Is free will a myth?

[Teeqoz]

padib said:

Teeqoz said:

See, this is exactly the point. It's a lot more romaticized and comforting to live with the illusion of free will than to accept that there is no such thing. But the cold hard truth is that there is no "meaning" to life. Life is just a bunch of boring "predictable" (if we knew every involved factor) chemical reactions happening on a very complex scale.

When someone says something funny, the reason you laugh is because just like it was in their synapses to say something funny, it's in your synapses to laugh at things that triggers an emotional (read: chemical) reaction in your brain.

Life isn't rosy and meaningful. There is no point to our existence. And we certainly don't have any say as to what happens to us. All the chemical reactions in our brains are reactions to other stimuli (and there is a whole shittonne of stimuli that impact the reactions in your brain!), and you don't control their outcome. But that doesn't really bother me. I just find it sort of peculiar.

 

But your post made me realize we evolutionarily it makes sense that we are under the illusion that we have free will.

It's only an illusion if it's not true.

Even if the dynamics of laughter and love are conveyed through synapses, they would ultimately be lies if they were pre-programmed. That's what I mean.

It's not an illusion, rather it's a broken machine. Laughter is there but it is artificial.

I refuse to believe that laughter and love are artificial feelings only existent to give us false tinglings. It would defeat the honesty and purity of the emotion.

If free will were false, and with that knowledge, there is no more reason to laugh at anything, or accept love. Because it would all be a lie.

I don't believe that free will is false, therefore I accept love. But if I did believe it to be false, I wouldn't care about anything anymore, and would fein most of my emotions from there on out.

And that would go against the "evolutionary" process, basically defeating itself through false reasonings.

That's why I don't think it's arrogant or naive to believe in the truthfulness of love or laughter, I think it's sound because it validates the existence of said emotions.

Well sure, it is a lot harder to accept the truth sometime than to just go on with life as it always has been. But in the end, life isn't some romantical thing, feelings aren't "honest and pure" (whatever that means), love is just chemicals in your brain interacting in a certain way. But you don't have to believe in that. As I've stated earlier in this thread, this is a perfect example of the saying "ignorance is bliss".

And it's not like you have a choice anyway. Whatever you end up believing, you were predetermined to end up believing so to begin with