@Arjuna,
Arjuna wrote:
Zetherin wrote:
Yes, it is because these people, despite their odd belief that humans can't freely make choices, must believe that they can freely make choices in order to even function in our society. They must acknowledge the difference between a free choice and a compelled choice, especially when speaking about moral and legal issues.
So, it's a self-inflicted cognitive dissonance (the holding of contradictory beliefs), where their scientism and rationality clash.
It's not that simple. If one was compelled, then no choice was made. The only way around that would be to discard rationality all together.
Any use of will, as we understand it, is aimed at creating a favorable outcome. In this, we all know the will is bound.
Fundamentally, possibility and will can't be discarded because of what we're referring to when we say
unnatural. We're saying counter to the normal flow of things. For instance an unnatural death goes counter to the ideal scenario. We have an image of structure. That image wouldn't exist were it not for our conception of the ideal.
It's a valid question: is there really anything that is unnatural? How could there be? In this, we're discarding the ideal and allowing experience to tell us What Is. That's what you call
understanding.
Could you please say why one's choice cannot be compelled? For example, someone points a gun at me, and choose to give him my wallet rather than take the chance of being shot. Now, since I did not willingly give him my wallet, but chose to do it rather that choosing to be shot, isn't that a compelled choice. I chose to hand over my wallet under compulsion. It is true, of course, that in such circumstances we say, "I had no choice but to hand over my wallet", but it would be wrong to take that literally. Clearly, when we say that kind of thing what we mean is that I had no
better choice, not that I had no choice. We call that kind of thing, a choice between the lesser of two evils. Isn't that so. But a choice of the lesser of two evils is still a choice we do not want to make. Therefore it is a compelled choice.
Analytic philosophy to the rescue of clarity, again.