvr- good poem.

Playing devils advocate to ART (as I have no idea which I believe)- don't you see it as a huge coincidence that you are even alive? Imagine the billions of years that took to create humanity, and then the thousands of millions of billions of tiny possibilities that you could have not been you. I know thats wierd sounding, but realistically, everything that leads to yourself as a person happened almost too perfectly to be chance.

Just a thought

__________________
the light that burns twice as bright
burns half as long

and you have burned so very, very brightly

phredgreen

you need to think about science and the human psyche.

sceintists have mapped the human genome. they know which genes make you tall or short, make you fat or skinny, give you blue, green, brown, or grey eyes. they know how to stop diseases before they start. they can build a "perfect human being" using this intimate knowledge of the building blocks of life.

however.

they don't know more than a pamphlet's worth of shit about the human brain and how it works. sure, they can strap electrodes to your noggin and see which areas give off sparks when you think about your first pet sparky or the loss of your great grandpa or your first romp in the backseat of your mom's nissan, but they don't actually know what's happening and why. the greatest scientific mystery in the world is the human brain.

so where does that leave humankind?

we love to think of ourselves at the masters of our domain. we can travel from the deepest depths of the ocean to the highest heights of the mountains and even beyond into outer space and planets well beyond our reach. we can travel anywhere in the world and know exactly where we are, we can easily produce enough to feed/clothe/shelter/medicate the entire world's population (not that we do, but we certainly have the capacity to as a race, if the logistics were set up properly). we are at the top of the evolutionary food chain, and yet we're still a bunch of kindergarteners making paper dolls when it comes to knowing and controlling the human mind.

so where is this taking us?

we still don't truly <b>know</b> ourselves. we will never truly understand our fullest purpose until we are aware of what those big grey masses of nerves in our heads do to/for us to the fullest extent. perhaps somewhere in that jumble of cells is a person, is memories and thoughts, morals and limits, the whole idea of one's true being. immanuel kant was right... "i think therefore i am" - but until we know why and exactly how one thinks, we're still lightyears off from truly knowing ourselves.

__________________
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
- Thomas Paine

Simple_Min

Well if one is a firm believer in one or many faiths or in Quantum physics, how can we claim to have free will?

If you believe in a higher entity, then that higher entity has already determined your life span on this third rock from the sun.

Conversely if you know anything about Quantum (also touched upon brilliantly in the film) Mechanics then you know everything is not deterministic, but is probabilistic. Again, no room for free will.

I think the idea of free will is a personal thought. If you judge any of your actions, there is some "deterministic or motivating" force behind it. You making a hand gesture to give someone the finger has to be pre determined before you do it, so therefore it no longer would be called free will.

I said above that I feel this is a personal thought, and it should be because everyone has their own idea of love, hate, and other emotions, and mainly of what is true/false. And if your truth leads you to the conclusion that free will indeed does exist, then what does it really matter? In the end, it's irrelevant. Does a belief in one or the other threaten anything? Will other beings someday look at us and notice the subtle differences in our cultures and socities or will they notice what we have in common as a species.
"They say that dreams are real as long as they last, well, couldn't you say the same thing about life?"


I think it's been speculated/theorized what you just mentioned. This is applicable to the "mutliverse" theory that there are other universes that coexist with our universe. One subset of the mutliverse theory is as follows:

1) it is known that the solar system is just one "atom" in a huge mass of the milky way.
2) Our Milky way is just one atom in a huge mass of other galaxies.
3) Our universe is just one atom in another bigger universe.
4) That bigger universe is just another atom in another greater universe...
Iterate this process upwards and downwards.
I read that in the last month's issue of SA.