Y’know, the more I think about free will as a religous concept, the more I’m convinced it’s supposed to be an allegory for how to treat others, like a more convoluted Golden Rule. The source was shifted to “God” simply to make the garbage people that don’t normally care about others hesitate before they just ignore others’ advice on how to treat people.
The reasoning is pretty simple: Nobody can actually do anything they want because others will interfere. Individuals restrict others’ freedom all the time. If you’re restricting others freedoms, you’re doing an even worse version of judging others. The Bible pretty clearly says to leave such critical stuff that idiots can screw up in God’s hands, because idiots can and will screw it up.
Same with free will. Peoples’ freedom is, according to religous teachings, a gift from God. They describe such things as “from God” solely because idiots respect their flavor of Sky Daddy over other human beings.
If it’s actually a gift from God, then it makes little sense that humans can simply remove a gift an all-powerful diety bestows. So… either historic humans are insanely stupid and bad at logic … or it’s actually an allegory for not trying to control others so much.
My concept of free will and determinism is that there are both in a way. What we see manifest at our level as free will is at its core determinism, driven by how the environment has evolved our personality to react and think about things. When asked to think of a color we quickly come up with a choice, made by either a preference for or a recent memory of, yet if asked when we actually chose that color at the thinking level we can’t find a single point where there were others to pick from, we just “came up with it”. Our free will is a conglomeration of things beyond our control.
Well, you never had free will to begin with, so…
Y’know, the more I think about free will as a religous concept, the more I’m convinced it’s supposed to be an allegory for how to treat others, like a more convoluted Golden Rule. The source was shifted to “God” simply to make the garbage people that don’t normally care about others hesitate before they just ignore others’ advice on how to treat people.
The reasoning is pretty simple: Nobody can actually do anything they want because others will interfere. Individuals restrict others’ freedom all the time. If you’re restricting others freedoms, you’re doing an even worse version of judging others. The Bible pretty clearly says to leave such critical stuff that idiots can screw up in God’s hands, because idiots can and will screw it up.
Same with free will. Peoples’ freedom is, according to religous teachings, a gift from God. They describe such things as “from God” solely because idiots respect their flavor of Sky Daddy over other human beings.
If it’s actually a gift from God, then it makes little sense that humans can simply remove a gift an all-powerful diety bestows. So… either historic humans are insanely stupid and bad at logic … or it’s actually an allegory for not trying to control others so much.
So Andy Weir’s “The Egg”. It’s a good philosophy.
My concept of free will and determinism is that there are both in a way. What we see manifest at our level as free will is at its core determinism, driven by how the environment has evolved our personality to react and think about things. When asked to think of a color we quickly come up with a choice, made by either a preference for or a recent memory of, yet if asked when we actually chose that color at the thinking level we can’t find a single point where there were others to pick from, we just “came up with it”. Our free will is a conglomeration of things beyond our control.