If you ask me, those guys who stole the car, got drunk and killed ten people on the highway were anything but free in their actions. Even as they began their adventure of debauchery, and reviewed the law, the consequences, the danger, this was not sufficient for freedom, for the struggle to decide was a matter contained within the inner tensions between possible actions. Had their been more motivation on the side of care rather than carelessness, they wouldn't have done it. So why was there stronger motivation to do it? — Constance

I don't think this is the "thinking" we're talking about in this thread. I gave examples of Descartes, Aristotle, and Schopenhauer's idea of freedom in thinking. It is rational thinking. And we don't always think rationally, of course, such as in your example above. The point of freedom in thinking is, we do have it at our disposal if we are so inclined. There is deliberation, there is decision, and there is future possibilities. That's what they mean.

But in our daily affairs, when we stand in conscious wonder about what we do, who we are, why we exist and so on, we are free of motivation. Doe this make us a spontaneous cause? — Constance

Yes, this is more like it. But spontaneity is not the idea here. We could be spontaneous and still be unthinking and undeliberative. We're after rational thinking.

So if the universe changes from "no-time" to "time", that in of itself is a temporal process, making it necessary that "no-time" is actually time. So time never begins. — Kuro

This bothers me. Time count begins when something changes. A void with no space-time has no time. Time starts at the mark of a change. "Universe and no-time" don't go together.

@EugeneW
Could you be arsed to go outside of this thread and have a smoke outside the building? You're loitering.

Stop it. You don't understand what a proof is.

There is evidence people dream. I dream you dream, everyone dreams. My dreaming is proof of your dreaming. If you say you dreamt I believe you. — EugeneW

This is not evidence! I knew you were gonna say this.
Look, if I said I dreamed I was floating, I would not be able to produce proof of me floating. What is YOUR evidence of MY claim?

What about it?

Can anyone explain why we readily claim that we dream, or that we readily accept that this or that person had a dream, when we can't provide evidence of it? Why does everyone talk about the scenery in dreams when they can't produce proof of it?
But if we do the same with the existence of god, people want evidence? If I can't produce proof that I dreamed I rode a sleigh pulled by reindeers, no one would say I didn't dream, or dreams don't exist.

L'elephant. The question should be: is there evidence they don't exist. No! So do they exist? Yes! — EugeneW

Let's not use this. This is a fallacy.

Can we bring this thread back to the compound of sanity?

What kind of evidence do atheists ask? Scientific? Then, no. There's no scientific proof for the existence of god.

Funny. The existence of dreams works the same way -- you can't show scientifically what you dreamed of last night. If you dreamed of riding a giant quark, you couldn't show this scientifically, not in pictures, not in actuality. Yet, everyone on Earth had claimed at one time or another that they dreamed about something. And that dreams exist.

So, if I demand that you show me the proof that you dreamed of something last night, I am acting like the atheists.

I was never a voracious reader. My reading habits only developed when I studied philosophy. So, my reading habits is what you get when you read philosophical writings -- you read passages not the whole book, you jumped from one philosopher to the next, you jumped from one notion to another, you only really focus on one idea at a time, and you neglect to read fiction.

There is no just war. (Do not start me with self-defense as it is a silly notion).
War happens because diplomacy and agreement failed. Country A might have a compelling reason to invade country B, but a compelling reason (and it might even be necessary to invade) is not the same as just war. If country A is forced to declare war, A is doing it not because it is a just thing to do. A is doing it because it is the only thing left to do.

It is a good approach to an analysis of the self. The self is fashioned after a model of plurality, witnessed in the world of others. This idea has a history and I think it was Herbert Mead who is most famous for it. So when I observe myself, my behavior, feelings my own thoughts, I am working within a structure of social organized affairs: I AM the "other" of a conversation, as I witness myself. — Constance

Yes, thanks for reference on Mead. I didn't know he wrote extensively on this subject -- the development of sense of self. So, to him, from my cursory reading about him, the development of the "I" came about when we developed language.

The illusion? What do you mean? What question is begged? Not that I disagree, but how do you frame this? — Constance

I made two posts in this thread about the critics who argue against the idea that we have freedom in thinking. The naturalists, or followers of naturalism, argue that we don't have freedom in thinking, like Descartes, Aristotle, and Schopenhauer implied or directly wrote about. Instead, it is only an illusion brought about by our biology, the nerves and cells and chemicals in our brain. When we think, we think in such a way that our thoughts are produced by the environmental stimuli acting on our nerves and cells and make us believe that it is our own voluntary thinking from which our thoughts are produced.

And I said this is question begging coming from the naturalists because they started off by claiming because of our nerves, cells, and chemicals, our thoughts are only produced by nerves, cells, and chemicals.

Thank you for these passages. The Petrarch one is what I had in mind about renaissance. Your comments are on point.

@Bob Ross
I understand that you said "positively assert anything".
There is more than one way to skin a cat. It's all positive if you asked me.

What the fuck happened to thread? How did this become a troll enclave?

It is not a weaker position because it doesn't positively assert anything — Bob Ross

Incorrect. Atheists do assert something: God does not exist.

Zeus does exist. — EugeneW

In mythology no less, sir.

There is no "should or shouldn't" in math. Use "or".

Who said that? I was referring to the article you linked, which referenced 6 BCE, and then proceeded to describe the pygmies as non-spiritual, non-superstitious, non-religious, and no concept of a god or gods.

:halo:

I find that article suspect because pygmies would not have been able to make a statement, god does not exist. If they didn't have a concept of spirituality or deity, they would not have been able to make that statement -- which is essential to be an atheist, no?

I mean, they could not be called atheists. Maybe something else -- but not atheists.

reductive Reason — Gnomon

You mean bone-headed, dismissive reason.

Sex is like money: some people have a lot of it, most people have some but nothing to brag about, and some don't have any. — _db

Except that sex gets stale, money does not.

There is polytheistic. Belief in all gods.

I guess the thing is, the onus is on the atheists, not the theists.

Theists: God exists, we believe in god.

Atheists: God does not exist, we don't believe in the existence of god.

Note that the atheists deny the existence of god, not that they would not believe it if god exists. If god truly exists, the atheists would turn into theists.

To me atheism does not make sense. What it tells me is, atheists don't believe in something that never existed in the first place. It's a circular argument.

It seems like a poor use of phrasing many people use. — TiredThinker

It is not. At least not mathematically. "Times" is the inverse of division. Try, ten times weaker. Does that sound like the phrase "5 times fewer"?

A rebuttal to the naturalistic view of mind -- freedom in thinking is only an illusion - is this: how do the adherents of naturalism determined this "illusion"? Did they arrive at this conclusion through the brain processes? In that case, their conclusion is also an illusion.

They cannot assert that we do not have freedom in thinking because their conclusion is begging the question.

Okay. NATO represents the west.

You can't negotiate with bad faith. It's why the whole thing started anyway: a party that makes clear that they are only willing to deal in bad faith makes thereby clear that they understand only one thing: lethal force. — baker

I'm not following what's going on in the war. Who did bad faith?

True. Is that your propaganda?

Well, think fast.

:grin:
Are you gonna be nice now?

I hope some of your late grandma's wisdom rubbed off on you. — Agent Smith

And on you.

While I’m hesitant to accept this, I won’t reject it either, without some proper argument to judge it by. — Mww

If I've come across an explanation I will post it here.

Maybe you could start a thread on that. lol. How did we achieve self-awareness when there was none before. I'm guessing evolution and language development. But still, I'm not sure about that either.

You should allow little breaks.

.from which the deduction of the self must have already been established, insofar as there must already be that to which the understanding of “we” belongs. Hence the presupposed necessary singular subject. — Mww

While I haven't explained how we broke away from the collective awareness, the plurality, to self-consciousness, I'm telling you that there was no reasoning or deduction that went into it. Rational thinking of the "I" did not happen before when there was only the "we". When Descartes, for example, wrote the meditation, he wasn't starting from the beginning of self-awareness. Descartes, after all, was operating in the modern world, where our knowledge was already sophisticated and advance.

Can’t have an understanding without that which understands. That the self to which understanding belongs, represented as “I”, is only a speculative metaphysical determination of pure reason. — Mww

Yes, I admit we're both struggling and grappling with this idea that humans didn't begin thinking in the "I" tense. It's hard to understand that we didn't have this. What we did have in the primordial understanding of everything was the "we".

The only comparison I could think of is an animal which has every faculty of awareness -- the pack, the surrounding, where to get food, the hunt. Except, no self-awareness. If this animal sees its reflection, it would not think, "That's me". That animal could only think in terms of the pack, the many, its family.

:up:

Sadly, naturalism has some harsh words against freedom of thinking. To the followers of naturalism, freedom is only an illusion. Some of the reasons given are : it's only biological, it's a collection of nerves and cells, and it's physiological. Among them: Stephen Hawking and Alex Rosenberg.

But the placement (where freedom resides) of their contention is, to me, misplaced. To them, because of our biological constitution and the chemicals that come with it, we are only given the illusion that we have the freedom in thinking.

I think this is again the reductionist and mechanical views of metaphysics, which I disagree with.

.

:up:

Hah! Indeed. Thanks.

Here, I pasted a passage from the book:

The freedom which therefore cannot be encountered in the operari must lie in the esse. It has been a fundamental error of all ages, an unwarranted inversion (hysteron-proteron), to attribute necessity to the esse and freedom to the operari. The converse is true: freedom lies in the esse alone, but the operari follows necessarily from it and the motives.
From what we do we know what we are. On this, and not on the pre sumed liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, rests the conscious ness of responsibility and the moral tendency of life. Every thing depends on what one is; what he does will follow therefrom of itself, as a necessary corollary. The consciousness of self-determination and originality which undeniably ac companies all our acts, and by virtue of which they are our acts, is therefore not deceptive, in spite of their dependence on motives.

But its true content reaches further than the acts and begins higher up. In truth it includes our being and essence itself, from which all acts proceed necessarily when motives arise. In this sense that consciousness of self-determination and originality, as well as the consciousness of responsibility accompanying our actions, can be compared to a hand which points to an object more remote than the one nearer by to which it seems to be pointing. In a word: man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily.
…
Consequently, my exposition does not eliminate freedom. It merely moves it out, namely, out of the area of simple actions, where it demonstrably cannot be found, up to a region which lies higher, but is not so easily accessible to our knowledge. In other words, freedom is transcendental. And this is also the sense in which I should like to interpret the statement of Malebranche,3 la liberte est un mystere, under whose aegis the present dissertation has attempted to solve the problem set by the Royal Society.

esse = essence or nature
operari = action

Except understanding itself presupposes a necessary singular subject, which couldn’t be any other that an “I”. “We” only indicates a multiplicity of singular subjects, doesn’t it? — Mww

So then the one thing we could deduce from it is that there was no understanding of self prior, since there was no understanding of singular subject. It's a primordial phenomenon that there was no "I" consciousness. It's hard to wrap one's head around it but that's what philosophers have posited.

I'm not sure Descartes declared we had free will. — Philosophim

No, he didn't. Not in the sense you're thinking. But he demonstrated in cogito that our thinking can be.

What does freedom mean to you? — Philosophim

I am in the group that believes there is free will in thought. Like I said in my OP, we tend to focus on action -- that our actions are determined. But if these philosophers posit that thinking is the springboard to action, and that there's freewill in thinking, let's start there. Aristotle's insistence on deliberation as future-oriented thinking implies the freedom of the will. We think of possibilities, we think of different scenarios, and we think logically. For example, there are truths (principles) to discover. If we do not have that freedom in thought, we would never discover these principles. Apparently, he believed that we could.

What's crucial to understand that there is an agenda, and objective to be reached with the actions.

We have to understand that the act of propaganda is used by a multitude of actors. — ssu

"Propaganda" and "agenda" are words that aren't used by the government or nation or state -- only the critics used them. Because they are politically negative charged ideas.