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Holy Ghost wrote:Kevin, do you have the choice not to worry?

Yes! I think the indirect argument I've made is good reason to believe that we all have the choice to not worry.

The short answer is because even if your decisions were predetermined, they still have an impact on the outcomes that happen. Choices still matter even if those choices were determined by a series of causal events outside of one's control. Therefore, Determinism =/= defeatism. Determinists are not ...

EAllusion wrote:KevinSim - Start by looking up “the idle argument.”

I looked up a couple of places in the Internet that mentioned the Idle Argument and read them last night. I admit there is a similarity. But I don't see how the listed refutations actually refute the argument made, let alone my argument.

then I would ask each of those posters, when faced with such a decision, why agonize over it? Why worry about it at all? Determinism means that the decision each makes is the inevitable result of the state of the universe twelve billion years ago, so we're going to make the same decision whether we...

That said, I think I get your point and I totally agree that this isn't intuitive. I feel like I have freedom and I feel like I should exert my will to accomplish what I want. Why do I do that? Don't blame me--blame my brain. Analytics, this has nothing to do with intuition. I just want to know, if...

Do you agonize over these decisions, Kevin? It seems you might since you think people facing life's decisions are agonizing. Some decisions yes, but definitely not all, or even most. It just seems to me that it's natural to agonize over some decisions that are likely to have a lot of effect on our ...

I'm a determinist, more or less. The agonizing you're describing is inevitable and part of the illusory process that our consciousness perceives as choice, feeling, and all the related ideas that go along with it. I'm not asking this question of people in general, Doc. I'm asking why you in particu...

Are there any posters on this forum that are convinced everything in this universe, including we humans, is deterministic? That everything anything, including us, does is the inevitable result of things that happened before those actions, and that those causes were the inevitable result of even earl...

What exactly is the God that atheists believe doesn't exist? If someone calls herself/himself an atheist what is a/he saying s/he doesn't believe exists? I'm more of an apatheist, but I'd say that I am 100% certain that a morally perfect, all-loving God who is also the God of Abraham as described i...

What is this supposed to be? Some tricky little trap to ensnare our atheist friends here? No, it's no trap. I seriously want to know what someone means when s/he says that s/he is an atheist. In the interest of full disclosure I do have a slight hunch that the deity I believe in might be so differe...