3 posts tagged “philosophic”

So I've been having a series of debates with my friend Zack, who goes to Bloomsburg and is quite large on philosophy. We enjoy just talking about philosophical beliefs and having these endless arguments that none of us will ever finish. Except for this one, it seems. This time, Zack and I were discussing what has become probably our favorite topic: the concept of free will versus the concept of fate. We've been really anxious to try and solve the problem of whether we act of our own free will or if it's all because of fate, and although I don't think we've gotten concrete yet, this is a huge step from where we have been.

So if you want to skip this horrid reading business and get to the ending right away, here's our conclusion...kind of:

We (humans) do not have free will.

Why do we say that, you ask? Well, let me show you the progression of our argument. First, Zack, who is a staunch believer of no free will, asked me, a staunch believer for free will, if I agreed with this statement:

"All of our actions, thoughts, and emotions are just our reaction to our external stimulus, in conjunction with our genetic makeup."

Well, yeah I kind of do. I mean, how can we not agree with this? And this led to the unfortunate downwards spiral and our horrible, horrible conclusion. Bear with me here, you probably won't like the things you read. Because of this, we cannot have free will, as we may think that we are acting on our own violation, but even if we are acting in accordance with our beliefs, those beliefs were formulated based upon cause and effect. This makes it seem probable that free will is just a contrivance that satisfies our need to feel in control of our lives, and to hold others accountable for their deeds and misdeeds.

But what about our personalities?, one might ask. To which we would reply, What determines personality? Your genetic makeup determines your personality, your environment determines your personality, and people around you determine your personality. Even if you're an anarchist who goes against how people around you want you to act, you're still reacting off them. We are incapable of acting at all when we have nothing and nobody to tell us how to act, without a doubt. Everything we do is directed by life and the way stimuli has affected our conscious and unconscious self. Every single, minuscule little thing is a cause that we react to, creating an effect. The universe is essentially a large system of cause and effect and it's all contrived. Even our reasoning skills aren't made by free will...think about it. We reason based upon our conception of logic, which is influenced by our beliefs, which are then influenced by the ideas and experiences that we are exposed to. Therefore, if everything we do is the effect of a cause beyond our control (you cannot completely control your environment, and you cannot control other people's minds at all), we do not have free will.

Although this is an anti-free-will argument, it is not necessarily a pro-fate argument. It's hard to describe it, but this system doesn't promote fate at all, it just destroys the argument of free will. And if this doesn't convince you, read this excerpt from an article that Zack found:

"In whatever manner man is considered, he is connected to the universal
nature, and submitted to the necessary and immutable laws that she
imposes on all beings she contains, according to their peculiar
essences or to the respective properties with which without consulting
them she endows each particular species. Man's life is a line that
nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without
his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born
without his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon
himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the
power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly
modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no
control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the
hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is
good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or
irrational, without his will being for anything in these various
states. Nevertheless, in spite of the shackles by which he is bound,
it is pretended he is a free agent, or that independent of the causes
by which he is moved, he determines his own will, and regulates his
own condition. However slender the foundation of his opinion, of which
everything ought to point out to him the error, it is current at this
day and passes for an incontestable truth with a great number of
people, otherwise extremely enlightened; it is the basis of religion,
which supposing relations between man and the unknown being she has
placed above nature, has been incapable of imagining how man could
merit reward or deserve punishment from this being, if he was not a
free agent. Society has been believed interested in his system;
because an idea has gone abroad, that if all the actions of man were
to be contemplated as necessary, the right of punishing those who
injure their associates would no longer exist. At length human vanity
accommodated itself to a hypothesis which, unquestionably, appears to
distinguish man from all other physical beings, by assigning to him
the special privilege of a total independence of all other causes, but
of which a very little reflection would have shown him an
impossibility. The will, as we have elsewhere said, is a modification
of the brain, by which it is disposed to action, or prepared to give
play to the organs. This will is necessarily determined by the
qualities, good or bad, agreeable or painful, of the object or the
motive that acts upon his sense, or of which the idea remains in him,
and is resuscitated by his memory. In consequence, he acts
necessarily, his action is the result of the impulse he receives
either from the motive, from the object, or from the idea which has
modified his brain, or disposed his will. When he does not act
according to this impulse, it is because there comes some new cause,
some new motive, some new idea, which modified his brain in a
different manner, gives him a new impulse, determines his will in
another way, by which the action of the former impulse is suspended:
thus, the sight of an agreeable object, or its idea, determines his
will to set him in action or procure it; but if a new object or a new
idea more powerfully attracts him, it gives a new direction to his
will, annihilates the effect of the former, and prevents the action by
which it was to be procured. This is the mode in which reflection,
experience, reason, necessarily arrests or suspends the action of
man's will: without this he would of necessity have followed the
anterior impulse which carried him towers a then desirable object. In
all this he always acts according to the necessary laws from which he
has no means of emancipating himself. In short, the actions of man are
never free; they are always the necessary consequence of his
temperament, of the received ideas, and of the notions, either true or
false, which he has formed to himself of happiness; of his opinions,
strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience."

It's all a bit too convincing for me. I think I want to go mull this over for a bit. Feel free to prove me wrong, I'd greatly appreciate that. Hell, I'd enjoy any feedback you can give me.

-blake.

So I'm going to whine and be pathetic here, because as Aaron Barrett of Reel Big Fish once said, "I found out that you can make a helluva lot of money off of pain and suffering." Not that I'm making money here, but I just think that it's due time...I mean, it's been like an entire week since I've done this whole 'therapeutic venting' shit, might as well resume somewhere.

So I noticed today that I have virtually no social skills anymore outside of my group of friends. I've made like....I'd say 20 friends max here that I can call and talk to, and that's only if I include all 13 other people from my dorm as my friends. It's great, because I am pretty much friends with everybody in my dorm. This is a good thing, living with 13 friends, but it's apparently put quite a large damper on my ability to meet new people. For example:

There's this one girl that I've known for a while who I've maintained a...well, I guess you could call it a friendship. I think the main problem with my friendships here has been stated by yet another influential person, my friend Zaxk. I was chatting about friendship to Zaxk, and he said something that really stuck with me. It went as follows: "[One of our friends at his college] is the only one who I can relate to up here. Even though I'm friends with other people, and we just go through the motions. I think they just view it as a normal friendship, but I view it as a fake friendship... nothing special at all." That quote describes almost all of the friendships I have up here. I feel that very few--maybe 3, if I'm pushing it--friends here I can actually relate to and really converse with. The rest of them are just these robotic friendships. We say hi, chat for 5 minutes, maybe write on our Facebook walls, and then move on. Simple, fleeting, like a housefly that never stops to land before it dies. And I hate it. Some contact would be nice, in any sense of the word.

But anyway, this girl that I knew was originally in my L&T, which was a workshop all us freshman Bardians attended in August. We had fun, chatted, never really paid much attention to each other, as I had my eyes directed towards another girl. That fell through, I was/am young and stupid, and, well, I'm moving on. I come into my French class, and she's in that as well. Quelle suprise, as the French would dire. Suddenly, we start being like...actual friends. She Facebook friends me, invites me to a few social gatherings at her dorm, etc. I feel accepted, warm, and fuzzy, but nothing really happens. I kind of decide that I like this girl and wouldn't mind pursuing a relationship with her; but until recently, relationships have really been the last thing on my mind. Yet for the last week, for some reason, they've been all I can think about. I keep looking at girls I know and thinking to myself "Could I bother myself to go out with them?" Well, that's not exactly the question I ask, as I'm a fucking pussy (This will be elaborated on shortly). But you get the point.

So today, we take a midterm dans la classe de francias, and after it, we end up walking down to the campus center to grab a cup of coffee. And by that, I mean literally just that. There was no sitting down and talking, hell, there was barely any talking. We just bought coffee, checked our mail, chatted with a few mutual friends, had some discussion about lifeguarding or cars with each other, and went our separate ways. Why? Why am I not intelligent enough to actually start something that's fun and/or positive? I don't know, and I wish I could find out. If I just got back into the social niche I'm comfortable with, the old James could come back, and I could start being suave...-er. Maybe I just need more practice, more experience talking to new people to get back to the place I was at before I arrived here.

I've become too damn introverted for my tastes. I mean, I'm fucking complaining to a BLOG. This needs to stop; I'd actually rather be complaining to a psychologist, as sad as that is.

-blake.

"The attack, I'm feeling the attack, I'm feeling the attack
Of basic social skills I know I know I know I know I lack.
I'm hyper-cognizant of facts
I'm well-aware that we are barely scraping by
But my good intentions aren't enough to salvage that."
-"No Rest for the Whiny", by Bomb the Music Industry!

Screw the Vox question of the day, here's my question of the day:

Have you ever stopped and looked at rain under a spotlight? I'm talking sitting there under the light, not some tiny streetlight or anything, but like, stadium lights. And I'm also talking huge, fat raindrops just pouring down. Just sit there and watch them for like...10 minutes.

Have you done that before? If not, why not?

Go out and do it, right now.