For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some ‘organic element’ since I couldn’t accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
Yo OP. We’re carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it’s pure carbon. Why wouldn’t we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.
I’m just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.
Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don’t see the point in quantifying with maths.
I think it’s bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Beyond that, the idea that’s gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.
Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.
I’m mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.
Allowing for quantum randomness does not help the free will argument. Randomness might be “free”, but it is certainly not but “will”.
But it does. If the universe was deterministic, choice would be impossible because all outcomes would be predetermined.
Quantum randomness may not directly provide free will but it does exclude determinism, which would make free will impossible.
This “choice” is just the manifestation what you are at that moment, the sum of everything that has influenced you up until this point. Whether that complex tangle of cause and effect was “determined” a million years ago or affected by random fluctuations the whole way, including a moment ago, doesn’t change anything. “Free will” just doesn’t make any sense, regardless of whether one considers predeterminism to be the alternative.
Except the universe is full of non-determinism that we work hard to keep quiet in our toys.
Huh, I always thought of us having free will in response to cause and efect, not in place of it. But maybe I’m understanding free will differently?
I think Camus might have summed it up best when he said the only real choice (therefore, freedom to exercise will) humanity has is whether or not to commit suicide.
Whether or not free will is “real” in some rigidly technical measurable way, we have never known anything different than what we now experience as living beings. To me, telling people “free will doesn’t exist!” is like telling them “you don’t meet arbitrary standards of self-actualization that don’t really exist anywhere else either!” and it has roughly the same effect on me: none, except that the speaker (in my experience, including offline conversations) often comes across as talking down to other people and maybe making them feel less good about their lived experiences.
I’m not religious, but I feel the same way about the kind of person that’d feel compelled to sneer “god’s not real” at a religious funeral to feel superior.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/125
I had a conversation with my neighbor along those lines. He reads his Bible everyday. I asked him if he knew that God were real, 100%, something/someone he could reach out and touch, if that would change how he lives his life.
I answered before he had a chance and said in no way would it change mine. I live my values. He said it wouldn’t effect him either, and I believe, he is a genuinely great guy. But the fact that that would change soooo many people is either terrifying or makes me super grateful that they have their reasons to not indulge their worst instincts.
Both are unsettling, really.
There’s quite a few versions of God that have hard determinism built right in, too. It’s God’s will that everything has a linear course, nothing can be changed, no choices are made, which means people are predestined to be punished for things they literally have no choice in.
In my opinion that’s crushingly bleak and believing in and outright praising any sort of divine creator that’d punish their own creations for doing exactly what was planned for them is fucked up on so many levels.
I suppose such an entity would be an interesting premise for very dark horror literature.
sometimes your brain will decide something independently of conscious thought, and then invent a compelling narrative for why you are about to do what your brain already decided you were going to do
This kind of effect can be seen when a split brain person reacts to textual commands, like “stand up” seen on a computer screen in front of them only one eye can see by standing up, but when asked verbally why they stood up they just make up some shit on the fly like “I was tired of sitting and wanted to stretch my legs”
We’re just narrative machines (no, not like ChatGPT)
It could be asserted that none of our decisions are ever actually real, and its all just a series of these ‘decisions’ that are just invented by your brain to explain why you’re doing what you were always going to do, and thus you don’t have free will you just tell yourself that you do as a nice story.
I don’t believe that, I think that assertion is a bit like last tuesdayism and I dislike the unfalsifiablity of it, but yeah I get the argument
How would our minds not being governed by this universe imply free will?
If anything, I’d assume the you don’t have free will if your actions weren’t chosen from experience, but were controlled by a supernatural ghost.
We do have metal in our veins. Blood has metallic taste precisely because of iron, which carries oxygen through our body.
Metal has no taste tho. What yr tasting is you. VSauce or Nilered did a video about it.
You can test it yourself, just degrease and wash a coin. Once clean, no taste.
Of course it is not free metal. Probably oxide. And no, I am not going to taste rust.