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What I'm saying is that free will and determinism are just words and phrases that have no referents in Reality.
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What I'm saying is that free will and determinism are just words and phrases that have no referents in Reality. Exactly. But the concepts of free will and self-determination built the computer you are staring into today. A baseball bat has a referent in a physical baseball bat. The abstraction "free will" has a much greater referent in Reality. Ask Germany: ask Japan.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Words and thoughts are physical objects
Even when you show me the word "stone" carved in stone it will not convince me that a word is a physical object. Nothing proves the true nature of the stone. They can describe it down to atoms and smaller particles still but nothing explains what it really is.
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But the concepts of free will and self-determination built the computer you are staring into today. They may have had some influence on the minds of the people who were responsible for the computer I am staring into today, but that doesn't make them any more Real things independent of our conceiving of them.
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Words and thoughts are physical objects
Even when you show me the word "stone" carved in stone it will not convince me that a word is a physical object. Nothing proves the true nature of the stone. They can describe it down to atoms and smaller particles still but nothing explains what it really is.
Then is a stone a physical object? What are the parameters of being a stone? Is a grain of sand a stone? Is the Earth a stone? A stone is a word that means whatever we say it means. What say we agree that every "word" is as physical as a stone.
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But the concepts of free will and self-determination built the computer you are staring into today. They may have had some influence on the minds of the people who were responsible for the computer I am staring into today, but that doesn't make them any more Real things independent of our conceiving of them. Does not lightning flash and thunder clash? Are they not Real things? Does not the spoken word vibrate the atmosphere when we talk? Do not physical patterns recur in our brain with any certain word we re-think? Are these not Real things?
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Thunder is Donner is tonnerre is гром is any other number of things in any other language. Yes, a word is a vibration in the atmosphere, but that vibration has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we apply to it. Gift pronounced by an English speaker is close to the same vibrational pattern as Gift spoken by a German speaker but the thing refered to is not at all the same in the two languages. I could say barksnoogle but that doesn't mean that there is anything out there in Reality that it refers to unless we, as a reasonably large group use it to refer to something out in Reality. Similarly, we can use a word that we all agree on the meaning of and it still doesn't have to have an actual referent in Reality. We can speak of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all agree what it means, but that doesn't mean that there actually is a Flying Spaghetti Monster out there in Reality.
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"... Yes, a word is a vibration in the atmosphere, but that vibration has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we apply to it..." Well...name a word that has.
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That's my point. The thing is that some words have a referent in Reality or at least reality as we perceive it, and some don't. I am merely averring that free will and determinism are in the latter category. Here's an interesting experiment that was performed that suggests that rather than having free will, we have free won't. What I am saying is that I believe that the concept of free will is just something we have invented to help us make sense of a Reality only dimly perceived.
Last edited by Faldage; 08/14/13 10:20 AM.
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What say we agree that every "word" is as physical as a stone.
Words are intangible. Sound is as physical as a word gets. IMHO.
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