viktor said:

iiilil said:

Thank you Victor for understanding me in part !

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No worries - and I'll invite you to consider something else I thought of.

It's more than possible that a God-like consciousness could will itself to be temporarily restricted in powers for the sake of experiencing something other than being God, and to will itself to have forgotten that it did so.

An example of the form this might take might be a life as a human being, where one is apparently not free to do a lot of things - but the paradox is that one will die and the restrictions of a human life will be lifted.

So even with access to an infinite set of possible worlds, i.e. an infinite set, one might have a subset of that infinitude and not know its a subset.

This could lead to a consciousness believing that almost literally any subset was the entirety of reality.

I've accepted that not only is there more to things than I will ever know, but that there are massive fields of knowledge about which I don't even know the simplest thing.

I suspect it's a spiritual exercise to dwell upon the nature of infinity in general.

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Rahz said:

Quote:

While we may be controlled to an extent by our lesser genius, the fact that people can change, dramatically even, as well as break old customs and disturb "things in motion" is evidence that humans can reach and express varying degrees of free-will, which imo, is synonymous with mindfulness and deliberation.

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Novel outside influences and "breaking points" could both be deterministic.

This thread is much the same as the majority of free will threads. Getting ahead of ourselves. Instead of "Do we have free will" the question should be "What is free will". How can we know if we have it if we don't know what it is? It may seem obvious or self evident, but such assumptions do nothing for shaping a cohesive debate, and the obviousness could be a trick of the mind, or a combination of that and our general acceptance of the legal definition... which I've found to be the only practical application.

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Agreed .. something i have been saying for some time. Happy where the thread is going now though ....with a little heat applied

Just captured some juicy things to follow up on from the last page or two of posts!

viktor said:

I'm almost convinced that all free will ultimately boils down to making a random choice between 0 and 1.

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