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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[Orange Wizard]

Spoiler: I agree with the obligatory xkcd on the Voynich manuscript. (click to show/hide)

[That Wolf]

I think it's fairly obvious what I meant.

Yes It was. My point without pointing it out was that you did exsit in the womb without memory of it. So why cant you exsist before conception without memory of it??

The Voynich manuscript is the earliest pre-alpha version of Dwarf Fortress. The resemblance is uncanny.

Oh my this had me laughing makes sense. We should steal the book for Tarn. He must really miss it by now.

Thanks for that comic strip Orange. I hadnt seen it before. I laughed again.
Wow what a good day

[TheDarkStar]

Atheists: What do you think of free will?

[That Wolf]

Great film


Edit: this is what wolfy thinks a good joke is.
He was wrong! Now look at him. Disgraceful

[mastahcheese]

Great film

That's "Free Willy"

Totally different.

[Bohandas]

The concept of "free will" seems ill defined at best, especially in the context of religious discourse where it seems to shift between being something non-deterministic, deterministic, chaotic, or even none of the above (which is impossible) depending on what contradiction the speaker is trying to rationalize.

[SirQuiamus]

Atheists: What do you think of free will?

Some atheists believe in free will, and some of them don't. That question is not an essential part of their "belief system," and in either case, the answer has no practical implications. (For the record, I don't believe in free will. I didn't choose this belief.)

Also:   

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is a dwarven bathtub / vomit-powered dwarfputer. Obviously.

[That Wolf]

Atheists: What do you think of free will?

Some atheists believe in free will, and some of them don't. That question is not an essential part of their "belief system," and in either case, the answer has no practical implications. (For the record, I don't believe in free will. I didn't choose this belief.)

Also:   

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is a dwarven bathtub / vomit-powered dwarfputer. Obviously.

Not only is it the vomitubcpu its a human farm aswell. They are all female. The children are minced for parts

[Bohandas]

The concept of Free Will is also based on a sort of false correlation; the implication that the "will" part is inextricably bound up to the "free" part. That all volition must be "free" in some ill defined sense, which is far from a given.

[That Wolf]

Yeah true freedom is nothing. No boundarys. To exsist is to be trapped. But im re quoting what I said way back in the thread.
You can only be partialy free. Free of emotions, responsibility, servitude and so on. Free will means that when your bone gets chipped youl pass out from pain and get your head caved in.

[Angle]

Atheists: What do you think of free will?

Well, it depends on what you mean by that. I think we're deterministic processes, maybe with some randomness throw in by quantum mechanics. I believe that human decisions can be traced back to root causes: Genetics + Environment + Upbringing + ..., etc. In other words, I believe that all of our decisions could be perfectly predicted if one had perfect information and Infinite Processing Power

[Bohandas]

Well, it depends on what you mean by that. I think we're deterministic processes, maybe with some randomness throw in by quantum mechanics.

Chaos theory would seem to imply that differences on the quantum level would translate into different outcomes on larger scales.

[Angle]

Theoretically. I'm not sure if that's applicable in this case, and even if it is, That doesn't really change anything. Then we're just deterministic processes + a roll of the dice.

[scrdest]

Theoretically. I'm not sure if that's applicable in this case, and even if it is, That doesn't really change anything. Then we're just deterministic processes + a roll of the dice.

If that's the case, it does. Every single bit of randomness not only propagates, but also interacts with every other bit of randomness; it would mean the randomness increases exponentially for each element of the system, but since a number of combinations cancel each other out, it would mean that the totality of universe, humans included, wouldn't be perfectly predictable, but be one massive multi-dimensional normal distribution of each independent randomized parameter.

That, in turn, means that 99.9% of everything is, for the most part, normal-ish, but there is a possibility for rare tail conditions which are completely unexpected, and since, statistically, no matter how low probability, an event with non-zero probability's chance of occuring at least once approaches 1 as time approaches infinity. Some events are unlikely enough that they would not happen until the heat death of the universe, of course, but the point stands.

[Angle]

But the point remains that neither o those things provides us with free will. Whether the universe is random or deterministic, we still don't have free will.