where did it happen?

[worm]

it's not just me I'm curious about, I genuinely don't care why I'm here, I want to know why everything is here, or there, or anywhere

[worm]

If we had enough understanding of the physiological process underpinning our actions, maybe your past history, genetics, previous patterns of behaviour, previous thought patterns, led you to the brain processes that resulted in a decision to pick the flower.

Edited January 14, 2011 by worm

[worm]

But what I can logically prove is that if there is free will, there can be no working "grand plan" for god or evolution, because free will undermines any plan there might be.

[worm]

If the brain is pre-programmed to make those choices, we have had no say in it. If we have had no say in the creation of the apparatus that gives us free will and we have no say in the action of exercising that free will, how much free will do we have? And what do we say of those with brains that are damaged, either from birth or some point after? If their functions are limited, is there free will limited also?

[worm]

Welcome to my world. I believe in a completely determined universe (I know, Quantum Theory, but I don't understand that so I naughtily dismiss it) and free will at the same time. And I think you can't have one without the other.

Edited January 14, 2011 by worm

[worm]

I can easily imagine me changing my stance on it purely depending on who I might be discussing it with

[worm]

I can't accept that our brains are pre-programmed... I just can't.

but, if they aren't, and are a blank(-ish) canvas that becomes a product of our environment, then we (and our brains) are not much more than a plant that evolves depending on it's environment..

[worm]

the core of what I believe would be consistent, but the way I express it might change... and as anything is not much more than as it is percieved, then effectively it changes

[worm]

I wish you wouldn't do that, it's pointless to what I'm saying

[worm]

but so what

[worm]

I never imagined I was...

but what has white, or affluent, or 'of the west' got to do with it?

and it's news to me that 'most of anything' percieve themselves as humanists first

[worm]

that's good.... I like that. We're just links

[worm]

with the implication being that if someone isn't white, affluent or from the west, similar ideas are less likely...

[worm]

using the Jack Straw topic was an example of how that process work...

I didn't intend it to be taken literally

Edited January 14, 2011 by worm

[feral chile]

Couldn't have put it better myself.

The paradox being that the concept of meaning and the assessment of things according to that concept is an entirely human construction. This should help people with questions regading the concept of nothingness. Nothingness does not mean a world of no objects, no events and no sentience, it means a world in which objects and events and sentience have no meaning.

Edited January 14, 2011 by feral chile

[worm]

Don't you start . My lecturer used to distract me from his lectures with a throwaway remark that would mean instead of listening to him, I'd be trying to unravel the complex assertion he'd so casually made. 'Nothing exists' being one of them.

Edited January 14, 2011 by worm

[feral chile]

By being distracted, what you were actually doing was trying to fathom out the meaning of the language he used, rather than the reality. You were assessing the statement in terms of its validity.

There's no escaping the fact that it's a human assessing human terms to give answers according to a human convention. At no point was 'nothing' ever a label given by an external agent.

[worm]

Quite. have a look at greeny's link, they discuss the different scientific meanings of 'nothing' on there.

The other one that used to get me was my lecturer saying, light doesn't take time to travel to us, it takes us time to see it.

[feral chile]

He sounds like my kinda guy.

Though he's still in that subjective/ objective dichotomy. What I'd say is that through the existence of light, we've created a load of rationales about what it is and how it got there. However, they're all fictions relating to what the light signals in our heads.

Edited January 14, 2011 by feral chile

[worm]

But you'd like him, he's definitely on your wavelength. I wanted to do research on the logic of time/time travel etc. and he said we all can time travel, every time we remember or anticipate.