I'm not referring to any particular order of events as the correct one; I'm saying that there is an order; i.e. there are events; there is change in the world.

Fairbanks:

Very clever. What made you ask me why I asked that? :cool:

... I think I see where you're coming from now ... I was over wandering through another thread where I heard you say:



... if "the world" in the first quote is shorthand for the sentence in the second quote, then things start making sense to me ... in "the world" of individual observation, we can say that there is no such thing as cause for any number of reasons: as I mentioned earlier we don't consciously experience the transfer of energy; there's the fact that a mental representation of cause is just that - a mental representation; there's something you mentioned that there is an observed order to "the world"; and so on ... is that an accurate assessment of where you're coming from?

I have a will that's not free, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, Where is the director? I want to see him. -Kierkegaard

Yes, at last we have peace...:bigsmile:

HAW Haw haw haw.

Time travel is possible. It might be that the observer would expect to notice some change in time sequence or he would not go to all the trouble and expense of building the machine. Would he notice broken eggs reassembling themselves? The arrow of time problem needs a Hegel to dispose of the illusion.

Yer right and I am doing it now and you folks are soooooo Sloooooooooow

Whatever the issue assosciated with relativity, 'time travel' is not possible. 'To go backwards in time' is a phrase with no meaning. Whatever is occuring, whether there is an appearance of reversed time or not, there are events that are occuring whgich have not occured before when viewed as a part of the whol eof the world.

e.g. imagine that the following sequence represents a period of time, a series of events, ANDJFNV

If you say VNFJDNA occur some time, you might think that you were witnessing time being inverted.

However, considering that VNFJDNA is part of a larger sequence of events, which includes ANDJFNV, there is still a linear progression, just one with some patterns in it.

e.g. ofweiorfANDJFNVwoprwefeqeVNFJDNAerofkwekmnfpw

all one stream of reality

You have one life and no experience and you have to get it right the first and only time, and it is hell if you don't; and even if you personally do everything right, a tree can still fall on you, so while there is will, every will is in competition with every other, and no one is completely free of their culture, their history, or their circumstances, or our common mortality.

If we eschew dualism and assume that mind and matter are composed of the same stuff on some very basic level (which is necessary for there to be any kind of connection between my desire to raise my arm, the subsequent movement and my perception of such), then the mind is subject to the same billiard ball determinism as the mechanical world. Ok, this seems to be the rational conclusion, unless you believe in the mystical powers of the pineal gland.

If mind and matter are the same thing and all of reality is just a great wave of existence streaming out like a kajillion billiard balls from the big bang (or whatever began this shindig) then we're stuck. Our minds are just one small part of the great (but ultimately boring) multivariable equation of reality.

The only escape from this trap is to believe that the mind can somehow create energy. That is, the mind is autonomous and able to break the great wave of deterministic causation by an act of sheer creation. We are not our own causa sui (that is, we do not create ourselves, but simply exist), but we are the cause of changes in the course of the great wave. When we make a decision, we actually create energy (from nothing!) which we then use to alter the course of events.

As I see it, this is the only way that a non-dualistic account of free will makes any sense. In order to change the course of the billiard balls from their deterministic path, energy must be added to the system - the mind as true causative force, the ultimate creator of energy that did not exist before. The billiard balls then do not follow a deterministic course, but are constantly given new spin and trajectory by the introduction of more and more energy into the system (the force and trajectory of which is not predictable nor constrained by finite possibilities). We would all be, then, our own little gods, I suppose. Or maybe consciousness, itself, is the god we seek, the great creative force. The only truly "free will" that makes sense to me is the free will of a god.

I dunno if it's true, but it's a thought. Not that it matters, but I prefer the above to seeing the universe as a giant math problem. I have yet to come across an account of free will that does not reduce to some form of mysticism at its most basic level.

Maybe so. It is not impossible in the world of physics. We need to know what kind of time we are talking about for this to make some sense. Any number of schemes to accomplish time travel have been suggested, but most require so much energy and funding that they are economically impossible at present as well as having no useful purpose.

When I refer to time, I refer to change, to the progress of the world unfolding itself, to the succession of events. To go backwards in this progression is nonsense. Consider the typical 'time travel' story; a man of 2001 steps into some kind of machine, he presses some buttons and suddenly, after a period of light blinking, whirly sounds, etc., finds himself in 1923. Has he gone back in time; no. '1923' was only a idea previous to his trip, he had not experienced the events he about to experience in 1923. His foreward progress through existance and experience continues.

In any case, the (t) of physics, I think, bears little or no resemblance to the passage of time in reality, once (t) is employed in very complex equations. This is just my opinion, without any mathematical proof; it just seems that time, when quantified absoltely, no longer belongs to the world, but only to the idea-system of which it is part.

with time... there is only a right now... past and future are concepts for conveniance...

there THANKFULLY will be no way to ever travel back in time... as any changes made could snowball the world into unpleasant conditions... and the grandfather effect... what if you go invent the time machine... you go back and interfere and accidentally kill your grandpa before he mates with your grandma and then you were never born to have never invented the time machine...
or what if you meet yourself? or just the fact there is now 2 yous even if you dont meet... this means there is no such thing as a soul... as you dont get a new one every second of your life, it cannot exist twice at once... but who says there is a soul anyway but still......

i totally came to talk about fate though.... with 20 pages im not even gonna make an attempt so its prolly all been said...

but i still maintain that there cannot be fate AND freewill at once... if you believe one thing happened for a reason, then everything had to happen in a specific order, and even with the ability to go back to any moment along your life span, the choice you make could not be any other choice because your brain would always make the same decision at that moment no matter how many times you tried. am i expressin this right? cause if you truly went back, you still wouldnt know the future... right?

i dont think everything is a designed plan type of fate

its all an intertwined infinite causes and effects... not necessarily adding up to something in particular... but that it couldnt operate any other way. As a mustard seed HAS to become a mustard seed and could not hope for anything else, its place of germination and growth and survival all determined by circumstance and intertwined events.

as Alan Watts puts it... the wake of a boat is not what pushes the boat forward, (we are not driven by the events of our life alone) but the wake is evidence of how/why we went forward as we did.
and to stick with the parable, to imagine you could do any amount of steering, is illusion... you might steer to avoid something, or cause the river curves... but you only steered CAUSE of something... if you come to a split in the river, the side you choose will be based on something you pick out, like looks calmer, looks more beautiful, or some other individual preference... and if you choose to stop the boat to try to prove the whole system wrong... then you wouldnt of tried to prove the whole system wrong if you werent introduced to the concept, putting the motivation into you....

i wrote so much it wont be read huh... time for bed... i write too much fluff

That's more like it. What is change and how would you know it happened? Does the world unfold itself? Progress could be cyclic. Is this supposed to be sensible?

Only a right now? Something changes, though. What changes and how would you know?

Forget the gf effect. It either isn't possible or it doesn't matter.

my point is everything changes... every atom is moving right? the whole "a river is never the same river twice" concept... everything constantly changes... but the way it was a second ago is never gonna be able to happen again... its passed. and whats gonna happen a few seconds from now will come... but it will pass... you know everything is changing because its never the same again. there is only physically a right now.

i mean by "there is only a right now" that there is no past to GO to and future to JUMP to... life isnt like computers and you can load up the last system restore... or like in video games you cant just respawn at an earlier time to correct the mistake that got you killed.... i mean time is a concept not a thing to be traveled along. and you cant just ignore the possible repercussions if it happened to be possible by assuming the universe can just handle it or fix itself or just not let something happen

I suppose it's a question of how many infinities we're daisy-chaining here. Move the number up or down a peg, and the seemingly rational answers change quite a bit. I can't tell you how many of the lines extend out forever, but it seems entirely possible that time does repeat itself (depends on how you perceive matter and consciousness) and is something more like a vibration (in the worst perversion of the word possible..maybe oscillation is better...wave?) than a rocket shooting ever forward.

It seems to me that it is not logically possible to make a reasoned argument that one does not have "free-will"...since doing so disqualifies the rational basis for the position. The escape (very limited) is to assert, except for the statement - "there is no free will" - all other thought is predetermined.

i dont like the word predetermined though because to me it sounds like that suggests someone set everything up... and fate doesnt work as a good word cause that means its destined to happen... like it HAS to happen...

since i maintain the position that its all cause and effect on a massive level... that everything will happen as a result of the way everything has happened... i think it needs a new word entirely...

causation? is that used? i dunno... that might work wait what about the word fatalism... i remember voltaire used that... i gotta look it up... maybe that means bound to happen, but not designed to happen...

but i definitly think there cannot be free will and fate... cause say its fate that i found these forums... but free will lets me choose to come here or go play video games... my choice would have to be made by fate so that i dont miss the purpose fate has... am i makin sense here?
free will would totally interfere with fate all the time, and then fate could get messed up, meaning its not fate at all...

I think you have already formed your answer when you say, " free will would totally interfere with fate all the time, and then fate could get messed up, meaning its not fate at all...". If you except that fate means you do not control your thought and action for whatever reason, you have reasonably described predetermination. However, if you believe that you are preconditioned to respond to causes beyound your control, you are suggesting that what you wrote was caused by what i wrote and, in turn, what I wrote was caused by some other communication, etc. etc. In short, in either case, if we deny "free will," we would have to admit we have no rational basis for any thought or action, including the claim that we have no rational basis for the denial of "free will" assertion...because even that assertion would have to be predetermined, or fate or caused by some force, nature or circumstance beyound our control . Hence, since I can not logically deny "free will", I can not logically contend i do not have "free will."