Fate?

[StupidUglyHead]

Undoubdtedly. There are several things that make stories interesting. You're right about the romance. Atheism would not have this huge calling if it weren't such an underdog position. Once the world population evens out towards 50/50 distribution of belief v. non-belief, it'll be less seductive to be atheistic. Rationality will only have just enough pull to get progress balanced on the tight-rope of this tiny fragile earth. Most religion will be relegated to metaphoric fables, there will be a few who insist on being devout, and then as many extremists and true fundamentalists as there are now. The last are never taken seriously,but pitied.

There will eventually be no excuse to believe except mental illness. Ironically, we'll become more and more aware of our collective "fate" as we learn more about the universe we live in, how to effect it, and whether the stellar bodies will support our existence. I think there will always be new romantic and philosophical challenges to compensate for antiquated terms like "fate".

I certainly wonder what our next big intellectual task will be. I always picture society like "Deep Thought" the Ultimate Answer Computer from Hitch-Hikers Guide, ever parsing through our perceptions to find what reality really is. I bet you there will be plenty of amazing things to look forward to in our coming years besides wistful emotions.

[TAC]

well put StupidUglyHead

and we are assured only certain fate and that is death, yay for death 

[TheFluffyDuck]

I can escape death but not taxes

[dogaro]

Here's my belief: Free will is an illusion, and as far as we are concerned fate does exist. The universe may be able to follow an infinitude of paths, but we can't; we're stuck on a track.

 I'm of the opinion that we're merely very complicated machines which, like all other things, simply react to stimuli in specific ways. I see consciousness as being nothing more than a funky mechanism, a program that allows us to judge the suitability of our more basic reflexive reactions. It seems as though our conscious selves can make decisions independant of our environment, but from a physical viewpoint I don't see how this could be; as far as I know it's impossible for anything to override the influence of the physical world so as to act in an independant manner, and for free will to exist this would be neccesary. The conscious mind must merely be an extremely complicated reflexive machine, the simple aim of which is to help ensure our survival and reproduction. If this concept is correct our actions must be fated.

By identifying and clarifying what choices we can make, and what our inherent will stems from, we can make more informed choices that represent a naturalistic free will. It’s definitely true that we will never have a ghost in the shell which is informed by a universal consciousness separate from reality. Until we transcend every need that we have as temporarily present human beings, we will not have that newagey type of free will.

Here are some psychosocial-cognitive problems that we can tackle in order to increase our naturalistic free will: Obedience (see Milgram’s Obedience experiments), Conformity (Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment), misuse of Ego Defense Mechanisms (Freud), manipulation by the media (I had found a great video by Media Matters, but its not coming up in results) of our fundamental ethical concerns such as injustice, insecurity, inferiority. Our propensity, ability, and stamina related to pursuing a naturalistic free will is necessarily naturalistic, determined by our genes, which are determined by our parents’ genes, which were determined by… ad-nauseum. Naturalistic free will is illustrated by the gradients between a skeptic’s world view and a sheeple’s world view.

I think see what you're saying in this post Mr.Uglyhead, though I'm not sure what you mean by 'naturalistic' free will. Assuming I understand your argument it has a flaw. Suppose, for example, we become aware of our susceptibility to advertising campaigns and as a result teach ourselves to ignore them, thereby giving ourselves freedom from this control. Does this really increase our 'free will'?

 Following the model of the brain as a physical machine, it will still make decisions based on its circuitry; the decision to ignore advertising will be caused by the physical mechanisms of the brain, as will our subsequent decisions regardless of wether they're influenced by advertisements or not. We will judge this behaviour as beneficial and as such will have to follow it. Altering the nature of the stimuli received by the brain will not alter the basic fact that, ultimately, the response determined by the brain is automated and aimed to aid ourselves, and not caused by a free-will-entity-thing.

 However, my grasp of the more complex aspects of physics, particularly quantum physics, are limited and as such this model may be inaccurate.

[StupidUglyHead]

We will judge this behaviour as beneficial and as such will have to follow it. Altering the nature of the stimuli received by the brain will not alter the basic fact that, ultimately, the response determined by the brain is automated and aimed to aid ourselves, and not caused by a free-will-entity-thing.

Our actions become unavoidable and 'stuck' only AFTER they have happened. Certainly everything that happened before a car accident, can be said to have been unavoidably certain to happen, only BECAUSE those things did in fact happen. You can make pseudo-deterministic claims about the past, and yes the future has no choice but to be a result of everything that has happened in the past, but it hasn't happened yet, so you can't make deterministic statements about the future except for what you know is probably going to happen. The earth will continually rotate barring an unlikely catastrophe, but in all probability there will be a 'sunrise' tomorrow.

Now, whether you will have a specific thought and make a specific arbitrary decision tomorrow, no-one else can foretell, unless they actively create that situation.

The deterministic view describes us as infinite beings: Everything that happened in the past resulted in our existence, therefor we have always existed.

The things that you  are arguing make us "stuck in a track" such as our brain's evolutionary function of propagating our genes, are the same things that are required ingredients for us to exist in the first place. If our ancestors' brains did not function to propagate their genes, that line would have been extinguished. If we're stuck in a track, it's a track where we can go forward, back, left, right, up down, and at all angles and velocities.

I think that the deterministic view is a bitter response to not having an afterlife or soul. You ought not examine your existence from these views, as if you've lost something by not believing in faith, but you still want to look down on yourself from heaven. Build the idea from the foundation up, and you will get a better idea of my angle.

ie. "Because there is no god or divine plan, my divine plan is set for me by naturalistic events. In fact, I'll just sit here and stare at a wall while naturalistic events occur around me." versus "I am a human being, and therefor have human needs and drives. It's up to me to raise my consciousness about reality, so that I can do what I (naturally, humanistically) want to do with my life while sustaining my needs."

As Dawkins says, we exist and perceive within a "middle world." On the level we perceive and exist, the "micro world" of molecular events that occur support our existence, but don't have a designing intelligence to enforce a particular fate.

If you could design your own perfect free will operable within a naturalistic world view, how would it be different than what you already have?

[SirCh]

We will judge this behaviour as beneficial and as such will have to follow it. Altering the nature of the stimuli received by the brain will not alter the basic fact that, ultimately, the response determined by the brain is automated and aimed to aid ourselves, and not caused by a free-will-entity-thing.

It seems you've refered to a decision process comprised of assessing possible actions and the desirability of their outcomes and selecting the one with highest desirability (a process carried out by neuron circuits). To me, that is making a choice, and that is what people were refering to when they use the phrase "free will".
Fighting influence from advertising campaigns doesn't change how much free will you have because it doesn't change the fact that you made the choice. All that's being achieved is: the enlightenment of skepticism which gives you knowledge that improves accuracy in assessing whether the outcome the advert suggested you choose is really as good as it claimed.
This is only an effect on whether they're skilled at utilising their free will, not how much they have of it. Otherwise the existence of regret would be sufficient evidence.

"stuck on the same track" isn't really a very good way of putting it, because we aim to be on the track we prefer most (or think we'd prefer most with the best of our knowledge). If we thought a different action within our capabilities was preferable then we'd take that one instead. So i don't think we're trapped on this eventuality, it just so happens to be the eventuality that we are in. The future is the future, or to be more specific, what will happen ten seconds from the point i wrote this will not change. That's a given as things changing refers to differences between two points in time, and if we're always refering to the same two points it will be identical simply because we are refering to the same thing.

It seems as though our conscious selves can make decisions independant of our environment,

I've never felt like that, decisions seem to be about what are senses are telling us or how we feel emotionally, and the emotion we feel is also a composite of detections of dopamines/adrenaline/serotonin or other neurotransmitters in our blood so its still part of the real world.

If someone said "you can to go to Disney Land or the beach, you're free to make the choice yourself", would you think they are asking you to pick one of the options regardless of what they are, free from any influence of reality? or that they're requesting you pick the one you expect to find most pleasant?

personally i think the latter, and i think it would involve using my free will, because free will is having options, despite the fact that you'd always choose the same if you're on an identical timeline(because the last few words are a truism).

[TAC]

because this topic has split into another topic altogether it has been split
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[Cheeserino]

redund that redundancy!