Wow. How come i always miss these? Ha.
Right, my two cents. I follow (mostly but not exclusively) Existentialism and i'm fast forming my own ideas about a great many things esoteric and becoming increasingly infuriated by the blockades empiric thought puts up. Admittedly, Empiricism was certainly required to get scientific method to it's current level however sadly, as a whole, the idea has forgotten a sense of epistemology. Personally, due to my Esoterical beliefs about things i'm often met with apparent fear and paranoia from empirical thinkers.
That's my justification of Esoterical thought and epistemic evolution, now onto the juicy stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_TimeIt is my belief that the philosophical debate always comes to absurdity because both sides of the argument are true. We live both in and not in a deterministic state. Free will is certainly not as we have previously thought, i think. Freewill (and the amount a being can exert it) depends solely on precognition.
There have been two important experiments concerning this as far as i am aware, with good results. The first is a given fact, i'm sure. 1. When you are shown a rabbit the same areas of the brain light up as when you are simply asked to think about a rabbit. This is determinism in action, in fact it's blatant Dualism, which is just awful. Awful awful, sociopathic, wrong wrong AWFUL dualism. There is no experience of the rabbit in either case - in both cases the experience of a rabbit was brought into reality by some unseen force, coincidentally; you had no freewill. 2. Experiments in time show that, in some cases, the area of the brain will light up
before the experience is brought into effect. It's not a very exact science, which is why empiricists hate it with a passion lol. Basically, you have to note the exact time you become aware of a thought, describe the thought and then find the thought pattern on the EEG, SPECT, etc and see what exact time it occured within the brain. In some cases it occurs
before the subject became aware of the thought. This is interesting, no?
It's my belief that some of us are simply better at exerting our will upon reality, i believe that (as it says in common law, religion and mythologies) freewill is a gift that humankind is supposed to evolve.
I don't disagree with determinism, but i certainly are not a part of it. I feel it would be a whole lot better out here if folk quickly learned the benefits of taking a responsibilty for the future of their actions in the moment and always respectfully learn to better the moment from the experience of the past. For those who cannot commit to the bravery this entails there is "God's Great Failsafe" - Determinism and, ultimately, dualism.
I, personally, (and this is
my opinion alone which i alone am responsible for) feel that dualistical thinking is sociopathic. How is anyone going to behave consistently when they only have two things to consider-
a) Every moment is predefined and you have no way to influence eventsand
b) if an event occurs, say murder, by you, in an horrific, brutal and nasty manor, this is simply an event which you were powerless to stop and so therefore you are going to be unjustly punished by the moral good. Your reward for being unjustly treated by humanity in response to events you had no power over all you have to do is admit that someone once died and was made into a link between your self and god. Once you have accepted this, you must apologise (pressumably for the horrific death said link was subject to through this deterministic process) and if you follow this action to the conclusion you will be granted eternal peace upon your death.Are you mad? You are aligning yourself with the enemy! Eventually, i believe, determinism and organised religion will be looked upon with joviality and utter contempt, respectively. It won't be for a while though, there aren't enough people with the courage to begin shaping our future.
To finish - i feel determinists are like Sith and Jedi. They are both allowing themselves to be some kind of pawn in a battle of good and evil; a battle over which they have no power and no understanding. The truth is, we don't need that fight anymore, we don't need to present any further comparisons. There is enough which happens through human error to base comparisons on. What we need to do is work hard on refining the truth of universal law and of morality.
Ironically, empiricism grants this - we have no way, as yet, of answering this philosophical question, do we have some thing like freewill? So, forget cause and effect and focus on epistemic change in order to observe it's effect upon how we feel about our human condition.
-Goo™ ...the living, breathing, undetermined, river of himself.
](./images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall")
awesome i look forward to reading it 
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HOWEVER, if you want to throw that out there, and really evolve the issue of doubt, then it really only leads us to say nothing is certain, and it is an infinite regress to solipsism...(As I said in the first post..) 
). Ultimately there is no answer to this argument, as there is to very few others...but we do it for amusement, and everyone is not as ignorant as your messages imply. 
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