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To me free will is essentially the ability to make any meaningful conscious choice that wasn’t predetermined. My sense is that due to laws of biochemistry and physics we can’t, since the sum of all reactions that result in our current state and the current state of the environment that acts on us should strictly lead to a calculable decision, even if we perceive it as a choice. Thus our choices would be predetermined millennia ago. I guess I wonder if those reactions lead to a range of possible choices (eg the quantum randomness you discuss) or a potentially a greater range, with varying degrees of probability, or if they inevitably lead to specific decision for every moment or decision fork.



I don’t think I could buy an argument from mindfulness, that seems like an appeal to the limitation of human cognitive ability.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCrr2yNoWhb1j8O0QsmgdBtMABiImT1AQ5gDucWm6KQET9I1x2

“I don’t think I could buy an argument from mindfulness, that seems like an appeal to the limitation of human cognitive ability.”

I think this all the time. It’s never off me mind.

If current state/environment are factors (which I agree with) wouldnt that mean predetermination instance by instance and not by a millennia ago?

Since physiological, psychic, and environmental factors change and all

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I don't think you need the argument from mindfulness, there's enough evidence without it, but still, what's wrong with it? Why wouldn't you know better if you pay attention? That's how it usually works. It's rare that you get more confused if you pay closer attention.

rome wasn't built in a day

I paid more attention to math and got more confused but maybe that's because I'm an idiot

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^^ physics is timeless, everything is just pre-determined by the state a moment ago. But that state was pre-determined also and so on, so in that sense it's predetermined from millennia ago.

I get u

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The reactions that make up the current state could only occur due to the reactions that took place millennia ago. Definitely if you went back millennia and tried to predict the present you could only come up with a probability distribution for events this far in the future but it’s possible those distributions could be used to make very accurate predictions if you had enough information.

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Silverspawn, it’s because I put very low value the processing power of the human brain relative to the scale of the universe so paying better attention than baseline may not get us very close to truth in absolute terms

yeah there was a time when i would have been much more convinced by the meditative argument but as it stands i'm leaning more in itwasthatwas's direction regarding that

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Fair enough

not tryna shit on tibetan monks or nuthin' at all, but experience has taught me that a lot of the most vocally "woke" meditative spirits I've met are some of the most useless, conceited, over-compensating twats on the planet and i wouldn't take their word for much of anything. spirituality can be as much of a vice as it can be a tool for clarity.

besides "meditating" on shit is kind of contradictory to the point of meditation. which is probably why a lot of people who "meditate on shit" end up making dumb decisions anyway (albeit with impressive conviction!)

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I wonder if there is some lost knowledge or art to the practice of proper meditation, since ancient cultures put so much value on it, but in the modern day the only people I know who practice meditation or mindfulness are out of touch hipsters. And one family member who wants to quit his lucrative job to become a mindfulness life coach

lmao! word up. honestly im sure losing touch with practices like that is an inevitability of advancements, a counter-weight to the ability to potentially understand it scientifically

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^^ well now you know me, so it's no longer everyone.



I suspect most of these people you know haven't really done very much of what I'd call proper meditation, so eh. It's definitely frequently being sold in combination with various woo.



"meditating on something", if that something is a subject, is definitely not meditation, more like the opposite.

Yep