Or is everything determined?
Descartes, Spinoza, or Leibniz?
Can Existentialism still exist in a Deterministic universe?
Did I choose to post this?
>>390244
Define "free will".
It's an illusion whether or not "everything" is determined. There's two possible states, causality, or true randomness. Neither constitutes for the "free will" we imagine. We can't even properly define free will, we just throw the term around like it means anything.
>Can Existentialism still exist in a Deterministic universe?
Albert Camus and Nietzsche didn't believe in free will. Only that idiot charlatan Sartre did. So yes, it obviously can.
>>390244
Free will is a state of mind, like fear, anger, madness...
>god/machine ai/the man tells you your future in its present course.
>you change course
Free will exists get btfooo
>>390244
no, our brains are shitty biological learning machines.
>>390251
/thread
Free will is not really relevant to anything or even a coherent idea.
Sartre's idea of choice is retarded. He believes people are born tabula rasa and can pretty much make themself into anything. Your gender, race, genes, and instincts don't shape you at all that's just an illusion!
>>390401
This
He didn't even believe in a biological motivation for sex.
>>390244
Apparently someone or something is ordering you to contemplate free will.
Methiks they're dicks
>>390362
Wouldn't the the man god machine AI telling you the course of history be a deterministic factor and just indicative of the fact its capability of telling the future wasn't functional?
Also to the thread at hand: does it actually matter? We're still capable of reasoning and willing, whether that will is spontaneous or causal really doesn't make a huge difference.
>>391017
nah i'm doing an essay on spinoza, prob going to include something about his denial of free will but on his positive sense wrt connatus and self-affirmation
>>391041
it has huge ethical implications. If free will goes out the window, we can no longer (or should no longer) punish people for their actions (as they couldn't help them any more than i could help not to do it. Everything depends on the assuption, that people can choose to do what they want (and not what they are compelled to through randomness or universal causality)
>>391049
Sarte and his crazy wife were the fore-fathers of the Liberal mind-set "everything is a social construct", because that's what they literally believed.
Sarte believed that our very instinct to stay alive is just a product of society. So fear of death is learned, not something we are born with. He would see no reason why a perfectly happy couldn't just decide to commit suicide on a whim.
Simone de Beauvoir believed that no one is born attracted to men or women and it's something we learn.
There is a reason that Sarte is being turned down in favor of less retarded existentialists.
>>390244
False dichotomy. Free will and determinism are compatible.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
>>390251
basically this
>>390401
This is wrong.
He doesn't discount the possibility that such things can influence a person, only that they account entirely for the choices you make.
He says our choices are entirely our responsibility, because influential factors are not absolute, we still have the capacity to deny them.
>>391205
That's stupid.
The fact that your actions are determined doesn't mean that they are no longer your actions. It doesn't change reality, your choices are still the ones you make, whether I can predict them (with enough information) or not.
Punishing crime is unethical if taken out of context anyway, for two wrongs don't make one right.
It's only useful to prevent crime by eliminating (for a time or permanently) past offenders and dissuading potential ones.
As such, it is part of the deterministic environment that makes crime happen and also not happen. A society without a penal system would determine more criminal acts into existence. Probably.
>Everything is foreseen, yet free will is given. The world is judged with goodness, and all is according to the majority of deeds.
>Ethics of the Fathers 3:19
If you don't agree with this you can go ahead and tip your fedora at me.
>>394502
*tips*
