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Discussion
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Simple question to start!
[View Poll](https://www.reddit.com/poll/vzymnq)
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Poll: Do you believe that humans have freewill?
updated 1 year, 9 months ago
2 Members
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1
Reply
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Einstein at one time said that he refused to believe that God played dice with the Universe, when speaking of quantum mechanics.
Today it appears God DOES play dice with the Universe, but they use loaded dice.
I believe, strongly, in both. I don’t see predestination and free will as being mutually incompatible.
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Yes to some extent.
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We have free will, but we always have to live with the consequences of choice. It’s just that sometimes, the choices you made were past life choices or between life choices.
Sometimes we make agreements at the soul level to clear ancestral karma, which means we willingly put ourselves in what might look like shitty situations in order to heal ourselves or our family line.
One of my favorite scenes in the Matrix movies is in Reloaded when Neo goes to see the Oracle. She offers him a piece of candy. He says, “Do you know if I’m going to take it?”
She responds, “Wouldn’t be much of an Oracle if I didn’t.”
He asks her about free will & the power of choice and she says, “You’re not here to make a choice. You already made the choice. You’re here to find out WHY you made the choice.”
That always stuck with me. Because sometimes a choice was made a long time ago and we’re just figuring out the lesson.
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It is my view that free will is an illusion and does not actually exist. Sure we might get to make choices but those choices are frequently influenced by outside factors. And depending on our social status, gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, etc., we may not be allowed to make the choices we actually want to make.
Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher who wrote, “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.”
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Wel I kind of do. I mainly believe in the meaninglessness of everything. There’s nothing that ever happens for a reason. Everything ever happened on accident, nothing matters, might just do whatever you want…. For many that’s depressing, for me it’s my true freedom.
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If the Big Bang theory is correct, then no. All of the things that we see, interact with, ourselves, and even our thoughts are the result of subatomic things set forth on a path by the that big expansion when time started. Unless something that was created from stuff not of Big Bang origin is actively manipulating the matter that is combined to be human, I don’t see how free will can exist.
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I can’t participate in the poll because I believe we have the potential for free will. But only with significant effort. And certainly not all the time. We have freedom of choice. We are given certain options to pick from.
We often feel we have free will because our programming is deep and we never question it.
We are constantly being manipulated by outside forces like family, advertisers, social media, and so on.
We are constantly being manipulated by internal factors like hormones, gut biome, behavioral patterns, and so on.
How hard it is to wake up and see these manipulations, yet alone overcome them. Harder still to break free and escape them for any lasting period of time.
Even with ample reflection and training in critical thinking, would we even know if we were exercising free will or just succumbing to the programed illusion of free will?
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I think that free will and fate are concepts we made up because our minds see time as linear and binary. But one can’t really exist without the other, if anyone truly thought that the future was decided most people would become idle, which would affect their future, in which case they are exercising their free will to be idle… and so on. So maybe both and maybe neither, maybe it’s a mechanism we’ll never really understand on any intuitive level
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Free will is a nonsense term that doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying scuttercluck. Can you prove we don’t have scuttercluck? What’s scuttercluck? Oh, it’s the abstract concept that unquantifiable concepts are quantifiable.
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I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t. Physical force doesn’t mean we don’t have will, it just means we’re being physically restrained. I’m quite certain it’s the will of someone in prison to be released, hence why escape attempts happen.
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Yes, but it’s interesting. I believe all fates are weaved together by the norns. I believe people can’t alter their ultimate fate, but they’re free to fight back against it and choose the attitude they want to approach it with.
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I had a therapist try to start me off with a similar “simple exercise” where he tried to get me to identify my core values, and this seemed like such a luxury to me.
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Perhaps every possibility occurs we just think we have free will as we inhabit the dimension we think we made choices on
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We have free will, but we always have to live with the consequences of choice. It’s just that sometimes, the choices you made were past life choices or between life choices.
Sometimes we make agreements at the soul level to clear ancestral karma, which means we willingly put ourselves in what might look like shitty situations in order to heal ourselves or our family line.
One of my favorite scenes in the Matrix movies is in Reloaded when Neo goes to see the Oracle. She offers him a piece of candy. He says, “Do you know if I’m going to take it?”
She responds, “Wouldn’t be much of an Oracle if I didn’t.”
He asks her about free will & the power of choice and she says, “You’re not here to make a choice. You already made the choice. You’re here to find out WHY you made the choice.”
That always stuck with me. Because sometimes a choice was made a long time ago and we’re just figuring out the lesson.
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Yes but they are easily influenced
